skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It was an easy choice for me. I got paid to go to college. In Georgia, the HOPE scholarship paid for 100% of my tuition and fees, and the Pell grant paid for a decent portion of my living costs.

That said, education is one of the most valuable things in the world. If you're thinking of it as a risk/reward based on how much you pay versus how much you could earn, you're doing it wrong.
If I had billions of dollars, I'd rather pay millions for orbital travel.

But yeah, Spaceship2 would be cool. I guess I would also do that, no reason not to start spending my theoretical billions now. ;)
Becoming a CEO
Joel Spolsky:How Hard Could it Be: A Real Cool Customer
I hear what you're saying. Seeing some numbers does at least indicate people are using it. So if that was in doubt before, I guess it isn't now. But did anyone really doubt it?
I'm sure it's two-fold. YC filters out people who aren't committed. Also, having someone believe in you makes you believe in yourself--it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This works in a negative sense, as well. For example, when pg says your chances of succeeding without a cofounder are low, if you internalize that, you won't succeed without a co-founder, because "why try" if you can't succeed?
Doctors At West Penn Are Using A Robot For Surgery
Is The Era Of The Amateur Blogger Over?
What you call a "loser attitude" is what I'd call being realistic. A lot of people get a little too caught up in the hype and hubris associated with startups, but its important to look at issues from both the positive and negative sides.

For example, you can take a rejection from YC and say "Gee, we got this far, there's something to this idea, we should definitely keep working on it" and you'd be right. But you can also say "Gee, we couldn't get into with YC their (relatively) lower standards, how are we ever gonna impress an Angel/VC?" and you'll also be correct.

So I'm just trying to be honest here. YC would have provided a great vote of confidence needed to put in a monumental effort into this (ie, quit jobs, take huge financial risk etc). Now we'll keep working on it and put it out, and maybe that vote of confidence will come in the form of enough users and growth to convince us to really get into this. Or maybe we've been wrong all along, all the criticisms correct and the thing will fizzle out.

But mindless hyperbole of the "we'll keep going no matter what and change the world" does little but stroke your ego, which I personally hate.
Congratulations on spotting a single keyword and otherwise failing to read the entire post! Throwing your fucking "credentials" around and writing your own assembler out of Ruby or whatever doesn't excuse you from exercising some basic fucking reading comprehension.

The largest system built in Scala is probably pretty small at this point. But like I said if you had bothered to read the fucking post, the risks of moving to a new language when you can keep the rest of a deployment stack are relatively small. You're compiling to the same bytecode, running on the same VM, running on the same server, and so forth. Your IT department or hosting provider doesn't even need to know you switched languages.

Please, do me a favor. If you're going to respond to this and tell me that Ruby is the most proven language ever and you can't trust Scala to display hello world, could you try to read the post this time and make at least a passing attempt to respond to the substance of it?
About those pesky shortcuts:
My suggestion would be to make windows shortcuts available by default:

Win+D = minimize/unminimize all windows

Win+R = Terminal

I also added Win+G = Gedit and Win+F = Search (which really needs some improvement)

Finally, standardize some behavior! Gedit and your ctrl+alt+pgup to change tabs, I'm looking at you.
Who Should I Follow? (Twitter)
Social Networking Goes Open Source With Insoshi
what does google hire McKinsey consultants to do? I only know two people who worked at McKinsey, and they were kind of like Ivy-League advanced versions of the "two Bobs" from Office Space. I.e. their jobs were mainly to help justify corporate restructuring (firing vast swaths of people.)
This could be a lucrative space, especially in the enterprise. While the field is a bit crowded, I think Insoshi differentiates themselves by providing the source code, and for secure intranets that is a necessity.
I went to a liberal arts college. "Liberal arts" still describes someone skilled in both sciences and humanites...sort of. What tends to happen is that the folks who major in hard sciences at liberal arts colleges become those people, while those who major in the liberal arts become basically unemployable. My fellow math/physics/CS majors (there were only about 10 of us per department per year, so we all sorta combined socially...) used to comment ironically that 50% of Amherst students never take any math or hard science course, yet it is impossible for a science major to avoid taking any humanities or social science courses.

Two things you need to remember about this:

1.) The folks who major in English and take only easy courses will get their comeuppance in the job market, which now basically requires quantitative skills.

2.) Many of those folks go to liberal arts colleges because they have a particular career track they know they want to do, and they're fully willing to make the financial sacrifices for that. For example, one of my friends wanted to be a professor of English, specializing in poetry, from the day he got to college. Another wanted to be a librarian. They're willing to live like grad students until they're in their 40s to do so, and to take the financial hit afterwards that comes with their chosen professions. I can respect that.
First, convert your locations and zip codes to latitude and longitude. Then use something like this:
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~cvm/latlon_formula.html
I actually like inkjet printers. They are an excellent source of little stepper motors for my wacky projects. They were such a bad idea (as far as printers go) that everyone I know has 2 or 3 of them that they got free with some new computer in 1998 and can now no longer find ink for. Always yours for the asking.

Soon my army of printer-stepper robots will swarm over all the earth and world domination will be mine. Narf, Poit, etc...
Sony Pictures Uses 'Green Power' For Data Center at 365Main
I hold out the hope that someday, you wont have to make it big to get into space.
I think there were a few technical bookstores online, but he was one of the very earliest, and certainly the first to try to have a larger scope (e.g. before it was 'let's sell our inventories online', Amazon's idea was 'let's sell every possible book online').

Interestingly enough, Amazon was (if I recall correctly) started as a research project: David Shaw (of the hedge fund D. E. Shaw) asked Bezos (then a VP there) for a list of ways to make money online. At the top of Bezos' list was bookstores. Shaw decided it wasn't worth the risk, Bezos decided it was, so Bezos left the company to found Amazon. Shaw ended up starting Juno, though, so it's not a total loss.
I have a B.A. in computer science from a top college, and I agree completely with boredguy.

Working on an open-source project or consumer website or other project teaches you to overcome hurdles, but only when they're necessary. If you're responsible for results, then you have an incentive to find and take whatever shortcuts you can. You plow through only the obstacles that absolutely are essential to getting the job done.

Getting a degree teaches you to work very hard at whatever your professors tell you to do. A lot of it is pointless; a lot of it is stupid. You do it anyway, because you have to. But if you do too much of this, you start seeing things that are really pointless and stupid as necessary, and do them anyway. This is the kiss of death for a startup: you have to be ruthless about inefficiency, and nobody (other than the blatantly dishonest folks who cheat their way through college) learns to be ruthless about inefficiency through a college degree.

I'd stop well short of saying I'd never hire anyone with a college degree, because I know a lot of smart folks who have one. But I won't make the degree more than a tiny portion of who I decide to hire. (I'd refuse to hire anyone that had never taken their own project from conception to completion, however - this will weed out virtually all of the lazy and disorganized, and also weed out people who are only good at following orders.)
The law gives the judge some discretion in sentencing: in this case the judge can pick any duration between 25 years and life. Reiser has not been sentenced yet.
Interesting, but this is not really newsworthy. Surgeons have been using robots to perform a variety minimally invasive surgical procedures for years. Intuitive Surgical (http://www.intuitivesurgical.com/index.aspx), maker of the da Vinci surgical robot, is the only serious player in the market, having bought out (and mothballing) their competitor Computer Motion. (A German alternative was shutdown by a patient lawsuit.) The major impediment to widespread adoption is cost: $2-3M for the robot and instruments are $3k each (a chip embedded in each limits reuse to 10 procedures).

The leading edge in this field is the development of flexible integrated manipulators (camera and multiple instrument arms packaged as a single device 12-15 mm in diameter) that can enter through a single port (hole), as opposed the 3 to 4 ports used in current practice (1 for the camera and 2 to 3 for instruments: grapsers, scissors, staplers, etc.). Ultimately, surgeons hope to be able to perform many surgeries through natural orifices (mouth, anus, vagina), eliminating visible scars.
So your counterargument is that 1) there are firms that exist as part of the supply chain -- firms that, if they could not flip their services to bigger companies -- would not exist, and that 2) there are smaller companies consisting of employees with built-to-flip careers.

I don't understand why you draw this arbitrary distinction between paying someone a fraction of your future cash flows (through stock) versus paying them a stream of cash.
Plus, he wrote the book! :)
"the code he released under an MIT License in July 2007 should be considered the first RoR open source code."

I hope that's a typo. If the writer honestly believes that sentence, he has no business writing for TechCrunch (or anyone, really).

I think he's talking about "the first RoR open source code for a social network." But even that is a sketchy claim. I've contributed to open source RoR projects that were loose social networks as early as 2005.
The da Vinci is actually the robot mentioned in this piece.
Well, at that time they hadn't branched out. So it really would've been Barnes & Nobel, Borders, and small books stores.
Wow, that struck a nerve, didn't it?
For good reason: The da Vinci is the only option for performing surgical procedures. It is the sole (currently available) robot approved by the FDA for clinical use. The Zeus surgical system from Computer Motion is also FDA approved; however, it is no longer available for purchase (Intuitive killed it in favour of the da Vinci).
Dang, choices, choices. K&R, of course. Followed closely by _Software Tools_, and Lion's Notes on V6 Unix.
You can get a great standing desk at Ikea for about 100 bucks. I swear by mine.
Thanks for the information, I actually had no idea that there is only one option.
As Broadband Growth Slows, Expect Speed Boosts
Embattled Yahoo CEO Received $1 Salary In 2007
He meant the latter. RailsSpace was to my knowledge the first open-source source social networking platform in Rails (with the profiles, friending, avatars, blogs, etc. that we associate with a modern social network). Mark certainly didn't mean to imply RailsSpace was the first open-source project in Rails.
as much as rails isnt my weapon of choice, i really think this could be big. anyone have a demo setup somewhere to play around with?
The developer site for Insoshi is here:

http://dogfood.insoshi.com/

It's not just a demo site, though; we're using it to coordinate the project itself. Contributions should be incorporated into the live site within a week or two. You can find the source code at GitHub:

http://github.com/insoshi/insoshi/
In straight up engineering jobs, nobody seems to give a damn about the school after your first gig. This may be due to the fact that you are generally being recruited for specific skill set and competence that the employer needs to derive measurable value from.

The signaling type jobs (law, finance, hedge funds) require the big name schools, but not a specific skill set. Which tends to make me think that they are full of shit.
Life After Television, Revised by George Gilder from 1994 Forbes ASAP
People moaning "I am just a tiny hacker" or "You should be directing this at people with money" are either lacking vision or are just not interested in making the world a better place but prefer chasing the mighty dollar. Which in it itself is fine, but then come out and be honest about it.

There are tons of ways even individual hackers can put their skills to use while solving real world problems. No one is expecting you to solve the problems of world hunger or poverty but bitching "I can't" is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Have a look at Kiva (kiva.org) for example. They did have a vision and they are doing a pretty damn good job making the world a better place by working on a real-world problem instead of finding a new and "revolutionary" way to figure out what your friends are doing right now.

Gross of the people in the valley are probably to busy liking themselves and praising their good-for-nothing ideas to actually sit down and look at the world in a bit wider perspective.

The world is bigger then the sub-reality that is Silicon Valley.
I know of two other open source social networks that also offer their source code: Loved By Less and Buddypress.

Here's the problem I have with Insoshi and Loved By Less: They don't seem (as yet) to offer any kind of architecture to modify and extend the code base. If you want to customize, you are altering source code.

Contrast this to Wordpress, which has an awesome plugin architecture and an extensive system of hooks to allow for customization, all without touching a line of source. Though I haven't seen BuddyPress source, I am hopeful that it follows Wordpress's suits.

It is the ability to customize and extend, coupled with a super powerful and slick admin system, that has made WordPress such a successful venture.

That's my opinion at least, from an admittedly cursory review of the source code on these projects.
Robotic surgery is very exciting. Keep in mind that lots of the potential is in tele-operation - meaning robots will help get expert care to far out places.

Working with tissues is very hard though. That kind of dexterity is very advanced. A general purpose robot surgeon won't be out for at least a decade.
Thanks for making it clear that you have nothing to contribute to the substance of the matter except for snide remarks.
this will weed out virtually all of the lazy and disorganized, and also weed out people who are only good at following orders

This is the number one thing to look out for, that can't be easily gamed. If somebody has a 4.0 GPA from a top school but no external side projects built on their own volition, they are probably not what you want, unless you run a very big company.
It's interesting to look back as preparation for looking forward. As a rule of thumb, look back 2x to forecast x for Moore's Law driven industries, so looking back 14 years and seeing what's changed will give an idea of how much more will change in the next 7 years. Gilder's concluding paragraph:

It is companies that shun the PC of today in order to cater to the TV, consumer electronics and telephone industries that will end up in luxury backwaters. They will resemble the companies that catered to the mainframe trade early in this decade, or those that catered to the horse business early in this century. They may find exotic or intriguing niches. Yet just as the real action was not at Churchill Downs or the Peapack Hunt Club but in Detroit, the real action today--the source of wealth and power--is not at Nintendo or Sega, Hollywood or QVC. It is in the scores of thousands of computer and software companies that make up the industrial fabric of the Information Age--the exhilarating new life after television.
Marvel sends C&D to TechCrunch - demands TechCrunch/CrunchGear Iron Man Screening Shut Down
snip:

Update 2: Just for the record, we began the whole process by calling the group sales phone number on the official Iron Man movie site, and worked directly with Paramount on the screening.
why is it news for CEOs to take $1 salaries? Everybody knows it benefits them to take that type of salary anyways. Why hasn't any CEO try a $0.01 salary yet? :)
"what does google hire McKinsey consultants to do?"

I meant they hire them as they're on their way "out" of McKinsey. And they hire them as managers.
"Negative keyword" ruling may have big impact on search ads
MacBook Air hacked with internal EV-DO -- finally lives up to its name
>Space would be awesome, but I think there are more rewarding things you can do with that much money.

Space is the ultimate humanitarian project. We live in a world where dozens of men have the power to destroy society as we know it with a single command. In addition, I think the greenies are full of hogwash but they seem to be upset about the potential of this whole Global Warming thing. If we do manage to screw up this planet, we will be much happier if we have another.

So, supporting space technology is better than contributing to charity, if you have a long enough view.
They don't seem (as yet) to offer any kind of architecture to modify and extend the code base.

That's part of the plan. Remember, WordPress wasn't born with plugins and hooks; it grew them.

"Release early, release often", right? This is the "early" part. :-)
Not to be a pill, but the suits in the photos don't fit the models at all! Some haven't even been pressed! Hire a stylist next time...

Doesn't speak very well to their attention to detail, which is pretty crucial when selling custom-fit suits.
Check out AOL Radio. They have a lullaby channel.
> I'd also get certified as an RN or LNP, and then spend my time as a doctor traveling in third-world countries. It would be a great adventure, and I'd get to help other people out. Win-win.

You would be helping them out one at a time, on a planet filled with 6 billion people. One-at-a-time charity work is something I never had the stomach for. I'm a smart guy, I ought to be able to do better.
You went from reasonable-but-wrong to very-angry in the span of just one comment. Why are you taking this personally?

I'm sorry, but the fact that neither Scala nor F# have ever been successfully used in a well-known large-scale project is a substantive argument. Address it! I'm not a fan of C++ either, but guess what? It has a better track record than Scala.

The idea that I'm going to pick Scala over Java "because they run on the same VM" is as silly as the idea of me trying to sell management on building their next product in ObjC, because, after all, they're both generating the same native X86 code. Of course, the real costs and risks have to do with training, maintenance, community, and support, which is why we still use Java.

I'm not sure if you noticed like 4 comments above, but I'm a systems programmer; I have no idea why you think I care that something runs on the JVM. I do, however, sell to enterprises. The VM they care about isn't the JVM: it's VMWare ESX. You could write your app in SNOBOL and they won't care as long as they can plug it into their clusters.
Who. Invested. In this!
I don't see why you'd be looking to NOT visit Thailand. My month long visit was the most pleasant trip I've ever taken. My (now) fiance spent 9 months there and loved every minute of it (OK, she missed me horribly, and I her, but she still loved being there).
Domize: instant ajax domain search
Don't you remember? The suit is back!

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
> why is it news for CEOs to take $1 salaries?

Because people are seriously sick of hearing about the Chairman of BigCorp earning $250,000,000 in salary and stock options, and taking another $100,000,000 in severance.

(0s for extra effect)

I don't know, its kind of refreshing to hear about Jerry Yang, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, taking $1 salaries, even tho we all know they're worth gajillions.
Other than joshwa's comment below about the actual quality of the suit cuts, I don't see why this is an inherently bad idea.
It doesn't mean you had to be alive or capable of reading in the 70's or 70's; have you read anything you liked that was published then?
Awesome, go get 'em. I think you'll have some stiff competition from BuddyPress, particularly since they've got a head start on the extensible platform, but I wish you guys the best... it's anybody's game at this point. Ning is really the platform to beat, in my opinion at least.
There's a funny disconnect that you can pull off though that I find quite useful. You can still be determined that you're going to take over the world without actually expecting it. It doesn't make much logical sense, but it's a pretty convenient way to approach things. From what I can tell this mindset is pretty prevant in i.e. sports teams.
I'm going to get downmodded, but what is this? Did Hacker News become TechCrunch's official RSS feed?
Anybody who quotes Alan Kay (even a misquote) has my attention.
Ask YC: Data building
We have recently completed one of the milestones for our web start up, and we are at the stage where we can start entering and building data.

Our idea is similar to TripAdvisor or Yelp, and we think we need to have a lot of data before officially launching our site, in order to attract new users.

We were wondering what people usually do in this situation, because manually entering possibly thousands of items (and even fake users) is very time-consuming for two co-founders.

Thank you very much, and have a great day, all of you.
Laptop Compubody Sock
There are some bits that stand out:

- experience designing and building large and complex (yet maintainable) systems. Mostly the yet maintainable bit.

- must be willing to relocate

- Well-capitalized, we will cover moving costs, meaningful equity ownership

- Alan Kay

- @netcom.com
Wait. So, getting 4 hours sleep, then showering and rushing out of the house with a cup of coffee within 15 minutes of waking isn't optimal?
Download the database I posted in my other comment here, and try this SQL statement:

SELECT z.ZIPcode, (sqrt((z.latitude-z2.latitude)*(z.latitude-z2.latitude)+(z.longtitude-z2.longtitude)*(z.longtitude-z2.longtitude)))) AS dist
FROM `zip` AS `z`, `zip` AS `z2`
WHERE `z2`.`ZIPcode = 'YOURZIPCODE'
ORDER BY dist LIMIT 10

Might be faster if you do a query to get the lat and long for the ZIP code you need first, though. Hell, it would probably be fastest to skip the database all together and just import the data and loop the distance formula, recording the smallest distances as you go.
If your strategy for becoming a CEO is to write a letter to Inc.com magazine, to see what they think, you need a new strategy. Fast.
well done dude, remember talking to you at the Joe Kraus dinner, nice to see the execution!
For things that need to be manually entered take a look at Odesk and find someone who will do data entry cheap. I would probably never hire anyone for anything critical there and I wouldn't post my own services there but data entry is fine.
Intel and Cray to conceive x86 Linux monster
Have you considered using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service?
An objective analysis of the lockdown protection system for battle.net
There's SICP, and MMM, but for me those are circa 90s-00s books.

In the 80s I was into Beagle Brothers one-liners.
I don't understand the headline at all. Plz advise...

edit: ok, got it
Ronald van den Heetkamp's Webapplication Firewall.
T1000, version 0.1