skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
oh man, I stood up at 6 early this morning (CET), turned on my pc to do a really really urgent math assignment, and my python scripts, which I tuned down today to report me only the most urgent things (in the category or a new 11th september or better: of a new 3rd world war) start howling, produce a window before my eyes, obscure the view to the math assignment, report me in blood red capitals: "NEW ARTICLE BY PAUL GRAHAM! NEW ARTICLE BY PAUL GRAHAM! YESS YESS YESS!!!!" (all the other python bots, except that one peridically checking PG's hp stayed calm)
I decided this reigns among the 3 incidents with enough balls to distract me today. I don't know the exact frequency of PG's essay-releases, but this can't be a coincidence. It was preprogrammed by a higher being, (something like the most general meta-meta-macro) it was a test of willpower whether I really really wanna finish my math studies or not, and I failed. I read this essay tho i had 0 time on my hands. This math assignment might have posed the turning point in my life, and I neglected it in order to read Pauls writing where he explains I shouldn't read things online. Because its so distracting! (Thats interesting: A distracting essay about how to not get distracted.) Fortunately it was short. THANK GOD! So I might survive this somehow.

SUMMARY of THOUGHT: PG's has created with his essays one of the deadliest addictions online, worse than TV, games, etc taken together. I hope he feels a bit guilty about it (and about my math assignments too)

MiKe
Did he forget the cost of the war? At $1-2 trillion estimated total, it dwarfs everything he mentioned.
It's preinstalled on many shared hosting places (as is php). That's my best guess.
There's only one three star joint on the west coast and while it's not far from Mountain View, it's definitely not Google's cafeteria. :)
How to Deploy Your Skunkworks Application
Regarding your final point, the article does mention it, though not in detail.

"I believe we have blended the best of Europe and the United States here, the Nordic welfare system with the American entrepreneurial spirit,' he said, pointing out that Iceland, unlike the other Nordic countries, had exceptionally low personal and corporate tax rates. 'This has meant not only that Icelandic companies stay and foreign ones come, but that we have increased by 20 per cent our tax revenue owing to increased turnover.'"

The article presents a pretty narrative, not a substantive account of different economic theories and their effects, but it does mention both the welfare state policies and the free-market ones, suggesting that choosing the best of both is what has improved Iceland. On the surface this seems sensible to me. The Nordic countries generally have better 'quality of life' than the US does, the US generally is stronger economically.
The best thing to do after Sept. 11th would have been to mourn, then smile and pretend it never happened. A lot less would have been lost.
It is ironical that reading this was the perfect example of the distraction that you talk about (no offence meant, only an observation).
Hmm, let's get this straight - Caveman had no TV, and stayed in his cave for 10 thousands of years. The Middle ages had no TV, and entertained with bloody battles, torture and witch burning.

And right now, the age of TV is the most peaceful and innovative age in a long time. Only marred by a few surly spots in the world - which are the same spots that don't have any TV!
Very nice article. It answered some of the things I've wanted to know about Scala (scheduling and actors), although of course I'd be curious to see if the Scala guys have a 'rebuttal'.
This is great news, congrates to Perl6 community.

Another question is, whether Perl6 will really be able to take off on a larger scale. I still have a feeling that it is coming a few years too late.
snufflebug.com would be ideal for a bug tracking website.
Satyam Computers sued for $1 billion
And I in turn got distracted by your replay. It seems all I can do is turn off this computer completely.
Is this real? The cast listed ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1049412/fullcredits ) is very eclectic. It stars Pauley Perrette (yes, the goth girl from NCIS) and includes Anthony Robbins, Raymond Kurzweil, Aubrey de Grey, Alvin Toffler, Marvin Minsky, Mitch Kapor, Bill Joy and Vinod Khosla.
Link-ified - http://www.conotes.com
ClearContext’s Stab At Making Email More Manageable
Why I Intensely Debated But Decided to Disqus (Embrace community or die)
This is spam about spamming.
20 million people is the maximum size for Scandinavian-style socialism? In that case, here's a suggestion-- why not divide the US into, say, fifty separate geographical administrative units?

(By the way: I live in Norway, and was recently screwed over big-time by Norwegians looking to make a fast buck. In my experience, the "work ethic" is far below that of hte US. But I wouldn't be too quick to generalize....)
China perfecting the police state
I like the idea... If reddit, news.yc etc has shown one thing, it's that conversation on the web is evolving.

I think your idea has legs.
Also, I think they are rich because of the cheap energy sources?
The most powerful and far-reaching lies are the lies people tell themselves. Their children are part of them, so they tell them the same lies.
I wonder how to make it happen. I think in germany we now have laws that allow paternity leave for fathers and mothers alike. But if the father earns much more money than the mother, it still doesn't make sense economically for the father to stay at home.

EDIT: here on paternity leave, you get some money, but not your full salary.
I would think that it is comparing the one killer feature of erlang, with one of 1000s in scala - and scala shapes up pretty well (plus its early days for it, its not early days for erlang).
It is good to see indian startups get some decent media coverage. There are some superb developers there and I will be very interested to see how things change there from hosted services to a more entrepreneurial climate.
well hopefully it's worth it to you.
Guessing the Online Customer’s Next Want
login to read ftl.
He lists more than one cool Erlang feature by my reading, and yes, Scala still comes out pretty well. That's why I liked it: knowing Yariv, I expected him to boost Erlang, but the piece was well done, and not at all unfair to Scala.
They weren't referring to the UN report when they said that the Russians are the most unhappy. They were instead referring to a separate "seemingly serious academic study", which supposedly attempts to gauge the "happiness" of each of the nationalities.
This morality thing was already done nicely in the early Ultimas (I think starting with IV, or V). I remember the one dungeon where you are attacked by a monster called "little children". Before you had been trained to never fight children because it immediately makes you lose your virtues.

I don't think Molyneux approach sounds very scientific, though. What is scientific about giving game figures an artificial idea of morals? Scientific for me would be to not make those inbuilt, but let them evolve and see why certain morals make for more successful societies than others.

Sorry to rant about this, but it is one of my pet peeves with games (like civilization). They claim to be simulations, but they are not - they are just projections of the game designers limited perspective and morals. Of course the same could be said for many books and movies, too. I don't like it there, either, but somehow I feel that with games it is another dimension. The pseudo-simulation somehow makes the opinions of the game creators seem more legitimate.
I take my laptop down to a coffeeshop, where i can't access the intenet. The laptop also came without any games installed -- not even solitaire -- and I've kept it that way. These two conditions work well.
We tried dividing it in two once -- didn't work out so well...
He's an awful speaker but I agree with his essential theses. I spent the first 18 years of my life in an awful suburb. Saturday night for the high school kids is getting drunk in a corn field or behind one of the strip mall. 1) Suburbia is a misallocation of resources, fully dependent on cheap energy. 2) Suburbia is a cultural failure, unable to create and nurture community and creativity. Cities have the economic, infrastructure and cultural efficiencies made possible by scale.

Now in Ann Arbor (semi-suburbia) by way of DC (kick ass mass transit, great neighborhoods, huge parks).
Yeah, that's why I thought 50 semi-independent units might do the trick. I figure one for the islands out in the Pacific, and one for the big chunk hanging off of Canada; and the other 48 can divide the piece between Canada and Mexico. I've even got cute names picked out, if you'd like to hear them...
Here's an old school strategy: How about putting something of value at YouYap? Right now, it looks like a random list of spam-links.
That's how it used to be, but ever since the US Civil War the federal government has been gaining more and more power. States used to self-govern, no more. See the federal raids on legal medical marijuana caregivers and patients in California.
"constant and noble battle"

Oh come on, give me a break. Google is a commercial company. They are in it for the money, like everybody else.
So would about 1,000 other domain names.
What will your son will think when he finds this posting in a few years?
The main difference is Google's options are actually worth something.
Facebook CEO Wants to Talk With Google on Friend Connect
Where Portals and Social Networks Collide
A few years too late for what?

It's actually pretty well-timed, I think, though a couple of years head start wouldn't have hurt. It's true that there are several Perlmongers who've jumped ship for Ruby (and I don't blame them--I wouldn't hesitate to do a new project in Ruby, as it's like Perl with all of the rusty nails polished away) or Smalltalk or Haskell or whatever. But, I think the Parrot+Perl6 effort is still interesting, and still quite viable.

The thing is, it's only been in the past two years that anyone thought to put dynamic languages onto a "generic" VM like CLR or JVM. Given that both tend to fight dynamic language designers hardest on those features that make them "dynamic", this new interest across the spectrum is a great place for Perl6 and Parrot to grow up.

Here's the thing...The JVM is awesome as a platform for new languages because of its huge library--one can build a new language from scratch while avoiding the biggest burden developers using new languages face, which is a dearth of libraries. That's the one redeeming thing about Java, is its incredibly huge library.

But, here's the kicker: Perl has even broader library coverage than Java (unbelievable as it may sound, if you're unfamiliar with CPAN--and it's probably the only language that has more/better library coverage than Java). The moment Parrot becomes a viable target for production languages the folks working on Jython, JRuby, Groovy, etc. are going to at least take a look at it. And CPAN is going to lure some of them over. Not only is the library broader and more diverse, it is also already designed to work with a dynamic OO+functional hybrid language. Perl idioms are far closer to Python and Ruby idioms than Java idioms, and so CPAN libraries will feel far more comfortable and "native" to folks working with those languages than tying to Java libraries ever will--no matter how hard the language designer tries to hide the differences.

And, of course, Perl 6 has a lot of nice features, and the installed base of Perl code is larger than Python and Ruby combined (though smaller than PHP), and perhaps surprisingly, still growing at a rate of more lines of code per year than either. (That said, I suspect Python will catch up eventually, if the trend doesn't reverse, as its rate of growth is higher.)
"What is scientific about giving game figures an artificial idea of morals?"

I got the impression that the "next" game he was talking about, the scientific achievement that would be on the cover of Wired, would be the one after Fable 2.
Guy Kawasaki poses and answers this question in his book, "The Art of the Start" and his answer is "You should be so lucky to have the choice." That's all - nothing more. Take from it what you will.
if you're looking for quality, there's http://www.fixmymovie.com
The new standard for meetings and conferences
A Funny Reciprocal Link Image
Due to a rumor humor ensues...
It's quite interesting but seems to lack any actual conclusion. Security costs money, so what?
Micro Persuasion: The Hyperconnected vs. 84% of Everyone Else on Earth
RISC vs. CISC in the mobile era
Software Visualized as Interactive Navigable 3D Cities
There's more to it than that, and the same goes for Norway. Sweden (ranking 6 on the 2007 index) has much of the same social structure as Iceland and Norway, but does not have the same availability of cheap energy. Sweden does have a fair amount of hydropower available, but you'll also find other countries in the top of the Human Development Index that do not have access to such luxuries.

Also, notice that the Middle East is nowhere near the top of the index. Having abundant natural resources certainly helps things along if a country has good leadership, but it is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition.
I gotta hand it to cnn for coming up with a creative twist on the fact that Windows strangelhold is decreasing. "Hey guys, I know: Instead of the umpteenth article on how *nix or Macs are becoming more popular, why don't we do a related story on how more programmers are developing for those platforms? It will seem new and fresh 'cuz no one's done it. And I bet no one will catch on to our little ruse either!"
Powerset shows semantic search solution
Cool. I tried their plugin once before but couldn't justify the price. I'll try the new version though since I thought the last one I tried was nice.
especially I am impressed with ixigo. my favorite utility application site was kayak and thought something similar should be there for India market.
Ixigo nailed it
Strong prospects in software to spy on bank staff
" Erlang doesn’t have loops — it uses recursion for everything "

Doesn't this make the language a bit of a brain tease! What harm can a For Loop do?

The best argument I heard against static typing, that for many tasks the type system forces you to write solutions that cater for the type system and forces you to create boilerplate code.

Isn't this "no loop" statement thing kind of the same, you have to reforumulate your solutions to cater for and use tail recusion, similarly to how you might have to reformulate your solutions to support a type system constraints

I prefer how OCaml allows you to program in different paradigms, in general thought OCaml does enforce many constraints, but its hybrid nature is a step in the right direction

I also like how Groovy (and Perl6) support optional typing.
Ubigraph: dynamic graph visualization
Easiest thing to do is to install Greasemonkey if you are using Firefox and then apply this script: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039

It allows you to block by site. Just add http://*nytimes.com./* to the block list. And add http://*forbes.com/* while you're at it!
Japan Running Out of Engineers
French Judge Orders Refund For Pre-Installed XP
Good catch on my final point. Thanks.

>> "The Nordic countries generally have better 'quality of life' than the US does, the US generally is stronger economically."

Iceland certainly sounds nice, if you could tolerate the weather. "Nordic countries" is too general to be useful, I think. I'm a bit sceptical about making the quality of life comparisons, in any case. While traveling in Turkey about 7 years ago, a Swedish woman told me that a software developer there takes home about $1,300/month on average (i.e., after taxes). Restaurants in Sweden are so expensive that hardly anyone eats out. Six years ago (while the dollar was still strong) a large pizza in downtown Oslo went for $60. Even business executives pack a lunch.

Norway is doing fine economically, since it has a tiny population and is the world's third largest exporter of oil (though that's running out). Given the explosion in crime that Bawer mentions (at much greater length in his book _While Europe Slept_, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Cirlce Award), I think I'll find someplace else to hang. I've lived in Europe twice (Germany and Greece) and, while it had its points, it always felt sleepy to me.
Why FriendFeed will go mainstream (Part II)
Shark Week at TechJaws | Tech Jaws
Why Microsoft will buy Facebook and keep it closed
True, but he didn't mention anything new, so I assume he is just taking AI to the next level or whatever...
Alright. Name one that isn't already taken.
Apparently it did not bother people before that Facebook is not crawlable. If someone chooses to publish his stuff on Facebook, fine by me. One more thing to safely ignore.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=185512 may be useful for your purposes.
Thanks a lot. I'm starting to get into GP and all the additional resources help.

Do you have any suggestions for a book to read after Koza's Genetic Programming?
Not all companies are in it for the money to precisely the same extent.
Wow! Great article. I was getting tired of all of the articles PG wrote about startups - if you ask me, that was too much of a good-but-not-very-good-thing.

If I were to start a startup, I would find some of Paul Graham's advice useful, but also, due to its size, it became a very big and incoherent potato mash in my head. :-)

So I hope to see more essays and articles by Graham about non-startup stuff. I have some good ideas for open-source-but-commercial ventures - not all of them FOSS related, and may eventually become a "professional" webmaster/blogger (= someone who makes a living out of it). But still I find that I'd rather hear general software management and software-development advice and philosophy than something specific to startups.

So I'm glad PG is back to more diverse essaying and wish him the best of luck.
Just to clarify: I meant a few years too late to be able to take off on a larger scale (larger scale == to be at least as popular as Perl5 used to be). Or in yet other words, the question remains if it will be as popular as Ruby or Python, which I think are its main competitors.
Are Pro Bloggers Going Extinct Soon?
`map` covers the majority of what for-loops are used in imperative languages. There's also `foreach`, which is a `map` that doesn't give you a new list back. You've also got list comprehensions if you prefer them over `map`.

Then there are also `filter`, `all`, `any` and others.

The rest of your iteration needs can be covered by the `fold` functions.

Sure, these functions use tail-recursion internally, but you never have to care about that.
I don't think I've met anyone who went back to Windows from Mac or Linux.
Why I Intensely Debated But Decided to Disqus
A classic perennial question.

Why is Windows more popular?

Why is MS Office more popular?

Why is webmail more popular?
bugsear.ch :D
The only reason I'd leave Google for Facebook is for the options -- if Facebook can wait to implode until after it finds a successful exit at their ridiculous valuation.
Hey, isn't selling ads what Web 2.0 is all about? :)
can't wait to push my app online. Will have to wait a few more weeks though :)
One Country’s Table Scraps, Another Country’s Meal
bugbear.net is available
It's Art Jim, but not as you know it!
I'm one of those "immigrants" in Norway, and I seem to have been able to contribute just fine-- in fact, my start-up employees 30 people, most of them natives.

My reticence to generalize about work ethic and business integrity is not due to a lack of experience-- I have travelled a fair bit-- but because stereotyping based on anecdotal experience seems dangerous.
i dont know why i'm shot down (by down arrow) by the readers - but once again i would like to clarify if u guys have mistaken me ... first thing first, this is definitely 3 way fight (yahoo, google and ms) - the timing is important here as yahoo & goolge is almost there to announce a deal and MS shows up with an alternative to keep google away from the deal (this is no brainier). This gives Yahoo an awesome position (at least for short term) with huge multiple benefits,such as #1 it can get best of the best deal possible either from google or MS (doesn't really matter who as far as good money shows up in yahoo's bank account), #2 these negotiations will put a speed breaker on Carl Ichan's bid for getting a new board (remember shareholder meeting is not far away, again it is all about timing) #3 if any deal is announced (whether with google or MS) before shareholder's meeting then yahoo's stock price will go up for sure and the chances are Carl Ichan will soften his position, #4 the deal (with google or ms) will make everyone happy with win win situation for all 3 important yahoo stake-holders (employees, end-users and shareholders) and #5 the biggest of all is if yahoo and google get in to a deal then stock prices will go up and yahoo will be then able to justify why they didn't budge to sell the company to MS - also now if at all MS wants to buy yahoo (even after a year) then they have to bow down to the price that yahoo wants, also remember this deal (between yahoo and google) will also make all 3 stake-holders happy. So by this analysis i think Yang is proving to be in a very strong position and he is smart enough to get the best out of these 2 bidders to make all 3 important stake-holders happy ....
So which countries without natural resources are dong well? Japan, perhaps?
As shown in the upcoming vs. facebook example in the article, ignoring Facebook is hard to do if you want to organize an event and get lots of people to come.
Google of course already has money in abundance at the moment. It won't last forever, though.

I don't see any altruistic actions on the part of Google, would welcome some pointers? I think the founders started some welfare organization with their money, but I mean Google itself.

Note: I have nothing against people getting paid for making the world a better place. But payment should be enough, it doesn't have to be a "noble battle" on top of that. Also Google has enough money to pay it's developers enough to make the battle worthwhile, noble cause or not.
Perfection does not exist
I remember back then when MySQL was taking off, there was no Windows version of Postgres. Therefore it was not really an option for most projects.

Now it is simply a matter of user base, I guess. I am interested in Postgres, but I already know MySQL, so I keep using it.
You have the same last name as Mohinder Suresh! Awesome! :)
Exploiting Flash for fun and profit
Falling out of love with robots
Laser heats up the fusion future
Facebook wants to team up with Google
Singapore, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Germany, South Korea, Japan, Denmark (some oil/gas), Netherlands (some oil/gas), parts of the Caribbean?

Seems to be a Europe/East Asia bias going on here. In addition some of the richest states in the US doesn't have a lot of natural resources.
I'm convinced that there is a use for this tech and surveillance for good purposes, but in situations such as this, good always corrupts. I don't think China can stay communist without giving way to capitalism, as they already have.

On another note, I visited Shenzhen last summer. That description is an accurate representation of its modernity.
Digg - Streaming video of GOP Senate debate coming Tuesday (Courier
Suresh is a pretty common name in India.
Staying safe and taking risks
Peter Thiel Makes Down Payment on Libertarian Ocean Colonies
e^i*pi + 1 = 0 is clearly a refutation.
He only included measures that at least give some appearance of increasing security.