skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Muslims are very diverse, and of course there has been a strong arabic influence on the cultures of places that follow the muslim customs. Your statement was this:

"This is probably why he was able to accumulate a deep knowledge in so many fields. Muslims have inherited this from Arabs."

There are more than a billion muslims in the world. They span from Indonesia to East Africa to the Western Coast of Africa through to the the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Accumulating deep knowledge in a field is not something that was inherited from the Arabs. It is something that comes from the local culture and the local traditions. Some muslim societies value deep knowledge, some do not. Islamic societies have a common bond, but they are still VERY different.

You are over-generalising, and I am pointing out that the role of religon on the many different cultures has not been estabished.
Is there any reason for desktop apps anymore?
Environmentalists care. The more bloated a software is, the more power it uses, the less greener it becomes.
India’s Novel Use of Brain Scans in Courts Is Debated
i tried watching the other videos, there is too much blah blah and luck of focus...
Just a warning because I always fall into this trap:

When you hold a large hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Well of course you are -- right now. But what happens when the finance shock ripples through the rest of the economy, and tech investments dry up? Or when tech purchases stop? Or when job losses in banking, real estate, construction and sales (coupled with high energy costs) lead to overall drops in consumption, which in turn leads to drops in advertising budgets?

It's still way too early to be whistling past the graveyard.
RESTful Grails: Build a resource-oriented architecture
DRAM might be cheap, but disk bandwidth is not. A least until flash comes about with insane 250mb/s read speeds we need to worry about bloat.
Having just learned Cocoa, I can tell you that you are not stupid, the design of Cocoa is stupid.

Design patterns are stupid, hence baking them into a language is stupid. And Interface Builder is very stupid.

Fortunately Objective-C isn't as stupid as C++, so once you've covered most of what makes Apple's design stupid, you can trowel over the gaps in logic with cement and forget about them.

Most platform and language designs are stupid. Sometimes I think it's an emergent case of a desire to ensure job security. Other times I just think the designers were stupid.

Programmers, who supposedly like to question authority, have a really hard time questioning the sanctity of the platforms they work on. I think many would be surprised to learn that their platforms have serious design flaws. Of course you should initialize Function A first using unrelated Function B. How else would you do it?

Part of the reason designers make bad designs is because they have to respect a history of bad designs. People are used to XML. Consequently, it's used in plists.

The antidote for worrying about whether you are stupid is to identify and express why the design of something you're working with is stupid. The next step is to realize that, whatever it is, it's there, and you have to deal with it. That's work, and that's programming as it is today.
Adobe, and specifically Flash, truly sucks.
It's cromulent but I think it needs to be embiggened.
"With small startups CEOs will communicate things much better and you can usually see things coming."

Not necessarily. More than one of my friends lost their jobs on less than 24 hours' notice during the first dot com bust.
I'm reminded of this Australian ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnN7c5wZKBM
There's no shame in looking good
Please email me, address in profile.
Hacked a prediction market lately?
Those numbers tell you nothing about the actual usefulness of the answer since that's entirely subjective. They only tell you a little about the community there, which is only useful if that matters to you (i.e if you're there to play the game).

However from the point of view of someone who admittedly wastes too much time on distractions like YC, I'm glad their design sucks since if they copied YC outright they would be 4x as likely to suck me in. In the same screen space YC manages to show me 20 articles whereas Stack Overflow only manages to fit in 5.
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How does Seth Godin keep making the front page? I guess this validates him as a marketer. He's not at all impressive (in my eyes) but I suppose he markets what little he has amazingly well. See http://xkcd.com/125/.
Gives you an itch to design a system that's not stupid, huh?

My favorite, least stupid GUI system is Adobe Flex. I only spent couple of days but felt very smart using it because I could get things done quickly.
Why not link directly to the video instead of some idiotic Reddit comment? Besides, the comment has already been deleted so this post is useless.
Someone in the comments mentioned silverlight having open specs & MS paying for a linux implementation. As always, there's a catch.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverlight#Mono_Moonlight_impl...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlight_%28runtime%29#Microso...
Problem is, it takes a lot longer to find work as a post-doc than as a programmer. The money may run out on predictable, yearly intervals, but what do you do once it's gone? Get a faculty position? (Because we all know that's easy.)
You might be a webcock if...
See search circa 1997
There's a dirty little secret that's extremely unfashionable to say but is completely and utterly true: Vista isn't that bad.

The problem with Vista is that it was bloated, didn't add much of value over XP and was initially MS forced it to be rolled out on low-end machines that couldn't handle it. Hardware support was initially flaky too, adding problems for the tech-savvy crowd who also were underwhelmed considering its long development cycle. All these things gave it a bad reputation, especially as the good largely didn't make up for the bad.

Windows 7 will likely be appreciated, even if it's not a radical change from Vista. Access control should have settled down now it's been introduced to developers and MS have got its act together to make it less annoying. Since there's no driver changes, it's no longer an issue. It'll likely not be significantly slower than Vista. Everyone loves eye-candy, and hopefully Microsoft have added another layer of sheen to Vista's above-par sleekness and removed the inconsistencies left from XP, integrated everything together better, added some niceties and improved the UI a bit. I don't think a huge departure is needed, just a lot of tidying up.

Oh, and having an upgrade path doesn't really matter to most people - people tend to buy new PCs that'll come with it and most of those running XP won't be able to handle Windows 7 anyhow.
You are correct and I totally agree, I ll be more careful in the future.
It wasn't that bad. I liked it because it was genuine. It's like being at uni and seeing all the kids taking corporate finance with $ signs in their eyes, impervious to their surroundings, as though nothing else mattered anymore, they'd found their raison d'être and were busy submitting those graduate applications to every corporate finance firm possible. Such individuals are the ones you probably were thinking about in your post.
I began writing this and its easier in pseduocode

if you know how they are executing poorly
if you know how to execute better
you could kick ass
else how are you not going to end up doing the same?
else are you just being cynical?
Frequently asked questions in Mathematics
Yubikey: Your Key To Securing the Web
Ask YC: Open source platform for a social network with lots of UGC(structured)
I want to put up a quick prototype of a community based site with lots of structured user generated content. Support for multi-media content is preferred. Please suggest.

I need an open source solution rather than a hosted platform.

I am considering Insoshi - http://portal.insoshi.com/.
Drupal with specific templates might work too.

Anything more robust and cleanly designed ?

PS: I would essentially build on top of the platform. I expect to have lot of changes in layout and interactions. As long as I cut down the development effort on the common things - sign up, profile page, connections, feeds etc i am good.
Yeah - people who suck at communicating suck.
I'm sure most of the readers would prefer that the blog be on WordPress.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/09/video-gm-chevy-volt-...
This is a minor stretch of ethics considering what the book publishers do. I think most students will agree.
That's exactly my point, though -- there's a standard module for POSIX integration, but it's not part of the language syntax itself. It's a subtle thing if you don't do systems code often, but it becomes apparent after working with Perl for a while how much of it really is a domain-specific language for UNIX systems operations.

Haskell, as a general-purpose functional language, is always going to require just a few more keystrokes/lines of code to accomplish the equivalent system operations.
I don't really see how you stand out from the rest. That said, a t-shirt company in today's environment doesn't seem all that groundbreaking. What Threadless did was something groundbreaking other than that I have just seen your run of the mill t-shirts.
Busted prints only on American Apparel, and Snorg prints some on American Apparel, so how is the quality different?

Your question is somewhat rhetorical, since entrepreneurs usually are the ones who take on industries that are sloppy, poorly run and delivering inferior products. So yes, its been done before. You just have to figure out where all the unsatisfied customers are, or where the cost savings are, or how to run things better.
For me personally I have a couple side business so I'd be OK.

But even if our startup whittled and died tomorrow; I've acquired more skills in 3 months working at ticketbumblerstumbler than I did in two years working at my old job.

Our burn rate is less than 3k a month; we're not whistling past anything.
This has changed over time. Communication was not as important as reasoning or problem solving when programming was difficult and computing time expensive. I can remember when programmers were expected to spend considerable time preparing to make good use of their programming session. One of my worst programming experiences was the time I was forced to work with a friendly, sociable but otherwise poor programmer on a task where we collectively had only 2 hours a week to use the hardware.

Communication is more important now that machines and people are relatively plentiful and the most difficult issue programmers face is knowing exactly what problem to solve.
What, like Google did?

http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/09/googles_first_s...
These companies are heavily advertised, too. (At least I know their names, and besides Threadless, I don't know many clothing companies.)

I think it might be difficult to beat them without coming up with a way to get your brand out there better than they do.

Another key thought: I worry that a lot of the t-shirt market isn't really about quality, but about the type of cleverness appreciated by the demographic that likes T-shirts. The risk is that it's a little like selling "high quality bumper stickers"-- people might not be looking for quality there.
It's because he writes short articles that usually make sense on the surface and so people read him because they think it will make them rich.
Reading this essay through completely has done more for my understanding of the current crisis than other single thing I've read, I'm pretty sure.

You have to be willing to deal with terrible grammar, but aside from that this essay makes the necessary points about as succinctly as you could, I think. It still takes a while to get through, but very worthwhile.
It's got no problem with my OpenID, which is delegated <http://necronomicorp.com/bct>.
How to Captivate an Audience
I think he's got half of an idea; people who focus entirely on polish are going to be more resistant to change. Bob Dylan certainly isn't polished. But you can be unpolished and still be a professional. It just means knowing WHEN you're unpolished and trying again.
I'm pretty sure the timing is planned rather than coincidental. He mentions the "busts" of both Bear and Lehman in the notes on figure 2.

Or maybe I'm misunderstanding you and you mean the timing of his release of 'black swan'.

If so, I still have to say that from what I can tell, Taleb has been espousing these same ideas for several years, so it's still not just coincidence that his ideas are getting a wider audience at the same time that the meltdown he warned about is taking place.
Um, virtual assistants? PG was talking about lots of HTML parsing, I think.
I still don't see why "type systems don't solve" the problem of keeping data domains separate. If user input is of a different type than SQL query components, you simply can't allow GET or POST arguments to hit the database un-sanitized. Yes, you can perform the check by hand (i.e., fix the "design problem"), but as we've all seen, programmers don't do that consistently, which leaves us patching the same class of vulnerability time and time again.

Type systems also don't have to be the algebraic types of Haskell; SELinux DTE and FlowCaml/Jif information flow analysis both fit loosely under the umbrella of "type checking," and yet allow for very fine-grained and interesting security properties of complex, real-world systems to be asserted and enforced.
McCain Adviser: McCain "Helped Create" The Blackberry
The real question you should be asking yourself is this: how hard will it be for the competition to change direction or spin-off a new line to solve the same problems we have identified but which can leverage their existing market presence?

If it is easy for your competition to copy any successful niche you identify then you are probably in trouble. This is not to say that the venture is doomed, because there are lots of good examples out there of entrepreneurs who have followed this route (e.g identify problem in market, introduce solution, profit) but unless you can build your brand identity quickly or tie your competition's brands to the problems you are solving then you may have trouble.

Seriously, how hard would it be for either of the big players to offer a new line from a different shirt supplier? Given their existing market presence they might even be able to convince people to pay a larger markup on the upsale to the quality goods than you can get by only offering the good stuff.
Ajaxian » Simon Willison, @Media Ajax
Or budget web-hosting today.
I think LLC is much better than Sole Proprietorship, its really not that much more work and you get the advantage of having more legitimacy
"Bloat" typically means profligate memory consumption and unnecessary features, not rampant CPU usage: using a lot of virtual memory wouldn't significantly effect power consumption (unless you end up spinning up the hard disk to swap stuff out, but even then it should be marginal).
How is Busted Tees low-quality? It churns out constantly-amusing shirts that manage to hit every trend that youth cares about. And they do a pretty good job at it, too.

They print on American Apparel, so you're basically the exact same there.

And you have competition from sites like Threadless, Veer, TurnNocturnal (my personal favorite), so I would find it a bit insulting that you think your designs are better than those of the other companies. One of your shirts rips off a 4chan meme: hardly original. Some of yours look nice, but if I saw them in Busted I wouldn't think they were particularly better than the ones already in the store.

In short: if you've got a truly new product, you've got a chance. But - all due respect - it doesn't look like you do.
Physical devices is one reason. Doing firmware updates is impossible with a web app. It might seem like a small thing, but look at how well Apple is using iTunes and QuickTime to create a beechhead in Windows. (QT needs graphic card and audio access, iTunes needs USB access)
Pinax http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J91Ownq-7g
This post is targeted at people starting a one-man shop, not entrepreneurs in the sense of the word as used on hn.

If you've got partners and plan to grow and/or are planning on hiring several employees in the next few months, you should do the couple of hours of homework and lawyering it takes to file the right papers at the beginning.
Wordpress? It's really extensible. And you'd get a lot of help from the open source community for any plugins that you might write.
What I found more interesting was this section in the story of the Remote Agent bug ( http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/publications/pdf/2000-0176.pdf )

One of the errors found with SPIN, a missing critical section around a conditional wait statement, was in fact reintroduced in a different
subsystem that was not veriﬁed in this ﬁrst preﬂight effort. This error caused a real deadlock in the RA during ﬂight in space.

So the bug fixed with the repl was actually one that was uncovered by the SPIN verifier ( http://spinroot.com/spin/whatispin.html ) months prior to the launch, but wasn't fixed because they didn't verify the code they actually decided to use.
http://aplaplaclizame.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/inigo.jpg
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100% agreed. This is moral panic, pure and simple.

What's disturbing is that a University would remove a tenured professor based on sexual preference / fetish.
I couldn't get ten hours of sleep if I tried, even after a day of physical labor. Six is a good haul on the average night for me.
Your post may be entirely true, but it's conspicuously missing a reason to spend $150 for something that "isn't that bad". Particularly if I'm a business, and the true cost of switching (measured in IT time) is way, way larger than $150.

"Windows 7 will likely not be significantly slower than Vista?" Wow, what a great selling point. "Everyone loves eye candy and UI improvements?" Perhaps -- but those who do have bought Macs already. "Now with better access control support?" Gosh, that's what I really hate about XP -- it doesn't have enough DRM to slow down my machine and lock me out of my own data!

The best selling point for Vista would probably be security. But Microsoft seems oddly reluctant to play the "switch to Windows 7 because our earlier products are so riddled with flaws that they put your life at risk" card. ;)

(I should point out that I'm joking -- I'm no security expert, and in fact I'm not sure that XP is really that much less secure than Vista. And that, itself, is part of Vista's marketing problem, isn't it?)
Indeed. This article is an abuse of language writ large. In addition to abusing "competent", it's also abusing "incompetent" to dubious effect. Replace "incompetent" with its synonym "unskilled" and watch the argument implode.
Angel Dust Inspired a New Schizophrenia Drug
Thanks, and sorry for the confusion - niryariv at gmail.com
Heh, Fred is under an assumption that all these bankers have the skills necessary to run a startup. He couldn't be further from the truth.
Yeah, as I go through the list it's interesting to see the items where PG is outlining a broad problem (i.e. #7) versus something where he is throwing out hints around a solution that he's thought of. For this one, I kept coming back towards something like applying the Kayak/Sidestep model to airline miles. But I'm not quite sure how that would work, so I decided to go a completely different course. I agree with you, though, there's probably a much better html-parsing-based idea that could come out of this one.
Ask YC: Best artistic/design firms?
Has anyone dealt with a design firm? I want to hire a company to design the HTML/CSS layout for a project. I'm not necessarily interested in 37Signals/Clean/"web 2.0", but something with a little attitude/art.
Ultracapacitor Nanotech Breakthrough Could Boost Storage Capacity and Power Output
According to friends of mine there, once its positions are unwound, the entity formerly known as Lehman's might not even have the money for this month's wages, let alone any redundancy payouts.
Of course, we are nearing the two-year anniversary for Vista and that's about when 10.3 came out...

You've found the problem. It's not that it's necessarily fatal to release a poor interim product. It's that you have to keep the "interim" down below five years, which is how long it took to go from XP to Vista.
"Every situation has a silver lining, and mine was that I got a big insight into what competence is. Competent people have a predictable, reliable process for solving a particular set of problems. They solve a problem the same way, every time. That's what makes them reliable. That's what makes them competent."

Totally, completely, and incontrovertibly false. People who are competent are those that are effective at solving new problems as they arise.

Don't believe me? Ask yourself, what makes a competent programmer?

Your measure of competence is simply wrong. Reputation != competence, and its a terrible heuristic, especially when dealing with contractors.
I don't disagree. I was not trying to accuse you of being a Christian, just arguing using a bit of hyperbole -- which was intended to be entertaining b/c in particular a lot of Christians don't care for Rand's ideas... :)
"I’m horrible at dealing with customer service people, but my wife is ridiculously great at it. I don’t know how she does it, but she’ll get on the phone and within minutes we’ll have crazy discounts on our cable or phone bills, instant returns with no extra fees, etc, etc.. "

I'm pretty good at this too. The trick is to be nice to them. Ask them how their day is going while they're waiting for the computer to update, etc. Basocally read How To Win Friends and Influence People and apply.

All day long they have people yelling at them over stuff that isn't their fault. A few minutes of kindness to them is like a life raft to a drowning kid. They'll often do whatever they can to keep you happy and on the phone, because they know that as soon as you're gone, you'll be replaced by some old lady screaming at them about their broken computer.

Reserve all of your negative emotion for telemarketers.
That would be accurate if your visitors were bots whose job it was to hit a truly random point on the page.
Pretty is good. Ugly is bad. It has always, and will always be this way.

If you don't make beautiful products, its probably because you can't.
I understand that in India they have, essentially, professional waiters-in-line for dealing with the various bureaucracies.
Reading that made my frustration with the "New Facebook Complaint-army" grow even more.

A new GUI that I don't know instinctively like the back of my hand? Definitely sucks.
Quants tend to be reasonably exposed, in terms of programming ability, and smart enough that they can pick up new languages quickly (necessary, as they're often used to crappy languages like C++).

Laid-off IBD/M&A analyst types are screwed, though, because they're pretty useless.