skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had the same idea for a dictionary, which I've been too lazy to execute on. You define an initial term, and it comes up with a definition. Then you can expand out from there, if you don't understand a word. Then you keep recursing until you understand (or get bored).

For instance, what does "panache" mean?

"a grand or flamboyant manner; verve; style; flair: The actor who would play Cyrano must have panache."

Then you'd click to expand out verve, and perhaps flamboyant. Until you understand what's going on.

I see it as a nerdy kid tool. For the young ones who like reading, like knowing words, but just don't have the vocab to really make a dictionary work for them straight up.
Amazing. This reads like a contrived science fiction story, but it's true (maybe it's just that the science fiction I've read is based on "alien" cultures on Earth - like the gaits in "walking with dinosaurs" made me think that birds walk like dinosaurs. But they based the gait on birds.).

> But what if a language didn't show recursion? ... First of all, it would mean that the language is not infinite

A regular language (like a* b) is infinite, but not recursive --- But he's probably not using a mathematical regular expression, but a Chomsky Hierarchy type-3 regular grammar (like A -> aA, A-> b), which is recursive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy#The_hierarchy

> Pirahã doesn't have expressions like "John's brother's house" ... you have to say "John has a brother. This brother has a house"

It seems very technical to say that this means the language isn't recursive, because that's only true at the sentence level. It seems to have the quality of recursion, but at the multi-sentence level.

> If you go back to the Pirahã language, and you look at the stories that they tell, you do find recursion. You find that ideas are built inside of other ideas, and one part of the story is subordinate to another part of the story. That's not part of the grammar per se, that's part of the way that they tell their stories.

So he agrees. It does seem very limiting to define a language in terms of the sentence structure. There are typical and non-typical ways for sentences to follow one another - surely that's part of the language. Of course, if your discipline has a certain structure for analyzing things (like the Chomsky Hierarchy), it's hard to think outside that structure (and harder to get it published). BTW: I think Chomsky was (and is) brilliant.

> That's one of the strongest Pirahã values; no coercion; you don't tell other people what to do.

> The Pirahã ... in some ways are the ultimate empiricists—they need evidence for every claim you make

I like them
There are lots of ways to profit from causing fluctuations in prices. One is the classic "pump and dump" scheme where some speculators profit at the expense of others. In this market another way to make money would be to profit at the expense of companies that buy oil futures for their own use, like airlines.
Aaron Swartz: How To Launch Software
Are you referring to Ruby's method_missing? As I understand it's about the same as Smalltalks #doesNotUnderstand:.

Python doesn't have an equivalent, but it does have __getattr__, which is arguably more powerful but less convenient.
If we are talking a month of involvement, you may as well learn both.

I would also throw Lisp in. And Forth. And Haskell. And Smalltalk...

But then, we are not talking about a month anymore...
my main projects go in /home/myusername/

and the rest go in /home/myusername/projects/

and stuff that I'll delete soon goes in

/home/myusername/test
Ditto, although I think I got fancy with the C64 BASIC and used ? instead of PRINT:

10 ? "HELLO"
20 GOTO 10
as of summer 2006, yes. standard 4/1 yr
when programming, if you keep your mind on the structures and on the problems themselves instead of on the language, you'll naturally reach points where you will demand that the language do X. sometimes the language will be able to, and it will seem "advanced." sometimes the language won't be able and you'll sob quietly for a moment because you have to implement it in another less elegant way

but if you worry about the details of the language, it will prematurely affect the structures that you create. in this mode it's harder to write "advanced" things because you are respecting the language too much, and are more confined to its syntax/semantics

if you stay above/outside the language, you will naturally pull it up
If you are using some sort of enter button to have the user submit their data and they fail to do so before navigating away from the page, then navigation should happen and the data in the text box should be lost.

Otherwise the text box data should be acted upon as soon as the user hits the submit button.
I have to make the red go green!

But really, I am a programmer because I'm somewhat critical and suspicious, enjoy language and get a bit of a power trip from creating/fixing things. Programming unites all of these and pays me handsomely for it.

Sure, sometimes we all feel a little like a code monkey, but I realize that what I do is far more empowering than what many of my friends do in order to grind out a paycheck.
He's rationalizing. The advertisers paid for qualified leads. Godin's idea deliberately tricks them into paying for unqualified leads. Is it exactly the same thing as click fraud? No. Is it ethical? No. If you don't want to play by the rules set up by the advertisers, don't take their money. We don't run ads on our blog.
How to get your lying printer to use up all its ink
You can quantify by saying "say when", by pointing at stuff, by physically bunching items together.

It was children. I assume their parents sent them away; because they were picking up bad habits (like counting). I don't think they really did "want to learn to count", since they have resisted all other cultural imperialism, and think themselves superior to all other cultures.
I don't believe anything I see on the site until it's corroborated by other reliable sources.
First, I think it's too easy to say "But only click on ads you like! It's not click fraud then!". The problem is that this argument is used both by people who are trying to make a valid point, and by people actually advocating click fraud ("Click on our ads or the site will shut down. But only click on ads you like, wink wink nudge nudge"), and it's pretty much impossible to tell the difference, especially from something as short as Seth's original post.

But mainly, I disagree with him on the form of tipping.

My form of tipping is to give a thumbs up on Stumbleupon, or even on Digg or Reddit. If it's not on Stumbleupon, even better, I submit it!

For ad-supported content, I think eyeballs is a fine currency. I tip with something that, in a way, belongs to me: a very tiny slice of my online "reputation" on social bookmarking services, exchanged for a chance for the author to get more eyeballs, which might click on ads they're genuinely interested in.

In Seth's scenario, I'm tipping with someone else's (the advertiser's) money. That doesn't feel right to me.
Some of the other Hawaiian islands might be even easier. Molokai has very few cars and you could go 100% this way. Plus Molokai has a huge emphasis on being green, so this would fit right in.
I agree. But that is an added incentive. But what about its benefit vs more rigorous testing?
Annals of the Patently Absurd: Microsoft patents PgUp/PgDwn
Orkut has taken years, and has had little to no traction in the country where google has many thousands of employees.

Also, xbox was a core play for microsoft. It is the computer in the living room now, which is huge. Online virtual worlds in the browser aren't nearly as core. My point is that I wouldn't expect them to invest heavy resources in M&A in this area.
For comments that have RSS feeds, you can add it to zaptxt to monitor via Skype, IM, Email, Mobile. No FF toolbar, but a browser bookmarket is available
Speculation: Google, Verizon Nearing a Search Deal
I tell everyone that I have a hobby that just happens to pay well.

Writing software is like solving puzzles to me; it's very enjoyable, and I get a tremendous sense of satisfaction every time I solve a problem or ship some software.
Generally, the company is engineering driven. This is well known.

A product manager / designer friend of mine was asked to code on a white board during an interview. That is retarded.
UNICEF says Britain is the worst country for children in the Western world
Better advice would be 'Take time to look at ads on sites you like'
I don't think the analogy fits perfectly though.

This sort of clickfraud is like using someone elses bottle opener to open the bottle vs buying your own bottle opener.

Clicking on adverts, you're using advertisers money to reward the website, instead of using your own.

Clearly it's not a good thing to advocate, but you can sort of see why some people may decide to do it.

A better suggestion IMHO would be for websites to use pay per lead/sale affiliate links, and just ask that if people were already going to buy something, that they use the websites links, thus giving the website a commission. That way no one is defrauded.
OpenSSH blacklist script
New Gears Geolocation API powers mobile web sites
Excellent - looking forward to seeing what you guys cook up.
I mirror all my code and projects between my home and work systems, so the layout is vaguely like this:

~/Projects/
/work/
/account-tools/
/courseware/
/system-mgmt/
/personal/
/blog/
/throwaway/
/org/
/fundraising/
/public-site/

(etc., etc.)

The meaning of the 'work' and 'personal' directories should be apparent, and 'org' is for non-profit volunteer work.

Each project is under some sort of version control, but it could be CVS, Subversion, or Git, depending on how many years ago I last worked on it.
Just two of the things I wondered about myself.
Presumably, in-nature trading could work without counting (quantification): "You take this X for that Y?" X/Y could also be "pile of X/Y". I don't know if that's the case there.
About the children being sent away... even more intriguing is "How?". He said that coercion was almost nonexistent.

But you're right, it is a long read and has a lot of interesting things in it. In that respect, probably anybody can find something(s) intellectually gratifying, to paraphrase a famous man. I found the first half more interesting than the second for example.
I like things doing what I tell them to do.
Facebook v. MySpace In The U.S. Market: The Music Factor
The insight for Tipjoy was that the worst case scenario was going back to fun jobs at big companies. Probably with a raise and a promotion too.
I joined two other startups and realized that there's no magic to it, just a lot of hard work.
Some discussion:

1. Python's object-oriented syntax makes it tedious to hand-code a complete GUI app. Instantiate a container, add a label, set the label text, add button, add a button -- without special hackmagic (e.g. fussing with __dict__ and __getattr__), it's very repetitive and not particularly readable. Basically, it looks like Java. Special hacks can cut the redundancy, but then, simple GUI layout code shouldn't be that conceptually tricky.

When I started using Glade alongside GTK, life improved dramatically. Separating the layout from the controlling methods seems to be part of it, and that works fine in web apps, so it's nicely familiar. But XML sucks for simply storing and retrieving data within an app, and I don't think the layout and logic need to be written in different languages necessarily. XML and HTML work for layout because the code physically looks like the layout it describes -- angle brackets don't matter; parentheses would be fine too.

In short, I think the syntax we want for GUI layout should be declarative, not object-oriented. Ruby's blocks make it work for Shoes, and I'm suspicious that converting that style to Python's OOP syntax without understanding the need for a sort of declarative mini-language will lead to... let's say, a confusing and ugly API.

2. Is this (a) a library that's either pre-installed on the user's machine or included with the distributed code, (b) a framework that generates code for the target platform during design, or (c) a preprocessor that generates the right platform-specific code before/during packaging?

3. I understood that Clutter was the new hotness in GUI creation these days. Any interaction there?
Pizza Oven + Inkjet Printer + Nail Polish = Solar Cell?
> I like them

They took unfounded beliefs out of a missionary. I like them too :)
No analogy fits perfectly. I hope TipJoy catches on in a big way everywhere. Voting the link up on social link sites is another good way to support what you like.
The gist of the original was 'click to say thanks, which all by itself is a nice deed for the author'.

The gist of the clarification is 'click and pay attention to the pitch on the landing page to say thanks, which over time will change click-ads to work more like TV, which would be healthy for the ad environment'. (Um... yuck!)

The original formulation sounded authentic, albeit essentially advocating click fraud. The second sounds like backtracking, but has within it the core of an idea in the TipJoy mold:

What if some contextual ads were explicitly of the form, "we'll tip the author X if you watch our Y second pitch", and their TOS allowed sites to encourage clickers?

Then you wouldn't be undermining the value of traditional cost-per-click ads, you'd be adding another variant to the attention-market that works like what Godin wants. It'd be a little like an interstitial (or TV ad), but appear only after you enjoy the content. (An 'afterstitial'?)

'TipWithAdvertisersMoneyJoy'?
this certainly is a zone Google should be aiming for (but not via g. adsense) - hopefully (for them) pre-empting any widespread cultural adoption of this techinque for tipping a creator, which would be totally unsustainable
This is what I use at my office:

TPL (three letter code for client Tippingpoint Labs -> TPL)

-> ~Resources (global resource files)

-> ~Information (research for the client)

-> TPL08-01Website (client ID + last two digits of the year - job ID

---> ~Resources(resources for the job)

---> 080210 (date coded, 10th of February, 2008)

---> 080220 (date coded, 20th of February, 2008)

------> actual stuff inside

-> TPL08-02CookieRecipe

..etc

-> TPL08-999_IT

..etc

At home, I just use three directories: /school, /work, /play. School has all of my school stuff in it (it's subdivided into year and class), work has all of my work stuff in it (a less intricate version of the above), and play is just a dump where I plop files.
Maybe a thermocouple to charge a capacitor for a timing element. But the mechanical solution is better.
I got my initial confidence through spectacular ignorance of the difficulties involved. Confidence grows as problems are solved.
Ma.gnolia goes open source
I'm getting FB ads in arabic already.
I don't think 6% will get you 1-3 "rock stars" at the stage that most YC companies are. Much too early for that.

At that stage (where cash compensation is minimal if not non-existent), the equity that would need to be given a real "rock star" would be considerably higher.
That describes how I got my start in music.

I wonder if there's parallels between child prodigies in music and in coding? I wonder if the labor of child prodigies might be some kind of untapped resource? (Early to mid teens. Maybe there's some black hat hackers out there like that?)

Perhaps best if this remains speculation forever.
If anyone has the link to a video of his speech, it would be much appreciated.

Edit: http://www.betterplace.com/press-room/videos/
Can you guess which method cuil chose.
If you remember what cuil is of course.

Perhaps they should have read this first.
Have you ever worked with engineers from Les Grandes écoles? You might reconsider your view.
I can't wait for Nokia to launch a no-keyboard, display only phone -- and see how that compares with the iPhone.
37Signals has launched four (4) commercial products, and takes in (by my guess, from headcount and subscription numbers) mid-high 7 figures from them.

Aaron Swartz has launched, by my count, no successful products (unless I'm wrong and Reddit wasn't already a success story when he got there).

From Aaron's own web page, here's what I get when I click on his "my day job" link:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/29804691@N02/2786744327/

Why am I being such a dick about this? Because the argument he's making is disingenuous. Aaron advocates for an extended friends-and-family beta before launch. Aaron has no idea what 37signals does to beta and dogfood their product before the "Hollywood Launch". From what I can tell, everything 37signals does happens just before "step 5" in his master plan.

The difference between 37signals and Aaron Swartz isn't methodology. Methodology is a band-aid. The difference between Aaron Swartz and 37signals is ability to execute.

Here's a much better writeup from a much more credible source on the same topic:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/PickingShipDate.html
I'm admittedly ignorant on alternatives on the Ruby side, but would be interested to see what other web frameworks people have built and the pros cons vs. Rails.

Merb is the big one. Think Rails, but more lightweight, greater emphasis on scaling and performance, and open to several ORMs (not just ActiveRecord), templating languages (not just ERB), and Javascript libraries.

Camping is a Ruby micro-framework that's been around for a while. The framework itself is 4kb, and Camping apps are designed to sit in one file. Used a bit on the side, but not especially widely for production work.

Sinatra is a newer microframework that looks similar to web.py, but in Ruby. Looks useful, and I've been meaning to get around to it.

The nice thing about Rails, Merb, and Camping is that if you know one, the others will be familiar. They're all MVC frameworks that support ActiveRecord (and other ORMs, sometimes). They all favor convention over configuration.
Yeah, because 3D is so much more useful that 2D for ummmm..... let me think about this one for a while. The 3D virtual world will not be coming for a very, very long time. Until we have a cheap and simple way to do 3D presentation the whole virtual world thing is a non-starter; once that appears you can start to talk about how things might, possibly, change.
Doesn't Ruby have call/cc?

(def which-answer-is-correct answers
(let like-ruby-block
(fn (answer index return) (when (is string.answer "42") (return:+ index 1)))
(ccc [do1 "none of the above"
(on a answers (like-ruby-block a index _))])))

as a useful contribution to the topic: Python does not have a call/cc

and how would the return statement be scoped if the block was created inside a different function?
You can add inline c to ruby for the few places where speed matters.
What are you doing that can't be done with python's lambda functions?
Blocks and lambdas

Yeah, but this is an area where both languages are just a mess. If python's lambda is castrated, ruby's notion of an anonymous function is tumorous. We've got blocks, procs, lambdas and methods? What's the difference?

Ruby mixes up the syntactic requirements of "passing" some code to a loop to iterate with with the data requirements of binding a function to a scope. It's just a huge mess.

LISP and Scheme figured all this out decades ago, and yet only Javascript (and, almost, perl) among common scripting languages has managed to absorb the lesson.
You're right, but what does that matter? When you give up 6% of your company in 2008, you're out that 6% in 2009. In 2008, a CEO costs 33% of the founder's pool. When the company survives into its first cash-flow-neutral year, that CEO costs much less.

The idea that you can just keep peeling 6% (or 40%) every round is also a fallacy. You can keep doing that exactly until the point where your shareholders stop letting you do it.

Again: it's really easy to devise an argument that says a YC endorsement is worth 6%. I'm not going there. I'm just asking you to think about the real value of that equity number, and I'm doing that because I think to a lot of people, 6% sounds low. I had less than 2% of a very small company that got acquired in '98, and I ended that year just shy of 7 figures.
Unlocked Nokia 8800 Black Arte
Nokia has unveiled the latest iteration of its classy 8800 mobile phone dubbed as the Carbon Arte. It mixes tcarbon fiber, titanium and stainless steel to come up with a truly elegant yet very durable design that cannot be mistaken for anything else but a Nokia 8800 slider.
I think a better analogy is choosing a house to live in and its neighbors.
You say "both languages are just a mess" as if to equate the two. But there's no comparison.

Your Ruby problem with blocks and Proc objects is a nit about elegance and semantics. How often does the difference between an actual Proc object and a block actually affect you? More importantly, if the cost of fixing that nit is that we wind up with Lisp's or Javascript's lambda notation, who would accept that? Javascript has relatively consistent semantics for anonymous functions, but extremely clumsy syntax.

Python simply doesn't have real lambdas. It has the ability to pass something called a lambda in place of a function, and that something forces you to think about things like the difference between a statement and an expression. It then tells you that you don't in fact want anonymous functions, but instead you want to define tens of itty bitty named functions and use them instead. You also "want" that "self" argument to all your methods, and you "want" to tack two underscores to the front of your method names to make them private.

So, I half agree with you. Yes, it would be nice if there was a (zero-cost) way of fixing Ruby's block semantics. Yes, I can rely on Lisp's lambda semantics slightly more than I can on Ruby's, which does start to matter when you start writing domain-specific language code. But I don't agree that this has any bearing on the Python vs. Ruby argument. Python lambdas suck.
>> Merb is the big one. Think Rails, but more lightweight, greater emphasis on scaling and performance, and open to several ORMs (not just ActiveRecord), templating languages (not just ERB), and Javascript libraries.

Sounds exactly like the reasons why I went to Pylons. I found SQLAlchemy to be a lot more powerful than the Django ORM, and we needed more application components to be 'detached' from the web interface which got wonky in Django.

I'll have to check these out, thanks.
Yes, and that simply costs you the ability to distribute your software to anything but your own servers.
Teaching Discrete Mathematics via Primary Historical Sources
the chicks?
Contrast this to Richard Feynman, who once avoided getting caught by boasting.

http://starsending.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!420D430F8E7933EB...
Intel's Nehalem to have 1M transistors dedicated to power management (PCU)
Interestingly enough the language everyone loves to hate, PHP, as of 5.3 has figured this out as well.
Short, and very very good. Those diagrams will definitely stick with me.
It's cool that it changed the way you approach writing code, but it's more than a little presumptuous to go and apply that experience beyond yourself. I'm sorry if I didn't see much in ruby that I hadn't already seen, it's not as though ruby is pushing through a new paradigm.

Certainly the "ah-ha" moment for ruby was much less intense than my ah-ha moment of Lisp, Python, SmallTalk and Erlang. And it's definitely more straight forward to me than Haskell, Prolog, OCAML or Forth.

That's just the reality of it.
"How to Get Rich": an anti-self-help book by Felix Dennis