skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd say it's super-social. Anti-social is where you actively avoid meeting new people, not go out of your way to meet them. :)
"They say you're not supposed to discuss religion and politics"

That advice is for situations where you need to "just get along", but it's an actively harmful stance if you're trying to seek truth, understand reality, fight regressive politics, etc.
This site is now "Hacker News", not "Startup News". http://ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

Site guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If creating a new language that looked like PHP/C/Java/etc, you could use {} for both blocks and arrays (and assoc arrays, like PHP) by making blocks a special case of arrays, conceptually. Then {0; 1; 2; 3;} would be an array of four elements, and as a bonus it would free up [] for something else. :)
There is a caveat to this assertion; If said god is entirely internally consistent, then his whim is no more arbitrary than the laws of nature.

Perhaps this is contained in the definition "God", perhaps this is why religious types are always on about "holiness" (which I have gathered mostly means "internally consistent") .
How about we actually ask the poster (me) how that goes? I know this is a lot more fun when you get to make up both parts, but gee -- give a guy a break.

T: Do you believe in God?
A: I believe through inductive reasoning that there are things we do not understand. I believe it is critically important to know this. I also believe this always to be the case. You can call this continuing lack of knowledge "a hole", part of the implications of Godel's theorem -- whatever. I find no problem with those who choose the word "God"

See how much more fun this is with two players?
Wine Economics: They Always Buy the Ten Cent Wine
Like in C or Perl, OK, but that makes both unreadable for humans rather than for compilers, that's what I'm saying. So the reasons behind PHP's array() construct are not trivial.
Hell, http://www.winehq.org
How Does Becoming a Whistle Blower Affect a Career - Associated Content
Quite simply: it's insurance and state-mandated minimum child-provider ratios! The least we ever paid for childcare was $820/month and that was a very good preschool that had extremely low staff turnover -- we were lucky. When my son was younger, the costs were higher: infants cost over $1000/month.

That said, many people here in MN do in-home daycare which is usually much less expensive. Usually it's a parent who has decided to stay home with her baby and gets the training and insurance to care for other children as well to cover the cost of her leaving her job.
However, as you get to the preschool years, the quality varies radically. They may give good childcare, but the learning experiences can be slim to none.
My son entered Kindergarten extremely well prepared and immediately outdistanced most of the other kids. Odds are that in-home daycare would not have prepared him for school as well.
Tour the Tour de France with Street View
Learning to code is one thing but learning to debug is something else. Even if you can figure out how to build something, it takes a certain tenacity and logical thinking to figure out how to solve a problem. Some people have it, some people don't and some just don't want to do it.

Don't think that because you can get Hello World! working over the weekend that you're ready for the big idea!
I've gotten everything from recruiters to people asking for angel capital through LinkedIn. I haven't personally found any real value from it.
Social Networking is not a business - for now.
Perhaps not. How would you presume that a "mundane" person tell the difference between genuine a priori knowledge held by a "special" person, and the rantings of a supposed prophet?

edit:

This should not be taken that I'm implying that believers are ranting prophets. Just a query as to how you propose to tell the difference.
The changes that MS makes now seem to be just for selling new versions. I use Windows 2000, it is handy, no Internet registration scheme where they track your usage, and so on. When I was younger I wanted to run the newst thing out there and would change often. Now I stick with whatever works best until it breaks.
Cheapest way http://www.textmarks.com

Also been discussed in the following posts:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=224324

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=211853
I honestly don't understand why Dan is being downmodded so hard here. He gave his honest opinion on the taxonomy of the unknowable from his perspective and philosophy. How is he being a net drag on the level of conversation here?
You can use an SMS gateway like http://www.clickatell.com/
If nobody depends on your steady salary and you have an idea you're passionate about, you should pursue it.

Even if you "fail" in the financial sense, you'll have significantly more experience than others who list more "years experience" on their resumes.
well perhaps a few options:

* Assume humans are the target of the simulation - our senses are fairly constrained (eg our focal point is only a tiny area where hi resolution is required etc...)

* What about non classical computing (quantum computing) - it may end up being nothing, but it seems to have some interesting promise in going beyond the raw computation power of atoms at least.
The day I settled on PHP was the day I was finally able to focus on the guts on my project, not on the infostructure. Let me explain...

I used to use what I thought was the "best tool for the job". Javascript/HTML/CSS for the client, another language for the server, another DBMS, and a separate server. And I spent half of my time trying to figure out why one thing didn't work with another. It was never anything big, but just bad enough to slow me down (performance, scaling, security).

Then a friend asked why I was messing with all that. He said to just download an Apache/PHP/MySql stack, install it, and forget about it. So I did.

Sure I hate the syntax, especially the dollar signs starting variable names, but I have never had a problem getting it to do exactly what I wanted. If I ever had a question, there were a hundred places to turn for help. And I never had to worry about one technology working with another.

I've always been a non-conformist when it came to tech, probably to get an edge on everyone else. But I learned the hard way, there's a time to conform and a time to be a maverick. I'd rather conform with a standard platform and "do my own thing" with my apps.
I think it means a blog post which kind of reads like it was written by a person, but is really a mushing together of paragraphs and sentences from other posts in order to get some traffic and serve ads.
An interesting startup in the market of voice message transcription to text is PhoneTag (http://www.phonetag.com/) which was formerly Simulscribe.
"How about we actually ask the poster (me) how that goes? "

Well, you were the one saying you ask that question of others, and then you gave a fairly dismissive account of how others answer. Basically, you played both parts.

I simply offered an alternative to how those sorts of conversations go when I'm the one being asked. You know, giving you an actual person so you don't have to play both parts. It's more fun that way.

If you want to use a very particular definition of "god" to frame the discussion in your favor, that's great. But we both know that when most people are talking about god and atheism and belief they are not obliquely referring to Godel anything.
If you're looking to receive data through SMS, like Twitter does (through sending a SMS to 40404 to post to your account) you'll need a SMS short code.

For a selected shortcode they run about $1000 a month, while a random shortcode might run around $500 a month, in the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_code
"I was a PHP hater for years, but I find that for certain types of problems, it really is the right solution."

Can you give some examples of those certain types of problems?
JL: are there any specific people or companies (that have come through the YC pipeline) that you are most proud of? (or maybe this is too much like picking favorites)
In a startup, you choose to work with people you think are talented. At a big company, you're stuck working with whoever else they've hired.

What a great observation. So obvious, yet hardly ever mentioned.

I'd add...

In a startup, you choose to work on what you want, how you want. At a big company, you're stuck working on whatever they want, however they want it.
Exactly! When I moved to US in 98 I was shocked at how popular voice mail was and it was annoying even then. Yep, voicemail and faxes - two things from common everyday US technologies I could never grasp.
I think the article is trying to say "Your employees have to play along with your chosen image" much like google requires employees to project a light and playful image of the company when working on its behalf.

Steve Yegge gave a great explanation of branding at OSCON 2007: http://blip.tv/file/319044/ (and his ramblings about it at http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/08/how-to-make-funny-ta... )
Related/similar:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=224324
Tour de France Street View
Well, there is a reason why it sold six kazillion copies back in the day.

Unless you think the reason was that it was hyped to high heaven in a gigantastic advertising avalanche.
There are reasons for this.. the biggest one I can think of if someone wants to cancel for some reason that can be fixed. Maybe they can't figure out how to use a feature, or they've run into a bug with a fairly easy fix. If you've got automated cancellations, they are gone. However if they have to talk to someone, and they mention it's because of this, then you just kept a customer. This happens very frequently where I work.

That being said, the fact that you have to call them is really unacceptable to me, since email is nicer for pretty much everyone involved.
"I suspect, baldness itself will become an accepted hair color several decades from now".

See how silly that sounds? Atheism is not nor will it ever be a religion.
Alan Kay: The Early History of Smalltalk
PHP was seductive, for me at least.

I wrote my first startup in PHP - No Smarty, no Cake, no Pear, just PHP. And it worked!

PHP leads the developer down the easy path then locks them into a big codebase. Yes, it has it's problems, but in the end it works or can be trained to work.

That said, I'm seriously thinking of Python/Django or Rails for my next project.
"I don't think he meant to insult you with his jab at young people at the end."

Indeed, he himself is too young to be nasty with any credibility.
If 80 in 10000 people who read Hacker News click on that link and 80% of them read all of the page, and 9 in 200 of them would previously have voted up the link and 32% of them leave New York at 14:10 travelling at 55mph, what is the probability that one of them is Bruce Willis?
So you got it, good.

I understand that you and others confuse God, religion, and social justice. I'll posit that they are all related in some fashion outside the scope of this discussion. But that common confusion is a colloquial discussion (What is commonly meant when one says something) not a semantic and epistemological one.
Sure. Social networking sites like the one in my user profile. Pretty much any site where the building of the site would be fairly trivial in any language, and scaling is the problem: with PHP, you can start it on any cheap host and port it in minutes to better servers, because you don't have to worry so much about setup. If the idea itself is innovative, but there's nothing interesting about the code that the site runs on, PHP is an excellent candidate.

I've built sites (some for clients, some of my own) in a bunch of languages, and there's a certain amount of tradeoff between setup/installation and actual coding. For whatever reason, languages which are more fun or more productive to code in require more setup time, and are likely to be already installed on a random new server almost exactly in reverse proportion with how fun/productive they are. It's eerie.
One of my old bosses had a similar problem. When she has her twins, both her and her husband had excellent carrers. What they decided was that she would stay home with the kids for two years, while the other worked. The idea was that should would be "out of touch" for a short enough time that she could get back in without much loss.

Then when it was her turn to work, her husband arranged to work part time from home. The kids were self sufficient enough that he could focus on his programming for short stints during the day and for longer periods at night when his wife got home. He was able to do enough work to "stay in the game." In fact, he liked it so much he decided to do it for another 2 years.

At that point the girls were in pre-school, so had about 3 hours each day to get work done while they were gone, could then play with them the rest of the day, and finish his work at night when his wife was there.

The girls are now 6 and in school for most of the day. He's looking at going back to work full time, but given how much he enjoys working from home, he may just keep doing that for a while.
Hehe, so true. Geeks usually place their religion all over licenses, languages, editors, operating systems, methodologies, etc.

Some people choose ideologies. There must be an evolutionary explanation for religion somewhere.
Easy: zero.
Heh. If the teacher was REALLY well paid, even for the Bay Area, they would get maybe 80k a year. The starting salary in Palo Alto (the highest in the bay area) is under 50k. A teacher with 10 years of experience will probably be making about 75k.

http://www.pausd.org/community/employment/teachers/teacher_s...
Manageable problems
In a startup, you choose to work on what you want, how you want.

This depends on what kind of startup and also what stage it's in. In our case, my partner and I are still in the mode of trying to break away from consulting work to develop our own products.
Wow, 3 points in an hour? Well, since at least three people care, there used to be Dunkin' Donuts in California. At least they were here in LA until about 12 years ago, when they gave up on trying to crack the market.

The interesting thing is that in the LA area there's a former DD that rebranded itself "Boston Donuts" and had the same donuts (but not the coffee, sadly) ever since:

http://www.yelp.com/biz/boston-donuts-la-habra

Maybe there's such a holdout up north as well.
If you want your kids to experience freedom, daycare centres are not a good choice. Its a really restrictive environment, your kids will get to play a lot of games but they won't have much depth in their lives. I don't mean that play is superficial, but they'll be shunted through different activities to keep them occupied and not be trouble for the staff.

My wife ran a daycare centre, and she's staying home to raise our kids. The best solution is to find the social activities in other places. Daycare is far from the end of the world, but I dont see it as the preferable option, just an easy and not the worst option.
Hey -- I have very little faith, so no harm done. I'm not a religious person.

You are answering in the positive -- how you know _what_ to believe in. That is not the question, and the two are not logical opposites of one another.

Let's try a thought experiment, shall we? Let's say you and I meet on a train.

If I told you my barn was red, would you believe me? You might or might not. We might have a discussion about science and how we know things. I'm sure we could come to some sort of understanding about levels of proof and this and that.

Why is that? Because reasoning and logic work inside of a web of meanings that we call language. That's what science is built on. It's both part of everyday knowledge and part of advanced reasoning.

We are dealing with concrete things: nouns with meanings, lists of things, perceptions and the relationship of formal systems, empiricality and positivism. But what happens if I introduce an item without common meaning? Perhaps things without any meaning at all. Let's say you are a caveman and I am from the year 4000.

I say "I have something that you do not understand. It is so outside your understanding such that that I cannot describe it to you inside of our limited window of conversation. I cannot even begin to describe the generics of the things that lead to those concepts"

Now you're perfectly capable of saying "I don't believe that. I only believe things that have a strict order (not realizing, of course, that all of "common sense" is tenuous at best. Read up)"

That's cool. Nothing wrong with that. But it does not impact the veracity of my statement. In fact, without language, reason, observation, theory, and reproduction, _you're unable to make any conclusions about my statement one way or another_. Things outside our web of understanding exist in a place where we can make no conclusions one way or another.

All I am saying is that there is a class of such statements. There always have been, and there always will be. Most of these statements -- perhaps 99.99999% of them -- are eventually dealt with as our experiential and smenatic toolbox expands. God, to me, is the set of those true statements that we are unable to understand.

Now I'm not talking about reasoning in common language and logical space -- I think science probably forms the interface between the true and unknowable and the true and knowable. In that sense, science and religion are like yin and yang -- one is simply the thing the other is not (and likewise, one is contained inside the other)

Looking back over written history, we can see the wonderful dialectic of reason and faith. One can look at this as the war of reason over superstition, or one can look at it as the conquest of universal concepts of morality and faith over political, tribal, and primitive power systems -- the species learning what part of God-belief is critical to its survival and what is not. Same thing, different viewpoint.
<<Εν οιδα οτι ουδεν οιδα>>

if you read it in the original Greek, you don't fall in the trap the author fells. And although there is a wise contradiction showing Socrates wisdom, what you can also intrepret is that if you don't know nothing then you know everything.
Have you ever read Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (http://www.amazon.com/Life-Times-Thunderbolt-Kid-Memoir/dp/0...)?

He talks a good amount of growing up in Des Moines, Iowa where all the kids used to just go out Saturday morning to a nearby field, meet new kids, and spend the entire day there before coming back home to dinner. Right now it seems the kids are too focused on their tvs and computers to go out and actually partake in the backyard baseball games.
Network-theory could help us use vaccines more effectively to stop pandemics
I don't think I should pick favorites. But it would be difficult even if I wanted to, since I've seen so many of the founders overcome big challenges.
In most cases you are right, but why not have a nice idealistic view to help motivate?
But it's not. It's lazy (in my opinion) to have such a shallow view of the matter.

I would encourage you guys to listen to some discussion and arguments around proofs-of-God. The Teaching Company has a couple of great lecture series. Take some time and learn. The worst people to teach are those who think they have nothing to learn.

We can't make a conclusion one way or another given common terms and understanding. The question is really about how we deal with things outside of our ability to reason about them, not werewolves, santa clause, or any of that other nonsense.

I wonder how many have you studied any of this since university? I thought about it, and I got tired of hearing the same old arguments, so I reached out and kept reaching until I got it. To me this seems like one of those questions people are just happy repeating something they heard a long time ago while not looking at the subject with a fresh eye every so often.

Hey -- my opinion only. But it looks lazy to me.
I've had good results from 99designs (formerly sitepoint contests), but the prices have grown at a pretty rapid clip, to the point where the cost of starting a contest is a significant portion of the cost of holding the contest. I plan to try a different contest site in the future.

There are some negatives--refinement of designs is not really part of the process, the way it is when you work with a single designer. I've found that most of the designers (by necessity) spend a few minutes whipping up a few entries. If any of them get good feedback, they'll polish them a little, and hope for the best.

But, the positives are that a surprisingly large number of really good designers will submit work. We've been very happy with all of the contests we've held. We got a new logo for Webmin for $500, which turned out awesome. Likewise for a logo for our new virtualization management product. I'm planning to get some banner ads made next.

I've worked with designers in the past, and even in cases where I love their work, in general, sometimes they just don't have the right idea or execution for a particular project. The contest model allows a lot of designers to toss out their ideas. And, honestly, it's a lot more like the way large corporations have their design work done. Design shops, the really big/famous ones, will frequently do some mockups before any money changes hands...design i very often done on spec. Us little guys don't have the million dollar design budget to throw around that allows us to just call up our favorite five shops and say, "We're doing a new campaign. Show us your ideas." A contest site like 99designs.com allows us to effectively do that.
I'm dying for some west coast dunkin donuts and starbucks doesn't come close...
It was also 'anti child care' because it was a pittance in terms of child-care expenses. No one can find anything like adequate daycare for $100 a month.
TinyURL Adds Custom URLs
Just as an aside, if I am explaining something to you, and you have not grown to understand it, I am not attacking you or trying to eliminate your basis for an opinion or an argument. Once you come into possession of an understanding of my statement, our conversation can continue.

It's in fact a very poor ad hominem, a non-existent ad hominem in my opinion, and if it was read that way, it was read that way in error.
Small group @ TI readying a low-cost development board, open hardware design
I agree. I'm scared that societal norms and pressures discourage unscheduled time and/or letting kids do something on their own.

Based on my own observations, I think that what the kids spend their time doing is largely a function of the parent's need to have them do something.

I fondly recall spending escapist afternoons digging into the dirt underneath a bush with my Star Wars action figures and creating my own world.
Most Powerful Hand Held Gaming platform in the world Runs Linux.
The world is just waiting for Fax-to-Voicemail.

Just play the faxmail recording into your fax machine to get a convenient printout of the message!

Like an email you can skim read the text, like a phonecall you can be sure it arrived. The best of both worlds!
(335 unread) Yahoo Mail, vadersmurf
It's doubtful that Giffen goods exist at all, but wine is a beautiful example of a Veblen good; demand actually strengthens rather than recedes as the price increases.
If It’s Wooden and Old and Once Kept Time, Call Him