skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What a crappy interviewer. The first question reveals the interviewer doesn't know Hofstadter from a hole in the ground.

Such a shame a great mind like Hofstadter is subjected to these awful questions. Here's an idea. If you haven't read Hofstadter's GEB and I Am a Strange Loop, don't try to interview him about it. Especially don't open with a question that reveals this in the first breath Hofstadter responds with.

I love Bill Moyers, don't get me wrong here, but this reminds me a little of Bill Moyers talking to Joseph Campbell. Campbell was so much more evolved in his understanding then Moyers, that Moyers (who is excellent) seemed like a dog trying to understand a card trick. The interviewer seems like that.

It's well worth reading anyway, because Hofstadter is so damn brilliant.
Yeah, but is that really true? If so, why'd Zuckerberg even show up to pitch?
A security breach exposes top-secret documents containing the latest intelligence on al-Qaeda
I generally hate microsoft-bashing (though a Linux user, I find it a waste of time), but this is actually insightful rather than just a "MICROSOFT SUXXORS" piece
I think it's both.

He's an incredibly bright person who cares only about being a success. He's making some incredibly savvy moves that I think are best for his company, but at the same time he's being quite a bit of a douche.
Judging from the pictures and having tried neither the iPhone looks a lot slicker and nicer. The Android has too many buttons to look appealing.
Intern at a YC startup this summer: sumon [at] snaptalent [dot] com

http://snaptalent.com/ads/218/
Total hoax.

There are so many holes in this I don't know where to begin. A humanoid robot with a measurable IQ of 130 would require awareness of self and environment. Programming it for servitude would be tricky, to say the least. Also, why do so many people expect any strong AI to resemble human intelligence?

Give Philip K Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" a whirl if you're interested in the implications. Isaac Asimov also spent a lot of time writing about robotic intelligence. Hit up Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun and Robots of Dawn if this floats your boat.
I'd love suggestion for something that would fit in a regular jeans or cargo short's pocket. I love moleskins, but the hard cover makes it tough to stuff in your pocket and sit down.
I can understand how it can be a point of confusion that I use these terms interchangeably, but it reflects how I feel about the name Myanmar, which is promoted by the Burmese government. I say "Burmese government" because Burmese is an ethnicity, not a nationality. The fact that the Burmese government is calling themselves Myanmar is just whitewashing the fact they discriminate against non-Burmese.

The thing you have to understand about Myanmar is that it's made up of dozens of different cultures who are not Burmese, which is a big source of conflict in the region. In fact, many parts of Myanmar don't even speak Burmese. Therefore, I take some license in the use of the terms "Burma" and "Myanmar". You're right though, I should be more clear with this.
You're missing out on a great opportunity because of fear. If you are a good programmer, you can get work instantly (call some friends, tell them you are broke and need work).

What are you going to regret more in the future, winging it and seeing if you had what it took to create a startup even if it goes down in flames or being super careful but not being able to see if you had what it took to make something awesome?
This is an idea I've often wondered about myself. It seems much more preferable to give some a few people good access rather than everyone poor (or worse) access.
"There aren't very many new ideas floating around," he said. "The facebook isn't even a very novel idea. It's taken from all these others. And ours was that we're going to do it on the level of schools.
"... Janet Portman, a lawyer and an expert in landlord-tenant law ... said her doubts about the viability of Mr. Takle’s business model remain."

Her concerns seemed a little strange to me. How is his model fundamentally different from a traditional property management company, or perhaps it's closer to the software companies that support that industry already? Both models are well established. Some Web-based conflation of the two sounds viable to me. He also offers a tenant screening service, which already exists as well.

“His jaunt to India to look for legal assistance is further evidence of his failure to understand the complexities of the legal world he was wading into.”

Where's the complexity? I owned a rental property for a few years, and apart from the initial purchase and subsequent sale, I never needed a lawyer. Of course, you could get sued, but that's hardly routine.

My biggest concern would be that I believe there's already a fair bit of competition in this space, at least for the individual services that he's packaging together.
Graduate unemployability issues apply to 1st world countries too not just India and 3rd world.
CTOs make more money than normal employees? No way!
Even in the UK many employers complain about lack of graduate quality.

In fact today Imperial College in London announced it will be doing 4-year degrees instead of 3-year ones to address issues in falling educational standards.
Were your sites affected by the Comcast weirdness?
Comcast had some very strange network problems today. Some sites were completely unavailable, others like google were partially available depending on which ip you were connecting to.

Traffic to some sites dropped by almost half.

Were you affected?
One good way for teenagers to break into a job is to start contributing to an open source project. Many in the community are old hands in a variety of different companies and organizations. They can open doors for you.

Also, try tapping into the resources around USACO. Rob and the others have many links, and many USACO alums have become quite prominent. Some really like to help young people out.

Rent A Coder and TopCoder design and development, eLance, and others, are all pretty much a waste of time. They are a market for lemons. You can learn far more in different environments.

The ideal situation? You're given a project with an enormous jump in responsibility, you get to work on something interesting and challenging, you get to work with people you can really learn from, and you get to see a project you're proud of through to completion.

If you'd like to, feel free to contact me -- details are in my user profile.
Easier browsing of Hacker News...for me
http://nirmalpatel.com/#hnsplitview

HN SplitView is a bookmarklet that adds a link labelled "SPLIT VIEW" to each post on the Hacker News website. This link allows the user to open the post and the discussion page side by side in frames. Simply drag the link for HN SplitView to your toolbar or add it as a favorite.

I've been using this and it makes it easier for me to browse. I hope that other members of the HN community find it useful. I've tested it under Safari and FF. Let me know if you guys have any problems.

EDIT: It doesn't add the link for posts like this one or those of the "Ask HN:" variety.
It might be too late to get an internship at a large company, but there are probably startups and other small companies that would love to have interns.

It doesn't hurt to find companies you're interested in an shoot them an e-mail inquiring about a summer position.

This worked for me when I e-mailed a couple of startups, one of which was Justin.tv. Even though they weren't specifically targeting interns, I e-mailed them anyway, with a solution to their pre-interview programming problem.

Now I'm in San Francisco =).
Wow, Apache still exists?
This bothers me because it pretends that it's railing against an unenlightened status quo, and it isn't. Philosophers of physics considered, and largely rejected, the many-worlds interpretation because, if quantum events result in every possible outcome occurring in some world, and our consciousness ends up in one of them by some chancy process, then there's no reason why we observe some events with higher probabilities than others. But we do, and many-worlds doesn't explain that. The author talks around this by saying that, yes, these probabilities are very mysterious, indeed. Well, there are other interpretations under which they're not. Such as a) the many flavors of GRW (a collapse theory), b) the bohmian interpretation (waves + particles), and c) the many-minds interpretation (anti-realist and therefore the most out-there of the three). Those are all pretty much consistent with QM, or there's a good reason to believe that they'll be beaten into a form that is so consistent (e.g. tumulka's relativized version of GRW-flash, but that's outside the scope of a HN comment).
I'm using it with Django. Is there a better option I'm not aware of? Everything else they suggested in the manual seemed too hackish - though I'm not a fan of Apache either!
I got this advice from a couple of people, one the Engineering VP at the last job [i.e.: 40hr/wk nominal, W2] I had, back in '79, one the CEO of the company before that (whom I consulted with for ca 20 years during the 80s, 90s, and 00s) after he started up his own consulting/contracting company.

Basically, take your desired salary[including expenses/fringes], divide by 100, and that's your daily rate. You can come down a little for long term work, say more than 2 weeks.
nginx, lighttpd worked with Django with WSGI mode.

I still use apache just because I can use subversion with it.
I use it in front of a mongrel cluster to make Rails app fast. Apache serves up static files (images, stylesheets, js) and I use mod_proxy and mod_proxy_balancer to load balance requests for dynamic content among the mongrel servers.

Apache is secure, and rock-solid.
Why normal sleep is critical to health
You know, I'm not sure if that was meant to be harsh of if you're just joking around, but I don't even care... that's damn funny stuff either way. I know most people don't like the biting responses, but that was gold.
I have looked at Rent A Coder but it seems inefficient: most of the time is spent on hunting down a manageable project and discussing the problem with the bidder, who usually don't even understand the problem!

Hmm, actually, being able to turn the vague requirements of an uninformed customer into a usable end product that meets their needs is a great skill to have. But I agree that Rent-a-Coder might not be the best way to spend your time.
Building Trust with your Online Users
When starting a web business, most startups don’t often consider how difficult it can be to convey credibility and establish trust with a client on their site. Pitching a service or product to a potential client in person is obviously much different than providing the same person with information on that service through a web site or webinar. When face to face, you often can establish credibility and competence through your personal interaction. When a client looks for a service online, though, it is much harder to get a sense of those who are on the other end. The personal interaction, that personal “touch” is often lost online. Visitors are left to judge your service based on the information they read and what they see on your site. If a user thinks your site lacks credibility, they will abandon your site and go elsewhere. On the other hand, there are methods you can employ to convey your company’s credibility online, so your clients can feel more comfortable. After all, who wouldn’t want to increase the number of conversions on their site?
Gen X-ers have too much confidence, write idiotic "news" articles
Inspirational video from Britain's got Talent
very nice, and very useful...can you make it a one click thing? right now I have to click on the bookmarklet and then click on split view. If it was just one link that would be awesome.
I wonder if this can be tweaked to work from within Google Reader, hmmm..I'll tinker with that a bit.

thanks again!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-minds_interpretation
My opinion is "take it easy". If you are a real capitalist and believe power of market force, the current success of Google may just be its biggest hurdle in future. As long as political power is not involved to hold the barrier for innovations, no one will be the only king forever.

Also you misunderstand Anti-trust law. The U.S. system allows you to be a monopoly in a market due to you create efficiency in that area. But as long as you try to leverage that influence on new market with unfair competition, you open the gate to hell for yourself.

I thought in 2000 that MS is so unbeatable. But I have no respect for them just 5 years later. It can happen to Google in next 10 years, too.
I think that would require the script running at the loading of the page. This could probably be done with a Greasemonkey script (Creammonkey for Safari).
As a founder of several companies that worked almost completely virtually, you can overcome all these issues.

Inability to brainstorm at any moment? Hardly. Chat is reasonable for this task.

Weakened brainstorming? Maybe. But you can always get together now and then in physical space. We do this every few months if possible.

Paperwork? Um, fax machines, scanners and pdfs. It takes the same amount of time.

Meeting pain? You still have to coordinate both schedules. This is work aroundable.

Motivation and keeping on task? This is a function of personality. It's very true that not everyone can work well virtually. I've found several winners in this regard, but I have also had to fire some people who might have been great in person, but just couldn't cut it remotely.

There are many benefits to working virtually. The talent pool is _much_ larger when it is national or international. The hours are better for everyone. One of my co-workers travels all over surfing in the mornings and working the rest of the day. All your communication (assuming you aren't using the phone much) is logged and can be searched, which is quite handy for those brainstorming sessions. It forces you into decent dev practices and into good communication.

It's not for everyone, surely, but neither is working in an office with your co-workers.
I started a business remotely with a friend and it didn't work out. He lost motivation and I couldn't get it back. Just because you know them very well doesn't always mean they will work well remotely. But at last you may have some idea going in. Oh, and it _really_ sucks to have to fire your friends.
Telescope to look deep into cosmos
It surprises me that so many firms still resort to arbitrary credential-based requirements rather than looking at something such as, say, solutions to a series of problems.

I guess it just means that the most creative HR departments are going to net the most appropriate candidates.
I don't know much about this, but wouldn't it be a lot more probable to be in a world of those many where the probabilities of events are distributed in a reasonable way, than to be in another world where the distribution of probabilities is out of the standard? (that is, there are many possible time lines, but the distribution of probabilities would indicate that there would be a lot more time lines for probable events, than for improbable events, so it's easier for us to be in a probable time line than in an improbable one). Or am I understanding something wrong?

(Sorry for my English, I'm not a native English speaker)
Ask YC: blaming the browser or supporting an argument
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvRa-CxkpZI

I am watching this video about GWT. They have difficulties with browsers multiple times but keep promising it's better than the demo supports. They also speak in support of each other by exaggerating what the other says from time to time like, "we get such and such speed here which is really fast" and the other says, "if that..." They both seem like smart guys but these two traits stick out. I have been working on wall st. for the last few years and know that discussions with geeky traits like this get the geeks thrown to the lions. I am curious how the YC community feels. Do these traits give you insight into how these guys work? Is there anything else about this unique personalities that stick out in a good or bad way to a potential funder?
I really admire the Facebook developers for this kind of thing.

It's great that they give away cool stuff they've developed.. as well as contributing to other open source projects.
Awesome video. Also old, and also not really right for this forum.
I'll have to take another look at that. We're bottlenecked by static file serving on a per server basis (a typical page is 1.5-6mb of traffic), so it's not a big priority. But it definitely will be if we move to separated out static + dynamic servers, or if we build out more dynamic places on the site that don't involve serving up a game.
Do you need to be in San Francisco? SF has the second highest power prices in the country. I'd check out Layer42 down in Santa Clara, email ser@layer42.net and tell him BitPusher sent you. Their network is great, their facilities decent, and their customer support blows 365main's out of hte water.
While I can see some merit in this argument, I'd also point out that I've never met a decent programmer that can't pick up a new language at least passingly in a day or two.
"Rob and the others have many links, and many USACO alums have become quite prominent. Some really like to help young people out.Rob and the others have many links, and many USACO alums have become quite prominent. Some really like to help young people out."

You seem to know quite a bit about USACO. Are you a USACO alum yourself?
Chomsky and Feynman for me... except with Chomsky it isn't exactly levity.
"Ideas" are not property. You are allowed to steal them. Who makes the money depends on business savvy and luck (probably more on luck). Greenspan just comes across as bitter that the dice didn't fall his way, and that he is not being compensated for having a similar idea earlier.
Cute story: when my dad would read me program from Family Computing magazine to type into my C=64, he would always pronounce the ':' as 'dit-dit' (spoken quickly).
"2x your hourly rate as an employee"

Maybe if you can manage to pretend that your employer doesn't pay half of your social security taxes =)
that's correct. the iphone sdk only works on intel macs.
What to do about wireless termination fees
Yahoo Loses Two More: Fayyad and Zawodny
Qik Demos iPhone Live Video Streaming Service
Comcast Increases Upstream Speeds For Its High-Speed Internet
Zeldman on Journalism and The Web
What Stinks About Sweat Equity
Don’t Want to Plan? Just Do a Sales Forecast
Do You Dare Drop the Day Job?
Should You Sweat The 'Recession'?
How Self-Made Titans Got Their Starts
Yahoo is getting desperate. Have you noticed all the adds on the radio for jobs? I wonder who would want to jump in a sinking ship right now.

Unless they flush out most of the management fat, and political-cooporate overhead, and start from semi-scratch, they will never be an attractive place fore great people.

Who wants to work for bozos anyways.
That's part of why you have to figure for a rate so much higher than your salaried rate.
Every other day :-)
Hofstadter is a usually great.

But he takes distasteful shots at AI researchers who disagree with him, here.

He embraces protecting animals and other semi-conscious beings, but doesn't extend that sympathy to AIs, or other potentially conscious beings. That's a bioelitist stance; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techno-progressivism#Contrastin...

He even celebrates slow developments in computing, as a good thing.
Internships.

I go an intern job over at Aviary for this summer, and I'm thrilled. Though I doubt it's a coding job, to be sure... I'm much more an end-user person. Still. I'm sure that if you're a programmer then being an intern is the way to go.
Well, I mentioned many-minds because a couple guys actually do take it seriously, even though most don't. But I think this entry is a little off when they say that many-minds "extends" many-worlds. On the many-minds theory, there's only one world, which is pretty different on the face of it. And since there are an infinite number of minds, if you get an 80-20 likelihood on values of some observable, then 80% of your minds will go to one and 20% to the other, which is very different from how many-worlds approaches splitting on outcomes.
I've never read GEB or even heard of I Am a Strange Loop. I've heard that reading GEB takes quite a commitment... Can I cheat and just read I Am a Strange Loop? (The original post says that GEB is basically reviewed in the first part of this newer book).
When I read "fundamentally hard", I think NP-hard. What is NP-hard about twitter? Am I missing something or is this a reference to a systems development issue?
If someone tells you an idea and you personally do it, great. If you tell me you are going to help me, then without my knowledge turn around and take all of the information I have been feeding you to help me and you do it, then that is a level above just hearing a "good idea".
Australia is 29 times as big as Texas
Don't listen to the commenters saying "just go for it" -- having cash in the bank is important (if you aren't wasting time earning trying to get the work to do so).

As long as you stay busy, building a buffer is a good thing.
i was thinking about proposing this as a feature. because when dealing with submissions, the constant is that i look at both the article and the comments
The problem with many-worlds is that there aren't more timelines for probable events. If every outcome occurs in some world, then for some event with two possible outcomes, there ends up being two of you; say, Lefty and Righty, one in each world. So there's no sense in saying "I'll probably end up being Lefty, since his outcome was more reasonable," because you'll end up being both of them.
Are you in Chicago? We'd pick you up as a paid intern. There are lots of other companies like us in other cities.
How To Kill An Idea
No, but I've been an observer in a few of the competitions, and played through much of the training set when I used to play TopCoder.
Why do people write articles like this? $100_000/yr in Kansas is much different from $100_000/yr in New York. But the data doesn't say anything about location, so it's probably irrelevant.

The article even mentions this disparity, but it doesn't do anything to correct it.
Informational Hygiene
Looks edited to me.
Is it antibacterial in the same sense as soap? I thought it was a material that just made it harder for bacteria to get a physical foot hold (no pun intended).
I recall reading that Hofstadter said (loosely) GEB was taken more as a collection of neat things, than the coherent thesis about identity.

I would personally recommend reading I Am A Strange Loop, and then GEB if intrigued. This way, you will interpret GEB according to Hofstader's more explicit formulations of his deeper ideas, instead of in the more shallow way GEB can be interpreted, without following the thread about identity.

I think I Am A Strange Loop is classic and cannot say too much about how great Hofstadter is. He gets consciousness. He gets it. And he has good ways of communicating it. One of the most brilliant minds I have read.
So How Many Search Engines Aren't Running Google's Ads?
If you're a Django person, you probably already know about http://www.djangogigs.com. Some of the opportunities there are short term.