skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Woody Allen isn't what I'm talking about. He's very specifically focused around punch lines. He's clever with them, he doesn't use them like many other people, but at the same time he is still very focused on actual funny reactions.

As you're arguing this you're changing your definition. You began by arguing that humor's objective and capable of measurement. Now you're saying that you can achieve it without ever having a singular funny moment. The problem is, your making that argument is countering your claim that there isn't any subjectivity to humor. You're splitting what humor is into several categories, and that invalidates the original claim. Plus, see the statement that I made before about the definition of humor: it doesn't just mean funny.

This is the problem we get into: while the English language can be said to be objective, it's only objective because words can mean many things at once. It's objective in a very complex way. And because of that, attempting to prove a point about objective humor like you did by citing that study is proving the point by ignoring everything but a very slim definition of a single word. That's not a good point to make, if you're losing out on the broader connotations of what humor is.

And your original point wasn't about humor. It was about interest. The two pertinent definitions: "The state of "wanting to know or learn about something or someone," and "The advantage or benefit of a person or group." You claim that fiction holds objective interest. That statement is false on both definitions. A person's want to know something is subjective. I find Ulysses a fascinating read because I think that Joyce's hypothesis that the human mind is in and of itself a heroic triumph is one that makes for incredible prose. You wouldn't think that. Therefore, you lack that subjective interest. Similarly, if it bestows an advantage to particular people (as the other definition goes), then it's not objective, because it happens differently for different people. So interest is subjective, same with insight and humor.

(As for this humor study: while I really do love the fact that science discovers more and more about the human mind, you can't cite a 30-year-old study and say that humor's been defined. Creating an objective study of humor is only valid if the result is a method of quantifying humor. And you can't quantify it by looking at reactions to already-formed comedy: you'd have to prove that it's possible to produce humor and predict the reaction ahead of time. So even if humor was only "funny" and not any of the other branching definitions, that study would prove a very slim aspect of humor's definition true and nothing else.)
Gliders, cryptography, and nuclear weapons
It's great that you want to get involved -- nonprofits can always use more tech assistance. But note that there are already quite a few orgs serving the tech needs of the nonprofit sector.

TechSoup (where I used to work) helps greatly with the acquisition of commercial products, like Windows and Office, by partnering with the vendors to lower the cost to a fraction of retail.

Aside from your back office and IT stuff, the other two big needs seem to be Web site development (for outreach), and CRM (to manage donors). Drupal, Plone, Joomla and other solutions are popular for the former. CiviCRM is popular in the latter, as are solutions from Kintera and Convio (for large orgs with the money to spend.)

This is not to say that all nonprofit tech needs are being met. But it's definitely a busy space. If you're looking to get involved, it'd be good to find a problem that isn't yet being addressed and attack that.

If you haven't already, you might want to join NTEN (http://www.nten.org). And keep an eye on Aspiration and attend their next NPO Software Developers summit. (The 2008 summit in Oakland was last week.) http://www.aspirationtech.org
(Another) Win for Open Storage...
There are some people working on this. The creator of Alice recently talked at my school. Alice is a syntax-free programming language used to tell stories using 3D models. The idea is to teach children computing concepts early, in a fun way, before throwing syntax at them. Right now Alice is used in many CS 1 classes and some high schools, but it could really be taught much earlier if public school bureaucracies weren't so inflexible. A person's first introduction to computing should come well before they enter college.

Alice's creator hopes that it will encourage more women and minorities to enter CS. His thesis is that telling a story is something that is natural and interesting to these groups, moreso than, say, solving the Towers of Hanoi.

Our intro class at UCSD uses Java and the intro professor hates it - being a leading researcher in CS pedagogy. She does do some interesting things with her class though. The earliest programming projects they do are not things like the fibonacci sequence, rather they do cool media projects such as sampling and modifying sounds, using a green screen to put themselves in images, and other fun projects. The students respond enthusiastically when their creativity is allowed to run wild and as a side-bonus, cheating is near-impossible.

The creator of Alice said he was struck one day when interviewing a female who had taken a CS 1 class and she said "Sure, I can figure out how to sort a list of numbers. But why would I ever want to?" CS pedagogy has a long way to evolve, but it is making improvements.
The startup that I work for, Akaza Research, is hiring: http://akazaresearch.com/about_akaza/careers.html

Mostly Java/J2EE, based in Cambridge MA. We deliver an open-source product to the life sciences, OpenClinica (http://openclinica.org/). Contact me through my profile (Linkedin, blog, etc) if you have questions.
"All humor comes from something being novel or broken relative to a set of existing mental models. When I say something can be objectively funny, what I mean is that something can be objectively novel or broken in relation to an existing mental model, whether or not anyone else realizes it."

So you're saying that something can be objective subject to its relationship with something else. Isn't that subjective?

"I don't see why not."

Well. Going along with your definition before, the one regarding that study, you need to realize that there is no way of quantifying the unexpected. Take Monty Python. They and their fans showed that you can take something unexpected and, by repeating it, make it more expected and therefore less funny, subjectively, over time. So the joke is subjective in terms of who it appeals to.

Now, you couldn't quantify something like the humorous value inherent in the Spanish Inquisition Sketch, and here's why. The primary punch line relies on the knowledge of the fact that "I didn't expect the bloody Spanish Inquisition" is a snippy, commonplace response to somebody's becoming overreacted to something. In order for "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" to be funny, you need to understand a) the perception that the preceding dialogue is indeed snippy, b) the understanding that the lead-up line is a gross exaggeration, and c) the knowledge of what the Spanish Inquisition was, and why they are, in fact, unexpected.

The problem is that all three of these things are subjective. You said it yourself: animals wouldn't find it funny. And the reason for that is that our humor is largely based on notions about our society. They're only funny subjectively within our society. Without the society, there is no humor inherent in many of these things. That also explains why infants laugh so much at funny noises. When you're young, these things are entirely unexpected. The older and more sophisticated you get, the more you come to expect from things and the harder it gets to produce a funny response. And people evolve their responses at different speeds. I don't laugh at very many jokes anymore, because between dedicated study and a set of rude friends, I've heard an incredible variety of jokes and humorous situations. The comedic shows I watch tend to be the ones that are more focused on craftsmanship rather than on the unexpected. When I do find a new type of humor, my response is delightedly juvenile - and usually, my responses to other forms of humor are lessened. This is all entirely subjective. You can't define it. You can monitor it, as that study did, but that's something different entirely.
I second this. I love namecheap, not quite the cheapest registrar anymore, but I have found them much more helpful than GoDaddy or any other registrar I've used.

I just finished moving all my domains to them last week with their newest promotion, like $6 transfers or something.
Reinvent The Wheel
Ok, I was thinking whether to post this here or not for a couple of days, we are not a fancy startup (quite the opposite) and our requirements are far from common, but since it seems there are quite some people looking for jobs, there it goes

We are also hiring on Craigslist and actively looking for developers (aka rockstarts, pirates, ninjas, heroes, barbarians, wizards of oz) with knowledge and experience on perl/mysql/sphinx/javascript-jquery/css

we do what we do, our frontend is as unsexy as it looks (and I really hope this will change in a future) but we have a lot of interesting problems related to massive amounts of data and traffic/spam/scaling.

mail at pablo at craigslist.org
NameCheap.com
They could turn it into even more than delivering software on Windows. I'd pay to have a virtualization layer that transports settings/environments across my computers. For example, I like to set up custom keyboard shortcuts in my text editor, but every time I set up a new computer I have to reconfigure all of those settings. That shouldn't be necessary.

BTW I feel like the TC article didn't communicate the key point very well. They didn't mention virtualization until eight sentences in.
Don LaFontaine, recently deceased.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_LaFontaine
Not entirely sure about vista 64.

However I've taken down vista 32 and win XP.
Walk in the service entrance, then act like you belong there. Will work for most conferences.
Prosper.com, P2P Lending Startup, Shut Down by SEC [pdf]
I tried claiming I was Spartacus, but, man, that did not go well.
[java applet] [java applet] [java applet] [java applet] [java applet]
ENC28J60 Ethernet Controller with SPI Interface
name.com - their new .com names are only 5.99 (with coupon)
I took a class in statistics in college. I used this book to help me select random phone numbers for a poll I was conducting for my class project. (The most popular household cleanser in the greater Siouxland area is Bon Ami, by the way.) One of those phone calls was answered by the woman who is now my wife. We've been happily married for ten years! Thank you, RAND.
Domains are pretty cheap anyway, doesn't matter which one you use.

The cost of the it is probably a few orders of magnitude less than the time you need to spend to come up with a good domain name. Thus, it's really not worth it to consider domain price as a decision factor.

Now, as far as functionality goes, namecheap.com is pretty good.
Change.gov uses IntenseDebate
Vice did a story last year on Guiyu - a tech dumping ground in China: http://www.viceland.com/int/v14n9/htdocs/ctrl.php
Just started reading it.

So far great reading.

Thank you very much
Been using http://domainsite.com for about 5 years now. Low prices, not nearly as much BS as GoDaddy. Sorely lacking in the user interface department (again, not as bad as GoDaddy), but aside from that I've never had problems with them.
Google 阅读器
This is really interesting. Is there a way to choose why type of users review the site? Say my website is aimed at 15-30 year olds, then is there a way to do that?
I use Prosite.de for 3 domains, they host the DNS for me only. If you are german you could too.

https://www.prosite.de/member.php?refid=5000140259&s=ma (Affiliate link)

http://www.prosite.de/ (Non affiliate link)
PowerSmart Power-Assisted Electric Bike 
Our company has formed alliance with manufacturer of light electric vehicle (LEV) such as electric scooters, electric bikes, electric wheelchairs, mountain bikes, and LEV parts like batteries, chargers and more.
C++ and Java are fine to be taught in a vocational context, but not as a CS major's main intro languages.

More to the point, C++ and Java were "invented" to be workhorse "vocational" languages. Java introduced C++ syntax and purposely bastardized Java from being a pure OO language with the requirement to appeal to engineers with C++ backgrounds. This is the main reason they are less fun and so many don't like them. This doesn't make them bad languages. But it is most certainly a turn-off for many learning CS in college.

Best languages to learn with your CS undergrad: C, Pascal, Smalltalk, Scheme, Lisp, Haskell, Prolog, Fortran, Forth. Thats a good starter list. You can add more to this list, but don't bother adding Java or C++ until you need to get a job in the field using it.
Fuzebox - Open Source Game Console
Though it's fun to sneak into places (I had my share), it's better in the long run to use participatory strategies (e.g. what the author listed: volunteer, blog, speak, party)

Or better, organize and start your own conference. We are entrepreneurs after all.
Swaroop's byte of python book is well liked by beginners.
What does this gain you beyond what you can already do in a debugger? Writing Mac apps in Objective-C I got really used to just setting a breakpoint in the code in question and in gdb calling methods and even replacing variables with the output of method calls, which covers everything he seems to be doing in the sample on his page...
Their support staff are reasonably knowledgeable & responsive (response time is hours, not days), which is more than I could say for other registrars I've used.
if you're still not totally opposed to using godaddy, someone just sent me this great deal... $1.19 per domain:
http://searchalldeals.com/deals/view/169384/0/1-Year+Domain+...
The really interesting bit of the interview was the fact that Woz is a user of "Cycorder", the video camera app installed via jailbreaking the iphone. Also he talks about the early years of Apple.
I know you are not attacking me, but I wish you were attacking my argument :) or author's arguments, for that matter :)
Not yet. You're not the first to ask for this feature. The demographics of the reviewers are slightly more women then men, mostly 20-30 year olds, and over half have college degrees.
'Trampolining' for recursion
The idea that we're going to wake up one day and something is going to happen that's going to make us better or more important than everyone else is pretty much the dictionary definition of masturbatory.

Well, maybe not the dictionary definition.
Sharing the Browser: Software lets workers collaborate online by clicking together.
Venture Capital Is Pattern Matching - What Pattern Fits You?
VC simply look for familiar patterns when the meet a new entrepreneur. As such, it is important to know what "pattern" they will place you in.
I don't know, google seems easy to get out of. Not that you'd ever want to leave, of course. Mail/calendar/docs/rss can all be exported. Any artificial restrictions I'm missing? App engine yeah, but it's barely up yet.
It doesn't prove you're a good programmer. But there is a correlation: if you take 100 programmers and give them a (non-programming) problem that 50 can solve, the ones who can solve it will on average be better than ther ones who can't.
Kiva, Zopa next? What exactly do the other two differently so they stay on the legal side (or maybe they're all illegal)? Anyone know?
The cloud does not auto-validate your work
I like some of these stories, and I think you're being a little unfair. The pattern of the child who turns out to be magic, or the loner who becomes a hero: these are archetypes that touch something deep in human beings. Sure there can be an egotistical - I'm using a less vivid word than yours :) - element to how we identify with heroes. But I think on a deeper level, it is a universal experience and not an egotistical one.

Take for example The Matrix - I really liked that movie when it came out, and part of what I enjoyed was the story of Neo turning out to be The One, and I certainly identified with that character. But so did everybody else who enjoyed the movie. If it were pure egotism, the enjoyment wouldn't be shared. Instead, you'd get arguments like "I'm Neo!" -- "No you're not, I am!" That doesn't happen with the best of these stories.
Looking back & thinking forward
The problem with this type of ruling is that it prevents new and innovative financial services from springing up which (if allowed to exist) might supercede the present financial system. It's not as if the present system is perfect.

Having said that, there are sensible reasons for regulating companies in the financial industry, for example preventing unsophisticated customers from losing lots of money.
And if you really want to do cool things with make: http://www.lulu.com/content/2584447
Kiva are legal because they don't pay interest.
"I must admit I'm out of my depth when it comes to the brass tacks of starting foundations, but it seems to me that Ruby is ripe for one"

Have you looked at Ruby Central? http://rubycentral.org/

(There's also a similar org in Japan; I cannot recall the name).

I believe RubyCentral helped coordinate the fund raising for Greg Brown to work full-time (albeit for only a few months) on Prawn.
Quite a brave step walking out into the abyss that no other has gone before. Charles has a great head on his shoulders--even if he is an a-hole--and I can't wait to see where he takes his extremely unique and well executed product.
With our current economic institutions failing, we can't afford to have innovative and successful financial institutions. That would just make everyone look bad.
It's not realistic in my opinion for interviewers to throw complex problems at people and expect to draw useful conclusions. For one thing, truly challenging problems are generally solved in teams. And there are plenty of differences between pure math and how computers do it (think of an entire course on numerical analysis).

Interviewers should find out how well candidates might work in teams, how familiar they are with debugging on a computer, and how likely it is their "cleverness" won't result in a steaming pile of unmaintainable code. There are lots of reasons why someone may make it or not make it through a puzzle, and either way they may be an excellent candidate.

What should occur is a reasonable bridge between abstract problem-solving and programming, to see if the candidate's aptitudes are strong where it counts. For example, numerical analysis is great: you could ask someone how they would make a machine perform a certain calculation expressed in "pure" math. (Does everyone know how to factor equations to minimize expensive instructions? Do all candidates realize the inherent quirks in things like the representation of floating-point numbers? This is the kind of stuff that comes up when math meets computers.)
"Guitar Hero" co-founders turned a bright idea into $100 million
How to increase your desktop space
Quảng Nam: Phát triển du lịch sinh thái nghỉ dưỡng vùng hồ Phú Ninh
Yeah, heaven forbid that the banks should actually have to face competition like, er, the rest of the economy.

If the computer industry was regulated like this, the Internet would look like Compuserve circa 1990. And your PC would still only have 640K of RAM.
... might supercede the present financial system

And that's precisely why they will be always shut down. Government hates competition. Gov also shut down Liberty Dollar which was a commodity-backed currency.

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

http://www.flickr.com/photos/71392301@N00/1404773871/
Is Now the Right Time to Buy a Business?
Let the world know what you did this holiday
In her book, I think Sarah Lacy has a few examples of people doing that at the Web 2.0 conference.
No, he's asking for a program, not a proof. The point I'm making is that it's possible to fulfill the guys request without solving the halting problem, because you can inteprete his request in ways he did not intend.

The request did not include any 'finite time' specification.
Yep, the profit motive was mentioned over and over again in the SEC document, and it seems that was the key. Because of the profit motives, loans on Prosper qualified as securities, and hence the SEC regulations applied. With Kiva, there's no way for the lender to profit, so the same SEC regulations don't apply to Kiva.
I tried finding out who he was and interviewing him. I didn't get anywhere. I didn't realize he was such an unknown. Seems like a sharp guy.
While 3 out of 7 point are "stealing" in some capacity there is some goodness in here, specifically:

Volunteer, Offer to write, Offer to speak

As someone who's job it is to go to conferences to speak and look after the Yahoo booth I see a lot of conference action.

You will get so much more out of a conference by participating in a positive way than shiestering your way in. Both in the way people treat you but also your motivation to engage with the topics. I've met some really great friends and colleagues by offering to blog for them out of the blue, or help out when a speaker drops out.
Submitter here. Glad you liked the story.

Incidentally, I am a Prosper lender to the tune of $300. The dirt on this story could fill a small book, or a large forum (http://www.prospers.org)

The long and short of it: Prosper really wanted to be a technology play like Paypal which disintermediated banks and then got to take a small slice off each transaction. However, their model required that they, in effect, take on a lot of banklike aspects -- including investigating borrowers and collecting on deadbeats. They were woefully unprepared for both of them, thinking at the beginning that the lending peers would crowdsource it, before they realized that this would be very, very illegal.

(Privacy/harassment laws + telling 50 pissed people the identity of a single mom late on her payments + Google + lawyer = you tell me how this story ends.)

Anyhow, Prosper expected that despite the complete lack underwriting and neigh-total lack of fraud checking they would get default rates roughly similar to that of banks. Then, BEFORE the financial crisis started, reality set in and lenders started losing lots of money. This made Prosper's claimed rates of return ("Hey, if you loan money at 20% and only 5% default that means you make 15% APR!"[1]) extraordinarily rosy. Rather than accepting the data and revising the claimed rates of return downward, they instead started slicing it in smaller and smaller pieces (creating, for example, a Prosper Select Index filled with their best quality borrowers -- are we hearing the word "tranches" yet?) to claim that the rate was still exceptionally positive.

Representative ad:

[Edit: Thank you to commenter who pointed out my URL was borked. I'll TinyURL it: http://tinyurl.com/63em2c ]

Funny, "Earn 8.00% to 12.00% rates of return" looks like a security, it sounds like a security, it feels like a security... except if it were an actual security, well, the accountant who approved those numbers would be locked up. (Seriously. I liked the company, but the math is THAT bad. The average rate of return lenders of size were actually achieving was, at the time, closer to 3%. About 25% were losing money. Only about 10% every achieved the rates that were claimed in 36 pt font. And for what its worth, although my $300 doesn't make me a large lender by any stretch of the imagination, up until my first late payment a few weeks ago I was earning close to 18%.)

[1] Despite two years of trying to educate them about how math works via their forum and their email, we lenders were unable to penetrate their ignorance about high school math. Seriously. Three years after opening they still thought 25% interest and 20% defaults meant a 5% return. Even if the defaults were almost instantaneous, as most defaults on the platform are.
You'd think that by 2008 we wouldn't still be banning usury, but I guess not.