skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most of your issues are addressed not true issues, but complaints from you about how OS X is not Windows.

* no reasonable way to write to a CD (!)

* installation of apps can be confusing to people not familiar with macs

* disk volumes (dmg files) can be confusing to people not familiar with macs

* not clear whether installing a virus checker and/or firewall is important to people not familiar with macs

These are all just complaints about how OS X is not Windows. All can be done in OS X quite simply if you learn how to use it.

I can understand that you may prefer the Windows way of doing things over the OS X way, but to count your unfamiliarity with a different operating system as a list of issues is not terribly useful.
I found the last bullet really interesting. At first I thought "wait, UPS isn't a tech company" but when you think about it, any time you buy something on the internet, you're giving money to UPS (or a competitor).
Can you return it?

I gave my mom a Macbook 5 years ago and she's never had to ask anyone for support.
You Can't Wait For The Perfect Business Model
> Yes, but if it's working, why let Sequoia in the deal?

You are thinking of YC as a for-profit company; don't. Remember, it was conceived as the result of PG's guilt when he advised students to seek out rich hackers for seed money--just not him. Moreover, one of YC's key goals is to give young, bright hackers the freedom to build valuable things without the impediments of bureaucracy. While the expense/revenue/profit structure is necessary for YC to attract talent and thrive, it's otherwise a benevolent venture. PG wants to expand the goodness. The four YC folks can only do so much.
Devil is in the details. Figure 2, last option on the chart - Display ads - indicates a massive decrease.

So in other words, marketers are increasing the time they spend doing "free" things. Being as that's exactly what you would expect them to do when budgets get tight, I'm not sure how this is even news.
Where are you guys getting these idiots. Yesterday it was comparing the US today with the Weimar Republic. Today it's some idiot who says it was better 500 years ago than today because they had local currencies based on grain. What utter bullshit. The great cathedrals were built as tourist attractions. The great cathedrals were built 800-900 years ago in a competition to glorify God. There weren't any tourist then. Tourism is a pretty recent invention. All our woes are a legacy of the British East India Corporation. The guy doesn't even understand what a limited liabiity corporation is.

Apologies for the impolite put down, but apply some critical thinking before you submit this stuff.
Friends versus Followers: Twitter’s elegant design for grouping contacts
Ask YC: Anyone seen the Aardvark'd movie with Paul Graham?
Hey guys,

has anyone seen this:

http://www.projectaardvark.com/movie/

I saw PG appears in there.

Is it good?

There's an awesome quote by PG in this:

"There's this custom among programmers of being nice, right, just like there's this custom among Wall Street people of seeming like a dick" :-)
There should be a wiki page about the creation of the Wikiid page (which apparently got deleted?). Surely that's relevant?
Probably not. I spent all day "configuring" it -- resizing the icons and text size, doing all that install stuff, imaging the drive, etc. Plus it's shipped.

How old was your mom when you got it for her? Did she have previous computer experience?
Just like everything else, it can work, but most people don't put the requisite effort into it to make it work. That means research and understanding people / the market first.
Another interesting question would be what alchemists got right about psychology and religion.

C.G. Jung was heavily influenced by some alchemists. Jung probably isn't a psychologist in any scientific way but I really don't know enough to judge his contribution.

Another interesting place where alchemy comes up is in Valis, Philip K. Dick's semi-autobiographical attempt at making sense of his purported visions. I think he writes about a continuity between christian gnostics and alchemists. I love this book but I haven't the slightest idea how I could find out if anything in there makes any sense.
Unless I'm very much mistaken, this does not implement "no shared state between threads/processes/whatever", which I consider a bare-minimum requirement to actually have Erlang.

You can try to discipline yourself to use such a philosophy anyhow, but Python is going to be one of the worst places to try that. It is mutable to its core, which is one of the reasons it is cool, but doesn't lend itself to this approach very well.
Legalese: This Is How All User Agreements Should Be Displayed
I really just meant what I posted - there isn't much to the article.

On the other hand, there is some truth to your comment. Aside from the guy who lives in China, there wasn't anything that suggested the authors had even been to California.

There are real disadvantages to living in Silicon Valley, and they didn't mention any of them. Instead, they brought up things like work culture and being showered with VC dollars, which actually aren't the big problems.
Maine to put a MacBook on every student's desk
Dude, have you met the man? Or are you regurgitating fables told to you at bedtime?

Seriously, calm the hell down.
She was 55 and uses a PC at work.
I was part of it from the beginning and really wanted it to go somewhere. The rules were a little stringent, but I thought it'd be good for people.

Too bad this didn't work out.
These are metadata, not numerically intensive data. There's plenty of file formats already out there - netCDF, HDF, etc.
Oh I don't agree with the article at all. I personally don't think the author understands the way economies work but still thought it was an entertaining read that can hopefully get some debate going.
True, false classification. (Metahumor would be humor about humor.)

Well, it's a wiki page, so anybody can edit it and fix stuff like that.
"Maybe this will prompt some research into the cultural factors in my community and how they translate into the observed behavior. "

I think it is not good to jump ahead in these conclusions.

what you missing is that the way filters are set up, a major part of indian immigrants that came here are the white collar types. Plus just by sheer numbers (there is one billion+ indians) there is more likely to produce a larger amount of smart/capable people, from a country with lests say 200million people.

When you look at the whole indian society, I would not call it a model. The caste system is still alive, and most indians live in slummy conditions (by european standards anyways).
Good example of geek get-togethers that tend to end well: game jams, such as the Global Game Jam.

There's focus (games! making games! a theme!), so participants just need to bring some skills (coding/art/music) and the willingness to awkwardly make impromptu teams with complete strangers. It's unlikely that the community will get swayed too far in one direction or another (all games need programming, and it's nice to have good art). "Idea men" have to find some sort of talent they can use for their team, otherwise they'll just be ignored or, at best, used as a playtester or level/content designer.

Negatives are that you have to clear out an entire weekend, and find a place with power and wifi that will let you stay (and potentially sleep) there.
Why is this so?

In NYC the guys doing physical computing are all "new media artists" from Pratt or Parsons. They are doing their projects with the hopes of getting a gallery show or maybe some contract work making a blinky display for a Macy's holiday window. The levels of desperation and competitiveness surrounding this activity are much higher in NYC than places where Arduino hacking is just considered an obscure hobby.

In contrast, in SF/Silicon Valley the people doing physical computing hacks are all well-paid engineers or programmers during the day and the arduino-artsy stuff is just a hobby. Nobody makes any money off of it and they are happy to share tips. Also, everyone in Silicon Valley already knows that you just buy everything from Digikey. ;)
Maybe those guys are like me and while they love to code for code's sake, their full time coding jobs and lives outside of work and the need for sleep are keeping them from coding outside of work.

Trust me I keep trying to find a way to do it, but when you can only code for either an hour or two or large chunks but only on the weekend, you just can't get into flow.

I keep hearing about people that can do it, and they allegedly also have friends, and fun away from the keyboard, and they supposedly are also not sleep deprived. Let's just call me an atheist about people like that.
Hey I have always had a doubt on this !

How do you know that the people running the show are showing you the actual result, I mean, can't they rig it to show some other guy as the winner?

Or is there some regulatory authority, an outside body to prevent this ?!
The bitch of it is that he's right so often. It's like John McEnroe on the tennis court.
Anyone else think that the author of this website (badchesse.com) resembles a young Steve Woz?
P-I Says Last Print Edition is Tomorrow
It has been suggested that this page or section be merged with Wikiid.
I do.

I'm using http://www.epharmacy.com.au/product.asp?id=3902&pname=Ea.... The packaging says it's -21db. I searched a little and found http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/369209-REG/Hearos_2210... which rates as -32db which sounds surprisingly high, but I've never tried it.

For the foam ones that I'd used, the wax I've got is much better. It could be the way I wear them or maybe their size. Using the wax earplugs, with very loud construction works at say 200m away, I can block out enough for me to work and I can't hear the TV in the other room with open door.

One thing with wax though, they are waterproof. I do feel a little pressure build up so it might take a little getting used to.
I concur.

He was ranting about Apple even though he didn't use any of their services or products? And I'm quite sure doing so would've saved him a lot of time and trouble.

I use Windows as well as OS X, and, knowing both sides, OS X is just so much more comfortable to use. Especially for people without previous knowledge, such as my mom or my sister. I did install OS X on my sister's Eee PC a while back and it runs great, she's never had any trouble with it. I'm confident it would've worked with his mother too. (Though buying a MacBook is much less trouble than hacking OS X on any other system)
I doubt we would ever do YC now: things are past the idea stage (and have been for a while) but I was thinking of coming up with a spin off idea just for the sheer experience (not really expecting to get funding).

Good luck in your app!
My childhood wasn't particularly horrible, but I've got to say that I'm jealous if there are people out there who actually got to experience bedtime fables about Zed Shaw. That would be awesome.
How Orbis Opened Up The World
Dupe of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=518449
I've had a pair of Beyerdynamic DT250-80s which haven't had any problems in 7 years of daily use.
Cool, now when I go for an interview I can quote my DMN (data mining number).
simple solution: go out of your way to use and promote smaller/better companies wherever possible.

i go out of my way to avoid giving money to best buy, norton, microsoft, etc..

these companies won't get better if you complain about them but continue to give them money. feed their competitors and you might see change.
i think this fellow is right on the money.

our economy borrows against future real growth to finance itself, and that will never work in the long term - that real growth is physically constrained, but the debt is not.

just look at our national debt - our economy will never grow fast enough in real wealth terms to be able to pay back the debt that is accumulating much faster. debt is just a number on paper, without bound. growth has to contend with the real world.
> Like the one that you appear to have just drawn.

I'm getting kinda sick of all accusations of racism. It is like a proverbial universal stick with which you can hit everyone with (even with just an accusation).

> B. Therefore, smartness and success must have something to do with being from India.

The smartness have to do with culture. People coming from a fairly poor country will work harder and will generally be more driven to achieve than a privileged person (in some countries your status is determined by the position you work in).

Also – the education level of most countries differ widely. It is no secret that the education (both at tertiary and other levels) in Africa is a giant step behind other developing nations (such as China or Brazil). So it would make sense to allow immigration from countries which have a good education system.

> C. Therefore, if a person is from India, we should give them a preferred immigration status over someone from another country.

If other immigrants from a country integrates well and is successful they should be given preference over another country - it is simply common sense. The immigration services of the USA should act in the interest of American citizens – thus it should select people that have the highest probability of making a positive contribution.

Also, people coming from countries where English is widely spoken has a much better change of integrating (e.g. common wealth countries).

> That Indian-Americans living in the United States are successful "on average" because the "average" person of Indian descent lives in India and can't afford to move to the United States.

Several countries work on a quota system. In this, the immigration quotas are designated for each country. It only makes sense to make the immigration quotas larger for groups who more easily integrate into the country – whether they are more successful based on work home education systems, work ethic, culture, etc..

> Another problem with the "model minority" label is: Who designs this "model"?

As far as I know most of the “model” minority is ascribed based on positive outcomes (e.g. university admission, SAT scores, unemployment rate, income) and negative outcomes (incarceration rate, welfare dependency, etc...)
Perhaps I am too much into Scheme and FP in general. I have come to view iterative loops as special case of tail recursion, necessary because some languages do not support general proper tail recursion.

Iterative loops and explicit recursion make you think about stuff you'd rather not think about. For example if I want to apply a function on a number of items:

> for(int i=0;i<n;i++)
> b[i]=f(a[i]);

plus managing the length of the array and creating the new array b in the first place.

With explicit recursion (in Haskell syntax):

> foo :: [a] -> [b]
> foo [] = []
> foo (x:xs) = (f x: foo xs)

You no longer have to care about the length of the list or an index. But you still have to think about where you place the recursive descent and how to make it tail recursive.

And the same function with combinators:

> foo :: [a] -> [b]
> foo = map f

Perhaps you will have to think a bit harder to write such a version, especially when you use the more advanced combinators like foldl/foldr, but reading is a pleasure.

Of course you also have to define the combinators somewhere --- but those definitions are way easier when they are not mirred in domain specific details.
This is a great article! Thanks for taking the time to write it.
Do people really buy the "it's because bankers are evil" line?

Yes, I think that's actually a common sentiment.
bail = you leave. With a greencard you're forced to stay, but with an H-1B, you can get your visa transferred to the new company you're working for (if you have another job).

In such instances, it's only fair that you re-imburse your employer for the fees that they incurred while processing your H-1B.
FbFund 2009
In that case, if you have a widescreen you can have two :vsplit going; on fullscreen there probably won't be enough columns for that. FWIW, my personal preference is having vim full-screen on one of my widescreen monitors which is rotated into portrait view. I routinely have four or more :sp windows going. Once again, far better utilization than with fullscreen.
Yes. And my code does 'nothing'. It just defines an algebraic datatype.
Business Link is good for general business advice but you're obviously better off with people that understand your technology, business model, etc. Again, general business advice is one thing but for UK specific tax and legals you need someone over here to talk to.

Open Coffee (http://opencoffee.ning.com/) is a great place to start, there's probably one near you. We've got roughly 3:2 - start-up businesses to lawyers, bankers, accountants, etc at OpenCoffee Bristol.

LinkedIn is OK, but better for finding potential mentors, advisers, etc, rather than general Q&A. I've found it a bit spammy with US 'experts' plugging their websites.

Twitter is rapidly becoming a real time Google and there are plenty of good UK people that will offer advice. Hat tip to http://twitter.com/z303 for pointing this thread out to me. :)

Another avenue is to get friendly with your local University incubator. Even if you're not a graduate, they'll usually dispense pretty good tech/start up advice and (should) be good hubs for finding additional advice.

As a last resort there's always email! If you talk to someone at a networking event, drop them a note to see if they'll be willing to chat. In this climate most people are willing to put in a little business development good will. Obviously they'll want payment for any heavy lifting but you should be able to work out what you need far more accurately before making that decision.
ISPs should embrace and cache bittorrent packets, not throttle it
This is reminiscent of Hofstadter's desire for a book of reviews of itself (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Hofstadter#Columnist).

Wikipedia tries to keep its integrity, but I think sometimes they need to be more reasonable. Someone ought to create a complement to wikipedia which allows people to add things like this and other non-spam articles which wikipedia editors won't tolerate.
So if they strike a deal with Apple, that's OK and fully transparent and open, but if it's with Dell or HP or any other MS-based laptop, that's evil? And what's wrong with, say, a Linux or FreeBSD laptop?

Here is another argument: the article states "the program is being paid for with existing resources at no extra cost to the taxpayer, which is good news in the current economic climate". Surely saving even more money by going with an open source alternative would have been better?

I mean, it's worked for France ( http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/03/french-polic... ).
When Microsoft provide software for low cost to education, it's an evil plot to get people to use their software and undermine the alternatives. When Apple do it, it's clever marketing.
Somehow, http://xkcd.com/545/ and http://xkcd.com/446/ seem appropriate to mention here.

Hint: Check the alt text
The article has good thoughts and I do not dismiss them so quickly. It is important to ask "how much value do banks and other investment vehicles create?". It is clear they are (or have become) highly inefficient and corrupt and some aspects either need to be eliminated or reinvented (possibly two sides of the same coin).

I hear many people talk about today's current economy issues without going back to basics. More so, without requiring proof that the current economic theory is correct. If you believe this man's thoughts are patently incorrect, can you at all prove (and I'm talking mathematical proof) the current system is? Where is the "critical thinking" that proves the current system should be supported?
No, it was a quick hack late at night, and I didn't think of archiving the data - sorry.
It may, actually. Partly simply because the larger the pool of startups, the more candidates there are for IPOs. But there are two reasons startups started now may be disproportionately likely to:

1. Because M&A has decreased so much. The great startups are less likely to be siphoned off by early acquisitions.

2. Because people willing to start startups now are going to be extra-determined. We've always wished we could put a question on the application form asking "Do you really want to do this?" It would be a waste of time, because everyone would just say yes. But now the economy is supplying that question for us.
I agree with you ("Hey self-selecting community of lispers: Is Lisp a good language for X?" is going to get a predictable reply), but half of the original question was about learning functional programming. Separating the two halves of the question would have probably got a more useful response.

Scheme is a good language for learning functional programming. (Haskell is as well, but I would argue that several techniques the poster is likely to learn from Haskell are difficult to use in non-lazy languages, and telling them apart requires experience they probably do not possess. Also, Haskell is very poorly suited to games, and (* dodges rocks* ) seems to me like a less practical language overall .)

Also: Lua is fast (certainly fast enough for prototyping), and has a clear migration path to C / C++ for libraries and the parts of the game that need the raw speed. Something on the JVM (including Java, of course) may better suit the author, since they are probably already familiar with many of the relevant libraries, but I don't have much experience there.
It's funny that just 2 or 3 years ago, bankers were rock stars. I lost the count of how many friends and acquaintances left Science & Engineering to try a career as investment bankers... and failed miserably.

Bankers deserve neither admiration (their job is not particularly noble), nor everyone's hatred (the economic crisis is not entirely their fault).
List of Browser Compatibility Tools
I guess not surprisingly, I attempted to write a book of reviews of itself once. The idea still lingers in my mind, and I'd suspect that after a handful of years I'll pull it out and finish it. (I think the idea will be to mark the book as a "50th anniversary edition" of itself, and have the entire thing just be a history of forwards to the book from various known literary critics, documenting the critical reception of the book throughout history. It's a very conceited idea.)
Maybe because he said not to do that.

Wozniak has asked tech-savvy viewers not to hack ABC's voting systems

http://gawker.com/5162920/nerds-squeal-with-glee-for-dancing...
PG is shown cooking pasta in the movie. But it's mainly about FogCreek.
Looks like a few people are vandalizing stuff - which is pretty awesome and should definitely be added to the page's "history" at some point - but for a reference point, the page looked like this when I submitted it: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Diikiw/Wikiid...
The Circle line tracks are ridiculous. But may I suggest the Victoria line, the Central Line, the Piccadilly Line?

The regular busses and the night busses are so much better than what the MBTA's offering, as far as surface transport.
This guy is British, so valve = vacuum tube.

I'm surprised that they were able to get all these supplies in a prison camp.

Other POWs have made simpler radios from less materials. The classic foxhole radio is completely passive and the only exotic item required is a piezoelectric speaker for listening. They are rare now, but were common in the past.
As a kid, reproducing stuff like this got me into EE.

That said, making your own insulation sucks bigtime. The other popular technique involved long thin bands of silk, probably not a luxary they had.

If you want to try something on a smaller scale, this can be constructed in an hour or two:

http://bizarrelabs.com/foxhole.htm

POW radio, but made for AM. Much simpler than shortwave.
That makes complete sense. Thanks