skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Asperger's is a syndrome - that is, a condition defined and diagnosed only by reference to its symptoms. Doubting that there is a single underlying cause is valid, and not even terribly controversial - one of the two psychs who diagnosed me (earlier this year; I'm in my mid-30s) told me that she could buy that as a label it could apply to half a dozen or more underlying causes. But doubting that it's a syndrome is... well, a bit silly. :)
In practice, we don't need to outright repudiate the debt, we can just expand the money supply (i.e. "print more dollars"). This causes inflation but is not as bad as just breaking our promises.
Verboten: Google Loses German Copyright Cases Over Thumbnails
I just experienced this first hand on my own site, and changed http://www.stitcho.com from a pretty, graphic-laden layout to a sparse, mostly text-based layout. (The old site is shown in the video tours, if you're curious.)

It was hard to delete what I had spent much time on. But when I analyzed the logs and saw that users weren't following a clear path, it was the best decision to make.

In the future, I hope to find a professional to make it pretty AND clear.
Chat with Barack Obama/Sarah Palin bot or pretend to be him/her while chatting with bot.
Check out these chat modes in the Chatbot Game:

Barack Obama Bot: http://chatbotgame.com/?cmd=chat_b&mode=obama

Be Barack Obama: http://chatbotgame.com/?cmd=chat_b&mode=obama2

Sarah Palin Bot: http://chatbotgame.com/?cmd=chat_b&mode=spalin

Be Sarah Palin: http://chatbotgame.com/?cmd=chat_b&mode=spalin2

Click "chat" to start chatting with the bot. Click "spy" to spy on
people chatting with the bot.

In the "Barack Obama/Sarah Palin Bot" modes, you can pretend to be
Barack Obama/Sarah Palin by submitting chat rules for the bot to
follow.

In the "Be Barack Obama/Sarah Palin" modes, you can pretend to be
Barack Obama/Sarah Palin while chatting with the bot.

Note also that you can create your own chat modes for other people.

The Chatbot Game is a bit like a social news site. To play the game,
you submit chat rules, which you can think of as being similar to news
submissions. Voting on these chat rules occurs during the chats.
Spying on chats involving your rules corresponds to viewing your news
submissions' comments. Your score corresponds to karma.
Just curious, can you think of another company besides Amazon where 'get big fast' actually worked?

"Get big fast" was actually a rather symbolic phrase for the excesses of bubble spending. It worked for amazon and few others.
It's clever, but I don't understood why somebody would spend so much time on a novelty.
At Google, Paddington’s Birthday Trumps Columbus Day
Who would you nominate in their stead? Is there some other organization that both a) attracts people as smart as the ones at Google and b) attracts as many smart people as Google does?

What I'd love is a list of organizations that have been the Smart People Magnet throughout history: NASA during the space race, the IAS during the Einstein/Von Neumann era, Florence during the Renaissance, etc.
Heck, the government is buying huge stakes in banks at historically low prices right now. Whether they're being "confiscated" or "rescued" is just a matter of your viewpoint.

You can also look at Russia for examples - the Russian government basically confiscated Yukos.
I recently saw a demo by a startup called BrandClik (http://brandclik.com) to facilitate this.

Their selling point is that they help advertisers to better control their brand.

Their software parse an article and wraps keywords in links out to an advertiser, giving both the provider and the advertiser control over keywords, payments, etc.

It was one of the better startup ideas I've seen in a while.
pretty juvenile IMO. great bridge burning though. nailed that part.
いいですね。このこんぴゅたあは日本語のIMEがありませんが今私はTYPD。INでしますよ。

すごいよ

でも私は少し日本語をできません。一年ぐらい大学に日本語を勉強しましたけど五年前でした。
I'm not on firm ground here, but I would think that ebay, Cisco and paypal are all in that category.
I don't really see this as being a boon for web developers, but for those who write or use Firefox extensions. That does include certain websites, but those are only the sites that are already utilizing a Firefox extension, anyways (e.g. del.icio.us, rememberthemilk). I would personally much rather hack up a Firefox extension in Python than to try to do it in Firefox's standard plugin architecture thingamajig (Javascript/CSS/voodoo/???).

2. Because the extension bundles its own Python runtime, it has to be built and packaged separately for every architecture target. Right now, that means no 64-bit platforms, BSD, etc. -- so cross-platform compatibility is probably no better than Flash at the moment.

Just be sure we're clear, this comment describes the pyxpcomext extension itself, right? Surely more versions will be coming soon to any platforms supported by Python. If you are building an extension that utilizes this Python-Mozilla API, this is all transparent to you, and packaging separate builds is a non-issue.
An Optimizing Python-to-C++ Compiler
You don't think Kijiji is a reasonable name? Reddit and Digg are hard to spell right at first, too.

From their list I don't think Thoof or SocialThing are bad names at all. SocialThing in particular is easy to remember and describes what it does.
I do know that. You should read the beginning of my post too.
So black Si absorbs 8-9x better in the IR range... heat to electricity converters, anyone?
I really agree on the straw man comment. If they wanted to disagree with Sequoia's stance on this, that's fine, not everyone is on the same page. The problem is that they didn't approach this sensibly. Sequoia never really made most of the claims Jason takes issue with. The root of it all is just sustain rather than grow for the time being, which is a fair argument given the circumstances.
not much, today anyway... it's like having a Sprint PCS phone in Baltimore 15 years ago. The value prop won't go up until it's in more places and there is more coverage. The device situation is also not great at the moment. The future looks pretty good for that, though.
280 North (YC Winter 08) speaks at FOWA
Vimeo rocks. But how are they going to survive? :(
Title should be "Lessig..."

a bit less confusing that way :)
This is like ActiveX but managed and therefore with only 1% of the original brain deadness of the ActiveX design.

Note: I would still be concerned about security with this. Even though python scripts can only be executed from trusted locations, quite a few web users have no idea what that is.
Microsoft now claims about one in four computers have Silverlight installed.

If this is true, Microsoft is doing better than I expected.

(And I'm a .NET developer, not one of those politically opposed to Silverlight because it isn't free enough for their particular preference of free)
That's the horror of UTF-8.
insane.
With hulu the entire thing is a no-go if you live outside the US.

In other words pretty useless to most of the internet.
Sorry, it was working last night. Anyway, it's fixed now.
I don't believe those figures for a second. I'm usually surprised when I see SL installed on someone's system.
I suspected as much. Otherwise I would have never bothered checking this article out ;)
An excellent post ... a must read for every entrepreneur, especially CEO, who are still trying to figure out the potential impact of the current downturn. In the spirit of sharing experience, the following was my own. Thanks again.

http://furrier.org/2008/10/10/beware-entrepreneurs-and-start...
Same here, but I also attempted to have it make sense with Lessing, so I thought I would help avoid confusion.
The savings of outsourcing sometimes are more related to infrastructure cost and tax than salary.

If only US workers would like to relocate to a cheaper place it would be a killer. Perhaps a Silicon Valley branch on a beach paradise in Mexico or Central America? Some place where half a US salary gives a significantly better life. Just a thought.
Dupe. This article was already submitted 2 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=329763
Funny but also really solid commentary on the past and present. I have been amazed for years at the practices of some investors and founders. This sums things up very nicely.
Ask HN: Suppose I wanted to develop a mobile GUI application...
What would be the best way to tackle it? J2ME? The application I have in mind just needs input boxes and buttons, very simple. It would store pieces of data and synchronized them with a webservice from time to time. It would ideally need to boot up VERY FAST so C/C++ is not off the table either.

What is the most ubiquitous platform for running applications on cellphones and what are the tools? Any pointers?
Reminder: Friday is the deadline for YC applications (Winter 2009)
Just another (last) friendly reminder that you have until Friday the 17th to submit your applications.

Details:
http://ycombinator.com/w2009.html
I'm surprised they didn't lift the quotas for printwhatyoulike, given they advertised it on the App Engine blog. Still, the "preview" status of App Engine is well known. If you don't want to worry about quotas, either wait until they allow payment, get them to significantly up your quota before you go public, or deploy on another system for now.
His involvement in politics is largely limited to the past several years. His main contributions to economics, arguably, have come far before that.

He's the author of the foremost textbook on international trade (Krugman+Obstfield), and developed models of international trade that every economics major knows (or should, at least).
For a set of 27 non-trivial test programs (at about 7,000 lines in total; see the ss-progs-0.0.29.tgz download), measurements show a typical speedup of 2-40 times over Psyco, and 2-220 times over CPython. Because Shed Skin is still in an early stage of development, however, many other programs will not compile out-of-the-box.
This article reminded me of a Wired article I read years ago. After a quick look I found this: The New Diamond Age - http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.html

Some lines in the Smithsonian article are almost word for word right out of the Wired one which seems slightly odd.

Either way, a very interesting topic.
Bringing farming into the information age: wireless underground soil sensors
ubiquitous? web app. you won't write something for blackberry that runs on the iphone.
Although I hold the title for most hilarious Keynote presentation, that was without a doubt the most amazing Powerpoint presentation ever devised by man.

Amazing. Matt, have my babies. We'll work out the logistics.
Passion Party Catalog | Passion Promises
Ask HN: Deploying scripts and tools to production
Hi,

I've got a number of batch processes that run behind the scenes on a website. They are starting to grow in number and complexity, so I want to bring a small amount of process to bear on them.

My source tree has a bunch of cpp files and scripts, organized with development but not deployment in mind. After compiling all the executables, I need to put various scripts and binaries on a cluster of machines. Different machines need different executables and scripts for their batch process. I also have a few of tools that I've written that belong on every machine. At the moment, this deployment process is manual and error prone.

I'm guessing I'm just going to end up with a script that runs at the root of the source tree and builds a smaller tree of everything necessary for any of the machines. Then, I'll just rsync that to the appropriate machines. But I'm curious how other people are managing this type of problem. Any ideas?

Thanks!
Great. And now, just as they are trying to bring it back up, a second wave via the Hacker News effect to see

A bunch of people visiting the site, to see, "Is it still down, because so many people were visiting the site?"

;)
Yeah, but I want to avoid having to force the user open up the browser before using the application, so even providing multiple versions of the same app to target the most mobile devices is an option.
There are a number of different avenues you could take on this:

iPhone - Obj C. and xcode makes for a great development environment. Problem is, xcode makes for the only development environment. You will have to distribute it through the App Store, unless of course it is for jailbroken phones.

Symbian - Common platform to many phones. C++ or Java with fairly good SDKs. No App Store equivalent could be a pro or a con.

Android - Not many handhelds out yet. Java with solid SDK and tools. Central app repository for distribution.

Blackberry - New central app repository. Variety of development environments including VS. Java for the most part. Well documented SDK.

Barring some really bad code, you should not have performance issues with any of these platforms. Depending on the simplicity of your app, it could be worthwhile to deploy on a number of these.
A job is anything someone will pay you to do, and as long as there are companies that will pay employees to help them achieve better results on Google, SEO is and will remain a job.

From the article:
"Anybody today can achieve excellent search engine ranking for his own blog or website in his sparetime (sic)"

True. Anyone can also be a great cook and keep a house clean in their spare time, but that doesn't mean chefs and housekeepers don't have "real jobs."

I'll agree that there are a lot of overpaid SEO "consultants" who do nothing more than add META tags and ALT attributes and get paid $100+/hr to jerk off the rest of the time. However, speaking as an ex-employee of a company who has 3 results on Google's first page for "health insurance," there are legitimate companies out there who would drown if they didn't have SEO experts working full-time doing A/B split tests and careful traffic analysis on a daily basis.
Microsoft: Apple Not Interested in Silverlight, Flash for iPhone
Let's say it's boom times and money is cheap and plentiful and there are a stable of eager acquirers looks for companies to buy. Why not grow fast in that case? It didn't seem like it hurt the guys who started YouTube. And there are more examples where that came from. Then, when the economy slows, cut back. Seems like a good approach to me.

A lot of the innovations we take for granted today are the result of people with big dreams and no clear path to profitability. If we didn't have big dreamers and investors to fund them based on... gasp... a leap of faith, then the web would probably consist of nothing more than simple project management services, enterprise chat services, and single page editors.

"If you had to keep borrowing to stay afloat, were those good times?"

I know the good people at 37s understand what venture investment is, but they keep trying to prove that they don't. If you're taking money from Sequoia, you're not borrowing money, you're exchanging money for ownership.
In march, at the peak of Facebook popularity, I quit.
MySQL virtual columns
The genius of late bloomers - Gladwell
It's not like this is the first time Sequoia has said this to their entrepreneurs. They've been doing it in private and in meetings.

This just represented their first public stance on the issue. In good times, it can (but not always) make sense to spend more money on marketing and headcount for experimentation purposes and because a really talented person is available (even if you don't have an immediate role for them). And while most of their advice applies regardless of economic situation, running a business in a recession is not the same as running a business in a boom.

Edit: This was also discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=327937
I'm sure they meant one in four computers at Microsoft HQ :)
I have two tools that I am extremely happy with and use regularly to deal with these sorts of scenarios:

Capistrano - http://www.capify.org

Puppet - http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet

They may not be completely fitting depending on what you are doing, and they both require some understanding of Ruby. In general, though, these tools have proved invaluable for me.
Also, try right-clicking.
Unfortunately the author does not differentiate between aerobic and anaerobic exercise. While aerobic activities such as running, biking, and swimming are great for burning calories, your metabolism drops back to its pre-exercise state after your heart rate goes returns to normal. Anyone serious about staying in shape should include anaerobic exercise, specifically weightlifting, three times or more per week because it increases your metabolism for 48-72 hours after you conclude your workout.
That might be a more userfriendly way of doing it, but my favourite way of dealing with pages like that is using Platypus with Greasemonkey to edit pages on the fly.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/737
Just waitin' on history to tell. You can return to your ranting now.
Except that the value of all those "expensive" developers in Silicon Valley is precisely that they are not on a beach somewhere, but right "here" where they can be hired immediately. That is worth something to the people doing the hiring, which is why they are willing to pay the added costs of locating a business there. If outsourced development was always a win, areas like the bay area would disintegrate on their own.

This is why no one worries about top-shelf product development jobs being "outsourced" for the most part. If developer talent was fungible in this way, we'd have seen rampant "outsourcing" to St. Louis and Pittsburgh long before it became popular in Bangalore or Beijing. The jobs at risk of being moved offshore are those doing lower-level "IT" jobs. These are the people who were complaining a decade ago about being replaced by contractors -- it's the same principle.
I'm retarded - thank you.
Yeah, why build a garage when we'll all be driving flying cars in 30 years, right?
Well, if you look at it from a capitalist point of view, the real question is "Why would we?".
I think it is evil because it basically amounts to making a bet with other people's money . . . I realize that "what if" scenarios sound unrealistic at times, however . . . seriously, what if - in that particular case with Gates, for example - the product had turned out to have some major showstopping flaws?

Consumers/users ALWAYS get screwed in those type of scenarios. I don't believe in taking risks with other people's money.
I presume you're talking about "evidence based medicine" the right wing medical reform movement, not all medicine based on evidence. Because while many doctors reject that movement, few seem to reject using evidence to pick treatment regimes.
Or you can take out your frustration by modding me down.

Look. Here's another one for you.
Hey the idea is cool! I recalled a similar tool for Chinese. It's actually a Firefox extension, allowing ones without a native IME to input Chinese chars in text fields. However, both typd.in and that plugin share a similar limitation: it's unusable OUTSIDE the browser :|

Plus, what's your target audience? Anyone serious enough to type Japanese should have some native IME installed, right?
Postmodernism and Karl Marx
we can, we just don't want to build one smaller or less opulent than the neighbors have. in fact we have to build bigger!
Very Cool 15 Minute Night Sky Primer
From forecasting baseball games to forecasting elections
not necessarily true. there is a distinction to be made between cheap and affordable. around where I live, there are no affordable houses being built anywhere. every new home is at least $600k, far outside the wage of the average resident. I can remember in the late 1980s you could buy a new home for less than $100k. Good luck doing that now!! I find it incredible that people can afford to buy, and live in, these huge homes. They pay hundreds a month just for electricity. Astounding.
I referred to a combination of innate skill and experience, not one or the other.

I did not say that marketing was a follow the cookbook type endeavor either.

Problem with this point is that, neither one of us in this small debate has any hard data to back up or counter our respective points (does any exist? I personally doubt it) which are highly subjective anyway, mostly based on anecdotal perception.

I stick by my opinion however, and can point to the relative number of programmers versus marketing people in the global workforce as indicative of what I am saying . . . if more people were smart enough to program, as opposed to market, they would . . .

Marketing has its place, but to an admittedly occasionally arrogant geek such as myself (who has come across some incredibly, impossibly dumb marketing types) they are figuratively just the people who stand outside the shop on the sidewalk and try to get people to step inside and look at the wares . . .
"The most sophisticated SEO strategy I've ever heard about is "remember to provide a back link whenever you put a link on you[sic] website". What's this, if not a joke."

The joke being that the author feels qualified to make a blog post on a subject they clearly haven't researched. Even assuming they meant "request a backlink for every link you put on your site" it's nonsense advice with just enough truth to it for it to seem credible that the author actually has received this as advice. It's like a networking consultant advising you to throw handfuls of your business cards into the crowds at conferences.

The SEO industry has more incompetent individuals than some industries who claim expert status but we shouldn't tar everyone with the same brush. There are SEOs out there sufficiently knowledgeable to make a real difference to the profitability of businesses. As dandelany says, as long as that is true companies will continue to, happily, pay them.
37signals have been extremely successful in their niche and I think they have a wonderful product.
However I think their biggest mistake is to try and extrapolate their experience to what seems like all tech businesses and start-ups, with the diversity we see in funding requirements, growth strategies and segments start-ups appeal to chances are slim that the 37signals model is for everyone.
Furthermore considering Sequoia Capitals track record this post is unimaginably arrogant, you need to come up with a better argument than that to take them on in a business model ideology war.
Unless you have quit your full-time job, you have no idea what it is like to be truly committed to your idea. No idea whatsoever. I would say "lack of conviction" is an understatement for cofounders that have not quit. They have one foot on the dock and one foot in the boat. When the boat begins to sink...they just lift their foot off the boat and forget it ever happened.
There was a study done back in the 80s, I think, about the cost of regulation in housing. As I recall, regulation amounted to 35% of the cost of a house. I would guess that the trend continued.