skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
seems more like commencement speech motivation, then how to survive and thrive in a down market. for a young startup founder with limited resources and runway, all the time spent reading and researching would be better allocated to talking with early customers and improving the product.
wow. this article is horribly biased.

i went to a lecture wolfram gave at my university when he was touring for NKS. he would answer a question from a CS professor until he went over the CS professor's head, then a biologist until he went over his head, then a physicist until he went over her head. flippantly passing off that level of genius by calling him "the lovable George Costanza of the mathematics community" says something. i understand wolfram has a huge ego, but that does not belittle his accomplishments.

just because your work "ruffled some feathers in the scientific community" currently, does not mean that it won't be considered ground breaking in 100 years. to be clear, i'm referring to how scientists become attached to their life's work and thus biased, as opposed to anything specific to wolfram or NKS and cellular automata.

finally, Alpha will be judged when it comes out. if it's worthwhile great, if not fine, but there's not much point in trying to persuade people of something before it is out.
I have a small blog hosted with Dreamhost and I am very happy with the service. The whole company seems particularly creative and very responsive to any question or need I have. Tech support in particular goes beyond simply responding to a problem and has taken the time to teach me how to fix issues myself the next time. It's a great company to associate one's site with, I think.
First of all, is the difference between project monitoring and project management obvious?
The younger you are when you first start programming, the better a programmer you'll end up being. Don't let anyone tell you you're too young.

You'll have to learn math /eventually/, but you don't need it yet. You can afford to focus on pure programming, and wait five years on the math.
Hardware as a rule isn't necessarily expensive. If you had a specialised peripheral you might be able to get going on a million -- maybe even a lot less if you can push functionality to software (eg a simple setup where the fpga or microcontroller does all the heavy lifting).

The problem is when you want to compete in a market with volume and wide distribution. Eg something like a tablet pc. Unless most of the idea comes from OEM parts then you need big money.
Did he actually go over their heads? Or did he just become too hard to follow?
> we should contract

Why is this off the table?

"Growth for the sake of growth is the philosophy of the cancer cell."
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I think the real threat to Twitter is that their medium/protocol will become genericized. Right now, they're living in the same spot that AIM one held. If they're not careful, someone will make an interoperable system, standardize the protocol, and then their monopoly is history.
"get out of the way and let me manage."
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Wow, that's a lot. Is that how much you reckon Anybot is spending? Would it be a lot cheaper to simply sell your hardware as a kit (less certifications, etc)?
In high school (at least here in the USA) teachers focus on math that will help students with the natural sciences, namely calculus and a bit of statistics.

For programming, what you need to read about are Logic and Discrete Mathematics. And yes, they absolutely will help you be a good programmer.
They are growing at double digit rates each month, so they must be doing something right. Perhaps you are analyzing this wrong, and their lack of features is a good thing, not a bad thing.
Definitely has some insightful commentary, but I feel like he hasn't gotten into the heart of the subject matter.

Haskell has something like NULL, it's called "undefined". At first, it feels like it's an ugly hack, something provided by the language designers as an afterthought. But it's theoretically sound, and pretty easy to construct manually. Just open up your Haskell REPL and type...

let x = x

This is an infinite loop. Another way to look at it is "let x = (let f x = f x in f ())". You will see x :: t, a single type variable, the most general polymorphic type. (This is also known as bottom type). In other words, it can be used anywhere, just like "NULL".

Shouldn't there be no values of bottom type in a statically typed language? How could this happen? Laziness. Try to force x, and you will find out that it never terminates. Because of laziness, any argument to any function could be a suspended infinite loop, or a suspended thrown exception. You just don't find out until you need the actual value bound to that name.

So, how is Haskell's undefined different from the NULL of so many languages? In one very key way... with NULL, one can check for NULLness. You can say "if (x == NULL)". With undefined, there's no way to express that. Any kind of expression that forces the value of undefined should itself be undefined.
I noticed this comment:
"When I reapply to jobs, I intend to put something similar on my resume, upper right corner.

What exactly is still up in the air, but perhaps something like a[5] == 5[a], More Magic, or 0x5f3759d5."

I get that "More Magic" is from this story (http://catb.org/esr/jargon/html/magic-story.html) and that "0x5f3759d5" is from Quake's Fast Inverse Square Root code (http://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-quakes-fas...).

I think a Steve Yegge post mentioned the equivalence of the a[5] == 5[a] principle but I can't seem to find any reference online expanding on this - anyone care to elaborate on this principle and/or possibly link the post if it actually exists?
There is a big difference between Twitter and AIM. Twitter messages are public.

Even (especially!) if their protocol is standardized they will benefit. They own the data and can publish it. There wasn't much AIM could do with private conversations without making people angry.
I'm not a fan. There are better options out there in terms of performance IMHO, but that's pretty cheap.
This kind of practice really irks me. I'm not sure what information these companies are going after, but what they're actually getting is "people who read lots of brain teaser books". Somehow I doubt that's what they're looking for.
I do what I can, thanks.
It's too easy to fake skill if you let the interview candidate talk about whatever they want. A lot of PhDs who can't really program will sound great if you let them control the topic, but ask them to write code to find the most frequent word in a page of text and they will be stumped.
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It's all about status and marketing. The halo effect is real.
For me the reasons are not really interesting anymore. The world economy is f*cked up.

Now what?
IMDb has a group of ultradedicated movie fans and it has an excellent rankings formula. The only reason their ratings are any good is that they have more movie buffs than any other place, so the reviews and ratings actually indicate a lot of very good movies.
Yeah - the ability to learn+adapt is more important.

So I'd say. Learn math. But maybe learn building a simple 3d game on the iPhone (maybe after Hello World though...).
There's some truth in what you are saying. We could put a link somewhere pointing to timmyontime dot com so people can have a better idea of what we are talking about.

By the way, are you angry or something? I don't understand why you are pissed off like that.
Is the YC program going to change in any way? I've often wondered just how far you guys can scale. I think we got a LOT of advantages coming into one of the later sessions (bigger peer group, more credibility, bigger demo day), but I envy the early YC classes a bit. I imagine back in the day, YC could REALLY dig in and help on the product side.

So, with going up to 30 funded startups per session, does YC itself increase headcount?
The problem is Twitter has no competition

Ever hear of facebook? Friendfeed?
There is a big difference between Twitter and AIM. Twitter messages are public.

Seems completely irrelevant. Twitter, friendfeed, facebook, and many more provide the exact same features. That's what makes something generic.
fair enough, i didn't word that well. what i was trying to convey was simply that he was holding conversations with computer scientists, biologists, and physicists each in their respective languages, which to me is pretty impressive.
I certainly want to work up to something like that, but at the moment I have enough on my plate!

I really want something reliable where I can just pay someone to do this for me, so I don't have to worry about it.
What they do have right is the open API, the features and innovation comes from third-party services.
I've been using them since '99, and all in all I'm happy with them. They've had some growing pains now and then, and since they're so big you'll get affected now and then when someone decides to DDoS one of their customers..

They support tons of tech, their control panel is quite useful, and just about everything is included in the base price.

They've also got those "virtual private machines", which means dedicated CPU and memory but they still take care of the boring admin stuff - but you don't get root access. Costs extra, of course.
Both are pretty simple to configure and run. The last website I launched, I just needed something to stick in front of my process to do compression, and found out that lighttpd can only compress static files it's serving from disk. nginx can compress any input it's serving.
Facebook is a closed network by default. Friendfeed is primarily an aggregator.

Nobody does exactly what Twitter does and does it well, or even in an interesting way. Twitter serves a unique niche.
This happens whenever there is a crisis. All the people who would normally go in to industry decide to take on grad school as a way to ride off the storm for a few years. As soon as things improve, enrollment levels will go back to "normal".
How many members in your team?
This "killer" talk is lame. It won't kill anything.

I remember seeing the Air at the top of the laptops sales charts on the Apple.com store.
Brain teasers are kind of extreme problem solving. Being able to tackle apparently impossible problems is a useful skill to have in most business situations. Think of it as a way to see if you can "think outside the box (tm)"
Fuel Industries / Games Looking for Smart Serverside peeps to work on games all day long
I work for a company out of Ottawa, Ontario. We're a smallish shop that is really starting to pop. We've got some bigish things coming in and we could definately use some smart server side peoples in short order.

Check out our listings, or if you've got experience with Java/C# in a network related way, drop me your CV or ask a question: shunter@fuelindustries.com

http://www.fuelindustries.com/careers/
10,000x7,500 as pathetically small

Ok, that's 75 megapixels. Ken Rockwell estimates that 35mm film is about 175 mp (http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/film-resolution.htm), so that is a technically realistic number. But you need an outstanding camera and photographer to make all those megapixels matter, and most people won't pay for and won't even notice the extra detail. Resolution bigger than the biggest computer doesn't matter much for mainstream users, and even a 6.1mp image from my DSLR looks good printed out at 8x10".

Now a hard drive full of HD movies would take up tons of space, but do you want to carry that around with you? Not to mention that movie studios will do whatever than can to prevent persistent files from being the digital format of choice. They would much rather stream on demand and charge per viewing or per rental.

We've always wanted more space, but computers are getting to the point where they're fast enough and big enough to satisfy common users. The fact that you're here on HN means that you're by definition not a common user.
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Trac and a daily standup?
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Are there bandwidth/data limitations with this deal?
"Google Killer": The tech journalists' kiss of death.

"AI Google Killer": The kiss of death and a box of poisoned chocolates.

I get the impression that tech journalists purposely overhype new ideas just so 6 months later they can trash the very thing they overhyped for not living up to its expectations. Job security for tech journalists.
This is a false dichotomy. Having the interviewee give a brief talk and following with a dialogue about something they've worked on in the past is absolutely vital. An interview consisting of that exclusively is probably better than an interview consisting solely of brain teasers. However, that's a silly comparison.

Way too many questions get labeled (on the internets) as "puzzles" and "brain teasers" when they are simply abstract algorithm questions. Crossing rivers with chickens and wolves, and/or figuring out the prisoners with the one room and the light-bulbs and all that crap are brain teasers and are totally useless. Impossible questions are not brain teasers. If I asked you how many tires are in the city of Chicago, and you said 1000, what should I think? What does that tell me?

Even still, way too many programmers decide to get intellectually offended (at least on the internet) when they hear about some problem that may involve, say, dropping light bulbs off a building to find the highest floor from which they can be safely dropped. This is nothing but an algorithm development question for a problem that doesn't have an off-the-shelf solution. This is testing your algorithmic thinking skills.

And as always I hear that phrasing such and such algorithm question "in real terms" is better than phrasing it abstractly. I've never seen a compelling argument that this is true except for this faux outrage that people have about puzzle questions. Phrasing it abstractly is quicker, simpler, and clearer. It removes all the hemming and hawing about implementation details. It removes answers like "doesn't intel have a library that does that?". It gets to the point, and quickly.

There is a second problem with that angst, and comments like: "I just can't muster any enthusiasm for completely random arbitrary puzzles in the face of so many actual, real world problems.". It is that we are computer scientists and abstract problem solving is something we should care about. Abstraction shouldn't be some barrier that makes it hard for you to think about a simple problem. Abstracting the real-world details away from you shouldn't get you emotional.

Besides, if I had an interview that was only a water cooler talk about something in the past, Jeff Atwood would smack that out of the park. And then I'd end up with a shop full of Jeff Atwoods. wink.
that wasn't a reflection of my current team [me + other guy: we manage via a todo list each week, and dont stop working till we've done all those and written next weeks tasks]
Olson preempts the question of “How come the Swiss aren’t poor given that they’ve had stability for so many centuries?” by looking at their constitution, which “makes it extremely difficult to pass new legislation. This makes it difficult for lobbies to get their way and thus greatly limits Switzerland’s losses from special interest legislation.”

Switzerland is like a hack of democracy, worth studying.

-- EDIT --

Great article, this quite stuck with also: Olson suggests that a rational voter should remain as ignorant as possible about politics and policies. Even if special interests manage to siphon off 80 percent of the voter’s income, the voter is better off devoting his or her energy to earning more rather than attempting to change the system (likely to require full-time effort, reducing income to $0, and be futile because the voter has no money compared to the special interests).

Sadly this is the absolute hard truth.

Some of the conclusions use a straw man when it comes to critiquing accepted economic theory. The economics are not quite as simple as their are being presented, never the less the vast majority of that article was excellent.
Having the same features is not the same as interoperability!

Ultimately people use the AIM network and AOL receives no net value. They can use any client and the data is private. Additionally they can migrate between clients because their network is a part of the protocol.

That the messages are public is completely relevant. As long as the twitter network is used, twitter can create value from the data. Twitter search only grows in value when more people are on their network.

This is why the comparison between AIM and Twitter is flawed.
I've heard they have problems with Django but handle Rails well (as of December, at least). Don't know if that has changed recently.
at 4 lbs it's too heavy to compete with the air.
http://dreamhost.com/unlimited.html

"What's not allowed in 'Unlimited'?
Basically, sites whose essential purpose is to use disk or bandwidth.

When making a website, you should be thinking about "How can I make an interesting site for my visitors while minimizing my server storage, bandwidth, file system, memory, and cpu impact as much as possible?"

The result will be a better experience for your visitors, your web host, and yourself!

Here are some specific examples of things not allowed:

- Copyrighted content you are not the copyright holder of.

- File upload / sharing / archive / backup / mirroring / distribution sites.

- A site created primarily to drive traffic to another site.
Making your account resources available (whether for free or pay) to the general public."
Opt out of Google's interest-based advertising
The difference is somewhat obvious, but you'll still need to back it up with a clear explanation of what the difference means in terms of your app. Otherwise it just comes across as a buzzword.

PS: I don't want to be rude but you've got to do a better job with your English. If your copy looks like this:

"Does the difference between project monitoring and project management is obvious?"

you're going to lose my attention way before project management vs. project monotoring has a chance to matter.

I think this is what you meant:

"Is the difference between project monitoring and project management obvious?"
An Outbreak of Autism, or a Statistical Fluke?
Jaiku, Brightkite. Calling Friendfeed "primarily an aggregator" seems like a dodge, they're pretty much just twitter with more features (one of which is aggregation).

Calling Twitter a unique niche, that's pretty lame. What they do, technically, is simple and could be repeated without much effort by pretty much anyone. They win, I think, because of branding ('twitter' and 'tweet' just seem destined for the lexicon) and because of the status they have among the technorati that's translating into mainstream adoption.
eBay is a pile of crap and easily copied, and yet it survives because of the network effects. I see not reason to think that Twitter won't maintain its monopoly for the exact same reason.

Well, actually I see one way it could lose the network effect battle - if it loses in the Twitter vs Facebook battle that's looming. Which is why it's so right that Twitter is pouring all its resources into expansion, rather than worrying about monetisation. Once they have a definite, secure monopoly on status broadcast messages, then they can think of the next step. Before that, everything must be geared towards building that monopoly.
I constantly had times where server load was going through the roof, bringing my site to a crawl or unavailable for hours. Support was responsive, but the problems never went away. Use it for a personal site or maybe a test project, but nothing more.
> Prove to me that the public works contractors will produce more jobs than the private sector would have with the same capital.

You are absolutely correct.

Dams, Bridges, Interstate Freeways, Air Traffic Control and Nuclear Power Plants all work so much better when they are built entirely by private enterprise. In cases where they were built using public obligations, they provide very little benefit and do not enable other industries.
Looking at its size, weight, construction, rigidity, manufacturing process, backlit keyboard, magnetic power connector, DisplayPort interface, etc. I'd have to conclude that every facet of the Air represents the cutting edge in industrial design. I also must admit that, while clearly subjective, the majority of my coworkers and I find it aesthetically pleasing to look at.

I am curious, then, as to why you would rate it as "so-so" hardware. Because it doesn't have a removable battery? Seriously, what?
Sorry for the mistake. I wrote it while someone was talking to me in a meeting and didn't want to look like a guy that wasn't listening.
My girl will undoubtedly stay with me.

But managing two households at once on $5,000.00 that YC offers is hard work. I would be eating ramen all the way for the entire summer.

Whats the percent chance that your actually profitable after 3 months worth of work.
asked, shes okay if it can be afforded..... Don't know that I can.

If I were to quit, does that mean that I will be unemployed or do I receive a check like employment from YC?
Twitter provides a very simple way to pass along messages.

Jaiku is too complex. Brightkite is too complex.

Sometimes not having extra features is a web site's primary feature.
I would say that being good at brainteaser problems only proves that you're good at brainteaser problems. Nothing else.
Except "_" is a perfectly good name for a symbol in Arc.

"nil" could be used instead, since nil isn't allowed to be rebound.

(let (x . nil) '(a b c) x)

even works already, since (unless it's been changed in some newer version of Arc I haven't installed yet) Arc just silently ignores the let-ing of nil:

(let nil t nil) ---> nil
Memory Switch Could Enable Brain Hacks
Right on. Twitter succeeds where others have failed because of its shear simplicity. Complicating the interface with advanced features that few people will use will not add to its appeal.
This would be an excellent YC application!
Ask HN: Why did this idea of Internet Time not work?
This is what I have been doing, but gosh sometimes I can't get a little help from my friends.
Did everybody really vote this article up based on the title? Because I, at least, am unable to discern any content here.
TechStars, (www.techstars.org) pays $6,000 per founder, so that is at least a thousand extra bucks there if you wanted to try that instead. There application deadline is Saturday I think.
Google-Backed 23andMe wants the spit of 10,000 people for research
HN allows recruiting posts now?
Ask HN: Cloud computing cheaper or more expensive than other solutions?
I have not dove into Amazon web services or Google or even Microsoft Azure.

But since Amazon is the only real leader right now in cloud computing.

Is it cheaper to go with Amazon or a location like Dream Host or Godaddy?

I know Amazon can scale, but you can do that with Godaddy as well...
Dell unveils Worlds Thinnest Laptop, the Adamo
No. I like how uncluttered the application is. It made me feel like we were applying for something professional, unlike some of the other applications I've seen, which either look decades-old or really sloppy and amateur.