skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In some respect, yes the Solaris system has fallen behind the likes of Linux and *BSD. Particularly in the availability of third party libraries and applications. In other areas (such as the kernel) Solaris is much more stable, reliable, and advanced. I build a new kernel every week or so from illumos-gate, and must say that the technologies in the kernel (ZFS, DTrace, kmdb, smf, zones, predictive self healing, process rights management) and some shipped in user-land by default (mdb, libumem, pfiles, coreadm, event ports, pmap) are cutting edge.

In the end it boils down to using the right tool/OS for the job :)
There are some developer-oriented startups that are doing well, like the one that sends emails for your service (can't remember the name, anyone), it's basically just an API. Dropbox as well is mostly backend and code and algorythms, very little UI. Stuff like that.

If you can do something that's hard and high-value for developers with their own startups, and expose an API, that might be a good startup. How about a face-identification/recognition startup?

Database startups (nosql stuff) are hard, but also being done (again, can't think of the exact name, anyone?). But then you're likely gonna be in the consulting business, apart from building a kick-ass database.

Another example: janrain's RPX, again, it's mostly just an API and code to mangle all the social services' api's, very little frontend, although there is definitely sales/consulting involved..
And the course itself: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/15-356...
This is a Pascal's Wager question.

If there is no free will, I have no choice over whether to believe in free will or not.

If free will does exist and I believe in it, I am correct to do so.
That explains why I have received so much spam about dieting lately.
Ask HN: Teaching online?
I've been around for a while and I've learned a bit about a lot of things, and a lot about a few things (e.g. programming, compilers, math, etc.) I'm looking for other (better?) ways to share what I've learned online and, in turn, better ways to learn. Of course, I'm aware of many ways to share: Wikipedia, blogging, math/stackoverflow, HN, various forums and email lists, etc., but none are quite what I'm looking for. In particular, I'd like something where I connect with people directly who have a problem or content they are trying to understand where I have expertise, the scope is not too small so you have a chance to build a relationship, and there is an ongoing dialog. Perhaps the closest is math/stackoverflow, but even there, I find many of the questions superficial and most questions have less of a back-and-forth/dialog than I would like. Ideas?
It is far easier to pander to the crowd than to act yourself :)
I'm not an expert on parsing, but I used PEG.js recently and found it a lot of fun to work with - a good way for a parsing noob to learn, or if you just need something with a little more rigor than regular expressions.

In the future I'd like to use a PEG with an additional tokenization step, as the parser generated from a pure top-down approach will give fairly useless error messages when you have a typo deep in a nested expression, and I think that could be mitigated if I could point those errors out during tokenization.
I'll forever have the phrase "sometimes behaves so strangely" stuck in my head --

Radiolab interviewed Diana Deutsch on her research a few years back, and it's one of my favorite episodes.

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/04/21/segme...
Bossie Awards 2010: The best open source software of the year
For anyone who is interested in interpersonal relationships at work, Bob Sutton is pretty much required reading. I especially enjoy his blog. http://bobsutton.typepad.com/
Is anything (non-biologically-necessary)?
مسلسل شيخ العرب همام الحلقة 15
If I recall correctly, the iMac started out as ellison's idea.
"Financial literacy" is often a cover-up for schemes to brainwash consumers into believing "stocks always go up", and that you should sell your dreams down the river, give as much money to wall street as you can with your 401K, and kid yourself that you're going to be able to afford to send your kids to college and then retire comfortably some day.

That's just such a cock-and-bull story that people conclude "finance is hard, let's go shopping" and pull out the credit cards.
Bathroom Monologue: A Little Bit of Alright
I think the use cases of Buzz and something like Fridge are very dissimilar. Buzz allows you to subscribe to individuals; although when you post it's one->many, fundamentally what it's promoting is a lot of one-one connections. Although Buzz makes it a lot easier to have a group conversation than, say, Twitter (which frankly sucks in a lot of ways, but was first), it's not really a group tool.

I agree about Google Groups getting ignored; it would be nice if the eventual Google Competitor to Fridge was built on an upgrade of Groups. Perhaps one that split off the Usenet part of Google Groups completely; mixing in proprietary Google Groups and Usenet via Google wasn't ever a good idea.
Looks nice, but I'd also say this: don't try to fit everything into one screen. Scrolling and blog-style layouts are your friends.
Exactly what I mean with linguistic/logic side-effects.
Really? I found it a pleasure.
sigh. i was really hoping you were trying to take this in another direction.

free will is an objectively observable phenomenon, and the burden of proof is on disproving existence or providing an alternate explanation for the observable. we might not be able to show the mechanisms for why it exists, but we can show that it exists.

god is not objectively observable, and so the burden of proof is on proving existence.
Essay implies you follow some actual style guide, even if it's unwritten. Blogs require no structure.
I am non-faculty/research staff at a state school in the US. I agree. Faculty positions get cut or shifted to adjuncts and lecturers while managers who spend most of their time managing other managers keep getting their 5%.
New UK Passport "to fight fraud"
Also the Flex APIs are extremely tightly bound to closed-source Flash APIs, so its really not an entity unto itself. To be fair though, it is "open" enough to allow for example IntelliJ to support Flex development in IDEA.
EA takes hard-line stance against Medal of Honor controversy
Quote from BBC:

"The key difference between existing passports and the new ones is that the security chip - which holds owners' personal details - will no longer be visible, instead hidden within the inside cover."
Seriously? You want to get into real estate in the middle of the biggest depression we have ever seen? When property values are still way over-inflated?

This is only the start of the article's problems. The next thing he advocates is putting 20% down on a $6.5 million apartment complex, effectively leveraging 5 to 1.

Leverage has no place in any retirement account, period!

This entire article is a recipe for disaster.
I think I made the link with the joke because you used the words 'child care', but still that did not deserve a downmod.
Isn't that a little premature? There are still 129 days left in 2010.
Open textbooks to the rescue
Damnit. I'm too late. Is anyone else over 30?
True. I've seen Japanese doing this.
Yes! My mind was blown when I read this. Here are some others:

"A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" by David Foster Wallace, pretty sure this book has changed how a generation writes. At least it convinced a generation they'll never be as good as DFW.

"Norwegian Wood" by Haruki Murakami, which I like to think of as a Japanese C.i.t.R.

G.E.B. - power through it, soldier!

"Making Certain it Goes On", by Richard Hugo. An instructional book on how to write poetry, or to basically do just about anything. I highly recommend it to all programmers.
I wonder if Why the Lucky Stiff designed it!
A friend lived in a co-op at Oberlin, which had only one house rule: "don't be an asshole."

That one rule supplanted all the traditional ones for group living: don't leave dirty dishes, don't play obnoxiously loud music late at night, etc.
Pop Music Hacking
Ask HN: What's the best/easiest software combo for software online store?
Just curious as to what produc/service I could use, to painless setup an online store to sell software license with immediate delivery

1) What Shopping cart product?
2) What merchant services?
3) What advertising can I use?

I am looking for the least expensive/efficient package, I have very little/not willing to spend much on the store.

If some of you have a good product from your startup, please recommend.

Best regards!!
Orkut Now Allows You To Group Your Friends, Family and Colleagues
What I want on Gmail for Mobile
I chose Nothing, and currently only get HD over the air with an antenna.
Before entering university, I had an applied research project that generated visitor passes by performing OCR on identity cards. The idea was to use them for protected locations as a better alternative to leaving your precious identity card at the security post. It worked but never went anywhere because I didn't know how to do very much algorithmic analysis and design work and didn't have the confidence to sell what I had simply put together by experimentation.

Now I do a lot of algorithmic analysis and design but see my research work as too difficult to commercialize. Ironically, my current startup idea doesn't have academic research behind it as a competitive advantage... It's just a service that I know people want.
I think Ryan's missing my point. When I talk about income %, I'm talking about across an entire portfolio (that real estate should certainly be a part of).

So you're putting 25% of your cash down on a $5m property for $110k per year. Nice! How many such properties do you think the banks are going to let you buy? With the future values of these properties a bit murky, I imagine that someone with 4-5m in the bank ISN'T going to get the green light to buy $21m in properties (4 difference loans to service).

People keep bringing up INDIVIDUAL investments that can net a great return (in this case, 9%). That's missing the point. With big piles of money, you have diversified holdings. You're not going to drop 90% of your cash in real estate down payments. Nor are you going to drop it all in stocks. You're going to (generally) do a reasonable asset allocation to minimize the risk. While I did mention the S&P500's performance for comparative purposes, I wasn't advocating for a pure stock portfolio (any more than you're advocating for a pure real estate portfolio).

As he says, real estate has plenty of risk. You're betting on a local economy, construction pace, population growth, etc. But anyone with millions ought to be playing in real estate.
send me an email, it's in my profile
I'm really liking the efficient market trend. What will be next?

Is there a market for letting individuals deliver packages instead of FedEx/DHL?

Perhaps with the private wind mills/solar cells that are becoming more common, something that helps the owner sell electricity to their neighbors.
That's a fairly snobbish response. So basically an essay is not a blog post because you say so?
I think ratifying all software as service will fix patent terrorism.
Hmm. Interesting. I need to think about this :)
Google Wave is going to be important. (Whoops)

It's going to be important in the way Lisp and Smalltalk are important. Many of the key ideas will find their way into other things which will be less pure, still powerful, and a lot more popular.
While I won't give you my own personal "Omg, monads are ..." lecture, what I will say is this:

When they finally clicked for me... I felt like it was something so simple, and I was seriously overcomplicating it in my head, and wondered why they were so frustrating all along. I had a similar experience with NoSQL, actually.

RWH is an excellent book, you should certainly check it out.
An REIT is a Real Estate Investment Trust. Not an index.

I have a small investment in an REIT and while the trust owns multiple properties, it is far from an index. An REIT is more like buying an individual stock, you are investing in a company that will use your money to purchase, improve, and maintain real estate in exchange for a share of the company. (That may not be technically accurate, but it is essentially what is going on)
I suppose you're talking about http://www.mailchimp.com/ for email service

As for database startup there are plenty of them too: cloudera.com, percona, schoonerinfotech.com , ...
Probably unrelated, but on Tuesday:
Two CF-18s shadowed a pair of Russian military aircraft Tuesday as they flew within 56 kilometres of Canadian soil

From: http://www.cbc.ca/politics/story/2010/08/25/cf-18s-russians-...
Ah Thanks!
Personally I like doing "back-end" development a lot -- you can be more productive that way, because a lot of the BS in software development comes from the requirements and testing issues that come from UI work.

That said, success at web apps requires somebody have a holistic understanding of "how it all works". The most common antipattern I've seen in commercial web software is that some guys who wrote

* mainframe apps
* command like UNIX apps
* applications people telnet into, or
* Windows GUI apps

want to "move a product to the web" and end up copying the way they did things before -- and not understanding the holistic properties of the environment (for instance, don't bind a cookie-based 'session' to a long-running process in the background if you can at all help it) they make products that suck.

Now, there are a lot of companies out there doing exciting things that involve exciting back-end work, so I say go out and find it.

There certainly are products that need making: personally I know I'll need to get off Mysql at some point because it doesn't have a future, but the current "NoSQL" products are a joke. I could really use something that's like an RDF store on heavy doses of steroids, written by people who don't believe in the RDF religion... Kind of CycL for the next generation.
Between one of pg's essays and a typical blog post?

Pg spends weeks writing a typical essay of his (or at least he used to), editing it and getting feedback from colleagues and HN alumni before, whereas a typical blog post is banged out in a couple of hours, with little or no rewriting.

Also, just look a the page of one of his essays versus all the visual clutter on the typical blog post. Maybe superficial you may say, but I don't think so. It speaks volumes about the motives of the author. Maybe the blog writer wants to SEO optimise, promote their business, serve AdSense ads...whereas a pg essay is an extremely refined stream of thought on a specify topic. And his primary motive appears not be to sell you something, but figure stuff out as he writes.

So the difference between an essay and a blog post? Huge differences I think.
>"We invest in people, not ideas" is a hell of a depressing way to get rejected.

Not really - PG isn't a god, so what he can reject you on is an application, a talk and a video and hope that this is a good enough indication about whether or not you are worth investing in.

I doubt he get it accurate more than say 60% of the time, but because YC is so popular, enough people sign-up who are a no-brainer (Sam Altman, etc) that it doesn't matter much.

But for those of you who have been rejected, there is a good chance that YC would accept you, had they known you.
Daniel Wegner's book, "The Illusion of Conscious Will" discusses the existence of free will, (not so much whether belief in it is rational):

http://books.google.com/books?id=eQnlRg56piQC&printsec=f...
Stories told via Google Search
A paid overseas internship? Wowee... great story for students everywhere. I'm planning to do something like myself next summer :)
You do not seem to have got the point at all. It is not about the profession, it is all about decommoditization.

The first and most important thing she (unknowingly) did right was to avoid having a pimp in the first place. The second important thing she did was to differentiate her service and offer it to the premium market.

You can follow the same strategy as a teacher. Refuse to lecture a class of 50+ students* (where the break even point for the school is 5-10). Seek instead to position yourself as a personal tutor for the children of the wealthy.

You will find out that you need to provide a quality of service way beyond what is expected of an average classroom instructor, and also you will have to tolerate your customers idiosyncrasies. But, hey... you would have to do that anyway!

* I am going to the outliers here. 50+ students is the low end of a continuous. I am just trying to draw a parallel to the other example in the article (the $18k/yr street hooker).
How to Write a Neuroscience Story for the Public
Actually, for income real estate, it works the other way around: value is determined almost entirely on the cashflow of the property. As a result, you can control the appreciation of the property by improving the income of the property.
How does the book compare to the video?
As consumers, our biggest problem is living well within our means.
"...a single person on full-time minimum wage can easily feed and house a family of four."

With all due respect, you don't know what you're talking about. It's not "societal expectations" that cause lots of gainfully employed people in the United States to be part of the working poor and hungry.

As an example, the minimum wage in DC is $8.25, which yields $1320/month. The actual amount would be even lower after taxes, but let's even forget about that.

About the absolute rock bottom price you'll pay for a room in this city is $600/month and that's assuming you're in a group living situation or a pretty bad neighborhood. Since a family of four will need two rooms to be even reasonably comfortable, maybe you luck out and grab a similarly crappy two-bedroom for $900/month. So now, you pay your rent, somehow keep your utilities hovering around $120/month (good luck with that) and you've got $300/month left.

But wait, now you've got to get to work (and to the grocery store, etc.). Minimum bus fare in this city is $1.50. If you (and just you, not your kids or spouse) make a round trip every day plus, say, three extra trips a month, you will spend about $100.

So now you've got $200 per month left to feed and clothe four people. But what about insurance? Savings? Unforeseen expenses? Doing something nice with your kids every now and again?

At what point does any of this sound easy to you?

If you want to be ignorant, that's your business, but please try not to peddle this BS to others who don't know any better. It's really irresponsible to further the notion that those less fortunate than us are having a difficult time making ends meet because of societal expectations. Ugh.
If you define free will as conscious deliberation of action, it is easier to make the claim that it exists
My perception was that andreyf was concerned more with Kurzweil's possible crackpottishness than his sincerity. In that respect, you are the one who has failed to apply Grice's maxims (or, in less intellectually pretentious terms, "missed the point"). Continually insulting me doesn't change that.
I remember beating myself over this idea in college, that there is no such thing as free will. I came to believe it. Then I realized something that was even more important: it does not matter if it is true. This is not a form of enlightenment that actually helps me or anyone.

Really, work through it. Congratulations: you discovered that everything you think and do is preordained by the first energy patterns of the universe. Now what? Do you second-guess your decisions? Isn't your second-guessing also preordained? Isn't your so-called enlightenment also just a part of the system? What does this knowledge really do for you?

Note that your quoted article does not oppose free will (unless you buy into the sensationalism). It points to the idea that a part of your brain figures out your next action before you are fully conscious of that decision. This does not invalidate free will; it just shows that you make decisions from multiple levels of your brain. You do not want too much decision-making power, like when your heart should next beat.

So, accepting that it is useless to believe in lack of free will, what happens if you decide to place your faith in having or acquiring free will? This opposite philosophy flows hand-in-hand with the idea of personal responsibility, the idea that you may actually be to blame for your own misfortunes and fortunes. There is a certain liberty in realizing that you have the power of Choice, that you can simply choose to leave these perceived/accepted traps and social constructs.

In other words, it would be irrational to not operate on the assumption that you have free will.

tl;dr - This philosophy does not help anyone. The opposite helps a great deal. Most people fall in the middle.
The NEW Digg goes live. Will it take off?
From what I can tell there’s a huge bond between the two
The single page version will save you from hitting next a few times:

http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2010/08/25/the-definiti...
It's fun to share this, as figuring out these numbers has always been tricky. Feels good to finally open up the discussion and get these formulas figured out. Also been really fun to develop the spreadsheet as a community effort.
Down With Social
It's automatically calculated based on churn. IE 10% churn would be 10 months (100/10 = 10)
Philip K. Dick: The Electric Ant. I think that sums up everything, really.
New Flock Browser Based On Chromium
Agreed, it's a whole different lifestyle. My own family's culture is such that the kids are expected to grow up and support the parents. So when you grow up, the parents don't need a job. My friends in the US find this super odd but that is pretty standard in many Indian cultures.

Also, as you are growing up, the parents typically make a bigger investment than an average parent. I never have to "repay" my Dad any loan. Nor does he need to repay me. Does it all balance out in the end? It may or may not; it's pretty irrelevant.

My mom gave up practicing medicine after her first kid. She never really had to worry about not being able to return because she didn't plan to.
IDevice history infographic
I guess that is a key difference in real-estate and retail. The margins in retail aren't high enough to hire a management company to handle all of the details. Sure, there are store managers, but they have to report to someone. And there is turnover.

I am going to keep the multi-family unit idea in mind for the future.
The Emergence of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes.

A mind blowing explanation of consciousness. The jury is still out with most critics considering this wrong -- but nevertheless, it's an amazingly detailed (and well supported) theory of where consciousness, gods, schizophrenia etc come from.
Flippant reply: I'd rather buy during a depression than during a boom.
You could invest in Canada. Property values have been stable.
I am pretty happy in my job. Could you make a feature so that I could filter out all posts with the words "investor, investment, retirement, rich, killer app" or any other story that concerns the adolescent wet dreams of lots of money and the coolest private jet EVVAH!, and rather let me focus on storys on technology?
There's no scientific evidence for the number 7 or the letter "x". They're tokens and constructs relating to man-made abstractions. I put the concept of "free will" into this bucket, also.
Sounds like a great opportunity for somebody looking for something to build. Keep abreast of the latest talks being distributed as videos, sell the summary (bullet-point text version, one-page text version, 1/5/10 minute audio summaries). $3.99 a month, all you can watch.

Perhaps there would be IP problems though...