skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks, Al.

Yes, if you've ever tried to create a mashup using data from Twitter, digg, delicious, etc., you know the problem is that you have to poll their entire data set (without exceeding their api request limits) to get at the data you are trying to track.

With Gnip, you get an abstraction layer so you can create a filter based on usernames, for instance. When these users do something, like tweet, we post that data back to you.

In this scenario, you no longer have to poll arbitrarily for needles in haystacks--we push the needles to you when they occur.

Hope that helps! If anyone is interested in utilizing data from the social graph to create their app (or if you are interested in publishing data you have for public use), we have a Group list: http://groups.google.com/group/gnip-community as well as documentation on our site, www.gnipcentral.com and a set of client libraries (we are currently evolving) to help facilitate such endeavors.

Cheers!
Very cool, I had a similar idea for a "scorecard for politicians" type of app - input either your location or a politician's name, see some info on what laws they've voted on and if possible, boil it down to a scorecard of where they stand on issues (pro guns, pro choice, etc).
I should have checked my saved list. Most of it is modded 20-70. Thanks anyway :/
Aside from being an engaging story, being able to weather an ER visit is another sign of strength of startups.

In any larger company the downside isn't just potentially larger, it's probably larger in expectation. The employee might sue.

In a startup that's just not even considered. Interesting.
SICP and learning calculus.
Can't think of anything that sounds impressive and fits in 2 sentences?
ok. hey i don't seem to have written anything in my profile. how'd u figure that out?
Hopefully one would diversify among many countries and also with some gold.
OK looking them up. Kripke's wikipedia entry is full of stuff about logic. I don't really have a problem with logicians. I don't think they are in the primary philosophy tradition pg was criticizing (and which I don't like). If he learned something about logic from wittgenstein, then great i guess.

Anscombe wiki has:

For years, I would spend time, in cafés, for example, staring at objects saying to myself: "I see a packet. But what do I really see? How can I say that I see here anything more than a yellow expanse?"

I think that stuff is a dead end. We should solve problems we have, not question all traditions simultaneously for no particular reason.

By the way, I do think there are good philosophers, who made useful progress, but they are largely neglected. e.g. xenophanes, godwin, burke, feynman. (neglected as philosophers)
Where's the magic in Django?
Python to C compiler.
Well, we did joke at the ER about Enrique paying me workers compensation for the hospital bill....hahaha
Who the fark browses the web with CSS off?
Non-fiction but a great read:

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_You%27re_Joking,_Mr._Fey...!
Thanks! I actually thought your essay was pretty interesting, but I didn't know how to include that nuance in my comment without making my comment less readable. Perhaps I am too much of a Grahamite!
You are relying on an idea that there are these brilliant, highly sought after individuals that outperform the 'one step bellow' individual.

Is this the case?
Fear Kills Businesses, Dead
I third that. I admire that these guys went after a difficult idea (hardware/software combined product) and didn't just settle for yet another web app. Karma will reward them, because their revenue model is simple and it will be much harder for copy-cats to steal their market.

Also, it looks bad-ass (if a little unresponsive).
Prague isn't that far away, and remember that you and your family have a free place to stay here anytime.
I agree. There are definitely many styles of thinking, and they seem to be developed or discovered independently of the skills which they are associated with, i.e. you can learn Java without learning how to think like a programmer. We can call it "talent" and say it's innate, but I think that's a cop out from the hard problem of trying to find better ways to develop it.

In a sense, it's not unlike personality disorders, in that
that those who "have it" generally don't know where they got it, and frequently don't recognize it as an "it" that not everyone has it, at least until they're confronted with evidence.

I happen to have recently transcribed something from Seymour Papert's Mindstorms, about LOGO, that seems relevant:

"By deliberately learning to imitate mechanical thinking, the learner becomes able to articulate what mechanical thinking is and what it is not. The exercise can lead to greater confidence about the ability to choose a cognitive style that suits the problem. Analysis of "mechanical thinking" and how it is different from other kinds and practice with problem analysis can result in a new degree of intellectual sophistication. By providing a very concrete, down to earth model of a particular style of thinking, work with the computer can make it easier to understand that there is such a thing as a "style of thinking." And giving children the opportunity to choose one style or another provides an opportunity to develop the skill necessary to choose between styles. Thus instead of inducing mechanical thinking, contact with computers could turn out to be the best conceivable antidote to it. And for me what is most important in this is that through these experiences these children would be serving their apprenticeships as epistemologists, that is to say learning to think articulately about thinking."
A great paper and network structure visualization of social roles in Yahoo Answers
The Early Stage Spaceship
a point that needs to be highlighted:

In a conversation with veteran CEO and financier Steve Larsen, currently co-founder of Krugle, he advises:

Of course, don’t be stupid. Have enough cash to run your business, but I think the doom and gloom crowd are getting too much airtime. Look for opportunities. Difficult times are when they’ll most likely occur. When we’re at ‘steady state’ and things are normal, good opportunities are much harder to find with GREAT opportunities nearly impossible. It is during periods of tumult and transition when you can spot things that lead to the greatest returns—if you are alert. So be alert.
You can have a look at the Lists: http://news.ycombinator.com/lists, and Ask YC Archive (weekly): http://ask.searchyc.com/, for a recap.
or you could just concentrate on growing your profits.
I started to build exactly the same a couple of months back but then abandoned the project because a business on a hack is risky!
Out of date review:

"One major flaw would be the price issue - it costs a whopping $249 for a 7″ Picwing digital photo frame"

Maybe it's come down by now, but at that price, may as well buy a netbook.
"Seriously. He couldn't comprehend:
X = X + 1"

Isn't that really all there is to comprehend, when you get right down to it?

For all the people who don't "get" programming, I think that's exactly what they don't get.

Unless you're teaching functional programming. Then it would be f(x).
Emailing to the frame sounds kinda cool, but if this takes off, expect to see a lot of spam photos inviting you to purchase viagra, or go to their porn site etc.
Perhaps he could be a functional programmer if X = X + 1 doesn't make sense ;)

I could understand why if a mathematician found it odd - of course in practice they would understand it, but they would probably in their head make the left most X to be X' or somesuch so they could understand what was going on.

When you do a mutation of a variable - there are all sorts of subtle things to understand about the machine underneath that you wouldn't have to if everything was immutable. I guess its easy to forget that in the day to day.
1) I think you've confused logic with an experimental science.

2) I am having serious trouble figuring out how this dismisses PG's essay.

3) So this is the only item in your list that actually addresses Graham's central point at all. I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to say but I think you're circling around this idea: "Sure, pre-20th century philosophy got a lot wrong, but it was that wrongness that allowed certain modern philosophers to get stuff right. PG thinks he could've gotten through the wrongness quickly, but I think he's wrong about that."

Well, okay... but let me give some evidence against that: I independently came to the conclusion that most philosophy is bullshit before I encountered Paul Graham. I think I'm smart, but I'm also pretty sure that there have been a bunch of people in history who are just as smart as I am, and so I'm led to the conclusion that there have been people in history who realized that philosophy as it was being practiced was bullshit. Which implies that, yes, all those pre-modern philosophers were wasting their time, because we didn't need their "false starts" to get to the root of the wrongness with philosophy.

4) I admit that I don't know enough about the origins of various disciplines to talk about any of the things you brought up, but, to me, the fact that philosophy helped nurture "useful" disciplines and ideas doesn't automatically imply that philosophy itself is valid or useful. Every kind of thinking, even pretty dumb kinds, produces more thinking. And after more than two thousand years, it's statistically likely that some of a discipline's intellectual offspring will have merit, even if the discipline itself doesn't.

Also: "Anybody who's a little bit careful can find these examples easily. Graham, however, failed. What does this tell us about his essay?"

First: this is really incredibly obnoxious. Second: why do you think that attacking the construction or presentation of PG's argument is the same as dismissing the argument itself?
That would be nice, but I doubt there are more than 3 or 4.
A Scheme With No Off Button
Just playing around with iPhone development.
Yea, this is one of the main reasons I use FogBugz. It checks email via POP and then imports emails as cases. You can handle the case just like another case/ticket/bug. You can reply right from the website, or assign it to a project, user, etc...

They have a free startup plan for two users, and free unlimited users for yc funded startups.
It would be extra magical if you actually aggregated tweets by link, so that it only showed up as one "link", but you could see what everyone posted along with it.
looks like a very small subset of http://rope.sourceforge.net/
We have United Healthcare, we worked with an agent through Paychex (our payroll provider) to get this set up. I talked to a couple of people in the medical field about the best plan for us (of the options provided by the agent) to help chose between our options.
I think the statement that math is more useful then philosophy is debatable, especially at the university level.

Advanced calculus and "pure math" courses had precious few uses in the day to day grind of many jobs. Pure math might teach logic in some way, but philosophy tends to focus on argument itself, which lends itself to more obvious practical uses.
Check out Roundup (http://roundup.sourceforge.net/). Written in Python, easy to extend, has a web interface and email gateway. The UI is pretty ugly, sadly, so if you want something easier on the eyes, you need to hack up some custom CSS.
A single example of something you think is of poor quality does not mean everything within that field is poor. This is simply lazy (and prejudiced) thinking. :-(
Hi Jackowayed,

This is almost exactly like my web app http://tweetlinks.org which I created and posted here several weeks ago.

Eiso
Free Acronis True Image 8.0 Personal
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Here is the News YC thread for it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392845
You can have Google analytics e-mail reports to you.

Could you just have them sent to the picwing every hour or so and you guys display the data somehow?
<cheap shot>And what is this substance of mathematics?</cheap shot>

Calling mathematics "incontrovertibly true" and stating that abstractions used in mathematics can be explained concretely in simpler terms are philosophical positions and the justifications for and against these positions are debated outside mathematics in philosophy. You praise the rigor of mathematics while ignoring the rigor in which philosophy searches for the justifications of assumptions for all fields of human knowledge including mathematics and science.
Is the smiley there to distract the clerk from realizing you always get 90% off everything? :P
Absolutely not. But linguistics seems like a legitimate enough field, and Chomsky is considered rather influential there.

His work seems to follow logically from Wittgenstein's point that a lot of philosophy comes down to the precise meanings of words.
There are more than a few conferences happening like this. Check Poynter.org for listings of upcoming events.

Also, there are quite a few solid hackers working at the big papers.

I think sometimes that the money situation is a big deterrent for hackers. A reporter at a mid-sized paper is working his/her tail off and making maybe $40,000/year. That person's editor is making all the decisions and more or less running the show on the editorial side and MIGHT be making $60,000.

How many really talented hackers would work for less than $60,000.year? I wonder how big of a deterrent that is.
So you're just going by his reputation? I have read about some of his ideas and formed the opinion that they are bad (apart from the one i mentioned).
you submitted entries from your blog
Your comment scores 98% on my spam detector.
Philosophy, at one point, was the catch-all phrase for any type of thought. Mathematics was philosophy. Science was philosophy. Law was philosophy. Economics was philosophy. Every form of thought (more or less) was philosophy. Over the course of history, these fields have spun off from philosophy, and achieved various degrees of relevance; their earliest works were done by "philosophers" because these fields did not yet exist, but in modern times they are studied independently. The question then becomes, in modern times, what is a person studying when they study philosophy? They are not studying any of the fields that spun off of philosophy, or else they would no longer be classified as philosophers. So, the question becomes (answering your point 5) what problems that other fields care about are still answered by philosophers? The critique in the OP correctly identifies that some philosophers still concern themselves with problems related to cognitive science, which still answer questions from psychology. But once cognitive science becomes its own independent field, there may be nothing left within the realm of philosophy.

We might not have had modern political science without Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Hobbes. But we would have had Hobbes even if he had not been classified as a philosopher, and thus we would have had the rest of them.

We might not have had modern economics without Smith, Pareto, and Mill. But we would have had Smith even if he had not been classified as a philosopher, and thus we would have had the rest.

We might not have had modern sociology without Marx and Gramsci. But we would have had Comte even if he hadn't been classified as a philosopher, and thus we would have had the rest.

I mention these three individuals' work because they (1) fundamentally began what came to eventually be their fields, and (2) did not really build these fields incrementally out of the rest of the philosophical body of knowledge at the time. This demonstrates that it isn't some kind of unifying thread within the study of philosophy that causes these fields to spin off from them; philosophy was just what you called it when you were studying problems that weren't in their own field yet. This no longer occurs in modern times, so we don't see philosophy spinning off new fields in the way that it used to; computer science (as a whole) sees its roots in modern mathematics, not philosophy. Psychoanalysis, as a modern field (unlike psychology as a whole, which also often refers to much older studies), clearly descends from biology. Electrical engineering. Nuclear physics even has it in the title.

The study of the works of "philosophers" can still be relevant within other fields, but to study philosophy is to spend one's time looking at what's left. It is this study, in modern times, that pg and I are attacking as vague, useless, and prone to wars of semantics.
They will consume their own production and start spending their dollars and euros.
this can get close to iphone interface of google earth on a normal browser.
Ignore his politics, though I personally have a great deal of respect for people with extreme politics.

The Chomsky hierarchy -- a method of classifying formal grammars. Seems computer science-y enough that you'll consider it as something real. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy
As a programmer, you don't see obvious practical use in understanding results in number theory? These have importance in a wide variety of computer applications.

What about linear algebra? Do you really think that understanding its applications in computer graphics doesn't/wouldn't improve your employability?

Certainly, if you're a janitor, having studied philosophy vs. mathematics does not significantly affect how you do your job (though it probably does affect how easy it is for you to get a different job). But mathematics--even advanced mathematics--has more and more obvious applications than philosophy.
Embargoes Still Honored Here--As Appropriate
Awesome. Anywhere I can follow your progress? What do you think the performance will be like vs psyco?
How to define good submission?

I just created a web app that actually track every number one story from HN in the database - http://hn.siong1987.com .

It has only one top story right now because I just created it. So, hopefully, it will record down every number one story from HN from now on if there is no bug in the web app.
Thanks everyone! I wrote the original article. Not only have I learned a bunch of new ones (the floating dictionary is sweet) but I've discovered ycombinator too! Thank goodness for pingback, eh?
Continung work on 'perf' my top replacement:

* Load average based on the amount of CPU cores in the machine, so that 100% is busy anywhere you run it.

* Figures for memory unused by apps, more apparent usage of page cache

* Figures for IO alas IOtop

* IO nicing

* Not doing silly thing like opening and closing a file
handle every loop.

* Zebra striping, other niceties.

Also making a working, simple, stable dock for Linux - a GNOME panel applet to replace the window list.
The magic in Django is present in the Admin module or whatever term the Django community uses. I have to admit it's useful but it kinda bothers me in the sense that I do not any idea where the wiring begins and ends. Another thing that bothers me is that when you code in Django you code in whatever style the developers have envisioned it to be.

Whilst in web.py you pretty much code in Python which in my opinion is a lot easier to do. In addition to that web.py is pretty transparent providing me a sense of how _everything_ is working together.
Looks phishy to me.
I'm working on a lightweight shell. It was originally an assignment for university, but I thought it was interesting to work on it.

I'm also trying to start a project with my Arduino, though I'm not sure what I'll create. Maybe a simple robot.
What about when they grow up?
The substance of mathematics is figuring out what is still true when one applies the highest standard for rigor that still permits the possibility of determining things not yet known to be true.

That any philosopher might continue to debate this issue is, while sadly true, irrelevant. A logical system without modus ponens can either define modus ponens, or is clearly not extensible enough to define anything. A logical system with modus ponens is either inconsistent, or at most as general as mathematics. Thus, there can be no extensible system of truth in which mathematics is false, validating my claim that it is incontrovertible.

As to whether or not mathematics can be explained in simple terms, I will suggest that this appears to be the case empirically, since some people become mathematicians, and they all seem to use the same terminology, more or less. To prove that every mathematical result in existence can be explained simply would require that I actually explain every mathematical result simply, and that is beyond the scope of an HN comment.

Finally, philosophers do not "search for the justifications of assumptions for all fields of human knowledge including mathematics and science" with the level of rigor I specified in my comment; indeed, the entire point of this discussion is that they tend not to use any level of rigor at all. Insofar as philosophy actually does anything to "justify the assumptions" for any field, it occasionally achieves useful results; however, much of philosophy is focused solely on a continuing failure to agree on semantics.
Apple Will Be Just Fine Without Steve Jobs
Above you say that this is an honest request to know more so I will treat it as such.

In philosophy a method proposed by Descartes to find the foundations of knowledge was to doubt everything that possibly could be doubted which includes the external world. Wittgenstein in his Tractatus similarly starts from a blank slate and tries to define and describe the world without crossing his own boundaries and definitions of what can be considered sensible to say (and fails. To objectively describe the world is an attempt to step outside it and his bounds of sense).

I would also like to note that this early is work very different from his later work where he completely rejected the Tractatus, writing with a different style and focus. His later work (especially Philosophical Investigations) has some extremely interesting ideas regarding language, its use and development which I believe would interest those working in the areas of semantic web and NLP.
Great point about the "undecipherable tables" that any program eventually becomes as languages, platforms and OSes change.

Beyond PR and vested interests, the full backward compatilibity of java (even when it hurts) and of Windows (up to XP) account for their survival a lot more than anyone would ever suspect at first thought.
It's a staging area, from his tweets I gathered he has a rack at a colocation center.
What Santa REALLY Does While You're Asleep
That's when they realise they can't be wasting time on social networking websites thanks to the wife and kids.
I have a family member who has autism. The thought has been expressed to me that although he is capable of completing tasks on his own, he often gets sidetracked and will (for example) get to the sink, but forget he's there to brush his teeth. It would be very helpful for him if there was some sort of 'call-to-action' when he enters an area of the house, i.e. a video previously recorded of him brushing his teeth comes on to the screen and he thinks 'oh yeah, brush my teeth!'.

Being able to hack with these and scatter them about the house, add some sort of discovery capabilities (bluetooth enabled wristband? Seperate controller with webcam doing facial recognition? Now we're talkin...) and we're off to the races.

Seems like there are a ton of applications for this, great work!
You can't build an improvement on another products by copying all their features and then adding some more of your own — that's usually a recipe for becoming as bad as your competitor(s). Firefox, IE, Opera — do they really do things differently from one another?

I hope Chrome stays simple and to the point. :)
I will post a link to it on HN in sometime.
Here is feedback: it's a scary privacy hole. Having a company trying to exploit this to make money will only hasten its closure.