skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"When you enter the game, you are assuming that you are better than at least half of the other players."

I think the difference is - at what point does that assumption become atleast somewhat provable. Shaquille O'Neal was probably an athletic 6'10" 280 lbs in high school. Just because the game of basketball itself is zero sum, does that make it irrational to think that he would become a decent professional basketball player?

My favorite part of Taleb's book is when he describes the investing world as if all player's had a random 50/50 shot of making money each year. There are millions of investors, by random chance thousands will do really well, a handful will do really, really well over the course of decades. How do you know Warren Buffet is not part of that handful that is successful purely by chance? It's been awhile since I've read the book, but I remember his philosophy being something like if you have a logical investing/hypothesis that gets proven results, then maybe we can say it's not by chance.

So to answer your question, if you think you have an objective theory/algorithm/etc for option trading and have done blind historical tests or have successfully paper traded for a year+, then you might be on to something. If you think you are just smarter than everybody else, or maybe had a couple successful stock trades, it's probably not a good idea.
Ask YC: What's the best site to register a domain name?
I've checked most of the popular ones: register.com, godaddy.com, networksolutions.com... I don't know which one I should pick. Which one is the best?
;) The apophasis may have been unnecessary, I think the real trigger is linking to the site in question.
This is a submarine article for Provigil. I've been noticing them coming out roughtly every year or so.
most hackers are already anarchistic and or libertarians so it isn't surprising that we think Ayn Rand is bullshit. We're already individualistic and questioning of the status quo. But for people whom aren't like this Ayn Rand can be an important author to read. For example women tend to be more caring and communal instead of selfish and rational. It doesn't surprise me that successful business women really like Atlas Shrugged. They need to hear a justification for the pursuit of selfish aims moreso than a libertarian does.

The things that hit close to home but are slightly off bother people a lot more than things from left field. evangelical christians touting their creationist museum bothers me more than muslims beating women, even though the latter is worse. The evangelicals are in my backyard. Likewise libertarians are bothered by Rand because she espouses some of our ideals but horribly twists others.
The only legally tolerated drugs in Amsterdam are marijuana and mushrooms. You can't even buy Nyquil there.
That's a cracker, not a hacker. You even used the word crack in your description.
I'm just a undergrad college student. I read a few articles online and decided to try the options trading simulation at cboe.com
I like the current logo. After reading this, it makes me wonder how much time was spent worrying whether the reflected 'b' should be forwards or backwards.
we invited you; it's a mistaken metaphor; ff6600
I used Certifications to get transfer credit's out of classes. I Spent maybe $1000 on Certifications where I would have spent $5000+ on classes. They are usefull for low end grunt work though. And if you can get a really good one like CISP or CCIE then they might matter. (both are really admin/networking certifications).
Totally. I can't tell you how much running for 40 minutes a day on an elliptical has changed my life.
Not really. And that was 10 years ago. Most of the people I know at Yahoo now started after I left.
BTW, http://members.wizzards.net/~mlworden/atyp/auden.htm
Yeah, we contribute equal capital.
Even though an old and previously posted article, is anyone listening? Or maybe it's a question of beliefs?

Because I think another aspect to look at this article with is that learning how to hack is fine, though start-ups should be focusing on the toughest problems, and ignoring history (how things got to where they are today) won't help anyone.

All of you working on the next social platform better beware of the history.
You must be new here. Links on the site fall off the stack eventually--but when you reload the page, new ones are made. It's a "feature" of the architecture pg used to build the site (continuations based).

So, if you sit idle on any of the comment pages for more than a few minutes it becomes unavailable. You have to start over on the main page and dig your way back down. I imagine this is not a fundamental flaw of a continuations-based design, since Seaside seems to cope with it OK (I guess?)...merely something that pg, or someone else, has not added the code to handle yet.
Can your kids hack?
as a novice, but language bigot it depends a lot on what you want to make.

Low level, kernel, command line C is king. Python for slightly slower but faster coding.

For an GUI program use C++ (qt is a good toolkit).

For Web Pages learn html/css and then add javascript. After that I would say mysql (or postgresql. I like postgresql better) and php. you can trade php for perl/python/ruby if you like.

Web means learning a lot of languages but to me seems the easiest.
An excellent essay indeed! Enjoyed reading it very much.

Danny Hillis is indeed a good writer. Even his Ph. D dissertation where he describes Connection Machine is quite interesting to read (as far as Ph D dissertations go!).

Bit of trivia - the CMs were programmed in Lisp. Why Lisp?

As per Danny Hillis: "Lisp was chosen... for a combination of technical and social reasons. On the technical side, Lisp is extensible, has dynamic storage allocation, and is generally good for symbol manipulation. In addition, excellent Lisp programming environments already exist. On the sociological side, most members of the AI community, for whom the Connection Machine was originally designed, are already familiar with Lisp".
Rumor: Google To Launch Hosted Site Search, Ditch Mini
I love this man.
Thanks a bunch. Glad the news is finally out so I can talk about it (and blog about it).
Of course you reap more biomass than you sow. It's what sets farmers apart from squirrels (sort of).

"Reap what you sow" means you get output proportional to input. You'll get more biomass, but you won't get more plants than the amount of seeds you planted.
Janitor => plumbing company, perhaps?
battery limitations are the show stoppers on every cool piece of technology I've seen for the last few years. :(

it's one of the fundamental engineering challenges of humanity. how do we store energy more efficiently?
Site5 review
www.hostmonsterreview.org is hostmonster review and hostmonster coupon site, hosted with hostmonster hosting since 14 months ago.
No, no. I mean the title of the article ended with "[dead]".
Disqus - After 5 Days on Disqus, I’m Turning Back to Wordpress Comments
I'd actually love to install Hacker News style comments... You?
Rails + Text to Speech = Festivaltts4r
http://www.pharma-orders.com/product_info.php?cPath=33&p...

this one might work, good luck and godspeed
How to Get Personal and Professional Value from Idle Web Surfing
The article's points are fairly obvious when you think about it, but I haven't seen enough emphasis on the real social network you can develop online in the articles I've read. It is also helpful for me to realize web surfing isn't all necessarily wasted time and can actually be quite valuable.

Also, in the spirit of the article:

I found this at lifehacker.com. Besides the regular sites, such as proggit, hn, & /., I also semi-regularly check boingboing.net, makezine.com/blog, hackaday.com, aldaily.com, tcsdaily.com, and my old undergrad tutors' site: scriptoriumdaily.org.

boingboing, makezine, and hackaday all go together. They focus on hacks, makezine and hackaday on the tech side and boingboing more on the cultural side.

aldaily and tcsdaily also go together, aldaily represents the humanities side of academia and tcsdaily represents the business/tech side of academia; though both are written informally.

The last one is written from a Christian perspective, but I usually find the articles to be pretty insightful, and if you are an atheist and don't get all these religious wingnuts you might get a better idea of what makes the more reasonable ones tick.
What did Erdos use Modafinil for? I recall reading that Einstein enjoyed his cigar very much for his mental work... is this the same kind of thing?
What won't work? Check out all the variations on "hacker": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker
I used two pretty big sites (kayak.com and nytimes.com) in the last couple of days that put my email in the From: header. Admittedly as a result of my specific action, but that's a user contract issue rather than getting through spam filters - which they didn't seem to have a problem with.
Indeed. I live in a house with a few other people, and we make music a lot. I'll play the drums for a bit, and guitar for a bit, and when we're done I can generally be much more productive coding than I would have been if I had just sat down to code.

This seems to be from being physically active for a bit, and from having the creative juices flowing for a bit as well.
Sorry, my text was ambiguous, Erdos generally used methylphenidate and/or benzedrine.
Hey Ryan, I responded to your comment here: http://ryanspoon.com/blog/2008/05/15/disqus-after-5-days-on-...
The article's points are fairly obvious when you think about it, but I haven't seen enough emphasis on the real social network you can develop online in the articles I've read. It is also helpful for me to realize web surfing isn't all necessarily wasted time and can actually be quite valuable.

Also, in the spirit of the article:

I found this at lifehacker.com. Besides the regular sites, such as proggit, hn, & /., I also semi-regularly check boingboing.net, makezine.com/blog, hackaday.com, aldaily.com, tcsdaily.com, and my old undergrad tutors' site: scriptoriumdaily.com.

boingboing, makezine, and hackaday all go together. They focus on hacks, makezine and hackaday on the tech side and boingboing more on the cultural side.

aldaily and tcsdaily also go together, aldaily represents the humanities side of academia and tcsdaily represents the business/tech side of academia; though both are written informally.

The last one is written from a Christian perspective, but I usually find the articles to be pretty insightful, and if you are an atheist and don't get all these religious wingnuts you might get a better idea of what makes the more reasonable ones tick.
Interesting how it pulls out a somewhat subtle observation about letters.
I think age really is an important factor in starting business and it works to ones advantage depending on the kind of business as well. For starters, I don't think there is any substitute for experience and like kyro said, it also gives one a certain level of maturity in dealing with issues like finances and emotions. Especially family, which tends to get ignored (to say the least) if you are a twenty something hacker working 28X6 in your mum's garage.

I have personally felt a little off balance seeing people lose color when they see me in person. Since my business requires a lot of off line interaction with people, they generally become a little wary on seeing someone in tees and jeans. If you are going for such a business, your age, and more importantly your maturity will be your biggest asset.
I think they are in the beginning, but at the end (basically, during high school) all that happens is that you get stuffed with AP and honors classes galore. Everything that was good in elementary and junior high just disappears :(
Ask YC: Coping with frustration a la setup/dependency/documentation hell?
I have just finished spending a few hours tweaking a flash charting package which was quite insufferable to use. After a few hours (and more), I end up feeling my soul getting sucked out of my brain in every passing second and feel progressively destructive, but at the same time, I know I have to keep working on it, and want to see its completion more than ever -- and finally, when it's over, I feel so suffocated that there is no feeling of accomplishment. Sound familiar? Setup hell? Dependency hell?

I have always wondered about how others deal with this kind of frustration, from problems that challenge your patience more than your thinking. How patient is impatient? How do you cope? Or, if you don't encounter these problems, how do you do it?
Where can one learn more about an Equity Collar?
sweet! I've come across a loot of people who thought the same too..
I really agree. I think there's probably a lot of people out there who read about Gates and Brin and Page and Zuckerberg, and say, "omg I want to be a haxor it wud be fun and I can make $$$!". I hate to say it, but if you really wanted to hack, you would have done it before you read about how much money haxors are making. You would have started like us, in QBASIC, because you were exhilarated at the thought of controlling that computer screen...
[comment that looks archaic once parent is modded up]

Which is to say a hacker also needs a taste for recursion.
Thanks for the suggestion. We are in the process of revamping our site, we will be adding loads of jobs from VC sites. ie: FirstRound.com (http://www.firstround.com/openings.html). We will have Job Leads component for anyone to submit links to hot startup jobs as well.

Thanks!

John
I remember reading that gifted kids who got tracked ended up being happy, functioning adults. Also, that child prodigies turned out all right for the most part (Bobby Fischer and child actors notwithstanding). But I can't find the sources.
It's popurl for jobs. I'm on the market for a job, this really help me out. Monster doesn't filter this much startup jobs in one reading.
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned flow here. Google it up and read up about it; if you have time for a book, "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" by Csikszentmihalyi is a great book.

This is commonly called "being in the zone." And you reach it when the challenge at hand is slightly above, but attainable, relative to your ability, such that it requires effortful focus to achieve. If you tackle a problem of this sort, chances are you will focus automatically, lose track of time, feel unstoppable, etc.

Obviously not all problems are at the appropriate level. There are some people (not myself, unfortunately) who skillfully reshape these problems into smaller tasks, or add challenges, such that they can lead to flow. This skill (of reshaping problems) takes training itself, but I can see it being tremendously useful.

Of course, stuff that stresses discipline is probably better than any pill, in the long run. :-)
from: http://www.arclanguage.org/
100+ Open Courseware Collections for Aspiring Web Devs
If you're looking to break into the web dev industry, start your own development and design business, or learn a few new skills to remain a competitive force in your field, you don't necessarily have to go back to school and pay for an expensive degree. Check out these resources.
10 Things Every Manager Should Learn from "LOST"
LOST focuses on the struggle between leaders and their groups, and how the choices they make impact the entire island. Read on to find out what you can learn from "LOST," and how you can apply these lessons to your own management skills.
John - it's a good start. Really useful site. Been following you on Twitter, waiting to see the relaunch.

Lisa
Top 25 Most Influential People in the Web Hosting Industry
There are hundreds of influential people in and around the Web hosting industry today, but this article has listed the most visible and remarkable people who are active in speaking engagements and/or in creative and substantial contributions to society as well as to their work.
50+ Google Reader Productivity Hacks
Google Reader can be used to boost your productivity throughout the day by letting you view your favorite blog’s feeds and posts in one spot: through your Google account. There are a lot of little hacks to make Google Reader more productive. This article has listed 50 hacks here.
Yes, all bets are off when it comes to PG here. He has way too many fans that will mod him high simply because it says "by pg".

That being said though, the site is pretty consistent for every other user, although as it grows I've certainly noticed a relaxing in what is considered "off topic".
Kinda confused...is the question about the specific problem of learning new libraries, the general problem of setup/dependency/documentation hell, or the even more general problem of dealing with frustration?

For libraries, I just accept that it'll take a long time to get familiar with them, and dive in. That's what Hello World is for, anyway. If I've got them setup and working and still have a tough time mastering the library (bad documentation, for example), I'll often just ditch the library.

For setup/dependency/documentation hell, depends on the language. I use setuptools for all my Python-related code, and use it's dependency-management functionality whenever libraries support it. Small 3rd-party libraries (no more than a source file) get pulled directly into our source code repository, larger ones are easy_installed, with a shell script to take care of everything that isn't available via easy_install. HTML, CSS, and images get packaged along with the web framework code they're associated with, and installed via setuptools. I wrote a custom documentation/dependency analyzer for JavaScript, and use that for all our JavaScript. It's wrapped in a setuptools package that just consists of a library of build scripts, the JavaScript being pulled in through pkg_resources.

As for frustration, I usually go do something else. Oftentimes, when I return to the difficult part, I find it's become irrelevant.
I 'have' ADD, and I'm able to focus perfectly fine, thank you.

I don't want to derail the thread, but lately I've been thinking that ADD is more about a faster attention 'cycle' than pure inability to focus.
Can we save posts on Hacker news ...
Really most of my tech news of the day comes through this site, and nothing would make me happier than to upvote a story and have it saved. I know there is delicious and other stuff, but its just a pain to go to another service and save the link when 90% of the links come from this site. Just thought I should throw it out there and see what other people think.
To back up the food argument, I decided to become vegetarian a year or so ago (to the chagrin of my mother), and definitely noticed an increase in clarity and 'calm' mind. I changed in part because of this rumoured clarity effect, so placebo is definitely not out of the equation, YMMV, etc.
I like many of your essays, but this one is exceptional.

Recommend this book: It's not self-help. It's by a University Psychologist. We are a lot simpler than we like to think: "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by B Cialdini

Also Richard Dawkins "The God Delusion". Excellent book that calls religion for what it is. He notes its a survival advantage for kids to believe what adults tell them without question: Unfortunately "Don't swim in the crocodile infested river" is accompanied by the same stories that tell us to love the guy who killed 2,000,000 people in the Bible, but revile the one who only killed 9.
I must be new here. I've never seen that happen.
nothing would make me happier than to upvote a story and have it saved

Try clicking on your username in the upper left, and click on the number after "saved:"
the end brought tears to my eyes.
Yeah, an editor must have killed it. But it seemed harmless enough so I unkilled it.
Why did you decide to leave lisp out?
I was about to recommend How to Think Like a Computer Scientist (http://openbookproject.net//thinkCSpy/), which is what I've been using and thoroughly enjoy, until I realized that it's the original version of How to Think Like a (Python) Programmer. Glad to know the new version's out. Hope this clears it up for anyone else wondering why TCSpy hadn't been mentioned yet.
Upper right.
If you aren't a hacker after 9 months, you'll never be a hacker.
My Virtual Summer Job
A lot of aid money flows into Africa so monitoring and evaluation is a big problem.

Our charity www.rose-international.org is looking to have a basic web app developed that will allow local m&e of donor money that is used to pay for school fees (Tuition is charged for public schools here, and many kids are orphaned and have no way of paying the school fees).
Jack - I agreed with you on this. It's popurl for jobs - super easy to use and quick. I don't have to navigate all over the place for scan for jobs.

Did you know it refreshes too?
CBS To Acquire CNET For $1.8 Billion
I also wanted to reach out. I am working for an NGO in Zambia (http://www.project-educate.org) and we have a couple of projects that could use talented coders. One for example, would be a web application similar to MIT's OpenCourseWare, except designed for Zambian students.

We also aren't shy about sending people to Zambia to help out. If you're curious, or want more information, my email is in my profile. I'd love to hear from you.
OK, I accept that if we're going to be pedantic (and honestly, being pedantic is one of my favourite hobbies too) then the question would really be "if a typical person thought aerodynamics was important for a lunar lander, why would they be mistaken?"

In fact, one could clarify the question a little for the benefit of somebody who couldn't see why anybody would be so confused as to think that aerodynamics had anything to do with the moon, by saying: "Given that aerodynamics are important for many [though not all] vehicles, what properties of a lunar lander distinguishes it from those other vehicles in such a way as to make aerodynamics irrelevant?"

So ahem, bearing that in mind, given that speed is important in many [though not all] programming tasks, what properties distinguish exploratory programming from those other types of programming in such a way as to make speed irrelevant?
I think you are still a larva at nine months.

FWIW see: http://www.hacker-dictionary.com/terms/larval-stage
I similarly found pre-university studies rather boring, rarely did the 'busywork' and skirted "on intuition" across most of it. Got me into a fancy named university, but only then to realise my ignorance of what 'work' was. I'm just about half-way through college, and maybe now I begin to appreciate 'work' and unlearn the habits from before. It's surprisingly difficult.

It's not necessarily a bad thing that HS trains (American) kids to work so well. Society runs on people doing (generally) repetitive work consistently. My early rejection of the system meant I got left out in the cold in terms of knowing how to do that. I did get a lot of 'soft' (i.e. cannot learn from books) computer/cs/systems knowledge out of what I did spent my HS years doing, though.
I'm sorry that you're having a hard time getting a hold of me!

For what it's worth, I've added my email address to my profile, and I've followed up via email.

If anyone else ever needs to get in contact with with me, the most efficient way is probably to write to cdavis@darkenedsky, or to call, at 888-456-6282x801
SQL Buddy - Attractive, in-progress, just-released PHPMyAdmin alternative
if i ever make a framework i'll name it Charcoal
Go to your profile, and change 'showdead' to 'yes'.
Or you could attend SuperHappyDevHouse.
From what I understand, LSD makes you think you have an improved state, and that you understand things more clearly, but in reality you don't. Much like drunk drivers claiming that the alcohol actually improves their reaction time and driving skill.
How to surf securely with an SSH tunnel
Twitter traffic almost doubled from February to April