skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that "why is Boston not in Oklahoma?" is a question without a sensible answer, but that has nothing to do with the fact that it is of the form "why does X not have property Y?" You will notice that "Why is Boston in Massachussetts?" is not a question with a sensible answer either.

Similarly, "why is your shirt not blue" is a silly question, unless there's any reason to suppose that it might be. For instance, if you show up to my "blue shirts only" party wearing a non-blue shirt, it's a perfectly valid question.

Now, as for questions about "Why is X not important for Y?", these can have sensible answers. Why is aerodynamics not important for a lunar lander? Because it never flies through air. Why is peanut butter not important for a lunar lander? Now that is a silly question, because nobody would suppose it might be.

So a question like "Why is speed not important in exploratory programming?" should really have a sensible answer. You could, for instance, say something like "Because in exploratory programming you typically only need to run short tests which don't take a lot of time anyway". To which I'd reply "Oh, I don't know about that, I typically run tests which take quite a long time". To which you could say "Oh, well I'm sure there are some cases where it is, but for most people most of the time it isn't". And I'd say "Yes, I agree with that statement".
Well, they don't specify what kind of 'press' (bench, leg, drill, coffee?), but I'll assume they mean 'bench', and for an 'athletic' 5'11" guy at 180lbs, not being able to bench 200 is... surprising. Anybody can, with a bit of training, bench 10% above their body weight.

I know that this isn't the point of the article -- I'm just being nitpicky. I definitely think that the tech is interesting, but I think that it will end up finding many more uses in the civilian world than it will in the military. A reliable, self-powered exoskeleton would make for a lot of changes in the building trades, in the way warehouses are managed, in the way factories operate...

We live in interesting times. :)
I will go out on a limb and agree that this isn't completely crazy.

I don't think you have to kick the bottom 10% of the class out...most of them probably won't have a problem leaving because they're not very good at school any way. I think it would be a good idea to give the bottom 10% an opportunity to leave school and enter the work force (I assume you're talking about high school kids only).

We could use some of the money we save on funding overcrowded schools to establish some kind of apprenticeship program for teenagers. I'm sure there are some problems with this, but it does seem to make some kind of sense.
"I decided to take three days off, to see what would happen.
It was easy."

I recently had this thought that being easy to wean off might just be another trick played by drugs to keep us addicted. For example, I have several times weaned off coffee for a month. It was easy, too, but here I am, still drinking coffee (again). Since it is so easy to wean off it, I can just stop tomorrow, so why not have another cup today...?

Also, it seems that some schools "addiction research" only consider something a relapse if it happens after 6 months not taking the drugs. So anything below 6 months is not even considered as "weaned off".
That's a dangerous question to ask, because if you have to wonder what you want people to want, they probably don't really know either and won't see the value of your idea. It seems that best and most useful ideas tend to grow naturally and looking too hard for a problem to solve will probably end up solving a non-problem.

For a good example of this, see http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html
Not necessarily. For example, Flash Player cannot listen for incoming TCP connections at all, and it can only open new connections to a server if the server has a cross-domain policy allowing it. If similar restrictions are in place for UDP then P2P may not be possible.

However, Amicima's technology was P2P VoIP, so I would not be surprised if the P2P aspect has been retained. But P2P VoIP is still completely different from P2P file transfer.
Robotic suits not make soldiers super.
The same sort of breakthrough is needed for not-powered-by-gasoline cars, so it's not like it's not a being-worked-on problem. :) This seems like a good application for fuel cells, actually, given that the energy density is five or ten times that of the best chemical batteries.
some things are easier said than done
Ask YC: "I would pay for that"
I'm looking for ideas for a new startup. Venture Capital is pretty hard to get here in Europe, so I'm not counting on any serious backing. It looks like bootstrapping is the way to go. This means that the choices are limited to either a subscription-based service or pay-for-download software: I can't really afford to work on this otherwise.

So I've been thinking about what kind of product to build. However, I realized that most people I know don't really pay for software. People just use free software and when the free software is no good... then well, bittorrent is an easy alternative.

And all of the YC startups on wikipedia (Biographicon, Anywhere.FM, Appjet, Parakey, Virtualmin, Weebly, Xobni, Justin.tv, YouOS, Loopt, reddit, Scribd) don't charge for their service. Everything's free. I don't want to compete with free.

37signals is profitable with their subscription-based software... but they're the exception that proves the rule. Their marketing and branding puts them in a unique position.

DHH advocated (during some YC event) that a good audience is a subset of the fortune 5.000.000. Small businesses, unlike regular consumers, are willing to spend money on software. But it looks like there's a _lot_ of software for small companies already, be it for accounting or CRM... competition is going to be really tough. My brainstorming session didn't amount to much here.

So what should I do?

And as a question to you all: have you ever built a product that people liked, but were not willing to pay a dime for?
Well, every time we've tried radiation, all we've done is given soldiers the super powers of 'getting cancer' and 'dying', so I'm kind of happy that they're going for more the 'Batman' and 'Iron Man' approach. :)
TotoiseGit, as far as I can tell, is still in the discussion and planning state, but it is the natural progression of TortoiseCVS and TortoiseSVN. They are effectively plug-ins to the Windows Window Explorer (not to be confused with Internet Explorer). You can see the state of files by the icon's color or shape. You can right click files or folders to perform version control functions. the nice thing is that the application can be run from the file system browser.
GIT, of course, follows a different paradigm, but I imagine the UI to the user to be very similar.
I have a Series 3 (futures/forex) license and worked in that industry for about 6 months. It was like the bad parts of Boiler Room. I left when I realized the shop I was working for had no problem ripping off retail clients and allowing them to speculate with money they didn't have; clients had to sell their homes to cover their obligations.

Bona fide hedging is a lucrative business for the companies involved, whether that's hedging against currency or commodity price fluctuations. It's also more "buy side" than "sell side" - you're dealing with companies rather than 'raising money' from new clients who get blown out over the course of 3 months.

I know a few successful options traders. It's highly lucrative (high 6 figs base after a few years), you just need the pedigree and the intellect to pull it off. If you're in a position to do that, though, you might try to get an analyst job, get on a path to assistant portfolio management, portfolio management, keep a good track record and start a hedge fund. That's all buy side and would allow for some flexibility in the strategies you implement.
Ask YC: What to do with myself?
Dear YCers,

This summer I'm working part time in a media lab on my college campus. The lab is stocked with all sorts of creative media applications and technology. Brand new, top of the line Mac Pros, all of which have the full range of picture editing/movie and music making software, plus all of the cool peripherals to go along with them. Technically I'm supposed to be monitoring the lab and assisting with tech support, but this being the summer semester, I almost never see people in the lab. With all of this awesome technology at my disposal, I feel like I need to put my creative side to good use, but I'm a little overwhelmed by all of it. My question is this: I have the lab to myself for six hours a day, twice a week. What should I put my mind to? What would you do if you were in my place?
It was not possible, since Flash Player cannot listen for incoming connections, and can make outgoing connections only under limited circumstances.
OpenSSL vulnerability
Was this when you were in the military? How common are such stimulants if you're not a pilot?
The Social Network Wars Begin In Earnest: Facebook Bans Google Friend Connect
Wrt to the "why" of the market, without speculation, liquidity is far lower. Take a look at the Chicago Climate Exchange's (CCX) price fluctuations compared to a fall expiring wheat contract on the CME/CBOT - you can move the CCX with a small amount of money.
It says he's "lucky if he can press 200 pounds" unassisted, which means he presses 200 lbs on a good day. Which, as you say, is pretty normal. I'm not sure what you're surprised about, unless you're misinterpreting the phrase "lucky if".
Has This American Inventor Brought an Answer to the World's Water Crisis?
I realized recently that Facebook is trying to rebuild the entire Web inside their site. Home pages, check. Email, check. IM, calendaring, photo sharing, dating, check. Next they will add VoIP, photo editing, an office suite...

So how many servers do you need to replace the entire Web? 60,000 doesn't sound like enough.
First, options and futures involve a sub-zero game. Money leaks out via commissions.

Second, there are two types of players in this game. The first group is the speculators. They play the game for profit from the game. The second group is risk managers. They play the game for risk reduction. Speculators serve the risk managers. The speculator's strategy is starkly different than the risk manager's strategy. The speculator can profit by optimizing his strategy.

EDIT: The assumptions made by Black, Scholes, and Merton are highly idealized. There is much research to still be done in the area of behavioral finance and the game theoretic approach to derivatives pricing.

I've thought about conducting graduate research in this area because the mathematics are truly fascinating in this branch of finance/economics. When you start exploring this area from a game theory approach, you can start to understand why John Nash won the Nobel.
Just because most people do it doesn't make it right.

Caffeine, nicotine and alcohol are drugs, anyone who says otherwise is kidding themselves.
Venture capital is not an example of this phenomenon. VCs accept high risk/variance in order to achieve high expected value, and it is not a negative sum game.
I am not sure that traders don't create value. Their job is to allocate money to the most useful company, I suppose?
Trying to shoehorn ideas into a specific type of business model is not going to get you anywhere.

I'd say don't even think about how you're going to make money at the initial stages of brainstorming. Look for a legitimate problem and solve it, make sure the people you're solving the issue for see value in the solution your providing, and on your journey to solving the problem you can then start positioning your company as far as what business model route you want to take.

That attitude is just going to lead to you rejecting a lot of good ideas because they'd be offered as free services, or you settling with a crappier idea just so you can start heading down the business model path you want to take, and you worrying more about the business than the problem is going to show in your product.
Sounds like a good trivial problem for a rails or django site building tutorial. Call it ScribdScraper.
I would think that drug culture in San Francisco would be up there with A-dam. ;)
Pick something you use and:

- Subscribe to the relevant development mailing lists

- Start using the development version of the software (from CVS, SVN, Git, whatever)

- Subscribe to any relevant community newsfeeds (planets, news sites)

If you're using the development version of software, you'll invariably hit horribly annoying bugs. Dig in, find the fix, generate a diff and mail it to the development mailing list. In the odd case of not stumbling into annoying bugs, the bugtracker will have a long list waiting for you. Rinse, wash, repeat.
Ah that makes sense :)
Wow, that is impressively evil. Maybe that's why vendors don't want to open their firmware.
YC is frugal with their investments - they give companies just enough to survive, which motivates the founders to be as frugal as possible.
Has the word "hacker" really become so devalued around here that it's now considered something you can "become" from a standing start, by following a six-to-nine-month course of study?
Make ramen noodles from scratch
GreaseMonkey one liner.
Now explain me how multiple email support saves my time!
Recently we rolled out an interesting feature where users can set up their multiple email accounts. This multiple email account is like having having multiple passports. You can travel to the wonderful world of blogging and twittering from any email clients.
Facebook pulls out of beer pong match vs. CollegeHumor/Vimeo at last minute
The Silicon Valley apparatus behind Barack Obama's fundraising
Correct. There is a big difference in leveraging options when you own tons of stock in a company vs. using options as a high class lotto ticket.

Example: Mark Cuban used options to guarantee he would be set for life no matter what happened to Yahoo's stock after they bought Broadcast.com for $5 billion (in stock mostly).
While an interesting project can get you excited to work on something, I doubt it can simulate all the neurological receptors that this drug can. The great Paul Erdos was known for his use of amphetamines throughout his life, and after a period of voluntary abstinence famously said, "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper."
I'll save someone the task of googling Nicholas Taleb. I think this link has been here before, but even so, it's a good one:

http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_04_29_a_blowingup.htm
So... do I have a low self-esteem because I'm 'gifted', or is it due to some other factors?
this post seems to equate
hack with "how to build a webapp"
being able to hack it should imply the ability to do webapps, but the converse is certainly not the case.
Any chance you've still got links to the other articles you mentioned? I seem to have missed those.
Just because the government says don't do it or people attach a blanket label to them doesn't make it wrong either.
Except the companies don't see any of the money once the IPO is finished.

Of course, the only reason the IPO can proceed is because people who buy shares know that they can sell them to other people later. So I suppose in that sense they help. However, once the market already exists, no extra value is created by an extra trader entering it.

As others have pointed out though, there genuinely is value created by the options trading market, since the existence of options allows risk to be spread.
I have never given thought as to what grade this could start with, but surely kicking someone out of the process at too early of an age is detrimental to society as a whole. I do, however, believe that there is a certain point at which this does become a great idea.

Are there any educational scholars on this board that could weigh in on this discussion.
I think that the line "build something people want" is not particularly useful. It's been said that "marketing is the art of making people want what you have". There are plenty of examples of things that people didn't want because they didn't exist, from Coca Cola to Twitter. I never imagined that I wanted an ipod shuffle until I tried one and now I don't leave home without it. Had it never been made, I still wouldn't know.
The consensus here is that ideas aren't worth anything because they are found so easily. But if that's true, then there must also be ideas that meet all the requirements. Roughly: (a) solves a problem (b) fun to work on (c) meets a demand (d) people willing to pay for it.

For me it's impossible not to worry (or at least think) about the money. If I build a free web service and need to expand to more than 2 servers then money becomes a serious issue already.

Take Reddit for instance. It was a good idea in the sense that the founders got to a successful exit. However, I wouldn't be able to expand after the first 3000 or so users, and would have to shut down. I don't think Reddit has made any money in the first couple of years, and they burned through $100.000 (crunchbase) before they got acquired. And a website without graphics that basically displays a bunch of links... that's really inexpensive to build and scale.
Can I be on the board then? I'm sure they'll all get a sweet payoff from the deal.
Living the Prolific Life: A How-To Guide
I think it has to do with the "superstar" phenomenon that Taleb discusses in Fooled by Randomness & The Black Swan. Being a dentist, you are not likely to see a multi-million dollar salary - yet you can definitely live comfortably.

What I believe Taleb's philosophy _was_ (he now remarks in bold text: "Finance is for philistines!" on http://fooledbyrandomness.com/ ) that by exploiting the random nature of markets he could "swing for the fences" by placing many small extremely risky bets that if they paid off -- even infrequently -- would guarantee him a lot of money.

From the little that I know/think I know: Options are a good way to leverage small amounts of capital into potentially large gains. If the price of the underlying security doesn't behave as you expected you can let your option contract expire worthless - meaning you have a defined risk which is what appealed to Taleb. Even in the worst case he knew how much was at stake.
My understanding is the "speculators" create liquidity for the risk managers, thereby assuming their risk.

Why does the money leaking via commissions necessarily make the game sub-zero sum? Is it because we aren't looking at the big picture where everyone wins?

It seems like the risk managers must have a positive incentive to sell their risk on the marketplace instead of assuming it themselves. I.e. hedging another investment like someone else said already.
"hacker" was just used for a catchy title.

It's a helpful post. Not sure I agree with all the choices, but I know a few people who are looking to take the next step and can't find any guidelines like these.
I would

1) Brainstorm: Write a list of the things I want to do that involves the resources in the lab,

2) Prune: Pick the top five I want to do.

3) Summarize: For each one, write out a quick description which identifies basic resources you need and major milestones to meet, and what you expect to get at the end. Keeping it to two or three paragraphs for each idea.

4) Choose: then pick two. First one is the quickest to get done. The second is the most challenging. Then decide which one, but shoot for doing both.

For bonus points, write time estimates for the milestones on the back of an envelope and see how close you get to your schedule estimate. Out of everything I do, estimating projects is the most challenging, especially because I'm usually doing something new.
Master Chief?
Blame the moderators. The guidelines quite clearly state "If you submit a link to a video or pdf, please warn us by appending [video] or [pdf] to the title." However, YCombinator funded websites seem to be exempt.
That's a great pointer, Danielle. Thanks.
Does anything other than GMail provide SMTP?

If he's just talking about setting the From: header, wouldn't that make it even more likely to be marked as spam?
Women want bargains but men prefer brand names
IMO the best approach is to focus on value creation.

Creating 1million in value is a lot easer than you might think. Create 10$ in value for 100k people and your there. Focus the top 1% of the worlds population for whom 10$ is not a significant amount of money and we still have 600million people so you only need to help one out of 6000 of them. Or look for some need brings in 10$ in profit pr year from 10,000 people and your at 100k/year profit which is worth around 1million.

PS: If you got 10$/year from 1/10th of 1% of the us population your talking about 3million a year or ~30million in value.
What was the point of this comment? I was saying that he's one of my heroes and pointed out that, incidentally, he fit some of pg's criteria as well. I also pointed out one of his major accomplishments. I didn't mention anything about him being a "martial legend." If you could explain how your comment relates to anything I mentioned or to the subject of "personal heroes" I'd greatly appreciate it.

To address the actual content of your comment, though - no, it takes more than "the attack at 3:53" to be a martial legend. As it happens, he spent virtually his entire life practicing martial arts, and a number of other prominent Japanese martial artists attested to his ability during his lifetime. I encourage you to learn more about him and about aikido. You might still come away thinking "Yeah whatever, the only reason anyone thought anything of him was because he had cowering tools for students", but at least you'll have more evidence for it then a short portion of some youtube video.
The cheating angle has nothing to do with "fairness". It has everything to do with "safety".

Linemen in the National Football League are good examples. Performance enhancing substances (especially steroids) give such significant advantages over opponents, at one time you had to take them to compete and keep your job. Twenty years later your health failed, partially from your occupation but mainly from the drugs. Many great linemen from the 70's and 80's are dead now.

No one should ever have that dilemma, therefore the ban.
It's obvious that the MS offer of $33/share is superior to Yahoo's "standalone" prospects? Really? Long-term, who do you think is on the decline and who isn't? Between the two, I'd bet Yahoo over MS.
Dark launching is cool, but Google did it last year with Gmail Chat:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6202268628085731280
forgot 1 step; make a developer friend. having someone u can get help from - lessens frustration and helps tremendous ly
10-year-old Moshe:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/14/10-year-old-scholar...

Danielle Fong's essay:
http://daniellefong.com/2008/05/15/advice-to-the-bright-and-...
Liquidity is one type of risk. There exist also interest rate risk, price risk, etc.

Commissions are an expense that both sides pay to play the game. Money is not transferred from one player to another, it is transferred to outside the game.

It is true that there is a positive incentive to sell risk from the risk-manager's view. That is the whole reason the markets were initially established, both derivatives and the underlying of the derivative.
What is Art? Sayings from a Heretical Perspective!
I don't think it's fair to lump writing software into the same category as substances that alter your brain's chemistry. To my knowledge, no permanent negative side effects were ever cause by, say, coding a social network for drugs.

I suppose it's ignorant if you take it out of context and then broadly define drugs. But I'm pretty sure it was meant (in context) more for prescription drugs, or more specifically, ones that alter the brain's chemistry.
Right or wrong is irrelevant. They're all bad for you when used frequently. I'm pretty sure that's why the person who said that meant you shouldn't take them, not for any moral reasons.
Insight into YouTube videos