skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A friend was answering some programming/logic questions for a potential employer. In addition to a many good programming questions, there was also this logic question:

"A man was sentenced to death, but the king wanted to give him a last chance. He asked the man to choose from one of the three knights that were there. One of the knights was the Knight of Life, and he always told the truth. The second Knight was the Knight of Death, and he always told lies. The third knight was the Knight of the Dungeon. He sometimes lied and sometimes told the truth. If the man chose the Knight of Death, he would be executed before sunset. If he chose the Knight of Life, he would be acquitted and set free right away. If he chose the Knight of the Dungeon, he would spend the rest of his life imprisoned in the Dungeon. The man was allowed to ask the three knights one question each.
Thus, he asked the fat knight, "What is the name of this tall knight?" The reply was, "He is the Knight of Life." He asked the small knight, "What is the name of this tall knight?" The reply was, "He is the Knight of Death." Then he asked the tall knight, "Who are you?" "I am the Knight of the Dungeon" was the reply. After that, the man was able to correctly choose the Knight of Life, and was set free immediately.
Who is the Knight of Life, and who are the other two knights?"

This puzzle seemed beautiful to me because it was so pure. If you can understand English, then you have the potential to solve it.

My friend solved it in about forty seconds, according to him. I solved it in over twenty minutes, and only after being wrong once.

I am an extremely slow programmer. I have had the good fortune of being around many productive programmers, so I know this to be the case. I used to make excuses as to why I was so. But in the end, it doesn't really matter; I am wrong 90% more often than I am correct, and I act stupidly most of the time. My memory is so horrible that I routinely forget the start of the sentences I am writing. I often re-read what I write (be it English or C++) over ten times before I am satisfied it means what I meant. My mathematical skills are a wash. (I still don't even understand the meaning and utility of 'e', and not for lack of trying.) My mind's eye is blind; I find it almost impossible to imagine what a given figure should look like, if I am about to draw it, so something such as Paul's painting http://bookshop.gfu.net/AxCMSTemplates_GFU/pics/products/013... seems nothing short of magic. My hand-eye coordination is decent, but not great. My reflexes are decent, but not great. So in summary, I feel I am decent, but not great; but I have an overwhelming appetite to be great.

I don't want to give up on becoming a genius, and I don't want to believe that I cannot become one just because I wasn't born one.
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Linc Energy also confirms that throughout the due diligence period and during this extension period, the Company’s drilling program on the Emerald “Teresa” tenements is continuing so as to further define and expand the coal deposit.
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not bad... i don't like the page design though
by pg do u mean, paul graham?
We have had very bad experiences with such ad hoc arrangements. One customer - fortunately a good one who effectively counts as a friend - was reduced to tears of laughter by one translation, and it was one that we'd had checked by two independent methods.
Firstly, don't feel bad because you feel this way. It is pretty typical for a bright kid to feel this way, often. The thing that is getting you down is the over-analysis and introspection not the relationships.

Relationships with people are hugely rewarding and enjoyable but you can't depend on them for happiness (or anything). See people as the oases in your life. Depend on yourself for what you need and enjoy people as you find them.

Over analysis and introspection are just a habit of mind. They are not always productive but have their place, especially at certain times (just broken up, just done something shocking, had a profound experience, failed in some way) but prolonged bouts can be destructive.

All the advice so far seems to point to finding something else to occupy your mind. Do that and you will find people with different interests a welcome distraction. Of course whatever you find to occupy your time other will do too, so there is your social circle.

It seems trite but you need to do stuff. I don't want to make you feel worse but if you spend all your time self absorbed then people will never have the same interests as you and yo won't be that interesting so won't meet life's 'truly interesting' people ( people like me ;) )

What do you like to do?
Check your spelling and write carefully - appearances really do matter.
So the first guy can't be telling the truth, because the third guy gives a different answer and the Life gives the truth. So he's dungeon or death. Second guy might be telling the truth, since the Death would lie. Or the THIRD knight might be telling the truth if he IS dungeon.

If the second guy is lying, that means we know the two liars and the third must be Life. But he says he isn't. Therefore, the second knight is Life, the third is Dungeon, and the first is Death.

But solving a puzzle isn't genius. It's logic. Some people spend much more time with logic than others: programmers have lots of games like these. The Blue Eyes puzzle comes to mind as a particularly hard one. Similarly, the more people program, the more they learn mental shortcuts that let them be more productive. Time fixes everything, and the best attribute to fix things is passion. You've got that. You just need to make sure to unfailingly look for whatever your goal is, and to learn everything you need to pursue it. Remember: there's more to building something than programming.
Most likely. PG is his HN username.
So you are saying that since there is not enough money in it, no one made AI? And if there was money in it someone would?

I say that no one made AI because no one knows how, and money is irrelevant.
Develop iPhone Web applications with Eclipse
"I feel like when I talk to my "friends", I either have to talk all about computers, or all about music, or whatever that they're interested in, but never a mixture of everything."

Have you actually tried talking about other topics? It sounds like you're making assumptions about what your friends are interested in, but haven't actually tested your hypothesis.

I don't think I've met anyone who isn't keen to learn something new or teach me about one of their interests.
the game continues while you are offline so if you go away you might have been beat up a few times but you will be all recharged and ready to go.
Super fast rendering for flash games
Well, the Earth itself has been transformed by life! Most of the oxygen in the atmosphere comes from billions of years of photosynthesis:

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Earth#Photosynthesis...

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_atmosphere#Evolution_...
Dude, not all startups are in the software business. I know a few startups in the hardware business which are growing spectacularly. Contrary to popular belief, not every startup wants to be the "next Facebook" ;-)
There is more to genius than passion. I have experienced so many situations where I truly believed the equivalent of "0 is equal to 1". When someone points out why this cannot be the case, I usually sit in stunned silence while I review my reasoning. When I find the flaw, it seems inane that I could have missed it.

Let me try to prove this from a different direction. You've probably heard of Henry Molaison, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HM_(patient) ... His hippocampus was surgically removed, rendering him unable to form new memories. Do you truly believe it would have been possible for him to build Quake 3 just because he was overwhelmingly passionate about doing so?
I was thinking of posting a question very similar to this one, though the details of my situation are pretty different.

See, I've been alone for most of my life. Alone in the sense that I've only ever had two or three real friends, and I often go for weeks without having a conversation with another person.

As a kid I was fine with this. I was the guy who always sat by himself during lunch and recess, and nobody bothered me and I felt fine. I stayed the same until my senior year of high school, when I was struck by a burning need to make friends, meet girls and stop being alone all the damn time. I made some friends that year, but we were high school seniors, so we all moved off to college and I never heard from them again.

Now I'm in my third year of college, I have no friends and I can't believe how hard it is to meet people. Though I guess the problem isn't meeting people specifically, but getting the acquaintances I make to turn into friendships. I just don't seem to really click with anyone.

"You should join an organization for something you're into!" Well, I've looked but 90% of the organizations I see are racial, religious or political, and the rest just don't interest me. If I could find, say, an OCaml or Lisp programmers group, or an early music society, I'd be thrilled, but of course there isn't one. Maybe I'm just a narrow person, I don't know.

Hmm... I'm not sure now why I'm posting this, but I typed it so what the hell. submit
Oh, and Sun does Certified Java Developer too.
Small is life, tall is death, and fat is dungeon? About 10 minutes, but I did have to write it down
Japanese, Burmese, Basque, Latin, Pashto.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject_Object_Verb
Then why is Gen-Y all like, we have all these amazing Interweb sK1Lz that no-one else does? 'Cos I'm not seeing it.
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You know the line about genius being perspiration? That one's very much true. That's why context matters so much.

So I solved that puzzle quick-ish. But then, as a kid I played logic games to pass time. Other kids would play sports, and I'd pore through books of puzzles and solve them. So suddenly I'm able to do that. But it means that now, as a freshman at the gym, I'm operating as a near-pathetic level. For Christmas I got two 30-pound weights because that's a level that's easy for bench and hard for curls. But compared to my roommate? That's nothing. He does 50s for light workout. It's because he's spent much more time doing that than me.

There are always impediments. The best trick is to figure out how best to work around them and do what you want anyway. Figure out where you best fit in to the process of creation. Look at the top Apple team. Steve Jobs and Tim Cook and Jony Ive - the three I know of best - are quite different people. Jobs is hotheaded. Cook is known for incredible stamina but he's not a design guy. Ive is all design, nothing else. They're very different people who excel at doing a few things very well, and they work together to create their brilliant products.
Tone is hard to interpret without a tone.
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives failing
That was an interesting way of sidestepping the question. If someone is born retarded, could they become a Steve Jobs just because they really wanted to and worked real hard at it?
Most likely not. No. There is always a problem with mental limitation.

However, that rarely matters as much as it's emphasized. The more you focus on something, the more brilliant your end results will seem.
Facebook Hole
Right. So we've established that there is a baseline for becoming a genius. You are either born with it, or you aren't.

Next question: how do you determine whether you're born with it? At what point does your demonstrated ineptitude force you to admit that you are incapable of realizing your goals?

("you" doesn't refer to you specifically, obviously. I just talk in the active voice.)
The cost drivers impact on so-called freemium models
There's no point. You'll never know until after it's already happened.

However, if you give up, you'll never know if you could have been. The struggle is what makes it so hard, but it's what makes it worth it in the end.
People are hitting the downvote button more.
True. But if you lie to yourself, then you may waste your life and alienate those you love in the process.

Not all of the YC startups that failed have failed just because the founders stopped working on them, I'd imagine. At what point should you let failure overwhelm you?
I wouldn't worry too much about the expensive suits and roomy offices. When we were first bootstrapping (no investors, angels or the like, just some money scraped together) the first thing we spent money on was (expensive) legal advice, mostly because we knew it was the only thing we needed right then that we couldn't teach ourselves quickly enough.

If you're still in startup mode, the following two questions should help you make the decision:

- do I need it right now?

- can I spare the money right now, if not: can I make a deal with my IP attorneys where they agree to bill me later? (just think about the money you need to spend the coming couple of months, the total estimated cost over 20 years is completely irrelevant at this point)

If both questions are answered with a 'yes', do it. Because if you need it right now, it doesn't matter how inconvenient the distraction from working on your product is right now, as a founder you'll just have to deal with it. And if you don't need it, don't do it, because I'm sure you can find some other thing you need to do 'right now'.

Don't let the idea that you already spent money on the provisional patent cloud your judgement about whether you should put more money into this. If you can't come to a rational decision, and the prior expense is what pulls you over the fence emotionally, it's probably better to cut your losses.

Good luck, these kinds of decisions are hard, especially deciding whether you 'need' something. That's something only you can assess, it could help to get a second opinion from another IP attorney, preferably one that doesn't have a financial incentive to sell you on going for it.

- Dirk
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I prefer giving out puzzles with multiple correct answers. I notice three kind of people.
1. the person who laboriously searches for and finds one correct answer.
2. the person who finds the correct answer and notes possible permutations.
3. the person who finds an algorithm that yields all correct answers.

Which one is the best programming candidate? :)
National Day of Service
I like the lack of the "talent" meme in asian culture. hard work is correctly identified as the reason for superior performance.
That's the separating question, then: to you, is it worth all that? It is for me.

I'd bet that most of the failing YC founders learned important lessons from their failures. Nobody succeeds every time.
As one reason for superior performance.
how about a board game club? find an empty classroom you can use and start one.
Joke explained:

The original comment made a joke that mentioned PHP. It got downvoted. I thought I would make a joke myself based on the idea that it got downvoted because it mentioned PHP.

Then, something went horribly wrong.
moniker is nice.
I don't think [a brain is a machine]

Are you meaning to imply you think there is a spiritual base to human intelligence?
Japan's buraku, genetically similar to Japanase, still wait for society's embrace
Sure, it's worth all that. I'd trade both arms for Newton's brain. (I could always learn to write with my feet.)

The problem is, it is not at all a foregone conclusion that you will become one of the greats just because you throw most of your life at it. Should a retard give up on his life's goals sooner, later, or ever?
This article is interesting as an example of discrimination that is not race-based, but rather based on the buraku historically doing unclean jobs, like butchering. It's incredible that it's still taken decades to make strides eliminating discrimination against buraku, even through they are genetically indistinguishable from other Japanese.
The latter is what I meant. I think most people would trade everything to be one of the greats. But is it worth it for the shot at being one of them? I'd say absolutely.

Not to mention: as you go for it, you find better and better people along the way.
Why I do not work in Corporate America
Would you mind capitalizing "by", replacing "u" with "you", removing the comma, and capitalizing Paul Graham?

Thank you for your effort. I'd really appreciate it.

Edit: please don't downvote him. It was a good question, so let's all encourage him to continue contributing to Hacker News eh?
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What If Steve Jobs Doesn’t Come Back to Work? - Bits Blog
I guess the difficult work could be delegated to geniuses who want to work with you, while you complete the work within your means.

It's hard not to be devilishly jealous of their towering talent, though. Also, I'd imagine it would be extremely hard to earn their respect, so it they would be hard or impossible to find, or to keep.

You bring up a really interesting point. To me, doing the work myself matters more than realizing the vision. I never knew that about myself before, so thank you.
Review of Career Renegade by Jonathan Fields
Don't try to meet people like you. Instead, become interested in lots of different types of people, how they live, who they are, etc. And don't just become interested, but actually make an attempt to blend into their cultures, social groups, etc. This is what is known as "social hacking." Successfully doing this will allow you to incorporate lots of different points of view in your work and life, which will give you a richer experience. Sticking to people who are all "good" at one thing inevitably leads to dysfunctionality and irrelevance.

Oh, and don't try to look for smart people. Half of those people we label as "smart" are actually complete idiots. Just because society currently describes people who can type mathematically-intensive instructions to a machine as "smart" does not mean that they are any more intelligent than the person who has dedicated their time to understanding social nuance and child-rearing, or whatever. A lot of "dumb", "average" people are a lot smarter than you at many things; cooking, talking to girls, changing a flat tire, whatever... Learn to enjoy this.

And finally, whatever you do, do NOT attempt to surround yourself with people who consider themselves "interesting." That's the absolute WORST. There's nothing worse than a group of people who sit around and congratulate themselves for being so cool and important - which is exactly why so many people in positions of power, feeling that they have "arrived" and can thus finally mingle with people worthy of their mystical talents, are so utterly impotent at accomplishing anything of significance. But hey, if you really want to smoke pot with Bono on his yacht and pretend you're saving the world, go for it. (That's not a joke, by the way. He really does that.)
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http://lifehacker.com/5131781/where-to-go-when-google-notebo...
Key Technology Introduced in Hyper-V, Virtualization
The beta release of the update to Windows Server 2008 will be of special interest to those who work with virtualization, as it unveils a key technology long-promised by Microsoft. A blog on Microsoft's TechNet Website announced earlier this week that the "R2" beta version of Windows 2008 includes significant upgrades to Hyper-V, Microsoft's proprietary hypervisor. The most crucial of these is the introduction of "Live Migration," which allows virtual machines (VMs) to be moved from one physical server to another with no downtime or loss of connectivity.
Does anyone else feel that even if this is not a contractual breach that it's an ethical one?

If he wanted to keep his company then he shouldn't have sold it.
True, but can you imagine the loading time with all that Javascript kicking around? We'd have ads plus all the jQuery demos.
lsof, ngrep, history (only found out this one a month ago after 6 years of being a sysadmin)
The article sneers that "seven out of 10 rank themselves “above average” in academic ability."

This bias is not specific to Gen-Y: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon_effect
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Mr Johnson also said that the Company was securing access to significant coal properties both in Australia and overseas on which it could base its production of low cost, low sulphur diesel.
My general attitude to passwords is "Never choose something you'd be ashamed to recite to your mother over the phone", since you never know when you'll be in a position where you may have to do exactly that.
Hmm. I would say more like 50/50 these days sadly. Quite a few of the issues over the last couple of years have had borderline crank science articles as the main feature. They also now have lots of dull ID v. Science articles, plus other non-science columns cluttering up the limited space. The amount of space wasted on consciously artistic illustrations of articles for which a damn photograph would be far more informative is also vexing.

I'm thinking of cancelling the subscription and swapping back over to Nature. The content's far less accessible in Nature but more pithy.
I flip burgers for the wages.
Ask HN: Any Tips for Applying to Berkeley or Stanford?
This morning I woke up and checked the temperature. It is currently -18 degrees. This is much too cold for me, and I am seriously considering crossing off Michigan and anything in New England for grad school. As a result, I am now thinking about some schools on the west coast. Does anyone have any tips for applying to Berkeley or Stanford's mathematics program? Were you already published? Besides good grades and GRE scores, did you feel you needed something more to get into either of these schools?
I think that is actually accurate though. They are not relevant enough yet for their own search results.

...they are in alpha after all. I guess that does kind of seem like a pre-alpha step if you are a search engine.
XUI: A JavaScript Library for Mobile Devices
What terrible names. Sorry, but from a non-Unix perspective, symbols such as 'lsof' and 'ngrep' seem arbitrary and nonsensical.
Y Combinator IRC channel?
I've been a member of many social bookmarking sites basically since their beginnings - and I've rarely seen discussion that is up to par with the quality of the Ycombinator comments section.

Is there already an IRC channel for Ycombinator? If not, then let's make one!
Depression ahead, prepare for stock rout - Societe Generale
Cloud42: EC2 Management Tool
Yeah, Nature's great. I really think it's the best general science magazine / journal out there. I feel like they've managed to hit a nice level of accessibility in that if you've got a scientific background you can still get a whole lot of what's in there even if it's in a field you don't know well. I've debated subscribing several times, but can't justify the relatively high cost given the amount that I'd have time to read. I used to religiously read their feature of the week during the years that it was online for download.
There is #startups on irc.freenode.net with some people from here hanging there.