skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, enumerating a finite list of things is not something you wouldn't do in a math proof. Now if I say: X="primes are all multiples of three", "why isn't X true?", there are many obvious answers to that. For starters, because there's at least an element of primes (7), that is not a multiple of three.

That should be enough to disprove: "there's never an explanation for why something isn't true", and that's the point. I would have preferred a simple explaination of why PG thinks X isn't true than the assertion that such a thing can't be explained (actually I suspect he was being humourous or something like that, obviously he has to have a reason to think like he thinks).

Also, you can always reply: "because I don't want to!", or "because I have other things to do", or "because I don't see a reason to" (it's like asking "why should I..?"), to "why don't you ... X?" :)
Net income, salaries deducted?
amazon.com(according to wikipedia)
Revenue	▲ US$14.84 billion (2007)
Net income	▲ US$476 million (2007)

net income means EVERYTHING deducted right?

so salaries are paid?
I think it might help to have an official statement, like, "We plan to add all these libraries, in time. You can help somehow." One issue in the Arc community is there's no clear way to contribute. A lot of this angst about lacking libraries could be turned into a polite suggestion to help build the language.

Perhaps there should be AEP = Arc Enhancement Proposals a la Python's PEPs.
Three wikipedia visualization ideas
There are already several visualizations of Wikipedia, but I somehow feel there is still more potential in it. Any further ideas?
Success, I guess, is where one is at the moment with respect to where he ultimately can be.

It shouldn't be limited to money or coding. If you think overall you are doing great and would not want things to change as they are in present, I'd call you a success.
I can't think of Yahoo app that I use on a daily basis, but there are quite a few Google apps that I use constantly.

Being able to see how Google works their magic is pretty cool.
My thesis for this essay is that the Great Gatsby is not an allegory for animal beastiality. First of all, Gatsby contains no animal characters. Because of this, the likelihood that F. Scott Fitzgerald's work was a veiled reference to man-on-animal love is very low. Second, there is no evidence than any of the characters are attracted to animals. While Gatsby does have an attraction to Daisy, there is nothing in the text to indicate that her character metaphorically embodies animalistic qualities. In conclusion, there is no possible way that the Great Gatsby represents an attempt to introduce zoophilia to mainstream American society. After examining all of the evidence one can clearly see that this simply cannot be the case.
True enough. I guess my point is that there were previous debates about banning TechCrunch, which has articles that are spot-on topic but of questionable validity, and then we get an article about farming regulations shooting to the top spot. I mean c'mon guys, do you want to be picky or not?
Sure, but the JS library that powers GMail should at least get a mention and not be buried 6 minutes into a video interview.
http://summize.com/
I volunteered for a local team of the US FIRST Robotics Competition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRST_Robotics_Competition). I felt especially proud, as my team was all girls.

My suggestion is go for quality rather than quantity, unless policy-level work excites you.
> If just anyone could label their food "organic", then what are the odds that word would ever actually mean anything?

Let's recast this. How you like to pay a third party an ongoing annual royalty for the privilege of calling your own software open source? We're smart enough to get concensus on a definition and, if necessary, back it with case law. We don't need interest groups co-opting words from the dictionary for their own financial interest.
Tech Hasn’t Empowered Workers Enough Yet - My Experience
Enhance Google Apps With GreaseMonkey Scripts
Electric Cars You Can Buy Right Now
Lab-on-a-Chip Made of Paper
Good knowledge of OS is a must..then some C, Perl will some handy...If you know unix shell programming, u can become a master in hacking...

and also, if you are a DB guy like me, then even with ordinary SQL, u can hack a lot of stuff...
I think this is an issue of perception. There's simply no way a large blue chip will be happy with the design philosophy of p2p delivery.

Whether it works or not is almost beside the point here...
"Edit: Another common thing about these discussions is otherwise intelligent people ignoring the fact that it is possible for a program written in one language to call a library written in another."

And this is a huge differentiator among languages.

Scala and Clojure have immediate access to the vast expanse of Java libraries. Python has a very good mechanism for wrapping and calling C/C++ libraries.

As far as I know, Arc does not yet particularly shine in this area, although I believe some arc hackers are working on it.
taproot should have a new york branch. they're not the most "hacker-focused" outfit, but i've enjoyed my work with them. (fyi - this is not a teaching organization, it's more of a mechanism for lending your hacker skills to non-profits etc.)

(http://www.taprootfoundation.org/)
How Apple is changing DRM
I made my own opportunity: I just started tutoring. I made an announcement in my church's newsletter, and I told people in person. People come, we talk math, and that's it.
For all intents and purposes, you will need to learn (at least) 2 technologies, one for the client and one for the server.

On the client, you have 2 primary choices: HTML,CSS, & Javascript or Flash/Actionscript. I would definitely opt for HTML,CSS, & Javascript because it's open source and it's everywhere.

On the server, you have many more choices for languages and databases. One of those languages is Javascript, although not too many people use it on the server.

I think you're on exactly the right track. Learn how to build web pages first with HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Then when you're ready to "connect" to the server, ask the next question, "What is the best language/data base to use on the server." But stand back because sparks may fly from your terminal screen as we hackers fight with each other trying to answer that one :)

Good luck.
Alternative To Silicon Chip Invented
I don't get this. It's a javascript library--you can host it wherever you like.
"You are likely to become pregnant any time and therefore a potential 3 month billing-loss candidate as far as I am concerned."

Do you guys think of this when hiring for one of your startups?
Copyright is the harshest law in the land | mathoda.com
learning html and javascript could be a good place to start since you can make things right away with those.

i think that is very important when you start, to get instant feedback, making stuff is fun :)

for this reason i would recommend python as your first language.
it is very highlanguage and have extensive libraries. it has clear sparse syntax and is very easy to write and read.

but that doesnt mean it is a weak language, ont he contrary it is a very powerful language that is used by a lot of big companies and small startups.

so not only is it a good language to start with but it is also something you will have great use for in general as a skilled hacker.

while paul graham and a lot of others rave about LISP(right fully, its a powerful, flexible language with some very special features) i wouldnt start with it.
it lacks a standard and you start working on a higher level of abstraction right away, there is not a lot of libraries that you can just install and start having fun with right away as you can with python.
i definitely think you should learn it later on but not at the start.

with python you can add the pygame library and start making simple games right away, it is very easy.
you can write webapps with webpy/django without much knowledge needed.

then as you evolve you should pick up something like the art of programming(or a similar book that has code in a language you know) and learn about all basic algorhitms and datastructures.
if you want to be a serious hacker you need to know the theory.

python however lets you create cool things right away without knowing that much.

while this is a rant for python it is not fanboyish, i just think python is very suited for programmers of all skillevels.
there was an article on here some days ago about pythons suitability as a beginners language.

there are other options obviously, ruby for example his fairly similar to python in a lot of aspects but when python tries to keep things simple(there should preferrably be one obvious way to do things) rubys philosophy is there is more than one way to do it.

you could ofc learn java(java and javascript only have the name in common) which is wide-used language that you will run into sooner or later anyway.
on this board youll probably find that it often gets critisized for being a language for average programmers though. it is fairly verbose and in some peoples opinion too objectoriented and dont offer any options.

the downside with python and ruby are that they can be pretty slow but that isnt an issue for most applicatiosn and certainly not for the apps youll write a s a beginner.

ruby also has a very popular webframework called rails(ruby on rails).

c/C++ are probably the fastest(executionwise, not developmentspeed) and are also good to learn but are a little more difficult to start with and c is fairly low-level. good to know but wouldnt recommend it to start with.
devc++ is a good development environment if you do though.
"most of your time developing a program is spent writing it, not watching it run."

This totally depends on the kind of program you are writing.

I just completed a class on Information Retrieval, the exact same kind of tasks and algorithms in the Collecting Intelligence books. One assignment, I spent most of the time allocated trying to get the program reasonably fast enough in Python to finish in less than a day. If a mistake was not apparent until the program had run for a couple of hours, it totally killed all of the exploratory programming advantages that Python has.

I finally gave up and rewrote the entire thing in Java a day before the assignment was due. I got my algorithm to converge in under 2 hours (had left the Python version running much longer with than this with no converging in sight), and was able to get some decent results to turn in.

Maybe I'm just greedy. I want it all. Speed, exploratory programming, lots of libraries. Common Lisp offers the first two, the last, not so much. Java offers 1 and 3, Python 2 and 3.

My next languages to learn are Scala and/or Clojure. Potentially the speed and libraries of Java, with many of the features that make Common Lisp and Python great at exploratory programming.

I do not see Arc on a path that will give it all 3 of these attributes in the foreseeable future.
CBS buys tech news website CNET
The nice thing about the Javascript recommendation is that by using the "View Source" option in your browser, you can get lots of real-world examples to read. Reading code is a great way to learn how to hack (and the way we used to do it, back in the day, when access to computers was very limited).

I'd suggest the following: find a web page that interests you, view the source, and try to understand what the source code is doing. Start with getting a vague overview, and keep drilling down into each layer of abstraction, asking questions repeatedly, until you truly grok every line.

When you can do that, you'll be well on your way.
Definitely good to hear. I am very frugal too. One of my blog postings on the topic: http://buzzpal.wordpress.com/2008/02/17/bootstrap-then-raise...
How to Find Clever Web Domains Like del.icio.us or ma.tt or blo.gs
Dear Yahoo! You're Fired!
Interesting thing is that as adults lie to kids other higher power people lie to the lower ones. For example politicians lie to citizens is a very similar manner. Or doctors (or relatives) lie to sick, probably dieing patients. So the concept is the same - to control and to "protect"
That does do a decent job if I already know what micro topic I want to hear about like "Plaxo" or "Earthquake" but it's not a great tool for discovering what the hot topic is for certain subsets of people. I'd love to know what the hot topic of debate is among political circles for instance, but if I type in "Senate Bill" I'm not discovering what what people in the know are talking about, I'm defining the topic already by my search term which limits the discoveries I could make.

If I type in "sports" I get a bunch of returns that use that word, but that doesn't tell me what people who are in the inner circle of the sporting world are thinking about today-who knows, they might be Tweeting about How NFL Players are organizing aid relief to China, but I'm going to miss seeing that since the search term doesn't show up.

What I want to be able to do is to see what the top 100 or so Twitterers in any given field are talking about without having to know beforehand what I'm searching for.

Summarize is a great tool in it's own right, just not the same tool as I'm talking about :-)

-Edit the "trending topics" does something similar, but that's an aggregate of all tweets, not a feed from people connected with specific areas of expertise.
Why is dynamic typing important?

I had an enjoyable time prototyping optimization heuristics in OCaml, where Arc would have been completely inadequate because it lacks floating point speed.
"I would suggest that torrents are non commercial since there are no businesses offering their content via torrents and making money."

Well, there's the marginally profitable World of Warcraft, which uses bittorrent for content distribution (http://www.blizzard.co.uk/wow/faq/bittorrent.shtml). Most linux distributions also offer their content through bittorrent, although I'm not sure how profitable they tend to be. I'm pretty sure some of the linux companies make money though.
"or we will be stuck with Java forever"

The Scala/Clojure approach makes this a blessing, rather than a curse.

Interesting language, with all the benefits of the JVM and Java libraries. (Which is why these languages are next on my list of languages to learn.)
An Interview with Sergio Pereira [Prototype.js]
A victim of Economic Warfare - Zimbabwe
What? Religion helped something? No way!!!11

edit: fine, be that way. i dare you to downvote this to -666. if you don't get all the way there though i'm gonna sue you.
Say what you want about the policies of Zimbabwe, the seizing of the farms has nothing to do with 165,000% inflation. Other countries have done worse without the same effect. Zimbabwe has been under a propaganda and economic attack by Great Britain. This is the result, I guess.

War is now assymetric. Welcome to the new Economy.
XSQL Puzzle of the month [$250 prize]
How does this affect the CNET/Yahoo! partnership announced just last month?
A whole new world has just opened: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=190581
AppJet gives you an in-browser editor to edit your processing.js app, you can instantly view the results, and then you can choose a subdomain for your creation.

This is in the spirit of Processing, which itself is all about by-passing unneeded complexity to make cool stuff.
Point taken. I really hadnt thought of things like linux distros. Was thinking more of movies tv shows etc.
A New Hope: Polyglotism
If Brand Loyalty Didn’t Exist, Twitter Would Be Extinct
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=149482

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=127952

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123903

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=90782
"It's such a good idea, that it's slowly making its way into new programming languages like Perl 6, Fortress, Factor, Scala, and future versions of C++, C#, and VB.Net."

C# 3.0 and VB 9.0, which shipped about 5 months ago, have limited local type inference.

In other words you can type "var x = 5;" or "Dim x = 5" and Visual Studio/the compiler will know that's an integer. It is not late-bound (the derogatory term in .NET/Visual Basic for dynamic typing).

That combined with LINQ (including LINQ to XML, which is the easiest way of doing XML processing I have ever encountered) and closures (which are used to implement LINQ) puts it way ahead of Java as a language at the moment. There are obviously issues with .NET as a platform.
EBay v. Craigslist. - By Bonnie Goldstein - Slate Magazine
Interesting to see that Mark Cuban is in the board nambed by Ichan.
This policy of Welch's undoubtedly helped fuel GE's massive profit growth while he was there, by removing a lot of the dead employee weight. (It's outlined in "Straight from the Gut", which is a decent read, if a little too conversational in tone.). However, I've always thought that there approaches a point where this is counter-productive. You're assuming that you can replace those 10% with workers better than they were. But, after you do this long enough, your bottom 10% are probably at least average, or above average, and it may be a better business decision to keep those on instead of hiring and training unknown candidates. At some point there's got to be reduced returns.
Learning the essence of programming is more important than learning a specific language, once you master one of them it's very easy to pick up the rest. So I'd pick an easy one such as PHP and use online resources like w3schools.com to get me started.

Also, I find it very effective to learn by looking at examples on line first and create similar problems to solve. That way, my head remain active to think through the problem solving process. It also helps memorizing the syntax because you see the purpose of the code instead of just passively taking it all in.
Use WordPress Functions to Create a Smarter Blog
Good write-up by super designer Chris Pearson on setting up your own custom functions coding for WordPress
Exploiting Network Cards
Frankly, I would advice against learning Javascript. When you try to interact with HTML, it's very inconsistent, and it's difficult for you to get a grasp of the rules and what is supposed to happen where.

I would suggest starting with Java. Java is a modern language, you can get a free compiler and IDE, there are tons of excellent books, and you will learn all the concepts of object oriented programming without having to deal with the 'interesting' parts of the machine.

Set yourself a goal, for example to create a GUI app that organises your MP3s or so. Then work on that as your way of learning Java.

After you know Java, the other imperative languages are mostly about syntax. There are no real new concepts to learn.

Now, I do not use Java personally. I use C++, and I started with VB. It's useful to learn C++ early, but only attempt this if you are a dedicated and patient person.
My reaction exactly. I am not sure what that was about.
Actually, large chunks of Grim Fandango were written in Lua.

http://www.grimfandango.net/?page=articles&pagenumber=2
Great read! Answers a lot of unasked questions. I'd give it 2 upvotes if I could.
I don't find these domains clever at all. They're impossible to remember, even del.icio.us is difficult to type in. That's why they bought delicious.com as well.
I just tried it; thought I found a clever domain name that ended with .ge; struggled to find somewhere to register an international domain name (anyone know of a good place?); found out .ge is the domain for Georgia; found out that the the "administrative contact and the technical contact must reside in Georgia"; game over. This is going to be harder than I thought.
"For all intents and purposes"

Not quite - there are other applications of programming than web and web services...
One side effect is that no one has any incentive to let their coworkers take credit for anything. Instead, the incentive is to make your coworkers look bad whenever possible. They become your competition.
RIA == Platform Play
last.fm is easy enough.
Right, but you can also do the same with vim and any web host with shell access. I guess it just seems to me like a solution to a nonexistent problem.
Adding to what everyone else said, you need a framework for the programming. These are skillsets & you can only pick them up if you practice extensively. You need something to practice at.

Install ubuntu 8.04 & explore the add/remove apps. Install netbeans & write a hello world app. Install quanta & edit some saved web pages. Get mediawiki working & use it for notes. Install a simple mediawiki extension. Edit it, or write your own.
Right. I was just making a few assumptions and trying to keep it simple and helpful.
'Accidentally' turning on a broadcasting flag like this would be a quick-and-dirty way of flushing out the (commercial) DVR solutions which don't obey it.
I disagree.

First of all, Gatsby contains no animal characters.

The Great Gatsby contains two dogs and a cat. While none are given names, one of the dogs (an Airedale bought by Myrtle Wilson) appears several times and has some identifiable characteristics.

Second, there is no evidence than any of the characters are attracted to animals.

In fact, it contains this scene:

"She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs awaited her orders there."

In conclusion, although bestiality is not one of the novel's primary themes, there is evidence that at least one character makes out with a dog at some point.

Please note: the only reason I have time to go and grep -iw gatsby.txt for "dog" is that I'm waiting for the program I'm writing to finish executing. This is why speed is important in exploratory programming.
Unfortunately, getting such an ISP is prohibitively expensive for many consumers. And regional monopolies lock in the rest.
One thing the article doesn't mention is that community colleges offer English and Math classes that are basically below 101 level, for people who aren't ready for the "entry-level" stuff yet. It sounds like a lot of people in his class would be candidates for that.
What is it that you want to hack? What do you want to make?

For me, I was a kid and I started hacking basic on an Atari 400 with a whopping 2k of ram. I was trying to make a dungeon crawl game. I learned about variables, conditionals and looping. Then I learned about I/O.

Your environment is, of course, vastly different than mine was, but the process is the same.
I wish gossip whores like Arrington wrote the way angry corporate raiders (or their secretaries, maybe) do.
they seem to work fine on youtube
Ruby and Python seem to be in vogue for web applications. I'm a Ruby guy because I got tired of reading through flame wars and decided to pick one of them randomly.
I'm sure a big number of these servers is used for data crunching/warehousing and ad serving -- not just for rendering pages.
Data Mining: Mapping The Blogosphere (gallery)
I suggest _why's lovely Hackety Hack (http://hacketyhack.net)

Reasons why H-ety-H is a good choice:
1. Ruby - Ruby is a beautiful, easy to learn, modern language that's both powerful and easy for beginners.
2. Hand-Holding - It walks you through all of the interactive examples
3. Community - Hackey Hack encourages users to share their programs with others

Besides, if eigth graders can do it, so can you!
Ask YC: Email Invite System Etiquette
With online email service invite systems that many web apps use these days, do you send the invites through the user's account within that service or is it more proper to harvest the contact addresses and send from the new (your) web apps email domain?

If the latter how do you avoid spam filters?
Mark Cuban looks like the only guy on the proposed slate of directors with any direct experience running a web/software business.