skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Relativity? Not right now. You will be able to fly a ship in "Newtonian" mode, but with a speed limit (due to collision implementation issues.) The ship will also fly in "inertialess" mode which will be like the way ships fly in Star Wars. Performance of ships in "inertialess" mode will be comparable to that in Newtonian, just with less flexibility.

One interesting twist to ship design, will be that the shape of your ship will actually change its stats in meaningful ways. For example, if you have a ship that uses armor for protection, then having the hull of your ship angled like an arrowhead will give you higher armor values from the forward direction. (And much weaker from the sides and rear.) Having a ship which is longer will also improve the performance of axial mount weapons. However, increased length, size and mass also have drawbacks, as it will reduce your maximum turning rate and the rate at which you can change angular momentum. Components will require some internal volume, so you won't be able to make an invulnerable Death Pencil.

The game will have elements of "space opry" and not just have hard science fiction. I want people to experience the thrill of epic space battles. There will also be exploration and trade.
I'm pretty sure that the same can be said about Paul Graham.

Now I don't know if you are saying this because you are really PG in desguise (btw, what've happened to bugbear?) or if you is really you. Damn, stop confusing me! :)
Unlike reddit or news.yc, jaanix has a recommender that is based on implicit trust between the users. Sock puppets destroy this trust.
If you want to show I'm wrong, show me the evidence and I'll accept it. But while all of the primary evidence is pointing the other way I'm not going to let personal beliefs influence my opinion. Just because lots of people are wrong together it doesn't make them right.
And a really subtle watermark, too. All around good job.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to present that in a way that would make you feel like you need to get defensive.

I was trying to use Wikipedia for your benefit. My opinion is actually based on primary sources from my time at MIT (e.g. alums who were actually students back then).

Pontificating about my "poor academic form" is harsh, unnecessary, and, frankly, it doesn't suit you; not when your argument -- that you know the first hackers were black hats because you found some article in The Tech where someone said something negative about one -- lacks any semblance of validity to begin with.

Given that you're the one with a contrarian opinion, you should present strong evidence if you don't want people to be skeptical. The burden of proof is with you on this one.
As a founder (and the website maintainer) of one of the startups "attacked", I'm not too bothered by the criticism. It is valid...we aren't showing up in all the right places on Google, and we're currently paying a buck or more per click to occasionally appear in those right places in ads. But, it's also worth noting that while we'd never turn down more traffic we also aren't experiencing significant pain due to that lack. Our site gets 1800 uniques per day, and is growing at a very respectable clip--I remember vividly celebrating our first week of 1000+ visitor days just a few months back and it won't be long before we're celebrating 2000+ visitor days. For a site that sells a product (rather than sells eyeballs), that's a nice stream of potential buyers. Actually, I sometimes chuckle when I read about sites that are selling nothing but eyeballs bragging about 100,000 monthly pageviews (or whatever) when our product site does significantly more than that (and our four sites combined see an order of magnitude more traffic than that).

We consider our biggest website problems to be conversion rather than bringing the eyeballs in...so even though I readily admit that we're weaker in the engines than we'd like to be, my current focus with the website is on getting those people who come to our site excited enough to buy our product (or, even better, ask their hosting provider to buy it for them), and better serving those customers that have bought.

So, I don't know that we're really a good example of a truckload of SEO fail, even if our SEO results are poorly, since we don't actually live or die by search engine traffic. Only recently did the majority of our incoming traffic shift from our Open Source project pages to other sources, for example, and those clicks from Webmin.com are still far more valuable to us than search-related clicks...they are about 10 times more likely to buy from us than natural search result users. Likewise for users of our Open Source Virtualmin version at places like Joyent, who are proving to be extremely likely to upgrade to the commercial version. This tells me that getting more people using and talking about our Open Source products is a better marketing tactic than almost anything else we could do. So, we balance our efforts, and SEO unfortunately gets put on a back-burner. (We do try hard to have good URLs, though, but mainly because I consider URLs a usability issue, and not because I care what a search engine thinks about them. I just wish Joomla didn't suck so bad for stuff like that.)
in my case i just don't like vista. its DRM crap, plus the interface that looks like it was designed by a committee of people checking things off a list rather than a single artist who actually knows how it must be done

it's not enough for me to get a mac though. i'll stick with my XP Media Center edition for the time being
Dang. It's either that or a whole tonne of French mathematicians. Good work!
Developing Developer Platforms - Part 1
"All of the primary evidence" is what, one person speaking pejoratively about a hacker in a student newspaper article? If you're gonna take a contrarian view, you should probably show some pretty solid evidence to justify it.
Here's an audio version:

http://www.podbean.com/podcast-detail-episode/342059/episode...

And the direct link to the MP3 to avoid signing up:

http://www.oopsla.org/oopsla2007/podcasts/invited-talks/keyn...
Yes it is just one anecdote. Probably not enough evidence to condem the whole area of SEO. Now if you had 2 anecdotes that would be a laydown.
The article delivered exactly what it promised and in my opinion that was something that needed saying.
First rule of effective SEO : Nobody talks about effective SEO.
Oh, you asked 'Alex', huh? Come on, we know that you and he are one and the same.
Nice graphic: which cities have a surplus of single men or women
It seem like the dot com bust, but this time is banking and finance people that are going to loose jobs. Most likeley a lot of these jobs wont come back for a long time.
Stanford researchers develop tool that ’sees’ internal body details 1,000 times smaller
Actually I didn't find it, my post is based upon research by Fred Shapiro (editor of the The Yale Book of Quotations, and a highly respected language researcher), but that's beside the point.

It's pretty standard practice in etymology to research the history of a word by finding all the earliest usages of it, and that's what Fred did in this case. And the early usages pointed towards a "black hat" usage.

Etymologists don't normally use evidence based upon individual memory due to people being very bad at remember exact word usages from decades ago. A few years ago I did some work for the Oxford English Dictionary and while they would use people's memory to guide them to potential recorded sources of evidence, they wouldn't use someones memory alone due to the problems inherent with it.

Especially in a emotionally charged issues like this one where people are likely to "want" to remember things being a certain way.

btw, the poor academic form thing was about wikipedia (from whom which we would expect a reasonale academic form), not you personally, sorry if it came across that way.
How many elements can you name in 15 minutes? (Game)
The problem is that there are _no_ recorded sources showing "computer hacking" in a non-"black hat" sense until more than a decade after the student newspaper article.
That's cool -- my bad if I came off rude to you in anyway. I just don't agree with your conclusion.
BUJUNGNSBBYVNZ Decrypted
Mac and Vista beaten by Linux in hacking contest
Proper SEO can mean the difference between making $10/day and $100/day.
Doing freelance graphic design work so I can save some money for a startup with a killer, obvious idea, but no one has done it in Jamaica yet... I'm talking disruptive stuff.

But then many great ideas in history seem obvious in retrospect.
Well, almost. I once saw nickb sneaking into a phone cabin, and pg rushing out shortly after. I reckon I didn't notice the discrepancy; my only thought at the time was "you'd think those guys would have cell phones."

Now it all makes sense!
I know I might be wrong, and that's one of the reasons I made the post. Maybe some who was in the TMRC in the 60s might read it and realize they have a diary or minutes from a meeting from that time which provides evidence for a non-"black hat" meaning.

But as probably one of the few people in the world who has credentials in both etymology and geekiness (I was president of a student computer society :P), I feel like it's my duty to let the world know what the current evidence points to :-)
I've always been a fan of the Friends of Ed books.
same article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152497
I have an uncle that tried that when he opened a pub. It didn't quite work.
I hear a lot of people saying that the Macbook Pro isn't worth it, but I think it is.

I bought a Macbook and ended up upgrading to the Pro within a week. The Macbook felt sluggish for me. My typical usage pattern is several browser windows open with about 15 tabs open apiece, plus an IRC client, iTunes/VLC, a shell window, and Textmate (a text editor).

Upgrading to the Pro made things feel a lot faster for me.
Where did you hear that idea?
Designed for Microsoft Windows
This is great news. It's great to see people waking up. I've personally converted 7 people to Apple. I hate using a windows pc anymore. I switched to compose music. It's a huge difference. This bodes well for the taste of the upcoming generation.

The only time I have missed my PC was when I wanted to delete forward from the cursor. Then I learned that fn + del deletes forward and I have been a faithful convert ever since.
Ask YC: Favorite designs among Facebook Apps?
I'm trying to find good, clean, user-friendly apps for inspiration. What are your favorites?
Me too.

Supposedly, almost everybody has their great idea at, or because of, work. They can't say so because of draconian IP agreements that stipulate the contents of your head are company property.
seekely - I'm the author of the post and am very sorry for being condescending. That wasn't my intent and on re-reading, I can see that it came across that way. I offer my apology.

I was writing a bit more emotionally than I usually do, and, as I said in the post, am much more frustrated with those who provide startup advice ignoring the power of SEO than I am with startups who don't engage in it. Startups have a million things on their plates. Those who make lists recommending marketing practices have just one task, and I think it's negligent to ignore such a valuable marketing tactic for web-based companies.
awesome, i'll try to blog about this, too :)
thanks for submitting! :)
Of course, you can always just stash your carry on underneath your seat to alleviate that problem.
Clearly the simplest explanation is that nickb is PG, but an earlier version of himself that had traveled back in time to kill his own grandfather.
pg!!! you admitted it too early!

Nice joke though :)
Is this an April Fool's joke?

What were they programming in before Java? Brainfuck?
I jumped into this without any preparation and, oof, did it make me feel really dumb . . . especially given that I've had this thing memorized in the past.

I got 40 of them.
Issues in writing a VM - Part 1
Ask YC: Speaking at your first conference
I have been invited to speak/lead a discussion at a tech conference in Italy this summer. It appears to be a large thing, turns out Aaron Swartz is also on the speaker list. I said that I'd go (after telling my summer class profs I'd be out a while). My "speaking" experience is comprised of various class presentations and pitching Skribit.com at a startup weekend and a handful of interviews. I'm not so much concerned about the talking as I am actually answering (hard) questions from the audience. What do you do to prepare? It's not until July so I have time.

Thanks
read this about SEO and Techcrunch: http://www.podtech.net/home/3579/a-secret-sauce-to-top-100-b...
Hm. It still seems like consistency would fix that. It would make "doing it right" a little harder, but it could be done with no loss for normal users, I think.
Have someone you trust and who knows the topic well ask you questions from a variety of standpoints. Practice answering asshole, condescending questions meant to trip you up. Practice off-the-wall/off-topic questions, just plain hard technical questions, etc etc. I did this with my research professor before my first talk and it really paid off -- I got a really condescending question and managed to deflect it and get some laughs too.

Basically, just practice :)
I'm working on a categorization/data mining project using Java JOONE for the neural network. Not as hard as it sounds (most of the time). Must finish this project today or tomorrow so I can get enough money to fuel our startup (http://www.awesomehighlighter.com) for the next couple of months.
16 characters rocks.
It can help to have friends in the audience. They can "ask" specific questions that you're already prepared to answer confidently (no one else in the audience knows who they are). This keeps you in a better frame of mind to deal with the rest of the audience's tough questions.
http://www.lisperati.com/landoflisp/panel56.html

lol. great
I like to write my slides and presentation the night before my speeches in the hotel at the conference. Helps keep it fresh. Say you have 50 minutes to fill... if you know your subject make about 30 slides and just be able to bullshit for 1-2 minutes per slide and you will do great!
No, I won't. The problem is not transistors; the problem is in the lack of understanding how speech recognition works. It is very difficult to get right and it is highly unlikely that those problems will be solved completely within the next 18 months.

They could double the transistor count now by running the algorithm on a better DSP or Cell processor.
do a live webinar beforehand and have us ask you questions. i'm sure you'll get the hard questions you're looking for.
But I've got nothing to hide!
I did it without preperation too, and got 51. I would have liked to have got 59 (ie half of them). I think my most glaring omission was 'calcium'. Funny how you miss really obvious things when you're against the clock...
Funny how you miss really obvious things when you're against the clock...

Yeah, that's the thing. I feel like I should have gotten all of the noble gases, for instance. Nope, blanked most of them out.

Fun times though!
Now that we have hackernews.xpi, we just need hackernews.el.
I would love to get into a lengthy discussion about why the One True Editor is superior to vi, but I have a feeling that it would just degenerate into a flame war. vi does have an advantage in that it comes standard on most unix servers, while emacs requires a long (but relatively painless) install.

Let's just say that in terms of power the two are about equal. I think emacs has an edge in the macros/functions department but vi isn't far behind. It's probably also fair to say that either one of them are probably better than a Windows based IDE if you're working with open source software (ruby, php, perl etc).
That's great, but I'm still holding out for Fortran on Flanges
GitHub switches back to SVN, launches SVNHub
Interesting, but not really all that unlikely. At home? At work? On a train? At lunch?
I can't take too much credit. I bit on the story hook, line and sinker. I started to write a comment saying in essence, "So what if Paul is writing under a nom de plume, there are good reasons for doing so..."

One of the good examples that came immediately to mind was Richard Gabriel. So I Googled "Worse Is Better" and copied that exact paragraph to insert as a quotation to support my point.

Then I read what I had just pasted and the light went on...
BusinessWeek 50 Rankings 2008
Practice as much as you can, in front of people whenever possible. All it takes is 3-4 smart people to come up with at least 80% of the questions you'll encounter. Know those, and you'll be way ahead of most speakers.

For the main talk, I found it also helps to write out a full transcript of my talk -- even though I usually don't follow it, it forces me to organize something coherently, and gives me something I can easily send to others for review.

Best of luck, and enjoy Italy!
The Best Ways to Stop Spam
I used to make and sell software for classified ad management, including personals. There is a loose code of ethics for newspapers: they will post "filler" ads if there aren't enough paying customers, however they never pretend to contact a customer and they maintain custoemr privacy.

For example, one client had filler adverts in their personals section. There was a box number for snail mail replies, and their strict policy was that all replies to the fictitious ads were shredded unopened and unread.

Just an anecdote, no opinion on what is and is not legitimate business...
Has Microsoft lost its way on desktop computing?
meh, I prefer darcs, so no loss there.

But seriously, does anyone where have any experience wrt the tradeoffs between all these new distributed versioning systems?
git is hot why would you want to switch back.

Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

you can run git on windows too...
http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/

that project is awesome (just started trying it today) but it includes a full unix cli including bash and coreutils.
Christ, I wish people would give the man a break on this essay.

Instead of parsing the perceived inconsistencies in the words, how about looking at the spirit of what he's trying to do.

Look at the default use of people's minds who have been trained to solve difficult problems are being put to today: In bureauacracies on menial things that won't mean much of a difference in the world.

What is the problem with someone saying: "This is wrong, and I'm going to say it. I'm going to push the meme out there that this is bullshit and the default should be to maximize your return on your talent and work, and have a positive impact on society as a result."

If a metaphor or phrasing or analogy is misconstrued, who cares? That's too subjective anyway. If the default spirit was imbued in more technical people than not, I'm guessing we'd be in a better place.

[descend from soapbox]
Music File Compressed 1,000 Times Smaller than MP3
For introduction to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, HTML DOM, I recommend you visiting the site http://www.w3schools.com/ .

Respectively, you might want to read: Learn HTML, Learn CSS, Learn JavaScript and Learn HTML DOM.

For reference, when I want to remember or search for some specific tag, I'm used to go to http://htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/ .

And I highly recommend you, when you're a little advanced in your learning, to periodically access Web Devout: http://www.webdevout.net/ . There you can find tables containing browser compatibility elements for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, DOM, articles, really interesting stuff.

Another awesome website I'm used to access, mostly for JavaScript clarifications and techniques: http://www.quirksmode.org/

I think these resources are 95% what I use when I need to figure out something regarding HTML/CSS/JavaScript/DOM and browsers compatibility.
holding out for tardiffhub.
Thanks. 26 years of therapy down the drain.
why is this getting voted down? I think speculating on which real estate is going to be the future tropical beaches is valid.
Oops: I downmodded you by mistake when I meant to downmod the lame South Park metaphor. Sorry!
I dunno. That lever seems a little too intuitive for a Windows machine.
... it's an April Fools joke.
I left vi(m) behind over a year ago, so I'm not sure what you're getting at here. ;)
Where's the start button?
The Official I’m Fed Up with Verizon Wireless Customer Service Article
Happy 32nd birthday, Apple Inc!
That rocks
Yeah , windows is a great big toilet and all thier shit should be flushed.Well good thing we have Paul Graham around to decide what kind of excrement needs flushing. Probably some of those unhappy caged idiots that Paul doesn't have is his lavender smelling claws into. I suppose Paul's toilet flushes pure roses. Get over yourelf man.
The argument that buying Mac will help you get laid is flimsy. It is not based on anything worthy of the name "data".

The average college student is better off spending $150 for an old PC, putting Linux on it, and spending the other $850 to $1,850 on hookers if he is unsatisfied with his sex life.

This seems pretty obvious to me, and I would think would be obvious to anyone else who stopped watching TV (and hence TV commercials) and listening to the radio (and hence radio commercials) as long ago as I did (about 16 years ago).
You examine the current mathematical climate models and determine their limitations in terms of available CPU power, RAM, disk on even the largest supercomputers.

Then you take into account the lack of any accurate model at all being available for the operation of the seas and oceans - we don't have an accurate mathematical model for even the Gulf Stream, for instance; much less the rest of the world.

Then you realize that all prediction models are so error-prone due to the above that they cannot be relied upon with a reasonable degree of certainty.
Ha. I guess that wasn't very helpful. What I meant to say is that it's kind of silly to suggest that basic startup advice should automatically include something about SEO. Even if we assume that SEO is highly important and every startup should spend time on it, it's an implementation detail. It's no more germane to general startup advice than how to deploy a web app, even if both are vital to a web startup's success.
I suppose you are aware of the Fry's story, where a guy goes into a local Fry's store, picks up a Philips brand nose hair trimmer that they have at the checkout, and asks if it is compatible with Windows XP?

The clerk picks it up, no doubt scanning for the sticker or a printed logo, then hands it back and shrugs his shoulders.
Google page rank sucks
It’s the truth.
Google is powerful and SEO specialists are becoming blind!
Immature.

Scatological humor forces us into "DH0".
Free $800 contest on Moneybites.com
Well, in one sense, it's much easier having no debt. Imagine trying to found a company if you owned a house with no mortgage, had a vegetable garden out back, and owed nobody anything.

Realistically, what are your living expenses... how much money do you really need to buy 3- 6- or even 48-months of your time?

Now imagine that you own no property of any sort, and have large loan payments that you have to make every month. How much money do you really need to buy even 3- or 6- months of your time.

The opportunity cost of starting the startup is roughly the same (adjustments for interest between the riskfree rate and your credit rating notwithstanding), but the actual number of dollars that have to come from somewhere is quite different indeed.
Recovering from having my gall bladder removed. :^(
Parsing and translation.
Project Virgle: the first permanent human colony on Mars
Not in the April Fool sense, but the article is pretty much a joke. It actually says that - and that Steele's claim to fame is that he co-wrote the Java spec.

That's like saying Stevie Wonder's claim to fame is "I Just Called To Say I Love You".
That's a pretty low blow. I expected better from pg, especially after the disagreement hierarchy essay. Go ahead and criticize Windows if you want, but do so in an intelligent manner.