skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Kamaelia & the future of python frameworks
Maybe ESR was making numbers out of thin air?
I really enjoyed your essay.

I can't help but think that if my kid asked if the turkey wanted to die that I would want to take him or her in the other room, away from all of the other parents and explain to them how turkeys are grown for eating by farmers.

I would want my child to be able to choose not to eat the turkey if they thought it was immoral.
"Probably the biggest lie told in schools, though, is that the way to succeed is through following "the rules." In fact most such rules are just hacks to manage large groups efficiently."

beautiful.
Does the OpenSSL bug mean vendors are bad for security?
How to Make Google AdSense Ads Invisible [major flaw]
You guys should think about gearing alternate versions of your services towards education. I really wish there existed hubs where universities could upload their lecture videos/slides. It'd be a great service to the students, and to people who are interested in learning various subjects and want a classroom environment where professors can chime in with their advice.
Another argument for starting your own startup.
I remember at 6 years old, my parents had answered that question and I became so terrified of death that I almost couldn't sleep at night...

I really don't know how I'm going to answer this question to my kids...
I agree - that's actually what our original plan was, although we decided to target the general case first.
kurt Vonnegut was rather famously against the use of semicolons. it made me rethink their usage. these days i'm more likely to use two sentences to convey the same idea.
You don't create a culture
Let N be the number of great scientists. It would be sensible for the curriculum to include the n greatest scientists, where n << N. Since Marie Curie always gets included in the textbooks, we can conclude either that she ranks as one of the n greatest scientists, even for very small n, or that the reasons for her inclusion go beyond her scientific accomplishments. Considering how few history textbooks mention (for example) Euler, Gauss, Lagrange, Laplace, Lavoisier, Faraday, Dirac, Onsager, or Landau---whose scientific accomplishments all rival or surpass Curie's---it's safe to conclude (as Paul did) that the textbook writers include some non-scientific factors when deciding which scientists to include.

Let's face it: almost no one reading this knows who the hell Onsager and Landau are---but you probably should. (They were both giants of 20th-century physics.) No one disputes that Marie Curie was a great scientist, but that's not enough to account for her ubiquity in the textbooks. And since the most significant diff between Curie and Landau is gender, it's accurate to say that Curie gets included because she was female.
Redundancy: Good vs. Evil
As Walter Bright points out here, redundancy is often thought to be a bad thing when it comes to programming languages. But in fact, well-designed redundancy can dramatically improve productivity by uncovering errors early in the development process. Redundancy not only helps find errors, it helps produce better error messages, and helps the maintenance programmer in understanding the intent of the code.
http://maps.staticrooster.com/

GPS overlay data on maps with geosynced photos.
Like personal Google maps w/ panoramio.
Having grown up in Manhattan myself, pg's description of kids who "seemed to have lost their virginity at an average of about 14 and by college had tried more drugs than I'd even heard of" doesn't ring particularly true for me. I knew some people like that, but I knew far more who were nothing like that. I don't mean to imply that the people I knew were a representative sample, I'm just not convinced the people he knew were either.
So was I. Maybe they're one of the four groups who declined being listed?
Yeah, this seems like a good thing to be able to turn off - I don't want the websites I visit to share information between each other.
It is strongly recommended that all cryptographic key material which has been generated by OpenSSL versions starting with 0.9.8c-1 on Debian systems is recreated from scratch.

grrrrrrrrr

I hope rapidSSL.com will re-sign my new SSL certificate for free. I just had my latest cert issued on April 28th.
The rss feed to subscribe to a search is useful. I want to know when people talk about my company on Twitter, so I subscribe to the search results for some Flaptor-related queries on our Twitter Search. I don't care so much for what was said a week ago, only about the new results.
I find it funny, if also a bit sad, how strongly certain societal groups try to spin Einstein's views about religion decades after his death. For insight, I offer a bit more of his text around that tiny little quote that is so often used out of context.

"The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

Though I have asserted above that in truth a legitimate conflict between religion and science cannot exist, I must nevertheless qualify this assertion once again on an essential point, with reference to the actual content of historical religions. This qualification has to do with the concept of God. During the youthful period of mankind's spiritual evolution human fantasy created gods in man's own image, who, by the operations of their will were supposed to determine, or at any rate to influence, the phenomenal world. Man sought to alter the disposition of these gods in his own favor by means of magic and prayer. The idea of God in the religions taught at present is a sublimation of that old concept of the gods. Its anthropomorphic character is shown, for instance, by the fact that men appeal to the Divine Being in prayers and plead for the fulfillment of their wishes." (whole text is available at http://einsteinandreligion.com/scienceandreligion2.html , and I strongly recommend it.)

This brings us back to the issue of lies. That quote is so often used to state that Einstein was religious later in life, while less than 2 paragraphs away, he completely eviscerates the idea of personal god. Obviously, someone here has told a lie of omission. Was it you, or the one who first told you about the quote? Does this, in any way, lessen your trust in the truthfulness of that source? Will you now be going around correcting other religious people when they use that quote to assert that Einstein believed in a god later in his life?
as far as i know, no one has done it or has a good way to. all the studies like this suffer from this problem. i think the researchers should be a lot more careful with what they say their study shows or not.

what can be done is to use arguments to determine which explanation is better.

i think the most important argument is this one:

we can explain how culture/memes (triggered by some detectable but unimportant effect of genes) would be able to affect intelligence, cause ADHD, and many other things. that is not a problem.

no one has a good explanation of how genes have complex and lasting effects on human minds and personalities.

of course for both points further elaboration is needed. but anyway, no one has made a strong case the other way.

this may be of interest: http://settingtheworldtorights.com/node/269

edit: regarding 99%, i don't think it's a problem. why wouldn't highly adapted memes be able to cause effects reliably?
Sounds like a great article. I plan to read this later, after a few rounds of Guitar Hero III.
This is one place where Unit Tests help nicely. If the group were using Test First, then the zealots would've had to read and revise tests before they rewrote code. They would've been able to read the test code and would've known about the business logic requirements. If they didn't do that, then failing tests would've clued them in.
Looks like everyone has one these days :)
http://terraminds.com/twitter/
Good point on Mary Gates, though my material point was that only Bill Gates was going to get the contract. Any one else would have faced significant challenges. Also, given the fact that Bill was in his early twenties at the time, I suspect, and I think you do too, that those conversations were anything but casual.

Additionally, IBM has been a services company for over a hundred years. With the greatest service rendered at the Nuremberg trials in my opinion. Hardware has been a way for them to sell services for quite some time. That said, a review of their historical financials, will bear out the fact that they have made far more money on service and support than hardware. That is true if you zoom in per year as well by the way. The computer industry emerged around the 1950s, and IBM was the guy selling the most of them, it's true. But, take a look into their training, service and support contracts if you want to see some serious revenue growth charts.

As to your last point, it is the same point made by Microsoft fanboys in the 80s. It is, in a way, the original 'long tail' argument. It has merit, in that companies that can monopolize the long tail, as Microsoft has done, will make a lot of money. But the fact remains that even with its 'long tail' monopolization, Microsoft still generates less revenue than IBM. FAR less. Why? Because the smaller companies are not willing to pay as much as larger organizations. Which is why they choose Microsoft, it is cheaper, and it is good enough.

Now your assertion is that they will choose Google in the future, because it will be cheaper still, and good enough.

Consider, however, what happens as these customers get more and more frugal. Suppose everyone on the long tail thinks that your product should not cost as much as Microsoft's. Or let's suppose that they believe that everything you get over the internet should be ... say ... free. The amount of money that the monopolizer can generate goes down. But IBM's service and support contracts stay the same price for the big guys! That's the beauty of being IBM. You always win in the end.
Interesting. So I wonder if exceptions are the programming language analogue of swearing?
Create a first draft and iterate rapidly really ends up being a philosophy for almost anything that can be lumped into "design". It's a great message to espouse.
it looks like it's saying they only tested twins that shared the same households. that might have an effect on the results (by not testing the same genes in diverse environments.) though i can't grasp the statistics at a glance
So obvious, and yet so difficult for bigger companies to get right.
http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...
I spend 90% of my time in Emacs already.

I've learned a few firefox shortcuts this morning though, and that is helping!
I can't remember dialogue, generally. What I seem to be able to remember best are things that surprised me. What I remember about that conversation was simply my surprise at my father contradicting a teacher. But I don't remember what about, for example, and I only know it was 6th grade because I remember the teacher.
FBML?? FBJS ?? WTF , I thought the internet was about standards.
I agree that there is right and wrong, even though I'm not religious. I agree you can try to teach your children right and wrong. I disagree that just because you have good intentions and are trying to teach good values, that this means that what you are telling your children is truthful.

Most parents exaggerate the danger of sex, drugs (including alcohol), and video games (these have taken the place of rock and roll). There's a good reason for this - children probably wouldn't believe you if you said "Well, these can be good in moderation, but you don't have the judgement to tell what moderation is yet." So you might be lying with good intentions, and good effects, but you're still lying.

PS: I can understand how you'd feel attacked by someone implying a belief in God which you hold dear is equivalent to belief in the easter bunny. Instead, imagine that atheists see your belief in God as equivalent to belief in Ganesh, the Indian elephant god. If people tried to justify things in terms of the will of Ganesh, you would look at them somewhat strangely and would certainly not be swayed by their arguments. That's how atheists feel about your God: the way you feel about every other god but yours.
Personally, I love finding solutions to problems that are new to me. I will work for 20 hours straight on a coding problem, but once I actually solve the problem I lose all interest. If, in the course of finding the solution, I didn't fully implement it, there's a solid chance that if I'm not given a deadline for finishing that implementation it will never be done; I'll have already moved on to the next interesting puzzle.
All Streets: Map of the US showing nothing but streets
I love the way Omnisio works. I have lots of seminars I give so I'll be using this a lot in the near future.
Slowing Economy Finally Catches Up to Online Ads
Yes I saw that. But how does it follow that he has to point out "in the year 2008"? When not given a particular time period, I always assume an author's example is meant to refer to the present. (Maybe I am not understanding your point).
Interesting read, but I didn't agree with this:

"'Couldn't I be more like that kid if I put my mind to it?'
No. You couldn't. That kid will grow up to be a powerful politician or business leader. You won't."

Procrastination != success or lack of success.
Washington Post, TechCrunch Mum on Syndication Deal
I found this essay (http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html) very helpful in understanding what "heritability" really means, and why it's so hard to control studies like this.

The short version is: think about how heritable something like "number of arms" would appear in a study like this. It would appear that variance in arm count is 100% environmental, since the only people who don't have two arms lost one in an accident of some kind. Arm count is therefore not controlled by genes!
Quoting ratio: 1:2. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=151561)
Mostly because for monolithic companies process and procedure are more important than culture for keeping the wheels greased.

In the same vein, you'd have to be pretty naive to think that culture at places like Google, Apple and Microsoft (to an extent) can remain how they are without some steering and work by higher-ups to foster said culture. Maybe it wasn't forced to begin with, but there is certainly an upkeep cost as employee numbers rise.
It's definitely planned. Here's an interview with Zmievski about it: http://www.fosdem.org/2008/interview/andrei+zmievski
Only if you don't plan to have employees.
Using jQuery to Produce Rich User Interfaces
Probably the biggest lie we tell kids, is that it is bad/immoral to lie.

Being a little older now, I have to conclude that this is a lie. Lying is like a knife. It is neither good nor bad; it can be used to do good or bad. This is such an important lesson and I really I wish my parents had been willing to teach it to me, instead of making me learn it the hard way by myself like everyone else.

Fundamentally lying is just a negotiating tactic. All that other emotional baggage is unnecessary.
A friend of mine assures me that being stabbed in the chest feels like a solid punch, the kind that knocks the wind out of you.

I'm glad to take his word for it.
you're right - the most ubiquitous standard on the internet is "WTF"
ESR writes small (but useful) UNIX tools. He ain't no analyst (for a big thing).
I don't think anyone is trying to deny that Curie gets a little more attention in the school curriculum and the popular mind just because she's a woman, but I think the point asnyder was making is that she at least has the distinction of being a great scientist, unlike George Washington Carver who (and I had to look him up, since having not been educated in the US I'd never really heard of this guy) doesn't seem to be in that category.

Oh, and be careful with statements like "almost no one reading this knows who the hell Onsager and Landau are". There's a surprisingly large number of physicists reading this board.
I guess that makes me a modern theologian when I say that the semantic web is already here, it's just not as impressive and dramatic as people seem to expect it to be.
Procrastination != success or lack of success.

I don't think that was the point of making that comment. I took it to mean that if you really are a chronic procrastinator, you probably aren't going to end up in a position where you will need to be super-organized and disciplined. You may be the guy that develops that cool app that launches a start-up into success, but you probably won't end up as the CEO of the large company that is created as a result.

That's just my take, and I'm not speaking from a strong position of experience or anything, haha.
If goto is good enough for Linus, it's good enough for me.

http://kerneltrap.org/node/553/2131

Then again, I don't imagine there are many Linus-caliber developers working in PHP. This could get ugly.
I agree about the author's time being the default context. I just suggested the specifics because pg was so concerned about timelessness.
See for example http://www.ncsu.edu/chass/philo/GRE%20Scores%20by%20Intended...
And Perlmongers reckon it was all downhill from there.
I think you're being voted down because you've pissed off retarded folks by comparing them to the PHP userbase.
The worst things about drugs is that many people die "bringing pleasure" to the unfortunate fools that use them. I will not be lying about drugs to my kid. They'll know the WHOLE truth, believe me!
Well, this is just anecdote, but I'm a 25-year old from North Carolina where in elementary school we did spend at least part of February (Black History Month) doing a unit on GWC.
Associative Search and the Semantic Web: The Next Step Beyond Natural Language Search
Shop Class as Soulcraft.  Maybe software too?
I love this software, it's syncing with the start-up school was perfect timing.

They should be working on some deals with seminars and other conventions to get their videos online.

This is a good step forward towards open information.
Craigslist Countersues eBay due to "Craigslist Killer"
Bishop c4 to f7. Check!

Can't wait to see how the game unfolds. However, I'm confident the only true winners will be the lawyers.
cough standford edcorner interviews
My love story with Yahoo
breathtaking? not. just more like Apple OSX. Yawn.
At which school? In my experience, the quality of graduate students varies even more widely than the quality of undergrads, and is more closely correlated to the quality of the school.
I'm running Ubuntu 8.04, and the updated packages came down the pipe this morning. That's a nasty issue. I'm glad I didn't have anything depending on my keys.
Interesting read.

"The end result of all this is what finally shipped: the lowest common denominator, the simplest and least controversial option."

This is probably the absolutely worst way of creating a good interface.
One time I called my friend with some land in Texas, his 7 year old daughter picked up the phone. I asked "Can I speak with you Dad?", She said "sure he is feeding the chickens". I asked, "Do you name the chickens?". She replied "No, because we eat them, they taste good". Very innocent, cute response, from a very well adjusted kid.
If the function had a descriptive name then its purpose would be even clearer, and the calling code would be more readable too.

Nothing against unit tests, but I don't think they should serve as comments (which is more or less what you suggest).
Either

a. I won't have employees or

b. They will follow standards.

Either way, I'll never have the problems in the original article.

We'll be far too busy addressing issues to be arguing over
details. I have never tolerated that from employees and I don't imagine I ever will.
No; fixed that too. BTW, it saves space on comment threads if people tell me about typos by email (my username @ycombinator.com).
congrats. I wish it didn't lag my laptop as much though. Regardless, cool piece of tech. Exactly what I was looking for (plus some) and I'm sure it will improve in upcoming iterations.

Any advice: which is better quality video Blip, Google Video or YouTube? In my mind YouTube is out of the question b/c of the limited upload size. Not good for hour long+ lectures.
They are certainly highly correlated.
Introducing passenger for easy Rails deployment
Tom Moertel derives the Y combinator in Ruby
I think a better question would be

"How do I improve the culture?"
or
"How do I maintain this culture, now that we have it?"
nice - a small but important distinctions, I'm going to use something similar.
Note that it applies as much to Cambrian House as well as the startups it attempts to build.
"I find it funny, if also a bit sad"

"certain societal groups try to spin"

"tiny little quote that is so often used out of context"

"This brings us back to the issue of lies"

"so often used to state"

"completely eviscerates"

"Obviously, someone here has told a lie"

"Was it you"

"one who first told you"

"lessen your trust in the truthfulness"

"Will you now be going around correcting"

My nominee for "Bait of the Year". Nice try.
I'm not sure that I would say "vendors are bad for security", but I think the practice of distributions applying a load of patches to upstream software is very unwise. Patches are warranted when they are backporting upstream changes or for integration with the rest of the distribution, but random changes (as this one was) shouldn't be made by the distributor -- they should be fed back to the upstream authors, who are in the best position to assess whether or not the change is sane. Furthermore, when a distribution changes something but doesn't feed those changes back upstream, it creates incompatibilities between different distributions of the same upstream package. For example, in the past the FreeBSD PostgreSQL port had all sorts of wacky patches (like changing the block size, or using the ICU library) that weren't accepted upstream, which lead to exactly this problem. Although the patches were optional, this is just not a game that vendors should be in.
I'd rather not malign the school. Let's just say they're overrun by populations of students that are underqualified - a condition I think is common among schools not in the "top tier".
We aren't talking about the users of this board, we are talking about the average American who went through the public education system. 99.9% of them have heard of George Washington Carver, but not of Onsager and Landau.
What's your idea?
Interested in sharing some web or internet ideas? Here are mine:

idea 1) a system for collecting the realtime browsing behaviour of a group of people (eg YC-news readers via a Firefox plugin) and then displaying stats of popular and fast-gaining sites and urls as submitted by the plugin. A name for this system could be: eg 'swarmlinks' and group owners would link their group to a particular site for those stats to then be displayed on the site, with the group owner also promoting participation of the plugin from their site visitors.

idea 2) site widget enabling anyone to enlist themselves to help develop any site that displays the widget with a notification sent to the enlister once a certain threshold of other people have also enlisted or once a certain number of those enlisters have forthwith become active developers.

How the first idea came about:
I just think the information would be useful in discovering new sites and learning about different communities.

How the second idea came about: would create an alternative to Sourceforge for helping people decide where to focus their development time.
I prefer "Working at love" to "Falling in love" - it addresses both of those "lies"

But that takes out quite a bit of the romanticism out of it, doesn't it?
a good point, essay gets downgraded a bit due to fact that the author does not have direct experience, but like startups, just because you've done one does not make you good at it, and many of the most interesting are first timers (see facebook/google/and most yc co.'s). This essay would be better if he was expecting and thus thinking a lot about being a parent.
awesome insight.