skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There must be dozens of books named "elementary number theory", is this one somehow special?
Sketchy outline of the first half:

Zuckerberg: Facebook disrupted a bunch of industries with social-graph-enabled mini-takes on stuff (Photos, Events), launched platform to allow other startups to similarly make social-graph-enabled stuff (Zynga), and now the next step is to directly promote Facebook-dependent startups with this new partnership.

PG: Why startups are the ones getting things done:

1. Sheer quantity of startups

2. Startups have nothing to lose

3. Startups are desperate for attention

4. Startups are poor => do things themselves

5. ?

6. Large companies require justification before trying
something

7. ?

8. Startups are a self-selecting group of people

9. Motives (from least successful to most successful): greed, fear of failure, urge to "hack the world".

Then Q&A.

I left out what I couldn't understand from the recording the first time, so someone please go ahead and fill in the gaps.
Aloe Vera the Great Healer
I actually clicked on the page, following my girlfriend Facebook.

But I was protected due to the ever useful Adblock extension. Probably the best plugin out there, the easiest method to fire and forget about annoying web elements.
Rising Tide Studios Adult WebCam Modeling Jobs, Work From Home Adult WebCam Jobs
Maybe we need fractional clicks. If you click on a 0% opaque button then you don't get a click. If it's 1% opaque, then you get 1% of a click event. :-)

Actaully... I started writing that as a joke but now that I think about it, if the browser embedded the opacity value of the clicked element in the GET or POST header, the webserver receiving the click could set the standard themselves.

Alternately, since facebook has lots of resources, facebook could make a request to the referring site themselves, render the page and determine if there are any shenanigans going on with z-ordering or opacity automatically. You could look at all of the css applied to all of the element affecting those pixels.

No... this is all crazy. Just pick a value like 30% and disallow clicks on anything less.
I'd be guessing it's about promotion of their platform
What struck me the most was when he spoke about Java possibly borrowing string immutability from Python and then the realization that Python is an older language than Java.
This really appears to be spam for a blog and gradebook software.
Steve Jobs's eye for talent is just as keen as his eye for design. It's an absolutely critical skill and has been an essential component of Apple's success. It's also a skill that too often goes unappreciated. Unlike most rockstar CEOs, he doesn't surround himself with people he can dominate and control.

Indeed, the story of Jony Ive reflects this: toiling in relative obscurity before Jobs' return, Steve immediately recognizes his talent and promotes him aggressively.
Off-topic, but I'm curious about the phrase "I could care less". Here in Australia, the phrase is "I couldn't care less". Is "I could care less" an American usage?
rule number one: never negotiate in person (especially if you're inexperienced)
But Facebook has a killer distribution platform, which Paypal doesn't.

The Chrome Appstore is another competitor (which, ironically is complementary to PayPal because of Google's complete incompetence in not rolling out Google Checkout world wide)
Because () doesn't call a method, it's simply used where a method call occurs. To call a callable object, you use #call or (as mentioned by epochwolf) #[], the latter of which I personally detest.

It's fun to contrast this with Lua, by the way.
Steve Jobs should not follow this rule.
Yeah, I know quite a few people who attempt to "catch up" on Twitter every day. These are, often, the same people who complain that they can't keep up with 100+ feeds in Google Reader either (and are incredulous that some of us maintain Inbox Zero :-)).

I think those people fear missing something. Mostly because I used to be in that group. With age, though, I realized a) that almost nothing is that important in the grand scale of life that it matters if I miss it, and b) if something is important, it'll bubble through another way anyway.
Does someone want to donate that guy a CSS file? Talk about making good content unreadable. Just a simple margin:20px would help!
if ruby is an extreme to the left, and java an extreme to the right, then python is also extreme to the left. The difference between python and ruby in dynamicity is really small.

Python is not in the middle of ruby and java. Python is virtually on top of ruby.
They must have applied their revenue-algorithm to News ... the one that always gives me shitty content farms and scrapers monetized with Google ads when I search.
Pit: command-line project manager that integrates with Git
and a model can very easily be a hypothesis which can be tested. I.e. it's far more like a theory than a thought experiment.
Facebook fails to alert police on child porn
This is a hot topic in modern (in the philosophical sense of modern, not necessarily contemporary) philosophy - the debate over what some will call "compatabilism." IMHO, the rationality of free will hinges on the definition of freedom. There is the freedom of not being a rock, and then the freedom of dreams. There is free like free beer, free like free speech, and free like the opposite of slave. Some are rational and some are, by definition, not.
What about forcing embedding sites to load a FB JS file, such that a standard Facebook confirm dialog pops up? This way the user doesn't navigate away from the site but some level of confirmation is made.
His point holds only if the society never converts to polygamy. This is true in a period of time during British history in which it was written. However, you would assume that over the period of one generation, if there were consistently more women than (suitable) men, the society would begin to accept multiple marriage, first tacitly, then finally explicitly. Or, as we experience in today's society, single mothers. Once shunned, then accepted, now supported. In fact, because of the surplus that modern society now generates (and thus is able to support single mothers, for the most part) single mothers can succesfully raise a family. In a modern society with a surplus of women and a deficit of men, widespread single motherhood is more likely than polygamy. Thus, successful men are going to have multiple partners, but might not stick around to support them.
Interesting article. At Chicago State, the article certainly spins it such that it appears they deserve to be singled out.

However, a University's dropout rate is not a determining factor of its quality. Some schools are just purely harder than others. In fact, I would argue that schools should be failing students if they are not qualified to perform the jobs which the degrees say they do. If schools end up passing more students just to avoid being on the "dropout" list, we'll be seeing a lot more bridges being "engineered" that collapse during use.

For insight from a professor at CMU on why he wants to fail more students, see: http://vonahn.blogspot.com/2009/03/failing-students.html

Yes I took his class. Yes it kicked my ass. Yes it was hella fun.
The recommendations from html5boilerplate.com actually include this:

html { -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; }

My point being: be sure to read and understand resets/boilerplates before including them in your own code.
I doubt they're her teeth.
What Fat Ladies In Bikinis Taught Me About Investing
The text-shadow hack stopped working when Snow Leopard was released.

-webkit-font-smoothing seems to be a specific solution to the same problem.

via: http://orderedlist.com/our-writing/resources/html-css/thinni...
Is it really altruism or self-preservation?

If a society has rules where helping each other out increases the chance of survival, even if the ultimate purpose of survival, reproduction is disabled for whatever reason, won't the need to survive keep the 'altruistic' behavior going on?

'altruistic' behavior => high chances of survival => high chances of reproduction.

Now even if the downstream purpose is removed, unless there is an inner mechanism that says, "stop surviving because you have stopped reproducing" why would it stop doing things (altruistic behavior, in this case) that would keep its chance of survival high?

If there is such an inner mechanism, we would all die the moment our gonads dry up and not really live till 70s, 80s or 100s.

Its not always that animals or humans do things for others just because they want to help. They end up often "helping" others because they are forced to do and need to do so for their own survival, consider the feudal societies in the past.

The moment a queen bee is destroyed, some of the dormant females start being active regarding their reproduction cycles and compete to become the next queen bee. And its some secretions of the queen bee while its alive which keep the other females dormant regarding their reproduction capabilities and just keep servicing the queen bee.

I Wonder if the researchers considered this perspective?
Ask HN: What are my mathematical odds of being sued by Facebook and/or Apple?
I'm starting a company called FaceThyme (facethyme.com) and we're slated to launch in early October. The application we're building is neither a social network nor a mobile video communication tool. However, I'm nervous that two of the biggest bullies in tech will kill us before we get off the ground.

What are the odds of FaceThyme being sued by Facebook and/or Apple?
Well, theories must be stored in some representation, whether it's a configuration of neuron state, ink markings in a book, verbal descriptions in sound, etc. My position is that programs are just another representation.
Readability bookmarklet is your friend

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
My understanding regarding iOS responsiveness is that it leverages the GPU for many UI elements while Android does not, relying instead on the 2D Skia engine.

source:
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=6914
I've got zero sympathy for investors in this situation. If you look at the numbers, most of those talent acquisitions end up making investors 2 or 3 times their money in 12-24 months.

If investors don't like that return, then they should set their liquidation preference high enough to make whatever profit they want.

Of course, founders would be free to ignore anyone who's money is too expensive, too....
"jab hot search phrases into their prose until it becomes a bloody pulp"

I love this quote - it so accurately describes "white hat" SEO at its worst.
Facebook Withdraws Chat Support for Internet Explorer 6
That's been the biggest shock of parenthood to me : how mind-numbingly boring routine it is. It's an unpaid job because it's terrible work. Parenting is just a 24 hour routine of fighting entropy via an immature human.

It's the ultimate in taking a long view. Most investments will have paid off (or disappeared) several times by the time the investment in a child repays. A good investment of time and money in a child can pay off well, with personal and monetary fulfilment, but you've got to keep up with the time and money for 20 years with a child.

Many parents will disagree with this position, but it's rare to find one that doesn't really enjoy the time when the kids are in bed asleep.
Salvatore Sanfilippo Uses This
Good Housewife Guide
Amaderforum
With inflation, that's only doubled: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%24100%2C000+1984+%3D
Blow a seeding dandelion, and you get diaspora. Which is why the dandelion is their logo, and the asterisk is a very close approximation of that form
If you've configured your browser to override webpage-specified fonts with your choices, it seems to me that anti-aliasing is surely not going to be high on your list of concerns...
a company who wants to see your transcripts in the interview process

Sure, if you have no work experience. That's the case everywhere.

(Google is highly hype-oriented; not everyone there is Guido van Rossum. I worked at a company that Google bought. I had a coworker who started crying when my boss and I taught him what database transactions were and asked him to apply it to fix a race condition in our application. He still works at Google.)
Nexus One successor?
Today's print edition of the SF Chronicle has a tiny story (page D3) entitled "Android-Google device rollout." It says:

Huawei Technologies Co. said that next week it will introduce an Android 2.2 smart phone it developed jointly with Mountain View's Google Inc. The device will come preinstalled with the Android 2.2 system ... The phone, to be introduced next Thursday, also functions as a Wi-Fi router.

(I can't find this snippet anywhere on sfgate.com or via Google. What gives?)

This doesn't sound like another carrier-sponsored, locked-down phone; it sounds like a successor to the Nexus One. Anyone know anything about it?
It can't be. Until they make it available. Hence the verb usage of Open-sourced, an action they intend to do to the project. That is, they intend to change it from closed, and very private, to open.
"It feels faster for me" actually might be a decent form of decision-making. The bottleneck in software isn't user-input speed, so it's kind of moot. If people feel better using the keyboard for input, why not let them feel better?
I notice that you don't update the search results, any specific reason for not doing so (given that you call it a real time search)?
"Well, I think you are. How long do you think it will take to do this project? A month or two? I think a really good programmer like you could get it done in less than two months."

In my limited experience negotiating on fees for programming or selling software I've heard this line a few times. "You seem like a really good programmer, that program probably would have only taken you say 2 days, times that by an average hourly rate and thats the rate I'm willing to pay for the program and all source code".

Always a sign for me that things aren't going to go well.
Apple has trademarked FaceTime:
http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2010/06/apple-wa...

IANAL, but Apple's trademark seems to cover software as well as mobile devices.

Meanwhile, Facebook is trying to trademark "face": http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/26/trademark-face/

So I think the answer is: "pick another name". The question I'd ask, is if you have no relation to Facebook or FaceTime in the application and have no expectation to receive goodwill based on those apps, why would you want to have a similar name?
Guess Who Is Trying To Trademark The Word 'Face'?
That was a good article, Was it an excerpt from a book?

I can completely agree with the author's take on computer engineers. Coming from mechanical and industrial engineering background and getting into programming off late, the power to get instant gratification by writing code that works is so much more than in other fields.

In other fields like mech or ind, even if you know the solution, you have to work it out with a few dozen departments or people to get something to work right.

Recently one of the managers I take advice from told me he had to work for 5 years convincing people to get them to accept a very obvious design change. phew!!

Liked the sarcastic humor too!
How many single founder startups have been funded by YC?
I'm trying to convince myself that it's worth applying as a single founder. Everything I've seen says it's not worth even trying.

Can anyone convince me otherwise?
YCRFS 7: Applications of Facebook Instant Personalization
What I find interesting is how this is going to change the types of YC companies that will be funded, especially in the short term. One of the things I've noticed about past YC companies is how diverse they've been in terms of the markets/industries they're going after. This will largely change the focus of certain companies already funded as well as the types of applicants. Presumably YC has an upper limit of companies they can fund due to human capital restrictions, and if this means that they fund or focus more on companies focused on "transformative social experiences" this will mean that other incubators and angels that don't have the brand of YC may be able to market themselves/differentiate themselves from YC better.
great story. great insight into Jobs and Gates too, giving a glimpse of both in action in the same era, and dealing with the same issue.
Making great things is marketing. The first (and perhaps most important) part of marketing is understanding the, you know, market, and what products would be appropriate for it.

The pervasive Marketing==Advertising mindset is a little short-sighted.
In Haskell, indentation is significant (Python-style), and case is used to separate values from various special names.

values, keywords: all lowercase
modules, classes, types, constructors: initial capital

For example, it's impossible to declare a class named "string", or a value named "String".
Haskell I believe
Simply liking something does not let a developer get access to your friend list. You will have to give the app at least basic permission (aka "run/install", which will share your friend names and uids) or extended permissions will get you friend's feed, statuses,birthdays, contact details etc. But extended perms have really poor conversions, so most spammers don't go that far.

Only a matter of time before that gets clickjacked though.
When it got to the part where Andy was talking to Jobs and Jobs was trying to close a deal to buy Switcher, I could almost hear the click of Steve's Reality Distortion Field turning on. Also pictured him doing the hand-waving motion Kenobi did in Star Wars when doing the Jedi mind trick on stormtroopers. "These are not the droids you're looking for. One hundred thousand credits. The Jedi will not be taken advantage of. This little one is not worth your trouble."
No,

Your argument is more like a quack who prescribes magnetics for cancer.

When someone objects to the claim, quack say "well, prove your claim by showing you can heal the patient right now".

Taleb, Mandlebrot and a number of others have gone over the fallacious quality of EMH claims and it's been over a number of thread here, I don't have more time it now.
I'm not sure because I can't remember which startups only had one founder when we funded them, but I know there are 2/36 in the current batch and there were 3/26 in the previous one.

Both Xobni and Dropbox were single-founder startups initially.
There is little doubt in my mind more would get done. The question I have is would the right stuff get done?

I'm a coder by background. I know how interesting those pesky little problems can become, until they subsume the important things like getting a product delivered.

A good manager realizes the (limited) meetings are to ensure everybody is clear and focused on the same goal. A bad managers thinks meetings help achieve that goal.
And, I heard on NPR, has something like 40% unemployment of the young (18-25 years, I think?)
One of the DuPont factors for likelihood of confusion is similar or identical pronunciation or sound. Apple would have no trouble suing you and the legal precedent is easy to find. So yeah, pick another name.
Perhaps we're splitting hairs. But this doesn't sit right with me.

Consider what is meant by a thought experiment in popular literature. Take Einstein's elevator. Would you call that "Einstein's elevator theory?" Or is that a prediction based on the theory of equivalence?

Maybe in this vein a clear distinction is that a thought experiment is a proof discovery technique. It is working with heuristics and intuition. At the end there is something; a statement or prediction that seems right. But no matter how much intuition confirms it, in the physical sciences it needs to be tested and in the mathematical sciences it needs a formal proof. Beyond that, it is just another hypothesis. After that it leads to a theory.
iWeb, .Mac/MobileMe and to a lesser extent, iTunes (especially on Windows) are all not in the same league of quality as OS X, Safari, etc.
They seem sensitive to this concern. One of the points Bret made at the event was that they're changing things to ensure your users really are yours.
Og dreams of kernels
I'm surprised at the number of coders I know who got MBAs that just wound up coding again afterwards (just with more debt). In many situations, the (wo)man makes the MBA, not the other way around.

A person who is good with an MBA would likely be equally good without; the inverse holds true as well.
Discover Smalltalk.
Actually twas Arrington himself, and he wasn't entirely serious.
I think it's about doing outsourced R&D a little more explicitly than big software corps have been doing it already. Plus Zuckerberg prob likes the filtering aspect of YC and so wants to benefit a little more directly from that filter.
it sounds like a wise strategic decision by facebook. since it's likely there would be YC startups which address facebook deficiencies and eat away at their marketshare. although it looks impossible for any challenge to facebooks position, all it takes is one huge outlier which could change the game, and YC seems like a probable source of such an outlier. but for YC startups it seems like a tradeoff.... short-term boost at the expense of long-term dominance.. but i don't know the details of the deal so can't be sure.
Mindcipher: Great brain teasers
Even monkeys rationalize
Not a bad deal for sitting in your house for a few months working on something that you enjoy.
The most interesting thing here was how much cheaper AdMob was. If the conversion rate for AdMob is roughly the same as iAd then the cost per acquisition is $2.43.

That's still not good enough for a $1 app, but it's a lot better than $14.90.
"one of the largest Ruby production systems that has ever been made"

As an aside, I worked on a very large Ruby app (built by about a dozen developers over the course of years) and then later worked on another very large Ruby app of similar size. One of the employees there remarked that it was the largest Rails app built. I think the people who write very large Ruby apps tend to be very quiet about it (no blogs, no open-source, less community participation, etc.) so that if you're one of the ones writing a very large Ruby app you think yours is the largest. :)
Cool. What's the site?
Reminds me a bit of the django "Poor Man's Cron" project:

http://code.google.com/p/django-poormanscron/

I couldn't think of a reason to go with it with projects like Celery around, but I guess if my host was trying to charge a lot for background processing, this would do it.
20  Business TED Talks
...and all it takes is one rogue or bad programmer to mess up the code base.
"... Worse yet, if your friends like something or run an app, they can get to your personal information because your friend has endorsed something. ..."

Most don't understand this. It's a royal pain. Read through this article by PJF, "Facebook privacy - Instant personalisation and connections" ~ http://pjf.id.au/blog/?position=604
Thanks. That's quite a convincing argument.

I'll get a "Remember Xobni & Dropbox" T-Shirt printed for when you interview me, then.
Wow, somebody here moves fast:

]> host Facecombinator.com

Facecombinator.com has address 69.163.237.51
Did anyone else think the story would end with the key combination being changed to "Ctrl+alt+delete"?
What he really wanted was for this to be bundled with the Mac. So that probably clouded his ability to negotiate a better deal.
There's no logic in the assertion that because he worked at Apple and had insider knowledge, that Apple should have to pay less for it.
Background processing and regular processing are ultimately the same thing. It doesn't make sense to me why Heroku would try to price discriminate around that feature.
Signs of an awesome coder
It's because of crap like this that I only browse sites like Facebook from a secondary browser, Chrome in my case. On Firefox, I'm not even logged in to Facebook, to minimize the amount they can learn about me with their Like stuff.
Rule number two: Avoid negotiating directly with Steve Jobs.