skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can actually see the progression in the original Ender quartet, since it spanned pretty much his entire career as a good writer.

"Ender's Game" in '85 and "Speaker for the Dead" in '86 — It's hard to decide which one was more awesome. They're very different, but both are really gripping and create two fascinating worlds. When I read those two books, I thought I had found my favorite author of all time.

"Xenocide" in '91 — Sadly, not as good as the first two, but still a pretty compelling book. Veers a little too close to becoming a paean to the wonders of marriage and fatherhood, but constantly course-corrects and is pretty successful overall.

"Children of the Mind" in '96 — It's a readable novel, but as the conclusion to the previous three books, I couldn't help but ask, "WTF?" It's way too involved in its own ideas to bother with compelling characterization, and it has this weird tunnel vision that essentially reduces all human interaction to marriage, divorce or some analogue for the two.
It depends on when in the year the bonus is delivered. If it's early in the year, it doesn't matter if you're going to hit the Social Security ceiling eventually, they take it out of your bonus. I speak from personal experience both on this matter, and on my previous accounting of only 30-40% of bonuses actually hitting my bank account.
I vote for "learn R the hard way" for the next book
When Apple announced that they were going to use KHTML in Safari (when they announced Safari) they stated that it was due to the library's small footprint. I assume that they didn't want to spend the time to reign in the Gecko engine to do what they wanted it to do (or hack/optimize it down to size).

Just because something exists and seems to be 'good enough' doesn't necessarily mean that it would be a good fit. Unless you develop for WebKit, Safari, Firefox and/or Gecko, I'm not sure any of us are really qualified to make those kinds of statements. Also remember that you can't compare the current state of the two codebases. You have to compare the state of the codebases at the time that Apple created Safari/WebKit.
Thrilled to see more investment money for London. It's so often overlooked compared to the rest of the UK.

I see lots of people desperately trying to push startups/startup culture up here in Edinburgh, meanwhile everyone leaves for London or expects you to relocate to London.
Our pg has, of course, had much to say about the feasibility of this kind of thing:

* http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html

* http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html

* http://www.paulgraham.com/maybe.html (a proposed recipe for how to do maybe create a new startup hub; that's actually somewhat more modest than what the tc article describes)

The most salient quote from those articles, IMO: "Of course, a would-be silicon valley faces an obstacle the original one didn't: it has to compete with Silicon Valley."

I would note that if the UK are serious about this "entrepeneur visa" then that could get very interesting. Currently I can't imagine fighting through the federal paperwork required to start a company in California if I weren't already an American. Should this hub nucleate properly I can imagine most non-UK non-US citizens vastly preferring dealing with UK immigration to what has to be a frustrating US system. (Any non-UK non-US folks care to comment more informedly on this?)

And real estate is stupidly expensive in London, so they're halfway to Silicon Valley already.

[Edit: formatting]
10 Barrel T-Shirt Gattling Gun
Gecko is not an HTML rendering engine, it's a Mozilla XUL+HTML rendering engine. It's a legacy codebase and not easily embeddable.

XULRunner and other developments are changing that but that still involves XUL. I'd love for a separate pure-HTML Gecko engine that competes with Webkit, but until that happens, there are technical reasons for choosing one or the either.
This was a great read..

"At one point, PayPal had enough funding to survive only another two months
while still losing around $10 Million a month. Shortly after, because
of what was then the dot-com zenith, Thiel tried to raise money for PayPal,
then valued at around $500 Million by VC’s even though losing money at
a rapid rate. Nasdaq had just broken its own record, hitting 5,048,
and the majority of investors thought the dot-com phenomenon would last
forever.

Peter, however, privately disagreed, believing that the dot-com era was
going to crash spectacularly very soon. He already realized what the
market came to know shortly thereafter: There was very little substance to the
majority of dot-com “superstars.” Nonetheless, he capitalized on the
opportunity presented to him, raising $100 Million to fund these hard times
for PayPal, closing this large deal in only three weeks. The closing was
March 31, 2000. This was critical as the very next day, the Nasdaq began
its famous freefall, crumbling by 67% in less than 18 months! Had he
not worked feverishly to locate an interested VC and jumped through
numerous obstacles to close the deal so quickly, PayPal would most
certainly not exist today."
Yes, go to college but don't go for the piece of paper, and don't go to a community college if you can help it.

I was in almost exactly the same situation as you at 19 (28 now). I screwed up HS to the point where no good university would accept me, and spent 18-20 doing web dev and not really growing. I realized I had to get out of there.

My advice: go to whatever 4-year, brick and mortar university will accept you and WORK HARD to prove your HS transcript is not an accurate assessment of your abilities. Live on campus. Then transfer to the best school you can that's going to give you the most opportunities for growth. I ended up at a big research university where you could get involved in research as an undergrad, and loved it.

Another thing: hang out with the right people. I think people, to a certain extent, are just a product of their peer group. If you're surrounded by smart, motivated people, it's going to rub off on you.

If you have a choice, I'd recommend not starting at a community college. It's harder. You're not going to be surrounded by people with the same mindset and goals.
Go to amazon.com with amazon cookies cleared and click on only the books that you like and then rate them. See what amazon recommends.

Alternatively, try Shelfari (http://www.shelfari.com/) or WhatShouldIReadNext (http://www.whatshouldireadnext.com) and look at their recommendations. (Note: I haven't used either of these sites but found them when I was researching using amazon for recommendations.)
I don't know about that--email is so convenient, it seems like someone is always dumb enough to email something incriminating, and knowing that, lawyers subpoena them.
If someone comes up to me and informs me that "XYZ is wrong!", and I refer him to several books on the subject, how am I being anti-science?

I'm reminded of a friend's story back in undergrad. His lab TA told everyone "See that stuffed bear of there? That's Mr. Cuddles. If you have a question, ask Mr. Cuddles first. Then if he can't help you, ask a real TA."

What the AI_bot is dealing with is automatic handling of a large number of pre-canned, pre-debunked arguments, which appropriate reply _is_ "This has been debated before, check it out." Understanding other people's arguments is also part of the scientific process. Furthermore, the author of the bot is reviewing the activity, to ensure that arguments are not being inappropriately applied.
Sorry, the slide deck was there as a presentation to Facebook's VP of engineering. I wasn't about to transcribe my own talk.
As far as I know Norvig's solver has constraint propagation (maybe it didn't have it in the first version though).
Although, I'm quite aware it would cause a lot of accountants and government workers to have to look for new careers, they could solve this problem with the following hammer:

http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_main
Open Floor Plan Office [opinions]
I've been in cubicles since joining my first company out of college as a software engineer. Recently, I discussed an opportunity with a company that has an open floor plan office. I'm uncomfortable with the idea. I feel I can focus more in a cubicle. Also, I like that I can partition my focus and social time by entering and leaving the cubicle.

What are your thoughts and experiences with open floor plan office space and how they compare with cubicles?
Yes, it's like arguing on a crowded bus. Everyone hears you, nobody cares and they either want you put in your place or told to STFU.

I'm more dubious of the proposed solutions to global warming than anything as it looks highly like a band-aid infused with arsenic to me. Sure it'll kill the infection, but it could well kill you too.

Go nuclear, it's the lesser of the evils. Existing infrastructure can be cannibalized for it (access to roadways, rail or river, cooling pools, cooling towers, etc.) even if the power plant itself cannot be. Furthermore, the totality of all nuclear accidents in the world has caused less deaths than coal soot alone. Disregard the fact that coal contains radioactive compounds that are being vaporised and inhaled.

Interestingly, I know here in Canada at least, that many of the nuclear plants have become their own sort of nature preserve.
Ask HN: What service has an API to do wire transfers?
Need to incorporate into a startup the ability to send wire transfers to clients who submit their bank information and so far I haven't been able to find a service that lets me do this through an API. Help?
don't apply to places that require .doc.
Missile Gap is fantastic.

Accelerando was ok. But I don't think any singularity fiction lives up to Vinge's classics (A Fire Upon the Deep etc).
Instagram is the page curl of 1997.
From the available choices of sounds to generate, I'm guessing he included a port of sfxr: http://code.google.com/p/sfxr/
Depends on how you feel about the recent spate of defections to smaller companies.
I used cutepdf. Thanks for sharing.
He's using known tested methods for getting people to listen to points of view that they don't agree with. That's psychology.

He's also using some set of content matching algorithms, and may introduce other deeper learning algorithms. That's computer science.

Seems like science to me :P
The bot may have problems, but I don't think its problem is that Twitter and Hacker News are two very different venues.
There's also an endowment effect involved - the more time/energy/money it costs to obtain a credential, the more people resent losing the perceived benefits.
The problem with these things is the stiff cost by the companies that sell them. No one doubts that they work. However, at this point, cities should be able to by much cheaper alternatives and do it themselves. Even fake cameras work.
For comparison, here is the rejection we received in late 2007 (for a two-founder business not in school willing to relocate):

"We're sorry to say we couldn't accept your proposal for funding. Please don't take it personally, because most of the proposals we rejected, we rejected for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of the applicants. For example, we were very reluctant to accept proposals with only one founder, because we think starting a startup is too much work for one person. We also had a higher threshold for applicants who were still in school, groups where one or more members planned to keep their current jobs, and groups that couldn't all move to California. We rejected a lot of proposals simply because we couldn't understand them, or didn't understand the problem domain well enough to judge them, or because the project seemed too big to start on only three months of funding. Sometimes we even rejected good ideas, because another group proposed the same idea and seemed further along.

"We realize this process is fraught with error. It's practically certain that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups. If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email telling us about it; we want to learn from our mistakes."
I'm reading China Miéville's The City And The City. It's quite interesting so far. I also have some Charles Stross on my list.
Older Brain may be a Wiser Brain
This also shows us the importance of documentation.
I don't mean to be contrary, but I had the opposite takeaway. There's something almost wrong about having a manual for everything. Put another way, there's something really beautiful about discovery.. and democratizing it to everyone who comes across something instead of just the first guy who got saddled with writing the documentation. I think it's well within the spirit of what _why was up to.
Does that invalidate his current opinions? People can change their minds.
This plus the Buzz case really underlines how broken the class action tort system is. "Hey, we're the lawyers, we work for you, that's why we get ten million and you get ten thousand, and if you don't like it we'll go work for someone else."
Nope, it's his own library, Bloopsaphone: https://github.com/mental/bloopsaphone (though there maybe some sfxr -> bloops connection I'm not aware of)
You do realize that well over half the country is anti-gay marriage? So when you read online do you discredit every two out of three articles you read because that person is likely against gay marriage?

This is in jest but most of the time external beliefs don't matter to the topic at hand. Such as do you discredit the work of Schindler because he was a womanizer and from most accounts a jerk, or look negatively on others who write about coding because when they aren't writing about coding they are out supporting the tea party perhaps.
You Always Want To Buy Shares And Receive Options
When asked can Chile make a Silicon Valley by pouring money into it?, the Chilean minister of economy speaking at Stanford responded that unlike other countries (such as Russia, and now UK) Chile will try the following instead of pouring money into it:
1. Create Role Models (Young Chilean entrepreneurs that succeed)
2. Reform the laws (bankruptcy and immigration laws)
3. Invest in Universities to promote technology
4. Start networking programs with Silicon Valley (for example they brought a bunch of their entrepreneurs here to work for a while, and are taking some entrepreneurs from here to mix the cultures).

In general he also said that they need to remove the negative view of failure somehow, which doesn't exist in silicon valley, but they haven't figured out how to approach this one yet.
The linked article talks of "forcing" carriers into this.

The "trueposition.com" web site makes it clear that they ship their hardware ("TruePosition Location Measurement Units") ostensibly for 9-1-1-from-mobile purposes.

For that reason (and others) it seems to me extremely likely that carriers don't need to be forced to support mass tracking at all. It's already there or easily slipped in. (The TruePosition platform does not rely exclusively on the Location Measurement Units.)

Heh.... This merits looking into:

http://www.trueposition.com/web/guest/press-releases?p_p_id=...

Here (about that):

http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/23/iphone-congress-mobile-tech...
Switching from SVN to Git: A Startup’s Perspective
I've worked on quite a few teams of nerdy hackers, as I suspect you have and many of us have, and let's take a look around and be honest: for the most part, the stereotype still holds. For the most part. Are things trending, if slowly, in the other direction? Perhaps. But we have a long, long way to go in a galaxy far away before your average hacker is dating attractive women.
Wearable Sensors and Body-To-Body Networks
Loved that book. Also loved that Arielly noticed his own irrational behavior when he bought a sports car instead of a minivan.
As a similar but less controversial use, it might be interesting to use this to debunk retweeted urban legends by sending out snopes.com links. But ultimately I think it crosses the line into spam and just gets annoying.
I code Flash too, on 2.26 Ghz laptop running 4gb and multiple distro's, no real problems here..

A lot of us Flash coders actually want to drop Flash from our websites, widgets and resumes. It performs bad and puts a lot of stress on the CPU, blocking my vital programs from running.

I also dont like Flash because Flex Builder is not a free tool and because of all the security issues in Flash that Adobe just never seems to get fixed. http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb07-20.ht....

Potentially leaving my computer including webcam feed and microphone wide open to anyone having an exploit before I update. http://blog.guya.net/2008/10/07/malicious-camera-spying-usin....

However, I think Flash (or read Actionscript 3.0) is a necessary evil to be able to do what you want to do.. fast and to a mass audience, see this table for statistics http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/vers....

I've been coding Actionscript for some time now, but only started really liking it when 3.0 came out. I remember when the Papervision project became popular I loved coding Actionscript.... I still do and I dont think JS has the right properties to become anything close to Flash.

Adobe really is on the right way by including hardware accelerated graphics. http://www.tgdaily.com/software-features/38273-adobe-flash-p....

I hope they improve upon this a bit though..
You are right, it is not 100% perfect so therefore it should never be used, and we should keep using the much more broken system we have now.
Yes, you can use science to destroy science, why shouldn't that be so? What's your point?
If they're serious, and it sounds like they are, I'd suggest two more changes that weren't mentioned in the article:

(1) An employee in the UK can currently be required to keep working at a company for 3 months after giving notice. This should be shortened.

(2) Make most non-competes unenforceable. This is a very under-appreciated reason why silicon valley prospers.
Your observations re: gamedev are correct.

Actually, I can't really stand working for other people, so I'm doing a startup. Now I work almost all the time I'm awake, and I make 0 dollars. Hmm.

So, what city do you live in? Does your employer have <10, <100, <1000, <10k, or 10k+ employees? Or, are you a contractor?

EDIT> I should point out that the highest-paying jobs I've seen advertised for non-management devs in Toronto are around 100k. Architects are like 120k. Then again, a detached house in town, near a subway stop is under 400k.
Screw that, they've got their priorities straight.

It's awesome that they don't treat 'uncaptured synergy' as a release blocker like Microsoft would have.
I suspect that part of the problem is that, at least with climate deniers, is that there's no real meat to their arguments. I know a few, and most of their arguments boil down to hearsay or "denier blog X says so, and who trusts Obama/the UN world government anyway". If they provided a link to something supporting their position I'd probably pass out from shock.

At least 95% of the argument with deniers is basically saying "No, you're wrong, that's been disproven by numerous studies - and here's the link". So yeah, arguing with them (or even just trying to put your point of view across) is annoying and tedious. Like any good programmer, Nigel's just automating away the drudgery.
http://www.sethlevine.com/wp/2008/04/how-to-get-a-job-in-ven...

http://www.sethlevine.com/wp/2005/05/how-to-become-a-venture...
Chatbots made from meat!
Morse Code Decoder using Netduino
link to full article: http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/11/04/uk-government-plans-east...
World Wide Web Contact Lenses Possible
I want to order two of these, where can I get them?
Concerns about having to choose between retaining a business relationship with your largest client who mandates a drug-free workplace and a rash of frivolous lawsuits is simply not an "overwhelmingly emotional argument".
It is the network effect. Sure you could try to get all your friends onto Friendster but most of them are already on Facebook. (poor example I know, why would anyone want to do that!?).
Ugh, what a nauseating hatchet-job. It's such blatantly distorted, emotionally-loaded propaganda that it hurts to read. I can understand someone wanting to criticize Thiel's plan, but that article makes him out to be a moustache-twirling cartoon villain.
Rubbish. He's providing links to http://www.skepticalscience.com/, which in turn has links to peer reviewed papers. It's a direct invitation to engage in meaningful argument - the science actually says "X" and here's how they arrived at that conclusion.

That most of the people he's replying to are unable or unwilling to engage doesn't detract from what he's doing.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine spam bots filling the net with appealing nonsense -- forever.
So I am a single-founder. For me, and it is worth nothing that I have a sum total of 28 users on my site, it is not that I feel that I need a co-founder or even a partner. What I need is a collaborator!

Everyone, everyone, everyone says to me 'oh, your a single-founder. When are you going to get a co-founder?' I feel like a handmaiden sometimes.

All I really want, desperately need, is a collaborator, a mentor, a sounding board. If that person is co-founder so be it. Funding should be dependent on team and 'team' is not always a 'founder'.

...sorry I know that was slightly outside the scope of the topic, /rantoff.
Nothing really clever though - he only applies the two most basic sudoku strategies:

If a square has only one possible value, eliminate it from the square's peers.
If a unit has only one possible place for a value, then put the value there.

And then he notes that those simple strategies combined with search yields very reasonable run times.
There is another "trick" solution : Let's denote a point when the fly turns around to be a step. Then just notice, from any one step the next, the fly travels exactly 1.5x the distance of any of the bicycles, since it goes 15mph versus the bicyclye's 10mph. This holds at each step, so is true of the total distance traveled as well. But alltogether, one bicycle will travel exactly half of the 20miles, so 10miles. So the fly will travel 15miles.
Try to Write Something Original
Video QA with Linus Torvalds Before He Dives in Shark Tank
The 2000 election was an ugly mess because damn near exactly as many people in Florida voted Bush as voted Gore, not because of rampant voter fraud.

Better technology could have helped, for sure, but there is always going to be some small margin of error and this particular race was decided by something under 1/100 of a percent.
Can someone sue Microsoft for slowing my computer with Windows 7? They don't provide any easy tools to downgrade and preserve my data... It's almost like they want me to but a new computer with Windows 7 -- another duplicated license to what I already own.
Yeah, it's a tough call. I can see R being very useful, but ChucK is way more fun. C just seems like a book that needs to be written before the "learning C sucks" situation gets worse.