skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In general, you always have to take into account the Law of Leaky Abstractions ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm... ).

No matter how convenient a new abstraction might make things, it will some day "leak". If you don't know anything about the layer underneath, at that point, you're pretty shafted.

Some abstractions are more leaky than others. ActiveRecord is a very leaky abstraction. Make sure you have a solid grounding in database usage, db model design, normalisation, etc

As for the web in general, your stack of abstractions reads something like: ActionController > MVC for web apps > CGI-BIN/Servlets > HTTP > TCP > IP > ...

You can probably stop around HTTP or TCP and be ok.

I don't think you'll find a single book that covers all that, but maybe someone will have some suggestions.

Please note you don't need to become an expert at all this stuff - but you need to have a pretty good idea how it all fits together.
i would say make it 2yrs degree instead of 3yrs and in those 2 years you need to train them exactly what is required in the market place / industry (the same way as Zoho university) ... there is no need to waste one more year of a student, the precious time that he/she could devote in getting employment and experience

OR

it would be best if you have 2 years of training followed by 2 years of employment and that makes 4 years of degree.
if you build it (and its a good idea), they will come.

at 17/18, you can (most likely, i'm assuming) live with your parents or do the work in your dorms and not have to worry about making a living while starting your business.

find some time and just do it. worry about making money after you have something.
seems pretty thorough. i'd consider mentioning the SaaS explosion.
right, but Righty is conscious of being Righty, and if his outcome was highly unlikely, then he must be wondering why his world is so unreasonable. And since he's just as much you as Lefty is, post-event, it's not true that you're only conscious of what happens on a reasonable timeline.
Parts of earliest genetic material came from the stars
Sounds like a good team. What's the idea? Three things I've learned thru the YC experience:

1) Investors like big ideas. If you can't tell a convincing story about how you've got the potential to build a $500m business, almost all investors will pass.

2) Traction wins. Don't build a prototype. Build a product. Prove that users want what you build and show a healthy growth curve BEFORE you take investment. It opens a lot of doors.

3) Distribution wins, too. Have a GREAT story on how you're going to find users without spending a nickel. SEO and viral marketing win. Don't say "word of mouth", "PR", "blogosphere" unless you've proven that your startup has legs there.

Regarding, "outside SV"... It depends. Right outside? Or in the Yukon? Where are you?

If funding is the path you should follow, not living in a hub is making a REALLY hard game a LOT harder.
I'd agree that "classical computer simulating the universe" is one theory which is local, deterministic and consistent with experiment, but are there really any others? Others which don't fall into the "grand conspiracy where everything is orchestrated from behind the scenes" category?
Well, how does it work if people postdate copyright?
I've thought that because of the iterative nature of learning/doing, school should alternate schedule weighting. For instance, once you've worked some, theories make more sense, and when you understand theories, work becomes easier.

I think school should alternate between 30 hours of practical work and 6 hours (2 classes) one semester to 10-15 hours of practical work and 15 hours (5 classes) the next. If you control the work so that it covers the previous, current, and next semesters, all the better.
Watch out! when you are using the MS SQL Server Express edition you are limited by its "subscriber only" replication mode.

MS SQL Server express cannot be used as a replication master, if you are interested in that type of architecture.
I'm unclear on why people seem to care so much that there should be a wikipedia article on this annoyingly-named guy who is (at best) borderline notable.

Is it because they've read some of his work and now feel a loyalty towards him?

Or is it because the revelation that "the third most important person in the Ruby community" isn't really all that important when viewed from outside said "community" might give them an unwanted perspective on their own sense of their own importance?
But... Righty could ask why his world is unreasonable, but actually, being Righty is very improbable, so if we find the world to be actually very reasonable, it's because it's more probable to be Lefty than to be Right. Whether if Lefty and Righty are the same conscious mind or two different minds, I guess that's more of a philosophycal question.
Shopzilla Founder Farhad Mohit Behind Stealth Startup DotSpots
Along the lines of this recent thread and article, don't be too afraid of revealing your work outside of your cave.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216614

A great way to get some real feedback is to make it, then post it as an Ask YC. The community really steps up to give credit and criticism where they are due. Take this recent thread on Dabbleboard as an example.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=202798

Don't worry about making money right away. It's more important to see if the idea goes somewhere interesting.
Code_swarm. An experiment in organic software visualization.
Yahoo `Damaged Goods' After Yang Fails to Revive Deal
I'm in somewhat the same boat as you, except using python and django. I've found this book to be pretty helpful in terms of a general understanding of web programming:
http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/
I'm currently using my name plus a descriptive word (say "Smith Software" or "Graham Tech"), and if I think about it, what I'm doing most is contract work myself (along with some consulting). Do you find it advisable?
And did you know that you're probably replying to a bot that posts dozens of stories from alleyinsider.com ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=204760 http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=fromedome http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=fromedome http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?... ), nowhere else, and has never contributed to a discussion on this forum?
So let us hear your deep understanding of consciousness. I hope that finally somebody can give us a definition. You sound like you know what you are talking about - or do you???

Really, I am waiting eagerly.

As for Kurzweil, being afraid of death seems very rational to me. His escape plan might seem overly optimistic, but at least it is conceivable. More than you can say for your average religion.
Is it supposed to imply that anybody who doesn't agree ... has simply done a poor job in overcoming their biases?

No. "Bias" is a term of art among statisticians and social scientists who study human decision-making. It's my understanding that Overcomingbias started out as a collaboration between Robin Hanson ("futurist" economist at George Mason) and Eliezer Yudkowsky (the just-plain futurist who wrote the quantum sequence at OB).

Eliezer's got a pretty good introductory paper, which deserves to be read strictly on the merits of its opening paragraph:

http://www.singinst.org/Biases.pdf
You might want to learn PHP first, especially if you're new to programming. Not only is PHP easy to learn, but it is also useful for quickly testing out simpler webpages.

By learning PHP, you'll also learn how web programming is traditionally done and the basics of how the web works. Once finished, you'll clearly see how Rails makes certain aspects of web programming easier, even for things like form validation.

I recommend a book like "PHP 6 and MySQL 5" which is very easy to read, and definitely type in the examples! http://www.amazon.com/PHP-MySQL-Dynamic-Web-Sites/dp/0321525....
I was in the audience for that talk, it was brilliant. Hofstader gave the second talk (first was Kurzweil) at the Singularity Summit, and completely yet classily trashed Kurzweil's talk, including his apparent failure to understand basic mathematics (of course there's no "knee" in an exponential curve, you can just rescale the axes to put the "knee" somewhere else).

Bad, bad haircut though.
Way to just make shit up there. Wikipedia has full edit histories. You might avail yourself of them, or of the article discussion page, where _why himself formally requested the article be deleted. But hey, if it makes you feel better to say "he wrote most of it himself", don't let reality stop you.
I didnt look to closely, but it looks like you are creating a closure around the comments var for your event listener function. The problem is that you are doing this within a loop, meaning the comments var changes after each iteraion, probably ending up in something you hadnt intended
If something is probable, you have to ask what makes it probable. We measure quantum probabilities by the number of times a given experiment yields a given outcome. Say there's an observable and when you measure it, outcome Lefty happens 90% of the time and outcome Righty happens 10% of the time. On MW, both of those happen, and 2 conscious beings result. What makes "being Lefty" more probable? Are there more Lefties than Righties? Or will outcome Lefty happen more often than outcome Righty? The answer to both is no, you get two every time. They're two conscious minds, but both continuous with the old you in the same way.
I've read all his books except Strange Loop. I skimmed it in the bookstore, but it seemed like more of a rehash of ideas presented more interestingly in his other books. Personally I'd recommend starting with GEB.
I'll keep the back button thing in mind when I look at it again... and I noticed the weird scrollbar stuff too. I'll have to fix that at some point. I've been up since 4pm yesterday, and seeing as how it is noon, think I'm going to head towards bed for a bit.

Maybe it'll all be clear when I wake up.
> Are they coding to a spec? If you're outsourcing you better be or you're just asking for trouble.

I see these two as quite distinct. Coding to a spec, even at the level of BDD, simply means making your implementation conform to some abstract behavioral specification.

If writing code that could both adhere to such as spec and was easily maintained and extended in the future were easy, then outsourcing (or simply relying on the most junior programmers you could hire) would definitely be the only sane way to build software.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you are a developer who wants to work and knows your craft) it is not nearly so simple. Even a perfect functional spec is usually at least 3-4 levels of abstraction removed from the actual code needed to implement it.

More fine-grained BDD specs or unit tests may come closer to allowing for mostly mechanical translation into working code, but they also must co-evolve with the code itself.
Ask YC: Would you partner with a domainer for your startup?
Let's say I have an offer from a domainer to use a very, very good domain (worth >1 million) to develop a site. The logic is, it's easier to sell a developed website than just a domain; we would share the profits. I already developed the technology; it would be almost plug and play.

The problem is, he controls the domain, so nothing would stop him from putting his own website full of ads or something once the traffic gets high, leaving me with nothing. It's an issue of trust mainly - I'm not really familiar with contracts and stuff like that.

The startup would require about 5000 USD per month of fixed costs, so it would require VC capital. Do you think this kind of partnership would be seen as problematic for getting VC funding?

Thanks for your help :)
But even if I create an anonymous function that just calls alert(), the click event never fires. i.e. ->

byId(thisnode.id).addEventListener('click', function(ev) { alert('test'); }, false);

Won't fire either.
I wish they did Drupal next :)
Just two days ago I decided to read one of Feynman's papers (the one on the Hellman-Feynman theorem). His style is amazingly readable and almost conversational, even in dense scientific work, and yet it's still sufficiently precise and formal to seem perfectly in place in a journal. I've been trying ever since to figure out how he does it.
Perhaps we're estimating differently the amount of work which will be needed to turn this into an actual paper.

But I've never published in a maths journal (only physics) so you probably know better than I do on this point.
I'm not sure that you can make these kinds of judgments of hosting providers that easily:

$ ping 66.39.3.7

PING 66.39.3.7 (66.39.3.7): 56 data bytes

64 bytes from 66.39.3.7: icmp_seq=0 ttl=54 time=43.215 ms

64 bytes from 66.39.3.7: icmp_seq=1 ttl=54 time=53.490 ms

64 bytes from 66.39.3.7: icmp_seq=2 ttl=54 time=44.041 ms

64 bytes from 66.39.3.7: icmp_seq=3 ttl=54 time=42.953 ms

64 bytes from 66.39.3.7: icmp_seq=4 ttl=54 time=45.672 ms

64 bytes from 66.39.3.7: icmp_seq=5 ttl=54 time=50.263 ms

^C

--- 66.39.3.7 ping statistics ---

6 packets transmitted, 6 packets received, 0% packet loss

round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 42.953/46.606/53.490/3.938 ms

$ ping 216.218.186.2

PING 216.218.186.2 (216.218.186.2): 56 data bytes

64 bytes from 216.218.186.2: icmp_seq=0 ttl=55 time=99.194 ms

64 bytes from 216.218.186.2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 time=105.039 ms

64 bytes from 216.218.186.2: icmp_seq=2 ttl=55 time=97.285 ms

64 bytes from 216.218.186.2: icmp_seq=3 ttl=55 time=99.197 ms

64 bytes from 216.218.186.2: icmp_seq=4 ttl=55 time=98.486 ms

64 bytes from 216.218.186.2: icmp_seq=5 ttl=55 time=98.926 ms

^C

--- 216.218.186.2 ping statistics ---

6 packets transmitted, 6 packets received, 0% packet loss

round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 97.285/99.688/105.039/2.481 ms

Similar results on two of my hosted boxes, which may or may not be in crappy hosting environments.
Wow, getting emotionally involved? Your tone really isn't at all appropriate for this forum.

I said "it looks like he wrote it himself", not that he actually did (I know, I read the talk page). From the content it's indistinguishable from a vanity page (the most identifiable feature of a vanity page being that it works hard to inflate minor achievements like speaking at conferences) but I understand he has quite a number of fans so it's quite possible they wrote it.
There's an interesting point here - the distinction between vocational training on one hand and learning theoretical foundations + domain specialization on the other. At least where I grow up consensus is that the latter will make a person better suited for changing job requirements..but I have never heard a good line of reasoning backing up this claim.

Perhaps what is needed to succeed in either case is the ability to adapt to changing conditions, with people in the latter category by nature having an easier time doing this. If this is the case, a lot of people could save a lot of pain by simply jumping straight to the domain specialization.
Don’t end your urls with .exe
See how far you can get without raising money, even if you have to work part-time on the side. Unless you're building something that requires a lot of storage, bandwidth, or people you can get a lot done without a lot of cash. Your location outside a tech hub won't be a factor until you need to start hiring experienced people or you need to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars. By that point you may know if the site is going to be successful or not, and you can move if you need to.
The Battle for Facebook
Oh Yeah, the Fun Part
It's always disheartening that these types of stories don't make major news networks. The fact that our DNA may in fact be extraterrestrial is small beans compared to Britney Spears's 42nd mental breakdown.
Of course, we are all built from the same explosions that made the cosmos. In fact i have some pretty crazy theories that neutrinos cause all Universal beings to expand (or the container to expand) but I think this is the main reason people love explosions and fireworks. They either signal change AND/OR life being created. Whether you are scientific or religious, you have to believe in multiple dimensions and particles or elements beyond Earth is what makes up the human and the planet we reside on.

The HLC is hoping to find more about this. The same elements that started the big bang, morphed and advanced into us. Amazing what else they can build with lots of time.
Make sure you hook up with someone who has written papers before. Aside from the procedural stuff there's all sorts of stylistic issues when writing math papers (I call it math-ese).
Ask YC: what do you think of Yahoo/Google deal?
I think it is too early to say that yahoo made a mistake - to me it is the safest (if not smartest) decision ever. I have very logical point of view:

1. Sometimes leasing is more profitable than selling, and that is what Yahoo has done. Instead of selling search business to MSFT, they leased it out (temporarily) to Google. Also it is not known how much msft was offering for yahoo's search business anyway may be it wasn't that profitable in the long run.

2. Yahoo/Google deal is only for north-american market. Agreed that it is the biggest market right now but not for the future, as everyone has predicted, future belongs to BRIC (brazil, russia, china, india). Asian and BRIC is the biggest search market one can ever think of, so it is wise that Jerry will take time and resources from north-american team away (as they may not be required any more due to google deal) for now and try to come up with technology/platform that caters to these markets. May be he has a plan to test its Panama platform for these markets and get it mature by the time it is reaped to start making money.

3. It is true that desktop search market is the biggest right now but in the future the search on other platform such as smart-phones is bigger than desktop - and Yahoo can start looking in to it with the help of freed resources.

4. Google is king in text search ads market and not in display ads, according to google executives, yahoo still is the market leader in display ads and it is a huge revenue generator (remember micrsoft was interested in buying yahoo's search business was due to its strong position in display ads). Yahoo can work on the same technology platform to keep bringing more money thru this kind of ads. Also display ads are going to play a bigger role in mobile phone market so it is wise to concentrate on your strength.

5. Yahoo has a strong presence in China, Google is still lacking in getting major revenue from this market. Jerry being from the same ethnic background can understand this market much better than anyone else ... also Yahoo is already deep rooted in china, it has to just find out how to monetize it efficiently.

6. In couple of years yahoo will know how much it can make from this deal(with Google) and if it is mature enough to sell the north-american search business than it would do so by making much more money than what MSFT is offering right now.

7. Last but not least - It is better that Jerry is more loyal to the people who are loyal to him (employees and endusers) than to be loyal who are least loyal (shareholders) to yahoo ...

Conclusion: it is not a worst decision and only time will tell what a smart move it was (or it wasn't). Jerry needs some time to prove it and now he has got what he wanted to prove his caliber and witty decision making capabilities.
I shot an email to the CEO of a search engine marketing company in NYC I'm acquainted with last night letting him know about you, he said he'd be interested in learning more (his company is in the top 200 of the Inc. 5000).

If you're still looking, drop me a line at richard [dot] kenney [at] sun [dot] com.
Why can't my professors be like this? I cracked up when he pulled out the bowl.
There are a lot of people that really aren't all that important when viewed from outside the communities in which they really are important.

I'm sorry that you're annoyed by his alias, and that you feel that Ruby users are self-important fools. I hope you can either get past those feelings or come up with a better argument.
Really you should make everything lower case, dashed delimited and keyword based.

/Latest_Fad_About_Web.2.0 should be
/latest-fad-about-web-2-0

This format is expected as of 2007ish. It helps immensely in making your url packed with keyword goodness that works on all case sensitive systems and spiders.
I agree - if you want to help get this on Reddit and Digg, feel free :)

http://www.reddit.com/info/6n9fl/comments

http://digg.com/space/Confirmed_Earliest_genetic_material_ca...
I'm not sure I understand. Suppose the mind throws a thousand dices. We measure two possible events: if there is at least a dice with a 1 on it, and if all dices have a 1 on it.

There are 6^1000 possible conscious minds. We call Lefty to the one that sees the first, very probable event. We call Righty to the one that sees the second, very unprobable event. There is actually only one Righty, but there are many, many Lefties. So it's actually a lot more probable to be a Lefty than to be a Righty. I think this works too with any other kind of event you could imagine (at least in a discrete (meta?)world, I'm not sure how you could have continuous probabilities if there are only discrete amounts of worlds available, or if you can have continuous amounts of worlds instead).

How does what you say work in this example? Why would both events have the same probability?

I don't know about QM more than the very, very basics, so please excuse me if I'm not understanding something very fundamental here.
You must build first. It is much easier to sell and you have more pull with a completed or ready system. Also, unless you have real professional experience you can't call that 4 years experience. If I could count my experience back to my C64 days and Apple II days then it would be highly inflated. Experience usually means professional work experience, at 18 you need to prove yourself more. Deliverables help this immensely and once you throw down experience means minimal.

The hard part is building and getting noticed, once that happens the investment part is much easier. Truly great business ventures dont' always need lots of investment though, just enough to buy some time to build it or get it in production.
Shake your iPhone, find a restaurant on Urbanspoon
Because it is the same story (albeit in two forms) and was posted here within minutes of each other. Hence the same response.
Well, shouldn't the quality be defined first. Quality differs based on situations, people, etc.
Yes, I saw that, but it is the content not the submitter that mattered.
Ahem: "Scientists confirm that PARTS OF earliest genetic material came from the stars." You took an already over-sensationalized article title and editted out even the tiny hint of rationality it had left . Shame on you.

From later in the article: "The materials they have found include the molecules uracil and xanthine". This isn't DNA, it's like finding a clay pit and announcing "Our house came from under the earth!".

Sigh...

[EDIT: I see the article title has been fixed to better reflect the source. Many thanks.]
PHP can allow you to be very sloppy, I'm not sure I would recommend it. Although you do need some way of learning in-depth MySQL, rails makes it too easy, and you probably won't be using Rails forever...
I think they are hurtful insofar as these immortality fantasies stop people from dealing with death in a less deluded way.

But, on the other hand, many technology/science/Math visionaries have been driven by mythic kind of visions. Newton, Swedenberg, Cantor and Bohm come to mind. That in itself isn't hurtful. But when the nature of the belief causes them to not deal with a major facet of human existence, it starts to be bad.
Edward Deming (and perhaps others) recommended this idea several decades ago. It's nice to see that 37signals is finally catching up though.
The Charities Commission think blogs have no educational value