skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are correct, no libertarian will say that as a direct comment. However, it is implicit in the way many of them present their points - if you're not getting ahead in the world (usually this means accruing enough wealth to live comfortably), that's due to 'not working hard/smart enough'.

Most of the libertarians I have talked with on the web are skilled white males, largely unaware/unaccepting of the advantages they've had in being able to gain the skills they do, and basically assume that if you don't have marketable skills, it's solely due to your own effort. Big subscribers to the Just World Fallacy. They offer no mechanism for either levelling the playing field nor systematic assistance for those whom catastrophe strikes. There's very much a subtext of "you only deserve to be comfortable if you're like me" in libertarianism.

Only a very small fraction of mankind is actually making a dent in the world. Are you saying that libertarians believe that only 0.01% of people are actually working hard?

I think we have very different ideas of what 'making a dent in the world' means.

I must note, however, that it's interesting you use 'mankind' - another trademark I find libertarians use frequently, hence why I specify "skilled white male" above.
I believe this is a response to some comments to their previous post http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3162-the-on-call-programmer?

I think they're completely missing the point of those comments, but regardless of that, I think there's a bigger point to be made here.

Over the years, I've noticed there are two types of developers: the ones who only want to work on interesting code/new projects/etc, and the ones who get shit done.

The first guy does NOT want to do any maintenance, only wants to work on new projects so he can get things "his own way", throws a hissy fit or refuses to do it outright when he has to dig through tons of horrible legacy code, etc.

And the second guy just gets shit done. No matter what it is, he understands that it just NEEDS to be done, and does it. He will not take it silently - sometimes, just like the first guy, he will be loud and obnoxious in voicing his opinion that this code totally sucks, what moron wrote this, and we should totally rewrite it, etc.. but then he sits down, rolls up his sleeves and does it (and then works on re-writing it in the right way, if there's time).

The first guy might be a much better programmer than the second. He will pass a technical interview with flying colors, he's usually up to date on all the latest technology, he's good and he knows it.

But after a few years of doing this, I will hire the second guy EVERY TIME.
The expectation for entrepreneurs is that they always have this very clear vision of how they are going to change the world when in fact many of them simply get hooked on an idea that then goes on to change the world. Uncertainty is viewed by many as a sign of weakness but if you're being honest then you need to expect that there will be times when you don't know what to do next.
You're right, the redesign looks shoddy and inconsistent with modern layout conventions. Truth be told, they probably didn't hire a designer to do the work.
Three thoughts about selling music on Fandalism:

1) The site is setup for individual musicians, not bands or acts. I'm really targeting the high school kid who sits on his bed and plays lightening-fast guitar solos. He doesn't have anything to sell.

2) If I promised that kid he'd make significant (to him) $$ selling his music, I'd probably be lying.

3) Most musicians aren't going to make money selling their music. But they get a high out of having lots of people listen to it. So I'd rather just let people give it away for free and optimize for generating lots of plays, which would make them happy. Vs helping them sell it only to be disappointed.
How about "You are the Road"

http://www.kongregate.com/games/duckets/you-are-the-road-mol...

This game came out of a game hackfest called the molyjam where each team had to pick a game idea from a Peter Molyneux's faker's twiter stream: https://twitter.com/petermolydeux
Assuming they found them in the mail during transit using xray or some other method since they were in canada, shipping to US goes through customs which has special rules allowing that, then they can look at who is receiving the package and then they get them to squeal on who the dealer was.
I just went to the CS department site of the university I attended. The same systems architecture courses I took (logic gates, to building a pipelined MIPS CPU, to assembly programming on that CPU) are still degree requirements.
As much as I agree, do you realize how big the active drug trade is? There are a lot of very smart people out there.
it's time to start betraying your users by making subtle but significant changes to the terms of service in preparation for exploiting their personal info for financial gain
Powershell is awesome. Piping collections of objects instead of lines of text makes half of the great unix utilities (grep, sed) irrelevant. I used to gripe about the command line itself (Bash's tab completion, for example, trumps) but this is more than fixed by Powershell 3's ISE (in Win8).

Doesn't address your remote access... SSH is really nice and lightweight and the fact that Vim works is great for real sticky problems. Powershell has a remote access mode but I can't say I know much about it.
I am totally a 'make shit work' kind of guy, regardless if it's my job or not, because I wouldn't be happy otherwise. But the other side to this story is my friend Chad Meadows, who is the most competent person I know. Chad will specifically take on lower-paying roles because he doesn't want to deal with the paperwork and related crap that comes up. Chad will put 110% into his job, but he'll refuse to do the crap he isn't being paid for--which is totally reasonable.

This case sets up a more generalizable rule, which is that if you're expected to make shit work, you should be compensated for it. When you're in a startup, making all the shit is everyone's job description, and it's part of your paycheck, too, in the form of equity.
> We now have means to share and consume information about our acquaintances and friends that we never had before

Being someone that was alive long before Facebook got big I can assure you this statement is wrong. Tons of ways to do that before Facebook came along, including other social websites (MySpace, LiveJournal, FriendFeed, etc.), web forums, Usenet forums, BBSes, etc. Yes Facebook was a little prettier and did something a little nicer with their UI and their demographic marketing than many alternatives. But they did not give us anything new we didn't have before. I still think it's pretty lame and not impressed with it. The biggest thing I'm impressed with is their ability to keep it relatively fast and responsive under huge traffic load. The rest is straight-forward CRUD profiles, web chat and image uploads. So everything they provided was and is a free, easily cloneable commodity in terms of functionality. I think they just happened to win the "network effect" lottery among the non-digerati, and got lucky with timing.

Again: I have major respect for Facebook architects/engineers for keeping that thing fast and up under such high and growing traffic. But the features? Meh.

> Impact? Being the man who invented Facebook isn't impactful?

I think calling that "invention" really strains the meaning of that word. Writing it, maybe. Inventing the light bulb, inventing a helicopter, now that's invention. Making a CRUD profile & chat website did not then and does not now require invention. Lots of coding, sure. Figuring out how to keep it simple and non ugly, useful, sure. Keeping it cool early by only allowing Harvard kids, then other Ivy League kids, then other colleges, etc. But is that invention? No. Creation? Yes.
Maybe try and get in contact with Derek Sivers, creator of CDBaby.. He may have a few helpful tips, and may even mentor you to success, like Kimo did for him.

https://sivers.org/kimo
can you explain how it grow from 0 to 0.4 million in such a short time?

how may of these users are actually active?
For a long while I used to think that if I work hard I will win. And I was right. But not for long.

Because working hard is just one thing. You must know what to work on. True hard work is to utilize time in hand to continually move to the next level of challenges after you are done with the current one. Once you do this you will realize that you are doing jobs that demand better productivity and quality time and not necessarily quantity of time.

It becomes a totally different story if the quality and quantity goals both merge. In such a case you are really in a different situation and I would say you are on the right path. And that is the path which leads to better life and pay.

That is totally different that the current BigCorp set ups. Tending to endless bug tickets, and minor feature enhancements will give you nothing on the longer run. This is where you gradually realize you are robbed of your soul and purpose in life in return for crazy hours and peanuts in pay. When people talk of crazy hours doing no benefit this is what they are talking about.

Not the prior one that I mentioned. In fact I would consider my self fortunate If I find my self in one such situation.
This is an interesting idea. On one hand, I think my users like the Fandalism brand so I'd want to launch new stuff on Fandalism.com. On the other hand, you have a good point. Maybe I should keep Fandalism.com (the site) pure and launch experimental businesses on different domains.
How is he betraying his users? You mean the free software he built and the $2,500 in expenses he is dishing out every month?

The man has worked hard and built something amazing. Why can't he make money? What is wrong with that.
"It's as if you're better off not even trying to earn money,"

If you don't have anything good to say don't say anything at all.
ShowHN: Freeware* GUI Multiple SQL Client Mac OS X
A lightweight, multiple-database client and SQL development suite. It is written in pure Objective-C using the Cocoa Framework. Extensible features via Lua scripting. Free for non-commercial (at home) or humanitarian (charitable organizations) use.
That's silly. Microsoft sees the ARM-based tablet future, and doesn't want to miss out. But, they don't want to piss Intel off too bad, since they work hand in hand to develop Windows' interaction with Intel chips in desktop/server environments.

Saying ARM will only run Office and Metro apps is like saying Macbooks have the huge advantage of being able to run all Mac software to date. iOS will only run iOS apps. That's the point.
Why do you think the proportions of "try" and "don't try" are fixed? Evidence suggests environment and culture affect how hard-working and curious are a group of people. There's no evidence that unlimited unemployment for as many as want it is financially possible or good for anyone's physical or mental health. You want nobody to go hungry or homeless; this is noble but it can't be solved by only having programmers, stock traders and artists go to work.
Or doing work closer to the zip2/X/PayPal phase of Elon's career. (We should all hope.)
Not even a little bit. Win7 Starter was aimed at people who wanted a dirt-cheap netbook, with prices starting at about $250. It didn't even come with Aero.

Windows RT is aimed at people who want a tablet. This is not the same market. This is the set of people who currently shell out $500 and up to buy an iPad, twice as much as a netbook.

This is not the same market, and it's not a renaming of the cheapest OS. Starter was the most stripped-down OS. RT is actually the most feature-rich, due to the inclusion of Office. There's a bit of overlap, but only in the same way that there's overlap between people who buy a netbook and people who buy a ThinkPad.
All of the suggestions or what Philip had been thinking of are pretty "generic" solutions to the "problem". I spent 5 mins on the site, clicking around and my first impression of the Fandalism is the community and Fandalism's tag line is "Use Fandalism to show your work and meet other musicians".

The community is most likely a mix of musicians AND music lovers. So even Fandalism's original goal of serving musicians is what it is, I'm sure there are music lovers who are enjoying the community's work as well.

All of the monetization solutions suggested thus far does not cover both ends of the users.

I'm more of a coder / developer guy but occasionally I like to play the product guy. So here is my suggestion so let me know what you think especially you, Philip, if you are reading:

KickStarter for Musicians. Be the online version of American Idol or British's Got Talent. You have musicians and also they have their audiences on Fandalism.

First mission is to scout or fund the first internet musician superstar. Get the winner into a professional studio, get a few singles out. Backers get singles free, the rest gets to buy the singles fr a price. Fandalism gets a cut of the sales. The rest should be history.

Up vote if you think this will work or comment if you have more to add.

@pud What do you think? If you really want to venture out this way, I'm available for a ride. ;) That would be fun.
Look, a great idea and a couple bucks will buy you a grande americano.

A mediocre idea however, can make you rich beyond your wildest dreams. The trick is to reproject that idea into working code -- and if you aren't going to do it without YC, you wouldn't have done it with YC either.

If you actually build something of value, some of your friends will be so excited about it that you won't have to search for a cofounder.

So really, a YC rejection IMO should be interpreted as "just build the damned thing already".

Build it and cofounders will come.
SML/MLton vs OCaml for Erlang Integration
FTA> "You could say it isn't such a big deal. But if they don't care about this what else they don't care about? Quality of the courses? User experience?"

This entire line of thinking really bugs the ever-loving crap out of me. Slamming the entire service based on a few misaligned elements? Pedantic much?

Edit*

I'd almost argue that the alignment was by design. Having the "start here" lined up with the middle bar implies that you would "start" by taking some action on that bar, since most of us read left to right. In this case, a bad cue. By breaking up that line, you cease going right and look down instead.
I have no meaningful discussion to add beyond, it impressed this non-programmer.
Woke up this morning to a rejection email. The good news is that this means I have successfully achieved my New Year's Resolution of failing more. The bad news is that it doesn't make failing any easier!

We didn't even hear about Y-Combinator until the week before, but I'd echo notdarkyet's comments about how you start to dream. Either way, the process has already been a very worthwhile exercise, without which I would t have discovered Hacker News, so there are a lot of positives to take away.

Unlike notdarkyet I go back to a very well paying job, but that's a curse in itself because it makes it far too easy to become complacent and comfortable.

I guess I just need to find the next thing to fail at until next round :-)
You mentioned Etsy. I don't think selling music would work (for reasons I've outlined in another HN comment here) but oddly there are several people on Fandalism who make their own instruments and have contacted me about helping them sell them. Custom guitars and so on. I wonder if there are enough of them to warrant building an Etsy-like platform for them.
Interesting story. What is the URL of the page? I would like to check it out.
Of course they do. Benford's Law is just an artifact of how counting works.

Let's say we are measuring widget production. Right now we're making 1 widget per period. Each period we increase production by 10%. After a random number of periods, what do we expect the MSD (most significant or left-most digit) to be? After a random (large) number of periods, if we add up how frequently different numbers show up as the MSD, what will the distribution be?

Well, let's think about it. It takes 8 periods before our production number gets over two (and thus stops having an MSD of 1), and another 4 periods before our production number gets over three (and thus stops having an MSD of 2). If we keep going, the results look like this:

1 -> 8 periods
2 -> 4 periods
3 -> 3 periods
4 -> 2 periods
5 -> 2 periods
6 -> 2 periods
7 -> 1 periods
8 -> 1 periods
9 -> 2 periods
1 -> 7 periods
2 -> 4 periods
3 -> 3 periods
4 -> 3 periods

And so on. If we were to stop there, we have counted 41 periods. The most common MSD is 1 (taking place 36% of the time), followed by 2 (19%), 3 (14%), 4, and so on. Benford's Law! Of course, you might say, that just shows up because I chose to stop there.

But actually, it works to a greater or lesser extent, pretty much regardless of when we stop (or where we start). It works regardless of the units being used. It also works if we're adding a flat amount instead of a percentage increase, or if we're adding a random amount, or if the number is not monotonically increasing. It also works in other bases. (In fact, thinking about the example of binary may be illuminating. The MSD is always 1 for any number > than 0.)

It also works if we're generating random samples between 1 and some BIG_NUM. If you generate 1000 numbers between 1 and, say, 2^24, you might find that that the MSD of 48% of those samples is 1, while no other digit is found as the MSD in more than 7% of samples. Pick a different BIG_NUM, and you'll see a different distibution. 2^20 gives you a much flatter distribution; in the test I just ran I saw 16% with a MSD of 1, versus 9-12% for all other digits. But the point is, lots of potential BIG_NUMs produce samples which skew heavily towards having an MSD of 1, and thus a random BIG_NUM has a highly skewed expected distribution.

And so on. :) It's actually kind of fun to play with. But at the end of the day, this is just a product of using a positional number system.
8 years ago gmail launched with a whopping 1GB, back then it was HUGE. Have storage costs plateaued so that now 8 years later the best they can offer is 5GB?
> Each year, every laboratory produces a new crop of Ph.D.’s, who must compete for a small number of jobs, and the competition is getting fiercer. In 1973, more than half of biologists had a tenure-track job within six years of getting a Ph.D. By 2006 the figure was down to 15 percent.

That's why the smart thing to do is to take yourself out of the competition - go into the industry. The whole idea of "science for science's sake" doesn't work when each professor advises a dozen PhD students over his career - the majority of those students have to go somewhere outside academia, and industry is the obvious (and only other) choice.
You take advantage of the fact that it's all but impossible for humans to sustain their productivity while working those kinds of hours for any length of time.

In current market economics those jobs will be moved to people who are ready to work for lesser pay. Like to china, what that means is now you get more people for same money. Therefore more hours.
Just curious: How would you differentiate between the first type and the second type of programmer when you hire him/her?
It's not fair to call tainted ecstasy deaths a result of drug use. Despite the fact tainted ecstasy is technically not ecstasy, if the industry was regulated it wouldn't happen.
Macrosoft - Where do you want to go tomorrow?
They actually have a really awesome designer, http://allisonhou.se/, who is the lead designer there.

I personally love the redesign.
I'm just a software guy, not aerospace, so I'm surprised to hear SpaceX is not widely known in the field. From an outsider's perspective, it seems like they are. Thanks for sharing your perspective on it.
I love the idea of American Idol for guitarists/drummers/etc. I really could find the best musicians in the world. That would be fun.

From a business perspective, if I wanted to make money doing that, I could imagine sponsors like guitar companies paying. Fender (maker of the famous Stratocaster guitar, for you non musicians) just filed IPO paperwork and had something like $700M in sales last year.
Reading the announcement would it be wrong to say this is a talent acquisition?
Did You apply before or after the deadline?
Inspirational message for life - Advice sms
As a long time linux user and recent OSX laptop user, I hadn't used Windows with any regularity since 2001. Recently I bought a copy of Windows 7 to run some niche software that lacks wine support and is cumbersome to run in a vm.

My first impression was that Windows 7 was great, it appeared to have removed many of the rough edges from XP and Vista.

Soon enough though I began to run into issues relating to legacy programs' security needs. Turns out, the only option I had was to run the programs as Administrator, since the crippled version of Windows 7 I bought has the ntfs permissions essentially disabled.

Why of all things would the secure filesystem be one of the disabled features on the consumer focused OS version?

This realization was a bit jarring, b/c I felt that the "tax" to use the OS properly in this case was fairly high. I can see charging more money for actual features, but NTFS permissions are clearly used behind the scenes in the Home version, so it feels more like using crippleware than opting out of advanced capabilities.

So I hope that Windows 8 uses a more reasonable way to determine what is a basic and what is a pro feature.
Rare Behind the Scenes Photos of ‘Star Wars’
MDMA is not old enough to show it's long term effects the way smoking or drinking has.

One study of 52 users that where hand selected out of 1500 that showed no cognitive impairment. http://www.addictionjournal.org/viewpressrelease.asp?pr=147 Others studies both before and after have demonstrated issues. The problem is it's hard to find good data on individuals before they started heavy use, and sleep deprivation and dehydration are linked to long term cognitive impairment.

However, if you look at the existing literature there is no large scale and long term study's demonstrating it's safety. And a lot of evidence that MDMA is dangerous.
Nice work reusing the ECC data in QR codes to hold the image, unfortunately it is still a bit noisy due to the limits of Reed-Solomon.

I use a similar technique (just the center part, though) on http://www.qrpixel.com .
The Agonizing Ecstasies Of Male Contraception
Yeah, this way you don't have to worry about ruining the Fandalism brand or the user experience.

You're in an awesome position Philip. More than anything, enjoy the experience.
Has the point that this machine is meant as a ubiquitous children's "learn to program" environment escaped everybody? It may offer cool alternative uses, but that's not its raison d'être. It's supposed to something kids can muck about with without screwing up the family computer so that there will be the same pool of kids to draw from going forward as there were with the BBC Micro (or the Timex/Sinclair machines) in play. Scratch is the killer app for the platform, not Flash or even a web browser.
I think the supply/demand is backwards here. Most amateur musicians gig for free. Many actually pay to perform (by pre-paying the venue for x number of tickets, then hoping to recoup costs by selling those tickets on their own directly to fans).

Big touring acts pay to play too, by renting out the venue.
Taxes Prompt More Americans to Renounce Citizenship
I gave a little more detail here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3850923 But, while the holes in the brain and Parkinson's where not accurate there is significant evidence that MDMA causes issues and it's not old enough for a lot of long term issues to show up.

PS: My mother has a PHD in neurology with a focus on brain development and MDMA is the drug she was most frightened of. Not that that actually means much in the grand scheme of things, but she has done a lot more literature review of MDMA than I or I suspect anyone on HN has done.