skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anyone who looks at that thing and thinks it's not going to be a hit is not a money man. To quote the sopranos - I know a hit when I see it.

That motorbike would sell like hot cakes because it's extremely cool. People who ride motorbikes care about coolness. And a one wheeled motorbike is the epitome.

But frankly, I'd be scared to ride something like that which is balanced by electronics.
Debian and OpenSSL: The Aftermath
During the first half of this century, a number of research experiments by companies (including GE) showed that good working conditions nearly always correlated with improved productivity and better quality.

The problem with China is that it is cheaper to higher more workers than to improve the conditions for the ones they already have. As the average income in China increases, and the middle class grows, this problem should lessen.
Great submission. As the grandson of a lifeling farmer, I have one thing to say to America: we better do a much better job of protecting the ones who out food on our tables because right now we aren't.
Yahoo offers geographic data to Web sites
I wish there a way to be notified when a URL from a certain domain is submitted to hacker news! I would've voted it up sooner.

Anyhow, thanks for submitting this. There are more questions to come so keep your eyes out.
Don't knock it 'till you've tried it. Rabbits are decent eating.
But the problem is that once reasonable regulations exist, they inevitably become unreasonable.

Only if your idea of effective political action is to start out arguing for a reasonable exception to a rule that unjustly prevents small-scale home butchering and end up thunderously denouncing the entire concept of "government".

Here's a simple rule that might help (aimed not so much at you, but at the author of the original article): Do not bring the word "firearms" -- to say nothing of an actual firearm -- into a conversation about the regulatory status of a small farm stand. Avoiding generic rants about "taxation" would also be good. Focus, people, focus!
Verizon Wireless Skips Android to use LiMo
http://www.jihadonyou.com

Just a place to vent frustrations. A friend of mine and I built this in a weekend. There's a blog post somewhere describing the tale.

We made it on techcrunch. We made it on digg and reddit. There was a short spike of traffic. A little bit of foreign media coverage and then silence.

It seems adsense doesn't appreciate our ideas or those of our posters. It also seems that the adwords we bought seem to either never be searched for or that google doesn't like our domain.
Ask YC: Review my startup
We officially launched yesterday, and i wanted some constructive criticism from the community. Please keep it real and don't hold back.

Couple things to remember.
We're aware that this idea is not totally original.
We're not trying to solve a problem but merely provide a fun way to interact with friends using your social graph.

Drop me an e-mail if you want to PM me.
Many vaccines sadly aren't 100% effective. The reason they work so well is because if _everyone_ is vaccinated the immunities of the group reduce exposure to the group, a kind of self-reinforcement.

And the more a vaccinated person is exposed to a disease, the more permutations of that disease get thrown at the vaccinated population. If one takes, then we have the whole problem of the disease all over again. One consequence of the short life of bacteria and the mutation of viruses is that they're basically brute-forcing our immunities of every population they're in contact with.

This is why it's _so important_ that people follow vaccination programs. Eventually we'll have to deal with new diseases, but if we aggressively and correctly vaccinate, we can stave off that day for a lot longer than if we half-ass it.
You forgot to mention Turing :)
Turing doesnt get much space in school textbooks.
And von Neumann too despite being one of the giants of mathematics in 20th century.
Whoever designed this is obviously a fan of Venus Wars:

http://www.imdb.com/media/rm705206528/tt0135037
Interestingly, the author didn't show that program in lisp ... which do you think is better style:

(mapc #'(lambda (x) (print (expt x 2))) (list 1 2 3 4 5))

or

(loop for i from 1 upto 5 do (print (expt i 2)))

interestingly, they are both longer than python/perl ...

Not to turn this into a game of Golf, but is there any shorter way?
My investors are only giving me money. From your comment, it sounds like I should give the investors less ownership and the founders more ownership so that the valuation is higher and the options pool is smaller. That being said, what is a rough estimate of how big my valuation should be and how small/large my options pool should be? I know this process is important, but at this stage, it seems rather arbitrary. Any advice is welcome!
Social Networks for Entrepreneurs
Good point. You may be right then (depending on the specific number, that I don't know), that this is a situation where regulation is called for.
Well, it looks nice, but what am I supposed to do? Why should I vote for "me" and what the hell is a challenge? First time users need to know what's going on. I left after 30 seconds.
I second that fear. Remember the Segway bug that caused the motors to spontaneously reverse? Imagine that on the highway at 60mph.
The things that inspire us
Great. With Microsoft on our walls, who needs an earthquake for the house to "crash".

Just put the IE8 version of this on any baseball stadium's center field wall. The "404" will always be there.

No need for blue paint anymore. Your walls will already have a blue screen of death.

(Sorry, I couldn't resist.)
So then what is the response when someone else's child asks those example questions? If a child asks you if there is a God, do you try to convert them to whatever you believe?
How to be wrong
Arc:

(pr (map [* _ _] (range 1 5)))
Can you give a few examples of SML's "many, many restrictions"? The only things I can think of that fit that description are the value restriction and lack of first-class polymorphism, but neither of these should have a serious effect on productivity.
the parent isn't saying anything about it being so important, he is saying that not regulating isn't working is some particular cases.
Presumably, U = typo for O
Google.org announces investment in BrightSource Energy
"Grandma went to heaven" may be a kind of lie, it depends on the context.

If a priest says to me (a 36 yo adult) that "Grandma went to heaven" it clearly is not a lie. I know that the priest is speaking from faith, and I am able to evaluate the truthfulness of his statement in context. In this case, it's implied that the statement means "I have deep religious faith that grandma is in heaven." This doesn't need to be spelled out.

However, if a priest says this to a small child, it becomes a kind of lie unless the priest explains the difference between faith and fact. If Itell my son that "France is in Europe, catepillars become butterflies, and Grandma went to heaven", I have pretty much lied to my kid, even if I deeply believe that all statements are true.
Agree. Looks awesome, but a super brief description of what its about would help.
Verizon Joins Android Competitor
Being all-electric means it will cause some emissions though, whereas a bicycle doesn't have emit any at all (although you could say it's powered by human-energy which in turn is powered by other things)
Ask PG: Correlation between frugality and startup success?
Have you seen any relationship between the amount of money a YCombinator company spends over the summer/winter and their eventual success?

I would guess that it's bad for a startup to blow through their investment money, but how big of a factor is day to day frugality for a startup?
Seems to be essentially a "Hot or Not" type app, essentially CommandShift3 but back to using people. My first thought is what incentive is there to participate? I guess those that submit pictures get bragging rights, which may be enough for some, but I see no motive for people to vote.
I don't see why you couldn't support many different markup languages in a single site. For example, on a web forum I'd love to be able to write BBcode with an s-expression syntax.

So you'd have 2 <select>s: one for semantics, one for syntax. So you could have BBcode semantics with traditional syntax, BBcode semantics with s-expression syntax, and a lot of other semantics and their corresponding available syntaxes. All those representations would simply be canonicalized into one language on the server.
The eyeballs are chock full of electrolytes and other micronutrients.
I suspect facebook will not approve of their logo appearing so prominently at the top right of the page.
"Blame should be placed always with the actor."

I wouldn't have put it the way the GP did, but yeah, "blame," if we have to assign it, probably does always land at least partly on both partners in a relationship. PG was proposing a hypothetical in "outrageous" terms as a counterexample, and arguing about the specifics of the counterexample is probably pointless. We aren't going to establish what the specifics were in the situation because it doesn't exist.

By "always blaming the actor" you also blame the woman who leaves an abusive man. You also blame the man who leaves his wife because she had an affair (though she doesn't want the marriage to end).

You're attaching a heavy moral burden to the notion of a failed marriage, and I think where the "Both partners are always responsible for a divorce" counselor is coming from is not one of moralistic condemnation. You're lumping an affair in with rape and natural disaster. At best, that's hyperbole, at worst you're trying to impose your moral code of fidelity on other people's children.

In a world where about a third of both men and women "cheat" on their spouses, I think it's hypocritical of society to be universally and unilaterally condemnative of the behavior. If we're talking about the culpability in breaking a promise of fidelity, we also need (in the context of our hypothetical affair situation) to talk about the culpability involved in the other promises of marriage. Was she loving, honoring and obeying him? Was he? I don't accept that these thorny and extremely poorly-defined questions can possibly come down to a simple equation of blame.

You might accuse me of casuistry, and I can see that. But as far as I'm concerned you can't possibly come up with some equation of "blame" for a failed marriage whose definition is so precise and so universal that there is any circumstance where you can objectively and unambiguously assign it to only one partner.

A better example lie, in the context of a divorce, might have been "children are always blameless." It's obnoxious to most people to contemplate the idea that children in a family might contribute to a divorce, but this is undoubtedly sometimes true.
I understand the risks of raw milk and want it.
I also understand why we have it regulated. I would like to relax the regulation to allow me to get raw milk in some situations. but I don't want BigCo. selling it. BigCo. can't be trusted.
Google opens geographic search interface
Disqus partners with Seesmic for video comments
Nice job Peteris. Takes time to be that detailed. Thank you.

You're right tho'. Good video tutorials for programming related topics are not easy to come by. Takes a lot of pre and post production to do them right. I've never liked the 'speaker as feature' approach either with fuzzy ppt slides inserted. It seems I'm always trying to look at the screen in the background while the speaker is front-center walking back and forth next to the lecturn.
One concrete tip for the self-employed programmer (that procrastinates)
There are aliens in the Matrix?

Has he even seen it?
it's down.
Getting a bunch of debug notices if I try to visit. It's a cute debug :)
What will you do after 10-20 years in a dome?
Tried to use it. Just got this...

"Notice: Constant APP_NAME already defined in /var/www/uliken.com/releases/20080514175006/config/app_config.prod.php on line"

I take it that was not part of the plan? :D

Will try again later.
The circled U is a trademark of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America which is used to signify their certification of a product as being kosher.
I say what I think. I don't think saying "doesn't seem to exist, but many people believe" may harm any kid.

If a kid asks me of sexual stuff, i'll think twice, because what I say can be transmitted to parents in a different shape.

Let me ask: will you answer "ask your parents" in the same situations? About the religion - do you consciously try to avoid confronting a kid with your beliefs (that may be different)? (just want to figure out)
Pretty awesome. Product is well designed too, but $300? I'd rather get a 2nd battery. 2 batteries should be enough for any flight.
I agree completely, and I guess I should have pointed out that your main point (that programmers take it on themselves to narcissistically fiddle with functioning code) is an excellent one. My comment wasn't meant as a criticism, but as pointing to an unstated assumption-- that the folks fiddling with the code assumed they knew what it was supposed to do-- and that documentation of the actual business requirement ought to be a) present somewhere, and b) consulted before anyone takes it on themselves to mickey with the code.
Hey jfarmer!

I was not aware that you were on Hacker News. Came across your articles and figured this would be the best community to share it with.

Thanks, and keep 'em coming. Enjoyed the articles.
Lenore Godin's son
It's really ingenious, except for the fact that the 2 wheels are side-by-side instead of balancing each other automagically (in some other strange, and surely 'too simple', arrangement).
It's interesting to note that Tata now owns Jaguar and Land Rover :)
Same here. I got through the first two parts without even seeing an attempt to explain the Conjecture, and gave up.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/
I read somewhere that if you eat meat (I assume they were talking about beef) then its actually better for the environment co2 wise to just drive.
"Telling a child they have a particular ethnic or religious identity is one of the stickiest things you can tell them. Almost anything else you tell a kid, they can change their mind about later when they start to think for themselves. But if you tell a kid they're a member of a certain group, that seems nearly impossible to shake."

Most of the other lies aren't accompanied by mandatory genital mutilation.
Yes, exactly. Too many people think society should be designed exclusively for them. They don't realize that what's good for them is not necessarily good for the world.
I assume you've given up on the opposite sex completely?
Be single, that's for sure.
My favourite bit is the bit about the "coming age of shortages". This was written in 1978.

I think I'll stick to doing stuff I enjoy and earning money for it, and then spending that money on stuff I want.
In fairness, I don't think they had lean cuisine and Ramen noodles when this was written.
I apologize in advance if anyone here owns eatbabies.com -- I didn't mean to insult you.
Mobaganda*
They are pretty tasty, but they're so abundant in the wild that I don't see why you'd bother farming them. My dogs catch them all the time.
I'd say number 4 "Keyword Value - a domain with a great keyword in it can be extremely beneficial for SEO purposes" is most important since people are probably becoming more comfortable typing in a company name at google instead of their domain name. I no longer bother with the address bar.
I think that all throughout history, man has expected the future to be far worse than the present. And all throughout history, the future has turned out to be better.
There is a dedicated website section.
I don't think it's a question of harm. As for what I'd do, that would depend on the situation. If I answered the question, I would offer what I think, making it clear that that's what I think. But if the child were young enough, and were asking me to find out "the simple truth" rather than what I thought, I would probably tell them it's a question better answered by his or her parents. Especially if it involved specifics like "Is my grandma in heaven?" or "Will I die?"

For the most part, what I tell my son is the truth, though surrounded what I consider to be an appropriate perspective.[1] I think moral authority is important as a parent, and I think that is more solidly gained by telling your child the truth, so that they know they can ask a question of you and you'll give them a straight, true answer, as best you can. Lying about your own foibles, as PG points out, is a "cheap" method of gaining moral authority that backfires badly.

[1] I think a lot of "lies" we tell children have to do with that surrounding perspective. When we lie to avoid discussing certain subjects, it's because a child is not yet equipped to understand enough of the surrounding perspective to make it worth trying to understand the "truth".
when the investment is micro (10-15k) I suspect (as said in their documents) that Ycombinator doesn't even keep track of where the money goes.
BlackBerry Thunder, the touchscreen BlackBerry we’ve all been waiting for
Mark Twain: Corn-pone Opinions
Tracking down the OpenSSL developers
Was it TechCrunch that recently pointed to Zuckerberg's original notes on his pre-Facebook project as the source for uLiken's inspiration? Comparing the harvard kids in the facebook to farm animals on something like hot or not?
Edit: yeah: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/13/facemash-returns-as-wha...
5-inch e-paper reader, cheap, limited, soon to be ubiquitous
Ask YC: How do you find manufacturers to outsource to?
I have an idea for a toy. How does one go about finding a toy manufacturer in China for example that can built it? Do they typically have in house resources to help with design and material selection?
20 tips for succeeding online.
$300 + $100 for the special power cord you will need; Too much, also hate seeing a press release on HN
I am not sure if http://alibaba.com can help.
Yeah, they didn't once ask us where we spent the money. I think the assumption is "food, rent and hosting".
Nothing earth-shattering here, but solid advice with some good examples. Bookmarked.
I didn't realize that someone had commented on this since it never made it to the RSS feed. I have many ideas, most recently the ones I have are:
1) a new version of a retro toy
2) an extension to salesforce.com (an appExchange app)
3) a better networking application (something better than Linked-in)

I live in Southern California. Thousand Oaks to be precise.
The top 25 b-to-z list blogs?
Your using rails, I would have expected some nice ajaxiness at least! Page loads when voting and reloadings pics were slow, ajax would help here.

Also - I would have expected clicking on either picture would count as a 'vote', rather then having to hit the vote button.

Design is nice and clean
The uses of this will replace the need for books for most tech-users. Instead having a book to read, a lot of people would listen to audiobooks on their players. Now, instead of having a physical library of books you now have a digital library of books, notes etc.
This seems to be the natural progression of reading.
Bill Gates stumps for the death of the Keyboard
great link thanks
why is this fun?
Frugality is useful, but so many people who are tight with money tend to underestimate the cost of time. Or the cost of friendship when you refuse to pay your share. Or the cost of a bad impression when your clothes look old.

Be careful with money, but be careful to also spend money.
Good question. There is a huge correlation. People who are cheap are much more likely to succeed. And not just because their money lasts longer; a frugal attitude seems to correlate with success.
The guys behind MouseDriver (http://www.amazon.com/MouseDriver-Chronicles-John-Lusk/dp/07...) did this.

I don't remember the details (and unfortunately I freecycled the book so I can't look it up now) but you might want to read that for yourself.
The problem is the belief that is hardwired into the humans basic instincts about balance. We see the bike and we see balance problems and danger (not that this doesn't have that) but they probably thought of that and are working on it.
Not sure if it was meant to be this way.. but the design looks eerily similar to facebook's.
In my opinion the keyboard will become the interface of the power user while the average person uses the new tools. I just dont see a hacker not using a keyboard in the next 10 years imagine having to say a string into a microphone instead of typing it
In 2004 I had already been using Kawa Scheme on the JVM in my day job for 4 years. That's also the year I began OurDoings using the same technology.

http://ourdoings.com/2004-08-24
That was this old article...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2195...

But it was discussing walking, not riding (far more efficient), and used common milk as the calorie provision (effectively a worst-case scenario).
Weellll, it's okay. It does what it does, but what it does is not really for me. Sure, I'd like to click on hot chicks, but you know what I'd really love? If, when I clicked on that chick long enough, she begins to like me! Then she calls me and buys me dinner.

Now that's a problem you startup founders should solve! Getting me laid is a killer application, I tell you.
"all throughout history, the future has turned out to be better"

splutter
Just...no.
1913? 1928? 14th-century Europe before the Black Death turned up? Rome at its height?

Yes, things are pretty damn good right now (in Europe and North America, at least). But history isn't a stately progress of life getting better - there have been plenty of times when things have fallen apart.

As for expectations: there are always some waiting for the end-times with barely-concealed glee. But equally there are usually some expecting continuity, or gradual progress, or imagining cycles of historical recurrance.
That's not really why I'm scared. ICs are affected by lots of things. What if there is a power surge? What if there is a burst of static energy?

Computers fry, even those in Nasa Spaceships. So the one in that device could also fry, and cause me a tumble on the highway. Which would be, to say the least, uncomfortable.
> If they die because they made the wrong choice, it's a shame, but at least they died free men

I agree with you if you are talking about adults. But what about their children? Should a child die just because their parents decided that a prayer would cure them?

Most regulations aren't there to protect what people do to themselves, but to limit what they can do to others.

A responsible child can probably carry a gun to school, but do you trust all children?

The author would probably kill his cattle in a humane way, but can we count on everyone to do so?
Scheme:

(define nums '(1 2 3 4 5))
(write (map * nums nums))
Performance Portable C++
Writing portable code is almost always a matter of proper and powerful abstractions. But sometimes just getting your code to compile on a range of platforms is only half the battle. Sometimes you also need to get it to run fast on all those platforms. Jeff Keasler of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has written a tremendously useful article -- It's a pretty powerful technique for avoiding some coding nightmares.
Information Visualization with... Javascript?
Be careful when dealing with vendors through the site. Beyond having to deal with Engrish, given turnaround times are often inaccurate.
Silliness. Inspired design creates simple solutions for complex problems. That thing is a complex solution for a simple problem. Or perhaps it's a complex solution without any problem at all.

Anyone who wants to positively impact individual's transportation issues should be working on battery development, and similar technology.
Physical work vs. mind work. Hmm, yeah, tough choice.