skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you didn't mean for the story about the programmers to carry any weight, I'm happy to ignore it. I assumed it was in the essay to bolster your argument.

This supposed refutation can itself be disproven by reductio ad absurdum, because it could be applied to any explanation of our inclinations based on how we evolved.

No, that's overbroad. It could be applied to any argument that takes the form, "Our ancestors evolved to do x, therefore we will be happier if we do x." And, indeed, all such arguments are false, for the reason stated in my post.

Neither of these arguments even attempts to refute the central point of the essay.

I believed I had identified the central point of your argument. If you want to designate a different aspect the main point, that's your prerogative, but nothing in the essay prioritizes one over the other, and in fact the title refers to the evolutionary argument rather than the "central point." I don't have any thoughts about the "tree-structure/inverse freedom" point.

I'm not going to respond to your accusation of dishonesty, except to ask what DH number you'd assign it.
he faked it, to trick us. that's the joke. nickb isn't really a sock puppet.
Since your second sentence displays rather poor logic (poor analogy), I am biased against believing your first sentence.
If it's a joke, why nickb didn't reply in this thread? ;-)
Yahoo Buys Microsoft
VCs pour $200M into open source, but less than 5% goes to first or seed rounds
I've always understood that it was more important to have a good product than to have good SEO. Who cares if your site appears at the top of a Google search if it isn't for what people are searching? They'll come across it, be like "this sucks," and not click on you again. SEO is only one aspect of marketing, which in turn is only one aspect of running a startup. I would argue that not mentioning SEO is not an act of negligence.

Also, SEO has gotten a bit of a reputation for being dishonest, with people placing references to recent scandals in their html headers to attract hits. This can kind of stuff can be like spam and doesn't necessarily help users find something useful. Especially if what you are selling is a piece of crap.

So it pretty clear why someone would not mention SEO in an advice column, even legit stuff: because they don't want to associated with crap.
Just thinking, we are told oil, gas etc. are running out and also that these items are causing global warming. Now I reckon that all the economical carbon in fossil fuels is going to be used up and is going into the atmosphere anyway so is it not just a question of timing?
It will be like Second Life, but everything will be a Ship, an inert object in space, or an Item to be used aboard a ship. Users will be able to design Ships and Items, but only after they have built and supplied a special ship outfitted as a Research Facility and operated it for a certain period of time. Designs will be vetted at first, but this will transition to a Slashdot-like moderation system.

The galaxy will be procedurally generated. There will be millions if not billions of star systems. You will not be able to bookmark arbitrary locations in space, however. (Hyperspace is extremely chaotic and changing, so any jump to a coordinate in "Real" space will always be randomized and never precise.) You must drop an item called a "beacon" to be able to warp back to a specific location. A user will only be able to afford a certain number of beacons.
Here's what I put on the post-- thought I'd repeat it here for those who don't want to wade thru all of the people bashing Matt Maroon. :-)

---

Hehe. The obvious solution for this is to, uh, submit articles to News.YC.

FWIW, a good percentage of my posts (which often appear on YC News) have to do with SEO ( http://www.tonywright.com/category/seo/ ).

(Disclosure: I am a YC08 Founder)

I think it's a "devil you know" issue, to some degree-- I actually offered to help some other YC founders with their SEO plans and didn't get a lot of uptake- people prefer to tackle the problems they understand.

Another issue (and this might be controversial) is that maybe SEO doesn't matter a damn bit for most early stage startups... At least in the very early stages (which is what most people tend to write about).

I always look at startups as a bucket with holes in it. You can focus on increasing the flow of water into the bucket (SEO, viral, PR, marketing) or you can work on patching the holes in the bucket (adding value, improving product/market fit, improving the "lower" part of your funnel). With time being the most scarce resource in a startup, any time you spend improving "flow" takes away from "patching the bucket".

If you've got a great "bucket" (a product people freakin' LOVE and love to talk about), all of the "flow" tasks get a lot easier. If you've got a mediocre"bucket" with lots of holes, great "flow" isn't going to help make patching the bucket easier.

So (as a guy who has built and sold 2 businesses and the third is looking pretty darn good), I'd recommend ignoring a concerted SEO effort in favor of making your product better (if you have to make a choice). Ideally, you're funded and you don't HAVE to make a choice (but most startups do).
A new reason to block ads
Has anyone seen nickb and pg at the same time in the same place?
The one that is caused by aliens? (http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-alienscauseglobalwar...)

Learn, ignore politics, care about real issues that affect you and people that you know.
mutt or GTFO.
... or so the Germans would have us believe.

Applying Occam's Razor, the simpler explanation is that PG actually does use nickb as a sock puppet, made a mistake, and then attempted to cover it up using April Fool's Day as a convenient excuse.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143143

5 points by nickb 10 days ago | link | parent | on: Articles, Ideas, Books and/or Concepts that have c...

http://www.cypress.com/portal/server.pt?space=CommunityPage&....

reply

2 points by pg 9 days ago | link

That's it! Thanks, Nick. I haven't seen this for 15 years.

reply
What does it have to do with Hacker News if I may ask?
The emacs macro features compare pretty well. They're a killer feature of emacs. The editor is named after macros, after all.

You can probably accomplish much of what vi's "." does using emacs macros. The trick is that in emacs you have to notice the opportunity slightly in advance, so that you can hit 'C-x (' and then plan out your macro so that it plays back well on subsequent invocations. You could probably train yourself to think of that more often, after which your emacs experience might be roughly similar to that of the vi user.

But I suspect that vi is better designed for such a macro-intensive style of editing. The beauty of "." appears to be that vi workflow naturally divides into little chunks of action, each of which can then be treated post facto as a macro. This explains my #1 pet peeve as a completely ignorant vi user -- that vi is so damned choppy, always switching in and out of insert mode. That's not a bug, it's a feature! Those little transitions are the waypoints that will later be used to break your workstream into repeatable chunks.
The world needs that. I mean that with no irony/sarcasm. Ebay sucks. The idea is great. The implementation is unbelieveably bad.
That's true. I'm working on FreeBSD support in our products right now, and every time I type "vi filename", I either get frustrated as hell for the few bits of typing I have to do, or I notice immediately and :q and "vim filename" to get the right thing. Since I'm spawning new instances for each testing cycle (I'm building a product installer) it's a bit of a nuisance to make an alias each time. The default csh shell also pisses me off.
Wait around for the end of the current interglacial period?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interglacial
No, there are actually people who think Linux sucks when compared to OSX.
URGENT : Remove your joetech.com widget NOW
BLOGTBT March Madness
Hexadecimal Playing Cards
The chance that the mistake would happen today in particular is what makes it not the simplest explanation. That also wouldn't explain why the comment would appear on pg's comments thread.
Why are monads on the list?

FWIW I've never read a clear and simple definition of a monad (that more than one person agreed upon). The word "monad" appears to be very nearly replaceable by the word "opinion" with all ensuing ramifications. Perhaps someone can provide a clear definition of "monad" here!-))

But seriously, I can't help but think that monads occupy a position similiar to Tait's quaternions: useful to some but not popular enough to achieve a critical level of adoption.
Not quite, it's more of a customized statistical function at this point -- Postrank. We're working on a whitepaper which will delve into the internals..
I agree. Just by its nature, SEO is bad. Of course there are some simple things that you can do to make your page better understood by search engines, but using these self-proclaimed tricks and methodologies employed by most SEO companies is a total waste of time and money. Focus on putting something out there that's good, not trying to find shortcuts.
Tomorrow's code: Bill Thompson puts out a call for more programmers
Where did you have your great idea?
Another difference is that dating sites typically "borrow" the images of very hot young ladies. That's certainly a much greater level of deceptiveness.
My app for the Android Dev Challenge. Deadline's soon...
The singularity and nanobots will take care of that for us.
Did you guys ever watch that South Park episode where one of the grade-school girls starts to grow tits? Suddenly all of the boys start thinking "she's so smart!" and "she's so funny!" and wanting to hang out with her, and they honestly have no idea that there is any connection between their new attitudes and her new tits.

There is no question in my mind that Macs are beautiful. The latest gadgets like the iPods and iPhones are real works of art.

Sometimes I wonder if Apple doesn't get cut a bit too much slack just because they are "cool". Just because someone is beautiful and smiling at you doesn't necessarily mean they do not have malicious intent. And especially it seems a lot of times, we are just so eager to believe in any credible opponent to M$ that we are willing to overlook any warning signs. I wonder if the peasants that supported the French and Russian revolutions felt the same way?
Good Devices Gone Bad
Just so we're clear on this, I asked Alex to post the above. He's just pretending to be upset.
"Just by its nature, SEO is bad" This statement is ridiculous. You are a fool is you don't do everything you can to rank for relevant terms. This is the best, most targeted traffic you can get. Gaming the engines is bad, but not trying to rank in them is idiocy.
Do you intend to code a realistic physics system into this game? If so, will you be using a physics engine that has the concept of relativity built into it?
You are right about the name but big company mailing lists is just starting point for us - mainly because they are easy to target. In theory there is no reason why it couldn't be used for any general mailing lists like Yahoo! Groups or even set of individual email address manually typed in "To:"
This is why my Mac runs OS X Tiger, and my Linux box runs FC4. The Linux box will die that way, but someday, when I have a spare week, I'll upgrade the Mac to Leopard. I hope a week is enough.
Work sucks in the following cases: if it’s not challenging, if there's not a considerable reward, if it’s something everyone can do (no glory). When you say to yourself, "Wow this is a pretty obscure problem that seems to everyone impossible to solve, but I’ll bet I could solve it." That’s when work reaches its ultimate level.
The concept of simplicity is the foundation of Mac's and Apple products and is why they are gaining ground. nix is for is for "Geeks" (Yes, I'm a Geek). It has always been about Geeks, it will always be about geeks. The additional benefit of OS X is that it still has the underlying Geekland that the nix crowd loves. For those that aren't at the Geek level of TechKnowledgy (Copyright 200-now), Macs will keep on purring with minimal fuss.
We have several customers using them (technically, every Joyent customer is our customer, too, since they offer Virtualmin on everything they offer), and the satisfaction level seems quite high. They are definitely among the smartest guys in the hosting business from a technical standpoint, and they build a lot of their technology in-house. The price is a wee bit high, though it's often difficult to compare virtualized systems in an apples-to-apples manner. Accelerators are Solaris Zones, which are significantly more efficient than the Linux Xen instances used for EC2, for example. Zones are comparable in implementation to vservers on Linux, though the most popular form of vserver is Virtuozzo/OpenVZ which has some serious memory bugs that strike when a system is over-subscribed--the low-cost providers all over-subscribe and thus all exhibit these memory allocation issues. Joyent boxes are quite large and fast, and not over-subscribed, so you might be pleasantly surprised by the performance you see from them.

Their support for Ruby on Rails and PHP is excellent, since the techs there are actually coders who know those platforms well. They also seem to be pretty Perl and Python savvy, though the Solaris packages for Python they use are reportedly problematic for Django. And, the Joyent forums are full of smart folks doing interesting things, which is pretty valuable.

That said, they do have their critics. Twitter left them in a huff, and at least one Y Combinator company has had a bad experience with them (I don't know the details). But, every large host has its share of complaints. It's hard to judge without knowing the number of customers they have in total and the average level of satisfaction of those customers (hmmm...that'd probably be a useful service, along the lines of the J.D. Powers automobile surveys--I wonder if anyone does that?).
Damn. Forgot that. Yes, sorry, it's not an April Fools' joke. I am actually nickb.
Has anyone seen nickb, ever?
Guy Steele's "claim to fame" is that he "co-wrote the specification of the Java programming language"

actually, I think most people around here would be well advised to look at the author of CLTL and note that instead.
Somehow I still feel cheated. I'm working on a social news site, and we do not use ghost accounts or fake stats. People still suspect us doing it anyway :( Now I know - they have a good reason to suspect everybody.
I think in general you are correct, but the devil lies in the details. The way people think about the word "agile", oddly enough, can be really inflexible. Somebody gets a CSM, reads a few Cohn books, or gets hooked on Crystal. Suddenly their definition of "agile" is exactly what they read -- no more and no less.

I read once that a programmer tried agile and gave up after arguing for two hours about what to put on the story card. This kind of BS happens a lot: it's the nature of dealing with large numbers of people who see things as binary. If you understand the _principles_ of agile, and why they work, then all the books and authors are just re-digesting common sense and peddling them as books. At that level of understanding you can work on all sorts of things: new development, existing development, non-software work, etc.

That's where my team is trying to take this organization I'm working with. The problem is that influencing large populations (thousands and tens of thousands) of technical people is far worse than herding cats. It's more like trying to get angry flaming weasels to perform circus acts by using a twinkie and a Disney song.
The Orignal Hackers were Black Hats.
37Signals Amazon S3 Stats and Costs
List of Vulnerability Scanners
A Comic on Lisp and FP Programming
This thing is starting to take on an eerie "Paul is dead" aura.
Amusing but still waiting something like a 1.0 couch db release. Its a DB, not a web server, kind of has to be uber stable.
The page is called "A Guided Tour of emacs-git (by TSKim)" and it appears to be a git mode for emacs. I'll be trying it out shortly, I'm sure.

Your employer thinks emacs is unsafe for work?
"The collective" can indeed be prolific. Intriguing.
Worlds are colliding...
Isn't exercising good judgment also part of the execution? I don't see a huge difference.

In the end, everything effects everything, and you are forced to come to the realization that you can't do anything...which is why you should do whatever you want and not look back.

If you think you have a good idea, give it a shot. See how sticky it is in your own mind, and those who you talk to. If things don't work out, pick yourself back up, and try again. Hopefully you will have learned something.
I'm sure it's the domain 'cafe24.com'; our filter categorizes it as 'chat', which to corporate IT morons is the root of all evil.
Solve it? Why do that when we could ignore it and go away?

http://www.google.com/virgle/index.html

Note: This is an April Fool's Joke.
Mostly in the US. I dont see any evidence of Macs becoming more popular in India for example. Any observations from Europe?
http://jottit.com/qrdh

That's a quick mirror of the html and images. Hopefully your employer doesn't block jottit.com
Quoting the article:

"This was a particularly difficult lesson for me to learn. I had always believed one should never give up, that once you set a goal, you should hang on to the bitter end. The captain goes down with the ship and all that. If I ever failed to finish a project I started, I’d feel very guilty about it.

Eventually I figured out that this is just nonsense."

My thoughts: Louis Sullivan said something like "The only way to find the truth is to take everything they say, and to test it out for yourself. By doing so you will realize that many things they say are true are not true and many things they say are not true are true."

And he is so right. The amount of false stuff we learn through our life is mind boggling. To make things worse we sometimes invent stuff ourselves.
You guys don't know anything. Chuck_Norris is pg's sock puppet.
Or maybe this 'pg' character is an elaborate front for nickb.

The pipe organ fugue should be right about here.
Score: -inf, Slashdot-like whining.

Well it is his site, deal with it. In the meantime please stop polluting my damn RSS feeds. Please consider the comments feature a side effect of this site's PRIMARY FUNCTION and not worthy of news itself. Thanks!! (GRRRRR)
Study: VC-backed mergers, IPOs slowing
That's just the sort of joke you would make if you really were nickb!
Tried login via HN site with no luck. However when I created a new account with Clickpass, ran through the HN option & the login verified straight away.
I'd say the main difference is that MS has a monopoly and Apple only has a very small part of the market. Thus MS is held to a higher standard.
I suppose you're entitled to that opinion but it's not what the article says.

"Since we switched to Java, productivity at our firm has quadrupled, just because Java is catching our mistakes."

Quadrupled!
This is a completely incorrect conclusion. As I wrote on the blog:

Actually, you’re the one who’s mistaken — history does support the benign view. As you note, the term hacker dates back even to the Tech Model Railroad Club. The term was generalized to include all sorts of neat but benign tomfoolery (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_hack) including white hat phone phreaking. At MIT, there’s definitely always been a sense that hacking has a code of ethics and that people who do bad things under the guise of hacking aren’t hacking at all.

The Tech’s 1963 reference to malicious phreakers as hackers is the same as modern day references to crackers as hackers: a mistake.
Hack before you die... maybe?
For a site like jaanix or reddit (or news.yc), there's no implicit fraud in having lots of ghost accounts, as long as you don't include them in stats to advertisers or whatever. People come for the content, not because others are there.
I did that a couple of months ago, and before you know it freelancing takes all of your time. Luckily I'm close to launch.
Customizing a Live Linux CD (for a client) writing a press release (for a client), finishing the SEO for a website (for a client) and teaching myself Ruby (FOR ME).
Well, at least you got your priorities straight. :)
Yes basically the really important point is to avoid to develop an anti-crawler site, but this is a side effect of site with good pages semantic, structure and so on. So simply the SEO problem can be optimized away.
I have it on good authority that if you come to Startup School in 2-3 weeks from now, you will :)
I've heard that such stories are largely fabricated.
You can not fool me. This is what really is happening: pg IS nickb's SOCKPUPPET! Even in IRL! I figured it out! OMG! Wake up shee...

Ok, enough, I'm loling too hard.
Let's try something else. I claim that founders tell themselves (regardless of truth value) that they want to be:

"Making the world a better place (and getting really damn rich)."

The justification for this attitude is that one can supposedly participate in a positive-sum game for both parties -- one party is you, the other is the world. This is the altruistic lure of market structures. Whether or not you agree with that non-zero-sum stance (do markets actually tend to produce such situations, all externalities considered?), I think the "making a lot of money indicates I'm filling a truly needed demand" mentality produces entrepreneurs who unnecessarily tie their personal increase in wealth to the feeling of an increase in some greater good.

But we do get pretty cool products out of this, whatever the psychology involved.
Sorry, was too busy with work... I finally found some time and saw the thread.
HTML/CSS/DOM book recommendations?
Hello. I'm beginning to look into web design/programming and am looking for recommendations of good books that introduce the client side of the web (i.e. HTML/CSS/DOM). I've been playing around with the Django framework but I feel like I need some exposure to basic layout design to further my work.

Thanks,

David
I have evidence that pg has been outsourcing everything, and is now working a 4 hour work week.

Willing to sell this evidence to the highest bidder, but pg has already offered a spot in the next YC round to me. He also is throwing in tickets and a flight down for startup school after I complained here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=148485
That's actually the funniest thing I've seen today.
The flicker is a really nice touch.
School districts serve up lessons in Linux
Steve Pavlina is the smartest programmer-turned writer I can think of.
The secondary source of wikipedia doesn’t count as evidence, relying upon third-hand anecdotes like the wikipedia article does is incredibly poor academic form on wikipedia's part (notice the lack of citations to primary evidence).

While you’re right term “hack” was used in a “positive” sense with regards to model railways, “hack” in the context of computers wasn’t. In the earliest days at TMRC it was used with regards to gain unauthorized access on MIT’s computer systems (although with less negative connotations then it has now). The modern geek “hacker” sense which is in common use now of an elite programmer didn’t come around until much later.

Saying that, if you read the descriptions of "hacks" given in the wikipedia article most of them would now be considered "black hat" under modern definitions anyway.