skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Confession: I use vi because when I was learning how to be a sysadmin (was already a coder) it was recommended -- back then (the '90s) you never knew if emacs was going to be on a system, but vi was practically guaranteed.

I still barely know how to use it, though: my own fault. Laziness prevails. Some of the commands I use because I discovered them by accident (shift-C erases the rest of the line and puts you into edit mode -- I figured that one out because of a typo).
Why not?

Most of my work and education has been in software, but I am also a professional musician, an avid photographer, and have significant interests in linguistics, politics, U.S. history, and education. One of the funnest jobs I've ever had was scoring open-ended essays written by grade-school students.

I don't see why a programmer couldn't develop an interest in pharmaceutical work.
Scraping seems rude, although I might try a gentle scrape if PG doesn't complain... so far, afaik, he's been silent on the topic in re to news.YC...
Mate, Google Announces gDay
That this would pass as a funny April fools joke, is the joke.

Come on yc'ers, get some humor!
Yes. Build Skynet.
You shouldn't.
Google traditionally runs a prank every April 1st.
From wikipedia:

"In their traditional role, pharmacists typically take a request for medicines from a prescribing health care provider in the form of a medical prescription and dispense the medication to the patient and counsel them on the proper use and adverse effects of that medication. In this role, pharmacists ensure the safe and effective use of medications."

Sounds like fun.
I'm not sure what the point is of drawing any of these metaphors - a market is important because you want to make something useful, and execution is important because you want to beat your competition. If you don't have a market, you lose in the start, if you don't have proper execution, you lose to competition. So do both.

So ideas without execution are worthless. And good execution of a market-less idea is also worthless.
Sony BMG infringes on Digital Rights, gets busted
Factorial function as a limerick
I hope you don't make your career decisions based on Wikipedia excerpts.

There are pharmacists that work in ICU's (Intensive Care Units) and hospital departments as part of teams where they play a pretty significant role and interact with surgeons and other doctors. They are the go to individuals when it comes to drug compatibility and whether a patient can withstand a specific drug. I've seen it first hand, and it looks far from boring, not to mention the fact that in the end, they're working to help increase the quality of people's lives.
That's kind of insulting to all the pharmacists that help keep people healthy worldwide, don't you think?
Mile-high tower to be built in Saudi Arabia
What exactly do they do that can't be done by a computer? I would expect a computer to be more reliable than a pharmacist's memory.
What's more, even if you do find pharmaceutical work boring, perhaps a bit of serious study of the field would reveal some gaping holes in productivity that could be solved by new software applications...
we use GoToMeeting at work for giving demos and telecons
There's a lot going on here.

First thing is Moore's Law. If it continues to hold, we'll be able to have more processors working on the same task, but more importantly, we'll have more processors working on different tasks, concurrently. This is huge. Think "computronium." A revolution? Yes.

Secondly, the problem of optimizing our algorithms for maximizing multithreaded performance is not solved. There's still much research being done in this area (e.g. Terascale, good CS departments). We can assume that our ability to use parallel threads will increase, although it will level off eventually, of course. The question is, how good are we at using many processors? I would wager that we aren't very efficient at that yet.

You are correct in pointing out the applicability of Amdahl's law, but exponential decay in the processor/performance ratio does not immediately mean we still can't reap major benefits from more cores. In this vein, I encourage you to think about the "long tail," and what that could mean for (parallel) computing power.
My experience with vim started when I got OS X. I had always wanted to learn how to use the terminal on a UNIX machine, and as an extension of that want, I learned to use vim as it was very easy to jump right into it from the terminal.

If there was one word that I could use to describe vim, I would have to say: beautiful.
640k blah blah bill gates.

there are uses for that multiple cores. will you need 32 cores in your average home PC? i highly doubt it. just like the average user doesn't need a RAID array or 4 gigs of RAM. yet. perhaps things will progress far enough in the future to require that many cores, but right now they don't.
Why you don’t need a Venture Capitalist
I forget where I saw the lecture on the internet, but the argument basically stated that people are only starting to realize what multi-core processors are able to achieve. It's a relatively new technology to the average user, and it is going to take some time before applications start moving down the development pipe that takes advantage of multi-core.

To answer your questions, no one knows yet what the average user could do with that many cores, but I can almost guarantee you that their will be an answer within the next five years.
This doesn't really address the issue that there's no centralized information repository. With the content entirely in RAM, to distribute the app to two boxes would require either some sort of message broadcasting system, or re-architecting the data to be stored in some other way.
What the hell...

This should be a ban-worthy offense.
Paul, your scaling up the war.
Don't forget your words carry much more weight than ours, and with that comes fear and aggression.
The proof of that is your essay, that went from you're own thoughts and observations to a reason to discuss about discussion.
I believe we are beyond all this.
I know we are.
Heh heh. For some reason I can't stop laughing at this post. Maybe it's because it's 1 am and I'm punchy or maybe it's because somebody took the time to draw Christ in Ascii.
I agree. So much h8 for pharmacists. It must be all that standing above others that creates this.
The numbers for IPO'ing and running a public company are now different post-SOx. Even though M&A is now the preferred exit for internet/software companies, are the number of M&A's really growing in number and dollars? http://blog.softtechvc.com/2006/04/vc_exits_mas_co.html

"The cost of complying with SOX 404 impacts smaller companies disproportionately, as there is a significant fixed cost involved in completing the assessment...companies with less than $100 million in revenue spent 2.55% [to stay compliant]." http://www.sec.gov/info/smallbus/acspc/acspc-finalreport.pdf

"...Sarbanes Oxley costs a private company about $2 million to $5 million in preparation to go public" http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=102632
Have you tried understanding the Berkeley Sockets API with C? There are some good sites that cover basics: http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/

If you are on Windows, search "winsock".
As I say, I do love the power of it and I'm sure I'd find it somewhat intuitive once I start using it, but it's just a steep learning curve when you can't fall back to input with a mouse.

What I mean is: whenever I start learning a new program, I like to be able to use it like a n00b at first (i.e. click around, use native controls), and then learn the more powerful features.

A good example of this way of learning is the way I use TextMate... every day I learn new controls, and get more proficient and more effective, but I'm not rendered useless (as one would be with vi) if I don't know each and every key combination.

Granted, you can make do with just a few vi commands and be not effective at all, but it's not the same as using a GUI
If you like that, you'll really like this: http://www.limerickdb.com/?269
Scientists successfully create human-bear-pig chimera
You would have a computer counsel patients? You would have a computer ask people to describe the side effects they've been experiencing, and ask probing questions to evaluate how serious those side effects really are, and which of their two dozen drugs might be causing them, and which drugs might be usefully discontinued or substituted and which might not? You would have a computer decide whether or not the patient's phone call, complaining that their latest drug isn't as effective as usual, warrants a call to their primary-care physician?

You would assign important decisions about your medical care to the sole discretion of a Java program written by a committee of outsourced developers that don't know or care any more about pharmacy than, say, you?

It sounds like you don't have a lot of experience with serious illness. Congratulations, and may you remain healthy for as long as possible!
IBM temporarily banned from Federal contracts
The modern world is so complex. Perhaps humans evolved to operate best with n vectors of freedom, but most are uncomfortable or unable to operate with m>>n vectors of freedom.

So perhaps you are right about humans, but wrong about freedom.
For every entrepreneur who says you don't need VC money, I can find you one who is equally convinced of the opposite. The biggest successes in technology have been venture-backed. That's the point of VC - to allow successful companies to scale up and have a shot at being super-successful.
If funding is a path that you'll be taking, I think anywhere for SV is pretty close to a dead zone. So, unless it's a part-time "hobby startup", build something that has a baked-in business model (i.e. something that people will BUY). That will allow you to bootstrap somewhat effectively.
Scribd holds anniversary at investor's $22 million mansion
Princeton Public Speaking - Executive Communications Training
How are you going to get really really really really big?
This article is excellent. I'm an emacs user, and I know of several articles and books that introduce emacs, but this is the first time that I've ever actually understood how a vi master thinks.
http://www.bemroses.net/images/curves.jpg

i've found the Cold Turkey method of learning very useful. there's a saying that goes something like, "the greatest catalyst for progress is necessity." when switching to dvorak i simply never touched quwerty again. likewise with Vim, i never used another editor. it's a bit odd at first, but if you keep yourself from using anything else, you will have to learn, or, as you say, you really will be useless. and due to that, you learn it faster than approaching it from a more reserved angle

is it worth it? absolutely. editing code is a fundamental part of programming. it's something you're going to be doing a lot of. the investments you put into that aspect will pay off greatly

the key to learning vi well is to be in command mode as much as possible
No quotes from Al Gore?
A tangent, however inappropriate:

You weren't meant to have a bed. The better a bed "feels" to most people, the worse it is for the health of your back, and vice versa. Most non-serious back pain can be corrected by sleeping on a dirt floor, or a hay bale.

You also weren't meant to have shoes. Orthopedics today are mostly needed because of the shoes we wear when we're young; your feet are meant to rest flat against the ground, to be able to curve around things like rocks and tree branches, and to mush up into wet dirt or sand. I personally get back-aches whenever I wear anything other than flat-soled ("skate") shoes, approximating the natural terrain below them.

From these two things, I can guess that chairs really aren't a good idea either, but I've never looked into them specifically.
If history is any guide, that compute power will be used by new applications, not better versions of existing ones (although 1080p Skype will probably also happen). So the inability to scale existing software is irrelevant; new apps will be coded from scratch using new parallel tools (assuming that those appear).

It's possible that no such apps will emerge, but I'm not betting on it. Many of them will look pointless at first. (Check out this 150MB screen saver: http://scr.sc/products/dropclock/ A waste of disk space, you say? 150MB costs a few cents.)
He refused comment.
The reliably thoughtful Chris Messina just posted on the benefits and costs of OpenID, partly in response to a decision by linkmarking site http://Ma.gnolia.com to stop accepting traditional address and password registrations in favor of OpenID only. http://FactoryJoe.com/blog/2008/03/30/magnolia-moves-to-open...

In the cat and mouse game between site owners and spammers, data on recent Ma.gnolia registrations showed an overwhelming number of spammers have begun using automated tools to proxy Captcha and create traditional address and password logins. For now, OpenID encumbers them by requiring presumably more valuable credentials.
They already know (search for "the Shocker"): http://blog.ngedit.com/2007/11/19/the-vi-gang-sign/
I'm going to go ahead and call this one an April Fool's joke.
Ha - I just thought I saw a female. And then I thought your comment was doubly witty - april fools == pagan festival.
There are a lot of problems in this article.

A lot of entrepreneurs can become disenchanted and unrealistic in expectations. I have seen quite a few presentations from entrepreneurs, and they are typically all over the place. Many lose focus, and do a bunch of things that essentially don't matter. Having an experienced set of eyes with a vested interest in the success of your start-up makes for an honest reality check. Also, it helps you get through the rough patches.
http://johnndege.com/2008/03/31/startup-advice-from-someone-...

The amount of funding VC's provide depends on where your startup is, what you need, what you want to do with it. Series A financing is meant to prove your concept, maybe test out a business model, maybe get some users. With internet and software, a couple hundred thousand should get you to that point. Other types of startups (medical devices, hardware, biotech) are more capital intensive, and need more money to build a prototype and prove out the concept. VCs are evolving and some are funding at similar levels to angels. Look at Founders Fund and Charles River Ventures as examples.

No one is going to just hand you money and hope you do the right thing. VC's are in business to make money and fantastic returns. There are startups that work really well with VC funding, and startups that are better off staying bootstrapped. I could get into more detail, but the basic idea is that if you're not ready to grow at a hair losing pace over the next 3-5 years, don't take VC money.

The alternatives do not seem well thought out in this article. Friend and family money and mortgaging your house are not really direct substitutes for VC's. Friends, family, fools are sources of initial funding, before you have anything tangible. Mortgaging your house gives you cash in exchange for additional personal debt, which is typically not the right type of financing for startups. VC's and angels use equity investments, which means that if your business fails, you're basically off the hook. Taking on debt means that you owe that money whether your startup succeeds or fails. Not using expensive software, outsourcing design work, using your house as an office, bringing other developers are ways of cutting initial costs, but there are still unavoidable costs to growing businesses. There is a cost to getting talented employees, support equipment, and sales people. Not every startup can rely on viral growth and word of mouth to get new customers.

I have seen too many entrepreneurs that blow $100k - $400k building and doing "cool, shiny" things that don't matter, and start running out of money, without showing any real traction or evidence that it can become a viable business. Involving an experienced outsider to identify essential features, actions, partnerships could easily mean the difference between success and failure.
Looking at the pictures from the investors mansion confirms my suspicion that Americans have no taste.

Besides - where are the chicks?

:-)
Google: Announcing Project Virgle
Not all Americans, just a lot of the rich ones, who spend their money to build a Hollywood image of being rich. So I guess it's just a result of financial mobility in the US, an annoying symptom of something, in itself, good :)

Disclaimer: I am not American.
NPR interviews Bram Cohen of BitTorrent fame.
"Besides - where are the chicks?" -- This is sillicon valley, the bigest sausage fest ever. Smart and good looking girls are very rare. You have to go to NYC to find smart educated girls, that are actually pretty and have good fashion sense.
Like your way of seeing the positive side of it.
This is going to sound a bit stand-offish (or trollish), but I'm sorta glad that its hard to go public with a company. Thinking back to the slew of IPOs of yesteryear that were all of companies that had no product or reasonable revenue source, I'm glad that the current slew of new web 2.0/social networking/etc web companies can't all go public. Letting your stock be bought by the layman is a pretty serious event and shouldn't be done by just any company - They should have staying power.

Right now, the people who are educated enough (VCs etc) to be taking the risk in investing in these companies do anyway, and although it slows the growth of these companies some because their influx of capitol is limited, it limits the amount of normal laypeople that get caught up in the hype and make bad investments.

That however does bring up an interesting point. Should the gov't protect investors from their own silliness? Where should the gov't step in to protect people from bad investments by means of regulation? The more I think about the stock market and investing as it applies to the average person, the more I don't get it. Stocks seems so arbitrary - Its price is just a result of the collective sorta-independent opinions of all the people owning that stock. You don't get anything from that stock. If I buy some stock of some company, the company doesn't see that money, just some guy who sold it to me. And the stock market is so fickle to bad news or analyst "advice". </rant>
Demystifying Clouds
Mediatemple -- the author of this piece says "no, bad!" I've heard very good things from others about MT. Is there a consensus here on the quality/price ratio of (mt)'s services?
Inside Jeopardy: An interview with former writer/researcher Carlo Panno
I think it's possible to argue carefully, thoughtfully, and with 100% good intentions, and still be guilty of intellectual dishonesty.

Example: the honest, well-intentioned pastor who delivers a sermon on creationism. I witnessed one of these last year -- I was stunned by the intellectual dishonesty as he made a false statements about what "science" and "scientists" say, but understand that he's a loving man who cares deeply and authentically for his congregation.

The fact that he believes what he's saying doesn't change the dishonesty of his arguments.
This is a multi-part interview by Ken Jennings, winner of 74 consecutive games on Jeopardy!.

Part 2: http://ken-jennings.com/blog/?p=776

Part 3: http://ken-jennings.com/blog/?p=777
GMail Custom Time
I never really understood pointers fully until I learned a bit of assembly as part of a computer architecture course. Once you realize that the computer stores everything as numbers, its like: ooooh. Addresses are just numbers written in Hex to scare away people who don't do number-base switching. In face, computers just play around with numbers mostly in different bases to ease playing around with them.
This is pretty pointless. FriendFeed will look at this feature and just copy it into future feature sets. I don't see the point in building features into an application that isn't your's.
For a company that just got 5 mil in funding, getting some traction, and perhaps looking for engineers, this might be the ticket to getting a call from pb.
Well said. This is why I think if OpenID is to survive, the provider must be the end user's ISP.

- They already have a relationship with the user, mitigating trust and tech support issues to some degree.

- They already have the power to redirect webpages, spam the user, and find out what sites they are visiting, so you aren't giving them any more power than they have.
Ask YC: Great idea, but not too fond of the tech, is it still worth pursuing?
So say you've got this brilliant and magnificent great idea that you know will get lots of users and everything. But it's specific or nichey enough that requires you to master/learn another language/technology to see it happen.

Would you still do it?
How to get profiled on TechCrunch
I agree and I believe I am one of those who thinks one thing and do another. I have had my own share of bad experience with VC's but I tried very hard not to demonize and tried to learn from my past. Perhaps using an analogy that I have seen in one of the YC posts, thinking that I could an astronaut one day doesn't mean that I actually want to go to the moon, but it gives me the motivation and the endurance to just get across town.

http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2007/10/vc-worst-enemy.html
Where faith is concerned, remember that it is your faith in the US Government (assuming you are in the US) that transforms an elaborate print on paper into money. As it isn't backed by a precious commodity, it is inherently worthless. Collective faith makes the system work.

To me, science and philosophy, the 2 things normally used to refute the idea of God actually prove it better than anything else. Science and philosophy are searches for universal laws and principles. What makes these principles universal, i.e., applicable in all instances? If there were no intelligent design, these laws and principles would perhaps be better described as leaky abstractions, as opposed to concepts which always apply. Think of things like pi, the golden ratio etc, which are so oft-repeated in nature, science and engineering. Seems far-fetched that all this 'just happened.' Supreme intelligence was at work.

BTW, although I am not a Christian, I am the son of a Minister and a Christian woman, so I am biased.

Greetings from Jamaica!
The Power of Javascript
April fool's jokes seem to be getter more obvious each year...
Did you know that each integer in a PHP array takes 68 bytes of storage?
Macros. Especially macro-defining macros.
Why is a pharmacist counseling patients? They go to doctors no?
10 Guerilla Airline Travel Tips for the Geek-Minded Person
Drugs are the answer! Go for it! :P
Such a freaky picture.
A new start-up service for tired Google users
Actually I still find continuations hard to grasp. I still have to stop and think before writing code involving continuations, the same way I have to stop and think before driving from A to B in Cambridge.

It doesn't feel like continuations match the way the mind works. Ditto for nested backquotes, though I've never been able to think of a better way to do what they do.
What problem do you solve?
How do you scale this?
How big is the market?
What do you want to do this the money?
What key assumptions do you need to prove to make this a success?
WHat metrics are you going to use to validate these assumptions?
Youtube is Rick-Rolling its users.  [WTF]
No, seriously. If you go on Youtube and click on a Recommended Video link you will directed to a Rick Astley video.

Does anyone else think this is nuts?
I had the same _exact_ experience with you, except, instead of letting my sense of contradiction lie dormant for a couple of years, I sat down for an intense couple of hours until I got your same lightning bolt moment. I just wanted to note this, because I found it to be an epiphany that someone else had the same exact problem with pointers as I had.
Anil Dash: Your April Fool's Joke Sucks.
Google Docs now runs offline with Gears