skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Yes, at first I was happy to be learning how to read. It seemed exciting and magical, but then I read this: Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. I read every last word of this garbage, and because of this piece of shit, I am never reading again." -- police officer Barbrady, South Park (1998)

I made it about 1/3 of the way into The Fountainhead but got bored and lost interest. Self-interest is ok, but I'm not going to make it my religion.

The architect who wouldn't design what people like (because it wasn't rational, as I recall) seemed like a really annoying person to deal with. And I certainly wouldn't want to invest in his startup :)
Where does Brittany Spears fit in the Kardashev Scale? There a millions of people that think she is more important than energy consumption. Should we put them all in the gas chamber?

Even if we let them live, Kardashev, brilliant though he may be, has hardly come up w/ a universal set of values that everyone is, should, or will eventually strive for.

The best you can do is to absorb his ideals, spread his word and create technology that furthers his goals. And in doing that you become an Ayn Rand follower.
That's quite stupid: all the issues she mentions are also the case for Windows: no control panel for touchpads, no DVD player bundled, and to watch anything interesting you have to install Codec packs from dodgy download pages - I prefer a package manager for that. iPod, I don't know why she couldn't connect it (never had such problems with Ubuntu and external drives). I never tried syncing the iPod, but it's not as if Windows comes with bundled iPod syncing either.

I guess you need a person in the know to set up Ubuntu properly for you, but that's it.

OS X scores a few points in the mentioned problem areas (at least it comes with a DVD player), but it isn't for everyone, either. Personally, I can't stand it.
Clever, I just voted you up, but consider the Apple vs. MS saga. One may have been a better investment, but which one is better?
The funny thing is that the answer to both question is unclear.

For investment, it definitely depends on when you invested:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=5y&s=MSFT&l=on&z...
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=my&s=MSFT&l=on&z...

The same goes for the early years btw -- apple had it's IPO much sooner than ms.

As for which product or company is better, that depends on what you're looking for. I don't believe that there is a single best solution. It's obvious that they both make products that meet a lot of people's needs.
I don't see a conflict of interest.
O2 lights up EDGE - looks like theres no 3G iPhone
You're taking what I said waaay too literally.

But if we're gonna go there (and this is all in jest), I see it like this: in 1981 Depeche Mode were a bunch of drama-whoring junkies with Casio keyboards, yet they managed to express the same basic ideas in far fewer words, plus a catchy euro-pop beat.

I appreciate some aspects of Ayn Rand's thought, but find her books a chore to read.

Alan Greenspan considers Ayn Rand a major influence? It's an interesting factoid, but falls far short of implying causality. I could make another Depeche Mode reference here, but it would be extremely tasteless.

When Greenspan and his ilk characterize people as 'parasites', I parse that as 'anyone who gets between me and the forests of money to which I am entitled'. I might see where he's coming from, but his rhetoric is needlessly violent.
OK, there isn't one. I lost here, I forgot that Objectivism ends up encompassing any rational belief so it's hard to argue against it.
More Students Attempting Masters Degrees Than Ever
I see at least two problems at the source of junk e-mail.
1X no authentication of sender. One of the most problematic consequence is that reporting errors to senders had to be disabled. smtp protocol, in its most common usage form, is broken. Relying on DNS to authenticate (DKIM) is just moving the problem to depend on DNS which is also weak from the security perspective.

2X the need for one to be contactable by anybody. This requires to open a door for incoming info which will be exploited by spammers. This is an old problem that managers are facing for years. The role of spam filter was hold by the secretary (human filtering phone calls, visits).

The problem 1 is a technical problem and it is a shame it has not been solved yet. Problem 2 is the real root of spamming. There are various ways to address problem 2. This is one of the business model I'm currently investigating.
Suing for patent on playlists?
Perhaps if you'd realized that The Fountainhead is based on the life of Frank Lloyd Wright or that by tirelessly adhering to existing architectural principles you're continuing to develop derivative crap, you might see what he did as a bit more revolutionary and appreciate what her message was a bit more. I couldn't put it down, but then, I don't really watch South Park.
Unicode art on reddit
> Perhaps if you'd realized that The Fountainhead is based on the life of Frank Lloyd Wright

No it isn't. Both Frank Lloyd Wright and Ayn Rand explicitly refuted such a claim: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Lloyd_Wright#Cultural_Ref...

In any case, Lloyd Wright's buildings might well have pushed the envelope on art, but they've been criticised on technical grounds.

And the idea that "if you don't do anything you're told not to you'll never do anything new" really doesn't need an 800-page exposition by someone who demonstrates a complete lack of empathy for humans, a penchant for rape, and no particular talent as a writer.
Not a huge Rand fan but I just thought it was an interesting take on why business folks have adopted her.

The philosophy works well with architecture because of "classical" limitations and the power of the individual to evoke change in the modern world. That's a message that any startupper needs even as you're certainly right - we need to iterate with customers in mind. But then, that's our sector. Imagine those crazy businesses where the innovator knew that, if he asked, people wanted faster horses.
I'd have to nominate 'We, The Living' as the best thing she ever wrote, on the grounds of both authenticity and quality. Everything after that was solipsistic pulp polemic, but I do retain a soft spot for WTL. But 'Anthem' was ripped off from 'We' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_%28novel%29) and can't hold a candle to either 'Brave New World' before or '1984' after; its only use is the same as that of 'The Communist Manifesto' (the two works are even as humourless as each other).
> Where does Brittany Spears fit in the Kardashev Scale? There a millions of people that think she is more important than energy consumption. Should we put them all in the gas chamber?

Only if we can use them as fuel.
Would that Ayn Rand had gone into banking rather than writing...
I assume she was still referring to Paul Stitt's book:

"In his book Fighting the Food Giants, Paul Stitt has tells us that the extrusion process used for these cereals destroys most of the nutrients in the grains."

(three paragraphs later, the rat study)

"Let me tell you about two studies which were not published. The first was described by Paul Stitt who wrote about an experiment conducted by a cereal company in which four sets of rats were given special diets... "

Since the book and study described by Paul are about cereal, and both paragraphs are near one another, I think the study is better described in that book. And since the study is attributed to a cereal company, that explains why it went unpublished.
Well, it doesn't. The exact rational beliefs that Objectivism encompasses were very carefully laid out by Rand before her death, and all other opinions, beliefs or perspectives were explicitly denounced as irrational. It's hard to take anything seriously that on the one hand says "reject irrationality, think for yourself, reach your own conclusion!" and on the other hand says "but the only way you'll know, and we'll accept, that you're being rational is that you'll reach these conclusions here".

And of course, her primary error is that humans are rational beings. We're not. We're evolved animals, and one of the things we've evolved is the ability to rationalise behaviours that stem from thoroughly irrational sources. That a whole bunch of bright self-made and aspiring individualists who prefer doing to theorising have a lot of time for someone who essentially gave them a way to feel just great about both means and ends which have caused pain to other people+ is hardly surprising; but it's correlation, not cause. Indeed, I suspect that the people who readily accept Rand would basically have thought and acted that way anyway, but would have found an alternative, less satisfying, justification for doing so (for example, the economical justification of the Austrians). The importance of Rand to such people is the moral justification she crafted for them.

+ Note, I'm not passing moral judgement here; what makes us feel guilty about our actions is the combination of empathy with knowledge of the pain we have caused someone else - but we can alleviate that guilt if we can convince ourselves it's for a greater good; and there is no greater good than to have done what is morally right.
> 800-page exposition by someone who demonstrates ..., a penchant for rape, ...

The relationships between her characters are usually sadomasochistic, not sexual abuse. But even when it does appear it takes up barely ten pages in her novels.

> ... and no particular talent as a writer.

Ironically contrary to her message, the popularity of her books suggests otherwise.
Yes, but Jeffrey Archer and Jackie Collins are popular.
Living Your Dreams, in a Manner of Speaking - Lucid Dreaming
OK. And because of this Rand isn't?
I think that every aspiring entrepreneur should buy and try to read the Fountainhead. Howard Roark (main character) is the prototypical entrepreneur fighting to get his ideas to a world that needs them.

It works intellectually, but it is best used for inspiration. How often do you find a piece of literature for $12 that MAY change your life.
I advised myself to skip them, and I'm happy so far with that advice.
Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?
You can take a screencast with Camtasia(pretty popular with internet marketers, not that bad...).

Then edit with basically any program...I like ArcSoft - ShowBiz for starters, it's easy and has alot of features. Or if you have a bit more video editing experience Adobe Premier or After Effects should help alot! Or if you're on a Mac...FinalCutPro for professional editing.

Hope this helped.

--
Auston
I never understood how geeks who claim to value freedom and civil liberties could also go back to CTY year after year. As someone who actually did the summer math program (once), CTY is a lot like living in a fascist country, but without the good food.
You said "popularity => talent" (ie. !popularity \/ talent = T). You also said "Rand has popularity".

I presented two cases where I assert
popularity /\ !talent = T, ie.
!popularity \/ talent = F,
to show that !(popularity => talent).

Your response: "so you claim that Rand does not have popularity".

Er, wtf?
Quick Poll (programming preference)
Ruby on Rails or PHP?

-For Webservice Consumption

-Webservice Deployment

-Database Interaction

-Scaling

anybody?
My mom taught me how to lucid dream when I was a kid to get rid of my recurring nightmares. The experience of battling against the evil monsters of my childhood dreams was one I will never forget.
Theory Girl by the University of Washington CSE Band [mp3]
I see. In all your arguments it is talent as judged by you. Therefore you are the arbiter of talent?

Can we just end this thread here before we get to the inevitable anticlimactic conclusion that people differ in opinion?
Benoit's Diary Shows Wrestler Was Depressed - TvByDemand | Forums | WWE
I found lucid dreaming by accident; it just happened to me a few times before I discovered some people called it "lucid dreaming".

There are some interesting mental experiments you can do when lucid dreaming, like the ones where you look at yourself in the mirror. What do you see? What do you see in the mirror when you move? What happens if you move into the mirror? The answers to these questions tend to be very interesting, but also very diverse between people.
I think you're misunderstanding him. He's simply pointing out that you said something false: that popularity is evidence that someone is a good writer.
How Bill Atkinson got the idea for the "marching ants" effect
But isn't it popularity among the elite (that is, critical popularity) that traditionally decides a writer's talent?
PHP all the way, and maybe .NET for some apps
Popularity isn't proof that someone is a good writer, but it certainly is evidence of same.
"Direct influence" may be too mild; Greenspan was one of her "inner circle" of followers.
Another WWE has been released.
Perl, Apache/mod_perl, PostgreSQL
After a few hundred years.
I taught myself how to snowboard through lucid dreaming. I'd recommend it. IIRC omega-3 is good for inducing lucid dreams, and since that's the one supplement the FDA actually recommends people take it kind of works out.
Technology Design or Evolution?
I don't know how far you'd want to rely on that evidence.

Only a small percentage of people buy books regularly. So to make a big bestseller you have to write a book that gets bought by that huge majority of people who don't read much. And usually their decisions are dominated by random extraneous factors: i.e. it's a biography of someone they admire, or is related to some doctrine they subscribe to, or contains facts they need or gossip they want to know about.

Think of the books you find in the houses of people who have hardly any books: the Bible, the Guinness Book of World Records, a Chilton car repair manual, a racy biography of Princess Di, a book of popular mysticism, a book about how to make money or lose weight. Those are the really big sellers.
Here is a longer version and forum for discussion.
http://jurvetson.blogspot.com/2006/07/dichotomy-of-design-an...
Try supporting your parents who live far away. What do you do if security wholes in several applications crop up, as was for example the case with Java, Flash and Winamp several times? How do you explain to a normal user through the phone how to update those applications, and make sure that the old versions are properly removed (which the auto-updaters that come with most applications often don't do)?
Me too. Having detested Catcher in the Rye and Slaughterhouse Five as a teen, I stopped reading books that seemed to only be popular within the context of being a teenager. It was definitely a good move.
This is New York Magazine, The New Yorker's 5% less snobby competitor.
Scientists to implant artificial cerebellum in robot
django, PostgreSQL
I love lucid dreaming, too bad that most of my dreams are only semi-lucid. There was just once that I woke up in the middle of the night and then convinced myself to enter a specific dream and it worked, the process took about 5 seconds (or so it seemed).

However I have to say I love the common non-lucid dreams more. You shouldn't always have what you want, and from personal experience I have learned much from unfortunate situations.

Random comment: Everytime I leave a comment here there is pressure to impress YC. This pressure either raises the quality of my messages or make them less honest.
If it's not general popularity, and it's only critical popularity after a few hundred years, then can a writer's talent even be judged in the short term?

(This question sounds smarmy, but I ask it earnestly.)
When a meeting with a VC goes bad (Jobloft)
First olive oil was good, then bad, then good again. It seems that they can find negatives about any food. People have to just stop avoiding and start living. Power to the brain.
I think we all lucid dream a little too much :) Its an entrepreneurial trait.
I was also a pitcher/presenter on this show, and the "Dragons" were some of the nicest VC's I've met.
HAHAHA. Vintage grad student.
A success story (26 year old Michael Worry CEO Nuvation)
Smith Project and MySQL
Why g ~ pi^2
Hacker fuel (can't live without it)
Alright, so everyone know the life of an entrepreneur/hacker is a 24/7 gig and there are certain foods/drinks an entrepreneur can't live without.

What gets you through the long days... cold pizza? energy drinks? loud music? cheap noodles?

share your "can't live without" diet
Probably not, no, since one of the tests of quality is timelessness.
In Surely You're Joking..., there's a great story about Richard Feynman's experiences with lucid dreaming (though I'm not sure he uses that phrase). It's what inspired me to try. Got it to work twice. Both experiences were during afternoon catnaps, for some reason.
Actually, I was thinking about this on the way into Sheffield, and I was wrong to use the term "the pain we cause"; I think what I actually mean is "the pain we have the means to prevent", which does encompass cause, but also covers things like survivor guilt as well. Rand's work allows people to admit that they do have the means to prevent the suffering of others (rather than pretending that they don't, which is dishonest), and yet to maintain that preventing that suffering would in fact be immoral, rather than merely impractical, unhelpful or counterproductive.
(You guys do get that I'm joking, right...?)
No, there's currently no neutral way.

Good judges can tell who the good writers are, but there's no currently no independent way of telling who the good judges are.

Empirically the oscillations of opinion seem to settle down after a few hundred years. Even then there are probably errors. E.g. tragedies will tend to be more highly regarded than comedies, because they seem more serious.
That's one explanation, and possibly not the best...
Python + Postgres, or ColdFusion + Postgres.
Failing that, I'd choose PHP if there's a chance anyone besides me will ever touch the project, or Ruby if its gonna be me all the way. Just because good php coders are easier to come by than Ruby ones, and because you've added "Scaling" as an item.
I'm saying Python and Ruby and not Django/Pylons/Rails because I won't pick a framework be default - only if it 100% fitted a particular project. Otherwise I'd rather code it myself from scratch.
Harel
One need only look at the current mess of Zimbabwe, where all the productive people both black and white, were driven out or killed, to see "John Galt" in action.
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That, and that when it was pointed out, his response was a non sequitur in the purest sense. Anyone who claims the mantle of rationality ought to have a better grasp of basic logic than that.
here's why it is dead wrong - have you heard of the word 'prejudice'?
I've started listening to my body more than the experts. After all, it has alot more experience than they do.
well that was entertaining
I had a similar situation just recently - only worse; when I suddenly became aware that I was dreaming, I thought "ah, a lucid dream! So I can do what I want here? Cool... what do I want to do...? Er... er... er... oh bugger I'm waking up now." Once I was awake, and had the chance to think about it, I realised that the aspect of my dreams I love most is their complete unpredictability despite also being completely convincing, and I was rather scared that I'd never get that back.

Happily the next night I was back to good old-fashioned vivid dreams.
Which, given that there's lots of omega 3 in cat food, works out nicely during the pre-funding phase. ;)
I have noticed g may be less in some pubs on Saturdays, so now I know pi decreases there as well.
Redbull ;)

(I'm drinking it right now) :P
Traditionally, man has two kinds of intellectual abilities: contemplative and practical. The only time the purely practical is best is when you aren't supposed to think critically.
Do people who use the word "f-bomb" invariably turn out to have no sense of humor? Or is it just me?

Am I the only one who actually laughs when a guy puts up a slide with a dictionary definition of the word "arrogant", admits that the definition fits his personality, and then (a few slides later) responds to other programmers' criticisms of his framework with a two-word slide: "f__k you"? Is the concept of "setup" followed by "punch line" really so obscure? Is the word "f__k" really so disturbing to your delicate insides?

Am I the only one who is amused by these lines from Linus Torvalds' git talk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8):

"If you actually like using CVS, you shouldn't be here... you should be in some mental institution, somewhere else."

"Git is so much better than everything else... because my brain did not rot from years and years of thinking CVS did something sane. Not everyone agreed with me... they were ugly and stupid."

"I decided I could write something better than any [source code management system] out there in two weeks... and I was right."

... despite the fact that Linus is (technically) insulting me and every programmer I've ever known?

And am I the only one in the world who saw the title of DHH's critique of the mobile web app ("You're not on a f__king plane!") and laughed out loud, because it was an obvious reference to Samuel "L" Jackson's famous line from "Snakes on a Plane"?

(I guess the reference would have been clearer if DHH had written "You're not reading this Motherf___ing Post on a Motherf___ing Plane", but somehow I doubt that such a title would have appeased the "f-bomb" crowd. Quite the contrary.)

I'd love to read more critiques of DHH (and Torvalds, and PG for that matter) that actually engage his ideas, and fewer tone-deaf, catty complaints about his attitude, his vocabulary, and the fact that not all of his apps are legendary success stories. If his work is so "anti-user", would you please give me some examples of similar apps that do a better job, and explain why you think so? If the web app which works offline is such an amazingly good idea, would you please tell me which ones you use, or perhaps build one and then sell it to me?
Neither. Django/MySQL (SQLite for dev/prototyping)
PHP 5 all the way + MySQL or Postgres.
The bloodsucking worm that fights allergies from inside your tummy
I'll take a guess, just for fun.... maybe 5 to 10 million, since they were acquired 6 months in and without a public version-1 out
What is "f-bomb"?
Yes, clearly we sometimes need to push what is "normal" and create things that people don't yet know they want, but we should be pragmatic about it. For example, Esperanto may be a more "rational" and well designed language, but I'm going to keep using English because that's what works for me. The early cars were "horseless carriages" because that was easier to build and easier for people to relate to, and there's nothing wrong with that.

The notion that "I know exactly what people need and my ideas are all rational and brilliant while other's are stupid and irrational" is just so arrogant and wrong, but it seemed to be the main point of the Fountainhead (based on the 1/3 of the book that I read 10 years ago...)
Poking around, I found http://www.jobloft.com/blog/2006/11/22/jobloftcom-the-suns-s... .. It's Jobloft's side of the story. Apparently the dragons wanted to invest $200,000 for 50% of the company. I have no idea if that's a good deal or not.
Another one I like:

http://www.cs.washington.edu/orgs/student-affairs/cseband/st...
Aaron Swartz's Jottit has been officially released
"Hi there. Sorry to bother you, but you asked me
to send you an email when Jottit was out for you
to take a look at. Well, after a lot of hard work
by my creators, Simon Carstensen and Aaron Swartz,
I'm happy to say that things are finally ready.

Take a look at

http://jottit.com/

and let me know what you think. (Just reply to
this email!)

Thanks so much,
- Jottit.com"
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