skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Disclaimer: I have not read all the comments below. I was too enraged by this post.

Lets get this out of the way. IF YOU WANT TO GET A SALARY GO WORK FOR AN ESTABLISHED BUSINESS.

This post is so short-sighted that if Joshua doesn't already have glasses he should buy a pair. I am a little surprised that someone that runs a business actually posted this. Joshua are you aware of all the activities that actually go on in a business? I can enlighten you:
- Sales
- Marketing
- Partnerships
- Legal
- Design
- Customer Service
- Business Strategy
and yes
- Development

The reason this post is short-sighted is that you are forgetting about what ACTUALLY makes a business (not an idea) successful. OPERATIONAL PERFECTION

Some supporting evidence is looking at a business plan or even a pitch deck, how many slides are dedicated to the technical aspect? 1 of 10.

"What you business guys should be thinking about is this: what am I bringing to this business?" THIS IS A QUESTION FOR EVERYONE IN EVERY BUSINESS. If you do not directly contribute to the success of the business then you are not valuable it doesn't matter if you have technical skills or business development skills.

I am not a developer! I said it, i'm proud of it and i never want to be a developer. I could never be successful as a developer and i would be doing my business an injustice if i tried to code anything more then a simple webpage.

Startups need to be higly efficent in the way they do work, each of the team members need to be very focused on what is important and what they are good at. Yes, a smart developer can learn to sell and a smart business development person can learn to code, but WHY would do that business development and technical development are two very different skill-sets.
He can't be very insightful. To be that, he would need to know a lot more about human physiology and if he knew that, he could not be as optimistic about his own chances of living to see the singularity. That is why he can not be truly insightful.
This is the same stuff Kurzweil has been spouting for a number of a years. If he's still around in 2030, we will likely see a new "more accurate" prediction then.
Ask HN: Advice for a fledgling hacker?
_Hacking For Dummies_

OK. I'm pretty new around here.

I've been scouting HN for a few months as a passive user, and I've seen a lot of interesting stuff. You guys seem like you've got a pretty solid community going on. A good number of the questions that get posted are answered in real depth, and most of the links are of a good quality - and are of interest to a newbie like myself.

I've decided that I'd like to join up and get more involved in the world of hacking. Plus, I plan to post some interesting stuff. :)

(I've also signed up at reddit, but I don't necessarily expect to get good answers to questions. Once you cut all the crap out of your front page and post to specific subreddits, it gets better, but there's still a lot of pointless commenting and posting going on.)

I'm currently a science undergrad. I've got HTML and CSS nailed - I started off with the easy stuff - and now I'm getting pretty good at hacking about with JS thats almost what I want, but not quite. Hence the messing around.

So far I've had some advice from a certain friendly duck, who told me about the importance of knowing how to write good algorithms.

Have you guys got any other advice for a newbie programmer? For example, what programming language would you recommend I started with? And do you have any ideas about how to get a foot in the door of the hacking world (like good experience and making contacts)?

Even the most general and obvious stuff is much appreciated - as, more likely than not, it won't be obvious to me!

Thanks very much! :)

- Wihon
Google is the largest advertising and user-tracking system online. I would only use those DNS servers as last resource.

Also your DNS request travels unencrypted through your ISP and a likely drop-in solution to packet inspection would just be a passive listener (typical solution with 0 configuration). So in this case, alternative servers don't help.
On a similar note, was the Bruce Willis-starrer "alternate body" movie called Surrogates (2009) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986263/
This is a bit how Amazon works. I can't recall the last time I went back to review a purchase on my own. That always came from the review reminder e-mail Amazon sends out several days after the order arrives.
What's wrong with favouring higher ranked users? Don't they have more karma because they exhibit behaviour we'd like to encourage?

I like the Stack Overflow approach, where downvoting costs the downvoter karma, but less than being upvoted gifts them.
I think I could have expanded on that.

The "riskier" part is about DB access. In most environment, the powers that be will not allow you to touch it (correctly), doing INSERTS/DELETES/ETC. So you can pass through the risk management gate a form-filler robot, while if you ask for direct DB access you'll hear a "no".

Anyway, even if you read me associating risk+API, I said "it's less riskier than asking SAP for an API". If your project depends on SAP doing anything, you have a high risk of not happening :p
I think his point that the genome is not the program but the data was very demonstrative.

If you're a computer guy, you should clearly understand what his fundamental disagreement with Kurzweil is about.
I admit to a bit of confusion on your response. I was pointing out in the "low blow" scenario that Oracle is much more vulnerable than IBM to a contest of patents. Oracle might not be suing in your scenarios, but that wouldn't stop a suit by IBM.

The crux of this whole thing is that Google isn't using the GPLed version, wasn't paying a license fee to Sun, and isn't to Oracle. Oracle believes Google should and (probably after failed talks) is filing a lawsuit. IBM and Blackberry payed to license like other companies. So, Oracle really has no reason to sue anyone but Google.
I used to think the Max Klein posts were somewhat inspirational, but at this point I just assume he's pulled a '419' on everyone.
There's a healthy dose of fiction mixed into whatever facts may be contained in his blog posts.
That would make for some seriously expensive coffee, at least between flights. Airports aren't, at least in my experience, exactly known for their competetive pricing on food and beverages.
I think his point was that we can't code the fundamentals because those require linear time protein folding. And protein folding is one of those hard CS problems.
Because we're self-centered pricks by nature.
It's kinda strange to me that CSS devs (designers? devigners?) would violate DRY in such an egregious way every time they want to create a gradient:

background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(rgba(220,220,220,0.6)), color-stop(0.5, rgba(100,100,100,0.2)), color-stop(0.5, rgba(0,0,0,0.21)), to(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.20)));
background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, rgba(220,220,220,0.6), rgba(100,100,100,0.2) 50%, rgba(0,0,0,0.21) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.20));
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(GradientType=0,startColorstr='#99dcdcdc', endColorstr='#33000000');

I don't work with CSS extensively; is there a better way?
Dustin Curtis (dcurtis) and Alaska Miller (alaskamiller) took as many flights as possible in 30 days, the last time this deal was up. They used to have a page at http://dustincurtis.com/30dayflight.html but it's broken now. I can only find one story (which is really interesting!): http://dustincurtis.com/to-fasten-your-seatbelt.html

dcurtis, where's your 30-day flight site now?
Facebook Profile Pages Becoming Irrelevant
Wow - that "What the Bleep..." does look remarkably bad.

The trailer is Poe's Law in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7dhztBnpxg

I guess you don't want to watch that again? ;-)
Basically you have listed a VC/Angel Investor here. As i mentioned in my reply a business (not an idea) is only 1 part technical excellence and 10 parts business excellence.
I was surprised to see an article about a price cut with no mention of the total price of the phone.
It never hit the front page when it was announced, but this is the first BlackBerry with WebKit.
The problem with making it cost is no one would down vote the obvious spam and one liners. I think making it public or having meta-moderation where users are asked to review down-votes, where if you do to many down votes that meta-moderators flag as incorrect, then you get down-vote privileges removed for x amount of time with 3 strikes and your out and you then have down-vote privileges permanently removed.
I am currently working on a web-site / process which hopefully will be available sometime next year. I don't want to provide too many details. But I am hoping when done it will provide a free means for people to share grocery prices and by sharing the prices the community overall can save money on grocery shopping.
Resolution: All measures of job fitness applied during the selection process are heuristics at best, and cargo cult practices at worst.

Discuss.
Posts like this that advocate working on your start up by squeezing hours out of your day ignore the switching costs involved. Even when I do decide to turn my hour TV-time into an hour of project-time, it takes a while to get back into the flow and remember what it is I was working on. With start up and shut down, I end up exchanging an hour of TV-time for 20 mins of productive work.
There are hundreds of accounts with over a thousand votes. It wouldn't be meaningful for us to lose a few points per day if we wanted to censor. In particular early down-voting can affect what comment gets to be the top on a discussion. Also, comments with negative points are grayed out.
It's true. There have been many "Ask HN" posts along the lines of "I just quit my job and am moving to Bay Area tomorrow to work on my idea. Where do I start?"

Even though I live in the Bay Area, when I read these I always wonder why would someone move from X to an expensive area just to bootstrap their idea. Yes, there are VCs and startup-minded people here. But really, doesn't it make sense to incubate your idea first before betting the farm? Moving to Silicon Valley won't make anyone magically rich -- hard work (and passion) just might.
Maybe you should refer some of the "idea junkies" to this guy http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1608315
For spam you have the flag option. Down voting should be rare.
why would complex interactions not emerge from a computer simulation

One answer is "They will, and surprisingly quickly. But they will be a completely different set of complex interactions than are observed in the real world, because of some roundoff error in the binary representation of the Nth digit of some apparently unimportant constant. Unfortunately, because the system is complex, you'll probably spend the rest of your career trying to track down that error, and fail."

Another answer is: They would, if the simulation was comprehensive enough. Unfortunately, phase space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. Seriously: Your mind reels when confronted with the number of different molecular interactions going on inside the "simplest" single-celled prokaryote, so you abstract it away, almost as a reflex, to stop yourself from going mad. Then you abstract away the first-order abstraction. Then you keep going. Soon you begin to imagine that you can model an entire collection of a trillion organisms, just as a naive programmer imagines that they can rewrite Windows in three days if only they use a powerful enough language. It's a mere matter of programming!
what is the right way to think?
I immediately thought of this pole near Disney World:

http://www.panoramio.com/photo/32142193
* Get involved with open source.

* Ruby and Python are good languages that you can do a lot with.

* Eventually, knowing some C would be a good idea.

* Run Linux as your desktop.
Well... do you think PG will have something to say that isn't already within these comments? Or do you just want to force him into responding with no other goal in mind?

HN isn't his inbox, after all. The discussion here is pretty interesting, and worth talking about -- that's why the topic has been voted up. But if PG (one of very many participants in HN) personally wants to write an updated statement about his views on investing in Kenya or other African countries that is primarily based on what's already being said here, that might be more appropriate for an essay (which takes time).

If he doesn't have any insight that adds to the discussion, I don't see why he should feel obliged to comment.
Coming up with a single example of correlation without demonstrating causation is an insult to readers, IMO.
I don't find these criticisms convincing. We haven't solved the protein folding problem? So solve it. Is there some reason to believe it won't ever be solved? If you had a sufficiently accurate simulation of a cell or organism (which we don't, but we might someday), you could do experiments on it much cheaper and faster than in a lab.

I do agree that there's no freakin' way this will be done in ten years, or in the 62-year-old Ray Kurzweil's lifetime, or mine.
Sweden is a small[1] culturally and racially homogenous country. If you look at indices that try to measure good governance, they correlate very strongly with all of those factors [2]. It's amazing that the U.S. does as well as it does, considering its size, and the fact that it allows so many poor immigrants with heterogeneous backgrounds into the country.

[1] population ~ 9M. NYC alone has nearly 8M people and is much more diverse.
[2] http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/mc_chart.asp
This is a great article, thanks for sharing.
ZSHARE - clawdr4us.com.rar
Sorry this is (well, somewhat) totally off-topic, but:

Has anyone else noticed that the HN news items now show the sub-domain in select cases? Or has it always done this for 'popular' blogging platforms? Currently I can see this for Blogspot, Wordpress, Blogs.com and Posterous.

And, peripherally related, for this item as well. Which confuses me a little...
Yup you guys are right. This is what I get for trying to overanalyze a problem at 3am.
The eyes have it: An inside look at GazeHawk (YC S10) and eye tracking studies
It is deadly dangerous for me to watch a clip from that film. It could inspire dozens of hours of rage-filled but closely-argued physics lectures. Given the slightest provocation, I will go all xkcd.com/386 on its ass and my actual career will die of neglect.

Now, I need to go calm myself by fixing some bugs before I start to throw things. ;)
All real.
Increasing relevancy of content always helps. Can you reorder your content depending on what the user already created/consumed?
That's still literally more expensive than the main computer I use at home.
"This is called 'inheritance' despite the fact that nobody died"
How can it initiate that dichotomy when it's the basically the same as a) the FCC proposal and b) reality as we've lived it for the last few years?

TorrentFreak aren't saying it's great, they're saying it sucks just as much as the status quo, so piling onto Google is stupid because you're attacking the one person pushing for progress in one area because they aren't making progress in a more difficult area, double that stupid if you're acting like Google is dismantling something that doesn't exist, rather than just not fighting to have it created.
Intellectual Property - so valuable and so broken
I find I get some of my most important technical insights when I'm doing totally non-technical things. I can't count how many times I've been grinding away on a tricky bit of code, making no progress, only to have a simple solution pop into my head ten minutes after I leave the apartment and go for a walk. It's true that to excel in programming requires more than a 9-5 commitment but part of that commitment is an interest and passion for things completely outside of programming, because it's the cross-fertilization of ideas that helps you grow. Life and the mind require balance.
> You lack some perspective and tact, you silly goose. It's not very surprising you and your friends think your native language is easier and that you prefer your own writing system. Way to navel-gaze, hello?

I agree that yuan's "I think you are full of shit." is even worse (although he addresses another `you'), and I even agree with your sentiment (if not your wording).

On the other hand, boyter said, the "Chinese realize" their language is hard to learn. And yuan disagreed. Navel-gazing was exactly what was called for.

So I agree with yuan and you. But your message was slightly out of context and does not address yuan's message.
To repeat my previous post on the pilot's license thread:

X-Plane:

* Has the most accurate flight model -- so accurate that some manufacturers use X-Plane to flight-test models not yet produced.

* Can be FAA-certified for instrument training

* Can be networked among multiple machines to power multi-monitor cockpit setups

* Can be extended via plugins, of which a wide variety are available

* Has an extremely active developer community-- plugins, aircraft, scenery

* Can be used to fly online with VATSIM (US) and IVAO (Europe) - where there is often live ATC and where griefers are kickbanned liberally.

* Has an awesome developer blog, talking about 3d graphics implementations at a very low level: http://xplanescenery.blogspot.com/

* Has Austin Meyer (owner/lead dev), who is a colorful personality, and blogs often about aviation and other miscellany: http://www.x-plane.com/pg_PIREPS.html

* Is available for iPhone and iPad

* Can use your iPhone or iPad as a joystick and to display instruments tied to the sim on your computer
This article basically uses the graph as a jumping off point to make the same old 'apps will take over the world' argument we've been hearing since the iPhone opened its SDK (it seems like people have completely forgotten the evolution of the Desktop PC and are intent on reliving those same mistakes with the smartphone)

The problem I see with the graph is it's based on percentage of total traffic but it doesn't take into account a huge increase in bandwidth and internet users. Put it in perspective and you realize the web's "peak" according to this graph was when most people were using 56k modems (2000 which was about a year after V.90 modems started hitting the street).

There's also an efficiency factor. Ajax type technologies have dramatically shrunk the size of the data chunks being passed back and forth. Back in 2000 most were still resending the whole page on every refresh.
Why does the graph end five years ago? That seems silly given how short the whole time scale is.

Also, that graphic is very confusing and I'm not too sure how to read it. Peer to peer hasn't changed much in the last five years on the graph, but it looks like its in decline. Am I reading that right?

Edit: Also, it says "Wired September 2010" at the top. What? This is from the future, and yet the data is 5 years old? Silly website...
I think he meant to imply that one scrolls through RSS feeds using a news reader. He wasn't being literal.
Hi! I'm actually in precisely (100%) the same situation - and actually one of my friends asked if it's not me who wrote this post (that's how i got to know about it originally). I'm not a "so-cool" programmer, but what i have noticed:

1). All the things are good - till they produce something. In other words (if your job is not very special) - you won't be using tons of different algorithms. So learning only a few most common is simply PERFECT!

2). For all the "hard-times" buy a handbook with things that you think you might need in future (for me it's whole series of Graphics Gems :)

3). To get some grip on what you missed - try the MIT Video Courses. They have an "Introduction to Computer Science". The course is very cool and easy to follow, and should cover some of your gaps.

5). Yeah, five! And the most important - trust yourself and do LOTS of free-time projects. You heard me right - LOTS! When? For ex. I have 30h of classes a week and 25h of work - and I manage. Means - you will also ;)
And, wish you good luck! 8]
This has been brought up before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=214398
Maybe he's planning to start bull fighting at the age of 690 and base jumping at the age of 695.
Thanks!

> * Get involved with open source.

Say, by helping improve the code of open source apps, etc?

And if you had to choose between directing my attention towards Ruby or Python...?

I'm currently in desperate need of a new laptop. Can you recommend any basic requirements for programming? I have a rough idea - something along the lines of lots of RAM and not much else - but getting it from the horses mouth (no offense (: ) would be ideal.

Thanks again!
Yeah, you "only" need to perfectly simulate the entire universe. No big deal.
you wouldn't be able to make that statement without that being the case for you personally, now would you?
Silly.

Practical dictionary-based schemes have an entropy encoder on the back end and often that's a Huffman encoder or something similar in spirit.

Huffman encoding is superseded not by dictionary-based methods, but by arithmetic encoding, which can compress beyond the Huffman limit because it can use fractions of a bit.

7zip, for instance, beats the pants off gzip because it uses a very large dictionary window AND arithmetic compression instead of huffman encoding on the back end.
The beachball was present in NeXTStep, there's no mystery over where Apple got it!
ConnectBot is better than many desktop SSH clients I've used.
The graph is skewed but to be fair Peer-to-Peer saw an upswing from 1999-2001 when the original Napster introduced the technology to the masses. Then declined for a while between Napster being shutdown and more decentralized systems taking hold.
Kurzweil is a brilliant scientist. Calling him a Deepak Chopra is just stupid. He's out of his depth is all.

Also, I wouldn't bet against him building an AI that for all intents and purposes appears to be conscious. Full-human simulation is another thing, but with that we are all out of our depth, and it's pretty likely that a conscious computer would be quite capable of understanding it better than us.
Why do you describe my blog as '419'?
Morningstar Admits Fund Expenses More Important Than Star Ratings
Dude, aren't you a biker? Fuck it, go ride instead.
There's a lot of money in kitsch, and following your audience is where you're supposed to be!

Probably just a bad mix between the material and my personal tastes. I often think that startups and business that submit ideas that are non-hacker-related get more criticism than they deserve from HN'ers. So heck, I'm the last guy you want to listen to! Stay with the customers :)
For what it's worth, I was having a conversation with my son (he's 11) about the key differences between scientific and religious beliefs - I think I'll use that film as an example of how it can sometimes be difficult to tell the difference - especially when people present what are essentially religious beliefs using terminology derived from science.

(NB I remember reading some Erich von Däniken books when I was 9 or 10 and getting awfully excited - I was quite upset when I found that people could just make stuff up and present it as science).
Another sleight of hand with that statement: Kurzweil's converting compressed data to lines of code, but humans don't write in high-entropy binary. So it's 800MB of code, not 50MB.
Some people lead more interesting lives than others.