skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why would an AI need to interact with its environment in order to understand language? ISTM that deriving cultural information and understanding language change can both be found by simply observing its environment, and looking at the right corpus (e.g. the Internet).
I got the impression that the main point was that higher prices in various non-US countries has led to societies that are structured less around the availability of cheap gasoline: denser cities, a greater variety of transportation options and so forth. Thus paying more for gasoline isn't as big of a "lifestyle" hit whether it is "absolute" or "relative".
There are definitely real applications out there:

http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/gpu/

And nvidia has an api to do it:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_develop.html
Never use any language feature that describes itself as "Smart" or "Magic."
Out of interest, is there any persistent archive of these smaller items on paulgraham.com? There's this, and there's the one about the cool construction charity, and I'm guessing there are more I've missed from before I was a regular News.YC reader.

But once they've dropped off News.YC, there seems to be no way to find them again. Are there links on paulgraham.com, is PG considering adding them, or are these one-off specials for our eyes only? Because the latter would feel like something of a waste...
Give JavaScript a chance
It is easy to rationalize the MS behaviour:

1. They answer to W.H. Gates.
2. He likes it.
3. It's not their money.
4. It will improve their reputations in the company.

The only answer I can come up with for the other side, given my information, is VC interference.
Microsoft buying Yahoo! is a good thing
Angels would have invested 1m at a lower valuation than VCs. That's both the perk and the drawback of VC money. You can get more while giving up about the same amount of equity.
Theoretically executive support staff has some value too. I mean, outside of the hacker crowd anyway, those people are viewed as useful.
They certainly do ask that question 100% of the time. It's definitely not bad form, but it might be to your disadvantage. They will probably find out anyway though.
There's an index link in the menu:
http://paulgraham.com/ind.html
The US was the largest oil producer in the world for half a century. Things evolved under the assumption of readily available oil, and that's why policy is what it is. The rest of the industrialized world historically had no good sources of domestic oil and always remained wary of becoming too dependent on imports. The North Sea fields largely didn't come online in Europe until the early 90s.
WTF is it with Conime.exe ?
Every time my PC boots it gives an error message that says: “Windows cannot find ‘C:\Windows\Sytstem32\Drivers\conime.exe…..’”
Should be "Why gas everywhere but the US is so expensive". The base price is set organically in the market, the price including tax is a result of external government meddling.
I use EXP because it lets me write about 25% faster than I write by hand (with a bunch of macros and keyboard shortcuts I don't even the mouse to click on various symbols, like most WYSIWYG editors).

http://www.expswp.com/

I wrote the following in about a cumulative hour using EXP:

http://math.uic.edu/~robertk/files/mth504_notes.pdf

I've used and seen many people use various math typesetting editors, and from my experience EXP lets you be the most productive (not good for research papers, but very good for writing homework, notes, etc.).
It might not be a badge of honor, but it is often the best thing to do in the short term. This isn't even new to startups. My grandfather was looking for work in the middle of the Depression, and got a 2-day 'feel-you-out' kind of assignment at a gold mine. So he worked 48 hours at a shot, and got the job.
I keep hearing about this book. Can anybody tell me if it is a pseudo-scientific look at the topic? I don't mean this in a particularly negative way. Rather, what I mean is does it put forth a lot of as-yet unsubstantiated claims perhaps backed up with some hand-waving analysis?
From a non-VC context, it sounds really weird to ask for preferred, because the usual difference is that preferred pays a fixed income if the company is profitable (and may convert into common at a fixed price) and has liquidation preference. Is getting a lower payout really worth it if you're also first in line to get paid when they shut down and sell off their Ramen stash?

Many years ago, I read that the first VC investment to be called a VC investment was a $2 million convertible preferred issue -- but since it converted into 2/3rds of the common, it sounded like a way to sell common.
I would extend this law a little: if you're going to perform magic, it had better be absolutely flawless.

Otherwise, show what you're doing, or don't do it at all.
I think your argument also works to say that he doesn't matter (by design), in that his project can continue with or without his active participation.

If you read the kernel mailing list, there is sometimes the question of "what happens if Linus gets hit by a bus?" He always says that it shouldn't adversely affect development... :)
quick summary: don't waste your time reading it.
even better rot27 ?
How To Guess On Standardized Tests
"which to me is not true unless all the users who downloaded Safari are also using it as their primary browser"

Market share is not calculated by the number of downloads of a particular browser. It is calculated by tracking the browser used to visit a particular website, or a set of websites. Net Applications, publishers of this particular fact, aggregates statistics across a large number of sites.
Shipping quality code with git
Safari uses its own text rendering engine, as opposed to the native windows engine. The engine is designed to render text the same way Mac OS X does, which differs from the way Windows does. There's a lot of discussion on the topic, here is a relatively good primer:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html

However, it's worth noting that this behavior is going to change soon. The nightly releases of Safari are introducing support for text rendering that matches the native OS.

http://webkit.org/blog/168/gdi-text-on-windows/
I'd be cautious if I was you...I don't know how much it has changed, but 4 years ago I tried using LyX to avoid LaTeX, but got so frustrated I just resorted to learning LaTeX and sticking with that.
The release version of Safari is several times faster than the release version of firefox. Firefox 3 will have pretty equivalent performance to the current Safari 3, but I suspect that won't hold true for long. The WebKit team has been doing an exceptional job at honing the performance of their engine.
So I wonder if the customers managed to extract their data before the company vanished?

I've suddenly realized why they call it "cloud computing": At any moment, it can evaporate without a trace and leave you high and dry.
"Preferred" just means "different from common". Preferred stock can have almost any terms you like -- you can't sign over your firstborn to the preferred stock holders (whatever it might seem like at times), but liquidation preference, dividends, conversion to common stock, veto rights... they're all on the table.

I believe that "converts to common stock if an IPO occurs" is almost one of the terms for VC-owned preferred stock.
http://blog.emmettshear.com/post/2008/03/03/Dont-use-Pound-f...

http://www.igvita.com/2008/02/11/nginx-and-memcached-a-400-b...
I just found the part of the article I highlighted to be kind of stupid, especially coming from a Berkeley "visiting scholar." Though I'm not quite sure how important that title is (random guess - not very), it's important enough to be mentioned in the article.
The logical conclusion of this article is that we should all design our own transistors, and program our apps in terms of the circuit that will execute them. That way nothing will trip us up along the way!

My reading of the article was "I didn't know how to use Hibernate or ActiveRecord, but I tried anyway, and they didn't work right." Yeah, that's the software's fault, not yours. Riiight.

As for magic_quotes, the problem was it was too general, not that it was too magical. Have you ever written this:

run_query("SELECT * FROM foo WHERE foo=?", "'bar'")

Congratulations, the "'bar'" is magically quoted! It works because you are specifying exactly what you want quoted and why.

All in all, this has got to be one of the worst articles I've ever read in my life. And that is saying a lot.
YouTube - Real Estate Prices Plotted on Rollercoaster [video]
Correcting vision is about changing where the light lands on the retina in the eye. I don't see how a display can do that, but I'm not a physicist and so will not claim possibility, let alone impossibility.
http://www.xobni.com/blog/2008/04/04/goodbye-organize-tab/

the functionality was removed as well
and Europeans have better public transport -- in the 200 miles it would take me to get a major city from where I live, even driving a 20 mpg car by myself, it'd be cheaper than public transport by a few dollars.

and with myself + n, it becomes increasingly cheaper to drive than public transportation, where n equals traveling companions

for another example, for thanksgiving I traveled to Chicago in a group of four. for about $180 of gasoline in said horrible gas-guzzling vehicle. price per train ticket was $150, and the train takes 6 hours longer.

with public transport being so horrible, and this country being so spread apart (obviously great masses of people live on both coasts, but even then north/south travel is a long ways) it would take a lot more $/gallon for it to make more economical sense to take bus/train vs. car.
I wrote two small math books in LyX: http://hilomath.com

It was interesting. It's nice in a lot of ways; LyX manages to combine the kind of continuous preview you get with a full WYSIWYG word processor with the more abstract organizational features of LaTex. Not to mention the kick ass typesetting quality, especially for math.

The current site (which I'm a bit embarrassed to show - I have a much nicer looking one in the works) is generated from the LyX source, as a bunch of mostly static php pages. Its replacement is a django site that is also fully generated; I just type 'make site', which exports LyX to latex, converts to html via latex2html, and so on.

I have a plan for a third book. And as nice as LyX is, I'm wondering if I want to try docbook or something for it. The reason is I found it sometimes hard to convert things fully into an html document that fully takes advantage of the medium. LaTeX (and hence LyX) was made first and foremost for documents that are physically printed, and sometimes there's an impedance mismatch.

But LyX ain't bad, and I doubt any alternative is a magic bullet. Anyone have any experience writing books like this? What do you use?
Americans value free time over money: survey
I'm wary of any one-size-fits-all solutions.

However, someone with intimate knowledge of how their web application works ought to consider doing some of these things on a case-by-case basis.

I would avoid anything dealing the with User-Agent at all, because you never know if two years from now the most popular web browser will be called Mozilla WebHarvest or something weird like that.
Public transport is a chicken and egg problem in the US. Since everything we have is so spread out, we need a very comprehensive system before anyone could use it for anything. A train or bus system is worthless if it doesn't get you within a few blocks of where you need to go. In the US we seem to think that public transportation means a train from the airport to the stadium, stopping at a mall in between.

So you won't get any riders until the system goes everywhere decently frequently. And you won't make any money without any riders. Since no one wants to fund a public transport system that isn't self-sustaining, nothing ever gets built, or worse, a 'trial system' gets built to 'test demand' ... and of course since it only goes from the airport to the stadium with a stop at the mall, it's a dismal failure.

The only way it's going to happen is a massive federal/state cooperative infrastructure program like the Interstate Highway System built under Eisenhower. And even then, with suburban lifestyle, it'd be too hard to cover all that area.
Where, then? Europe is pretty closed in its own ways. The gulf states have some good things, and a lot of pretty serious bad things. Canada? Hong Kong? Open...yes, but with a sword hanging over its head.
Hmm looks kind of expensive though. Does it really justify the price?
Registration for Django Dash has started
Really? Do ads for transistors describe them as "smart" or "magic"?

The idea here is not that abstractions are bad, it's that those that are frequently described by the people who made them as "smart" or "magic" are often not very helpful, and tend to do more harm than good. There are some exceptions, but good abstractions, while they may be described as "smart", don't usually include that in their name, and are rarely if ever called "magic".
The index used to be a lot more useful, but last fall Yahoo finally retired the Lisp version of Y Store and I had to switch to the C++ version. It was not quite a straight port; there were a small number of design changes (all for the worse). One is that site indexes are now chopped up into a large number of very short pages, which is worse for SEO and human readers alike.
Ubuntu Unleashed: Sun xVM VirtualBox 1.60 Just Released for Ubuntu Hardy Heron and other OSes
Well, that was bad luck. With the interest shown in the article I would expect greater success. I would submit myself with a direct url and a title that mentions "n-back test" in particular but I don't want to step on your toes. Meanwhile I am off to test your site.
Top Paid CEOs
I agree. This fits with Joel's law of leaky abstractions. Imperfect magic is dangerous. Perfect magic is wonderful.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...

Rails pluralization rules are an interesting example, they leak--I have to know about exceptions, but they're consistent enough that they, in my opinion, just pass the threshold. Nearly-perfect magic is most tolerable when dealing with structure, not data and when the magic's imperfection is consistent, repeatable, and documented.
Wasn't Michael Arrington an investor in this startup? Seems kind of odd that this wasn't deadpool news that he likes to cover.
Problems with this survey: "Wealth" versus "free time?" Why not a dollar value versus a time value?

Also, once you reduce it to that, the answer is very simple: look at how much people work versus how much they make per hour. Since when do we need to ask people how they would behave when we already have evidence of how they do behave?
Putting aside any possible biases, anyone interested in an easy to use LaTeX-like program should give Microsoft's Word 2007 a shot. The new equation editor and symbols functionality is quite powerful, and incredibly easy to use.
If the title is to be believed, no Americans have jobs.
safari for everything, firefox for firebug and web developer and myspace(so when it kills the browser i don't kill my work flow)
The smell of a good startup
Yes, they were obviously way off with that one. Facebook has grown enormously in the past two years, and they would have no trouble selling for many times more than the $750M that he turned down.

The great thing about these old articles is that with the benefit of history we can see wrong they are, which should tell us something about the current "news".
A Killer Product
Jeff Hawkins (the author, creator of PalmPilot) has always been interested in how the brain works, and once he made his Palm money, he started a neuroscience institute. That research along with his own and what he read led him to his theory of how the brain works. It's extracted from lots of real, hard research. He then started a company (Numenta http://www.numenta.com/) to create a software implementation of that theory, which has a set of tools you can download and play with. They've had good results consistent with the theories in the book and had some impressive results. There's also a recording of a talk he gave at an O'Reilly conference: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3499.html

So long story short, it is for real. When I read it, I had to stop every 20 minutes or so to catch my breath I found it so exciting and enlightening.
"Web 2.0"-style cloud computing just a passing vapor
Psychostick Announces “Terrible Shirt” Tour / Use Your Skillz
Watercooler: Yet another social network app company that’s making money
It would be an excellent tradition for people to post stories about their mistakes -- we live in such success-driven cultures that it's almost like admitting you're a loser if you ... well, lose occasionally. Yet, the more I develop software for other people, the more I see that it's about the people, not the software per se. The map is not the terrain, the plan is not the project.
People don't realize it is cheap here, mainly because it was SUPER cheap before. I remember in high school paying a dollar or something for a gallon. 107 octane race gas was $3.50 a gallon and we thought that was outrageous. Now we are paying more then that for 87 octane crap.

also, where is the rest of the list? I know by me gas is 3.75 a gallon now. I know the US is 111 on the list but I'd like to see what a 30 cent increase makes it.
I´ve used nginx in Rails and Pylons environments with good success. These apps don´t get much traffic so that wasn´t a consideration, but the ease and simplicity of nginx is fantastic. You never have to do anything with it once it's initially configured.
"Language will be difficult for quite some time due to its links with culture and the fact that it is always evolving and cross polinating between languages."

How much trouble do you have understanding things written in English 100 years ago? 400? 800? Older works require footnotes, but they don't introduce new verbal concepts -- you can footnote Chaucer in modern English, and I suspect that a Chaucer scholar would be able to describe modern concepts by building on old ideas -- there isn't a discontinuity where you have some concept that simply cannot be linked to the words Chaucer would have used.

So the problem is not that language changes too fast.
http://www.paulgraham.com/better.html The footnotes here cite earlier work, as does the referenced Slashdot article.
Riding Rails: Help improve Rails documentation on Git branch
"the more I see that it's about the people, not the software per se"

Thank you. A fundamental truth we too easily forget.
Facebook is going to become the poster child of dot-bomb 2.0.

It may take a few years, and it'll be because of a super slowdown in the market outside of SV, but mark my words, it will happen.
The article did mention that, for the poor, those values were inverted. They valued money over free time.

So really it's just a supply/demand type curve, and most Americans are at a point where the nebulous 'free time' has a better value than an equally hazy 'more money'.
I liked my headline better before the moderators or whatever got to it:

"xobni releases major feature: Search bar now purple."
What Will Microsoft Do With Credentica?
Is there any reason they don't use different classes of common?
sounds like in this case smell = (passion + spending money only where it helps things get done)
Correlation does not imply causation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus...
What people say they value is not necessarily the same as what they do value.
I would love to see some data about the relation between startup success and field of study. The article mentions that 2/3s of the surveyed startups were founded by science, engineering or maths graduates, and the other 1/3 by business graduates. This is nice, but what about the success rate ? Is there any correlation? That would be nice to see.
For all I know, it might just be that lawyers have preconceived notions of what "preferred" stock is and what "common" stock is, and call something one or the other based on those traditions. When I've seen multiple classes of common stock, the only differences have been voting rights -- but I don't know if there are any legal limits to how much difference there can be between classes of "common" stock.
I'd rather make less, and have a few months off every year to go and travel, than make more, and be chained to my job.

Of course, the end goal is to make a ton of money and have free time, but that's still a work-in-progress. :)
Nginx: http://highscalability.com/friends-sale-architecture-300-mil...
I've used pen, Squid, and LVS. All useful for different situations, though LVS is just not practical for the vast majority of situations.

PerlBal looks really cool, as being written in Perl means it has some of the same kinds of flexibility that Squid has (a good reason for Squid is that you can write your own balancing algorithm in any language you like in a redirector script--I always used Perl, or Python when I was working with the Zope guys--so, you can actually do crazy stuff like choose the right server based on keeping them "primed" for the content users are asking for based on URL, or you can use destination URL hashing and achieve the same effect even if you have millions of URLs). Squid also has experimental support for ESI (Edge Side Includes) which is pretty awesome...build a page from disparate and wholly unrelated servers using a simple templating system, and caching them. I don't think any other Open Source product out there has ESI (experimental or otherwise).
I'm going through the aftermath of one of my failures at the moment. It's been an interesting, illuminating experience. I've learned that I am (as I suspected) fallible. I've also learned that most "civilians" don't know what they want from software, even though they think they do. And I've learned that you can't please everyone, and it's futile to try. I might write this one up some time, but the fat lady ain't singing just yet.
Less code surface area means less potential bugs to fix that would distract from improving the core functionality.
git wholly altered Linus' position in the world of software. It was like George Foreman's comeback, proving that an old dog can learn new tricks and stomp all over the youngsters in the field.

Anybody that's not looking at Linus (for a second time, if you were around for the beginning of Linux, or for the first time) with a sense of wide-eyed amazement just isn't paying attention. He's now helped reinvent two entire industries. git is pretty revolutionary...it builds on the shoulders of giants, just like Linux did previously, but it makes the leap that no one else as made and puts it into a simple package (Mercurial and darcs and bazaar all come close, of course, but all have a "research project" feel to them in several important areas--partly because git came last in the line and could learn from their mistakes, but the same is true of almost every great idea).
Sorry to hear about it. For some customers, showing that you care is half the battle. Hope this is one of them.
I'd like to see segregation of attachments (should probably put the suggestion to the team). My brother's wife always sends photos as attachments. I have to download them manually if I want them in picassa which is tedious.