skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
".. hard work, intelligence, and willingness to accept risk are overrepresented among successful people versus the general population ..."

I think the point is that hard work, intelligence, and willingness to accept risk may be overrepresented among failures as well.
Change can be viewed as a sequence of distinct immutable observer-moments, like frames in a movie, and nothing forbids them to form a loop.
psst...
I work at a large corporation.
I choose who I work with.
I choose my own projects.
I work 40 hours a week for a good salary.
I have good health care (in America).

I do have to describe my projects in terms that matter to my corporation, but how is that any different than pitching to VCs?
What seems rational and honest is based more on your prejudices than anything else. Ultimately, who and what you choose to believe is up to you. If you choose to restrict yourself to only what can verified without assumptions, you will end up with solipsism. If you choose to believe everything that comes your way, you will end up very confused. If you find some arbitrary 'halfway' heuristic, then you'll probably be better off. Just never forget that it is a heuristic that you are using as a criterion, or else your belief will be just as arbitrary as those who wait for alien spaceships to take them to bliss.

Really, its arbitrary. Just make up your mind.
Dude, what is wrong with you? The point that you are missing is that, if you include time as one of the dimensions of the universe, then change becomes impossible. That is the meaning of the block universe. This is why Popper called spacetime, Einstein's block universe in which nothing happens. Counterintuitively, a time dimension does not enable change or motion, it forbids them.

The conclusion to be drawn is simple: There are no such things as spacetime or a time dimension and any talk of time travel via closed time-like loops in spacetime is just plain stupid. Guess what that makes those who insist on talking about time-like loops? Stupid, that's what.
Harrison Owen, founder of Open Space, on Wave Riders
I can't see how you can incorporate a belief (faith) without strong evidence, by your own admission, into a scientific worldview which would demand evidence precede belief.

I agree that some christian sects are more open minded about science than others, but at the end of the day, it's the scientific worldview that doesn't lend itself to the christian worldview, not the other way around.
But you learned how to make some cool fireworks in the process.
I'm still waiting on the type system.
Are IP Addresses Personal? Hell Yes.
Ask YC: First and Last Name + Username vs only Username?
We are finalizing our sign-up process for NIXTY (www.nixty.com). Broadly, our market consists of educators, learners, and academic institutions. We subscribe to the belief that getting users easy access is hugely important. However, our target market isn't the most technically advanced. So, we are struggling with what information to gather on the initial sign up page. Should it be:
First Name Last Name
Username
Password
Email

Or...should it just be:
Username
Password
Email

One person thinks that educators and students might feel more comfortable putting in their first and last name and then choosing a username - partly b/c the idea of a 'username' might not be immediately apparent w/out the first and last name. In addition, the first and last name would be gathered on the second page. The other person feels that most people know what a username is, so the first and last name isn't necessary on the sign up page.

One last thing to keep in mind, the username is the person's unique identifier and will be part of their URL.

Any and all thoughts are welcome. Thank you.
You know, if you keep up this kind of intellectual exercise, you'll go blind.
Off course immad, is based in the believe that using our brains as measurement tools for experiencing the universe we can only make models of it, partial maps (filtering a lot of information in the meanwhile). In this process we use our senses, experience, conditioning, prior beliefs, and other non-objective factors to create our unique map.

Every brain make his own reality tunnel (or reference frame) to experience the universe, and we may share some of it with other brains around (also called culture).

So if reality depends of the observer there must be more than one.
Run for it! We're all going to die!
Ask YC: Do you like our overview video?
We just finished up our marketing video and would love some feedback from the community. We've showed it to about 25 people so far and have received some solid criticism.

You can find it at www.nixty.com. Just click on the button that says "Catch the NIXTY vision".

Our specific questions are:

1. How do you feel at the end of the video?

2. Would you take the next step and explore the site?

3. Would you sign-up?

4. What don't you like?

You'll notice that there aren't specifics yet as to what the service will offer. We can't really disclose too much yet, but will in the near future. Our goals are to:
1. Show the big picture
2. Be open and welcoming
3. Encourage people to join us.

Thanks for taking the time to check it out.
I am fast realizing that YCombinator is turning out to be a den of asteroid orifices where you get modded down by asteroid orifices for telling inconvenient truths.

You people are chicken shit and your attempt at censorship is chicken shit. You can't stop people from expressing themselves on the net. YCombinator is not the only outlet for expression, you know. I express myself freely on my blog and I get hundreds and often thousands of hits a day. You asteroid orifices can't stop that. IOW, F*ck you and the mule you sleep with. LOL.
Exactly. Different observer, different models.
I have to say I'm grinning whenever I read one of these articles. I'm not sure why... I think it's a religious-like inducing the Apocalypse sort of glee. But seriously, you park your Yukon to drive a Land Crusier? wtf.

I recently hit a $70 debit card prepay limit here in Canada (Google says the price is equivalent to US$ 5.75/gal). Here's to $200 tanks! $300! $500! When does it end?

I guess there's probably no Yukon XL's in Holland: http://carscoop.blogspot.com/2008/04/european-gas-prices-and...
Like McLuhan said, "We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us."
I thought you might be joking at first, but from the article:

“I don’t know if it gets better gas mileage, but I like her car because it costs $100 to fill it,” said Ms. Hammond, 40. “I think $100 for a tank of gas is cheap now.”

So as long as it is less than $100 per fill up, she doesn't care what the mileage is.
Pros: I like the background music.. video makes me feel happy for some reason

Cons: No specifics = no reason for me to sign up.
You are right and wrong. The term 'nature' is used in multiple ways. Sometimes to denote organic life, sometimes the physical world, and sometimes as a synonym for 'essence.' The problem is not to conflate all of these meanings.

When people speak of supernatural things, they do not generally mean that something is defying its own essence. What they do generally mean is that is defies what we understand to be the essence of physical matter. Our understanding of it is based on our experience thereof. So, something which is supernatural, defies classification through experiential knowledge.

We can also speak can also speak of supernatural as a sort of non-material existence, by which I don't mean Plato's forms, necessarily, but entities that exist that are not governed by the laws that visible matter is governed. Such an entity has not been widely experienced (otherwise our physics would take it into account,) and is possibly non-experienciable, so one might debate the merits of discussing it as there is clearly no reason to assume it exists. However, one cannot simply define it away.

St. Anselm in middle ages attempted to define 'God' as existing, arrived at what we now call the Ontological proof of his existence. The 'proof' was so laughable that nearly all of the Scholastics rejected it out of hand and even went out of there way to refute it. Now you seem to be presenting me with the ontological disproof. It's a little ridiculous.
Ah OK so that's the missing piece for the article to make sense. Thanks for that!
Not necessarily, but already we're hitting up against the limits of what we we are capable of thinking.

I like the model of a computer universe. It makes sense to my consciousness. That's more than most of the other models, and it has some interesting consequences.
I don't know enough about Dunkin' Donuts to know the answer to their situation specifically.

That being said, a lot of food corporations own multiple trademarks / brands. Sometimes when a corporation buys another corporation, a decision is made regarding branding, and the geography of where each brand will live.

This is why you have Hardee's on the East Coast and Carls Jr. on the West Coast. They're the same company, albeit with a slightly varied menu.

So, I wonder if there is a DD owned donut chain in California, and it's just not common knowledge.

[Edit: I did a little research and it looks like that may be the case. There are quite a few multi-national corporations with a hand in Dunkin Donuts' corporate life:
http://www.dunkinbrands.com/aboutus/history.html]

[Edit 2: Evidently it's not that complicated; Dunkin Donuts was in CA previously, and withdrew in the late 90's due to market forces (i.e. poor sales). I read an article that said in 2002 95% of their locations were east of the Mississippi.

So, it looks like it's just economics at work.]
Fold and map are beautiful, but they work just as well in the guise of a foreach loop.

It's hard to argue with the foundation of the article -- namely that for any novel programming paradigm we've seen implementation of key features in a lot of modern languages, but if this statement holds you could easily say "foreach loops are beautiful, but they work just as well in the guise of an array and an iterative loop in assembly." It's true they produce equivalent results, but the nice thing about (perhaps the whole point of?) higher level languages is that they provide the compiler/interpreter with more clues about the intent of the code, and the compiler can do smarter things because of it.

With map, and i assume fold, you could (in theory) replace the uniprocessor foreach style implementation with a multicore friendly version or even a hadoop/google mapreduce style cluster-aware implementation. If the code was initially in foreach style it would seemingly only be possible if the compiler was smart enough to ensure that there was no access outside of the foreach code block.

I suspect that the premise is right -- that the functional languages of today are probably not going to ever win out over the popular languages of today -- but I think the popular languages of today are going to have to evolve a lot to become the popular languages of the multi-core tomorrow, and a lot of that evolution will come from these functional languages.
This all boils down to poor practices and false assumptions by Flash developers.

Just because it's compiled bytecode doesn't mean you can hide secrets in it, that's security through obscurity.

And always use POSTs for actions that modify data on the server, never use GETs for anything except requests which only retrieve data (and don't modify anything)
Linus is 'not ambitious' and 'happy to get the paycheck and go home'? Not in the world I inhabit! Also, most of them do work on open source for their day jobs, with the possible exception of Guido, but even he gets more than 20% time for Python. In terms of impact on the world, most of those guys could very easily go up against the best of YC, just that they're different sorts of impact. My point is merely that, that hackers can find other outlets in this day and age, besides startups. Personally, I'm more interested in the startup route, not being a brilliant Linus type hacker, but I think it's interesting to consider everything out there.
It makes me really happy to see this happen. I would be even happier if gas hits $8/gallon heck even 10 or more. Innovation in gas consumption efficiency in the automobile industry has been close to null since its inception.

I believe this will really make people change, and most likely people will stop buying gas powered cars if they were given the option. Automobile makers should be forced to think of alternatives to oil.
Again, I wanted to do it the old fashioned way. It just feels nice to start up the old dos prompt and type "rott"
I'm well aware that hacker news is not limited to stories about technology or start ups. However, that is the origin of this site and those are still the topics where it shines.

This discussion, however, is pure fluff. I equate it to the videos of pratfalls and cute animal pictures that the guidelines admonish against.
If you really need someone's full name for them to use the service, it's probably best to put it directly on the sign-up process. If not, make it optional to add after registering.

You may want to dispose of usernames entirely, and use their email as a unique identifier. That ought to be easier for people who aren't used to the concept of usernames.
Ask HN: Setting up an open source project.
We have a ton of projects at massify.com we've been itching to open source, but we're obviously a little short on time. I'm wondering if anyone has actively participated or maintained an open source project and can help me answer some bullet points:

A. Has anyone ever started an open source project?
B. Any recommendations for project hosting (github, sourceforge, google code, etc.)
C. Tips on general project maintenance.

The biggest project is that we want to fork PHP. I'm not sure what kind of nightmare that would be. We have successfully been running a patched version of PHP that supports anonymous functions, closures and array shortcut notation. I guess this might be a whole different topic? Has anyone maintained a fork before?

Thanks for any input.
>They say you're not supposed to discuss religion and politics

Fuck the man

By that, specifically, I mean that a mysterious ethereal social convention is not a good reason for me to do or not do something, especially on the internet.
A form with
1. first name & last name
2. user_name [http://www.nixty.com/user_name]
3. email
4. password

Also, for #2 make sure people you display the corresponding url, so people know that it will be a part of their url as well.
I think you're mistaken in believing that the S&P 500 Index includes the value of reinvested dividends. The number
you're describing is a separate one called the "total return."

http://techfarm.blogspot.com/2008/04/historic-s-500-pe-ratio...
I like to stick to US wines. Why pay foreigners when American wines are just as good.
github is great for forking and the like, I'd go with that and lighthouse for tracking and google groups for a mailing list.

Or, you could just run your own git repo, trac, and mailman.

Just stay away from sourceforge.
Excellent. Thank you. We will be addressing the specifics very soon.
Arrington consistently bashes Twitter (it seems weekly), he has even personally attacked their previous head architect.

It's possible Arrington is trying to get revenge on Twitter for unknown reasons (other than it being down all the time) by continually publicizing that FriendFeed is better. Almost a bullying tactic, "don't mess with me or I'll write blog posts about how much you suck and thousands of people will read them". Though, at least in the past few months, the publicity has contributed to Twitter's growth.

Alternatively, he has come to rely on Twitter so perhaps his anger is justified beyond an emotional outburst.

If not for Erick Schonfeld, the site is sensational and editorial and thanks to Gillmor, largely unintelligible.
Yeah, unfortunately this has been reality for engineers in the Bay Area for at least 10 years. Your company either goes public and you're rich, or you're in a bipolar economic limbo where statistically you are upper middle class because of your high income, but really you are lower middle class because you are renting and your job can disappear at any moment.
The problem with this argument is that your chair actually has an impact on your health. Humans were not designed to sit in the same position for dozens of hours on end every day of every week.

I'm now doing physical therapy because my back is so weak that my innards are literally applying serious pressure to my lungs. What I initially thought was asthma (in my nightmares it was emphysema) turned out to be poor posture.

I'd just ask that you consider that.
I'm partway through the video and I got bored, I would have much rather read your mission statement. You aren't taking advantage of the video format. No one really makes straight flash GUI videos with scrolling text anymore.

I would have preferred 1 minute where you have a voiceover actor explain your mission, then 2 minutes where you go through the product. There's a web 2.0 marketplace where you can hire voiceover actors cheaply, or do it yourself. If you really can't talk about the product, I would still recommend having a voice talking about the mission.
Thanks. Yes, we will need their full name. We did talk about using their email as a unique identifier, but we need to have something for their URL - like: www.nixty.com/philh
Make both, offer them randomly and monitor the statistics.
We found taking out the first/last name (and pretty much everything else besides username, password, email) caused the completion rates to go way up. I guess people don't like sharing that stuff. Many of the people who did give their names, used fake ones.
Thanks for the feedback. I'm bummed that you were bored, but that is good to know.

We can definitely talk about the product. It is actually pretty compelling, so I think that would be pretty easy to do. I thought about doing something like that for the elevator pitch thing on TechCrunch.
Why are Black Nerds so Unpopular?
Thanks. One of our team members hypothesized this same thing, so it is good to hear that your experience confirmed this.
Clojure is a different philosophy than Erlang but still relevant since it is LISP + concurrency + it runs on the JVM so you get access to all those nice JAVA libraries.
> I'm bummed that you were bored, but that is good to know.

I read fast so fixed speed text makes me uncomfortable...
We talked about doing some of this testing. Thanks. Not sure what we decided upon.
We thought about speeding it up quite a bit. 2 people have commented that it too slow. With you, I'd put 3 in that camp.
1) good - it's a vaguely uplifting vid
2) yes - it isn't asking me for anything & makes me curious to hear more
3) I'd need more specifics as utnick mentioned
4) minor irritation when the soundtrack loop starts, and there's no clear signal that the presentation is over.
I would say Fred is arguing against his own desire for comments to be less fragmented. Just as the 'groups' by those portals are different, those reading his blog also read in groups, such as the HN group here.

I'm not sure I see the sense in taking comments out of their group context and mashing them all together.
Thanks for the feedback and for answering the questions. I appreciate it. Snap. I thought we had fixed the ending. It should just stop and then fade out.
I started disagreeing with the video right at the beginning, "there are too many of us." Also questioned the numbers you used 600 something students/educator.
Reputation Management Patterns
AVG changes their mind, decides not to flood the internet with fake requests
6 iPhone games we can't wait to play
I wonder if this attitude of RMS is also the reason of why some of the more interesting compiler projects are now happing on top of LLVM?

http://llvm.org
It was a joke. I was suggesting that this is mental masturbation.

When the theory can make a risky prediction that can be verified by an appeal to observable evidence, I'll consider it. Anything that starts with you'll never be able to test it, but... is not science or philosophy, but religion.
Too many of us? Like that is a bad assumption...like there are not too many of us? Feels too global warming esque? or something like that?

Also, yes, I thought about that too. We are looking at global (k-12, higher education, and lifelong learners). I thought about putting at * after that, but felt like it might take away from the video.
Social Design Patterns for Reputation Systems: An Interview with Yahoo’s Bryce Glass
further clarification, like an * after students and there would be a footer that would describe exactly what I'm referring to.
Free Coloring Pages - Princess Images
It totally depends on what your company does. If all the development is a particular style (web apps, desktop apps, embedded systems, etc etc) then it makes a lot of sense provided the choice of tool is periodically revisted and also provided that it's chosen for the right reasons (i.e. not just someone senior's "favourite toy"). You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket and end up in a technological dead end with nowhere to go but a rewrite. I'd argue that that's what's happened to everyone who thought J2EE was a good way to build websites...

If however you have a lot of different things going on (e.g. your company's main business is programming embedded systems and happens to have an unrelated group doing your website and another unrelated group doing internal desktop apps for business users) then a one-size-fits-all strategy is likely to be suboptimal.
I agree, but the best chair is still at least an order of magnitude worse than some good old-fashioned exercise, esp. of stabilizers, and good postural habits.

Btw - good luck with your physical therapy. It usually works wonders!
Google code is a good place to host. Very fast to get started and you get a very clean website with all the basic tools. Bug reporting is simple so your users will be happy too. It uses SVN but google give you the option to host your repository somewhere else if you dont like SVN.
However Google allows only a restricted set of licenses so you need to check their list of supported licenses.

launchpad is also an ok place to host code (and it allows any license) but it doesnt host wikis for example and some of the UI elements are rather radical and may not suit your taste. if you host on launchpad, you will need to host a proper website and/or wiki somewhere else.

Dont go with sourceforge. The site has become slow and full of ads which cover half your screen. The interface is clunky too.

edit : launchpad uses bazaar a distributed VCS.
Chicken shit asteroid orifices. ROTFLMAO
Oh, I'm not assuming that. I'm just not-assuming the opposite.
For Startups: A Theme Song
The Repetition Kills You.
Hahaha, the ontological disproof. I love it.

God would be more perfect if he could create the whole universe without even bothering to exist.
God is completely perfect.
Therefor, God doesn't exist.
QED.

The ontological proof falls down when you try to use it to prove the perfect sandwich. The perfect sandwich is has all the perfect qualities a sandwich can have. One quality of the perfect sandwich is that it exists. Another is that I'm eating it right now. And.... dammit, magical thinking still doesn't work.

If it can't handle a perfect sandwich, what hope does it have with a perfect deity?

You're right, I am conflating definitions somewhat. Arguments get squished when typed quickly into a little textarea.

My point is that people don't just mean that "supernatural" is "that which we haven't observed and thus don't understand." There is an implication that we can't understand supernatural things using theories and evidence, which is crazy. (Be careful using the word "visible" in this context. Plenty of matter isn't visible, but I doubt anyone would call electrons supernatural. I think you mean visible in the not-just-visual sense, yes?)

What does it mean to say that something exists, but has no effect on any part of the universe, no aspects that can ever be observed in any way, that leaves no footprint that can ever be detected? I think we call those kinds of things "imaginary".