skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the headline refers to the cheapness of getting tailored suits in southeast asia. A couple of my friends were in China and they made sure to have suits made.
Albert Hofmann, discoverer of LSD is dead at 102
"Haque then issues an open challenge to Silicon Valley: find a problem to fix that will change the world for the better and he will help you do it."

"His help will come in the form of free consulting time."
That's correct trefn. Most of my friends have, at one stage or another, done a Thailand trip and returned with many tailored suits (and shirts) (and ties) (and dvds).

One couple I know have even booked their next Thailand visit for the weeks before my wedding in September, just so he can show up with a new suit!
A sad day for silicon valley.
Can someone explain the difference between this and http://lovdbyless.com to me?
Twerpscan: Analysis of your Followers on Twitter
Andrew, I think Mark posted this because he knows that so much of the Hacker News community is San Francisco-based and/or Iron Man fans.

You've been around HN way longer than I have, so I'm sure you're comment is made from displeasure at a declining quality of submissions. But that's best addressed by submitting more quality content yourself, discussing how to improve submissions in general with other HN members (#startups on irc.freenode.net is awesome), and simply not up-voting submissions you don't like.

So much of TechCrunch is crap that I don't subscribe to their own RSS feed; I'd rather see the good content, interesting news, and occasionally news-worthy righteous outrage it produces come through a smart filter like Hacker News.
Federal KSA Writing
Get a KSA that works.
No. zdnet is one of the most miss lead online journals available. This debate has been peaking its head for the past 5 years. Again and again companies walk away fed up with Apple's 'we are good enough, deal with it' attitude toward game developers. I don't think Apple will be willing to couture to game developers because they will ask Apple to change its course ever so slightly and Apple will change for no one but its own will. That and Apple is currently advertising it base model workstation for $2799.
If you have an idea you really believe in and you quit because YC didn't buy into it then you're fooling yourself.

You really need to follow through with your ideas whether or not other people believe after they heard your pitch for 10 minutes.

YC is indeed a great opportunity, but it's definitely not the only one. Keep working at your idea, go out to conferences and meet-ups -- you can network on your own. Be yourself and be your product.

I believe something that is important to YC is that you are not banking on their funding to fulfill your idea. You need to have the mentality that you are going to finish your product with or without them. You need to make them want to get on your boat rather than you praying to be on theirs.

We came across the application and decided to fill out as an exercise for solidifying our idea. Whether or not YC was going to fund us, we still had a plan of action, which is essentially still the same. I feel that our mentality is what gave us the confidence to interview the way we did.

Try again next time, don't be so bitter. Give value before you get value. If you make your product and it is good, word will spread, and you will succeed, just keep at it. Please.
Here's a registration-free version

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hNDRiP53gl6YPZEcojTe2sK6E...
Java 6 for Mac released -- sort of
Who owns JavaScript?
Only works on recent machines with Intel Core 2 and Leopard.

Remember to run the Java Preferences utility to set this as your default or you'll keep running the old version.
From what I read years ago, standing is better for your back than sitting. Especially the kind of sitting where the person slouches for hours at a time.
Really? I only want to watch a small percentage of the movies I search for. An "action" other than reading information is rarely my primary desire, and I have no idea how the semantic web will be able to intuit those cases.
mySQL 'SELECT zip FROM '.insert table here.' WHERE (POW((69.1(tablelongitude-"'.$obj->longitude.'")cos('.$obj->latitude.'/57.3)),"2")+POW((69.1(tablelatitude-"'.$obj->latitude.'")),"2"))<('.$radius.''.$radius.') ';
You need the origin long and lat, and the radius (distance), but the nice thing is the database does all the radius distance calculations internally without passing it to the scripting language, in a fraction of second depending on the server and DB. This is the query I used in http://mybandsupport.com. You can see the result by entering the zipcode in the splash screen and clicking search. The function takes your zip, gets the long and lat, then the DB compares it to every zip's (4500) long and lat to find every zip within 20 miles.

Just a note: comparing every zip code and its distance and recording the distance to a DB would create upwards of 12 million records. This might be the breaking point for some.... I was thinking about doing it myself. Once I worked out the numbers I backed away.

If you know the origin and destination long and lat this works well to calc distance.
$dist = sin(deg2rad($this->lat1)) * sin(deg2rad($this->lat2)) + cos(deg2rad($this->lat1)) * cos(deg2rad($this->lat2)) * cos(deg2rad($theta));
Ask YC: How fulfilled are you with tech entrepreneurship?
It's time to dig deep within ourselves and get a little mushy.

I feel, well I know, that I have a passion for both entrepreneurship and medicine. Both passions are very time and labor intensive and to most people seem like two mutually exclusive passions, with no room to pursue both. Ideally, however, I'd be able to mesh the two and pursue an entrepreneurial project with a medical flavor.

I'm at a fork in my life's road right now. Look down one path and you see a long arduous road to M.D.-ship. I feel that being a doctor, you acquire an invaluable ability to help people directly, helping them retain, maintain, and improve the most precious attribute to human nature - life. Everyday, you're helping people grasp and grip onto their last thread. In my opinion, there's great fulfillment found in knowing that you're saving a brother, a son, etc., but it requires roughly a decade or more of your life, depending on specialty. Drive down the alternate path, and you get an exciting adrenaline filled life with extreme highs and extreme lows. You're out on your own leading a team to success during your youthful years. You're on the bleeding edge of tech, steering the ship into newly found waters with the hopes of finding untouched hordes of fish just waiting to get caught. And if you find yourself in dead waters, you refocus, and make way in a new direction full force. But zooming out, in the end, it's just a web page, a new widget, etc. Not to belittle the whole field, because God knows I love it all, but do you find fulfillment in that? Do you feel that you are using your life to fulfill an honorable purpose?

I feel that if I give up medicine, I'd be giving up a chance to truly help people, and have a direct and positive effect on others, yet if I pursue it, I'll be missing out on the young exciting 'I make my own rules' type of entrepreneurial life I've always dreamed of living. Hopefully, I can drill my way down the middle of the fork and forge my own path.

EDIT: I'm not just asking for advice. I'm curious as to find out what people in the tech entrepreneurship field feel towards the purpose they're working to accomplish.
I was disappointed this wasn't built-in on launch. They fit it in the iphone but not the Air -- ridiculous.

Constant internet connectivity is as big a reason to get a laptop for me as form factor. Combing from someone whose last two laptop purchases were 17 inch screens, this might not mean much.
On the contrary, there are quite a few medical device companies in Silicon Valley -- the other day, I was talking to a VC whose sole focus is on investing in medical devices, and he is located in the Valley for a reason. More broadly, there are also a lot of biotech startups in the Valley.
Lovd is made by Less Everything (http://lesseverything.com/), which runs a thriving contract development firm and makes a beautifully elegant accounting application (http://lessaccounting.com/). We think Lovd is great---in fact, you'll find some Lovd code inside the current Insoshi code base, with more to come---but it's a side project for them. In contrast, Insoshi is our sole focus, which means we have more resources for community-building, documentation (http://docs.insoshi.com/), and future development.
Do both, like my doctor:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/health/15well.html?8dpc
Are we really "Dancing on the precipice of economic cataclysm" ?
This is self-righteous libertarian moralizing, though certainly not of the worst kind.
You missed part of his point, which is that there are huge tax benefits in not taking a salary, and these are well-known, therefore not news.
Would you be content studying medicine while others were running around creating successful startups? Or would you feel a bit like a grounded child having to watch his friends play outside?

If you love helping people then medicine can be a good choice. But practicing medicine has changed considerably in the last 10-20 years with managed care. While I come from a family involved in medicine, I was always encouraged to pursue my passion for computers instead because the rewards of being a doctors are just not what they were. You might be painting a picture a bit too pretty for the lifestyle of the average doctor.
Yeah, the investors (hedge funds, pe) don't have to bear the downside of their investment but they get to keep all the upside. Which gives them an incentive to be really risky with their investments.

The Fed has been hesitant to make them face the downside of their decisions, and that needs to slowly change (without causing a panic/crash)
Mint Moves Into Investment Tracking
I had a kneeling chair. It was great for 10 minutes, but after several weeks I got fed up with the strain it put on my lower back.
> Combing from someone whose last two laptop purchases were 17 inch screens, this might not mean much.

I'd buy a second laptop as light and easy to take along as the Macbook Air is. With WLAN HotSpots popping up everywhere I roam, I don't mind the missing wireless connectivity too much.

It's just the availabe combo of slow harddrives that is killing the device for me :'( According to ArsTechnica's "No Spin" review, not even the SSD option saves you from frequent idling.

link to the review: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/macbook-air-ssd-revi...
FaceBook In Reality - Hilarious Video
Modern medicine is in desperate need of entrepreneurial approaches. Finish your training and practice for a few years so that you understand the issues deeply and can address them with authority. If you are entrepreneurial you will find a way to blend it into your practice. It's not too late to start a company in your 30's once you have gotten a thorough exposure to the issues.
"Where Do People Find The Time?"
You can probably have a bigger impact on health as an entrepreneur than a doctor.

I'm working on a start up addressing the medication adherence problem. I think a solution to a problem like that helps more people then an MD in most circumstances would and represents the exciting lifestyle you love. I think you got yourself a false dichotomy set up.

It sounds to me like you have a passion for technology and a guilt issue around helping people with health care. You're saying "on one hand, I feel obligated towards A, and on the other, I've dreamed of B."

From what you said, I think you should stick with tech and find a way to work on a start up that could produce equal health benefits to an MD. I particularly think you shouldn't get an MD. You sound like you really don't want to get one.

Feeling like most of web 2.0 would be a waste of your life bodes well for you. It means you have high personal standards and clearly perceive the big picture when most people are distracted. You should feel fine belittling almost the whole field. Most of them are wasting their lives on completely frivolous things. Especially the ones who get by on ads. If you don't feel comfortable clearly criticizing people without sentimentality, you will never be able to manifest your high standards.

But the frivolity and lack of moral vision common to most start ups are not a prerequisite to starting a company. It's false that giving up medicine costs you a chance to truly help people. Apply technology in such a way that it has medical import, with high standards, and you can have your dream and help more people than you would as an MD.
I just bought a brother from Fry's for $60 (after rebate). I'm pretty excited as I can't print stuff from home now. We should have another 1000 pages of printing left, so I'm worried that by the time we run out of toner, it will no longer be made. I'm thinking about buying one now, but I don't want to be stuck with a $50 toner if my cheap laser breaks.
You have described a very romanticized and inaccurate picture of both medicine and tech startups. I come from a family of doctors and most doctors are not directly saving lives on a daily basis. Likewise, the work in a startup can be incredibly mundane.

I could paint an equally distorted portrait of both fields: Do you want to be stuck at an HMO, explaining to crabby hypochondriacs that you can't just give them a script for oxycontin based on website printout they are waving in your face? Or would you rather stay up until 4 am every night restarting the server while your business partner tweets about doing shots next to Arrington at 111 Minna?

Anyway, that was mainly an exercise in creative writing. The only real advice I have is that if you have any inclination to do work in a medical related field, it is a good idea to have an MD. I've worked on biomedical software projects and was always just a paid lackey.

I knew a kid in boston in medical school who ran a successful web-based startup part-time while he was in medical school. He was a "kid" too, I believe he was 18 or 19 years old. Thanks for bringing this up, I should see where that guy is now.
The gist of what he is saying for people he'd most likely want to reach but can't for the very same reason he's adressing with his lengthy post:
When reading a long, carefully arranged cohesive body of (text)work, it does not help to be distracted. With ubiquitous access to seemingly useful resources, it is very easy to give into such and deviate from the intended reading material. Book publishers don't seem to get this when devising their solutions for the declining book readership problem.

Another note by me: Good writing is very similar to good programming/programming language design/engineering: a system/text does not get better by adding more to it, but when you can't remove anything from it anymore without changing your intent/its purpose.

Petzold could have done with a shorter post ;)
I am fully aware that both fields have their dry/monotonous/painstaking moments. Hard work and consistency is pretty much required to succeed in all fields. I was just mainly looking at the idea of fulfillment, and the fact that you can give up a decade for one type, or jump right into real life as a younger individual in pursuit of a different type.
hat tip to http://robwilkerson.org/search/twerpscan
What Excites You About This "Strange" Startup World?
You can look at it this way...

Taking the entrepreneurial path will equip you with a multi-faceted skill set, kind of like a swiss army knife, and if all goes will, some money in the bank too. In my opinion, you can use the skills and capital to develop a product or service that could help people on a much larger scale. However, in the end, we still need a doctor in the house. God knows you love it all...I suggest you start asking Him what you really should be doing.
But then it is maybe more efficient to make those people richer than to build cheaper filters. Cheaper filters is just one puzzle piece for getting richer, anyway.
It depends on what your actual options are. If you have a great startup plan that you are putting on hold, maybe it is worth avoiding med school. If you plan on being an entrepreneur anyway, you don't have to give up a decade, you just give up 3-4 years - you don't have to do a residency.
I don't think cubism can represented in 3D models this way. Cubism is a way to represent an object from many perspectives on a 2D plane. That's why the faces of cubist subjects have both a profile and frontal view. This artist really needs to find a 4D subject to represent in 3D. That would be closer to the spirit of cubism.
Sick of IKEA? Design Your Own Stuff, And Get Rich While You’re At It
What about an outsourcing company like http://www.b2kcorp.com?
I bought a cheapo Samsung laser for my dad about five years ago for Christmas soon after I made the switch from inkjet to laser (I was feeling the excitement of a new convert), and I've bought him a new toner cartridge for it every couple of years since then. So far, they have not discontinued the printer or the toner and it has continued to serve him well. The model is still available from several sources (maybe an updated version, I dunno), and the toner is still widely available, though the price has gone up $10 from $70 to $80 for the 6000 page rated version. I guess that means I can recommend cheap Samsung laser printers.

A year or two later, I bought my mom a pretty high end standalone inkjet photo printer, the kind that requires no computer to operate--just hook up the camera and press the print button. I bought it because she never used the digital camera I'd given her the year before (without the printed photos it just wasn't a camera, as far as she was concerned). I don't think that photo printer works any more (last time I saw her taking photos she was back to the film camera). I suspect she used it a half dozen times, whenever my 4 year old nephew was around to work it for her. Obviously, that did nothing to instill me with new confidence in modern inkjet technology.
i have developed a mobile application for mobile phones that syncs to a mobile server, since mobile phones are more common than computers here in africa.
It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.
If you are successful as an entrepreneur you could do much more good with the wealth you've created than you could as a doctor, even if you spent the rest of your life helping people one on one.

That said, success is far from guaranteed.
This may be just the TechCrunch blurb, but if they really want to be the WordPress of social networks, using Rails will be a problem for them.

Part of the success of WP is that it uses PHP and MySQL, two technologies that are ubiquitous, and that installing it is a simple matter of dumping some files on some shared hosting space.

Installing a Rails app, on the other hand, is nothing to sneeze at.
Melbourne IT Acquires Versign DBMS For $50 Million
ISwish puts the iPhone UI on any Windows Mobile phone
My current company that I work for, was started by three people in their late 30s early 40s. 6 years later, it has 230+ employees and it is doing pretty good.
Have you considered drafting some YC alumni into helping you do interviews? I'm imagining a system where applicants would have several interviews with YC alumni and then you'd interview the groups which get the most "yes" votes from your alumni screeners -- I'm guessing that after going through the YC program people get reasonably good at identifying what it takes to be a successful YC participant.

Of course, this would depend on the availability of YC alumni. I know I'd sign up to do it -- if I were a YC alumnus, that is -- but the fact that I spend several hours per week acting as an alumni representative on my alma mater's university senate (and committees thereof) marks me as being unusually prone to volunteer for such things.
Learning Haskell by Writing Music
Knuth Is My Homebody T-Shirt
Become a better Ruby Programmer
Some thoughts on "Up or Out"
Internet ads do work in certain situations.

I can see why print ads would be more effective for things like brand awareness for large companies, but I can tell you that running a small MMORPG, I am getting over 3:1 return on investment on Adwords image ads.

If I ran a print ad, people would have to care enough about the ad to put down their magazine, go over to their computer, type in the URL and then play the game. Banner ads catch people who may be idly clicking through gaming sites and are just as happy to click on my banner ad as any other link. And that click and subsequent download are so easy compared to what would have to happen with a print ad, I find it really hard to believe that print ads would have a better ROI, at least with the budget I'm spending at which is about $4k per month.
As far as I can tell, ontologically, you're not a criminal until you get caught, just as a pressure wave (of a tree falling et all) is not a sound until it is observed by something with ears.
>I am getting over 3:1 return on investment on Adwords image ads.

I think you are the exception to the rule with that ROI.
I used to sponsor 3M by keeping a pile of PostIt notes beside me when reading, but paperclips are just as good once you recognise that the smaller inner part of the clip can indicate which side of the page you are marking.
Browntech is energy technology that still has to do with fossil fuels, like clean burning coal or new ways of extracting oil from shale.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/16/technology/16venture.html
Green Energy Enthusiasts Are Also Betting on Fossil Fuels (Browntech defined inside)
Software Development Lessons Learned from Poker
"If Yahoo did have a dual-class share structure, Yahoo's cofounders would have been much better situated to block Microsoft from attempting a takeover."

Great cautionary tale: Yahoo's cofounders were really smart people with access vast information resources, yet they clearly missed at least two things, which may be prove to be fatal now. I must never assume that I know enough.
See also http://www.modsecurity.org/ (which now seems to have a very professional web site but still seems open source).
Web in infancy, says Berners-Lee
Product-Driven Platforms vs Platform-Driven Platforms
John McCarthy - Wikiquote
Syntax Matters
It seems like entrepreneurship is what you are really excited about, but medicine appeals more to your altruistic self.

Clearly, you should go for entrepreneurship - also there are going to be ample opportunities in entrepreneurship to truly help people - possibly have a bigger impact then you might have by studying medicine which will take care of your altruistic leanings.
What a silly argument. If the book is good, you will read it anywhere. Who would lock himself up in room just to read a book? Must be bad books. If the book is good, most people will prefer reading it on paper.
yes. anyone who replied that ad thinking it was serious, we (unsurprisingly) didn't hire...