skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If this is his personal blog, I don't see what's wrong with that.

Paul Graham can promote YC in his essays, so why can't Brin promote something he believes in on his personal blog.
PS3: Web content, weather, news and more
Could you explain the connection? It sounds like you're implying penicillin was discovered by being a malicious jerk.

(And re: the gremlin thing, I was thinking of people doing things that would generally be considered stupid vandalism, but I don't want to split hairs.)
How about a legitimate iPhone App with a secret (hidden from Apple) backdoor which allows running of other apps?
I have copies.
flash, regardless of any development environment, is not ideal to any unix geek.
This was exactly the common wisdom in 01/02. And then the economy turned around, and ad-supported was all the rage again.

So you're right - now. But if you've got enough cash to wait out the downturn, ad-supported businesses could be very profitable. It's always a mistake to try and extrapolate the present out indefinitely...
Google could end this now with a nationwide wimax buildout. Build a skype-like voice protocol on the android stack, open source a reference hardware design, and let programmers planetwide innovate on the platform. Would fell the iphone and every other carrier within a year or two.
Last known position:

23:37, September 15, 2008 Punkmorten (Talk | contribs) deleted "PBWiki" ‎ (R1: Redirect to a deleted, nonexistent, or invalid target)

I can't find the original PBWiki page but it's more likely that it wasn't up to snuff instead of a blatant conflict of interest delete.
"... You don't need a genetic test to know that excercise is incredibly healthy. ..."

But if you charge "X" dollars to screen people for say Alzheimer's, something they may get 20 years before symptoms arise? The current population is say 25M worldwide expected to rise to 81M by 2040 ~ http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/2364899.htm Though there are tests currently being trialled to test for beta amyloids in blood.
On Teleworking
Pandora opens up: Q&A with Tim Westergren
> I suppose exceptions could be made for services like Google, which people would pay $1000/year for if that's what all the providers charged

Nobody would have paid $1000 a year for google. If they had started of trying to charge users then nobody would know about them.

Most classes of online consumer apps are dominated by advertising supported models - search, email, social networking, social news, forums, productivity, etc. The transaction cost/hassle associated with paying is too large for most users to bother with.
That should be 3.141592654, rounded to your number of digits.
Dean Kamen: Partners with Nokia in eco-developer contest
An afternoon? Took me 20 minutes.
Not a web connection or mag subscription among the lot of them, eh?

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/index.php?name=News&file=a...
http://www.forbes.com/2005/02/21/cz_0221oxan_default.html
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/...
Or they simply claimed it somehow: being that Google owns Blogspot it shouldn't be very difficult to do that.
So basically the idea is, ban the only group of people who were actually right about what was happening in the markets.
Or:

1. Allow a factory for Class.

2. Make Method contain the full body contents as a list of statements, and give them a factory as well.

Then it's a matter of reasonable constructor syntax.
100 year flood. Brilliant, quants. Quick investment tip: Never, ever, invest in a prospectus that has the word "Gaussian" in it.
Your high school experience
From what I've read high school seems to be a key period in the development and life of a hacker. I'd like to know any experiences you had during high school (and college?) that made you interested in computers and technology et cetera.
We have been officially licensed by CA for maybe 3-4 weeks now.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/20/business/20gene.html?_r=2&...

A lot changes in a few months ;-)
The really beautiful thing about OCaml, I think, is that it lets you do either when you need to and just encourages you to give the imperative code a clean functional interface.
i was introduced to tech in elementary and middle school. my high school actually didn't have much tech involvement.
How to Develop Virtual Appliances Using Ubuntu
Lisp's biggest problem is the simple fact that most other languages already ship with most nonwindows boxes. _Successful_Lisp_ is a good book (amongst others), but what do you type the code into?

Until today, I hadn't heard of SBCL. I've been fiddling in e-lisp, which is a tragedy of its own sorts. The only mention of SBCL in "google:lisp linux" is an ad. I don't think I'm the only one still afraid of a $5k entrance fee for lisp.
You've got a lot of detailed answers, but I find the following quote conveys the feeling:

"Functional programming is like describing your problem to a
mathematician. Imperative programming is like giving instructions to an idiot." --- arcus, #scheme on Freenode (via http://community.schemewiki.org/?scheme-fortune-cookies)

You know how annoying it can be when you're trying to debug a function and it turns out it was acting weird because of a global variable? Functional programming is sort of like avoiding that sort of thing* , and then discovering that once you guarantee you won't mess with global state, it's suddenly possible to e.g. easily parallelize code, since you already know the processes won't interfere with each other's data. At the very least, it makes code much easier to test and debug, since there aren't "hidden variables".

* Maybe entirely, maybe just as a general rule -- long story.

When you have code that is "referentially transparent", that is, it doesn't have any side effects, there's also really no difference between doing something a thousand times or doing it once and caching the value, except the first wastes time. The language could potentially just cache it for you, or any of several other optimizations. (Or not waste time calculating results that it knows won't be used.)

Also, I'm of the opinion that when most people are talking about OOP, they're thinking OOP as implemented in C++ and/or Java. That's a very specific style of OOP, grafted somewhat uncomfortably onto C's type system. You may find OO makes more sense when you see how it works in Smalltalk, for example.

Alternatively, look at how it works in something like Lua, which is not in itself OO, but can easily have its core extended with any style of OO system by defining the language's hooks (called "metamethods") for handling table lookup and a few other things.
Hmm, pi is closer to 3.1 than 3.2, so why not 3.1?
"... My mother had always been haunted by Parkinson's because her aunt had suffered from it ..."

A cheaper way to hunt for hereditary disease is to check your family tree for cause of death or symptoms. The only problem is if the disease has some sort of stigma attached it may be hidden.
Palm Centros = Apple iMacs
I don't think the question is whether or not you can run a profitable ad-supported business. The question is whether your product truly matters if people wouldn't pay for it.

I believe there are ad-supported products that matter, but I'm tired of being advertised to. I will pay for good products.
It was an overly broad statement, for sure
What a crock of shit. Plus, who cares? Personally I'm getting a little tired of the excess of political stories here that seek to explain why something is in an unscientific, biased, and heavily left-leaning way. Plus its off-topic and irrelevant, in my opinion, to the topic of startups, technology, and new business. Has all the BS from the valley hippies finally started to ruin this place too?
I prefer mencius moldbug's MMORPG explanation:
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/01/straigh...
I worked on my own and teleworked all my life, and when I finally found what the office chatter was, I really found it disturbing. I couldn't miss it a little. But when I'm not at an office I do miss having many clever people around me, only that I don't miss them talking about random stuff, only about interesting technical stuff.
I wonder who will be the first to comment.
There may well be less stand alone applications being developed, but I have a hunch that the number of developers needed in a desktop application startup is substantially higher than the number of developers needed for a web application.

If the scripting languages that are used have a 10:1 LOC advantage over Java/C/C++, then with an equal number of applications being developed, I'd assume that there would be 10x as many Java/C/C++ jobs available as Python/Ruby jobs.

I'm wondering why there aren't more IronPython/IronRuby/F#/Powershell focused startups in the Microsoft world. It would seem like a competitive advantage.
Beaverton boy lauded for solar cell invention
Google failed to win the broadcast spectrum to build out anything. It's not as simple as just deciding to put up some towers.
...and he hasn't even had to sue anybody yet.

With Danny Hillis, Neal Stephenson, and Sanjay Prasad (former chief patent attorney at Oracle, and an ouspoken proponent of patent reform) on board, I doubt that it's your garden-variety patent troll.
They'd be nuts to not just copy it. iPhone's zooming is pretty awesome.
Google executives cheery about Silicon Valley economy
right. they can be cheery because they're Google...
I still don't understand how anyone can believe that Seinfeld only being in the first 2 was not their plan all along. It's not as if MS makes decisions one day, and then the ads are on TV the next.

They plan the ads, shoot them, and buy the slots months in advance. They're not pulling them like recalled toys from Wal-Mart shelves. If they had wanted more of them, they would have filmed them and purchased the ad slots months ago, and we'd be watching them next week no matter what the critical reaction to the first two.

TV studios don't just say "sure we'll refund your commercial payments because people didn't like your previous ads."
SEC follows suit
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178234612954617.html
Twitter Gets a Facelift (that doesn't suck)
"... TraceBack is most useful in monitoring the activities of large masses of people. But of course, that's why the Chinese and the NSA are so interested in this proposal in the first place. ..."

Step 4 on the way to a Fascist state. Set up a comprehensive internal surveillance system ~ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/apr/24/usa.comment
Maybe it just wasn't notable? I've never even heard of PBWiki.
how about an increased risk for certain types of cancer that I otherwise wouldn't screen on a normal basis?
fun but too simple.
Google DOES Acquire Valve "Do Not Suck" Clause Invoked
Valve doesn't want to become Jaiku, Jotspot, Grand Central, or Dodgeball ... (funny)
SEC Plans to Temporarily Ban Short-Selling
for what it's worth here's a wiki page comparing various wiki software and most of the other companies have pages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software

the magic of wikipedia is of course that david weekly can get an intern to put back the page.
The original's been deleted. (Google cached a copy of the page at http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:iwQCy4E4y_8J:en.wikiped... )

The decision looks to be on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...

Anyway, what strikes me as slightly odd is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_farms (try ranking by alexa), I'm sure it's only a matter of time until most of those linked articles that exist are deleted for non-notability as well, right?
Google don't live in a vacuum - without new content, new advertisers, new businesses, new users, new ideas, they'll stagnate.

If Google is happy, then I think that's a good indicator for everyone upstream and downstream.
Compare and contrast this to Steve Jobs + Apple's handling of Steve's cancer scare a few years ago. Fascinating.
that app will be banned too then. Maybe if someone can hack Safari...
My brother has teleworked for years.

Every day he gets up, put on pants and a shirt and goes to work. At the end of the day, he "goes home" - changes in his casual clothes and relaxes.

Seems weird - but it's essential for him (and his family) to delineate between work and home.
I was going to point out that link, but I discovered one specific to wiki farms that isn't the same, but still has some very obscure wiki farms with articles on wikipedia.

On that particular comparison page of all the software, it does stick out like a sore thumb though..
It was Emacs: http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/UnParenMode
While people generally talk about using macros for code generation, macros are essentially for doing things at compile time. (Or read time, in the case of read macros, e.g. 'x -> (quote x).) Due to simplicity of Lisp syntax, the easiest way to extend the language is usually by generating code, though, so that's what they're associated with.

You can do things with the C preprocessor at compile time, it's just completely unaware of C, which really cripples it. The Lisp preprocessor (its macro system) is also running Lisp, and can easily process itself.
You can do it. Go ahead.
Yeah... or just send via an established SMTP server?
I hope he changes the color scheme.
"Make something people need enough to pay for."

Even better.
Yes, I forgot to list this, but it's significant.

* each team gets a one-on-one meeting with the AlphaLab team every week, and when something urgent comes up they can usually make time for another meeting or discuss it on the spot.

* between the AlphaLab program advisors and Innovation Works (the parent company) there are a bunch of experienced business people and entrepreneurs to get advice from and network with.

Together these people have helped us with all sorts of stuff, from developing business documents like executive summaries and seeking further investment to setting up focus groups to test and discuss our product.

I don't have experience with YC's program first hand, but anecdotally AlphaLab blows YC away in terms of amount hands on business help you get. Makes sense when the program only includes six start ups and is backed by a mature investment firm. For teams like ours with a lot of technical experience but very little business experience this seems pretty important.
I pity the marketers working the Microsoft account. There’s no way to win. If they go vague, they get people_ready. If they go edgy, they get panic and push back. Talk about a set of golden handcuffs.

Pity indeed. They're in a tough spot because MS has too many irons in their brand fire. The same company that sells Halo and Zunes sells BizTalk server.

They could probably fix this by breaking the corporate branding into several virtual companies; they could be sliced over 9000 different ways but at least getting the consumer entertainment and devices out into an "edgy" brand would alleviate the pain substantially.

I suspect that this is kind of what they're trying to do with the prefix naming they've done so much of over the last 3-5 years. I think "Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail" is an attempt to put a marque around them without making them look like they are separate companies for antitrust purposes.
If we're headed for a depression: what business types flourished during the Great Depression?

Is it really true that facilitating laughter and connection isn't worthy?
Well, I liked it, anyhow. Then again, I'm one of those TED-liking liberals...
Entertainment flourished. People needed a way to forget their troubles, even if it's temporary.
In the US, the real cost is the fear of litigation.
Did you make it through the entire video?
Analyzing Your GMail History
But David Weekly is honorable and tries to minimize self-interested editing and surreptitious sock-puppeting. ;)
Common Lisp and (especially!) Scheme are really elegant languages, sure, but there's really something to be said for being able to install the one clear Python implementation* and getting a huge standard library with lots of documentation and a large community, upfront, versus trying to figure out whether you should set up SBCL or CLISP or PLT or Chicken or ..., then finding there are several libraries for what you're trying to do, but you're not sure they're compatible with the compiler/interpreter you're using, etc. And then, what editor do you use? ("What's this SLIME thing about?") And this, that, and the other thing. That is a lot to figure out, all at once and upfront, before you can try it out. Making it really hard for curious people to play around with Lisp means that few people will see its potential.

All of the above could just as well apply to Ruby or even Haskell. I think Python, in particular, has been really carefully designed to give a good first impression, though. I don't know if that was deliberate or not, but it's brilliant. (I know some people balk at the indentation-based syntax, but I bet many people coming from e.g. a Perl or C++ background think, "Whoa, this looks really clean." "Executable pseudocode.") Lisp doesn't really seem to focus on making a good first impression. (On the other hand, OCaml just says, "Hello!" and immediately backhands you. It makes up for it once you understand the type system, but I'm not at all surprised the OCaml community is small.)

Stuff like Lisp in a Box helps a lot, but it wouldn't hurt to have a link to it in 300-pixel-tall burning letters at the top of lisp.org, you know? You can't even go directly to a download page for any implementation from lisp.org. (When you click the download link at the top of Haskell.org, it takes you right to GHC's download page.)

I've also frequently heard the Lisp community can be rude or off-putting, but I haven't experienced this personally. I could see them being a bit gruff and frustrated about answering a lot of the same questions over and over again, though, and seeing languages like Python and Ruby getting so much more attention than Lisp can be heartbreaking.

So, basically: Marketing.

* I know about Stackless, etc., but which does python.org point you to? QED.
I was lucky enough to have gone to a high school with a major system. As luck would have it, I opted for the Computer Science Major. I had been around tech my whole life but this was my first introduction to computer science. It was a enriching experience overall. I once went through a week of no sleep to finish a term project. Turns out I was the only one to actually FINISH the assignment. I later refactored the thing months later and saved many a line of code. It's pretty crazy how much you learn and then even crazier when you go back, look at your earlier work, and think...I wrote THAT?

Good times.
Actually, barring errant issues such as that, our biggest pain point by far is the back-end. There are a few bugs still around, yes, but they are within acceptable norms for something "just launched". The new back-end is a big part of what will fix issues like the one you've pointed out (not to mention the current cause of them). The more stable it is the more it can be relied on to automate fixes such as this and other bugs that crop up; click around long enough and you'll find a few other easter eggs! Sorry to ruin your fun, but I am aware of all of them.

There's a significant difference between optimization and getting something where it should have been in the first place. All of our user facing issues such as links that go no where, stale tickets, etc. are all in one way or another caused by the back-end. All the TS front-end does, really, is display data. It takes almost no input, other than what you search for. There's no user data. A well-trained seal could make it bug-free.

TL;DR: No.
It's fair that you might not have heard of PBwiki, but a Wikipedia admin should have at least given a cursory glance at what's out there, including in the last 30 days alone mentions in Newsweek, Forbes, the New York Times, LinuxInsider, WebWorkerDaily, Mashable, and Wired News.

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=pbwiki...
Do you really think SuperPoke or Top Friends has the potential to make a Billion, I really don't think so. Throwing a sheep or sending a drink is of no value, it might excite someone in short-term but it really has no value in long-term business sense.
I'm not ACTUALLY sending production mail via a telnet session, I just wanted to see why nothing's sending. It's all just through sendmail.
If you could have any blogspot name that you wanted... what would you choose?

While Google is a play on googol, too is a play on the much smaller number - two.

I'm not sure I would choose too - soooo many other choices. It's memorable and short which is about all you can ask from a name. I wonder if he is going to acquire the related domains (too.??? etc). I guess now-a-days that isn't required. But if you are a multi-billionare and starting your own blog... why not?
wtf? Do they even have the power to do this? What are they going to do, exactly? Stop all margin trades?

Also banned in the UK. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122177732212354285.html
How is the quality of Seznam's results?

Czech people are good at english in geenral right? A least the younger internet-using people?
Google’s $199 phone to compete with the iPhone
Okay, this article has basically no content whatsoever. It's 37signals, yeah. It's DHH, yeah. But should that really be enough to get any post to the HN frontpage?
It's bad scholarship. A political ideal is an extremely complex object. All he's done is cherry-picked five filters through which to view it. He's taken a very big n-dimensional object and inspected a handful of the shadows it casts.

Does he think he's pinned it down with these five criteria? This is why people make fun of the humanities. Sloppy, runny thinking. You could select just about any value and the two political ideologies would fall somewhere on either side of it. Those on which they aren't opposed aren't worthy of mention, and so aren't. You could play the same game all day. In fact, you might even argue that it is a defining property of a two-party system.
From http://www.alphalab.org/about.aspx:

Funding

Innovation Works will invest $25,000 in each AlphaLab company in
return for 3% of the common stock of the company. This funding
should support company operations during the AlphaLab program. As
Innovation Works utilizes funds from the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania, each company receiving funding is expected to
maintain a significant presence in Pennsylvania after the
program.

and from http://www.alphalab.org/faqs.aspx:

14) Do we have to stay in Pittsburgh after the program ends?

Companies are expected to remain in Pittsburgh after the end of the
AlphaLab program. Our goal is to help you build a successful
technology company and to add to the critical mass of flourishing tech
companies in the Pittsburgh region. We believe that Pittsburgh is a
great place to build a company and after your experience at AlphaLab
we are confident that you will agree.

As I understand it, the state money imposes the condition that companies stay in PA. It's been a long time since I looked at our contract/agreement, but I think the technical details for this round were (roughly) that companies must maintain a "significant presence" in PA for at least 5 years after receiving the money. If a company fails to maintain this "significant presence" they must return the $25,000 invested, but IW retains their 3% equity in the company. So, I'd say they're pretty serious, but if it were essential for your company to cut ties with PA at some point it wouldn't be the end of the world.

I don't get around that much myself, but can add: The AlphaLab office space is on the South Side, which is the big "night life" area, with a bunch of bars, clubs, restaurants, and for some reason a tattoo parlor on every other block (maybe drunk people are more likely to spontaneously get tattoos?). Overall Pittsburgh kind of reminds of Portland, OR, since it's green, cheap, and has a big river (two actually) running through the downtown. It's also supposed to rain a lot like Portland, but that hasn't started yet ...
The Heat Is On for Details of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement