skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think perspective is that much relevant. If someone says "This restaurant is the best in town", it means that of all the other restaurants the person tried, that one is the one he likes best. You don't need to be an expert to have opinions and feelings toward things. If you don't agree that restaurant is the best you can provide info why you think the statement "this restaurant is the best in town" is wrong.

The second person perspective is just a suggestion. Of course you're free not to go there if you don't want to.

Finally, the first person perspective is just one other way to put things. In this case it's more verbose and, before the second phrase, don't even give you as much information as the god's perspective (in god's perspective you know this restaurant is the one the person likes the most, in 1st person perspective you just knows this person likes it). Saying "This restaurant is the best in town. Cooking is great and it's very welcoming." gives you at least the same information as the 1st-person perspective.

I'm saying all that because I hate see people trying to debunk an argument by picking on the guy's perspective. Stuff like "you can't state that as an absolute truth", just because you said something like "this restaurant is the best in town". If you have information that may change that opinion, please give us, otherwise, don't flood the comments with "you don't know that much". That's about the same as DH2.
Oh god, for a structured finance nerd, this website is like heaven.

I'm pretty tempted to create my own mini-CDO. Looks like they have pretty good historical data, so you could at least estimate what level of credit enhancement you'd need to get a good rating on each tranche. Given what the loss curves look like, you could probably do pretty well selling front sequential pieces. (Look on Wikipedia to learn more about sequentials, PACs, pass-throughs, NAS, and other CDO structures). To fund the structure, you would borrow again on Prosper.com, and tell borrowers that funds would be repaid according to the structure you set up. If you provided good enough documentation for your structure and your model, you could probably get a rate significantly lower than the rate on the loans you bought.

You could also sell credit default swaps on the individual loans... and then aggregate the CDS into a synthetic CDO...
That concept has a name, the "zone of proximal development", which is "the level of difficulty ... that is neither too hard nor too easy, and is the level at which optimal learning takes place":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development
There's a reason that YC is based in Boston and the Valley. The culture of risk, entrepreneurial spirit, invetment and technology in the Valley is like no other place I've ever lived, and that includes 6 states and 3 countries. Not that it's a utopia. It's not. But, if you're going to found a startup, it's the place to be.

I moved here two years ago, and I'm working as a nurse while I finish my CS degree. My goal is to be a serial entrepreneur when I'm done, and I've been setting up my life to do that for 4-5 years now. Since being here, I've received 2 offers for funding in the past 2 years. I've also been offered several introductions to VC's from people I work with in my hospital. I'm not even done with school, and I've barely talked about starting a software business at work without giving specifics. You won't get that any place else on the planet.
"Omega-3 is good for you and might make you smarter."

There might be other, scientific studies but see:

http://www.badscience.net/?cat=66&paged=2

"Drink a lot of water: after all, your brain is mostly water."

I used to think this was a good idea, but I spent so much time errrmmm ... getting rid of the water that I don't think it helped much. But he's right about laying off the coffee; tea is much better ;)
Most text editors have some sort of parenthesis matching highlighter. I don't usually find counting () to be that difficult. I see that the greater problem is that lisp (and a lot of languages that empower functional programming ideals), undermine the idea of lines of code that other tools like source control and debuggers take advantage of.
Under Promise and Over Deliver
if you're having that much trouble debugging paren, put them all on their own lines and use indentation. then it'll be easy enough to fix.
The Ex-Googler's Collage
What about having a separated board for ask yc? Wouldn't that work even better? That way, if you are looking for site references you look one place, if you're looking for questions and their answers you look other place.
They fail to explain how non-ionizing radiation causes tumours.
I wonder if it can be used as an anti-troll weapon in other discussion forums... Should it be added to the news.YC guidelines too?
We need an algorithm, which, given any valid prefix of a Turing dialog, i.e. any sequence C1,H1,...,Ck,Hk, knows how to produce Ck+1 in such a way that the dialog will end successfully.

Exactly, but since each Turing dialog is of bounded length (i.e. no more than a megabyte in size, depending on the bandwidth of the TTY and the predetermined maximum length of the test), the set of all Turing dialogs is finite and is therefore subject to the dictionary algorithm approach.

It's rather like building out the game tree of optimal play for White in chess. The tree for the Turing Test "game" would have to include all the questions that could be asked at each point in the tree, but you only need one possible correct ("Turing-test passing") response at each node.
Digg is bad. Don't go there.

Funny how much ad hominem thinking regulates our behavior, and benefits us, no matter how much of a fallacy it is supposed to be.
I can vouch for that too, and I think it'll probably be another 4 or 5 years before any other language starts to make significant inroads into game code. I've worked with people in games who simply don't know any other languages.
(You can be a perfectly solid C++ programmer without needing to know anything about, say, Ruby or Scheme, but in my opinion, the more you learn about programming in general, the better programmer you will be.)
Here's a very interesting article in Scientific American about how how you think about intelligence and what it means to be smart affects your performance. And it's actually based on science:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-sm...
Ask YC:  Is it feasible to design a laptop that radiates heat from the back of the display?
This would mean you could use it on a soft surface such as a bed without having it overheat. It would also be nicer to use when it's on your lap.

Is there any particular reason why the parts that heat up are not placed in the back of the display?
Designing for SpaceTime, Building in No Time by Matt Jones, Doppir
I have heard the argument about particularly java being a horrible language for teaching CS, and that it gives you terrible habits. I've heard it both here and other places - so it's most probably right.

Not being a seasoned programmer I don't quite understand why. Would it be possible for someone to explain the reasoning behind this?
I find that the articles linked in the comments are a lot more interesting than the actual article - which seems a little thin.
doesn't this highlight the fact that if a new user comes to the site and can't find the answer to his/her question he/she must ask it again?
The problem may be that the growth of users and, it follows, submissions is independent from the growth of HN-worthy postings. That is, there isn't enough good content for everyone to make good contributions.

As more "poor" submissions are made, the "mediocre" submissions begin to look better and the community standards are lowered.
I'm currently going through some real problems with workspace quality at the office. We're growing too quickly, and I think given the real estate market and general state of the economy, corporate level management is a little hesitant to start going after new office space.

I see things like this and really believe them, but wow, I wish I could just buy a good workspace in a box, bring it in, and set it up like a tent in the middle of the loud open office.
apt-cache show emacs22-el

Installed-Size: 13080

The wonders of emacs are embodied for the most part in the most primitive Lisp dialect still in widespread use. Emacs Lisp doesn't even have lexical scoping, and it's still amazing.

Not that I have anything against C, when it's used to bootstrap a Lisp implementation, at least.
A review of CustomerFriendly.org
Irony of the day: Student honor code turns out to be plagiarized.
"I think software/web startups are basically international now. It's all one big market. Now all we need to do is explain this to the governments."

But there is a big difference between applications and their usage in certain international markets. Even if web applications are international, many apps are mainly focused on a North American/ Western European market.
I'm interested in your critique but it seems to me you've misrepresented two of his points.

#2 compares Lisp's minimalism to any language with more complicated syntax, not just C/C++. So I don't think this insight is "common to almost all high-level languages". (The idiosyncracies he mentions are from Ruby and Python.)

#3 isn't about Visual Studio's memory usage, it's about it being slow [1]. When I work in C#, many times a day VS is unresponsive enough to break my flow, so much so that I go off and check a website like this one (it's better than sitting there feeling angry). This is disastrous in a programming tool, so I don't think the author is being precious.

(There's also a deeper point to be made here, which is that the ultra-interactiveness of Lisp and Smalltalk environments is so different from what one experiences in the likes of Visual Studio that it makes a qualitative difference in one's programming.)

There may even be a little more to #1 than you give him. "In Lisp it feels like types are a tool I can employ when I need it" refers not just to static-vs-dynamic typing but also to the fact that one can easily write functions without having to make up types to hang them on (i.e. programs don't have to be organized into object models). That's not true of all high-level languges.

I share your desire to read more knowledgeable and useful writing on this topic. But I did like the post because it's clearly coming from real experience.

[1] Admittedly, much of this slowness is due to the add-in bizarrely known as Resharper. But that's Visual Studio's fault too - for being so backward and provincial that it needs a humongous third-party workaround to achieve bare tolerability even compared to Java.
Interesting.

If you're talking about books my experience is the opposite, for me there is definitely a correlation between reading habits and girlfriend potential. It has however changed with the years, when I was 17 the first thing I would look at was a girls boobs, now it's more what books she's reading. So it might be related to age.
int. students graduate with 44% of STEM (Science, Tech, Eng., Math.) degrees
Whoa. Striking difference. It's almost like YouTube... I don't think comments can get worse than YouTubian ones.
This article is dead on. I can esp. identify with the passage about "perceived productivity" versus "accomplishment" in the work place.
Ola Bini: Meta-level thinking
My guess would be balance. Putting all those parts in the display might make it top heavy.
Well, I want to avoid insulting, e.g., my former co-author, a neurosurgeon who also does oncological research... but I don't think your analogy is bad at all.

It's generally true that the skills, the approach, and the techniques of surgeons and researchers are completely different. Surgery is a specialty. For example, I've had the head of surgical oncology at a very prestigious hospital tell me that he doesn't know much about chemotherapy -- there are other experts for that. And none of those clinical guys are necessarily experts in the causes of cancer, nor in its rate of incidence.

The stereotype, of course, is that every surgeon thinks that being a surgeon makes you an expert in everything. Sometimes that mold fits: Tremendous self-confidence is almost a requirement for being a great surgeon, and the side effect can be... an excess of confidence. And sometimes the mold is unfair. The field I briefly worked in -- antiangiogenesis -- was founded by the late Judah Folkman, a famous surgeon who did his even-more-famous research as his second job. Folkman had to spend a lot of years gathering data before other researchers were convinced that he wasn't just another surgeon with delusions of grandeur. But, as it happens, he wasn't.

In the end, you've got to show the data, and it has got to survive real criticism. That's the metric.
Could you elaborate on your experience? You very rarely hear anything bad about lisp, so it would be interesting to hear more from someone who has had a bad experience with it.

There is probably no perfect language, and every one has its good and bad sides - it would be great to hear more about the bad sides of lisp. Simply because the arguments are never heard. I'm assuming that there are bad sides of course :-)
Given that this guy's main complaint with C#/.NET (as opposed to VS) is essentially that it allows the designer of a library to enforce hiding of the implementation (see http://ryepup.unwashedmeme.com/blog/2008/02/13/brief-list-of...) I'm not sure the rest is worth taking seriously.
point taken. Perhaps, since they operate within one users photos, it is still doable (both ESP players get to see the list of known persons)? Would be interesting to see how many different persons they can manage for one person's photos.
http://www.jwz.org/tent-of-doom/
I don't accept your premise that the content downloaded on Torrent networks would otherwise not be paid for. So I'm going to go with, "the producers of content are hurt".
Best argument yet for telecommuting.

4 hours output for 11 hours input (including lunch & commute), or

8 hours output for 8 hours input

Your choice, boss. Are you a good enough manager to double (or triple) output for free?
i said when it wouldn't be paid for anyway, then it doesn't hurt anyone.

this is obviously common because people download more stuff than they could afford.
Correction: not on MetaFilter.

http://www.metafilter.com/70350/Turning-writing-into-a-conve...

On the other hand, it's not entirely surprising MetaFilter users would dislike this one. The point about the pretentious subtype of DH0 was inspired by MetaFilter comment threads.
1980's cartoons: "The group is always right...the complainer is always wrong."
So your argument is, even though a significant fraction of the market acquires a movie for free (the "vast good" the torrent networks do, in your view), the downloads don't depress the market value of the movie. In other words, when supply goes to "infinite", demand is unaffected.

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
+10 for Python
+1 for Nutch
+1 for Hadoop
+1 for Amazon EC2

I think you have bundled two things (crawler and parser (or may be scraper)) into one term : crawler.

Beautiful soup is ok. Give html5lib a try (on google code) - but at some point you are going to have to hack the parser, but that depends on what kind of parsing you want to do.
Q&A with Mozilla’s John Lilly on 10 years of Mozilla and the future of browsers
No, the point of high-level languages is that you exchange speed for simplicity and power.
I think we're speaking different languages (despite the fact that it appears we're both speaking English). :)

I know you can reduce development time using a high level language to solve problems like this. So do you. And now so does he because we told him. No need to have him waste time proving it for himself.

And to be 100% clear when I said "efficient" I mean efficient as relative to life/goal achievement. I did not mean efficient as relative to CPU time or memory usage. One of my assumptions is that if this guy implements something successful in Python he'll be able to hire or partner with someone who has a real engineering background and can make "it" go fast using every trick in the book.
You forgot the words "the illusion of".
The hottest part is typically the CPU, northbridge, or GPU. The CPU is connected to the northbridge, which is connected to the GPU and RAM. These connections need to be extremely short, which is why these parts are placed in physical proximity. You'd basically have to put the entire motherboard back there, which is going to cause some very interesting engineering problems.

As a side note, amichall, I notice that of your last 30 posts, two were about your startup, and 17 were Ask YC posts which, frankly, seemed pretty random. You might want to start trying for quality over quantity.
If he used an editor that auto-indented parens, he would probably be using an editor that had M-x forward-sexp and M-x backward-sexp too, so the debugging wouldn't be a problem.

Still, 18-19 close parens sounds excessive. The source for ourdoings.com has 1 place with 9 close parens in a row, 4 places with 8, and 7 with 7. That's in 13KLOC.
Looks like posting on digg is like spitting into the ocean. What's the point?
If you are willing to do YC why not apply and do it. Successful founders have been through much more insurmountable obstacles before, why restrict yourself at the first hurdle.

As a UK founder in YC i can say that the move to the valley is really worth it and you've got to do whatever it takes to succeed.
I'm curious: could you run a heat sink from the CPU/GPU back through the case? Many metals are excellent conductors: if one part gets hot, it all gets hot. It seems like you could use this to radiate heat away from the hot parts and then sink it to an area with better ventilation.
Percent of population with a college degree, by country
Addressing your points in the opposite order:

#3 may be true for C# development; I read a lot of C#, but don't write it. But I did spend 4 years writing a significant amount of systems C++ code in VC++, and --- at least 8 years ago --- VC++ was significantly better than any comparable C environment.

We can get into a tit-for-tat on it versus, e.g. GCC, but I feel like one way to lose a programming environment shoot-out is to imply that Microsoft half-asses that part of the business.

Regarding #2, you seem to be sticking up for the author's implication that Ruby has "complex" syntax compared to Lisp. Clearly, most languages have more "idiosyncracies" (here defined as: "notation of any sort") than Lisp. That doesn't make Lisp's austerity an interesting lesson to take to other languages; it is, in fact, the major failure of Lisp.

There is a notion, unaddressed in the original post but far more important than any of that post's insights, that obsessively regular syntax is crucial to metaprogramming. Even defined down to "true macros", this is simply folk wisdom: you can get "Lisp-style macros" out of any language that gives you access to an abstract syntax tree.

Finally, call the two "mainstream" high level languages Ruby and Python (relegating Perl and PHP to uh, different, uh, categories). Both share the type system the author appreciates in Lisp.
This is starting to sound like that fantasy everybody not-quite-technical-enough has about how someday software will be just dragging and dropping little boxes on the screen, and everybody can do it! As it turns out, drag & drop doesn't seem to work too well for much of software development, but the idea of software being _really_ easy to develop and deploy seems to be coming to fruition. The best part is that it's coming from the geeks, not the guys who want LabVIEW, so I think it's actually going to, y'know, work well for geeks. Here's to Saasaas!
Thanks for this. Really appreciate the detailed response. This is basically what I was looking to do, but rather than re-invent the wheel was looking for something that already existed. Thank you for your time and thanks to everyone so far who has commented - it has really helped
Most people like their laptops to be able to close. The hinge is already mostly full with power and video cables for the LCD, as well as cables for any other hardware in the display such as a webcam or microphone. Now you want to thread a heatsink through there? That's a product recall just waiting to happen.

Once you get the heat into the display, that's not an issue; LCDs do great with heat unless it's hot enough to melt plastic. The problem is getting the heat there.
Thanks for that suggestion. Will have a good look at it.
Hi there. I think I've decided we need to build our own, mainly as what we're wanting to do is quite specific - monitoring of sites for keywords and really we should understand,to a degree, this technology. Happy to share if you end up heading down the Python route. If there is anyone else on here who is doing crawling/data mining then maybe we could share ideas, help each other somehow :) My email is in my profile
Thanks. I owe you six minutes.
Thanks John. I'll do that. Your resume looks awesome mind. Not sure how much we'd be able to help you!
The problem is, good office space is expensive. Just as it's cheaper to eat mass-market junk than to shop for organic food, it's cheaper to pack your employees into veal-fattening pens, turn on the bad fluorescent lighting, and imagine that having everyone together in one place will result in magical "teamwork" synergy that makes up for the pain.

I have a theory that good office space is an adaptive luxury afforded only to small companies: just as large and small animals have to develop special anatomical features to overcome the surface-area/volume ratio problem, large companies have to make sacrifices that accommodate for their size.

Even Microsoft and Google have adopted cube-farm mentalities as they've grown, and presumably, they know something about programmer happiness...
I've Got a Product Just for You!
At least one reason is that it hides too much from you.

I started out in Java. It really got me into programming - I could make all these pretty little windows and graphics and do everything else quickly and easily. But, as I later found out, at the expense of that ease came my knowledge.

Example: The ArrayList class. It's a dynamic array. The LinkedList class. It's a linked list. They're fundamentally different. But in Java, they look and act pretty much the same, and they're already available in the standard library. The learning programmer doesn't need to know how they work or anything.

Same thing with memory. In Java, you get no feel for what memory is being used, or how it's being managed. In C, you're the master (and the slave), and you yourself have to manage and take care of memory and pointers. It tells you much more about how computers actually WORK when you're programming in C.

In summary, Java just gives you too much. It hides you from the raw details. This is great for a production purpose language - but for a teaching language, what could POSSIBLY be worse, when the intent is to reveal and NOT hide all the small details?
You're Not a Programmer, We Won’t Pay You That Much
There are a lot of cheap office spaces that are great to work in. The trouble is, they tend to be small.

For example, I suspect Yahoo was paying more per square foot for the grim cube farm we moved to after getting bought than Viaweb was for our cheery offices on the top floor of a triple-decker in Harvard Sq.

I think the problem with big company offices is that the office space available in large quantities tends to be grim. It seems like you have to pay a fortune to make office space both pleasant and large.

The problem may not be impossible to solve, though. I doubt many big companies have tried to make offices that were large, pleasant, and cheap. There might be solutions if someone looked for them.
Am I the only one who tries to create a new app on heroku and it just hangs at creating it? I know it might be booting up an instance or something (?) so I've been patient for up to 15 minutes but nothing happens.