skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Democracies with two major parties invariably promote discrimination and brainwashing.
I find it amazing that people, particularly in the US, identify themselves as liberal or conservative. Why should people agree on a seemingly arbitrary set of issues?

My guess is that they do not, at least initially. But they do associate themselves with the party on which they agree on the most important issue to them. Agreement on remaining issues then comes as a compromise. But I think it becomes worse than that. After a while, people start agreeing on issues that they would not agree on otherwise. For example, religious conservatives who identify themselves with the Republican party may not initially agree with the party's policies on the environment. So this is a form of brainwashing.

But there's also discrimination. Democracies with two major parties tend to divide their populations into two, thus resulting in unwarranted assumptions and discrimination.

Having said this, there are probably important reasons why many countries end up with only two major parties.
Now imagine the tech industry if it took 10 years for people to see that browsers are better than desktops...
undo: none available--this is a design choice

downmod: a user must develop a certain amount of karma before the down arrows appear. additionally, you may not downmod direct replies to your own comments or stories.
I'm starting to feel like we need a meta.news.ycombinator.com, for all this meta-discussion... I'm sure the politics are fascinating, but they feel the same as those of every online community since the dawn of the Internet... :p

Ah well, I guess I could just not click on them in my RSS.
A good alternative: http://www.dailyhub.com/ from the owner of http://www.onstartups.com/
Both these comments are dead on.

Never, EVER go to grad school the way I did - just noticing that your four years are up, and seeing where you have to apply next, so you can keep on proving how smart you are.

Going to grad school straight out of college is almost always a mistake in any field, and it is especially a mistake in CS. Spend a couple years as a working programmer first, ideally at a small company.

One, it may change your mind - this should be embraced, not feared. And two, if you do go to grad school, you will find you have much more perspective and depth than your fellow grad students.

Since there is no such thing as CS, every field is different. Some just decrement the "C". Others are perfectly healthy.

Without question the soundest field in CS is graphics. I wish to God I had gone into graphics. Digital image synthesis is actually applied math, of course, and any area of applied math that actually has a real application will serve you well.

Unfortunately, pseudoapplied math is very common and quite worthless. So be sure to look fairly deeply into any claims of applicability. A genuine applied field, such as graphics, will have a steady flow of innovations (and innovators) into actual industrial practice. If you don't see this, something, somewhere, is wrong. Trust the nose.

Also, when you apply, don't just select schools by reputation, as if you were applying to college. Pick the actual group you want to work with, and don't be shy about contacting professors.
Registering a domain in .it - staring down the mouth of Italian bureaucracy
Since we're posting things that go beyond startups, I thought I'd share my adventure trying to register a personal domain for myself, thus freeing up dedasys.com for my newly minted LLC.

It's also a good example of why things in general are sometimes slower in Europe.
I have all sympathy for heretics, but to claim that CO2 is not a problem because there could be a countermeasure seems like very flawed logic. Apart from the countermeasure not really convincing me (genetically engineer plants to grow faster???), without recognizing the problem, it is unlikely that the countermeasures would be taken, so it would still remain a problem (assuming it is a problem - I merely wanted to point out the flawed logic).
This is true, and an astute observation. It's also unavoidable - or at least one of the better alternatives.

Everybody has their own ideas of how things should be. In a society of 300 million people, that means 300 million different ideas. There will be some overlap, but obviously they won't all think the same things - then they'd really be brainwashed.

Unfortunately, there's only one way that things actually are. So somehow you've got to condense the myriad of different cultures, beliefs and desires into a single reality. Governments have relied on various ways of accomplishing this:

1.) Kill everyone who doesn't agree with the "official" culture. Eg. Rwanda, Bosnia, Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, U.S. conquest of Native Americans

2.) Kill the most vocal proponents of alternate viewpoints, enough to terrorize the remaining citizens into keeping with the party line. Eg. modern Russia, several South American governments, apartheid South Africa

3.) Convince the population that eternal damnation awaits anyone who disagrees with the party line. Eg. the Catholic Church

4.) Split the population into many little populations, each of which can have their own reality. Eg. former Yugoslavia, former Soviet Union, American Civil War, Roman Empire. Problem with this is that each sub-state still wants to impose its reality upon its neighbors, so you often get continual warfare until one gobbles up the others.

5.) Convince a majority of the population that they really agree with you. This is the "discrimination and brainwashing" you refer to.

6.) Develop some fundamental principles that everybody agrees on, then agree to disagree on the specifics, knowing that eventually reality will come swing your way. Eg. the Enlightenment theory behind liberty and democracy

#6 seems to be the ideal, but it requires some cognitive dissonance, namely the ability to say "I disagree with what you're doing, but will defend your right to do it." Most people are not capable of this kind of cognitive dissonance - either they slip into "I will not defend your right to do this" and end up with #1 or #2, or they slip into "I agree with what you're doing" and end up with #5.

So #5 is the most stable system that a large civilization can enter. Most Western democracies actually function as a combination of #5 and #6, with the masses adjusting their beliefs to fit their leaders and the leaders themselves agreeing to disagree under fundamental principles. U.S. democracy is currently in danger because a disturbing number of "leaders" (on both sides) are suggesting #1 or #3, but the political party system is meant to encourage #6.

Incidentally, the same problem happens with multi-party governments. Most multi-party systems are actually run by coalitions, where a bunch of parties get together and say "Okay, I don't totally agree with all of your viewpoints, but for the sake of getting things done I'll let you do things your way."
I have to disagree with your assertion that the soundest field in CS is graphics. My field is algorithms (in particular, numerical and algebraic algorithms): I describe a problem, describe an algorithm, prove that the algorithm works, prove the algorithm's running time, implement the algorithm, and then write a paper saying "look, my algorithm is faster than that other guy's algorithm". What could possibly be sounder than experimental results backed up by rigorous mathematical proof?

As for picking a supervisor vs. picking a university -- I agree with this with one very small caveat. If you don't need any supervision -- by which I mean that you've done independent research before and have a good idea of what research you're going to be doing as a graduate student -- there's really no need to pick a supervisor. My supervisor, Richard Brent, is one of the greatest people in my field in the world; but this was entirely coincidental, and in my time in Oxford I probably saw him an average of once every three or four months. I could have been at the University of Timbuktu (if there is such a place?) and received adequate supervision; the greatest benefit Oxford provided to my research was to open doors for me -- it's amazing how many people pay attention to an email which starts "I am a doctoral student at Oxford University".

One final remark about supervisors: If you're planning on applying to do a doctorate and there's a particular professor whose research interests you, you should absolutely contact them; if you're planning on applying to do a master's, please don't. There are far too many wannabes with no research experience entering master's programs to have a personal dialogue about one's research with every one of them.
I would like to introduce to this thread a book that recently came out called Myth of the Rational Voter. Byran Caplan argues that voters on the whole make irrational decisions and even lists 4 specific "biases" that voters suffer from.

Here's a podcast that explains the book: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2007/06/caplan_on_the_m.htm...
This seems like a strange statement to make -- for a lot of people, the careers aren't really substitutes for each other. If you like the life of pure research, why would you be interested in a startup? Likewise, if you like the action and risk of entrepreneurship, why on earth would you consider academia? You can't claim that for everyone, it's better to do a startup than to be an academic.
Ironically, one of the ways to "fail" a genius is to label her so:

"The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids"
http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/

But, you also can't hide from someone that they're not being challenged by the same academic work as their age-peers, so you'd better be ready with some special challenges for them.
BTW nobody is posting porn here .. "whatever" is posted, is somehow related to startups/pragramming most of the times.
I can't say anything about CS, but in physics, these comments are spot on. The essay points out: "A Ph.D in the humanities is useful for one thing only these days, and that's being an academic." Ok, a phd in physics gives you more flexibility, but while you're in grad school, your professors expect the best and brightest to go into academia, the less smart go off and work in industry.

Again, I don't know if the "academia uber alles" attitude pervades CS. But, suppose it's common. Imagine how that will make you feel if you want to go work in something so undignified as consumer internet applications. The academic attitude is really a brainfuck, UNLESS, you want to be an academic :)
A Desk is a Dangerous Place to View the World ...
The Multicore Kerfuffle and a Dose of Reality
Actually there is. I use a blackberry which also has a similar feature - if a number on a web page looks like a phone number you can just click it and it will call the number. However I routinely need to copy paste things from one email to another or from a web page to an email.

You may be happy with your iphone, good for you. My point is that you can't call a feature extraneous just because you don't need it and that if you have to reduce features to reduce bugs you have a very serious problem. If your engineers are prone to writing buggy code, the product will be buggy even if it has very few features and vice versa.
I just finished my PhD in CS at Georgia Tech, so I'll share my two cents on the topic. (My field was programming languages and compilers.)

I wouldn't characterize graphics as the "soundest" field. I might give that title to formal methods, where the bar for publication is often a machine-verifiable proof of correctness.

Of course, graphics is math-heavy, too. A lot of the good graphics folks I know started off as mathematical physicists.

For that matter, many sub-disciplines within CS are quite math-heavy. For my own dissertation, I developed static analyses of programs. To do so, I modeled the semantics of a programming language as a mathematical relation on machine states. I then defined new (finitely computable) relations---the analyses---and I proved these are sound simulations of the semantics relation. Plenty of math involved.

Theory folks do plenty of math on the complexity and correctness of algorithms.

Machine learning involves lots of probability and statistics.

Even the top-notch human-computer interaction people know statistics well.

I could go on. But, I think you could find a way to do some "real" math in any field within CS. (Though I've noticed each sub-discipline has its own self-aggrandizing definition of "real.")

As far as how much of the article resonated with my own experience, I would have to say not much. I had plenty of cordial debates with professors, but ultimately, we would arrive at either a theorem or a contradiction, and then the debate was ended. No feelings hurt. No ego assuaged. Just a truth uncovered.

The one part of the article that does ring true is the myopic vision of the world one receives in academia. Academia takes center stage as the noblest of all possible pursuits. The thrill of publication and peer recognition can be intoxicating, especially if you're the kind of person who is obsessed with publicly validating their own intelligence.

I'm now taking a year off from academia to work full-time for my two startups, but a part of me feels like I'm selling out by not going on to become a professor right away. My own advisor warned strenuously me to continue publishing, lest the "jealous priesthood" of academia reject my attempt to return. I know enough, though, to know that he's right. If I don't continue to publish, academia will cut me off, regardless of how might money I might make doing startups.

My parting advice to potential grad students in CS is: (1) choose a field that's growing rather than shrinking, and (2) find an advisor with whom you can develop a comfortable working relationship. After that, lots of hard work and a modicum of smarts can get you the rest of the way.
Software - How Software Companies Die
Your observation would work better on your personal blog than as a story on "Hacker News".
Regarding your first point, you're probably right, and I likely overstepped my ideas and/or didn't express them completely. I also had another consideration that I didn't express in my first comment. The Africans that ended up as slaves in America were the ones who had been defeated in tribal battles. On average, I would say they would likely be less intelligent than those who win battles or avoid them altogether.

Regarding intelligence of agriculture vs. hunting, I would argue that hunting may require more skill, but in agriculture, intelligence (and creativity) has a greater reward (than in hunting). That is, it is very difficult to automate tasks in hunting (beyond things like inventing guns, which they obviously hadn't done), but agriculture has been steadily getting more efficient with creative inventions from iron tools to plows to the cotton gin and so on. Hunters today still use very similar methods to ancient times. For that reason, I believe that an agricultural society selects more strongly for creative thinking, while a hunting society selects for physical skill and quick thinking. The creativity required to change society in order to accommodate more crowded conditions also undoubtedly requires intelligence. Anyways, enough of that...

I do agree with you that there is likely a small amount of bias in tests like these, and your example is a good one. Another I have heard was about a question which involved the "knowledge" that lemons are yellow. In Latin America, however, lemons are more often green, obviously giving Latin Americans a disadvantage on that particular test question.
The Cost of Losing a Developer
Sun is misusing the GPL for Java: Part 1
Unstoppable Subversion
Am I Too Old To Be A Programmer?
'The "I've played a lot of Number Munchers" line only works for so long.'

I don't often make comments like this, but LOL, for real :-).
There are at least two separate questions here: 1) why does the US have only two major parties; and 2) given such, why do people often pick one and stick with it for all issues?

The first has been studied to death. It has to do with more with how the US government is set up and less with the psychology of its people. There are other countries with different setups that are not two-party dominant. One viable way out of such dominance is some form of party-list proportional representation (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party-list_proportional_represe...) .

The second is all about psychology, it most certainly has several components at play. I posit the most prevalent are attitudes of commitment given the initial choice of party and some form of path of least resistance.

The former is common in psychology. It is a natural instinct to think your group is better as soon as you join it, for whatever reason, even an arbitrary one. This even happens in psychology experiments when groups are assigned randomly.

The latter reason is simply most people don't research any issues nor do they want to. They go with perhaps the simplest method to decide, which is listen to what the group told me before. There is some real trade-off here. To be fully informed is perhaps impossible. You need some sort of proxy for most policy issues. Blindly following one of two major parties (on the other extreme) is probably not the answer either of course.
Bring back down arrows on story submissions, but instead of voting the story down like before, enough down votes would show the community disagrees with that type of submission.
Salary expectations? Willingness to work overtime?
That would frighten me.
Is there really such a thing as "infinity"?
I think being an employee and launching a startup are on a continuum of sorts. With a startup you get lots of uncertainty, but lots of independence. There is a job to do, you decide how to do it, and the market is your metric for success, for better or worse.

As an employee you have a lot more security (worse case your perfectly steady paycheck disappears for a bit to be replaced by another, maybe smaller maybe larger steady paycheck) but most likely your performance is reviewed by a pointy-haired boss.

As a graduate student, usually you get paid a pittance (sometimes you pay for the privilege), have even more uncertainty that a startup (after 5 years or more you may be kicked out; good luck transferring your credits) and your performance is reviewed by a committee of pointy-haired bosses.

If you were to actually plug all that uncertainty into a utility maximization problem assuming a risk-averse individual, I seriously doubt it comes out as a good idea for any field, without maybe adding in a variable for "must prove myself more intelligent than the mundanes with a formal title bestowed by the intellectual aristocracy"

Of course most don't really know that going in, and the article was right; once you are on that train it's hard to get off. All of this sounds a little bitter (I used to be a bright eyed idealist; I promise!) but I'm in the midst of slogging through my dissertation and things will be much better when (if) I can finally put on my ridiculous floor length hood.

Anyone good with optimal control of vector-valued stochastic processes? Have I got a deal for you!
QuickInsert, a free way to protect content and harness users
I think the big change there is bandwidth - browsers were SLOW 10 years ago. It wasn't possible to do much beyond the basics on a 64K dialup. (actually, wan't it even slower than that in 97?)
Very depressing. I initially thought the change was going to be a good thing, but it has taken all of 2 days for the site to turn into Reddit. There seems to be much evidence (reddit, digg, slashdot) that social news just doesn't work.
Ah darn. The tag cloud in #6 is my own. massive fail on my part.
Compare a bright kid with an excellent education to one with a poor or absent education - the difference is profound. I agree that any bright kid can figure it out on his own eventually if the desire to learn isn't killed, but think of all that wasted time. I would much prefer to have my PhD at 20 than at 30 (note: I do not have a PhD - just an example). I think I wasted at least a decade learning what I should have been taught at school.
Is GenITeam your startup? There's certainly room in the marketplace for companies like GenITeam but most of the people on this site are strongly against outsourced development for the products they are building. That's cool you're running it out of Pakistan though, I haven't seen any freelance development firms in Pakistan before.

How is the local programming education? Do the Pakistani universities teach Microsoft languages or Java or something else?
And here's why:

- It's simply conjecture, as far as I can tell. It even goes so far as to say "invariably", which is a pretty strong word for something with no data to back it up.

- It's not particularly well thought out, if I may say so respectfully. The reason the US has two parties is partly because of how the electoral system works - first past the post causes people to glom together in the center, as per the hotelling effect. This has advantages (lessens extremism in some ways) and disadvantages (less representative than a broader range of parties).

- I would expect a serious article on this topic to delve into other voting systems and their effects on parties, and representation of the spectrum of views held by the electorate.

So, this is what we get from someone who is without doubt a smart guy, who has been a member of our community for some time, and if his "karma" is anything to go by, is generally respected in his views on startups due to interesting and insightful comments.

Just imagine what happens when you start fiddling with those variables - more people who haven't taken part of the community, for instance, and the possibility for low-quality content becomes very high.
why? they wouldn't have to put ads on user profiles just put them on canvas pages in an unobtrusive way, you can potentially target them A LOT better than google does no?
Designing a monument of humanity and a warning to the future
Are you suggesting that, if I'm patient enough, they'll change the focus of this back to startup news? 'Cuz I can get "hacker newz" at reddit/digg/slashdot/a-dozen-other-places...

And what "solution" should I be part of? The one that makes YC more money? Or the "sense of community"? I care squat about the YC community; I used to come here to read the startup articles. I can get arstechnica/lifehacker/etc links elsewhere.
Working from Home solves the problem, No ? You would assume that with a real tech company like Opera, that would be the case - but you never know.
If it were true that no value can be provided by good education - I would agree with you. But I've seen what good education can provide. Why should we spend so much tax money on a system that we then try to avoid?
SVN has already lost mind share with the real hackers, the thought leaders like Linus Torvalds - It's the new COBOL of the open source version systems. The decentralized version control systems that are open source are really pushing version control systems in new directions.They are addressing important questions about the committer/non-committer divide, which SVN only perpetuates (at least with open source projects).

BTW,should corporate spiels be posted here ? I agree that Collabnet deserves some credit for sponsoring dev of SVN. But is this the appropriate forum for a post like this ?
The difference with a backup hard drive is that it's dedicated to music. No one wants to share their backup hard drive, but they might share or even sell their MP3 player. The legit use for the MP3 player is probably legally safe, but things can get gray quickly.

Since this particular MP3 player can only hold MP3s, not arbitrary files, they should be required to implement a self distruct feature, even though a device that could store MP3s and files shouldn't need one.
eh, I'll always use both. Maybe I'm just that big of a slacker.