skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great post. By the way, I have the answer to this:

> No credit

I had the same problem because I avoided credit cards when I was younger because I thought it was a bad habit, and I was self-employed so I couldn't verify any salary. It meant I had no credit and I got rejected for low end credit cards - a yucky cycle. Eventually a smart bank manager I knew gave me a plan to fix this:

I went into the bank and got a "secured loan" - what you'll do is deposit about $1000 into the bank (or whatever amount you want) and get a CD for it that you can't touch. It'll pay something like 2% in today's climate. Then you get a loan secured by that CD for something like 2.4% - seriously, the interest rate on a secured loan is very low because the bank has your CD sitting there and you can't get it... there's virtually no risk.

Okay, now, have your loan set to auto pay so you don't have to worry about it. You'll get 12 "paid on time" records in the next year and it'll cost you very little. Actually, it's a little better than that even, because it's a different kind of credit from a credit card. Credit cards are "revolving", this sort of loan is something else... so it'll permanently boost your credit a little bit for the next 7 years until it falls off your record.

I had no credit. Got a secured loan like this. 3 months later, was able to get a crappy credit card from Capital One, very low limit, high interest, no benefits. Just charged some small purchases to it and paid in full each month. After a perfect year between the secured loan and the Capital One card, was able to get an AMEX gold card with no limit on which was important because I was having business-related payments that'd sometimes be a lot in a short period of time. Also wound up getting two free one way international flights from the points from the card. So yeah - secured loan is the way to go. The difference you pay between the CD's interest rate and your loan interest rate is well worth it to have credit.
It's incomprehensible to me how people can still be thinking this. Essentially all the facts point to things like this being fundamentally incorrect.

Help has been accepted, and the Jones Act isn't an issue. Help that's been refused has been refused for pretty rational reasons (unapproved chemical dispersant), and some of the "help" is the same help vultures offer - they come with extravagant price tags, clearly hoping to get rich off our misfortune.

This is flamebait bordering on libel.
I am not an adherent of any organized religion, but this question is puzzling:

Where did stuff come from? There are two possibilities, either 1] it was put there, or 2] it was just there to begin with.

God is an easy solution, but then where did he come from? Same problem.

Maybe there are other possibilities that our brains just aren't able to process at this stage in our evolution.

Anyway, before anyone says "the big bang", isn't that the explanation of how stuff got where it is, rather than how it came to be to begin with? It started with a singularity, where'd that come from?
Precisely. I don't care two shits whether God exists or not, frankly--that's not the interesting question. And "scientific materialism" is a bad way to cast it--materialism is a metaphysical system while science is an epistemic system.

I'm nonreligious because I don't believe claims without a good argument behind them. Buddhism is a set of claims without any good arguments just the same as Christianity, whether or not those claims are about gods and resurrected demigods or not.
Did you always think, "I've got some great things ahead of me", and now you ARE grown up and this IS the future and you're worried about what you have to show for it?

Yeah, did my first relatively successful startup in high school. Got into one of the top incubators(may be even YC). Have many people that would kill to be me. And yet, they don't know about the monsterous rut my life is plagued with--mostly because when I do get my "mojo", I am super productive and successful(even if just for few weeks or months).

I am very hard on myself and hate drama. Yet I find myself turning into that failure I never saw myself becoming and can never accept. Really, I cannot go a life as a failure. I still have plenty of belief that I can change--but it's taken a lot of hit in the last five years of trying and falling back to the same place.

Since you're still in school, have a chat with a psychological counselor on campus.

I'll do this. Last time I went to the school shrink, I was prescribed a pill but I never used the prescription. I got my idea for a startup and most of the issues went away(I got into the incubator; startup failed but still did relatively ok)...but looking back, it seems like it was only a temporary fix.
If the mechanism that stores glucose into fat is triggered by glucose peaks, as some people claim ("graze don't gorge"), then stuffing yourself in one meal and skipping the next may lead to more fat accumulated for the same calorie intake.
Your lack of focus on a particular thing sounds similar to the cycle I have found myself in. Discover, learn, master, get bored.

I have my own concerns about this cycle, but it does have an upside you can channel; I have been picking up new skills left and right. As an example, I am currently fixing up a motorcycle I bought for real cheap. My passion for mechanics has long abated, but I still find it mildly pleasant and I want the goal (getting the bike running). Because I was so deep into cars and motorcycles for a while, I am quite excellent at servicing now. I know exactly what to do without much trouble, which enriches my life by opening doors and extending the life of my vehicles.

Virtually anything complicated enough to be stimulating can work with this cycle. I am currently contemplating diving into nutrition. I'll get completely bored of food after a while, but for the rest of my life I'll have the skills and knowledge to tap into.
[Album] Limbonic Art - Phantasmagoria (2010) - wWw.NhoMaiNhe.Com
Say bye to sleep ;)
"If I had the money, I would hire Zed"

This phrase has appeared multiple times in response to comments on this story, but I think it misses the point entirely. The parent poster has a point at some level, but he delivers it with no tact.

The point is that you need more than money to hire really talented people. It sounds as if Zed left Dropbox because the problems he was solving there weren't the type of problems that he was passionate about solving. The pinhead, middle-manager response to this is to get pissed off and rant against hiring "rockstar" programmers, but that just shows how little they understand about what motivates really talented people.

I can't speak for Zed, but I know a few talented programmers myself. I've brought them in on projects and seen them hit the door in short order. The #1 reason was never money. Great coders are artists. Their greatest work will always be works of inspiration, not portraits they're paid to paint by narcissistic clients.

The bottom line is, if you want to hire talented people, set out to solve interesting problems, or build interesting projects. And don't be upset if the "rockstar" programmer you hired doesn't want to keep doing what you're doing. Go out and find someone who is interested in solving those problems and pay them what they deserve.
I still think they should have taken up googles offer to host them for free, no strings attached,

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/tech/google-wikipedia-hos... http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Google_hosting http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Google_offers_to_help_Wikipedia
The media crisis befalls both Trans-Tasman nations. SBS did a segment on news broadcasts across NSW and found out most "breaking news" segments were recorded days in advance, and in one session where the announcer deliberately changes outfits. Viewers would wait for updates on bushfires and other similar regional crises and they would be "updated" on news about the flavor of the month, rapist footie player leaving a nightclub or doing shopping.

American media, however, is as efficient and fervent for their corporate sponsors as any militant death-squad. In America, the footie player's ethnic origin would be researched and the rape case made into a race-war, or the victim tied to a political party in some fringe manner.
Adobe should plaster Facebook and flash-gaming cites with "play this game for free on Android - iPad just can't handle the flash" ads.

I do love Apple products, but they consistently alienate me. Given that the PSP has seemlessly handled Flash for me (with lower processing power) the iPad just looks like a giant clunky text viewer to me.
Could you elaborate how adderall effected you? Totally understand if you can't but just in case! Thanks a lot.
At least basic machine learning seems to have become ingrained enough in a lot of areas that it's not really a separate thing anymore, just part of how people do things, which I suppose is one kind of success. E.g. lots of business-analytics departments will use things that at least 10 or 20 years ago would've been considered "machine learning", but now are just part of how you analyze and visualize data.
There's actual paganism, which is gone. If you ever hear someone say "nobody seriously thinks Thor exists anymore", they're talking about paganism.

In recent decades, people (for whatever reason) decided to try and restart paganism--if you meet a "pagan" today, they're actually following one of these reconstituted religions.

I personally have trouble taking neopaganism seriously, largely because I've never known any serious neopagans, only disaffected suburban teenage girls who wanted some excuse, however flimsy, to be nonconformists. I've known people who took religion seriously, and I've known neopagans, but I've never met anyone in the intersection set. So my perception of neopaganism is quite dismissive.
here are some more common patterns that HN seems to find acceptable:

1. <something-something-something> Google?

2. <something> Facebook <something> Apple?

3. when will <Apple|Google|Facebook|Amazon> do <my personal whim here>?

:P
Check out http://wishcraft.com to grab a PDF book from Sher.

This book: http://www.amazon.com/Refuse-Choose-Revolutionary-Program-Ev... helped me identify myself more.

I got this book for my wife: http://www.amazon.com/Could-Anything-Only-Knew-What/dp/04405... and she said it helped her refocus things.

The takeaway from all of this is that TMA page helped me identify and 'diagnose' (in a loose sense) that condition. The Sher books above helped with some practical advice on how to live and deal, and sometimes thrive, with the condition. Her term for someone with TMA would be 'scanner' , and she's written about scanners for years.

I've been juggling things for a while, and currently I'm a publisher (groovymag and jsmag), a consultant (really just consulting sometimes), a developer (hands on coding), a trainer, speaker (2-3 conferences per year), have written a book, and am working on some other projects for later this year which may help open some doors in to new avenues.

Had I stayed at my job I would have been more compensated financially but far less fulfilled. That said, I still wrestle with feelings of unfulfilledness, and some of that comes down to not being able to execute on all my ideas. What I'd like to do is get to the point where I'm comfortable hiring people to do a lot of the grunt work fulfilling my ideas (I don't particularly care to do the work, I just think it needs to get done).

This doesn't mean I'll never take a traditional full time job again, but I'm a lot more demanding and critical when I talk to potential employers. That still comes up now and then, and I'm a lot of aware of myself and open when talking about employment. Nothing has yet fit the bill, but I'm not shutting the doors to that possibility. I just don't think it'll be likely. It'll need to be a kickass company and/or working in an extremely engaging problem space with some freedom for me to float around some. Very few traditional jobs fit that bill.
Watch Berkeley's lectures if you are starting out. They are superb.
[Album] Athlete - The Getaway (2010) - wWw.NhoMaiNhe.Com
Have the treatments worked for you? I've come super close to getting tested for ADD, each time resisting out of fear that it'll only be another temporary fix(in pills). May be I'm wrong reading stories like yours.
Your proposal only closes a few possible holes. This is worse than nothing, because it creates a false sense of security.

The reason is that JavaScript code trusts the DOM in many and varied ways, and can thereby be tricked into doing unexpected things by plain HTML code. Consider a page using a calendar.js plug-in, and a user-provided element '<div class="calendar" month="13">...</div>'. This could easily result in JavaScript code being configured with hostile parameters and event handlers being bound to hostile elements.

The only way to handle complex user-provided input is to start with a blank slate, parse the input completely, and only create output that is proven safe.
How could you? The idea of God by itself is just a weird metaphysical claim like "maybe we're all actually in the Matrix"--okay, I fully admit that possibility, but there's nothing I can do about it, by itself.

Which is why theistic religions don't stop with God. They say things like, "God exists, and he says don't eat pork. Seriously. DON'T EAT PORK." That's actionable.
> Casey pursued a Spartan business philosophy that emphasized military discipline, drab uniforms, and reliability over flash—a model that is still reflected in UPS culture today.

http://www.amazon.com/Big-Brown-Untold-Story-UPS/dp/07879940...

> The company prefers to hire people who fit the culture, who share its core values of hard work, cooperation, and commitment, over those who may be more experienced but lack these valued traits. The belief in commitment has been so strong that the company only recently relaxed a rule that forbid rehiring anyone who had left the company. Orientation programs, taught by UPS employees, not outside trainers, emphasize values and norms along with skills and procedures.

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/2296.html
The nice thing about living in Hong Kong is that most of these stupid edge cases have been sanded out of the system already. Probably because they doesn't just affect immigrants, but "local" people too (the 10% of the population who emigrated in the 80s, but kept their flats and bank accounts cuz they're intending to come back sometime). I've never had a problem with foreign mailing addresses, or my name being too long for the input field (like in Korea where they give you 4 characters max), or needing a citizen's ID number to complete transactions (you can use your passport number for literally everything from government forms down to supermarket loyalty cards), or any of that nonsense.

It's always a rude reminder of "normal" to deal with businesses and government bureaux in other countries. Like "another Brian" said in the blog's comments, the third world isn't even the worst in this regard, cuz at least there you can rely on personal relationships, or at worst bribes. It's the less efficient countries of the first world, where clerks generally won't take bribes and don't care who your friend's daddy is, but will go through their triplicate forms at the speed they please (and make a series of blocking calls to you to clarify each piece of information when you don't fit into their check boxes), and close the office at 4 PM, client be damned.
Google Reader which pulls in: Hacker News; Engadget; TechCrunch; Lifehacker; Mashable!; and a few blogs by personal friends, Facebook, Digg, Woot!, Gmail, YouTube and OkCupid.

Those are really the only ones I'm guaranteed to hit every day.
God is the nicest, happiest person you'll ever talk to.

If you ask him how he's doing he's always doing great. If you ask him how you're doing he always say you're doing great. I've asked him this immediately after doing something I knew was pretty stupid and God seemed unconcerned even though I asking him hoping to get corrected and some guidance on the issue. He told me that he wasn't too worried about it.

The actual sensation is pretty weird. I'm not the most gifted person at hearing from God but if you ask him to he'll talk to you and say some pretty cool things. I freely admit that I could be a crazy person talking to myself of course. The reason I believe otherwise is that I'm not the crazy person type and I hear weird things from God. I'm always expecting him to be mad at me or disappointed but he never is. The story of God's people is that they always expect one thing and he's working another way. It's the Wire when Marlo says "You want it to be one way-but it's the other way."

I want it to be religious way (i.e. doing things to make God happy or at least less angry) but God has things setup another way. If you have a kid you can sort of understand but it seems like God sees us like we see our own children. I'm happy watching my daughter do just about anything and I think God is happy seeing me do just about anything too. Yesterday my two year old daughter comforted two crying boys and cheered one of them up pretty well. She really cares how people are doing and wants to make them feel better. I think God reacts the same way I did when I saw her do something good-he couldn't be happier just like I couldn't have been happier. She didn't earn my love there but she made me very proud of her.

Hope that helps a little :)
Secular humanism feels too much like a brand name for a set of ideologies I may or may not fully agree with. I don't really need anyone else to come up with a brand name for my ideology, especially since it changes every week or so when I meditate for two hours and do my Bayesian updates. (Joke).
I came to this thread to check if Bradford replied. Not yet. Hopefully he will pitch in.

The uninitiated will benefit from digging into his blog:

http://measuringmeasures.com/

Also, the new ML Q&A site:

http://metaoptimize.com/
I'm in the same boat. I have always loved and tried to make startups work. I read all the books and all that jazz. I took a giant leap of faith and failed. Slowly but surely I have started to get my life in order again. I have tried sucide before and failed. After that I have refused to try again. I see that as the easy way.

Now I'm starting to get my hopes back up and there are people around me that believe in me. I would highly recommend reading "think and grow rich". Ever heard of the book "the secret"? They ripped off that book.

I often find myself too making new friends only to not keep them after a year or so. Sometimes less. That's part of life.

Find something you like to do and obsess over it. That's what I'm doing now.

Also you will always need balance in your life and the focus and motivation will come.

Again, if you haven't read think and grow, read it and follow the instructions outlined within that book. If you have read it, read the damn thing again.
My belief in God is at the same level as my belief in a multiverse of which we are just one universe amongst infinite.

- It would be great if this were true (Yay afterlife/alternate worlds!)

- No one can provide any convincing evidence for existence.

- It is impossible to prove nonexistence.

- The truth of this matter has absolutely no influence on my life. i.e. focus on other things should take priority before focus on this, although it is always fun to read about and debate existence.
How does one come about to finding the mobile Kongregate? I use your site quite regularly, and never even considered that there would be a mobile site available.

(Off Topic: Love the highest rated comments system, and your website in general.)
i can understand why Google would want to host them. for both philanthropic and also potentially very selfish reasons. either way works!
His Jedi-sense told him it was 14.
Faith is the belief in what you can't prove. From a strictly rational point of view, it's a kind of madness, and the gospels explicitly point it out.

To use a source I'm sure you know, in I Corinthians 13 there is an apparent contradiction: even if you act piously, you act in vain if if you don't feel love. The religious experience is emotional and visceral, not logical. It comes before codes and rules. From this perspective, Pascal's Wager is irrelevant: if you don't follow a moral code because you believe in it, then you won't fool anyone, much less an omniscient God.
No need to quote chequing and cheque. Them words is real.

Gotta love how Americans go against the grain by changing spellings, dropping letters, etc. Then they try to spin it like everyone else is odd for spelling it differently. We're on to you! ;-)
You do the same thing, over and over again.

If you look at some of the most successful businessmen in history, you'll see that a lot of what they did was find some kind of unexploited area of the market and take advantage of it.

Usually it starts in their home town, but it can often by replicated and expanded outside of that area. And when they do that they generally get to take advantage of the economies of scale. Along the way, if they iterate and refine on the process -- they get stronger and stronger till they become the $50B MNC you're talking about.

Looking at the history of UPS, this seems pretty apparent. They started doing deliveries in Seattle > California > West Coast > New York > East Coast > Midwest > Canada > Europe.

Walmart and McDonalds kind of did the same thing. In every instance there is a certain level of innovation that keeps them ahead of the pack.
What’s It Like to Work at Google?
Women Had Nothing to Do with the Founding of the Web, Says Mashable
Mine is python, so I selected other.
The short answer is "no proof".

But I'm always amused at how religious people always drop back to arguing the existence of God. The existence of God by itself is a useless metaphysical claim. There's the physical universe. I get that. We can use science to figure out the physical universe. I get that. If you attach a caption to the universe saying "by the way, an all-powerful deity made this", how exactly does that matter?

Religion gets the real work done when it says, "the all-powerful deity doesn't want you buggering other men or eating shellfish." OK, you started with an unproven metaphysical claim, and then used it to try and convince me to change my dietary and sexual habits. You've gone from vacuous to inventing unproven reasons not to bugger other men or eat shellfish! That's the thing about religion I question the most! It doesn't matter whether God exists. Once you start making actionable claims that rest on the idea of the Almighty approving or disapproving of my behavior, that's where I actually start to disagree with you.
Orkut - Street racer
Except that I'm not sure that true atheists, as distinct from agnostics, actually exist. Challenge any atheist and they'll admit that the existence of one or more deities is possible, but very unlikely.

The real distinction is between "teapot agnostics", who think gods are incredibly unlikely, and "proper" agnostics, who actually think it's reasonably probable. Many teapot agnostics will call themselves atheists just for the sake of saving time.