skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Any link for more information on "au fait" as a component of social class?
I live in Columbus, OH and as I read PG's essay I was wondering what Columbus tells you. And seriously, I just kept thinking about one thing: "You should play college football."

College football is king in the Bus, and the players and coaches are our royalty.

It's kind of a scary thought, but I'm as big a Buckeye fan as anyone else, so I'm partly to blame. But I also admit that I don't want to live in a place where this is the best thing we have to offer.

The truth is, I love Columbus for all many reasons: close friends, a great job, the Wexner Center, and of course, Buckeye football. It's a scary thought to pick up and move to SV. I often think about Spielberg, Lucas, Kaufman, and Coppola all hanging out together in the 70s. I desperately want to be a part of a group like that, but for startups.
just enjoy it ;)
So move to a city, it's not so difficult. Besides, I have lived in smaller towns, too, and I still never needed a car.

Edit: as mentioned elsewhere, of course cars are necessary for transportation of goods. But the majority of car travel is very unlikely to be necessary.
black bums, lower class korean immigrants... I appreciate German attitudes of precision but with that mentality no wonder you lack immigrant capital.
I don't want to be a dick to anybody, I just don't like cars. It's nothing personal.
What ticket tracker/code review software is best?
Trac? Bugzilla? Lighthouse? Reviewboard? Discuss.
Columbia, NYU, and Cooper Union are excellent schools. If they were located anywhere but in the center of the world's media and financial system, they would define that place as an unparalleled academic center.
Ask HN: Grad School
It is approaching about that time where I need to decide on whether I should go to grad school or not (I am currently an undergrad). My future goal is to start a start-up, but I don't feel 100% about anyone else I know right now to be my co-founder. Therefore, I am stuck now on deciding whether it is better worth my time just heading over to Silicon Valley and getting involved there and hopefully meeting a co-founder (I have never been there, is this asking for a miracle?) or going to a school like Stanford or UC Berkeley, which would require me to take out a loan and be in some serious debt. I would probably go for a masters degree as opposed to a PhD since I am assuming a PhD is setting myself up to drop out at some point (I don't intend on it taking 6 years to find a co-founder). Is there any reason I should be thinking PhD instead? Also, how certain were any of you that you knew you had the right co-founder at the time of starting your company? I'm not looking for someone to tell me exactly what to do as much as give me more information about why one option may be better or worse than another from the viewpoint of someone who is currently involved in the start-up world.
Cities are nice to visit, but in the long run they are a bit of a grind.
I think you are missing his point, as he said " beneath this layer, every city is made up of normal people". The judgments you are making on those particular areas are relative to the individuals you are associating with.
This kind of thing is why "the cloud" is going to have a hard time serving bigger companies. Security, regulatory compliance, reliability, accessibility of data, etc. are all things that are historically not being well-served by even larger companies, and I think they're the reason a lot of "Web 2.0" companies are unable to make their way from success with consumers into enterprise markets (where a single sale can make your month a good one).

Wufoo have managed to do it extremely well. They provide great export features, and they go to great lengths to explain how and why they provide reliable and redundant infrastructure.

But the good examples will be dragged down by the bad examples, and the end result will be much slower adoption of the model. So, going off-line without warning and without providing a means for customers to get their data, is a great disservice to not just your own customers but to every other hosted application provider.

I don't want to pick on the Stikipad guys in particular, but it's a real problem--if you aren't sure that you'll always be around to serve your customers, you need to make a dead man's switch plan to get the data back into the hands of your customers.
I only recognize a few of those first-name handles on TechCrunch; a lot of times it's just random anonymous spam. TechCrunch of yore was a pretty nifty place (2005-ish), but watching it convert into an actual media company was also pretty interesting.
Thoughts About The Unabomber’s Manifesto - Industrial Society and its Future
I don't know about unparalleled. Harvard + MIT + Tufts + BU + BC + Northeastern + ... would probably still win.
I've used Trac, Bugzilla, Mantis and now Lighthouse. I'd go with Lighthouse if you're looking for a light tracking application of a small team. Lighthouse has been the nicest I've used, though they're still a little light on some functionality.
People traveled a lot during the Great Depression. That's when hobos, okies, migrant workers, and Route 66 entered popular culture. Much of California was settled during the 1930s, as emigrants from the dust-bowl states moved to the Central Valley and LA areas. One of the fastest-growing professions was "gas station attendant", and the Depression years featured the consolidation of the auto industry.
The sails in the picture are being winched in. Normally, they fly like a kite, about 200 m above the ship, and tow it forwards. The winds are much stronger up there. It also looks like the kite has been partially furled - the picture on Wikipedia looks much bigger:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Beluga_Skysails
Castle Demo App #3: Saving time and effort with advanced Monorail features
Paul, what specific activities do you recommend for listening to a city? You mentioned general eavesdropping and walking around residential areas in the evenings; any others?
Or at least less likely to investigate them further...
Well, as someone who has worked in startups for three years. I think you should at least take on an internship with a startup to see how much you like working in a startup. There is a pretty big financial cost with going to grad school especially if you do a masters. I know that payrates for a person fresh out of a masters program is comparable to the payrate of an undergrad who worked for 2 to 3 years. My opinion is that getting some real world experience is always good before you start your own company.
I live there. I think the message is:

You should be younger and hipper and enjoy indie music.
Here's a familiar looking idea from 18 Apr 06:

I find every ambitious town sends you a message. New York tells you "you should make more money." LA tells you "you should be better looking." Rome tells you "you should dress better." London tells you "you should be hipper." The Bay Area tells you "you should live better." And Cambridge tells you "you should read some of those books you've been meaning to."
Am I missing something? Who's dragging down the male and female expectations?

"Five years after graduation, [MBA grads] expect to be bringing in $180,031 annually vs. $169,849 the previous year. Male graduates expect to be raking in even more, $206,000 vs. women's expectations of $190,382 five years down the line."
yes, that's very nice but does nothing to refute Cambridge as the intellectual capital of the world.
I recommend TrustCommerce.
If I just release the thing now with little content and no community then it could just look like a failed website...

To paraphrase Twain [1], which would you rather do? Launch an open version of your website and let people think that its userbase is too small? Or deliberately limit the size of the userbase and remove all doubt?

If the site is really not ready, you should recruit a handful of testers -- only five or six are necessary to tell you what you need to know. Otherwise you should just launch the darn thing. Actively recruiting people to help fill it up is still a good idea, but don't put some up some stupid barrier that prevents these people from inviting their friends, their friends' friends, and anyone else in the world. Don't worry, if (while?) the site sucks most people won't ever see it anyway.

[1]: http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/1098
A good scale which uses impedance to give a reasonably accurate measure of body fat % is fairly cheap nowadays, fyi. I got mine for about £25 in the UK. It's accurate enough to tell you whether your fat is dropping overall, week after week - just make sure you measure at the same time each day (ideally, just after waking up, before having breakfast).
I've been to different places in the world but the same ideas popped into my head:

Barcelona: Party naked but watch your backpack.

Toronto: Buy land north of here.

Amsterdam: There's no work done here at all.

London: Next time, bring more money.
Since we're on the subject of the politeness of New Yorker's and the attitude that everything has its price, in New York, a simple "thank you" might be considered a costly acknowledgment.

Here's a dismal example by hacking standards, but it's still indicative of the attitude. Someone from a financial firm, known for its rating system and price indexes, had a data conversion problem. They were using Matlab--a dismal language with a bastard semantics. One of the functions they were using was Datenum(), which converts dates and times to the number of days since the year zero, in the proleptic Gregorian calendar.

The specification of this function should have been to return a floating point number equal to 1+1/86,400 (in units of days) for a date argument equal to one second after year zero. And in fact, the open source equivalent function in Octave does exactly that. However, Matlab's function differs from this in the 11th decimal place. Their technical support has been silent on the issue.

When I informed the person at the financial firm about this discrepancy, they thanked me for "my comments." In the next sentence, I was informed that that they were redoing their calculations using another method. It was stated as if the decision to do this was an entirely independent judgment, not at all informed by my observations, and completely unrelated to any problems they might have encountered using the previous method. They simply decided to change the way they were doing things, without explanation.

Finding a numerical bug that could complicate the analysis of code that depends on it is not earthshaking. But not stating what informed a decision to avoid the problem altogether is a typical New York attitude. Or perhaps the reluctance to credit others is typically corporate. Correct me if I am mistaken.

I have to agree with Paul Graham's essay on the relative lifelessness of employees: if I were an employee, I simply would have accepted the decision as a completely independent judgment, internalized it and defended it.
The Google Mini gets a Not-so-mini Upgrade
Ermm, I grew up in suburbia and do know that people live outside cities. I also know that the price of goods and services I appreciate are impacted by the price of fuel.

I don't know what that has to do with what I said, though: people who bought bigger vehicles than they needed are now finding out what a bad investment they were. On the other hand, farmers and tradesmen can and do pass the cost of fuel on to consumers. That may suck for me, but it is what it is. I don't blame them for it.

I'm pretty sure that the suburbanites commuting in big cars they don't need form the majority of complainers. And, as I've said, I have a hard time feeling much pity for them.

(To put it another way: get off your high horse about people up on high horses. I'm not one of them.)
I think that a web browser offers more chances for eavesdropping than living in Cambridge (or any other city) does.
And I don't like country music. But if I were to sit around hoping that country music ceased to exist and that all the people who currently enjoy country music would be forced to no longer listen to it, that would make me a dick.
At some point it becomes economical to synthesize fuel using nuclear power plants. I would expect this to be well short of $100/gal.
Xobni's growing user base leads to hiring more QA Engineers
Lately PG essays have become more literary/poetic than before. I do not somehow identify with these later essays anymore.
Imagine some black bum you drive by, imagine how he sees cambridge. For him its not a place of ideas. There is no push towards reading.

I'm not sure why you felt the need to bring the hypothetical bum's race into it, but I disagree. A bum on the street in Cambridge sits around resenting the fact that all the successful people around him are better educated than he is. A bum on the street in Hollywood, on the other hand, sits around resenting the fact that all the successful people around him are better-looking than he is.
What rules do they break in Berlin that are not broken elsewhere?
It does because the parents entire message was that for the most part, every city is made up of the same ingredients and you cannot dub the city the intellectual capital of the world based on a small subset of experiences with a select group of people. If your entire experience with the city of Cambridge is surrounded with individuals involved in academia, then it would be easy to come to such a conclusion. Having a friend that attends a well known Cambridge institution, I would never title an area based on or around the experiences I had with those individuals while visiting because that would be entirely inaccurate. If that were the case, I could call Cambridge the pseudointellectual and back patting capital of the world (not that those were my experiences, but no less accurate than any of the previous statements).
5 Things Facebook Should Change
Don't like the Webvan example. NYC shops on Fresh Direct. More of a lesson in timing. How many failed ideas from the last bubble are now viable businesses now?
Google App Engine opens up for Google I/O, pricing announced
My experience as a native resident of San Francisco(22 years, but the last few mostly spent out of town for college/work) is that most of the people residing there are _tourists_.

That is, people who come there(and many different people do, the turnover is high) also tote along some baggage of what they think the city is about. Vision meets and gradually becomes reality as the newcomers act out their desires, to varying degrees of success. So there is a sort of flow at work. Realization of all the various lifestyles present is a multi-decade process. Plus it changes quickly and incrementally, so as to become nearly unrecognizable. I'm still nowhere near a full comprehension of my hometown.

The broad strokes pg paints in this essay seem more reminiscent of college lifestyle than the character of entire cities. A four-year college is able to concentrate those kinds of ambitions precisely: everyone is at roughly the same few stages of life and so can quickly find common ground.

But in a city, things quickly collide.
There are real working models, so they are not vaporware. They are instantiated-but-not-yet-coming-off-an-assembly-line-ware.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/new_cars/4237853....
Boston says, "Ride the T, don't buy liquor on Sunday, and incorporate Dunkin' Donuts into at least two meals a day."
In my experience, the Ruby culture doesn't prize cleverness over consistency. Instead, it leaves responsibility up to the developer. You can do convoluted things like 7, 8, and 15, but you don't have to (and few people do). Really, any language lets you write ugly code, and good developers will strive for clarity.

As an example, you can use Perl-style magic variables in Ruby ($!, $_). But in three years writing Ruby code professionally, I think I've only seen one of these ever used, and only rarely.

IMO metaprogramming is a bigger potential problem than Symbol#to_proc or perlisms. You can override the + operator globally with Ruby, or do any other number of stupid things. But metaprogramming also offers a ton of power (similar to Lisp macros?).
I filled out the quote page 4 hours ago... We'll see what happens.
"your best best is probably to try living in several places when you're young"

I have, and here's what they've said to me:

Pittsburgh: You should be nice.

New Jersey: You should be in New York.

Los Angeles: You should go outside.

Phoenix: You should go inside.

Detroit: You should be glad you have a good job.

Tampa: You should buy a new pair of flip flops for dinner Saturday night.
The usage is awkward, but the grammar is sound.
You are not in touch with the general world population.

Most/many diseases are caused by people not adhering to very basic eating, exercise and health routines to begin with. Couple that with vague superstitious beliefs about Drs just wanting to make money/actually hurting the patient, also the inability to pay for the medicine, etc.

I do wonder, however, if someone is not capable of taking medicine, how will they use a website/other technology any more reliably?
I've never been to the Science Museum in Oakland, but New York has some pretty good science museums.

And I can't really say that Science and Oakland go together all that way in my mind either.
OK -- you are saying that things are much more complicated than being able to dub a city the intellectual capital of the world.

It is nearly impossible because humanity is more complex than being reduced to the experiences of one person, but if someone was holding a gun to your head and saying you had to name the world's intellectual capital, what would you name it? There really doesn't seem to be a better one than Cambridge.
I think it's a kind of natural selection for kids. Surviving the peer pressure (and authority pressure). That should be OK education for some of them, not for the majority though.

Funny, I was exposed to similar bullshit growing up in the communist USSR. All propaganda forced on people was always justified by the most of humane reasons. Do you want to support the oppressed of the world? The starving? The exploited? Of course we were!

It was only later in life you start to notice some fat smirking person sitting in the shadows and enjoying the fruits of that mass enthusiasm... and mass scarifie. Some of the kids I new have noticed the falsehood early on, but decided to play along. Most were clueless and later shocked when the whole communist system collapsed around them. And a rare few had chosen to simply stand for the truth and face the consequences.
Places I've lived:

Sydney: You should spend more money on real estate.

Melbourne: You should spend more money on clothes.

London: You should have been here 150 years ago.

Davis, CA: You should leave Davis, CA.
I used one once, and I was skeptical about its accuracy, since it required gender and activity level as input. I still prefer performance as a metric, because it measures fitness.
Amazon Web Services presentation with video & slides
Communication can stunt innovation
At the risk of sounding inane, you have to do both. Iterate, release early, and listen to users (PG). But also think deeply about the market, how you differentiate yourself, how you'll get the message out, and be sure you're really building something worthwhile (SB). Both contribute to the same goal - figuring out what your product or service will look like - but they attack it from different sides.

No reason why you can't do both. But if you naturally lean in one direction, you might want to be careful that you don't ignore the other.
"I make sure I come back home to HN and mingle with the people who live here"

Me too.

Nice observation, the virtual city. The result of choice, not circumstance.
Sure, but Joe VC's venture funds usually have a ten-year lifetime, so year-to-year fluctuations in the skittishness of investors shouldn't be that big a problem. Your average VC is still working to invest a big pile of money he raised years ago, while trying to raise money he won't invest for years.
Leaked Screen Shots of Windows 7 Hit CrunchGear’s Inbox
Fav.or.it Founder Fires at Twitter and the Blogosphere
Estrogen helps drive distinct, aggressive form of prostate cancer
That's the wrong question. This is about culture, not tallying. Berlin is special because it's a chaotic city in a country of orderliness.

I started writing a list, but it doesn't do it any justice. Just like listing 10 big companies won't circumscribe the feel of Silicon Valley, a list of goofiness won't peg Berlin. But hang out in Kreuzberg for a weekend and you'll get it. :-)

Berlin is still living on the energy from the wall coming down almost 20 years ago. The west side was long a quirky occupied island hundreds of kilometers behind the iron curtain and the east was the first place where people rebelled and started down the path that reunited the city.

(Note: I've visited 28 countries and lived in 8 cities, so this isn't just cheering for the home team.)
Unless you are in or have been in a similar situation, I don't think either of you are qualified to make an assessment of what the views are of the "bums" in either city. Not everyone has the same goals or expectations in life (not claiming they aspire to be homeless) but making the assumption that individuals become bitter and resent those who either more successful (which is subjective) or better looking (also subjective) is quite a pretentious statement. This attitude perpetuates throughout our society and fuels many of the problems we face today. Maybe that "bum" is simply happy to have survived a childhood surrounded by drug addict parents or none at all, or maybe he is one of your praised intellectuals who went off the deep end with mental illness or was left behind by society. While you corrected the parent for making an ignorant statement for calling the "bum" black, you went on a few sentences later to make an equally ignorant statement by making the assumption he envies those surrounding him.
I found it cool as well, and appreciate you linking to that. It's somewhat inspiring to see how someone begins to think about a topic; leads me to stop rejecting my early ideas so ruthlessly.
Well okay, I'm not sure whether having a working prototype actually makes it officially not-vaporware, but until there's something I can actually buy I remain skeptical about the range and price.
7 points and no comments yet, would it be that lots of people want to use scalr, but no one has yet?
I was thinking how you define brilliance. The problem with arguing such a complex topic is that in order to make a point you need to understand and take into your system the whole long chain of assumptions and conclusions that your opponent has made. Was your model right? Let me explain my model... Which is normally more than an average person is prepared for.

Hence, the power of the soundbite.

Freeman Dyson (and others quoted earlier on HN) however wins over the complexity not through unsubstantiated soundbite, but by arguing a simple logical point. CO2 is not a 'pollution' in itself. It's not an alien element on Earth. Plants put all of the carbon through their system 'every 12 years' on average. Plants are not alien. Forest fires and volcanic eruptions can produce carbon, and there is a ready system to 'digest' it. Plants.

That's something of a radical shift in the thinking. All that smoke from burning coal is not pollution???? Hm, taking the thesis to the extreme -- actually no. It's just taking one natural element from the soil and placing it in the atmosphere. Nature does exactly the same thing all the time (forest fires, eruptions etc.).

Obviously, even if we assume that increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is not a disaster, it may still be unpleasant because the change would affect the current status quo. Siberia will become fertile and Arkansas will turn into desert. This change should be prevented or at least managed. But not by the government austerity measures, but by gradual and natural means.

These simple ideas are powerful. They don't require complex arguing over whose weather model is better. Hopefully they will spread.