skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reddit is a classic example of this approach.
When Reddit first launched, it seemed like
there was nothing to it. To the graphically
unsophisticated its deliberately minimal design
seemed like no design at all. But Reddit solved
the real problem, which was to tell people what
was new and otherwise stay out of the way. As a
result it became massively successful.

I'm not quite sure Reddit is exactly "massively successful." They just posted the other day about how they aren't making any money. In a capitalist sense, it's not very successful if they aren't making any money.

So how do you define success? Is Arc successful if you open a web page and then 30 minutes later try to submit a form and get "unknown link" or something to that effect. It seems massively broken to me.

I'm not trying to pick on pg. I'm trying to present the alternative which is this: survivor bias. pg may have been in the right place at the right time with viaweb. As an incubator, pg probably made money on reddit, but conde nast has almost certainly lost money on reddit, so I'm on the fence about that.

Continuing on, I think it isn't unsurprising that putting $15k or so into 118 startups over the past 5 years would lead to one or two successes. pg has the benefit of being the magnet, or is it magnate? All the best ideas come to him, but there have only been a small handful of "massive successes" turned out. With his social network and contacts, quite frankly, I expect more big successes than I've seen.

How successful is pg, really? Do we know?

I suppose, really, my point is this: If there was a science to this, then it should be repeatable. Since it doesn't appear that pg has repeated his viaweb success in over 10 years, I wonder where is the science? Is pg just someone we choose to listen to because it feels good? He makes hackers feel good and important and understood? He can empathize with us, so we lend him our ear?

But are we wasting our time?

I love hn, I love listening to pg on stage talk about startups. It's like chicken soup for the startup soul. But maybe I'm being misled. Maybe it's just feel good, irrational stuff that isn't practical or beneficial -- and perhaps even harmful.

How do we know we won't be listening to him and then 10 years from now, we find out he's lost all his viaweb money. He hasn't been able to keep the startup chuck wagon turning out profitable businesses or something like that and we wasted all this time trying to replicate his success because... well... he writes a lot and it feels good to read it...
Actually a portraitist could do more with this than with a photo. When someone works from a photo, what you tend to get is that photo, reproduced in paint. You can usually tell when a portrait is done from a photo because the subject has the sort of fleeting facial expression people wear only briefly in photographs. You could probably avoid that working from video, and get something more like you'd get if someone sat for you in person.
The Founder’s Pie Calculator
that's something that a lot of people in Organizational Development would be interested in - you should build it!
Yeah...I wouldn't call that mastering. It is a good overview nonetheless.
Nokia's Reply to Jobs: Releases official statement about antenna design
there is something sadly evil (and oddly unsurprising) about the funeral services ad.
Is it true that quicksort is worst-case O(n lg n) if you always select the median? What if there are a lot of duplicate values at the median? My understanding has always been that for any quicksort algorithm on given hardware you can construct a pathogenic input that will be sorted in quadratic time.
It's hard to live off passive investment income b/c world governments are intent on shafting savers to bail out the debtor majority. "High yield" FDIC-insured savings accounts pay like 1.2% now in nominal terms but their return will surely be negative in real terms.
The title is bit deceptive - it's quiz question asking you to create recursive descent parser, not an introduction to the principles involves.
[Wikipedia quote]
His colleague Alfréd Rényi said, "a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems", and Erdős drank copious quantities. (This quotation is often attributed incorrectly to Erdős himself.)[7] After 1971 he also took amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking the drug for a month.[8] Erdős won the bet, but complained during his abstinence that mathematics had been set back by a month: "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper." After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his amphetamine habit.
[/quote]

(I remember the story from his biography, but Wikipedia has the copy-and-paste advantage.)
The question is, who makes the living and how? Do you want programmers with brains capable of creating software worth buying to be doing tech support? It's a waste of time for programmers like that to be doing tech support -- they should be programming!

The truth is that creators in our society do not make money. They sometimes make salaries. Sales people make money. Distributors make money. But the creators very often make almost no money.

We need to reward creativity in our nation. We need to reward the people who are clever enough to think of solutions to problems. The consumers are creating problems. We need fewer of those -- both consumers and problems.

So I'm not so sure really if it is possible for creators to make money without intellectual property and I definitely do know that without intellectual property it's easy for consumers to get content without paying anything.
I'm far from a security expert.

I have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours upgrading random packages in Linux for various reasons. Afterwards, I didn't feel any wiser in security or anything except how to build stuff (well, maybe a bit of systems stuff...).

If upgrading is main task here, what do you really learn? If upgrading isn't the main task here, what is?
I learned socket programming in 1999 w/ this guy's site. Glad to see it's still around.
I believe that the NYT still has all their obituaries "approved" in advance by their subjects. I.e., when a person the NYT considers notable gets older, the NYT sends a copy of their proposed obit to the individual for suggestions. That's what they used to do, at any rate.
Facebook | Lovish Goyal
This could greatly benefit the TWINKIE project.

http://www.twinkiesproject.com
This seemed like a tutorial for people who already understand genetic algorithms. I want to understand genetic algorithms.

Anyone know some good beginner tutorials or explanations?
tried it out - strange results.

I "historified" this site - HN.
Then searched for it in terms of "Hacker News" and got

No documents matched your search.
To add more documents to your history, just install the historio.us bookmarklet!

http://historio.us/search/?q=hacker+news&search=Search
I cannot believe that anybody would recommend a drug to be able to stay awake longer or work longer (with the exception of coffee). Any drug that is able to do this to your body will probably decrease your health drastically. If you really do have to work a lot the best way that I have found is to sleep 8 hours and work 16 hours. Unfortunately shower time will probably suffer so use plenty of deodorant. You will also be eating junk food for a couple of weeks but believe me, it is a much better alternative than using drugs. A cup of coffee would be the strongest drug I would use but that is it. Taking drugs like the ones mentioned is an extremely bad idea. You can end up being addicted to them.
Provided you have some familiarity with C like languages. I'm skimming through this now, and it really is quite well-written, but I'd be totally lost if I didn't have some experience with C/C++ in school years ago since it does make a number of assumptions that you'll just 'get it' -- e.g., the section on for loops pretty much says "they work like in C." :)
Squatting is infringing other people's trademarks. If I bought micros0ft.com and covered it in software ads, that would be squatting.

If I bought hotels.com and planned to sell it for money to a big hotel chain or something, I've not infringed anyone's rights. Generic/descriptive names are normally OK.

of course if there is a company using the generic for a non-generic purpose and I grab a typo/another extension and use their non-descriptive purpose, that is also squatting. For example, if I owned amazon.net and tried to sell books that would infringe on amazon. Or if I bought apple.net and sold computers. However, if I advertised amazon rain forest trips or sold apples that would be ok (not squatting).

Of course, lots of money and lawyers can change what is and isn't right (checkout nissan.com)
The truth is that creators in our society do not make money. They sometimes make salaries. Sales people make money. Distributors make money. But the creators very often make almost no money.

Entertainment creators, yes. People who solve actual business problems? No.

So I'm not so sure really if it is possible for creators to make money without intellectual property and I definitely do know that without intellectual property it's easy for consumers to get content without paying anything.

Release something in the public domain. Try hard to make money, and report back if it is a success or not.

I don't even care if it is a failure, but I would like to know more data points about the viability of the public domain.

In my field, there has been a few downers/failure in open source game developers trying to make money. One guy eventually succeeded, making 43,000 dollars in the space of a few month. He was already making more money than the rest of would-be game entrepreneurs.

Now, I am making money writing games for a repeat client. My games are also BSD licensed. We'll see how this goes for future projects.
It seemed to me that many of Arc's early critics were actually pg's fans, not adversaries. They seemed to have expected too much.
I prefer it to Scheme or Common Lisp. But while I've spent a decent amount of time on news.arc, I haven't spent much lately on the underlying language.

It turns out I can do a maximum of 2 things at once. I can't work on YC, writing, and hacking. And since YC is a given, that means I have to choose between writing and hacking. Over the last couple years I've mostly chosen writing, but that might change.

Which reminds me, I really should do a new release of news.arc. It's significantly better now.
For a rather more in-depth argument, the Mises Institute also published this 70-page book/essay: http://mises.org/store/Against-Intellectual-Property-P523.as... (PDF: http://mises.org/books/against.pdf)
Beej is a poor man's Richard Stevens. Amazing technical writing, for free.
In that case, sending the portraitist a 3 minute video would be better? They could loop it until they are done.

Doing it asynchronously seems to be so advantageous. Can it not be done without sacrificing quality?
Do Schools Kill Creativity?
The one in the study was of children with ADHD, not adult ADHD, which are very different... childhood ADHD is often a disorder of not conforming in school; adult ADHD is a disorder of not being focused or productive enough.
I have never quite understood why language developers never thought providing their platforms a little bit more like Linux developers do with distributions, i.e. besides providing libraries only, also provide package managers, dependency resolvers, test & rate the packages, dump orphaned packages, and so on.

I encountered this problem especially while learning Lisp. After you learn the basics of the language, and decide you want to do something productive with it, you find out that in order to do basic tasks, which other platforms nowadays include in their standard libraries, wading through and evaluating all the half-finished libraries all by yourself, because the community wont do it, will in the long run take more time than you needed to deal with the language itself.
Diigo (http://www.diigo.com), among other things supports saving page snaphosts and annotations.

I've been using Diigo for 8 months now and it's just great (I have used some other services like delicious previously, but they really can't compare to Diigo which just offers a lot more functionality).
I took some generic modafanil and it worked as I thought it would, though the traditional stimulants are clearly more effective. I got my 23andme results back the next month and ran it through SNPedia and saw I was a non-responder to Modafanil, but that mutation is definitely not an absolute determination.
Link to VLDB'10 Paper: http://sergey.melnix.com/pub/melnik_VLDB10.pdf
Yes, but there is a catch. If you do a video yourself, it may not show much of your personality. A good artist (or photographer) can get more out of a person through face to face verbal communication.

So Diy video, ok, face time, better, recorded videoconference, best.
My friend is rs4680(A, A) and he finds modafinil quite effective for increasing concentration, memory and enthusiasm for work. It didn't seem to be a lot of help for situations of sleep deprivation though which is what the study you refereed to was about. As opposed to the author's description, it did tend to make him somewhat 'high' and 'wired' as well as causing a degree of muscle tension and difficulty in 'coming down' at the end of the day. Also doses of 50-100mg seemed optimal and 200mg was way too much. It is difficult to know if this different response is related to rs4680(A,A) or not.
AFAIK decompiling and recompiling a SWF into something that works and looks the same as the original is not particularly do-able (unless you feel like reimplementing most of the code yourself). Certainly, for most of these sites that steal Flash games, it would be far more work than they are willing to put in (their business is all about easy money, after all).
I can't speak for your source, but as somehow that was on adderall through much of my middle and high school life I can speak from experience. Amphetamines do a great job in the short term, but most people do find that after a couple of years the benefits recede and the side effects kick up in intensity.

I finally had to go off adderall while I was in college because I got to a point where I was only sleeping a couple of hours a night and I was having mood swings that resembled manic depression. It sucks because I'm certainly not as productive as I was back then, but I'm generally a much happier person all the same.
The leading introductory book is A. Dixit and S. Skeath, Games of Strategy, Norton, 2nd edition. It's a very good, easy read.
The backlog for iPhone 4 is what, turės weeks as Į write? A trouble indeed.
We have rights to our work, that is clear. the nature of our existence requires it.

you must be able to keep others from taking the results of your efforts. If, for example, you could not improve a piece of property and keep the benefits for yourself, our modern society or even a primitive agricultural one would not be possible.

Our work takes many forms and so does the nature of rights associated with it. But one thing is clear. If people will not do a kind of work we value without having their rights to the results protected, than it is necessary to do so.

But we should not hand out rights if "we" aren't getting something of real value in return.

One problem is that "we" the people have far too little say about how our interests are defined and promoted by the lobbyists who have the most influence over what government does. The collective right to make such deals with innovators has been captured by private interests.
Try the free for non-commercial use version of http://www.princexml.com/ — you give it some HTML, some CSS and tada, pretty PDF! well, as long as you give it decent CSS...
If I am not mistaken, the reason why VCs don't sign NDAs is because they get presented with so many of the same ideas that they don't want to get sued for stealing ideas, when really they are not.

Having said that, if you didn't sign any written agreement, I think you're probably in the clear.

Ideas are commodities, execution, however, is not.
There's a couple of things the Haskell community are doing that should help address this problem. The Haskell platform (http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/) provides a tested collection of compiler and standard libraries. There's also a Google Summer of Code proposal to improve Hackage (the library repository) to make it more social. See http://cogracenotes.wordpress.com/hackage-proposal/.
An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms (Complex Adaptive Systems)

A short read, explains what they are, how they work, and what can go wrong.
Also worth pointing out is the fact that length of time one retains a right to intellectual property influences how many works are created.

Handing out rights for 70 years for literary work probably doesn't get us any more benefit than limiting them to 25 years. Writers don't really decide whether to create based on such long term considerations, so why should we give it away for nothing in return?

On the other hand, if we make the period too short, a lot fewer works would be created.
He also maintains the Pirate Image Archive http://beej.us/pirates/index.html
Damn, it would have been totally awesome if Gruber yanked off a cloth.

Even more awesome if he then yanked off a mask a la Mission Impossible to reveal that he was really Steve Ballmer all along.
The thing is that it would be hard to say that there was a "widespread deficiency in the genome". For the conditions under which we evolved, it's very unlikely that an always-provigil state is unambiguously better, or that would have become the dominant type.

But if the lack of appetite thing is always true, I suppose that could have historically outweighed the cognitive benefits, and now it clearly doesn't. In which case I guess you could call it a deficiency in the genome for current conditions. There might be other, longer term side effects, though.
From the article:

There are many good reasons to completely repeal
patents and copyright laws: they are too complex
to be understood or obeyed by anybody except a highly
trained Intellectual Property (IP) attorney[...]

Some parts of copyright law, that most people won't ever come anywhere near having to deal with, are complex. The 99.99% that covers what most people do is pretty easy to understand: if you didn't create that song or movie you just copied, don't give away the copy, and don't take copies from people who are not obeying this rule.

Musicians could still get paid, even without
copyright. They would still be able to sell
concert tickets, even if they did not make a
thin dime from CDs and MP3 downloads.

What about musicians whose music does not work well in concert? What about bands like Pink Floyd whose stage shows lost money--they relied on album sales for their money. What about songwriters?

Of course, people would still buy CDs, even
with unrestricted file sharing networks in place.
If you hear a CD being played in a store, and you
like it, what are you going to do:

Spend a few dollars, get a dozen good songs
in your possession, or

Spend the next four hours on the Web trying
to find those songs performed by some obscure
local artists.

The answer is obvious.

There are two fatal flaws with that argument.

1. It's not going to take four hours on the web. Right now, it might take four hours on the web to find the songs, because we have IP laws so that sites that want to offer the songs have to operate outside the law. That necessarily causes there to be some difficulty in finding and using them.

In the proposed IP-free world of the article, that barrier goes away. Finding the songs on the web will take minutes, not hours.

2. Yes, some people will still prefer a CD--even if they can find the songs on the web in minutes, and they will prefer to buy a CD rather than burn their own from downloads. Even if that is a significant number of people, will those people buy CDs from the artist? In the article's IP-free world, anyone can make and sell CDs. You'd be able to go down to your local CD store and find a third party copy of the "official" CD, complete with all the artwork, liner notes, etc., for cheaper than the official CD.
This is smart. Time and money are to some extent trade-offs. Joel Spolsky discusses this: http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html .

The real answer is that not every trade-off will be right for every person. Someone mentioned brewing your own coffee: that's probably smart. I'd get a Chemex and be done with it. Someone else mentioned having multiple people at the same desk. That would make me crazy: if I leave a paper or book or whatever on the desk, I want it exactly where I left. That seems like a false optimization to me.

Another example is office equipment. Getting reasonably good stuff is probably smart -- but buying new probably isn't. A lot of places have office liquidators; in Tucson, there's one named Andersen's that regularly advertises $500 Aerons on Craigslist. If you need a chair or desk, they're probably a good place to go.

This list can go on and on and on... the answer to the OP's question is just too often, "It depends."
Hi please can you tell me exactly what you did before this occured, i thought i'd squashed this bug but clearly not.
He's also a great game programmer--and a photographer.

Worked with him at Z-Axis (Activision) years ago.
It sounds like the device on the hard hat is more like a passive RFID chip; It's hard to be sure, but the article says all the dangerous equipment has transmitters of their own.

Of course, the effective difference between the passive RFID chip and a device that simply consumes ambient radio-spectrum EM radiation is small, mostly a paradigm change.

Your initial question begets an interesting question- since light is EM radiation, just like radio waves, shouldn't we be able to pick up light with an antenna? If we can figure that out, we can forget about solar cells with their sad efficiency levels.

edit: with some quick research, the answer is obvious; while it seems extremely weird to imagine, light can be absorbed by an antenna- and the first and foremost reason this isn't being done already is because the appropriate antenna would be ~700 nanometers long.
An iPhone App In 30 Days – The Challenge
float wr, wi, arg, *p1, *p2, temp;
float tr, ti, ur, ui, *p1r, *p1i, *p2r, *p2i;
long i, bitm, j, le, le2, k, logN;

Oh come on, what's with people and variable names like this? It's not like longer names take up more memory.

Especially heinous is when, like this snippet, the variables are not explained anywhere. I dislike de-obfuscating code to understand an algorithm, especially when posted on a page which claims to help you understand it (this is the FFT, not the FT, but still. They might as well have shown LZW/BZ2, would you be able to tell the difference?).
Do the page "The ZFC Axioms" contain errors? I can't understand the following proposition:

∃y∀z(∃w(z ∈ w ∧ w ∈ x) ⇒ z ∈ y)

Shouldn't it be:

∃y∀z(∃w(z ∈ w ∧ w ∈ y) ⇒ z ∈ y)
There is a difference between IP and trade secrets. MS relies on IP, while Google relies on trade secrets.

IP is illegitimate because each concept exists in effectively infinite supply, and therefore cannot be owned anymore than the Pythagorean theorem or the color blue can be owned. _Access_ to a concept, however, can theoretically be owned, since access can only be gained through physical channels (books, bandwidth, oration, etc.), which are inherently limited in volume. Google limits the “supply” of _access_ to its code, while MS (tries to) limit the “supply” of the code itself.

So closed source could still exist in an IP-free world. There’d be nothing to stop people from distributing binaries freely, of course, but there’d also be nothing to stop anyone from concealing the source as a trade secret.
New BP Logo Concepts (Although they're more art and less logo-esque)