skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The idea of there being an indigenous "higher-level" theory of computation is an important one. But I doubt very much it would look like physics, or have the benefits of physics that Hillis thinks are important.

Its much more likely to look like biology, eg nature's computers. Most models in physics are not inherently based on the idea of information and computation, in fact the functions that they are based on are merely primitive recursive, making them unsuitable for for descriptions of fully generally recursive computational processes.

Of course, biology is also noted for its lack of higher theory, and so when I make the above claim, the meaning is that when such a theory exists it will address both of these issues.
Are you solving a real problem for someone? Whose problem are you solving? You should have a flesh-and-blood person you can point to (not just "surfers", or "facebook users"). If you don't actually know someone who has that problem, how do you know people are willing to pay for it?

So I'd say you have to know your first customer, and build from there. If you don't personally know them, go to a meeting, conference, or mixer and meet them. As uncomfortable as you may be, just do it, or find a partner who is good at it.

Maybe for a free site like facebook, you can "build it and they will come", but if you want people to pay you, you have to get up from your computer and sell your product.
I just found a newsgroup meme that pointed me to Wikipedia's policy on crawlers vs. using a Database download:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

Can anyone translate this? I understand the part about not letting any crawlers ping Wikipedia more than one time per second, but what does this DB download provide and how often is it updated?
Yep, the only reason they call it theft (or even piracy) is because it sounds a lot more dramatic.

When I first heard about piracy, it meant people copying CDs and _selling_ them.
It's about time to get over it and move to something productive - until Android ships devices in a quantity it's just a waste of time to spend any time on it.

There are other phones with install base out there: Blackberry, Windows Mobile, IPhone, Symbian, Brew, J2ME.
You have to remember not everyone is technically savvy and for the masses who want 'instant-on' computing this will appeal.
The boards may even turn out to be useful in ways we cannot forsee yet. I for one am already considering its uses in a PVR solution I am builing.
I've been programming for well over ten years. I found it hard at first, but now I find it really really hard. By the time I retire, hopefully it will be damn near impossible.
Eh. This isn't really very interesting, anyway. 27 years of screwing around with physics still hasn't produced any offspring (quantum computing doesn't count yet).

yawn
That's strange, because PG looks less gnomic now than in years past. (To be fair, some may have thought he once looked wizardish, not gnomic.)
Dreams of my father by Barack Obama
That sounds awesome. Put it up on the wiki as an after-party.
Thanks a bunch, just didn't see it before.
I've been using vim for years, but I'm picking up Textmate after the free trial ends.
Right on. As the parent of two children living in Silicon Valley: Consider moving sooner rather than later. Once you have children, Silicon Valley is expensive. And your cost of living directly affects your risk profile, and your available time.

I have noticed a steady flow of people leaving the Valley once they have that second child (Austin seems to be a popular choice)...
Debunking the Laundry List Fallacy: Why Doing Less is More Impressive
Before anyone posts another example of word-of-mouth working: the op did not say it doesn't work. He simply listed reasons why it may not work in certain situations.
Entrepreneurs value 'ideas' over wealth, study finds
Learning how the best tools (emacs or vim) work is also worthwhile, even if just for posterity.
Where to find a good CTO for your startup?
What do you think is the best way to find a good CTO for your startup? ...especially after you have been established for a little while?

A friend recently asked me this question. Usually my response is to search through the people you know or have worked with and respect. Failing that to search through your extended network and base the decision upon the recommendations people get and, provided the person is able to and willing, on a trial-run period with whoever you decide to take on.

Otherwise I suggest using a specialised/alternate recruitment method to explore the niches as this works well e.g. posting an ad on your blog or an ad using SnapTalent or registering a need on YouNoodle generates excellent leads compared to the more traditional agency methods.

However, her startup is fairly established and is having problems finding suitable people. I have included text from her blog below which provides an overview with what she is looking for (from http://www.birthofastartup.com/).

Any comments, suggestions, and feedback on the experiences and thoughts of the others here is most welcome.

Thanks.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Skimbit now has a good size team (Joe the amazing Marketing Director and Matthieu the incredible Operations Manager), but what we really need now is a CTO.

We have a team of developers offshore, but we would like someone to really champion Skimbit from a technical perspective, with experience in scaling web applications, and in building innovative services. As we are a small team, the CTO would also have to be a lead developer (so experience with Javascript, AJAX libraries and PHP essential), and probably be involved in some front end development work too. But aaah, isn’t that the joy of working for a start-up, you can be a jack-of-all-trades, and be truly an integral part of building something special.

Let me know if you or anyone you know would be appropriate. The candidate doesn’t need to have been a CTO before, but is ready (and experienced enough) to be one now, at least."
Thanks Turtle. Helpful advice.
If found #7 to be the most interesting, even beyond UML. "Pictures prove to be good at sharing ideas and allowing people to visualize concepts. But in the end words are better at describing the fine details." The same applies to many "visual programming" tools. If the text-based language is expressive enough, and doesn't need excessive boilerplate, that would be more effective and accurate than visual programming.
SearchYC is really nice, but it doesn't index stuff in real time. So when theres a new story, you can't use it to check if it has been submitted already - so you get dupes if one of the links has 'www' and the other doesn't (or other small differences in the urls).
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/63/fasttalk.html

"The basic worry that comes with having lots of money is no different from what worries everyone else. Whether you've got $100 or $100 million, you don't want to lose it. After we sold Broadcast.com, I hedged my stock with synthetic indexes, in case the market cratered in the six months before I could hedge my actual Yahoo shares. It cost me $20 million, but I protected what I had. Todd Wagner and I had a credo: "Pigs get fat; hogs get slaughtered.""
Please elaborate? Do VCs have an interest per year?
TextMate and BBedit are both highly recommended.
My entry got the same quartile as martythemaniak's app. I think my stuff is a quick & dirty app to prove an idea. It took me 40 hours to implement it.
I thought to port my stuff to symbian. But nokia charge $3000 for the development tools and that turns me off.

I am working on iPhone at the moment.I am glad Blackberry also provides developer tools for free and I will work on that one next.
Cost is a lousy reason to choose something else over Textmate. It's high quality software, worth every penny.

Having said that, I paid for Textmate and used it for a couple of months before chucking it in favor of emacs. I'd never used emacs before, though my first editor was TECO for those who remember. I started with Aquamacs emacs, which I found no more difficult to pick up than Textmate. Ultimately, I switched to Carbon emacs, because it is more like the emacs I use on Linux and Cygwin.
Speaking badly of people, i.e. in a non-constructive way, is not a leader-like feature.

Always constructive, please.
I basically use TextMate for typing up Latex. It has all kinds of builtin goodness that makes everything easier. Its also easy to add your own ideas copying from what is already there.

Whats cool about textmate is that you can using any scripting language to write macros. Most of the ones that come with Textmate are written in Ruby, but you could use anything, which is pretty cool I think.
> an extra 2-3K a month

This is what I am trying to do. Please share any other tips that you have please.
Heh. Interesting that they've stopped using the term "piracy" so much now that pirates are thought of as debonair swashbucklers who are sticking it to The Man, instead of as the murderous thugs that they actually were (are). Thank you, Johnny Depp.
I spent a week building a game on AppEngine.  Here's what I learned.
It is a bad sign that such comment got so many upvotes.

Of course, it takes less time NOW to dig into TextMate, but VIm or Emacs changes your way of thinking. That's exactly why it makes sense to learn Lisp or C. Even if they're hardly usable in the current market, they make you a better programmer.
I'm not sure I'm convinced of this, in the case of Asus (or Gigabyte or Intel, who have sponsored some LinuxBIOS/Coreboot projects in the past). Asus, with their Eee PC, are striking out into delightfully new territory, and an instant on feature would be a pretty killer thing. Traditional BIOS makes that impossible, because it's so damned slow and changing it is, as you note, practically impossible.

But just because the BIOS software companies (who are, on the whole, separate from the motherboard manufactures) don't want to rewrite their software, it doesn't mean some motherboard manufacturer won't jump ship one day. In fact, I would argue that it's inevitable, if the BIOS manufacturers don't get their act together fast--people are beginning to expect a completely different experience from their devices. The iPhone and similar devices are training people that real computers can turn on instantly and be ready for work in seconds. No reason PCs can't be similarly fast to boot.
Nice! Mine didn't score as well.

On the surface it wasn't that much different than the default ListActivity.

Like an iceberg all the interesting bits are underneath. It allowed for async updates and other neat things.

Also this is a client for a product that hasn't been publicly released, so it's akin to submitting a Twitter client before Twitter launched.
Condé Nast/Wired Acquires Ars Technica
It really depends on the language you plan to learn. If the language has a de facto IDE, you would be best served by that. Otherwise, Emacs offers a number of language-directed enhancements that help a lot with boilerplate work.

(And c'mon, MacVim and Emacs.app? Just open Terminal.app and run Emacs or vim directly! Both are pre-installed on OS X.)
I'm a fan of Smultron as well. I've been using it for a few years. I don't maintain a large, complicated code base so I haven't felt anything lacking. The editor itself is nice, it handles multiple files and interacts with Finder pretty well and the syntax coloring works well. I created a syntax definition myself which was also easy.

I also like the easy shortcuts for moving text blocks, commenting, chopping, conversion, etc. I'd say try it out, then buy TextMate if you don't get what you need from Smultron.
I actually really like TextWrangler.

It's close enough to BBEdit I don't mind the missing features for it being free.

If you're looking for "1 window development" try Coda: http://www.panic.com/coda/

Otherwise I concur with what everyone else is saying.

VIM/Emacs if you're willing to learn--otherwise TextMate is supposed to be good.

The best solution however, is the one that you feel most comfortable in.

Try each one for 2 weeks and see what happens to your productivity.

Personally, TextMate does wierd things for me, so I prefer TextWrangler.

When I'm not on my Mac, VIM all the way.

I really want to give Emacs a good run but I can't switch my key bindings on this computer, and the Control+Alt keys are killer on my fingers.
ASK HN: What is the logic that links would expire on HN?
Is it to avoid crawling? and indexing? If not, what else could it be?
I'm sorry, I should have been more clear with my meaning. I used to think similarly to you regarding addition - I could quit caffeine any time I wanted for as long as I wanted, but ultimately, I went back to soda or coffee or what have you.

So, I thought maybe that was the nature of addiction, that it was a subtle psychological thing.

THEN, I quit smoking, and the hair-pulling, hand-wringing, eye-gouging experience that followed showed me what addiction was really like.

On the other hand, my girlfriend quit smoking the same day I did, and when she quit it was like me quitting coffee; no big deal at all.
My mother has sold tons of stuff on ebay since I introduced her to it a few years ago.

She has a friend who does dissolving of households - that's where she gets most of her stuff from. People buy the oddest things.
Sure. Or in another way better off.
Although most people who use these common programs have to customize them extensively. Using emacs without my .emacs file can be as disorienting as using another editor.

Not sure if you're thinking of TextMate or TextWrangler. TextWrangler does have a Mac-like UI and uses Apple-style keyboard shortcuts. TextMate's UI is not particularly Mac-like, it exposes shell commands quite directly, and most of the macros are shell/ruby/etc scripts.

To illustrate the difference, TextWrangler has a menu command to sort the current document, and a menu command to remove duplicate lines. TextMate has "Filter Through Command" which lets you apply arbitrary command like "sort | uniq" to the current document.
I took a look at Scala about six months ago. It's quite a nice, full-featured language, and is a real contender for anyone forced to deploy to the JVM. However, it has a lot, and I do mean a whole hell of a lot of growing up to do before I'd actually use it for anything.

Its support for editors and tools was pretty horrible. The Eclipse plugin outright sucked (bundled compiler lagging behind the language release, syntax highlighting which came and went unpredictably, weird compilation errors which didn't matter --- and when I submitted a bug report ticket, the Scala team took four months to respond). I tried the Emacs mode, but it had such flaky indentation that I didn't know what it was doing half the time. If I absolutely had to use Scala, I'm sure I'd fix the Emacs mode, but it just wasn't worthwhile back then.

In addition, the language changes rapidly in ways which break existing code (I ran into an incompatible change in the Actors library, but don't remember the details any more). Granted, that's actually a good thing, because it means that the developers do not want to be stuck with bad design decisions from the past, but I'd like to be able to write production code, too. Since it seems that Scala's authors use it as a testbed for their research in languages, I have my doubts that it'll stabilize quite enough. (Counterarguments welcome!)
I prefer battery acid. (Edit: upvote if you think battery acid is better than coke and pepsi)
What makes you choose TextMate over other editors?
And if you don't know Emacs yet, start with Aquamacs. It has "normal" Mac keybindings set in addition to the Emacs ones for most operations, and comes with many of the best Emacs packages already installed.

Heck, even if you know Emacs well, give Aquamacs a try. All of the pre-installed packages can be a big time saver over downloading and installing each of them individually.
Real-World Tufte Graphics in 11 Lines of Code
Get a hacker who didn't get in YC.
TechCrunch on the iPhone
Reality Check: What does Gartner really do?
If society declines to acknowledge the limited monopoly granted, why is it immoral for an individual within that society to also ignore the monopoly?
Two Flaws With "Time Off From Programming"
I just loved this one; very thought provoking! Some very strong ideas, with wonderful examples. I think, I am going to go through the whole thing once again, and then ponder over the ideas.
Komodo Edit: http://www.activestate.com/Products/komodo_ide/komodo_edit.m...

TextWrangler is also good. Can't understand why Textmate is so highly regarded, but editors are a very personal thing.
You mean... learning happens the whole time you're alive?!
As far as I know they store a continuation for each page you view. And after some time they just delete the continuation.

(Please look up call/cc if you want to learn more about this.)
Personally, I use jEdit for the majority of my web programming unless I need to do a lot of FTP and site-structure related stuff, then I will use Coda.

For my non-web programming, I use jEdit or Emacs, depending on the situation.
Marc Andreessen's Startup School Talk One of his Last?
CIO.com has a pretty cheap ($300) job posting section. I don't think it gets much more targeted than that.

http://www.cio.com/solutions/careers/wanted/1
1."The Long Tail" by Chris Anderson
2."Super Crunchers" by Ian Ayres
3."Six Great Scientists" by J.G Crowther
4."The Meaning of It All" by Richard Feynman
5."Dealers of Lightning"(The story of XEROX Parc) by Michael Hiltzik
6."What I Believe" by Betrand Russell

The above titles can all be found at audible.com, and probably through itunes too.
diet-wise, about 2.5 of my 5 meals a day are just fruit, and it does wonders for sleep. it's like flipping a switch: eat mostly fruit, sleep 6 hours a night; eat mostly other stuff, sleep 8 hours a night. unfortunately in a couple weeks i'll be in startup mode and probably unable to afford it.
What does Emacs or Vim have over TextMate? My friend was a hardcore Vim user but ended up switching to TextMate because it has enough keyboard shortcuts to make him happpy, but also has a nice bundle system that adds a lot of snippets.
CIO != CTO. CIO's actually do stuff.
Investing your time in Emacs is a good idea in the longish term. Also learn VIM if you can.

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/effective-emacs

(I use both Emacs and VIM, for different purposes)
"CTO" is a pure vanity title. It's a little silly to go looking for "the right CTO". Your friends want an evangelist product marketing manager, not a "CTO".
EmacsWiki
I don't think it's boasting but rather trying to explain away an apparent contradiction.
I've been trying various things to address this problem, but I haven't found a solution that I like, yet. The current system will typically index new articles within 30 minutes to an hour of posting, but could take up to two hours in the worst case.

Do you often use SearchYC for checking dupes?
Don't hire into a CxO position the way you hire a technical staff member. Imagine you are a shareholder and ask yourself where do want your company to be in x years. Then find a person who has experience in generating that sort of change for an organization
CTO's come in a couple of different favors, generally ranging from being very technical to be very 'executive'. At worst they're just an extra layer of management, at best they're the visionaries behind the products. Some code, some just talk. The cost for a good one is usually 'equity'.
It depends. If you pay in dollars, Textmate is fairly expensive, yes. If you don't, its about 25 glasses of beer in a pub. No big deal. For that money you get the text editor with the largest community of developers on the Mac platform which in itself is worth paying for. Textwrangler, on the other hand, is dead (or rather, it's a stripped down free version of a dead editor called BBEdit) so investing time to learn it isn't worth it, IMHO.

If the price bothers you, use vi or emacs. Neither of those integrate too well with the rest of the OS X environment (though they're getting better) and learning them will help you on other unices as well. That is especially true for vi - no matter how poorly endowed the unix, there's always a vi to work with (on the other hand, bash uses emacs key bindings by default, so it doesn't hurt to learn those as well)
Use Gmail as Storage or Shared Hard Drive | Live Crunch
I do if its an older article/submission - if its actual news I find it easier to just look for it manually.
Or use Google Reader with TechCrunch as your only feed.
Vecto (http://www.xach.com/lisp/vecto/) in Common Lisp is excellent for this sort of thing (see http://common-lisp.net/project/adw-charting/, which uses it).
Ask YC: How do you deal with potential legal issues?
I'm predicting that my current startup may have some legal issues in the future. I'm nearly certain that I'm not doing anything illegal, but without a lawyer even the threat of a lawsuit could hamper site growth. Has anyone had similar issues in the past or have any advice (maybe for good internet law firms with free consultation). I'm not funded so money is a big issue. But even assuming I had money to spend on legal advice I'm not sure where to go.

Any advice is greatly appreciated!
Not to mention you still have to locate the things in 3space.
Many jobs also require college degrees, yet it isn't an unspoken industry solution for first-time job applicants to lie on their resumes because they couldn't afford to go to college. So this "unspoken industry solution" of pirating Photoshop strikes me more as a rationalization for why someone wanted to pirate rather than an explanation of why they needed to pirate.

(Never mind that art schools cost a lot more than Photoshop, teach Photoshop, sell Photoshop at discounted student rates, etc.)
I agree 100%. I've enjoyed reading about Feynman for about as far back as I can remember. One of the true geniuses of all time, yet so damned human that you can't help but love him.
While we're on the topic (and since it seems this went almost unnoticed on HN yesterday), CBS announced its intent to acquire Cnet for $1.8 Billion yesterday:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/15/cbs-to-acquire-cnet-for...
Law != Ethics
What is a hacker?
What is a hacker? What is your job? What do you do? Where can I find one?
How is BBEdit a dead editor exactly?

I've used BBEdit for about 8 years now, since it was pretty much one of the only kids on the Mac block for a long time. But I never felt limited by that choice, I felt quite good about it compared to what was out there in the Windows world (I'm also a regular vim user too).

BBEdit is a powerful and stable editor that handles all my needs well, including integration with external scripts (shell, etc) and integrates nicely into OSX as well. It doesn't have nearly the current popularity of TextMate nor pre-installed script library for everything under the sun, but it seems far from dead from my perspective. I've tried TextMate several times now. Maybe old habits die hard, but I honestly didn't find a compelling reason not to stick with BBEdit.

As a mature product in a fairly mature industry, how much activity is really needed as far as new releases/features go? I know I have my personal wish list, but I'm a pretty happy BBEdit user, and wouldn't consider it anywhere near a dead product.
Can you at least say why you think it's immoral? You don't have to stick around and defend your belief.
Please stop equating being legal with being moral.
Games with a purpose (executive producer Luis von Ahn)