skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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.

Aren't most PHP apps dependent on weird php.ini settings?

And anyway, the "real" langauges are equally easy to deploy. Get yourself a $20 slicehost account (to start with), add two lines to apache's config to enable FastCGI, then just copy your app up to that server. That's all there is to deploying Perl, Ruby, and Python these days.

With Perl and Catalyst, I can "make catalyst_par" and get a file that contains the entire application; including the version of Perl I am developing with. That way I know for sure it will work when I copy it to production. (Yes, this means I have to use the same architecture for both development and deployment. I do.)
Scala lift-off: Martin Odersky Keynote
I think you are missing some information necessary to solve this problem.
How to explain RSS the Oprah way
What if we had search?

(Sorry, couldn't resist...)
Eric Raymond has similar essays for why geeks are "often" libertarians, or "often" in favor of gun rights. "Logic dictates" that they would be so. Of course, a year later you find out that he also thinks people with dark skin are genetically inferior, and that we should bomb Tehran.

For my part, and despite what the avalanche of comments on this thread says to the contrary, I'll assert that it's hard to find an argument more boring and petulant than this one. "Geeks" are people who like to take things apart and build them back up again, and vice versa. That is the only thing they have in common. Unless you'd like me to make fun of your grimy pony tail and Star Trek ears.
Weird php.ini settings can almost always still go in the directory with the php files, so just copying the directory automagically makes everything work right. Some settings don't work this way, of course, but I'm not sure which those would be, offhand.

If you're using Python, for example, you're probably also using some framework... for years I used Webware for Python, and more recently web.py. Both require careful attention to get working in a convenient fashion, in my opinion.
well it can be ;) (I joke)
What do you think of Katie Hafner's account of it? You figure into it.
"First of all - you should disregard unusual personal experiences if you don't know of any way to repeat them. I dream. I even start halucinating when I don't sleep enough. People can even dream and halucinate under fairly ordinary circumstances."

I was talking about paranormal experiences I've had, such as the ability to predict dates and details of major events. I don't believe that anyone (certainly not me) is "psychic" and I can't reproduce this at will, but there have been enough paranormal events in my life that I cannot ignore the likelihood of a conscious will directing the things we consider "random".

In October 2005, I predicted that I'd meet a girl at a very specific place (a particular coffeeshop) on a specific date, four months into the future, and had a rough vision of her appearance, knew her ethnicity and about six other details about her, all of which turned out to be correct. This ended up leading to a relationship that lasted over two years. There could be a "self-fulfilling prophecy" at work, but the mind-boggling number of details that matched leads me to find it unlikely. Although I cannot possibly explain why, I've had 5 or 6 occurrences like this (and a couple that didn't come true). I've also had limited success in drawing on past lives to develop talents that I never thought I had, although I haven't seen enough strength in this department to rule out non-paranormal explanations.

Frankly, my opinion is that "the paranormal" almost certainly exists, although 99% of it is complete bunk, and the remaining 1% is nearly impossible to control or contain.
I really do hate that type of statement - why do people feel they can't have a family in order to make it in the startup world? I'm married, have a mortgage, have car payments, pets, etc. My income is the sole income of our household at the moment and my wife is excited every time I start a new project, regardless of the risk.

If we lost our house, cars, etc on a gamble and had to rebuild, we'd still be alive and do what we have to do to rebuild. BFD.
"finite matter" = the ~3.5lbs of squishy grey stuff between your ears and all the material stuff that leaves an impression upon it

"visions of the infintite" = can mean many things that approach that limit = Pi = recursion of indefinite length = time "before" matter = the number of possible synaptic connections ...

What makes them interesting "visions" - to me - is our intellect can just about get our fingers those concepts and then...indeed, I know not the bounds of this inquiry

And studying semantic memory in the brain, I have no idea where a concept like "infinity" comes from. Sure it might come from the brain? It must! Right? Right!? :)
But they're only "harming privacy" because Google, supposedly, allowed copyright infringement to take place. That's how the law works-- in order to investigate crimes, your privacy is sometimes invaded (when there is due cause).

I'm on your side, though. This philosophy of breaking privacy for investigation doesn't scale with the internet.
Susan Wojcicki on the Secrets of Google's Success
Mysteries of time, and the multiverse
You missed my point. The problem with a definition for God is that it would take God to check that proof. That's where dfranke said it "approaches tautology" and I agree. We just can't ever be sure that what we come up with is correct or circular. That's faith and humility rolled into one. And it's where I most disagree with Dawkins. His definition doesn't speak for me, and his training gives him no special insight into the problem.
Well argued, can't find a flaw if you place it on those terms.
"though the founders didn't know a lot about marketing and advertising, they did know how to build a product that customers would use."
How to do Research at the MIT AI Lab
I'd say we are already there but the pretty pictures are still very alluring. One example: Consciousness appears to be within grasp with the massive datasets already collected. The problem comes down to explaining, or reducing, consciousness in terms of that data. We might be able to show you what happens in the brain when you see beauty or feel pain, but that explains the experience of neither. The questions remain even as the science is the best it's ever been. I think this reality is much more glaring in modern physics.
Simple question: Where does Pi exist? :)
Of course you could make an overly elaborate uptime monitoring system. Many people have in the past. The thing that makes downforeveryone neat is that it is absolutely bare-bones. "Is it down for everyone?" "Nope, just you." No screen shots, no packet traces. Does it work? Yes/no. All I wanted to know.
I worked there, the haircuts aren't free.
Honestly it's not a "tactic" for me. I've come up with a workable definition that I'm very comfortable with. Luckily my wife and I mostly agree - and she's Indian. That's good enough for us - my definition doesn't have to work for you. And prayer, for me, is simply finding a stillness in my mind.

You're insisting on a set of concepts that never worked for me. So I gave them up. It's still weird for me that this thread is filled with this common response, among folks very comfortable writing their own definitions on a daily basis, but this subject area provokes resistance but not reformation.

By "Nature", where does that end for you? This planet? Or the solar system? The universe? Or the "metaverse"? There have been Christian theologians who can be read as naturalistic pantheists. See Charles Hartshorne. Good luck ascribing classical concepts to him, for instance.
From what I remember it was pretty sloppy.
Google's choices:

build something because you can

build something because you want to

people will use it because it's there

people will use it because they want to

people will use it because they need to

- Google maybe hit all 5, last one being the key.
With all due respect, I am growing a bit tired of deliberate avoiding startup pitfalls, when we talk about them here on HN.

Yes, I much prefer working in a small company for all these glorified (and popular here) reasons but it doesn't mean startups are good for everybody. In fact I believe startups do not appeal to real hackers, guys who we quote and admire. My limited personal experience confirms this too: smart people I know work at IBM, Motorola, Google and Microsoft and they're HAPPY.

And this is why:

Let's face it: in a startup, most often than not you're working on something trivial, technically simple, something that can be "released often, released early". Some minor "incremental improvement", and you've got PG books saying "it's OK". At a startup you (most probably) will be working on something that most of your friends will call "stupid shit" behind your back. Let's not pretend this elephant isn't there. There are exceptions to every rule, but it's a rule nevertheless.

And this is something I miss the most: an opportunity to work on hard problems, not necessarily even succeeding: this is why startups almost never try. And this is why my ideal "exit strategy" is to cash out (some day) and spend my days in academia.

Wow... This was very sudden (even for me) and perhaps misplaced rant.
http://www.sunnydonuts.com/

The donuts are in fact pretty much exactly the same as Dunkin' Donuts, but the coffee is not.
Related question: How much does blue weigh?
And you can really feel all of that sentiment when working with Jessica and the rest of Y Combinator. They're not just doing it because it's the next-generation, paradigm-shifting, game-changing micro-investment model (I call that buzzword-dashing).

It's also one of the reasons why, with all these similar funds cropping up, YC cannot be completely duplicated.
The cost of lisp machines also include much of the cost of developing the lisp machine environment. That probably cost more than the software that came with suns, apollos, etc and the workstations had more volume, so their comparable cost per machine was significantly less.
I wasn't interested in an "argument". I was interested in an answer to the question posed by the post and specifically to this community. Thank you for your perspective. Dawkins I find unsatisfactory as specified elsewhere here.
Investing in a Quality Programming Chair
I'm going to comment on a micropoint, since the main issues seem pretty well covered at this point.

<i>Having discovered that Google is not, in fact, the promised land, a number of Googlers have left recently to join start-ups, hotter companies like Facebook — and even Microsoft.</i>

Wait a second... Facebook is "hotter"? That seems unreal. It's not that Facebook is a bad company, per se, but I'd much rather work at Google. I can't imagine top-talent wanting to have Mark Zuckerberg, an arrogant 24-year-old, as a boss. I can't speak for tip-top talent, but even still I'd rather gargle a fistful of nuts and bolts.
Again, that's a specific definition that I don't ascribe to. Not that I have an answer either that I can easily describe. But it works for me.
As a Boston native, I can attest that people go to Dunkin' Donuts for the coffee, not the donuts. That is the main attraction of the place - donuts, bagels, etc - are all secondary. A chain that doesn't have the coffee is bound to fail.

Here's another article talking about this - http://www.lasnark.com/attn-los-angeles-entrepreneurs-please...
There's an extra 2Pi all over the place in physics equations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger_equation#Short...
Official Google Mobile Blog: Google Talk for the iPhone
Most of this applies well to research in general.
Meh, I'm not particularly concerned with how religious I am. I'm a theist - that I know. I don't feel the need to prove it to anyone or justify it. And that's where the problem of a tautology comes in.

Atheism just seems weird to me - a rejection without further effort. I think there's enough diversity of belief in theology, that one can learn alot without being nihilistic.
There seems a bit of a contradiction here. You say that real hackers wouldn't work on startups-- that the really smart people are in academia. And yet a large percentage of the CS faculty at MIT and Stanford have done or are doing startups. There's a joke that you can't get tenure at Stanford without having done a startup.

You're also confusing exploratory programming with doing trivial work. Making a quick version 1 and then iterating works for both big and small problems. It just depends how long you keep iterating.

It's true that a lot of the work you do in startups is crap work, and that a lot of startups only take on trivial problems. But this is also true in research.
flippant summary of bayesian stats: normalize the likelihood, multiply by a prior (which you can just set to whatevs).

oh, and you are allowed to assign probabilities to non-repeatable events, i.e. what's the probability there is life on mars?
What is "blue"?

I'm playing a different game with pi. Produced by the brain as a shorthand or discovered within the fabric of the universe? Number theory, to me, is either a grand unveiling or just another language.
> people will use it because they need to

I don't know what I would do without google to spelunk into technical problems. Hasta la Altavista?
Finally had a Krispy Kreme donut. I really don't understand the hype. Maybe if I had grown up with them as part of my formative years?
Yes, I thought that might be what you had in mind. It always struck me as a silly non sequitur to observe biochemical or neurological changes in the brain of a person experiencing X (the classic example being mourning the loss of a loved one) and conclude that X has biochemical or neurological causes or can be reduced into those terms. Of course, that's the way the pendulum has swung in psychiatry for 40 years now too.

It's not obvious to me that consciousness can explain itself.
Breaking:

YCombinator's Robert Morris Breeding New Generation of Cyber-Criminals?

;)
Intelligent people have better things to do with their time than argue about undefined words. (edit: I just saw how many comments this thread has, never mind)

here's another one for you, why don't geeks believe in casplak?

It's the russel's teapot problem. People who talk about god are using a word with no referent.
Maybe this Usenet group is for you?

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.religion.emacs/topics
I've been exposed to the robotics academic world in depth. Even academics I know are growing tired of the academic mode of work. There is a persistent and growing respect for making real and complete systems. This it often antithetical to the unit of academic progress: published results.

A great test for whether you have a real system is whether you can sell it. That's why iRobot is so awesome. They make robots that people actually use.

Make something people want :)
that's a brilliant synopsis.
That is not what is traditionally meant by those terms.

Gnosticism is a religion in its own right and agnosticism generally always applies to questions of religious significance.
I'm not sure this is such a horrible thing. I live in LA and there is no shortage of good coffee shops of all sorts (I'm definitely not counting Starbucks here, but I may be slightly partial to Peet's and Coffee Bean both for convenience if I can't find anything else). I haven't noticed anything terribly different up in San Francisco either.

Annnnd well, if I'm not making my own coffee at home (which I usually do), I've fallen in love with the iced coffee at McDonald's. I don't like anything there (except maybe the 60 cent ice cream cones), but that iced coffee is mighty cheap and is pretty drinkable.
Poll: My religious beliefs are best summarized by...
Let's just get this out of the way. I'm interested in an approximate distribution even as I'm okay in the minority.
Atheist!
Agnostic?
Theist.
Cookie monster/Werewolf
Oh, sorry - the prior probability that any given person is Bruce Willis is roughly 1 in 6x10^9.

I can follow the nice, sensible text about how you can take an initial probability of something happening, and a binary test which branches into four outcomes including genuine and false positives and genuine and false negatives, and the ratios coming from the four branches describe how accurately the test discerns the two possibilities, and the more accurate the test the more tightly coupled it is to the thing you are testing for and the more it drives the initial probability one way or the other.

"A Plan for Spam" - an initial probability than an email is spam. A test such as "does the email contain 'vi4gra'" and some probabilities calculated from your email archive of how often spam contains 'vi4gra' and how often it doesn't, and how often ham contains 'vi4gra' and how often it doesn't, and you can precisely adjust your probability of an email being spam based on whether it contains that text.

Training it on your email archive means you can judge incoming email never seen before without being unfairly prejudiced against it just because it's new, only judging it on whether it has spammy characteristics - and Bayes' Theorem applied to your previous email _tells you what it means for an email to have spammy characteristics_, is that right?

It seems kind of straightforward, and yet I can't (yet) follow it through numerically so I clearly don't understand it; I may be glossing over big important parts of it. So if 300 people have a 30% probability of having a positive result from a mammography, and 60% of people who don't have a positive result aren't 40% less likely to not have a 1 in 10 chance of already being a winner ... wait, where did the train come into it again?

:(
One possible solution is to elongate the time-steps; if we take a million years to simulate one second of simulation time you could get by with a lot less computing power.
Trevor's a case in point. As far as I can tell, he's ahead of pretty much everyone on walking algorithms.
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.

If someone accuses you of being self-righteous or condescending, don't let him or her find this.
Yeah, that's precisely the point I was trying to make (I think). It's the same basic mental model, "we ARE the technology we use." As it evolves, so does the theory.
I spent 13 years in corporate America, mostly because I didn't understand what my other options were. I was hypnotized...

I don't want young people to endure corporate America like I did if they don't want to.

I find these statements very moving. Perhaps it's because they speak simply from deep experience.
How about adding "the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question" as an option?
In regards to that article and many others I've seen: I know there's HUGE demand for Dunkin' Donuts here. I would _love_ to open one, and it seems I would meet most/all of their franchisee criteria - not to mention I'm shopping for a business to either buy or open, franchise or not right now anyway. The only problem is that they don't give out any franchising opportunities in CA. I'm sure I'm not the only person who would kill to open one here. I could think of half a dozen locations in LA where I could buy out an existing business or lease a space.

So PLEASE blame the company, no one else. I wish I could just get that through all those thick skulls (especially comment #8 on that link) that think you just need to throw money at a franchise to open a new store so it's just a lack of people interested in doing so. It's NEVER that easy to run/start a business, and if the company says no, they mean no.
Ask HN: Clans in news recommendation site?
I was wondering what will happen if a "Clan" forms on News.YC or reddit etc. By a clan, I mean a group of users who always upmod each others articles or comments etc and possibly downmod certain topics?
Even if there are only 7-8 user clans, the stories submitted by a clan can rise very fast to the top. How will you detect and deal with them? I dont believe any clans currently exist and its just a hypothetical situation.
For a second I thought the post was going to be about the need to endow a new kind of chair in CS departments. Does anyone work standing up?
Have you asked Dunkin Donuts why they won't sell any franchises in CA?
I really don't see the common analytic framework there - but sure, you can vote on the werewolf/cookie monster option. :)
Entry of Intel in the mobile segment is forcing traditional ARM-based SoC makers to open up their software tools etc. Even though Intel doesnt have anything that competes with OMAP series lets say, Intel does have a thoroughly documented instruction set and one which is very well supported by compilers etc. Compared to it, compilers for TI DSP's for example still cost a fortune usually.
Voting rings certainly exist, both here and on Reddit. And while we both have ways of detecting and neutralizing them, describing these techniques in detail would tend to cause them not to work as well.
I personally haven't because I know others (like some of the brokers and folks I talk to often) who've inquired about it with no success. I don't think it's a lack of money or interest that's stopping the franchise from opening locations in CA.

I haven't researched the franchise itself much for the above-mentioned obvious reasons so I can't realllly say much more, but I'd have to guess that it's either taken by someone else or the franchise has some future plans for the state if they're not willing to open stores now.
I read an article in the late 90s in Esquire magazine about a businessman who tried for years to open a Krispy Kreme franchise in a new state. He loved Krispy Kreme and knew it would be a hit. They refused. He visited headquarters, wrote them letters, became friends with the secretaries. He was persistent to the point of obsessive. He didn't take no for an answer. They finally relented after (iirc) 9 years. It's a good article - worth finding on microfiche.
I wish I was that dedicated ;) But I don't have years to spend (I have other plans for my life at this point too!), this is a family venture, and there are lots of other franchises and independent businesses out on the market.

Maybe someone else might be that obsessive about opening it, but I'm not the person. I'm just pointing out though that it's not possible that people with enough money and experience haven't considered trying to open a Dunkin' Donuts in California lately.
Zeitgeist RSS
Government web sites should focus on RSS, not redesigns
Discovering the next New New Thing
It usually doesn't turn out to be a problem, because even when startups are doing something similar, they're rarely doing exactly the same thing.
Show and Tell YC: Built a webapp in ~14 hours
It may be possible that each universe will simulate a substantially simpler universe; it would of course be impossible to tell whether you universe has "lower resolution" from the inside, cause you'd have no frame of reference.
I think donuts wont be a huge seller in the bay area. It seems they are more of a comfort food when it is cold, and it is never that cold in here. Plus people are more health consious in here (SF is the slimest large city in the USA).

Plus there are so many options for coffee. Dunkin Donuts coffee is mediocre, slightly better than McDonalds. The only thing that they have is the huge cup sizes. A medium DD coffie is more like a large starbucks one.

Anyway, I lived in Boston for three years, and moved in SF, and never missed them.