skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is no doubt in my mind that the CIA has trafficked in drugs. I grew up in the country between Nicaragua (The Contras) and Panama (Manuel Noriega) during the 80's. I'm sure that they still traffic drugs or worse to achieve whatever objectives they're after.

But, the idea of the entire DEA being in collusion with big Pharma to keep drugs illegal is a bit silly when there are other much more straight forward answers that fit the evidence much more readily.
I feel your pain, but that's what has to be done to make it all work.
Sounds like "Be Relentlessly Resourceful" is version 2.0 of "Be An Animal".

http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html#People
You mentioned on your blog that you tested out of your bachelor's degree. So what's your experience getting your degree from a non-traditional university? You seem somewhat of an autodidact, so did you find that the coursework was an acceptable study plan, or did you end up supplementing the coursework to learn the material?

The school you mentioned seems to be credible, it even has a couple engineering technology programs accredited by TAC of ABET. But I haven't had great experiences with getting college credit through standardized tests. I took several CLEP tests before entering college. And while it was definitely worth it to get rid of some general ed requirements, the tests were extremely easy. All I ended up doing was reading the study books once or twice before the tests. I don't think I learned a significant from preparing for those tests.
I know, but the question is "How?" Particularly because if you just do it naively - like calling the same prospect over and over again and begging them to buy - you tend not to get very good results. Relentlessly resourceful, not just relentless.
> Not everyone agrees on what is interesting

The problem is that the upvoters get a highly disproportionate say in the matter. Let's say

- 30% of the HN community finds that drug war article interesting. They all upvote it.
- 20% don't care or have no opinion. They do nothing.
- The other 50% think the article is only marginally on-topic. (I would say it is not at all on topic, but let's give the benefit of the doubt.)

For those HN users, the article isn't spam or evil or lame (it's the freakin' Economist!), so lumping it in with that sort of nastiness by flagging it seems extreme -- a bit like the nuclear option. I can't find any description of how the flagging works, so I don't know if flag counts are public or not.

What you end up with is a plurality of public upvoters balanced by a (I'm assuming) silent and mostly invisible minority of off-topic flaggers. These are very different axes of expression. They don't really balance each other in the case of a marginally on-topic submission.

What would help, particularly in these marginal cases, is a reciprocal downvote.
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Wake me up the minute they announce dividend payouts, I'll buy the stock then :)
I don't think I'm arguing for the other side.

The other side argues:
a) because illegal drugs should be legal (at this point in time),
b) contributing to demand by buying or selling illegal drugs is acceptable (at this point in time).

I'm arguing, or at least trying to argue:
a) because illegal drugs are not legal (at this point in time),
b) contributing to the demand for illegal drugs by buying or selling is not acceptable due to the violence that it fuels (at this point in time).

I define something acceptable as something morally permissible. If that makes sense.

> It is a logical fallacy to blame the consumer for systemic violence.

I would be sincerely interested in this topic, if you would like to go there. :)
YMMV, but I've found that in interpersonal situations the kind of resourcefulness that pays off the most is actually internally directed. If I give closer attention to my own reactions, I start to see what I'm doing to create or maintain a problem. That gives me new choices I didn't have before. I can stop doing those things or I can add something new, whereas it's hard to directly change what others are doing.

I've often wondered why this (applying introspection to social matters) works. For one thing, if I'm experiencing a certain reaction, the other person is often experiencing something similar (or opposite, but opposite is similar). For another, human relationships are systemic, meaning if a shift occurs in one place (you), some corresponding shift often occurs in another (them), yielding an effect that would be hard to bring about directly.

I guess what I'm saying is that the kind of resourcefulness you use in technical matters can be applied to social ones, but you have to learn how those two fields differ. If you try to naively treat one like the other, people will resist you till the cows come home. But the underlying qualities, like curiosity and play and trying different things, bridge both areas.
You're half right on that. I probably should use the word "unbelievable." It's either a good thing or bad thing. We can freely give to others in third world countries; however, current SEC Reg D rules that we cannot invest in companies that are struggling down the street. We must be accredited.

While it's good, it can also be viewed as a bad thing.
I'm faced with similar issues, but I find that by reaching out to the people and other resources around me, things arise that I would have never otherwise considered.

When you face a dead end, that's exactly when you need to tap into the relentless (never giving up) resourcefulness (looking in places you have not yet considered).

Sounds great in theory, but it's much harder in practice.

It's like starring up a 70 foot wall and wondering how to get over it.
Like Windows, the've outsold every OS out there, so what? well the wii is overrated, I got a wii two years ago and its full of dust now, I enjoyed wii sports the first month, after that I got tired of waiting for another good game, but nothing came, now I got a xbox 360 and it kicks the wii in the balls.
But that's a redditism too. Ironic, isn't it?
This is very interesting...
I hope it will be much faster than Amtrak.
If you take Amtrak from NYC to San Francisco for example, it would take around 50 hours with stops!

I know some people who don't really like to fly, and still prefer train or car in travelling.
I imagine that would depend on how limited what you are trying to achieve is. You could make it pretty easy if all it did was cut up a lecture into parts (table of contents) & annotated it.
Google is great for finding random data, but the results generally require human perusal. You couldn't feed them into a running program without at minimum a hand-written screen scraper.
flagging is a very different (and basically silent) axis of expression

I think the silence is a feature not a bug. The meta-noise reached its peak just before flagging was introduced, and it got way better after that. It still flares up intermittently, like now. An interesting observation is that it's mostly new(ish) users who post complaining meta-comments. Perhaps after they've been around for a while they notice that those discussions are always the same, as are the "sky is falling" threads.

Edit: uh-oh, the right margin is fast approaching. And damn it, I had managed to go at least 6 months without getting sucked in to this meta business!
Not so much version 2.0 as what happens when you apply that rule to the job of startup founder.
As it turns out, convex optimization is being seen by a few folks as the new least square. As wwalker mentioned, convex optimization is currently being used in solving for measurements taken with hardware implementing compressive sensing (or compressed sensing or compressive sampling). The A/D converter is just one of the application of compressive sensing. One of the most well known example is that of the single pixel camera at rice but there are many others. I have listed most of the known hardware implementing compressive sensing here:

http://igorcarron.googlepages.com/compressedsensinghardware

One should note that while convex optimization has given some real impetus to the field (by providing theoretical bounds), signal reconstruction is also using speedier techniques nowadays even though linear programming techniques remains some sort of gold standard. For those of you interested in the subject, I write a small blog on the subject of CS:

http://nuit-blanche.blogspot.com/search/label/CS

and have written a page trying to summarize our current understanding in this page(it is a bit technical):

http://igorcarron.googlepages.com/cs

Cheers,

Igor.
> Fuji was making point-and-shoot cameras with lower megapixels but superior image quality since '05

Could you provide some references for this, please?

Not because I disbelieve you, but for the opposite reason. I have an aging low-megapixel Fuji which appears to take better pictures than much 'better spec' cameras owned by my friends. I'd like a replacement, but I don't want to lose image quality.
Probably some kinds of programming, but not others. It depends how much of the effort is devoted to overcoming external constraints. Sometimes programming is like math, in which case the recipe may be more to be actively curious. But writing an app for end users on a buggy platform might require one to be relentlessly resourceful.
Right but if enough people find it interesting it finds its way to the front page. I think it makes sense in the context of saying that if X people like this, more than X other people will probably like it too. And that's the point - find stuff that the audience likes.

I think that's pretty healthy. It means that Paul Graham gets an article to the front page one day, and the next day a rebuttal to that article goes up right next to it. Doesn't matter if all the people who agree with one want to downvote the other - as long as it's good, we all get a chance to judge for ourselves.
REST APIs are not the gatekeepers to transparency: data with guaranteed access and any predictable format works fine, for many data sets.

Pretend they release the salary survey results in one big, gigantic text file broken down by county and updated yearly. If you wanted to figure out what the average salary of teachers was nationwide, rather than waiting for the government to implement average_salary_by_occupational_class you could just download the entire freaking thing and calculate it. And since you can download the entire freaking thing, nothing prevents you from exposing any API you care to give it. Make it RESTful, make it Big Freaking Java Enterprise XML, put it on an iPhone app responding only to telnet commands written in lolcat, whatever you want.

I've got a project on the back back burner which would benefit great from doing exactly that. (Downloading and exposing an API, not writing in lolcat.) If data.gov gives commercially interesting things I'd publish APIs to my slicing of it just for the PR benefit, since APIs are essentially just a no-marginal-cost industrial biproduct of my own need for the data.

(The engineering resources to develop APIs are no marginal cost. Accessing the API is a marginal cost, but I anticipate it being so low that it isn't worth me worrying about. If it gets to be a problem I'll rate limit it and OSS the scraper code.)
I thought most of the article was pretty standard stuff, but I was interested in this part:

Researchers have found that nodding can be used to 'regulate' conversations. If you make single, brief nods while your partner is speaking, these act as simple signs of attentiveness, which will maintain the flow of communication from the speaker. Double nods will change the rate at which the other person speaks, usually speeding up the flow, while triple nods or single, slow nods often interrupt the flow altogether, confusing speakers so much that they stop in their tracks. So, if you want to express interest and keep your partner chatting with you, stick to brief single nods.
No, I agree with your point. I just take it further by holding consumers responsible for fueling that violence when they could have done otherwise, not contributed to demand by obeying the laws.
Me: Why don't you just do x?

Founders: Could we really do x?

Me: Sure, why not? Can't hurt to try. How hard can it be
to do at least version 1 of x?

Founders: Ok [dubiously] we'll try it.

A few days later:

Founders: Pg, check out this demo of x. It was a lot harder
than we expected, but we just got it working. While
we were working on it, we thought "what if we did y..."
I have enough points to downvote comments, I come here all the time, and I've never felt the need to downvote a story. I just ignore it and wonder why everyone else thinks it's so interesting.
That only explains the mechanics.

It doesn't answer the important question of WHY?

WHY on earth would an allegedly intellectual someone, who wants to be taken seriously, include an anime stripper girl as a traffic meter?

I'm not offended, but I am bewildered by the lack of consideration of social implication.
Good and worthy discussion, though, because this is the very heart and soul of designing software (or at least web apps with discussion) for human beings.
I was going to do this anyway. I decided to as soon as I wrote that paragraph in the angel essay. (I would never decide what to write based on how many points a previous essay got, either high or low. It only works to write about what I'm currently interested in.)
I totally respect the Economist, but are they really saying something about the pointlessness of the drug war that I haven't heard a thousand times over already? Furthermore does it belong on a site devoted primarily to programming topics?

And on top of that it is clearly politics, which isn't fun to discuss or engage in. Unless you enjoy other high-risk, low-reward activities like, say, juggling chainsaws..
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How do you define direct vs. indirect involvement?

If a weapons dealer sells a terrorist a bomb knowing it will hurt innocent people, the dealer might not directly detonate the bomb themselves, but I think we would still hold the dealer partly responsible for supplying the tool.

Likewise, if a buyer buys an illegal good and it is known that, somewhere down the line, people were killed in the process of getting that good to the buyer, the buyer shares responsibility for supplying the motive, money.
Thanks for replying.

I guess I usually see someone accomplish some really hard task I assume they have some high level of innate ability or other advantage, when what really happens is that that they just started it and then dealt with any problems as they came up.

Hopefully I'll keep this in mind when ever I'm tempted to think that I need some big break or big idea to accomplish a goal.
And I was beginning to think reading your essays and HN comments was sufficient to authoritatively reason about your motives.
Ask HN: How are url shorteners making money?
I've seen a ton of url shorteners (like tinyurl.com) out there but haven't seen any real business model behind them... but they seem to survive. Are they doing it from donations, advertising or do they have other techniques?
You find quite of bit of support for legalizing marijuana on the Coasts, but even among the drug legalization crowd, I haven't really heard too many people suggesting that morphine/heroine derivatives like Vicodin and Oxycontin, or stimulants like cocaine be sold freely like alcohol or nicotine. I don't believe that our society is ready to accept that.

I would guess that much of the focus on marijuana is to do with setting achievable goals. Similarly to medical marijuana or soft decriminalisation. Marijuana is easier to 'sell' because it is so commonly used & arguably far less harmful then alcohol.

But on the whole, I agree with the article pretty much word-for-word. Decriminalising marijuana might be a positive step. Less risk of impurity. Less soft criminals in jail. Less unnecessary meddling in individual rights. But avoiding the big evils of drug prohibition: narco-states & a ($320b less whatever marijuana retailing is worth) illegal industry, that is the big fish.

On the question of the more harmful drugs, I suppose if we ever get there, they should be made available very gradually, & keep the process non-ideological.
On the Importance of Recognizing and Using Maps in Clojure
Or is it because they are so limited in functionality that cost of server processing is bare minimal?
Most articles are gone within a day as they fall off the front page.
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Long term future still bright for online advertising
I understand that some of them make money by inserting their IDs into referral links.
I did a MIQP package for the DeBeers Trading Company to help them decide who to sell to. A very odd project in many ways!
hmm... that seems shady... unless they make that clear ahead of time.
In spanish you might say "un barbaro". It's literally "a barbarian" but with the implication of native cunning, resourcefulness, drive, and few inhibitions. It's someone who always wins because he figures out a way.
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Link to pdfs:

http://www.sirc.org/publik/flirt.pdf

Also, their advanced guide to flirting:

http://www.sirc.org/publik/flirt2.pdf
Lets see...

We start with murderers. Then move on to rapists. All violent gang members and those involved in organized crime (this should be handled by a quasi-military organization). Anybody convicted of serious assault. Ie. permanent injury etc...

Need I go on or is this enough?
Now that you've reminded me of Mackay's equally wonderful book, I can't decide which of these two is my favorite ;-) All math books should be like these two gems. I never get tired of reading them.
We may help out with the occasional idea too. I don't mean to suggest that the preceding conversation is the only one. There so many different types of conversations about so many different problems.

It's not just me, either. There are also the other three YC partners, plus a constant stream of outside experts who meet with all the startups and talk to them about what they're working on.
They don't. To be honest the majority of url shorteners don't make any money at all. I know because I run one. http://urli.ca

It costs me nothing to run because it uses next to no resources on a server that I already pay for and I got the domain for free.

//Sidenote, if anyone is interested in using the service, we have a really simple api (as all the services do) http://urli.ca/api note: the urls auto-increment (ie. ab/ac/ad/ etc.)
"Really? Are you saying that the student who screws up and decides to experiment with drugs deserves to die?"

Deserve? who knows. You could form 5 different opinions based on 5 different lines of reasoning from the exact same data. My argument is that rigorous use of the death penalty for drug users and dealers will result in greater aggregate wealth and certainly get rid or at least significantly reduce the current enforcement problem.

The solution to high crime rates, if one is convinced of the correctness of the law in question, is to crack-down on illicit activities. In this case, I am convinced of the need for anti-drug legislation and given this, I think that the government should enforce this law.

Furthermore, I don't have a problem with controlled use for medical purposes. Ie. painkillers, etc...
Opportunistic (without its negative connotation) = resourceful. That gets you the direction of the vector, then you add relentlessly as the magnitude.
Downvotes are problematic, because even the best people can't always be trusted to use them correctly. A downvote should be reserved for something offtopic, evil, mean, etc., but too often a downvote simply means "I disagree".
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Stories on HN don't have to be about hacking, because good hackers aren't only interested in hacking, but they do have to be deeply interesting.

What does "deeply interesting" mean? It means stuff that teaches you about the world. A story about a robbery, for example, would probably not be deeply interesting. But if this robbery was a sign of some bigger, underlying trend, then perhaps it could be."

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
I can bring it down to one word:

MacGyver.
I actually happened to use a website Cooltext (http://cooltext.com/Buttons) recently, and it also created buttons for you. Comparatively, your website's interface is definitely much better (more dynamic - buttons reflect changes immediately), but in terms of features/options it would be a good idea to take a look at Cooltext and try to add in some of the features that they offer. (Like a wider set of fonts to choose from, button special effects, etc.)
I think there is a huge indirect value for the owners to be derived from the data and trends it shows.
While some may find this guide a bit obvious, I find it an interesting read, and somewhat fitting here in HN. I say this because when I think "hacker", I think of someone who knows more than just the correct API call to make, but the reason why. Well, this guide goes beyond stating what or how, but goes into why as well, in a way that reminds me of technical articles written for those who are past "Hello World".
Long Google Again
I don't want to start a dogpile, since you already admittedly feel like a doofus, but what's up with writing an article about "what's wrong with Hacker News" when you clearly don't have enough experience with Hacker News to have a clue about what's right with it and what's wrong?
That is great, thanks. BTW, Trevor also found this very interesting.
As long as iTunes & the like don't offer full CD-quality, lossless encodes of songs, I'll keep buying CDs.
Just a small niggle, but don't you mean "helpless" as opposed to "hapless"?

Helpless: "unable to help oneself; weak or dependent"

Hapless: "unlucky; luckless; unfortunate."

It seems to me that helpless has exactly the definition you seek. "Relentlessly resourceful" founders are able to help themselves, strong, and independent.

I know you disagree with the dictionary definition, but could it be that the two meanings merged in your mind? They're not really merged in mine... I see "hapless" as relating to luck, whereas helpless is relating to ability. It seems unnecessary to propose a new meaning for "hapless" when "helpless" fits the bill perfectly.

Handily enough, the antonyms of "helpless" are: ( http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/helpless )

able, capable, competent, enterprising, independent, resourceful, skilled, strong

Which seems to be exactly what you're aiming for. On the other hand, the antonyms of "hapless" are: " fortuitous, fortunate, lucky, well-off", which is not really what you mean, I imagine.

</niggle>
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you could probably run it on a $5 dreamhost account and get away with it.
No, I meant hapless, but as it's really used, not the obsolete definitions in most dictionaries.

Hapless means bad stuff is happening to you. Helpless just means you couldn't defend yourself if it did.
It would seem that, for isntance. tinyurl.com has ads on the homepage.
The service probably costs close to $0 to run so any upside is profit.