skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love contrarian articles.

Not only is it fun reading a scathing criticism, (and I think he went too far in some ways and not far enough in others) the really funny part is watching the target audience digest (or rather, regurgitate) it.

There is a strange similarity between YC and a cult. You guys quote PG all the time like he's the next Buddha or something. YC is looked at as the only way towards making your startup happen. Sometimes around application time the posts get really out there as far as hero worship -- and Paul's said so himself.

Having said that, there's a LOT of dissension here as well. Lots of folks that have nothing to do with YC and just think Paul's a nice, regular schmuck like the rest of us. I know I'm here because of the crowd -- and by that I mean the larger startup crowd, not necessarily the YC bunch. This is the first board I've been on that has a long-running discussion about how single-arrow voting sucks, for one thing, or the role of contrarian comments in a healthy community.

So yeah, he's got a bit of a point. But it's mostly overblown, and I wouldn't worry about it. If you're 22 years old and don't have somebody to look up to? Then I'd start worrying.
Help with widget building
Does anyone know any good tutorial sites with info on how to build a basic embeddable flash widget?

What do people think of the other options like widgetbox, dapper.net, google gadget, sprout and clearspring?

thanks,

n
This is a Trojan Horse.

YC admin should remove this post immediately.
Productivity and time management tools seem to be a popular topic, so I've added one of my favourites.

Explanation: http://davidseah.com/blog/the-printable-ceo-iii-emergent-tas...

More Resources: http://davidseah.com/blog/guide_productivity
OTOH, if you were brainwashed into believing another group was brainwashed, you will fight any suggestion the other group was not brainwashed and come up with an unending stream of reasons to believe they were.
I'm not sure what a 'CSS Editor' is, as I presume the visual layout of any page would be kept separate from the data in any working web page editor.

CSSEdit (the app) sounds like what I'm looking for tho, a Linux/Windows equivalent would be awesome.
"We've got to stop dumping the used ones and zeros into the oceans! It's melting the ice caps!"

Really, it's the ones. It's a well known fact ones have more energy than zeros. We should right now start dumping more zeros to cool down the oceans. If we do it quickly enough, we may stop global warming. We should also switch to other binary architectures as x86 code has a one-to-zero ratio that exceeds 1.
Page Pets
Add an animated pet to your profile that floats above all of your other stuff. Dogs, Cats, Fairies, Fish, Butterflies and more.
My sex adventures with Craigslist New York
Fantastic real life story about using Craigslist for casual affairs
I once proposed our team all had brain-scans to put them as our portraits in the "about us" part of the site.
what if the problem is the solution?
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http://www.kellyoshiroevents.com/blog/?p=511
If he really wants a change, going to Europe might be good: way more diverse than the US in a relatively small space, and relatively "safe" (personal safety, health care, etc...). Agreed, though: "see something new" is a great reason to go abroad, but "start a company" is a great reason not to.
Worst submission yet on HN. Plus, this guy started a blog just to say that?
Even more twisted: what if you were brainwashed into thinking that people who have been brainwashed don't believe they've been brainwashed? Would you be able to tell whether you've been brainwashed yourself or whether it's the rest of the world that's brainwashed?

The world would be a strange place... but very clean.
Erm... I've wasted far more time fiddling with Linux trying to get it to see things like the mirrored RAID in my PC than dealing with Windows. (Yes, even Ubuntu.)
I chose a subject with higher information density.
Obviously the guy is trolling, but a useful question does emerge: Are people taking pg's advice without critically evaluating it? If they do not then all is fine and dandy but if they do, the guy has a point (albeit poorly presented).
Ctrl-D does it.
Regarding 1: You can refer to 'self' when you have bound it - it does not have to do anything with methods. Though 'self' is usually employed in methods.
He wasn't saying that the only energy given off was that or heat or that all energy put in was given off as heat he said, you could run the arm processor on the portion of energy given off as heat.
if you learned how to program, you can learn other stuff
Fast: not the devil :)
Thanks, Dr. Paul.

No, but really, I agree with you. However, this might still be a step in that direction, as less tax money for the government to spend means less spending.
I'd meet your challenge - but I guess I'd just start wasting my time instead of procrastinating for the challenge.
about thesixtyone.com: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=153856
"The Race Between Education and Technology"
Researchers Synthesize Evolution of Language
Objectified: A documentary about Industrial Design
Curiously how's it like living in Japan? you have email? mine's is wrm932 at gmail.com
BlackLight's physics-defying promise: Cheap power from water
Inventor plans to unveil "the world’s first practical jetpack" - $100k
I'd love to see some insight into what went right, what went wrong, the decision to shut down etc
As an interesting aside, that's also why Skype claimed Windows Update caused their last major outage - they claim there was a bug that caused the P2P network self-healing code to work slowly, a larger-than-normal number of computers rebooted at the same time after patching and the P2P network took two days to recover from the "critical disruption".
My email sig:

"If there's one thing I am truly proud of, it's that I've wasted all my talents, contributed nothing to the human race, and will not be remembered by generations yet to come."

If you're doing things because you want to be remembered for them, you're doing things for all the wrong reasons and will never be remembered for anything.
I'm sure they've covered their bases. They're not negligent.

I think they only very recently added a checkbox to opt-out of being a supernode though, the lack of which I found rather annoying.
The World's Best Places to Live 2008
Perhaps it will mutate into something else and be saved?
NY Times Op-ed: "USAF or NASA should reopen investigations of U.F.O. phenomena."
- People are put in physically or emotionally distressing situations;
- Their problems are reduced to one simple explanation, which is repeatedly emphasized;
- They receive unconditional love, acceptance, and attention from a charismatic; [sic]
- They get a new identity based on the group;
- They are subject to entrapment (isolation from friends, relatives, and the mainstream
culture) and their access to information is severely controlled.

You mean just like doing a PhD or building a company or heck, being a geek about anything in life. A baseball fan who can recite stats about everything and everyone for the past 100 years is, by this definition, part of a cult.
Living in Zurich is like going out with a beautiful woman who has nothing to say. The best day is the day you get together. The second best day is the day you split up.
This is a good idea. If you are fully vested at and risk in your business and it's a small one, you shouldn't be hounded by every little government agency that can come by for a piece of you.

We want hundreds of thousands of little experiments, not just thousands.
I'm much less worried about that happening here because of the transient nature of the site. I don't think potential manipulators would find it worthwhile.
Paypal is easy. But it is not as easy and ubiquitous as sending an email.
You could also give other clues besides ordering - without revealing the numbers 'in your face'.
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The Ruby Object Model and Metaprogramming
So the point about ZeroMQ's performance is that it removes almost all the messaging overhead, leaving only the network stack and network protocol. The main cost in conventional messaging is what sits above the network stack, in the messaging products and in the applications.

ZeroMQ gets rid of almost all this cost, so lets applications approach full network speed, as zinxq said, 10Gb on a 10Gb network.

There is a very big difference between a test program at each end of a network, and an application framework like ZeroMQ, which includes routing and queuing of messages based on the AMQP semantics of exchange and queue. The real beauty of ZeroMQ is the way it lets developers build fast multithreaded applications without ever worrying about how to scale - everything works as asynchronous messages, between processes on one machine, or processes distributed across wide networks.

It is possible to get about 2M kernel traversals per second, in one direction, per core. So with a perfect scalable messaging product that does not bypass the kernel and TCP/IP stack, you can hope for up to 1M messages per second per core. Depending on the size of the message you can thus saturate any network.

Apart from ZeroMQ, no existing messaging actually manages this. The very best closed-source products in this space manage 1M messages per second, which is already a big number.

To get to the stated goals, ZeroMQ will need to bypass TCP, bypass parts of the kernel, and probably move parts of its routing into silicon.
How Debt Consolidation Company Works
There are several advantages in obtaining a loan consolidation. First, you lower your interest rate. Second, you only make one payment a month that pays on numerous debts. Third, you can lengthen the amount of time to pay on your consolidated loan, which lowers your monthly payments.
People don't get it, do they. I have ZERO interest in an operating system. No, it's not that I have zero interest in an online operating system, I have no interest in any operating system at all! What I want are quick and convenient applications, and the OS itself is totally irrelevant. So anyone who tries to apply a paradigm that was forced on us to something that we choose to use will ultimately fail.

What is needed is not an OS, it's an organiser. A place I store files, write letters, etc. Not some multiple window thingy, but some simply thing that gives me quick access to my applications.

Everyone trying to recreate Mac OS or Windows, but webbased is doomed to failure. Mac OS and Windows are used because people don't have a choice as to what desktop paradigm they can use. If one decides to switch, there are no applications, so you are forced into using a particular way.

But it has always been a flawed design, so don't copy this stuff.
in the case a startup attempt fails this is the most valuable thing that is left for the founders.

So, asking them to hand it to you is a bit obnoxious
If you read closely, you'll find that's 18 hours a week.
I too thoroughly enjoyed Founders at Work. Straight after, I read Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham, which I found equally inspiring.
Generally agree with this list as a whole especially considering I live in one of them ;) However, I do not agree with some German entries on this list. Düsseldorf ranked 6th?!?
over time it should return to a 'fair' position, once temporary disequilibrium in the 'crowd' (induced by marketing, hype, whatever) is resolved. It's a shame people vote 'strategically', not to reflect their true sentiments - but whatever. Over time, with a diverse enough crowd, 'wisdom of the crowd' systems are effective and reasonably unbiased.

doubtless IMDB will enjoy the free publicity.
I would like to add, insight from the investors on the reason for investing, what changed in the past 2 years, and if the market conditions have changed, if an opportunity still exists?
Isn't how much people hate you a sign that you're doing something different and right?

I'm certain I read that somewhere.
Can't come up with a "business plan"? Just answer 4 questions
There are a lot of would be entrepreneurs out there with a great idea, but are afflicted with Business Plan Paralysis. Instead of shipping product, they're "working" on their plan, doing more "research", or "thinking about it". Right now, all you need is an internal working plan to get you going. And to get that working plan, all you need to do is answer these four simple questions.
Not really.

Roger Ehrenberg has been writing some great posts on what went wrong with his company (Monitor110) at informationarbitrage.com, and has been getting some great feedback.

They can leave the private stuff to themselves, but it wouldn't be completely unreasonable for a y-combinator-funded company to at least briefly post a "what went wrong" for the benefit of future startups. They'll still have all their knowledge and experience, and sharing that won't take it away from them.
I'm not sure that's it.

Just because many, many people take pg's advice doesn't mean they aren't evaluating it. We only hear about the ones that come to the opposite conclusion (that he's wrong).
New Firefox Alpha Shiretoko & new Safari vulnerability?
If I understand correctly there is a small chance that someone else can use your user account on a website hosted on a co.uk or co.ch domain IF the site you visited earlier has minimal security. If that worries you enough you might want to consider reading the article and then let us know if WE should switch to (a stable version of) Firefox too. Apparently Internet Explorer, Firefox and Konqueror plugged this hole 4 year ago.
I think all the women in that audience would disagree that its a disrespectful analogy.
Embedding Rhino
Doesn't mean it must happen public. You can be certain when someone decides to shut down they've already had that kind of discussion, with people the would like to share these thoughts.
Oh, I know about that. And the media backlash as a result has made it much safer for Americans in that area. And that was 14 years ago.
So we should work harder and be distracted less.

But YC is a cult (heh). We should WORK less, according to the top link on HN.

o_0
If I worked for Exxon and something like that passed, I would probably become the sole proprietor of Exxon[205.5] with an offshore company as my main shareholder, to whom I pay dividends.

Accountants are sneaky, that was my main point, anyways.
Maybe then they could find all the weather balloons I lost.
Well said, Dan. I said it with a bit more contempt over on the source blog.

ragerageragerage
Ask HN: Online legal forms subscription. Worthwhile?
Has anyone had experience with this site/service or anything similar?

http://www.formsmadesimple.co.uk

Costs 85 pounds, we're thinking about forking out as it should save us a lot of legal fees if we're able to draft and get lawyers to review our docs.
A couple hours away from Guadalajara. Look for a city without drug gang problems.
Hasbro Sues Makers of Scrabble-Like Scrabulous
In this day and age, these kinds of things should come with a flash app with sliders to control weights for things like climate, so that you can do your own rankings. Frankfurt? No way.
VMware ESXi Hypervisor Now Free
If you plot its success and the hate it receives on a graph I think you'll see a strong correlation.
BBC programmes data feeds for developers
"Lose a bunch of users" just for having to log back in? Give me a break.
I've seen The Godfather. I've seen The Dark Knight. Now, maybe I'm just missing the point of that Godfather thing, but I'd say The Godfather had more dramatic tension and The Dark Knight had more philosophical depth.

No, stop laughing, I'm serious. Tell me what point The Godfather makes.
Ruby 1.9, massive boost in threading preformance
PushUpTheWeb.com: Browser detection and Upgrading
If we successfully investigate them, they're not U. F.O.s anymore!
Thank you :)

So, what exactly is the norm? What we hear from blog entries and the like is that you're all working from the time you get up to the time you fall asleep clutching your laptops.
Groovy is a great addition to the Java developer's toolset for the same reasons why this guy loves Python.

I tried Jython, Beanshell, and Javascript, but Groovy is making it fun for me to program again.
The HN title is misleading-- is really more specifically about newspaper sites.
I remember showing this to all my friends at school. I opened it up and opened the browser, then i opened it in that browser and opened a browser in that and i did that until IE crashed :D They were all like "Wow, cool"
if their plan was flawed, then sure, they could let others waste time to come to the same conclusion, but that seems mean to me. If they'd rather not say though completely up to them.

I think it is interesting though, as web OS things were hyped up at one point. It'd be useful to know if youos shutdown because the plan was flawed, or for some other reasons.
But were they really users if they're just "sleepers"? Depends how you define them - I would call them account holders.

In the mobile telecom industry, they use a metric of "users who made a phone call in the past 90 days" and similar for each service (SMS, internet, etc). This negates any inflation of subscriber figures from Pay as You Go kind of billing who may use a SIM card once a year.
in pythons case its consistency, not lack of polish. If you try to do "exit" now, it tells you to either call exit() function (thats new), or ctrl-D/EOF to quit. Now it can't be lack of polish as it knows what you are trying to do, its just it is catering for the larger picture which is to educate you on how the interpreter works.
Microsoft building LCD rival technology
DevCentral Daily – July 29th, 2008
I use the "beta" stuff in myYahoo quite a bit and I like it. It provides search suggestions as you start typing (I've come to rely on them--instead of finishing what I was going to type, if Yahoo recognizes it in a slightly different phrasing I go with it), map links, etc.

I use it as my start page with rss feeds, etc., so it's kind of my default.

I still have to go to Google for some things, though, when Yahoo can't find it.
Fannie Mae (FNM) and Circuit City (CC): From Good To Great To Roadkill
Are you referring to Cornell West? My impression was that Cornell West was not bothering to show up for class and grade papers, and that Summers asked him to do the job he'd been hired to do. I guess that could make someone unpopular.
Life is boring without canvas prints
Sometimes our routine life style can become such a great bore! People fight out their boredom through various ways before it can hit them and that is the best way to protect yourself. That is why it is important to have hobbies that will distract us from our routine daily activities. One of the useful hobbies is collecting canvas paintings
Sexy naked cops in costumes
Fun story about dressing up for adult fun
It's specifically about newspaper sites but it applies to almost every site on the web. Its also written by a person who's thought a lot about online communities in general in Derek Powazek
I'm not sure where to start... There was a point I wanted to make and then I spotted this:

"A healthy skepticism about extraterrestrial space travelers leads people to disregard U.F.O. sightings without a moment’s thought. But in the United States, this translates into overdependence on radar data and indifference to all kinds of unidentified aircraft — a weakness that could be exploited by terrorists or anyone seeking to engage in espionage against the United States."

Terrorists from Mars! It could be the title of a really bad B movie... only the NY Times is telling us we should really be afraid. Ok, I know it's a stretch... The article doesn't specifically mention extra-terrestrial terrorists in UFOs. But how the hell do you get from UFO sightings to terrorism? sigh

What's the point of this post anyway? I got myself all worked up and now I'm wondering what the heck this has to do with HN? I guess UFOs are kind of geeky and interesting to hackers, but surely someone could have come up with something better than this.
On significance, I'm not so interested in people remembering me in 200 years as being able to look back before I die and know that I did something really important. (What that important thing is, I don't know yet.)

Like neilk says, fame and impact in many cases don't correlate. And that's okay. The people that made TCP/IP are/were probably satisfied with what they'd accomplished, and beyond that, who cares.
I remember talking to a guy who worked full-time for an ISP and did nothing else but handling dead people accounts. They kept charging these people who NEVER logged on and never complained. They had special mechanisms to ensure these people wouldn't be bothered with mail (since they were often literally dead) so they could keep charging them...
Cults are defined in other ways too:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult#Definition_according_to_se...

"A cult is a group or movement exhibiting a great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea or thing and employing unethically manipulative techniques of persuasion and control (e.g. isolation from former friends and family, debilitation, use of special methods to heighten suggestibility and subservience, powerful group pressures, information management, suspension of individuality or critical judgment, promotion of total dependency on the group and fear of [consequences of] leaving it, etc) designed to advance the goals of the group's leaders to the actual or possible detriment of members, their families, or the community."

For and exhaustive list, see here:
http://rickross.com/sg_alpha.html

This is no laughing matter. People's lives are ruined by cults, and even if taken away from a cult, their effects linger.
Seriously, hasn't the "...is evil" meme run its course, 10x over?
These were my thoughts, too. Using functions instead of decorators would have many more benefits. I guess they could argue that some of the runtime performance moves to instantiation in the decorator approach.

Still, warn the new coders against it, but don't stone the guy. Let people explore. I'm probably one of the few people who didn't want decorators added at all (I think they're ugly and feel less pythonic than decorating after declaration), but I like seeing people experiment.
He called it the "brain-hours", and said you only have a limited number of those in your life

Exactly. That's why it's not a waste of time to watch TV, read forums, and play video games. The number of "brain hours" per day is less than the number of hours your're going to be awake. You have to fill that time with something; Twitter is just as good as anything.

Now if you're feeling creative, productive, and wide-awake, it would be a shame to waste those hours on something not creative. Which is why I am closing this window right now. There are a few libraries I want to write before the end of today :)
I haven't made use of Delicious for a long time now... logging me out isn't going to get me back either!
Strings in the D programming language
I think it's different when that's the overt motive.
I know you were half kidding, but I'm _not_ saying eliminate 90% of the government or put an end to all government programs or anything like that. Cutting spending by 20% would work wonders. And while I admire the awareness Ron Paul has raised about government waste, he's crazy and has yet to accept evolution.
Drizzle - A Lightweight SQL Database for Cloud and Web
Then the competition could just clone your whole team ;-)
Interesting. I saw an article- I think on HN- about the most expensive cities in the world and many of these were on that list as well.
Wellness Industry Become a Distributor Residual Income
Wellness Industry Become a Distributor Residual Income