skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Scientists have been in favor of group selection since the late 1800s. I don't see what's new about this at all. Here's a quote from 1902 that implies the existence of group selection:

"Competition [...] is limited among animals to exception periods. [...] Better conditions are created by the elimation of competition by means of mutual aid and mutual support. [...] "Don't Compete" -- competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!" That is the tendency of nature, not always realized in full, but always present. That is the watchword which comes to us from the bush, the forest, the river, the ocean. "Therefore combine -- practice mutual aid!" That is what nature teaches us." -- Pter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid
The site is incredibly slow. I can only assume a lot of people want .me domains...
18 year old invents mobile phone-based vehicle anti-theft system.
I've read The Intelligent Investor and The Theory of Investment Value and Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits. All three were quite good.

To summarize the first two (very roughly): The market isn't perfect and there are a lot of undervalued companies that are great. You have to find these companies at a significant discount to what they are really worth, and then you have to be patient enough for everyone else to realize their error.

The third would IMHO be more geared towards someone that wanted to be a professional. Fisher talks extensively about ways to interview management/competitors/clients for information not found on a balance sheet, and prefers to look for new technology companies with huge potential upsides. He admits himself that most of his success was due to a half dozen huge wins in his entire life, and he tries to document how to find such wins.

Realize that with Buffet's reading list you are going to end up wanting to invest like Buffet/Graham/Fisher, which means patience and a lot of due diligence on what you buy.

If you don't have 100 hours a week to research/interview prospects, Buffet and Graham would both recommend that you set a good allocation and buy index funds. Fisher would probably tell you the same, as he makes it very clear that he never buys a single stock without knowing the company like it was his own (which often included knowing the management on a first name basis).

And remember, the key to allocation-based investing is rebalancing, so you periodically lock in gains and don't get overly concentrated in one thing over time.
Is The Media Wrong About Las Vegas?
I have been saying it all along that the media reports about the Las Vegas Real Estate Market are just not completely accurate. Today on CNBC they stated that Las Vegas Home Prices will continue to drop into 2010 but that is just crazy with over 100K jobs being created in the next 5 years with the opening of Encore, Project City Center and Echelon to name just a few.
Value Click drops 20% on Weakening Ad Market
Stupid Human Facts (but interesting)
oh, i didn't mention insurance because i don't consider it an investment, i consider it manditory.

get insurance, even if its minimal disaster-level stuff. no question.
How would you reform the patent office to make it web friendly?
eBay has a patent for the buy button, Facebook just got a patent for a privacy selection form, some company today sued a bunch of people for offering wish lists...its obvious that the patent office needs to change, to stop people from patenting frivolous stuff and then suing people, so how would you do it?
After I resigned from my startup early last summer, I spent about two weeks moping in the evenings/on weekends (I had a dayjob by then), then came up with another idea that I started to work on.
Don't forget to pick up a book on how to read financial statements, once you figure that out you'll actually be investing, instead of playing the lottery based on hype.
Terribly slow. I've been waiting for 10 minutes for the payment page to appear...
Using your browser URL history to estimate gender
I think the #1 rule for outsourcing is making sure that you can sue the pants off the person if they screw you. This means you need to stick to programmers in U.S.

And yes you will pay more, but you'll be surprised how much less it is compared to what you expected. And yes rentacoder is a good site, because you can set where to get bids from.

Other sites you can list in the description that you will only work with U.S. based people, and you'll still get 50 people from India offering you their services.
Thank you. I have been married to a programmer for almost 20 years - this article was very enlightening. I always wondered what was going on with my "mad scientist" when he retreated deep into his work and I was not to disturb him. After hours of his being sequestered in the basement glued to the computer - I would dare to ask him the question - "Would you like something to eat?" He would stare at me blankly unable to answer at best, and at worst this question would start a war. It all makes sense now - thank you!
and like everyone else said, make sure that the person has a good reputation on the site, that they did projects that were similar to yours in the past, and that they have a flawless reputation
To find words that end in "me," try:
egrep "^.{3,3}me$" /usr/share/dict/words

The 3,3 means 3 characters minimum (anything less is invalid) and 3 maximum. So increase that second number to get more words.
you must read "The Dollar Crisis" before you invest in anything - trust me this will help for the rest of your life !!!
I just gained a whole lot more respect for that man:

" I think we don't yet deliver a good enough user experience. I think we deliver a user experience for people that have a reason to want to be on the Linux platform, either because of price or because of freedom. If that was your primary reason, Linux is the right answer.

But if you are somebody who is not too concerned about price, who is not too concerned about freedom, I don't think we can say the Linux desktop offers the very best experience."
Are mobile operators really going to tolerate a platform that circumvents long-distance and SMS surcharges?

You can use Skype on AT&T Tilt (or any Windows) mobile phones. It works with WiFi and 3G data network. People are downloading and using VOIP application on their mobile phones.
From a feed perspective, its links lead to various outside sites as content is not stored on Techmeme.

http://www.techmeme.com/index.xml

Thanks.
Are mobile operators really going to tolerate a platform that circumvents long-distance and SMS surcharges?

They might, if the alternative to losing surcharges is losing customers to the iPhone-exclusive carrier.
How To Earn Your First Love Dollar
I really enjoyed Henry Blodgett's "The Wall Street Self-defense Manual: A Consumer's Guide to Intelligent Investing" (http://www.amazon.com/Wall-Street-Self-defense-Manual-Intell...).

It's basically a diatribe against active investing. Buy index funds and hold them.
Jonathan Hoenig's Greed is Good is pretty excellent. http://www.capitalistpig.com/merchandise.html
AOL, MS to discuss Yahoo breakup
3G iPhone 'scares' Japan
"How Buildings Learn" by Stewart Brand. Highly, highly recommended book. It's about buildings that can adapt because the architecture allows them to. I'd read it again but my 2 loaned out copies have not been returned.
Amazon Plans an Online Store for Movies and TV Shows
I just got sued for patent infringement for operating the voo2do.com todo list
Holy cow, THANK you for the suggestion. Godaddy was taking upwards of 10 minutes to load a single page!
Ask YC subtopic: Have you ever been the target of a frivolous IP lawsuit? How do you deal with it?
IPhone 2.0 Apps: The Social Networking App Comparison
Hmm... From the comments, it seemed to favor female...

Not a problem for me, though, since newegg.com, pricewatch.com, ubuntuforums, etc all have 2+ ratios of men to women. Hah. (I'm male)
Hindi! Everything will eventually be outsourced to india, anyway.

Please keep this kind of thing off HN.
OCaml. If you've been working with languages dynamically typed at runtime, using something statically typed at compile time will be very informative. Unlike most other statically typed languages, OCaml's type inference turns the type system from a thing that needs to be constantly appeased to a free reality check when you need it.

OCaml will also teach you functional programming tricks usable in Ruby, or several other languages. At the same time, it doesn't force you to learn almost everything all over again before you can do anything at all the way Haskell does. In my experience, OCaml is designed to be a practical, modern, statically-typed, multi-paradigm language, while Haskell is designed to be a conceptually pure language for experimenting with language ideas in new territories. Whether that's a good or bad thing depends on what you intend to use it for.

About the OCaml type system:
http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/2008/04/14/useful-things-ab...

"Why Rubyists Should Learn OCaml" (a presentation): http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/2008/07/07/rubymn-presentat...
I'm enjoying Clojure - in terms of web frameworks there's Webjure and Enclojure, for example. The latter seems more Rails-ish whereas the former is more Javaesque, but it's still pretty early days. I prefer Clojure to Common Lisp as it doesn't have a lot of the cruft you'll find in CL, it has some cool concurrency features, and you get easy access to any Java library you might want to use. Plus, the source code to the language itself and its supporting libraries is very readable and hackable, which is something I haven't found in other languages.

I can't really recommend web programming with C, although it's a wonderful language to learn; I'm sure you'll have many revelatory moments as you get to grips with it and discover things about the higher level languages that you normally use.

Common Lisp is definitely usable for web development, and Hunchentoot is a pretty decent web server and programming environment, although it's certainly not the only one.
I'll second that recommendation. Lowe's biography of Buffett is an excellent book -- it's a biography with lessons on investing woven in.
Marketing? How to win friends and influence people?

What's next on HN, dating advice? No, scratch that. It'll be how to 'hack' the perceptions of people so you can take advantage of them. I expect to see spam for Mystery Method here in short order. Swiftly followed by NLP and hypnosis courses.

Guy Kawasaki is undoubtedly a very bright individual, and I have even personally benefited from some of the advice given in his writings. But...not this. Not here.
It took mine about 20-25 minutes to process. Now theoretically the owner of jem.me though.
Namecheap seem to be offering them too.
World's most economically powerful cities
I really like Ben Stein & Phil DeMuth's "Yes You Can Get a Financial Life":

http://www.amazon.com/Yes-You-Can-Financial-Life/dp/14019112...

Very conservative approach to long-term investing, but also helps prepare you for other common life expenses, such as housing and children. A great broad, bottom-line, why-this-really-matters-in-life approach to investing. I wish I had read this book at or before graduating from college.
I also got me a nice domain, and even though they've taken the money, the domain is not showing up in my domain list. Hope dies last, ey?!
I was one of the founders of Abacus Concepts, a pre-internet Macintosh startup. For thirteen years we were in start-up mode as all of our competitors were much larger than us. After I sold, I was truly burnt out and took some time to see the world and start a family. The money was holding out good until the crash of dot-com and a property purchase I made -- then I had to start looking for a job again.

For me, it was difficult because the advent of the internet changed everything, and my resume was filled with dinosaur skills. I knew it would be mistake to jump into the internet with my skills as they were, so I was able to find a job doing java. Nothing exciting, but I'm getting my hands dirty with Linux and net stuff.

Working for people sucks. The regular money is nice, but it's a pittance and the tasks are boring. I spend my spare evenings diving into python and django to build my own site. I'm getting kinda old for the crazy hours, with kids and all, but if you want real financial security you either have to put in forty years with the government and get a nice pension, or do your own thing.

I thought about a career change, but I love programming too much. Your on the edge of a revolution they will be talking about for a thousand years, and the money's good. Besides, what other careers can you have where you can drop out for nine years and then jump back in again?
I am in the process of learning OCaml and Haskell. If I can use them in production, great. If not, I'll still learn things I can apply to my Python work.
ETFs are just fine. There are pros and cons to each, but they are minor. Generally, ETFs have lower expense ratios, but you have to pay a commission to buy them (maybe $10 per purchase at a discount broker). Mutual funds are usually free to buy. So if you're going to invest $100/month, go with a mutual fund. If you're buying $5K at a time, an ETF is fine. Never pay more than 2% of your purchase price on a commission, and <1% is better. There's a little more to it than that (the purchase price of an ETF may stray a bit from net asset value, up or down), but that doesn't usually make a difference.

ETFs sometimes get a bad rap because there are so many slice-and-dice funds - gold mining ETFs, Alabama mid-size business ETFs, etc. Stick with the basics (stocks and bonds, US and international, developed and emerging, large cap and small cap).
For the shortest introduction to sensible, index-based investing, read The Coffeehouse Investor (Bill Schultheis). It shouldn't take more than an hour or two to go through, and it contains all the basics. Then, if you're interested in a more in-depth analysis of the same thing, read A Random Walk Down Wall Street (Burton Malkiel), as suggested by several others in this thread.
In the case of YC startups, a lot of them get picked up by other YC startups. This was one of many unanticipated advantages of funding startups on a large scale.
Not many people have to use a lathe. It's designed for specialists to use, and the knowledge of how to use it is a given prerequisite that the designer takes into account.

Cellphones on the other hand are one of the most widely distributed electronic devices in the world, and they're clearly designed for anyone to use. It's certainly the designer's prerogative to assume the user will have a certain level of training and familiarity with it (or will take the time to learn it), but my argument is that in some cases a designer who goes the extra mile and makes a truly intuitive device has the opportunity to capture a much larger user base.

You could say that's what blogger did -- there were many ways to build a blog before, but Evan Williams and co. made it much easier to launch and maintain one, and that paid off for them.
Unix domain sockets are fast. really fast. as in, beating shared memory sometimes fast

Really? How would that be possible?
Here is a good list:
http://www.bogleheads.org/readbooks.htm

General Investing

# The Four Pillars of Investing - by William ("Bill") Bernstein.

# Wise Investing Made Simple or The Only Guide to a Winning Investment Strategy You'll Ever Need - by Larry Swedroe

# The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing - by Taylor Larimore, Mel Lindauer, and Michael LeBoeuf

# All About Asset Allocation - by Rick Ferri

# The Informed Investor - by Frank Armstrong

# The Little Book of Common Sense Investing - by John "Jack" Bogle

# The Coffeehouse Investor - by Bill Schultheis.

Investor Behavior

# Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes And How To Correct Them - by Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich

# Your Money and Your Brain: How the New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Help Make You Rich - by Jason Zweig

# Rational Investing in Irrational Times: How to Avoid the Costly Mistakes Even Smart People Make Today - by Larry Swedroe

Financial History

# Against the Gods and Capital Ideas - by Peter L. Bernstein

# Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation - by Edward Chancellor

# A Random Walk Down Wall Street - by Burton Malkiel

Like others here have mentioned, http://www.bogleheads.org/ is a great forum for Vanguard investors.
I meant that the assignment of a TLD would follow near universal recognition of the independence of the long oppressed Kosovo. This is something all freedom loving people should look forward to.
The Burn-Risk Ratio; or Experimenting Cheaply to Spend on Execution
Nice. I subscribed to that and to your blog. (FTW It might be nice to but some dates on your blog posts if you get a chance.)

I signed up for the developer program yesterday. Any idea how long it takes to get accepted?
Is this a link to a spam blog? Never trust a news story with adsense between the headline and first paragraph. Never trust a news story where the byline is someone's initials and not a full-name.
Ask YC: Building a software review website, what to use?
So me and one of my friends have decided to start a software review website (iphone). We're looking to build in user reviews, search, categories, etc. It doesn't seem to make sense to us to start from scratch when there might be existing back-end software or frameworks out there to help us, but we're having trouble finding them. It seems every other day I read about a new company that's made building sites a whole lot easier, but a Google search on the subject seems to turn up a lot of SEO-ish, spammy or "make money now!" type sites that seem very shady.

So we thought we'd ask here. Have any good solutions slipped by us that people know of? What are other sites out there built on?
Yaw, using the word profitable isn't really reasonable even with a disclaimer. Software startups have very few significant expenses other than manpower. Our 3-person startup (when we start paying ourselves) will literally be paying out 10x more per month in salaries (that's with fairly stunted salaries) than all other expenses COMBINED. It's a long road.

Nonetheless, killer accomplishment and I think it's a kickass tool. I am leery of the non-recurring revenue (I read the authors post on why he made that decision, but I still think he's wrong)... Every customer adds a touch to the support overhead and doesn't add to the revenue line but once. Customer acquisition is hard, and fixed price software has to do it constantly or die.

SaaS is golden. Low risk for the customer, beautifully aligned interests, and you cease to be a slave to the launching new versions just to get your current customers to give you more money.
Text messages could work in that case, no?
I completely agree. The conventional wisdom of buy and hold a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds or index funds is simply bad advise right now.

While stocks do tend to out-perform over the "long-term" there have been multiple 10 year periods when stocks lost big in terms of real inflation adjusted returns. (e.g. 1929-1960, 1971-1983, 2000-present)

As a primer on the current financial crisis, I recommend firing up your favorite search engine and reading up on:

* inflation: understand that inflation is not rising prices, it is inflation of the money supply and debasement of the currency

* fraction-reserve banking and fiat currency (understand the leverage built into banks and financials and its impact on the broader economy)

* petrodollars and their importance to the US economy's ability to run deficits and import it's inflation as well as the rise of the Euro and the opening of Iran's oil bourse with it's promise to trade oil in all the world's currencies.

Other posts have listed some great resources, here are some general tips from personal experience:

* Stick to the classics and understand fundamental valuation

* Remember, there is something to technical analysis for short-term trading and market timing, but most of it can be explained by thinking about the supply/demand situation for a specific stock or asset class. Don't get sucked into the voodoo.

* learn to think about stocks and asset classes in marketing terms (branding, awareness, interest, trends, etc.) and you will gain a big edge over most. If you can figure out where the money is flowing and why within market segments or individual stocks, you stand to outperform.

* invest in what you know. find companies you are interested in and learn their investment story. Read their ipo prospectus if it is a new issue or their last 2 annual reports if they are established.

* never accept a stock tip without an explanation of the investment thesis behind the stock. Do your own research and be able to explain why you hold specific positions.

I am an entrepreneur and as such am generally an optimist. However make no mistake, there are clear and significant downside risks to this economy. There is more downside risk than upside potential over the next 6-12 months and possibly longer. The next 12 months will be an education in itself.
That's often true, but the ability to express an idea succinctly can also be a sign that the author has thought through the idea and his words very carefully.

("I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." Blaise Pascal.)
American lawns take up the same area as NY state, cost $40 billion a year
Hm, I can't think of a good overview off the top of my head (maybe I should sit down and write a good one sometime), but the way it works is:

An application will typically use a GUI toolkit like GTK or QT to do it's UI. This library will use Xlib[1] (or XCB[2] in some cases) to do it's event handling. Event handling in X consists of handling button clicks, sending messages to and from the window manager, cut and paste, etc. (The WM to app protocols are detailed in the ICCCM and the EWMH documents)

The painting will be done through a drawing library. for GTK apps (and Firefox, which isn't a GTK app, but does a good job of pretending it is through nasty hacks[3]) will use Cairo[4] to paint, and QT apps will use QT's paint engine (Arthur, I believe) to draw their UI.

Both of these engines will use XRender (which has largely replaced core X drawing) to actually put the pixels onto the screen, but works at a very low level (antialiased trapezoids and porter-duff compositing of images, more or less). They also fall back in software if the X server doesn't have XRender, or they've detected a buggy version of it.

That's the application side of it.

The fallback library that's used in Cairo is shared with the X server's software XRender implementation, and is called pixman[5]. Making this faster will likely make both the X server and the Cairo image surface faster.

Finally, the X server accelerates drawing to the screen through either the Exa accelleration architecture, or through XAA.

Exa is the more modern of the two, and it accelerates commonly used stuff that XRender wants for things to be fast. This mostly means alpha-transparent blends and such.

XAA is rather old, and is somewhat complicated to implement. Furthermore, it doesn't accelerate very much interesting stuff for modern apps -- when was the last time you saw an unantialiased wide line?

[1] Xlib: the X protocol library and more. http://tronche.com/gui/x/xlib/
[2] XCB: a new X protocol binding. Designed for transparent thread safety and asynchronousness: http://xcb.freedesktop.org/
[3] Firefox renders GTK widgets offscreen, mashes them up, and paints them on screen in the XUL layer to pretend to be GTK
[4] Cairo is a vector graphics library based of the postscript model: http://cairographics.org
[5] Pixman is essentially a software implementation of XRender's drawing operations: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/pixman/
The Evolution of Economic Rationality: Do Monkeys Understand Money?