skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>On a complete tangent, this is one of the perks of living in a foreign country if you speak the language well - instant recognition that you have mastered their language, and that you must therefore not be a complete moron.

Absolutely. I'm a partner in a small educational venture in Taiwan, and my sales conversion rate is actually significantly better than that of our local staff. I don't believe for a second that it's because I'm that good. Having people shocked at my Chinese skills definitely gives me an extra oomph.

I'm not sure if Chinese people in the US would get the same credit.
Check out Ook! as well: http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/ook.html

Hello world:

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Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook.
Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook?
Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook.
Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook.
Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook! Ook. Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook.
Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook!
Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook!
Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook.
stretched way past the breaking point but what did you mean?

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/12/15/today-on-offworld-13.ht...
use the back button?
* Doesn't work in Safari for me.

* Page titles don't properly work with UTF-8.
> I'm not sure if Chinese people in the US would get the same credit.

I think the problem there is that you have no idea what background the person has. There are plenty of ethnically Chinese Americans who of course speak English perfectly, whereas if you're obviously "not from around there", people are going to connect the dots faster.
The credit card industry is already subject to a sizable amount of regulation: Truth in Lending Act, Fair Credit Billing Act, Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, etc. Granted, that's not to say the regs couldn't be better or start leaning more toward the consumer (especially those changes that happened with the bankruptcy "reform" a few years back) or that the agreements couldn't be written in more straightforward English.

For the issues you've listed (interest rate changes, etc.), all of this information really is included in the agreement you're given when you sign up for the card. And the bank or CC company is supposed to mail out the updates to the terms levels whenever changes are made. You have a choice on whether to agree to those changes or to cancel your card.

What usually happens instead, however, is that people just look at the glossy marketing brochure or whatever gimmick is used to promote the card (airline miles! cash back!). And of course, assume that nothing bad's going to happen.

There's a lot to be said about not signing your name on anything that you don't fully understand. It's the same with any legal agreement: employment contracts, software EULAs, etc.

[Full disclosure: I used to work at Discover.]
"... every other school has let me down by graduating some goof who i have interviewed or worked with. never again will i get uptight or impressed by stanford, mit or the ivies. ..."

Don't confuse 'intelligence' and 'education'. There are plenty of smart people who have never been to University. Likewise there are plenty of people who go to University who graduate but can't think beyond what they have been taught.
The left likes credentials? The right doesn't like intergenerational transmission of income?

These aren't any left or right I recognize. Who is PG thinking of?
(They do...but they're careful to hide the bodies.)
Those are actually some pretty innovative new features. Unfortunately, I don't think there has been enough of a shift away from what a lot of people saw as core issues ( python only, etc.) to flock to app engine en masse. When I check out who is using app engine right now, i'm a bit underwhelmed. http://code.google.com/appengine/casestudies.html
Startup Interview: FieldTurf India – A startup into artificial grass
http://this.paper.confuses.me
"An American Tragedy" by James Quinn
We require more vespene gas!
Nice link and info, thanks for that.
I have a Sony Bravia HDTV plugged into my house antennae. No cable. The reception is better than cable, and I get an array of HD-only channels I never even knew existed.

For example, in the Bay Area, I can get a weather-only channel from ABC (7.3), a weird traffic channel that shows 4 camera views poised at different highways, and a multitude of PBS channels (9.1, 9.2, 9.3, etc.) all with a picture better than you would believe possible.

I don't need all the infomercial channels cable provides, nor the sensationalist "news" channels. Sure, I miss ESPN from time to time, but thanks to my father-in-law's Slingbox, I can get my fix when I need it.

You'd be surprised how easily it is to ween yourself off of cable TV. As long as I have my cable Internet connection, and my FREE HD channels - sorry, and Netflix - I'm good to go.
Lol!

I used to work at BOL (UCLA Tech Support), awesome post, brings back good memories.
Look at Wall St. Wizard Finds Magic Had Skeptics
The Knot Imploding
I think what you saw was a patent application, and while the drawings were of a laptop-sized device fitting into an iMac-sized device, an iPhone-scale system would be more likely to see the light of day.

I'm wouldn't hold my breath, though. How large a display can the iPhone/iPod drive? How to justify the cost for something that is not a primary computer? What happens to your phone functionality? What about the accelerometer? What about rotation, as most apps are designed for vertical orientation? Wouldn't using the mouse as an input device be redundant? Would emulating touch control with the mouse (like the simulator) be adequate? Wouldn't it be cheaper to just add Bluetooth HID support and hang a magnifying glass in front of it? Etc, etc.
Facebook Connect Fourth Party Code
SHA-3 candidates are out
Okay, I just skimmed it, but that didn't make much sense. I guess it's a Scott Adams post...
Nobel Prizes per undergraduate is an interesting measure. More than one in every 1000 Caltech undergrads wins a Nobel Prize, and that number rises substantially if one restricts just to science students, not engineering (which doesn't have a Nobel). This suggests that the admissions office there is doing something right.
Access to funding and marketing continue to matter a lot for most startups. Since web products are so easy to change and refine in response to feedback the initial quality of a product doesn't matter too much. As long as you can get users to provide feedback and funding to stay alive while you refine the idea you have a much higher chance of success. I'd argue that YC provides both: more attention and better access to funding, particularly because YC's track record at picking winners. The better you get at picking winners the more important the YC brand becomes.
xs.md is much better and shorter. It uses 3 letters instead of 4. example: xs.md/LSP
Really? I think people have hesitated to launch major App Engine sites primarily because: (1) it isn't supposed to be production-ready yet, and (2) no one has hitherto had any idea how much it costs. It wouldn't be pleasant to spend time to write an app, become popular (and everyone hopes to become popular), and then have Google turn around and say, "Sorry, you blew out of your free quotas, and we aren't ready to bill you to extend them." Just as bad: "Your free app is popular, congratulations! You owe us $10K for the bandwidth and storage you used last month."
We're (TicketStumbler) a pretty good example of a startup that hasn't really been affected by being a YC company. [1]

I did YC because it seemed interesting and I needed a good excuse to quit my job. [2] Tom was bored and wanted to get out of Ohio.

When we launched on Techcrunch, we were met with widespread apathy. Techcrunch readers, by and large, weren't our target market and didn't give two shits about a ticket site. We expected this to happen, and it was still cool to be featured on Techcrunch anyways :). We weren't creating a new platform or becoming the next facebook - we were just solving a simple problem (finding tickets).

The investors we met with didn't care that we were with YC (many didn't even know), they cared that we were making money in an expanding market.

Also, our most targeted/best traffic has been from places that didn't know/didn't care who YC was (e.g. Ticketnews.com, Thrillist). Same situation for our users.

Finally, as Paul alluded to, the YC name can only do so much for you, if you don't have a good product none of it matters.

[1] - I'm only talking about the YC brand name/credentials, not the program itself, which certainly had a positive impact on TicketStumbler.

[2] - When much of your family lives in Detroit and has been recently or is, unemployed, it's difficult to say your ditching a cushie 60k per year job to do a startup. Having "backing" makes it much easier.
Really, python only isn't the issue. Sure, it takes a while to learn a new language, but a good programmer shouldn't have that much trouble.

The real problems are the other limitations. Background tasks, full text search, MapReduce, support for uploading files larger than 1MB, not having short bursts cause the application to exceed limits, limitations in the datastore like only returning 1,000 records.

Those are real limits to what the system allows you to do. Python doesn't stop you from producing something, those limitations might. Learning a new language isn't that hard if you're a programmer.
Thanks that was helpful.
One of the complicating factors in my case is code highlighting and particularly handing Scala code. But as others are pointing out, I guess I can think of it as a client side problem independent of what blogging software I run.
More like the downfall of crony capitalism, caused by the federal reserve.
Led me to http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/

Funniest single serving site ever.

You need to try it out, for example:

http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=something
Apple announces final MacWorld, Steve Jobs won't deliver keynote
Paul, how much of the conclusion did you decide on before starting the essay?

It felt more like an attempt to convince us, rather than a revelation to yourself. Not that that's bad, but you didn't seem excited.

What were your diffs?
http://daringfireball.net/2008/12/apple_netbooks_eh

Gruber does a pretty good job of calling this one what it is: bullshit.
You can always use a CNAME record to point blog.mysite.com to the hosted blog.
This is perhaps the most poorly-thought out post on economics I've read in a long time. Adams is essentially arguing for a completely unrealistic set of draconian regulations to manage every aspect of society, from capital investment to personal health. An example:

"Stock bubbles could be avoided by restricting how much money can be invested in stocks, on an annual basis, to keep the price earnings ratios around 15."

Err...what? Who decided 15 was the ideal? What about those companies that clearly don't deserve that multiple based on their growth prospects, or companies that clearly deserve more? Why bother with a market at all?

He asserts that it's not socialism, but I'm having a hard time seeing how it wouldn't be worse.
Something like the Celio Redfly?
I'm trying this out now. If this really syncs automatically I'll be amazed. Thanks for the recommendation.
That strange quirk in the FICO scoring system sounds a lot like coercion to participate under threat of financial harm, i.e. extortion.
This is good to hear! I just started a project that happens to fit well within GAE's free requirements, so it's good to know Google will support me as it grows.
Apple Announces Its Last Year at Macworld
Larry Wall on the Zen of Perl 6
PartyGaming founder to pay out $300m
I'm anti-noncompete too, but my comment wasn't normative, concerned with "pro" and "anti", "should" and "shouldn't"; it was just an attempt to describe the world. (Although my perception might be skewed by my own preferences, hopefully that hasn't made my description inaccurate.)

Anyway, from that perspective, what Paul Graham does or doesn't want me to do isn't relevant. I doubt he really wants me to do anything other than make insightful comments, since I'm not working with him.

What I'm saying is that the QA guy has more bargaining power if he can go work for your nearest competitor, and perhaps still more bargaining power if there is also no trade-secret law prohibiting him from taking that other information to the competitor, not just himself. (He can't do that legally in California.) So, all else being equal, he's more likely to move from Massachusetts to California than vice versa, especially if he's a really good QA guy who can get a job even when there's a lot of competition.

It might be the case that having access to really good QA guys are more important to your business being successful than being able to keep your QA guy from defecting. For example, maybe you're a good guy to work with, so the defecting isn't really a problem, and the difference between okay QA and really good QA is huge. In that case, you'd be better off doing business in California instead of Massachusetts, if that were the only difference between the two places.

On the other hand, if the thing that would make or break your business is being able to raise $500 million to build a semiconductor fabrication plant, you might find yourself siting it in Massachusetts (or Oregon, say) instead of California, in order to reassure your investors that they're getting the best possible deal from your employees.

So banning non-competes will attract certain businesses: the ones that are good to work for and in which employee skills are much more important for the company profits than, say, employee retention, secrecy, or capital equipment investment.

So I think it is especially knowledge and sales businesses that will tend to seek out areas with strong non-compete prohibitions --- not on purpose, but just because that's where the superstar scientists and salespeople are.
I certainly agree about managing debt reasonably. I also agree with changing companies. The practices are industry wide, however.
College admissions officers do not, as far as I know, follow up on the careers of the people they accept and see how they did.

In Canada, one of the strongest selling points of universities is what fraction of their students got a job in a related field within X years of graduation -- so at least here, institutions do track this sort of data.

In addition, there's a lot of work done to validate admissions processes based on the success of students during their undergraduate years; universities have extensive "black books" which tell them how a student graduating from high school X compares to a student graduating from high school Y given the same nominal high school marks (here in Canada, admissions are done primarily based on high school marks -- we don't have any equivalent to SATs).
Analysis: iPhone doesn't benifit mobile operators business, may be damaging.
I completely understand what you're saying, and I hope to always pursue my passions and the things that I care about, but I agree with the sentiment of the person you're responding to. The people in the article do not sound like they're happy and building things because they love to or because they want to make a difference. They all sound stressed and miserable because they're continually comparing their standard of living to the next guy, who is a little bit higher. Perhaps it's just the tone of the article, but they all sounded out of touch and ungrateful.
Is programming really appropriate for a seven-year-old?
Aubrey looks like he has aged
I'm sure this was intended as a joke but it was an actual issue for me, since I sometimes can't read an entire article without looking suspiciously inactive at work. :-)

I use an add-on for Firefox called "Read it Later" (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7661) and sync it with my Firefox at home. Sometimes I build quite a collection.
I agree with much in the essay, but it's interesting that PG used law as an example of an organization that broke from the deferred compensation principle.

Most "elite" law firms actually do pay by seniority. An associate is generally paid according to the number of years he or she has been with the firm. And while the salaries for young lawyers is very high, they are actually (often) working for the potential of becoming partner - a reward for work done earlier in life. This is the essence of deferred compensation.

Law firms also tend to be more impressed with credentials than almost any other segment of the economy. The pecking order of law schools would surprise many people from the engineering world. Of course, some schools do have stronger reputations (for good reason), but in law, Harvard > Columbia > Cornell. Students accepted to a school higher in the chain will prefer that school by a wide margin. Whereas engineering students, especially at the grad level don't tend to have an MIT > Stanford > Berkeley kind of mentality... they'd be more interested in how their research interests match up with faculty in that area.

I think Law, Medicine, and other professions will be the holdouts against the trend away from school-based credentials. It's probably no surprise - these are the few sectors of the economy that can actually ban someone (with the full weight of government behind them) from practicing based on degrees and exams.

The question is, when will the tide overtake them (if ever)? Will the opportunities in a free market eventually become so appealing that only second-rate people will seek out the credentialed industries?

I'm not joking here. Law school is three years, but we all know that people learn at different rates. I suspect that some people could learn the material in a few months, whereas others would need six years, and some would never be able to learn it at all. The requirement of a 3 year degree most definitely sends some of the brightest folks into other fields where they can leverage their exceptional ability to learn quickly (software seems to be a favorite field for these people).
just a random thought. Maybe they're switching to CES? their focus for the past 2 years has been "being a consumer electronics company".
In India they seem to make a huge difference. Friends and relatives who went to "IIT Preparation Courses" (6-12 months, at a boarding school, for getting into one of the IITs, the top technical colleges in the country) usually did vastly superior to others (of similar ability) who did not.
Why? Is there some system under which you can play rented HD content without HDCP? Does this remove any functionality which you previously had?
I have to disagree. it is true that the only reason we see small companies in the tech sector is that it is a young market that is still changing. but this change will continue, all indications are that tech will only change faster in the future. this means that the tech sector will perpetually act as if it were a new market.
That second to last paragraph sticks out like a sore thumb and should be removed, imho.

'left' and 'right' are pretty meaningless terms, their origins being the antithesis of American ideals. That paragraph says more about pg's political self-identification than anything else.
One important factor Paul left out was the ability to terminate bad employees. If an organization can't get rid of poor performers at reasonable cost, due to restrictive labor contracts or tenure for example, the organization will have to put much more effort into screening candidates.
"September 28, 1995" If only they found some way to put multiple cores on a single chip, so programs could truly exploit parallelism...
I agree with this sentiment entirely. I went to a public magnet high school with SAT scores averaging around 1480 and at least half our graduating class every year ends up in an ivy / mit / stanford. I'd say more than half of those who made it to the top tier got in from legacy / extracurriculars / obsessive dedication to good grades and making teachers happy as opposed to genuine intelligence and love of learning. Also curiously, like you said, everybody from my graduating class who went to caltech, although not necessarily teh uberg3nius math wiz, was at least minimally competent in some technical field.

Although one could make the case that a lot of those schools, especially the ivies, are picking people based on their ability to lead and 'make a difference' in some general sense rather than pure raw ability. Therefore they may intentionally focus on apparently manifested soft qualifications like achievement in extracurriculars, personal discipline as exhibited by a flawless GPA, or well-established personal connections.

This is all strictly re: undergrads of course. I've never seen a single retard get admitted to a top-tier PhD program in science or engineering.
any type of creative field runs into this problem a lot. a lot of people reach a certain level and realize that they don't actually have any talent for X, they were just good at following the directions.
Paul argues testing will be pushed aside by measurement of actual performance. He may be right but existing methods of testing are amazingly unsophisticated and open to improvement. For instance:

Most work in the real world is done in teams, but schools tend to grade on average team output, which is vulnerable to free riders. Why not rotate individuals through teams and measure independent contributions with some simple statistics? That's what coaches do for sports like rowing.

Knowledge in the real world is rarely all or nothing. It matters how confident you are in what you know. Will you risk your company's future on an algorithm? Why not adjust test results by student's own ratings of their confidence in their answers? Then we could see who can really be trusted with their knowledge.
Ask HN: Shared office space in Bay Area?
Working from home isn't an option for me, and Starbucks has too many distractions. Can anyone recommend a shared office/cubicle space rental arrangement in the Bay Area. All I need is a power connection for my laptop and high speed Internet. Thanks.