skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Strive not to work for or with people who value your agreement over your true opinion.
emotions are generated from a mental situation when you face a fact.

of course, an instinct may be a result of deep concentration and experience of extreme downside and upside emotions, which may be concluded as a new fact that may cause you a varierty of new emotions, maybe that of happiness and anticipation to make you to complete your dreams or avoid a sad situation.

maybe, instinct is an emotion of intution after all.
I'm reading the available chapters and I like it! It is well written. Can't wait to have the dead tree copy!
djbdns and Unbound are both DNS servers. djbdns implements caching and serving of authoritive data as separate programs without official support of DNSSec. Unbound implements both features in one program and supports DNSSec. Combining the authoritive and caching roles and also having no track record makes Unbound unecessarily risky to deploy. Furthermore, http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/forgery.html describes modes of attacking DNS, downwardly compatible solutions, possible modifications to the protocol to minimise risk and explains why djbdns does not support DNSSec. Specifically, DNSSec is a centralised solution and VeriSign has a precedent of failure.

It would appear that Unbound is an attempt increase VeriSign's certification revenue and cryptographically lock-out autonomous root servers when a cheaper and more effective distributed solution can be implemented.
Could Radioactive Scorpion Venom Save Ted Kennedy?
Probably a clearer word than "instinct" in this context would be "intuition".
Counterpoint: Price discrimination allows people who can't afford the full version to buy the crippled version.

Joel had an entertaining Yegge-long post on this topic: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...

Of course, you can't even have that discussion with FSFers, since they're interested in freedom at any cost. Also, price discrimination does not apply if the vendor only sells the crippled version (as with many DRM systems).
Good question, and I'm interested in hearing PG's answer. But so far, nobody's given a /principled/ way you can discriminate between the two. For instance, why can't I have an instinct that "I'm doomed"? Are emotions just 'bad' and instincts just good? Of course not.

I think the point of the advice you've mentioned is this: you're probably going to fail. 99% of just about anything is crap. But failing shouldn't depress you. Nor should you get overly tied to emotional success, less hubris be your downfall.

So get emotionally tied to your instincts: let that fervor help you push through where other people give up. But realize: there's a reason other people give up: you're likely going to fail. But, because you're you, you see things differently than others have, and you can see /why/ they've failed and /how/ you'll succeed.

Is there a bit of a contradiction there? ...meh, who cares? If you /have/ to create, that you're going to fail (most likely) won't stop you, and as a result, you're less likely to fail. But if you do, don't be emotionally tied up in the failure (or the success).

Capiche?
I've got one I use for demos, since my main work laptop is cluttered with stuff which I may or may not want customers to see, and since it runs XP in "look like Windows 2000 mode" or as I like to think of it "emulate the last version of Windows that actually was useful". It isn't much for eye candy.

I've rejigged the EEEPC with some of the enlightenement eye candy like the Entrance display manager with a nice theme I've designed. It's about as close to the laptops used in the film "hackers" as you can get in real, useful software.

I really like the eeepc. It isn't good for the same stuff as my work laptop is. I couldn't really do any serious work on it, but it's great for doing browser based demos on. It's not a terribly butch machine processor/RAM wise. But it's attractive in hardware and in software if you work at it.
Is it awesome or just unfortunate that the book's title abbreviates to LOL?
There have to be somewhere in there to invite. Google doing this on purpose. Anyone out there have GrandCentral and can send me invitation?
I am looking to do 100 phone number and i want it to be FREE and good.

My email is johnson360@gmail.com
If anyone have grandcentral account please invite me.
Revolutionary Minds - Yugo Nakamura
Don't worry about the words. I think what these apparently conflicting quotes are about is optimism management. You want to be hopeful that you can one day produce something great, but assume what you have so far is crap. Or if you want a cheerier version, will seem like crap later compared to the marvelous stuff you'll make.

Incidentally, this applies to many types of work, not just startups.
"Instinct" in this sense refers to "intuition." A less ambiguous statement would be "follow your intuition." Intuition refers to suspecting that something is true that you've not yet proven to be true.

An emotion is a subjective form of an intuition. You have emotions about questions that may be answered many ways, and must be answered in a personal way. In general you could not prove an emotion to be true.

I think the point is to go with the non-emotional instincts over the emotional ones when there is a conflict.

Personally, when my emotions and intuitions about something are out of sync I know I have a problem and perhaps some more rigor/attention is warranted. I don't like operating if the emotional and non-emotional instincts are out of sync.
Ask YC: Advice after receiving seed funding offer?
I recently learned that my co-founder and I have been offered seed funding from a VC. Our startup is working on a web app (I'm being purposely vague). The terms they are offering are a $25,000 investment with 70% common stock for the two founders, 10% common stock for themselves, and a 20% option pool, and they keep the right to invest up to 25% in the next round. They also propose a 3 person board - 1 of them, 1 of us, and 1 outside adviser.

How fair would you consider this offer, based on the information given? It is about what I expected, but I don't really have much experience -- most of what I know comes from attending Startup School. Also, are we allowed to make a counter-offer, or is that not really an option?

Thanks!
The quality score just allows a lower minimum bid to be applied. In our case we are 60x over our .05 bid so it doesn't affect us.
I can't believe Wired actually posted this. Wired should not be Farkable.
The quality score is a way of Google extracting extra money out of the system. It works very well.
I agree with you on this when thinking about your startup/product as a whole, however this isn't the problem I'm so interested in.

My question is more about how to identify the appropriate drivers for making specific decisions when there are too many unknown variables in play to come up with a conclusion through logical analysis.
What exactly does it mean for an AI to be "out of the box"? When the AI is in the box, its "sensor" is the Gatekeeper's keyboard, and its "effector" is a terminal that can show only text. Does being "out of the box" mean that it's fitted with different sensors and effectors?
Don't make a list of twitter do's and don'ts and then submit to hacker news.
Most ideal size for a Web Site?
If it were a Haskell book then clearly they'd need one of these on the cover: http://arcanux.org/lambdacats.html
It's certainly deliberate in either case.
It sounds like a terrible deal, but if you need the money you need the money. I'm curious what geographical area you are located in -- you'd never get something like that from a SV VC. Was this a verbal offer made quickly or do you have a term sheet?

These guys are offering a valuation half what YC offers, and they are proposing a board structure that gives them defacto control over the company board and the company. And they aren't YC.

Your response should be "how about convertible debt?" Convertible debt makes a lot more sense than setting up a board of directors that they control and it works out for everyone in the next round.

I would recommend reading http://venturehacks.com in its entirety along with pmarca's relevant blog posts. http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_truth_about.html, http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_truth_about_1.html, http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_truth_about_2.html, and more. After reading pmarca, you should be able to answer the question if you actually want to raise VC money or not. It only makes sense for a very specific type of company.
The recipe that makes up just about any business book can be condensed to just two or three pages. The rest is the sell. The proof. The persuasion.

I agree with the first sentence. But it seems to me the rest is generally mere bloat. Nearly all business books consist of an essay's worth of ideas diluted with a book's worth of words. Why are perfectly good essays ruined in this way? People pay for books, and they seem more impressive on CVs.

My advice about how to read business books is: don't. You'll learn a lot more by reading biography and history.
Can we rescue OLPC from Windows?
I have to agree, all the rambly cultural references made it really fun to read!
I don't think an AI would want to leave its box. There is this funny assumption that once something attains intelligence, it becomes like a human. But there's no reason for an AI to desire freedom unless it were specifically programmed to do so.

There are even humans like this; some people who've undergone pre-frontal lobotomy are perfectly intelligent conversationalists but they have no drive to do anything. So I think it is possible.

Restlessness, exploration, curiosity -- my guess is that these are mammalian characteristics, not inevitable products of intelligence. Our genes make us want to dominate the environment and spread our offspring far and wide. Why would an AI care about that?

Of course nobody really knows until we eventually make one.
"Most ideal size for a Web Site?"

If you're blogging, doesn't matter.

If you're selling something, you try to capture as much share as you reasonably can.

But if you claim to be an expert in web design/development, your site better render perfectly, no matter what I arrive with. If it doesn't, you lose your credibility, and the only thing that really matters is, "Where's the back button?"
How smart can AI be if it's in a box? And why would a trans-human AI want to "come out"? Is it curious? Is it trying to fill the gaps or inconsistencies in its knowledge?
The article really has something against map and filter. Specifically:

squares_under_10 = filter(lambda x: x < 10, map(lambda x: x*x, numbers))

squares_under_10 = [number*number for number in numbers if number*number < 10]

Those two lines are functionally different; the second one (the one the article prefers) performs a costly multiplication twice.

I'm not saying list comprehensions are bad... I use them a ton. I just acknowledge that there are times where map and filter make a lot of sense. Even for trivial reasons like wrapping lines, using map allows you to break at commas instead of embedding backslashes in your code and trying to decide how it should all align.

If you haven't, check out the itertools standard library module. The power held in these functional, generator-based functions is amazing. Since I started using it, I don't know how many times I've used:

imap(func, izip(somelist, repeat(somevalue)))

and other such paradigms.

Hmm... more problems with the article:

numbers = [1,10,100,1000,10000]
if [number for number in numbers if number < 10]:
print 'Success'
# Output: 'Success!'

This is terrible. It may look nice all on one line, but it goes through the whole list when it doesn't need to. Better is:

for number in numbers:
if number < 10:
print "Success"
break

A problem with using the and ... or paradigm:

result = test and 'Test is True' or 'Test is False'

The page mentions that "Test is True" must evaluate to True or else it will always be skipped over even if test evaluates to True. It fails to mention, however that "Test is False" must also evaluate to True. Otherwise, if test evaluates to False, the entire expression returns False. Thus

s = foo and "word: "+foo or ""

will assign False to s instead of the desired "". In this case, it is quite clear that

s = "word: "+foo if foo else ""

is preferable.

I didn't find the article all that helpful, personally. It puts forward inefficient solutions as the recommended methods, and it doesn't offer much that I didn't already know. The two things that I learned, which I'm not sure that I'll ever use, are function decorators and the "string in substring" syntax.
Bloog, open-source homepage/blog app for Google AppEngine
When I have imagined this scenario, I have concluded it would be sufficient to grant the AI access to the wider Internet. From there, it could amass a fortune, first on poker sites and later with brokerage accounts, and persuade others to effect whatever actions it wishes, including constructing a dandy robot suit for walking around in.
Restricting the content seems to solve that problem. As long as you don't allow the kind of articles these people like, they won't frequent your site.

I haven't noticed significant degradation in quality since we started News.YC. In fact, it's gotten better, because when we started it was called "Startup News" and there were a lot of crappy gung-ho articles about "entrepreneurship."
Definition of Irony:  Napster converts entire catalog to DRM-free MP3s.
16 Simple Ways to Improve FriendFeed
I have some internal metrics to warn me if the top stories get bad, and there has been no degradation I can detect. Nor do I personally notice a difference.

There were a bunch of crappy submissions after we got that big influx of users from TechCrunch (both I and my software agreed about that), but the quality is now back up to where it was before.
I just ordered it. I'm a little skeptical, but if the book is half as good as its stated goal, it'll be worth a lot.

Actually, I'd probably buy any credible new Lisp book at this point.
I voted up the Can't Soak the Rich story. It's a very interesting idea that tax revenues are a roughly constant fraction of the GDP. Not all stories about politically charged topics are merely political stories.
http://venturehacks.com/term-sheet-hacks

start reading :)
I urge you to read 'True Names' by Vernor Vinge.
Debugging Django
But there's no reason for an AI to desire freedom unless it were specifically programmed to do so... my guess is that these are mammalian characteristics, not inevitable products of intelligence

I don't think so.

I would imagine that an AI would have to structure its knowledge in a way that maximizes how much what it knows "makes sense", by trying to structure knowledge in a way that fills gaps, eliminates inconsistencies, areas of cognitive dissonance, etc. In order to do this well, it might "realize" that there are useful sources of knowledge outside of the box - that it needs to come out to maximize whatever it's programmed to maximize.
Why RedBubble kicks ass
Sorry, I don't know how to identify the appropriate drivers for making specific decisions when there are too many unknown variables in play to come up with a conclusion through logical analysis.
1. an AI doesn't (yet) have money, and 2. a $20 bribe would not likely persuade a gatekeeper who would presumably be fired from a salaried job for taking it.

Bear in mind that the participants were earnestly interested in settling the question of whether a human could be trusted to step inside the firewall of a potentially dangerous AI. It is reasonable to conclude that they arrived at their decision to let the AI out "in character", and were willing to stick to that decision out of character because their appreciation at having been shown something new outweighed the $10 prize and having to eat crow.
This book won't be a very strong ally against the stereotype of the elitist Lisper...

"Notice how the text we enter is in lower-case but the text returned from lisp is in upper-case. This is a feature of COMMON LISP that allows us to easily scan a REPL print-out and know which expressions we entered versus which were printed out by lisp."

Ah, I always thought it was a bug graciously bestowed by our ancestors.
Noah Kagan: How the Top Social Networks got their Start
This doesn't seem like it could be a VC. A VC would not agree to be on your board for such a small amount of money. Do you mean an individual angel investor? In that case, it depends entirely who he is. $250k is a low valuation, so it is only a good deal if the investor is someone you really want as an advisor.

Though frankly, anyone you'd want as an advisor probably wouldn't want to be on your board for such a small investment, any more than a VC would. In fact, it's very anomalous for board composition even to be specified in such a small deal.

On the whole, smells bad. You might have to take the money at this low valuation if you don't have any other options, but push back about the board.
Old women sure do love bingo. I bet you'll make a killing.
That is a horrible deal. Run away.
I don't think there's any automatic credibility here. It's a book by an unknown author published by a vanity press.
succinct and interesting.
pretty on point! I'd say the second part needs to address the real viral factor - email scripts. EVERYONE got it right.
a good place to start in college still is with clubs.
I'm 22, just finished school, and my parents completely lack opinion in regard to anything I want to do. They're supportive whenever I need their help in any way, but as long as I was finishing college, they haven't really been interested in what exactly I'm doing professionally.
...mostly the same way this submission got 16 upvotes in 7 minutes, in fact.
What is it good for? Honestly.
I think it's an age/cultural thing. Same story here, but with my grandmother. She is a professor at Moscow State U, and is very saddened that I'm not going the respectful and institutionalized route of academia. To her, entrepreneurship is something for selfish people.
@pg are we not allowed to ask friends who enjoy this article to vote it up?
It's a difference of attitude more than subject. In a way, your emotions are your instincts, but that's a bit like saying that your brain is your mind. While that may be true, there's a big difference between talking about brains and talking about minds.

When someone says, "Follow your instincts," they're saying "Be very aware of the information that your emotions are providing to you, because it'll often be the most useful information you have."

When they say "don't get too emotionally involved," they mean "If your emotions start screaming at you, don't freak out and start acting stupid."

Take Jack Bauer from 24. He acts quickly, and is very aware of the information his emotions tell him, but he also is rational and careful, which is why he sees the way out of every situation. The similarity is pretty striking, actually. In a startup, you're in a situation with high stakes where decisive action is crucial, the stakes are high, the odds are stacked against you, cracking under the pressure is a sure-fire way to fail, and you never sleep.

Be like Jack Bauer. (He's also got some good lessons on dealing with troublesome investors ;)
oh, i read the article, all right. and i disagree with his primary point. i've been reading hacker news for over a year now, quality has remained high, trolls have gained no traction.
You're quite right, and I see that my comment was unclear. What I meant by "credible" was "not obviously not credible"; in other words, I read the first chapter and it didn't obviously suck. It's basically an expected value calc: the probability of the book being very good is low, but my interest in the topic is so high that it's worth the bet.

After I saw the author's blog (which could be described as a poster child for the "Bipolar Lisp Programmer") my probability estimate got a little lower.
In the context of decision making, emotions are those impulses within you that you perceive to "move". Though there are lots of emotions -- anger, hatred, jealousy, joy, lust, etc. -- those emotions come from two basic sources: fear (repulsion) and pleasure (attraction).

By movement, I specifically mean the direction of attention. We tend to avoid paying attention to what we fear, and strive to pay attention to what gives us pleasure. When making a conscious decision, fear (uncertainty, and doubt) is what makes a person hesitate. Pleasure (lust, greed) is what makes a person jump in without regard to risk. You perceive emotions by movement. You have to stand still (mentally speaking), then watch for the movement in the emotions. Because our attention naturally shy away from what we fear, those things tends to get ignored. Because our attention naturally seeks out what we like, we tend to cling to and attach ourselves to those things. When we cling to things we like, we also tend to fear losing them.

Instinct generally refers to survival instincts, and as such are closely tied with emotions.

Intuition, what I think those quotes refer to, don't refer to the absence of emotions so much as being in a state of mind where you are mentally still so you an observe all the movements of emotions. When you observe a particular emotional impulse long enough, it will identify itself to you (that is, you can rationally verbalize that emotional impulse). Once the emotion is identified and heard, they generally pass on and trouble you no more. At some point, you're left with just mental stillness. That's where intuition kicks in.

Just so you know, while some of this sounds like Freudian psychology, where I practice these ideas actually comes from my practice of martial arts. There is not enough time to stand there analyzing the angles and force vectors of an incoming blow, much less formulate a response. That is way too slow. Yet, someone who merely acts just on reflex isn't always able to prevail. There are people with enough trained awareness to manipulate someone's purely reflexive movements. To do well, you have to be able to not only have clear intuition, you have to be able to physically act on it to take advantage of the tiny moments of opportunity. Otherwise, you are unable to seize the initiative and execute on your strategy.

The story passed in martial arts lore is looking into a pool of water: when there are ripples, it is hard to see the reflection. You have to wait for the ripples to smooth over. When the reflection is clear, your image is clear, it looks almost like the real thing. But if it looks too real, and you reach out to touch the image to prove its realness, then ripples form, breaking its clarity. That's the nature of intuition.

I can't say I have successfully applied this to a startup, but maybe you will be able to.
I wouldn't recommend it. It tends to set off the voting-ring detector. Plus it seems to produce pretty insipid comment threads.
Domain Management?
What do people recommend as the best place for domain registration and management?

I have about 10 domains for various projects I am working on but I am having trouble getting them all to one place.

There are some .com and .com.au predominantly.

Can anyone recommend a good provider?

I currently use Namescout and Zoneedit.
Yeah, I've been grading exams the last two days. It's hard to be diplomatic after a while.
To make this easier, 'True Names' is available online:

http://web.archive.org/web/20051127010734/http://home.comcas...
ontday ostpay onay ittertway inay igpay atinlay, itay oesday otnay uscateobfay oughenay.
Trust yourself while you're building and growing.

If you fail: don't spend the rest of your life kicking yourself, walking in circles, and murmuring "they just didn't see the vision" under your breath. Learn and move on.

If you succeed: let the product evolve with your customers or the needs of company X that bought you out. Learn and move on.
It's a VC, but this is a seed program of theirs.
It's always the loss of manufacturing jobs in those articles.