skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On the contrary: the hard sciences are easier to learn by yourself because it takes more self-deception to fool yourself into believing you understand something you really do not. When you do a math or physics exercise and get 20 for an answer, and the answer back of the textbook is 3, it takes a heroic amount of self-deception to convince yourself you understand the exercise.

Then again the hard sciences are less likely to be taught badly because falsehoods about the hard sciences are easier to detect, so if you are more worried about false teachers than about arriving at false understanding through self-study, it tends to make sense to reserve the more difficult-to-get-right subjects like philosophy for self-study under the theory that if you want a job done right you should do it yourself rather than trust a bureaucratic educational establishment to do it.
Ask YC: How happy will you be if MS takes over Yahoo and do you think MS will benefit?
My take on this is MS will fail horribly in the long run if it doesn't consider wish of other 2 important stakeholders (i.e yahoo employees and end users/customers) --- i'm very uncomfortable to see almost all the time that m&a is all about increasing value of the shareholders and not about increasing value for other 2 stakeholders. How far you can go if employees and customer are unhappy with the merger? which i think would be the case in this tussle of yahoo-ms merger ...
Perhaps induction and deduction? In any case, this is the basis behind economics as I understand it; taking data and then reasoning from there to more generalized models. Then those models can be used in future studies as a means to both reconcile the data, and to improve upon the models. There are several schools of thought, each with their own models, and each arguing that the other models are wrong due to particular reasons. This is not much unlike philosophy, except it deals with money instead of ethics and motivations.
Well, I don't really use either of their products, so I don't have a strong feeling about the merger.

I think that the fall of Microsoft is eventual anyway, no company has historically maintained a strong dominance or monopoly in their industry over a long period of time. As things continue to change in the computing market, Microsofts sheer size works more against it than for it. We've all probably heard the story about how Microsoft almost missed the Internet in '95 or so. That one was easier to recover from than sinking billions of R&D dollars into a desktop app development when things suddenly go to apps in the cloud, or some similar thing.

At this point, I don't know that Microsoft can really benefit from any significant merger. They may however be able to fend off the inevitable for another few years with some strategic acquisitions though.
a small point: most yahoo employees/end users/customers are likely yahoo shareholders as well. so the creation of value for yahoo shareholders will benefit them as well. in any case, they can get a voice proportional to their share in the company.
This Week in Ruby (April 7, 2008)
i think u r right in the sense that i would rather acquire 10 different futuristic companies than just one jumbo that can fail terribly ... it would have been better if ms bought something like social networking, voip, cloud apps, virtual s/w for desktop etc. companies than just one single content provider.
Microsoft have been buying small innovative companies for some time without a significant effect it would seem. I'm not sure that buying Yahoo! would make a great deal of difference to them either as I feel that Yahoo! is too big currently to be part of the next-phase. I might be wrong though - it has been known once or twice before!!
sorry, i didn't mentioned who are the shareholders? when m&a takes place its all about biggest shareholders who are mostly private equity or big venture funds and not the retail shareholders like you and me ... while customer and employees are located world over - for example a yahoo email user in a small village of china should also be considered as a value stakeholder because those type of users are in millions and in the same way an employee in the yahoo's r&d dept. in india is also as important as any other stakeholder.... so what would happen to ms if these 2 stakeholders switch their loyalty to the competitor (say google) after merger ???????
...and thus, the students in the article majoring in Philosophy with the intention of later attending law school.
i don't know what to say but one thing i know i dont know most them...honestly, you, as an essayist is one of my favorite..please don't stop write

thank you!
Nice to see that HN still remembers philg.

Although, as someone who took the first draft of this course in 2001, I certainly wish I had submitted the link and got the karma for myself :).
what about the properties underneath the yahoo umbrella such as flickr, delicious, etc? what about the technology underneath the yahoo user interface javascript libs? don't forget that yahoo has diversified itself in media, for better or for worse, and the media diversity is something m$ft lacks.
I think 'yahoo email users in china' might applaud the merger:

Yahoo Says It Gave China Internet Data: Journalist Jailed: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09...
I fear for my Flickr :-\

Seriously, though, I think Microsoft is also buying managers and developers who made better moves in many of the areas where it has fallen behind. YUI vs. "Atlas" (is it still called Atlas) for example. They get some good properties, but I think they are also looking for skills they apparently haven't had.

The question is, will they crush/warp/bend them or crush/warp/bend themselves?
10 impossibilities conquered by science
Hm, that inspires me to another idea: maybe smoke signals could be revived, if they could be automatically picked up by weather satellites?

I wonder at what resolution and frequency the world is being scanned by satellites these days? I often wonder how to help people in war countries. For example Tibet at the moment: communication channels are being shut down, how could one provide people with simple means to get a message out to the world? Could smoke signals be a solution?

One problem is that I would not like the sender of the message to be detectable by the enemy. Not sure if that is solvable at all (certainly not with smoke signals).
Programmer Destroys $7 Billion Industry
10 Ways the Internet (As We Know It) Will Die
Delmontes.com - a new online mediaplayer startup
Hi guys. I just created this little site in 2 hours. Tell me what do you think. Waiting for your feedback.
Functional programming - coming to a compiler near you soon?
"Kulveer Taggar says he expected to wait a little longer before becoming a millionaire."
Etymology of a Linux distro
I've found God, says man who cracked the genome
Haha, nice.

I took it in 2003, but had to drop it a few weeks in . . . started that term with 90-something units and was running for UA President. 8(
A difference between Singleton and a global variable is that a singleton can have lazy instantiation
NYT: Yahoo Rejects Microsoft Bid Again
yes, u r absoulutely right, one of the proposition of ms buying yahoo is to get on open source bandwagon because most of the startups are open source and it would be easier for all future buys for ms to integrate with yahoo apps/platform.

But this discussion is about taking care of employees's and customer's wish and aspiration - again what if key employees and customers of flickr, delicious etc.switch their loyalty just because they were not respected and considered during m&a....

sorry, but i haven't read any survey regarding whether or not yahoo's (and its subsidiary's) employees and customers are for or against the merger.
INovia launches a new fund - Seed and early stage venture capital
I will not be happy at all because Yahoo might loose hackers like Doug Crockford and alike. The way he bashs Microsoft while he speaks is a clear indicator that he (or some others) might refuse to work with Microsoft. Moreover, if a company cannot market a product while spending whopping 6 Billion on research & having people like Ray Ozzie is doomed to hit a huge failure when it comes to Internet applications.
What do you mean guessing is the best way to read? That's an absolutely horrible idea that will lead to all kinds of misunderstanding!

Seriously though, read all the words vs guess is a false dilemma.
Yahoo tells Microsoft to increase $41B bid
Simple Rules for Designing Threaded Applications
The Wikipedia page is pretty decent:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize

The class of algorithms that it's dealing with is called collaborative filtering and the Bell Labs team has done some impressive stuff there. The contest is more academic than it would seem on the surface, since as was mentioned in a recently posted article, the data set is rather narrow in scope. In other words, it's more of a collaborative filtering algorithms contest than a "find the best recommendation algorithm" contest.
Wii Players Suffer New Injury Named Wiitis
I use neither of their products but hope that Yahoo's shareholders will tell Microsoft to go urinate in a direction opposite the wind.
I like this approach (although I would shift things earlier, because I'm an early bird). A couple of questions, if you don't mind:

- Do you have meetings, and if so, how do you balance them against your "protected" time?
- Do you work with global employees? I have someone who works for me in India and my boss is in the UK. Would you suggest I reserve the afternoon and just reverse the schedule?
- Do you allow for bits of personal things during "protected" time if you hit a block or single-task fatique? What is your strategy for staying focused during that time?

I'm actually considered highly productive. However, I do think I spend too much time being tactical and I feel a bit ADHD--I am a bit ADHD, but I don't think jumping around different tasks and mindsets all day is good for me in the long run.
Full text of the letter from Yahoo! to MS:
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/apr2008/...
It feels better if you do the same backwards: for every x hours of work on the main project you reward yourself with an hour of surfing.

Also, saying you have to do something is disempowering language that drives you to rebellion. Remember yourself why you want to do it. Think of the consequences of both doing it and not doing it. If after that you still don't want to do it, don't do it.
5 Ways to Sharpen Your Ruby-foo
Yet Another Video Service, Adobe Edition
TechCrunch UK - Events news
Maintaining a Sense of Urgency
Angel investing and angel financing overview for entrepreneurs and startups
Yahoo Launches "Stock Market for Ads"
The article doesn't get into the downsides of Asterisk, which include support and hardware costs (http://tinyurl.com/52pbvm)
Is Apple About To Launch Apple Search?
Insecure Content Ownership
Excellent read. There is a lot of great advice in this post, especially the note about urgency at the end.
I think you are absolutely right about pleasing the stakeholders, especially because good engineers are hard to find and if the engineers leave en masse, there will be problems.

I see the culture of the two companies as incompatible. Yahoo! is a FreeBSD shop, they use lots of Free Software, MySQL, etc. Is Microsoft going to rip and replace all those servers? If they don't, they are saying FreeBSD and Free Software is better than Windows. I see this problem as being a very expensive issue.

Secondly, Microsoft has never borrowed money before to purchase a company. They were having Bear Stearns help them with this purchase, and while Bear Stearns is gone, they still will need some serious capital and will go into debt. This will change their culture, their ability to attract investors, and the bottom line.
I don't think that you have to understand all his work in detail to claim him as a hero. He was more than just his work.

I wonder about John von Neumann. I thought maybe he'd be on there too.
To Catch a Car Thief, the Police Exercise a Little Remote Control
Generic pharmacy: At your rescue
Generic pharmacy is a pharmacy that specializes in offering generic drugs at affordable price to customers. Therefore no need to loose heart, if you have got fed up of the escalating price of the prescription drugs.The active components, quality, prescribed amount, routes of administration and strong points of a generic drug like Kamagra, Caverta, Levitra are the same to that of its brand-name equivalent.
This all depends on the definition of "scientifically impossible" - most of these arguments were just the formal equivalent of "zomg thats impossible".

I feel there's a difference between saying "it is impossible to create a thinking machine" and "it is impossible to turn back time" or "it is impossible to create a free energy device". Perhaps even these statements will be proved wrong someday, but at least there is a noticeable difference in that we have a working example of the first statement, but the last would have implications that shift things all the way down to the smallest parts of our theories.

All in all, no discussion of whether the laws of physics permit some technological venture has much utility. The laws of physics are never wrong, whereas naysayers are wrong very often. If some conceivable path to whatever it is we want to do exists, there is no historical reason not to go ahead with it. It doesn't take more than a single counterexample to prove something possible. Perhaps the morale from history lessons such as these is to keep your mouth shut unless acknowledging the possibility of some crazy idea will create big problems for your own work. (A patent worker would have a hard time if all free energy devices were to be given scientific treatment, for instance)
Feel Confident About Taking Generic Drugs
Generic drugs have always been put to questions. So to get people rid of these unnecessary doubts, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has come to the forth to educate people about the actual facts related to generic drugs.

FDA says that all generic drug manufacturing facilities must meet the standards of good manufacturing practices. This organization based in US does not permit drugs to be made in substandard facilities. FDA conducts about 3,500 inspections a year to ensure standards are met.

When a brand-name drug's patent protection expires, generic versions of the drug can be approved for sale. The generic version works like the brand-name drug in dosage, strength, performance and use, and must meet the same quality and safety standards. All generic drugs must be reviewed and approved by FDA.
Redwood Trees vs. Solar Panels
I'll be delighted!

Combining Yahoo's high traffic with Microsoft's reasonably good ad management system would finally produce a competitor to Google Adwords (as outlined here a few days back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=154184 )

Microsoft hasn't been able to build Live.com traffic and Yahoo is clueless when it comes to building a useful ad management system. Putting the two together should resolve both problems reasonably quickly.
S#&% Eating Grin
12 year old Dmitri  Gaskin gives a Google Talk on JQuery [YouTube Video]
An oldie but goodie.

I always found his attachment to AOL and Oracle kinda strange. I imagine that if this was written today, open source tools would be featured more.
Great advice. I especially like:

2) Spend A Lot More Time Building Something Than You Spend Thinking About, Reflecting On, And Analyzing Your Ideas.

It's so much easier to think about something than to do it.
Speaker Description (from YouTube)

Dmitri Gaskin drinks code with his cereal for breakfast every
morning. He's a jQuery whiz and a Drupal know-it-all. He
contributes patches for both Open Source projects. In the Drupal
world, he maintains many modules, is on the security team, and is
involved in the upcoming Summer of Code as a mentor and
administrator. Dmitri has given many talks on Drupal and jQuery, in
such places as Logitech, Drupalcon and live on a radio show out of
L.A. When Dmitri isn't coding, a very rare occurrence, he is playing
and composing contemporary music. And attending classes in the 6th
grade. (He's only 12.)
Number 10 is the one xkcd uses for nerd sniping.

http://xkcd.com/356/
Urgency is the key to driving business deals. If there's isn't any, everyone adopts a "wait and see" stance.
I would like to add a complimentary point: "You are what you measure."

An honest results focused to-do list with daily/weekly reflection does wonders.
In some situations that can mean that thinking about something is better than doing it. Like if you can dismiss a plan by thinking about it, you have wasted less energy than if you execute the plan and fail.
Stop thinking that corporations are monolithic entities. "Comcast monitors Twitter" is as correct as saying "Stanford founded Google" or "The Graham family is working on a Lisp variant".

Someone at Comcast follows Arrington's tweets, or uses a service like Google Alerts. It might be for work, or it might just be for the same reasons any of us might do such things. Maybe that person emails the link to someone who is able to do something about it. The end.
Impressive kid. I wish I was that smart when I was 12.
Somehow, I enjoyed his few 'jabs' towards Steve, especially the one about how Yahoo! has been uncooperative in negotiations:

"Moreover, Steve, you personally attended two of these meetings and could have advanced discussions in any way you saw fit. "
Maybe. Maybe not. I know it seems counterintuitive, but sometimes it works out better when you build something you never needed in the first place. At least you have a "bird in the hand".

This advice struck me particularly hard because I have done both. I have laid out the most fantastic apps with pencil and paper. OTOH, things never really became crystal clear until I actually built it.
6) Leave your job and move to San Francisco to work on your startup full time.

Like he said, don't treat it like a hobby. I've found that moving has really focused my mind and put my efforts in another orbit.
Mobile Phones Coming to EU Flights
I can't decide if the noise fellow passengers' call would annoy me or if this is genuinely useful. Thoughts?
After all these years, this is still on my PDA. And this:

http://www.amazon.com/Philip-Alexs-Guide-Web-Publishing/dp/1...

is still on my coffee table.

(I'm still trying to figure out which chapters the dog wrote.)
It is better rephrased as "Spend a lot more time thinking by building than thinking by reflecting on and analyzing your ideas."

Analyzing = Passive thinking.

Building = Active thinking.
Oracle has been replaced by Postgres. AOLServer is still going strong, but I guess it's not sexy enough to compete with RoR et al.
How To: Getting Started with EC2 (for beginners)
and for those interested, I just got my copy of O'Reilly "Programming Amazon Web Services" and it looks pretty comprehensive.
New Massive Botnet Twice the Size of Storm
Why would 'Steve' be the one to advance discussions?

Microsoft has put forward their offer and is awaiting a response. It's not as though Yahoo has forgotten about it -- the next move is theirs to make.
the cultural clash, the technology clash, the reputation clash will cost ms dearly ... also employees who dont leave will stay there with the lowest moral which is even more dangerous than an employee leaving the company ... this will also create internal politics about who's right regarding selecting a technology and/or new apps and business.

Anyway this would be fun to watch as 2 different giant animals (dinosaur and elephant) coming together to rule the jungle - while all the other animals like lions, tigers, leopards will try to create an even game to ouster these giants.
Yang responds: Dear Steve, raise your offer and we'll talk
DimDim: A good, free, and open source Webex competitor
Lecture on Graphical Models by Zoubin Ghahramani
Congrats:-) Any bets as to the first Economist article related to Y Combinator?
The Frustratingly Unfulfilled Promise of Google Gears
GiveYC: One month of free advertising space
I wanted to repost this since my last submission was on Sunday and might not have got to the people I had wanted to help - BootStrappers.

Update: There is no catch! You do NOT have to link back to Simplebucket or anything like that.

Here's my pitch: One month of free advertising on my new site Simplebucket , url here: http://www.simplebucket.com/explore/photos

Here's the traffic that we have doing since our relaunch on March 20 to April 7. We are on track to getting more than 10000 visitors/month considering its only 17days from March 20th.

Traffic Stats (March 20 - April 7th)
Absolute Unique: 6000+
Visitors: 6669
PageViews: 14400

What do I need to do to submit my startup?
Add a comment here with your startup url and a brief description of what your startup does and the comment with the most points get the spot. How this?

*oh, I forget to add, I will reserve the right to select the next highest comment if the winner is a competing startup (ie. photo hosting ), I hope you understand.
Brightcove Partners With Bebo, Meebo, RockYou, Slide And Veoh
Schneier on Security: Internet Censorship
I would like to be able to delete an account
Artificial Abundance and The New “Free” Psychology
i wish there was jquery when i was 12.
so there is no catch?
I would have been hooked to video games or PC games at that age. Though I have a excuse I saw computer only when I joined the college. yeh lame excuse :)
no .. nothing.. one month of free advertising
Is it normal to address people by their first name in formal business communications?
In my experience most of us only maintain a sense of urgency over time out of fear. That's certainly the basis of most of this advice. I've always been somewhat conflicted about using fear to motivate myself and others. I feel almost guilty that it's the best tool I've found. I feel much better about the work I do out of pure excitement, but most of the time after the initial excitement wears off, I find it's fear of failing that keeps me going strong.
ok haha sweet... my submission is www.hangmanworld.com - the best hangman game on the internet :)
Microsoft sucks at the one and Yahoo at the other, but the two together should be good at both?
Sing along with Jerry Yang (apologies to Amy Winehouse):

They tried to make me go to Redmond
I said no, no, no.
Yes it's been bad, the stock'll come back
We'll grow, grow, grow

We ain’t got a clue
But Mr Ballmer thinks we do
He's tried to make me go to Redmond
I won't go, go, go.

I’d rather be at home by the Bay
But can't just sit here an' pray
Cos there’s nothing, nothing they can teach me
That I can't learn from Dr Eric Schmidt

41 B's not enough
But we're worth more than that small stuff

They’re tryin to make me go to Redmond
I said no, no, no
Yes it's been bad, the stock'll come back
We'll grow, grow, grow

We ain’t got a clue
But Mr Ballmer thinks we do
He's tried to make me go to Redmond
I won't go, go, go.
FTFA

"Caveats

Currently, only jabber is supported. It is possible to access other IM services over jabber, but I'm not 100% clear how it works, and I don't yet have need for it, so that may or may not come later."
So, will advertisers still be forced to place ads on all Yahoo content networks (regardless of quality), or will I finally be able to create a campaign to advertise only on Yahoo's search pages?
More interesting, perhaps, would be the first YC IPO.
Longer flights within Europe are around 4 hours long(i.e from Glasgow to Antalya). I wouldn't really care if other passangers talk on their mobiles all the way as long as I can get data connectivity. But then again there are people who prefer a silent carriage for a trip of 15 minutes.

Maybe this is an opportunity for carriers for differntiating their offerings.
If you are a Python programmer, be sure to read this:

http://jimmyg.org/2007/09/01/amazon-ec2-for-people-who-prefe...
"I fear for my Flickr :-\"

I recall hearing that from may people when Yahoo first bought Flickr.

Having to use a Yahoo ID to use Flickr was enough to get me to stop using it. Too damn annoying.
This is not new.