skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Its good to see someone else who understands the pitfalls of credit. I didn't realize it was such a controversial idea. I figured people smart enough to be on Hacker News were also smart enough to think paying >19% APR is unreasonable. I know where not to look for a CFO in the future ;)

edit i meant to say _un_reasonable
You can convert to Judaism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ger_tzedek
New, New Rules for the New, New Economy
Do Something New Every Three Years
Where I grew up (in Canada), it known by both names. I wouldn't be surprised if nearby areas used the UK name of "it".
Can you Answer this Question at Mahalo Answers?
The Internet Is a Brain
10 Most Popular Flash Games of 2008 — Mochi Network
Oh yes, I've heard of this. Fears among climatologists are that if temperatures increase even moderately above minimum predictions these methane hydrates will start melting and releasing methane directly into the atmosphere. If this happens, they exacerbate the warming problem. Methane is a better greenhouse gas than co2, meaning it's more dangerous. Many scientists are afraid that if the ices start melting, it will create a feedback warming loop that will release even more methane. The scenario they fear leads to a mean average temperature above that of just co2 warming. Some have even speculated it's possible to trigger a runaway loop that leads to a Venus situation. While those are still speculations, overall it shows that releasing captured methane is a very bad idea. It is utterly irresponsible to consider mining these materials and putting more greenhouse gases into the air.
Correction: shared libraries (DLLs) on Windows are shared between processes exactly the same way as it works on Linux, they're called 'shared' for a reason :-) They get "mapped" into virtual address space of every process, but physically there's only one copy, moreover, if you're running as an Admin, a process can alter the code in a shared DLL, causing it to work differently in all other processes that use it, that's one of the tricks that infamous rootkits do to hide themselves.

You are right, Windows processes are heavy. Moreover, context switch between processes on Windows is also a little slower, because NT-based kernels went "maximum security" route and perform full process isolation, that's also why Windows doesn't have a fork-like syscall, only environment variables, IIRC, can be cloned. (which is how, I suspect, Linux threads are implemented - they're probably share-everything fork calls).

On the other hand thread/fiber switch on Windows, I believe, is fastest of all popular x86 OSes.

All in all I like Windows process model a lot more. Clear separation between processes (share nothing) and threads (share everything except the stack) is well-known and well documented, and leads to a much nicer server-like application programming experience.

Although... I really like how easily you can nuke frozen processes on Linux if there is a problem. No programming tools/knowledge required. Dealing with hung threads would have been a lot harder.
Entrepreneur meetups in Melbourne
We need both Socialism and Capitalism to build and sustain a great nation.

1. Prevent race to the bottom aka Socialism
2. Promote race to the top aka Capitalism
My brother and I both started programming around age 5 or 6 when we discovered QBasic. We switched to Visual Basic years later, then he lost interest. I picked up C++ and kept going from there.

Today, I'm a software developer and he's a network administrator. He has no interest in programming.
The fraction of people getting a job in a related field isn't a good measure except for trade schools. Often, the most successful and interesting people do something unrelated to their undergraduate degree. Or they do something other than a "job".
http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html gives insights to using threads in server-side software.
You know the github guys named that feature for maximum effect...
1. Subscription Fee
2. Advertising Fee
"History suggests that, all other things being equal, a society prospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children's success directly."

I would love to see some evidence for this claim.
Your idea is horrifyingly out of touch with economic realities that it is laughable to say I'm out of touch with the big picture. I understand that people have credit card debt but to say no debt allowed in the country at all is just plain stupid.

You are basically arguing that massive across the board deflation of every good in the country and literaly putting every single person underwater on their mortgage is a GOOD thing. If house prices have to fall to the levels you want, everyone who owns a home now would lose so much money that the great depression would look like a cakewalk. Nearly every person with a mortgage would be bankrupt.

So this grand idea is to prevent a repeat of this temporary 50% reduction in our investments due to 5% of the people in the country defaulting on their mortgage? What?

Not to mention anyone that has a pile of cash today (i.e. those that are old enough to have paid off a mortgage and had the advantage of credit in their youth) would be able to outspend everyone else. So we would become a society where inheriting your parents wealth would out weight anything else you can do. Sounds very American.
Politics Not Pancreas the Reason for Jobs' Macworld Exit
Will Freemium save Web 2.0?
Programming = Practicing a New Religion
My intention wasn't to corner you, just to start a discussion. For arguments sake, let's get about as black hat as a Chinese mother with a shot at Oxford.

I don't know much about YC or what influences them apart from fragments from pg's essays.

Insisting that LISP or some other language no one uses is absolutely the best tool seems like it might be a bonus point. But I think that is as a bonus. What would be the core? They say smartness & an attitude that they are going to do something big with or without the program. The latter can be gamed. The former, I don't know much about the criteria.
Mahalo Answers User Gets $100 Payday For Giving PR Tips To Strippers
Grady Booch on The Irrelevance of Architecture
Not unless you are paying for your own insurance.

This is, however, how life insurance works.
Your idea is horrifyingly out of touch with economic realities that it is laughable to say I'm out of touch with the big picture.

Usually it worries me when users say such harsh things to one another, but in this case krschultz is right. This whole thread is surreal. Economies need debt to function.
Angel.
I would have done anything to program at seven. I knew that computer games were made by people (and sometimes, by a single person), and I was determined to do it, but nobody around knew how to get me started.

It wasn't till I was ten or eleven that a friend announced to me that he had found a program on his computer that would allow us to make video games (qbasic).

I think the thing I missed out on most is having a few more years of wildly creative programming without being encumbered by any ideas about the right way to program.
Use Factor, the postfix Lisp.
"You're stealing from people who count on your honesty to make a living."
No - assembly language is the perennial philosophy uniting the mystics of all religions.
I thought I was a dork b/c I could not solve this problem. PDF's have a bookmark function, am I missing something? Anyway what I do is, close the pdf and then I right click the icon and I click "rename" and I had the page number into the name of the work. Nifty, eh?
How Cultural Competency and Geoleadership Merge
Your example is hideously flawed, why don't you compare creation of a list with creation of a list / vector rather than an if statement. The equivalent lisp (clojure) to your python example

(if (not (nil? object)))

Is very simple to read, even if you hate parens.
Cool cool cool.

I never looked into Webmynd until seeing this. Thanks for adding HackerNews to the list of sources and kudos on the effective marketing :)
Don't worry, TARP funds will ensure their executives all receive bonuses this year.
Ultimately everything's a number in a computer, so this is not something only in C. It's just C's low-level nature.
" The economy has always been too complicated for experts to understand."

Adams' thesis doesn't rest upon any assumptions about the complexity of the historic economy. He's simply acknowledging a fact: the economy of today is much faster than it has ever been before. Scammers can effectively hide behind the speed of their actions. That's new.

Once upon a time, regulatory agencies like the SEC had a fighting chance of catching stock scams, because the market was slower. It was still efficient, but because there were fewer players, making fewer plays per billionth of a second, they had a chance of stopping crime. Today, the best that the SEC can do is to (maybe) catch these guys in retrospect -- and there's absolutely no chance that they're catching all of them. Thanks to modern technology, market manipulation can happen at the speed of light.
You can get a Nobel Prize science prizes for "physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine" but they often give them to 2 or 3 people so let's say 17 / (~8 per year over ~40 years) which gives you ~5%. That sounds great but I think most Nobel Ph.D. have 2 or 3 schools (if not more) in their background so it's really more like 2% which sounds about right for one of the top 25 science schools in the world.
"All it takes is a few beachheads in your economy that pay for performance. Measurement spreads like heat. If one part of a society is better at measurement than others, it tends to push the others to do better. "

There is little evidence of that - Car companies, investment banks, etc, etc
Sure Yahoo sucks, but take the good side of this story George Oates will do awesome work wherever she goes next so build something that's worth having her work on it and then get in touch
Bonuses are down 70% and top executives have given up theirs.
All credentials are just another way to reduce the "blameable" risk on a party. People fork out hundreds to do a whole bunch of certifications which are happily accepted by large organisations as they are somehow proven... This in turn is just a manifestation of an aspect of the Principal Agent Problem - Adverse Selection!!

(by the way I hate doing exams and I absolutely suck at them because when I study I am interested in learning more than I am in getting a great mark at an exam...)
"... and Season 2 of NerdTV never appeared ..."

sigh...

anyone care to have a stab at VC's becoming banks & tech becoming self financing?
oh and by the way, what should be the policy on inheritances?? those are a direct transfer of power/resources between generations which can just easily be seen as unfair advantages.
Warning, the first search tends to be slow, which makes one wonder how the thing works, but give it time and you'll see HN search results on the right. Successive searches are faster.
Maybe they just will receive the money anyway. They just won't call it a "bonus".
An Unlikely Sports Business Success Story
Here's the real link (question to poster: Why did you link to an unnecessary reference?)

http://george08.blogspot.com/2008/12/not-quite-what-i-had-in...

My comment: Congratulations to the affected. A website that does little besides arranging "img" elements is fundamentally lame. I was hit in the 2001 blowout, and it was probably the best thing that could have happened. Find something good.....
I've heard two different figures for Caltech. The 17 figure I read on Steve Hsu's blog; presumably he has the same source as you, although I assumed he was referring to undergrad only. That assumption seems to have been a mistake. The reason I made the assumption is that while I was a postdoc, one of the oncampus papers ran an article that set the number at 27, if I recall correctly, roughly equally split between undergrad and grad. In either case they're a long way ahead of other US Schools.
Well you got playing around with foxit reader to see if I can get bookmarks to work. I found that you can create bookmarks fairly easily and they are listed in order of creation. With that as long as you remember to bookmark where you are it seems to work. That being said I am still looking for something that does that automatically. I know that Microsoft reader actually does that nicely and I like how when you go full screen it blacks out the rest of the screen so you can focus. But nobody makes .lits anymore so its basically a useless tool.
Group Think
"... (flickr) A website that does little besides arranging "img" elements is fundamentally lame ..."

That isn't an accurate description of what flickr does. The kinds of problems they work on are a lot more complicated than arranging images.
"Ask someone who works at Google if there was ever a time when in the company's history when a Stanford or Berkeley degree wasn't a major advantage in the hiring process."

All my info is based on what they said (and hence somewhat unreliable), but the factors cited in my case were my startup experience, the interview feedback, and the fact that my skillset happened to fit what they're looking for at this point in time. I also have an Amherst degree, so I can't rule it out as a factor, but nobody once mentioned it. And my GPA sucked, so it certainly couldn't have been all academic.
U.S. News has a fairly broken ranking system. I think they try and set things up so schools jump around with little rime or reason so people will buy this years ranking vs just reading last years. I mean if if my school will rise and fall 5-10 points while I am their why try and give a number just list those that make the cut.
Aha! It is a religion!
And other followers of your essays, and people who got rejected from YC that first time. I checked out Reddit at first because I was curious what the folks who did get in were up to. And they happened to have built something cool, so I told a lot of my friends and family, and who knows who else they told.

I think it's a fairly good bet that Reddit did a lot better with their initial group of users being seeded from folks who'd heard of you or followed comp.lang.lisp, than if they tried to launch something among their UVa friends.
Hi,we are working on shopping cart at www.bestdealaz.com,
when implementing the "tell a friend" feature, I had done it with plan text mails. and one interesting find was that none of them crossed gmail's spam filter. we switched to table based good looking html mails with inline styling... and something nice happened... none of the mails get into spam folder now! all straight in the inbox. So, i guess this will of some help around here :)
Good stuff, Brilliant job

Effective marketing at its best!!!
Amherst isn't quite Ivy League, but I had a bunch of friends there with SATs in the 1400s, or even the high 1300s. I believe the median (from stats, not from friends) is about 1460.

It was fairly scary how many of my friends had 1590s or 1600s, though.
Ask HN: What is your definition of Artificial Intelligence
I'd be very interested in what your personal definitions for AI are ..

To me , intelligence is coming up with your own algorithm for solving a previously unseen problem.

Therefore,my (admittedly naive) definition of AI is :
Software that behaves satisfactorily under (previously) unseen conditions ..
If the leading criterion for admission was concrete evidence that the applicants collectively have the ability and motivation build things people want as measured in users and sales...

...then a cram school for YC would be a program much like YC in which younger teams built smaller, more easily guided technology start-ups.
Furthermore, what were you expecting from a guy who defended Intelligent Design not so long ago?
And even if it weren't much more technically complex than that, which I'm sure it is, a product is much more than the sum of the technologies behind it.

One of the most ubiquitous inventions I've seen develop in my lifetime is luggage on wheels. The technology is trivial (it's a combination of two simple things that have existed for centuries) but somehow it didn't get invented until the late '80s/early '90s. Now you wouldn't buy a suitcase without it, and it makes travel infinitely more pleasant.
Not sure about gaming YC, but that might be a trick for gaming performance measurements.
I disagree. Most finance news is very short sighted, living minute to minute... Personally I feel that Goldman Sachs has a very strong position in the years ahead; They don't even need lobbyists anymore

"Analysts wonder why Mr. Paulson hasn’t hired more individuals from other banks to limit the appearance that the Treasury Department has become a de facto Goldman division."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/business/19gold.html
Could also be because of increasing specialization. When my parents' generation was going to work, the sort of things you'd actually do might include serving beverages on a plane, assembling cars, or shuffling papers around. There's not much room for differentiation in these jobs: you either do them well or you don't do them, without many gradations in between. So the only way to "prove" that you had qualified, top-notch employees was to use their degree as a substitute for their competency.

A similar effect occurs in the financial and management consulting industries today, two of the most degree-conscious industries. It's nearly impossible to measure performance in these industries, because the results of an individual's work don't become apparent until 5-10 years later, and there are a whole host of confounding factors. Did the money manager get rich because he was good, or did he get rich because he was lucky?
Rails Metal: a micro-framework with the power of Rails
I wouldn't be surprised if come 2010, Apple launches its own replacement tradeshow, covering all Apple product lines, and uses it for the big splash product announcements.

"AppleWorld"? "AppleFest"?
I've suggested a rationale for the taboo, but I don't think there is such a thing as a "rational taboo". That's not how they work. The whole point of a taboo is that it doesn't require, or even allow, much rational thought. That's a design feature.

The problem with rational decision-making as a universal strategy is that people can be really bad at it. Especially when they really want to hit on that hot 14-year-old, or stab their bastard half-brother, or eat that triple cheeseburger. You'd be amazed at the kind of "logic" that people can apply in a situation like that. Or when the data that's required to make a rational decision is outside their personal experience. (If every generation had to experiment with living in the swamp -- losing half its population to malaria in the process -- it would be a lot less efficient than a simple taboo against swamp dwelling.)

So, yeah, it's irrational. Sometimes that is a good thing. More often you need to use some applied hypocrisy to keep your taboos aligned with reality. And sometimes it's time to chuck the old taboos and develop some shiny new ones.

In the particular case of 14 year olds and porn DVDs? Technology is moving so fast that the taboos can't keep up. Only a few decades ago it was taboo for fifty-year-olds to rent porn DVDs -- read Eric Schlosser's Reefer Madness for examples. That is changing very, very quickly thanks to the Internet, which has eroded the porn taboo pretty thoroughly. Who cares about DVDs anymore? We've only just woken up to discover that every 14-year-old in America has a free porn machine sitting on his or her desk, and social norms are struggling to catch up with that.
Using the left/right abstraction is really silly. It's a broken, continually redefined buzzword concept that is too simple... so don't bother with it.
Lisp Machine Family Tree
The [edit] link disappeared on me, or I would just correct the last 'a' to a 'c'.
Terrible situation, sorry to hear about it. Brm, you're exactly right, as truly high-quality employees are let go from failing big companies it creates unbelievable opportunities for startups to pick them up.

It's true no matter whether you work for a small company or large company--if you do something that's valuable to someone, you won't go hungry.
Philosophical perspectives about personal identity
Great strategy, just be honest with your "customers"...

"Hey, we built this awesome piece of software that will help you do [x]. We love building software for our customers. Help us continue building great software by paying $[y]."
I think in Australia kids call it 'chasey.'
All these things were done before massive consumer debt, and people with enough self discipline are continuing to do them now.

> how to do you start the business to make the cash reserves?

Not all businesses have this luxury, but fortunately for most of us software has an extremely low startup cost. Start with what you can afford and expand as you can afford it.

> how do people get an education when they can't afford one?
My wife payed $0 for her undergrad degree by getting good grades. Her second Masters was essentially covered by her employer. I payed $4,000 for a Masters in CS by working my tail off while I went to school.

> how do people get to work before they have a car to save up enough cash to buy a car?

Take the bus, slug (if its available in your community), ride a bike, or put some walking shoes on. I work with several engineers who are humble enough to ride their bikes to work. I have a neighbor who walks to work every day. Put away your money and before you know it you can buy a car. The concept of savings is really not that absurd.
Kids that age say things like "why are they eating each other" or "eeeeew, boy germs/cooties" or things like that.
ESPN Strives to Eject Clutter From Its Site
Psoriasis Treatment-Psoriatic-Psoriasis Pictures
Psoriasis is an inflammatory skin condition. There are five types, each with unique signs and symptoms. Between 10% and 30% of people who develop psoriasis get a related form of arthritis called “psoriatic arthritis,” which causes inflammation of the joints.
This is a pretty bad list. Most of these are unoriginal and I don't see any of the high quality ones from armor games or xgenstudios.
This is a very important step towards what Search will be (somewhat social). If there has been a HN thread about what I am looking for, I will check it before I check the Google results.
A review of Google's new App Engine health dashboard
Lexing/parsing is one of the easiest parts of writing a compiler these days. With a parser generator, it shouldn't take you more than a couple days to write the lexer and parser for a moderately-complex language.

I second the comments up-thread about error-reporting being the hardest part of a real compiler.
And it's only $20...I can understand why people steal Microsoft Office and the Adobe Suite, but I can't understand the incentive in stealing something like Transmit or TextMate. It seems that some people can't accept that some software costs money.

And while we're on the topic of small Mac software shops, can we safely call ShapeShifter abandonware yet?
This is a knock against FT's credibity. How can their business advice be relied upon when they can't get the human resources together to make a paywall instead of a payhurdle?
This is great.

I think "shameware" is much more compelling than DRMware. If you remind people that they are costing a small developer business and then let them pirate anyway then you are going to catch the people who might pay. The people who are going to pirate will do it whatever.

Also USB Overdrive is a great product. So I'm glad to see them trying something to keep their business viable.
Cute idea, but in firefox it asks me if I want to allow it to install and/or run "UNSAFE" software on my machine. What's this about?
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.religion.emacs/topics