skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: Help Choosing A Platform
I posted earlier asking how to approach Drupal. The response was wonderful, I truly appreciate it. It is now clear to me that Drupal can be a decent platform in the right circumstances.

My friend and I, while highly technical, lack experience programming. He has hacked up Drupal before and gotten a few sites up for activists to organize actions, so he knows a bit how to get modules working with each other. While he's never written any PHP or anything, he's pretty good with CSS and HTML.

The site we're going to be building is pretty basic. Users need the ability to create an account, and we are going to offer a service to verify their identity via certified mail. Thus, we're going to need to able to support user classes, and to 'lock' some of their profile info once they verify their info.

For the site itself, we really only need a robust Group featureset. Public and Private groups, each with a fairly large list of information. Also, we're going to need an email form with a few data fields that forwards to the owner of the group (and doesn't get picked up by spambots).

Also, we don't need to worry about scaling this at all. If people like the service, and actually use it, we're going to probably end up canning whatever we make right now and rewriting it in something else. If people actually use the service money to hire a small team won't be an issue.

How difficult will this be for 2 guys with little experience to figure out? We both have time, and have been working on this long enough that hitting a 2 week brick wall trying to get a module working will not deter us.

Any advice? Is there some other platform besides Drupal that is so much better that it will overcome the fact that our only experience is with Drupal?
You are providing Spokeo with your credentials for all your social networking apps. Isn't that scary?

At least there is one solace:
"Forgot your password?
Enter the email address to your account and we will email you a link to reset your password."

This might mean they are not storing your Spokeo password in plain text.
Indeed. I was sceptical at first and then laughed it away when it asked for my passwords.
everyone can think, but the fact of the matter is, there needs to workers, because technically if everyone thought, everyone would lead, leaving no one to follow.
Maybe I'm a complete idiot, but you are not making any sense to me at all.

Nazi Germany was a culture, a society. It was a brutal, horrible thing that should be despised for the many faults it had. Mongol society was a barbaric, violent, awful society and culture that should be shunned. Paleolithic tribal societies were also brutish, superstitious, harsh, and murderous towards themselves and outsiders. Many were also cannibals.

How is this in any way disparaging Germans, Mongolians, or people who may have come from a tribal background?

E-gad, man. We have to be able to make comparisons of how various things work. Some cultures work better than others. Sure, stupid people will extrapolate that to say that the _people_ in those cultures are good or bad. But stupid people do stupid things. That's no reason at all to give up on our duty as sentient beings to make comparisons and judgments. We don't give up living in houses simply because some stupid people burn them down. Why would we give up the Enlightenment because some cultures never grasped it?
Where to find the best coffee in San Francisco
An OLPC viewing live streaming video on justin.tv
What if the TSA were held to the same standards as doctors?
It almost works out of the box - just needed a better version of Flash, which was very easy to install:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Adobe_Flash
A very good point. At the end of the day, Java 1.5 is still 98% as good as the latest release. And a language without closures (while certainly frustrating if you've been pampered) doesn't break a language.
The economics of female circumcision
Even if they store the passwords as MD5 hashes the system is still extremely vulnerable because of MD5 hash google searches as detailed a while back. Besides, the whole system is hub for potentially thousands of users passwords, and that would worry me a little.

I supposed it'd use it instead of yahoo pipes or other mashup services - giving it lists of my friends' myspace pages and looking for new comments for example - but I would never give it my passwords.
have you ever been to a bazaar? Or is it just a rhetorical device?
I can't comment at all on the Nazis, as there is too much negative connotation to argue that effectively.

However:

>Mongol society was a barbaric, violent, awful society and culture that should be shunned.

Bullshit. Mongol society was different than western society. They had a tremendously effective military, but they were also known for tremendous religious tolerance, placing an importance on education and arts (teachers, lawyers and artists paid no taxes). It had basically no crime within the empire.

They built the largest empire the world has ever seen. If you honestly think they did that by walking around like jackbooted thugs, you sir are a fool.

Of course, they weren't perfect, but neither are we. To say something like the Mogols were "a barbaric, violent, awful society and culture that should be shunned" while blissfully ignoring the faults of our own culture is woefully ignorant and arrogant at the same time.

>Why would we give up the Enlightenment because some cultures never grasped it?

I'm not asking you to. I suggesting that the Enlightenment is but one path to the destination.
A videoblog about Plone, Python, Zope, Web2.0, Second Life and many more Technology topics.
I'm sure you are not suggesting that the average overall culture of 300+ million people changed after 9-11 to include things like honor killings, oppression towards women, clans instead of families, etc. I mean, that would be a miracle of miracles. Cultures change only slowly over time, right?

And you can't be suggesting that societies that adhere to things like, say, no banking, enslaving half the population, anti-rationalism, etc are successful ways to run a culture? Perhaps you are confusing stagnation with things that most any person would agree to be good: modern medicine, free markets, ability to form private contracts, etc.

These aren't values that are owned by one society that somehow we arbitrarily use to judge other societies. These are good ideas that occur time and time again no matter what the original culture. Some cultures work better than others. Some cultures are better at things like feeding their people, making them happy, and understanding the universe than others. Everything is not more or less the same.
2007 Had Its Share Of Internet Woes
Apple Tries To Patent A Way to Avoid Long Lines
Tips For Startups Can Apply To Any Business
How to ruin your college business
You have made my day. Thanks for the laugh.

I'm saying that having tens of thousands of people show up on horseback ready to invade Vienna isn't exactly a calling card for Mongol politeness. Sure the Mongols did good things! Tell you what? Let's take apart the good and bad things and compare and contrast them with other cultures, shall we? And maybe, after doing that for a while, we can come up with a list of attributes that make cultures better or worse. Which is exactly we started this conversation. LOL

"Of course they weren't perfect, but neither are we." Okey dokey. Do you understand that such statements completely alleviate the speaker of any obligation to continue analysis? Ted Bundy had a lot of faults, but who among us is perfect? Jack The Ripper may have done some bad things, but aren't we all flawed in some way? Cannibals ate your parents, but hey, don't we all get a little hungry now and then? I could go on, but I honestly don't mean to have fun at your expense.

Yes, there are good and bad things anywhere. Our duty as intelligent people is to take apart what works and what doesn't and keep building on what works. Not to just cast an unfocused eye on the world and say something like "looks all about the same to me. We all are in our journeys on our own paths." -- these sentiments, while sounding great, are not helpful to either us or other people.

I'm not talking about enlightenment, I'm talking about The Enlightenment -- the awakening in the west that things like freedom, rights, rationalism, and an open society were prerequisites to change and growth, and that societies that changed and grew were happier places to be. The world keeps changing -- it is not something that is up for debate. Societies/Cultures that embrace certain values are able to change along with it. Those that do not are not. It's been that way since recorded history.
I don't know, toxic seems like the right word after reading the conclusion.

The bulk of this piece is a build-up to his final warning that "advanced" cultures must be vigilant to avoid slipping [back] into warrior-esque social dogma.

What the author describes is the most basic form of a pattern which can emerge in societies at any level of advancement. The metaphorical problem is the implicit assignment of hierarchy and title, whereas a successful and fluid society will only grant these things explicitly as a result of behavior beneficial to all.
I think hardware makers should just chill out, relax, take a few weeks off, and maybe even help out with software.

It's not like current software usually utilizes anywhere near the full potential of given hardware.

Surely part of the fun is squeezing every last drop of performance out. Making hardware do cool stuff it wasn't exactly designed to do.

Ah well :)
>the awakening in the west that things like freedom, rights, rationalism, and an open society were prerequisites to change and growth, and that societies that changed and grew were happier places to be.

Is that what you tell the people of Iraq? How about Iran? How about Nicaragua? Vietnam?

You're comparing living inside an empire to being conquered by one and have the gall to suggest that you are morally superior?

Instead of making my day, you've got me crying. For someone who speaks highly of the Enlightenment, you sure have a long way to go in understanding the principles.
I think it would have been valuable if the articles at least mentioned the word nootropics if you are interested there is a lot more to learn about this topic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nootropic
> In low tech warfare, the fiercest and most cohesive side wins

I don't think there's any evidence for this, and certainly no evidence that Thar is related to battlefield cohesion. Battle has always been about tactics, technology, and men & materiel. The relevance of a "RAWR! we are fierce!" culture to victory is unsubstantiated BS, claims of B movies and high school football coaches to the contrary.

The Romans and Mongols weren't Thar and they militarily dominated neighboring Thar cultures with superior tactics and technology in a relatively low-tech environment. Bantu and Arab Thar people have always been relatively incompetent at war.

So why are Thar cultures common? It's simple and has nothing to do with military prowess: high birthrates. Thar cultures displace non-Thar cultures with a flood of human beings. There are expansionist cultures and cultures geared to limiting the population to a sustainable level. The expansionists always over-run the sustainables, at least in the intermediate term.
You can see this all over the world. In Africa Thar Bantu people have almost eradicated non-Thar indigineous cultures like the San over the last century. Thar Lebanon has overwhelmed non-thar Lebanese culture in just the last 50 years by way of birth rates. There are many, many examples.
I'm still not following you. Aside from the fact that you have no idea where I live, What do you mean that I'm comparing living inside an empire? So when America was formed, and the country basically consisted of a bunch of farmers, what was your excuse then? They were the same ideas then. Or how about ancient Greece? Never was the huge world empire that, say Britain was in the 1800s.

And I never said I was morally superior to anybody. Come now, think about this. I said that certain attributes work better than certain other ones. Cultures who have more or less of these attributes or more or less effective at very important things. It has nothing to do with me or any country or culture that I am a part of. In fact, that's the whole point! That those attributes exist outside of the cultures themselves. Isn't it great that we can analyze, compare, contrast, and discuss those attributes and what they do to help or hinder the happiness of the people who are in those cultures? Don't we have a duty to honestly and politely engage in conversations with people of other cultures so that they can help us as much as we help them? Moral superiority has nothing to do with it. A culture full of bad attributes is not such a hot place to live. There are, I'm sure, many more attributes that the ones we have today, and as long as we keep our heads on our shoulders we can continue to find them. In fact, it doesn't take much imagination to see that western culture is probably just as barbaric and brutish to some alien civilization as some cultures are to us. And that's exactly why we can't get lost in some kind of moral relativism: we've got a lot more work to do.
Well yeah, but I liked it better when the Internet was disaggregated.

At least then you had to spend hours looking at Google results to stalk someone.
Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs of 2007
Almost all 'design patterns' are just instances of yet another pattern: The Human Compiler.

Make your language do something it can't naturally do, by having to transform abstractions into hand crafted code. Especially when using a higher level language would make that 'design pattern' automatic or innecesary.

That said, I'm not agains patterns per se, I just don't see them as the 'Holy grail' that fixes all the developer problems if only you used them well, because they are nothing of that sort.

'Design patterns' are simply like an Assembler programmer doing ADTs, just because he knows about OOP, and he is methodic about his work, but it doesn't mean that what he's doing is the only way to use classes when programming.
Prediction: a Bayesian filter trained to detect uninsightful comments would be discovered to have given a surprisingly high rating to the token "racist".

The word is meaningful, or at least once was. But as with the names of fashion brands, it's a bad sign if it occurs a lot in your conversation.
Reading what you wrote I could not help but think of "What You Can't Say (http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html)"

There is a recent idea that criticizing other cultures is a bad idea and or bad form. However, cultures are unique so Thar and "honor" are separate concepts so not all cultures have "Thar". EX: Some early cultures in Europe practiced human sacrifice however over time that went out of style etc. In other words cultures are different, but we should not talk about how these differences may be good or bad at generating wealth?

In the modern world attempting to keep doing the same job your entire life will often fail. Doing your fathers job the same way he did is not going to work. And doing the same thing as your great grandfather in the same way he did is a really bad idea. However, it seems like bad form to criticize cultures who think sons should continue in their father's foot steps. At the same time it seems obvious that such cultures would on average be less likely to do well in the modern world.

Anyway, rather than defending the essay I would just ask you to read it again after "What You Can't Say" and see if you react in the same way. I think the he is trying to talk about a vary specific kind of "honor" vs attacking specific culture as a whole.
> the key to winning in ancient warfare was never to run away.

Not really true. "Hold the line" battle is practically a modern invention. Battle for most of human history looked more like guerilla campaigns and surprise massacres.

The Vikings, Mongols, Iroquoi and so on had no problem with the "He who fights and runs away..." sentiment. Thinking strategists win wars, not pumped up jocks.
The Mongols were not barbaric in the sense of being disorganized. They were barbaric in their cruelty. So whether they were jackbooted thugs depends on your definition of jackbooted thugs. Which is a pretty silly position to be in.

I would argue that this discussion has now reached such a point of vagueness that for all you know you could be saying the same things, and that since any actual disagreement between you is smaller than the (enormous) imprecision of each of your statements, all that's left driving this is your animosity to one another.
Standard writers' practice.
I'm sticking by the source who told me about Digg bringing in the bank to help them sell. Even if that's not how Digg wants to spin their strategy to Business Week.
So if you know "everyone" will not stop enabling, and you know most people won't, should you do so, even at great cost to yourself?
Automator action for Python scripts
>They were barbaric in their cruelty

Sure, if we take the accounts of medieval writers faced with looking at the tip of their spears. My point is that the same point of view would hold true for a Gaul facing the cruelty of the Roman legions. Neither representation is entirely accurate.

Being that the advancement of both commerce, trade and wealth under Rome and Khan are very similar, and collectively in fact point to the successes of warrior societies, the post author's point is rather shaky. To suggest that empires that lasted longer than any modern democracy has are backward and unstable is simply wrong.

The main issue I have is that we seem to forget that we're still dominated by a society (the US) that is very much a product of the warrior ethos. To say that we are somehow superior to an Arab world that still practices an outward version of "Thar" while completely disregarding that we ourselves have done the same - nay, actually denying it - is so shortsighted that it can only be described as racist.
Why Humans (and Baboons) Stress So Much
I don't take issue with the idea that certain aspects of some cultures should not be condoned as morally right.

However, the author has no facts to back anything he asserts. Warrior societies are successful, and always have been. Thar is a proven business practice, as it were.
Why buy what you can just copy? Digg.
It may be time to hire a consultant :)
Quoting from the article -

"For 99 percent of the beasts on this planet, stress is about three minutes of screaming in terror after which it's either over with or you're over with. And we turn it on for 30-year mortgages," --
Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford University neuroscientist
Yeah, it was the Project for the New American Century's fault. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Ce... They kind of hijacked the US government for a while.
Where do we keep getting the term "moral" from? I'm talking about the effectiveness of certain cultures to make their members happy and to adapt to change. I am not sure where we got into this discussion about morality.

This is the first time you have used the term "warrior society," so I am unsure as to what you mean. Last I checked, there were no truly pacifist societies that existed for more than just a few years (or were supported by another society prepared to use force)

My fuzzy-definition alarm is going off again. I sure hope you don't mean to use the term "warrior society" in such a broad sense that it has no particular meaning at all. As a starter, I would suggest societies that have mandatory military service, require the ownership of weapons, believe that the strong should conquer the weak, etc. I could add more, but it's your term. I think there's a big difference between what I think of as a warrior society and a society that uses violence in measured ways.

But I submit. Uncle. Whatever. I enjoy people having differences of opinion. I also feel that in small teams you have to chase down these differences and get them resolved. It's not like one person can think of the customer as being a 70-year-old lady and the other person think of them as being a teenage male. Terms mean things. I think if you keep chasing, as pg opined, you'll eventually end up in fairly close agreement. There's a balance between being probing and inquisitive and being obnoxious. I was probably a little obnoxious. Sorry about that.
"robust Group featureset. Public and Private groups, each with a fairly large list of information."

It's unclear what this means - but the organic groups set of modules is probably as close as you will get in Drupal with existing modules.

if not, then I agree with nanijoe.
It seems like you might want to use Ruby on Rails because you can "describe" what you want to do and Rails will make the basic pages and database tables.

From what you are describing, what you are looking to do is very simple. There are probably examples that encompass most of the functionality you want to make. Look here for lots of free examples: http://www.codango.com/
I suppose it depends on how groundbreaking your project is. A lot of web apps are mostly glue code and presentation, making libraries more important than language features. If you're solving more interesting problems, your ability to write new code will be more important.
Deer always seemed constantly petrified to me, but maybe that was because I only saw them at times when I happened to be near.
This article should have been published in the National Enquirer. I can't think of any other demographic that would fall for the crap this guy is trying to sell.
I do not see "news.yc". I am not happy. Maybe that is good sign. If i went where 99% of the population goes to do things, find things, see things, then I must be in real trouble.
Avoid back pain while sitting
It's sad how many people continue filling it in anyway.
That was expected (bankruptcy filings were announced a while back, and companies in bankruptcy can't be listed on NASDAQ). Hopefully, everyone who was short SCO has sold to cover before now. SCO, the company, still exists, and still has ongoing lawsuits, unbelievable as it sounds. But, you're quite right that this is the end of the SCOX stock story. I don't foresee them recovering from this--have you seen their new products in the mobile space that they intended to be the next big thing? They're so bad and so clearly not viable that I have to assume there was something semi-fraudulent going on...like raising more money from credulous investors.
Digg Traffic Has Questionable Value For Most Niche Publishers
Dave Winer launches his new product later today...
Apparently some kind of photo app that sucks in photos from major news organisation - OSX only at the moment.
The US is not a "thar-ish" country. It is probably the farthest from "thar-ish" of all the major countries in the world if you judge by the importance placed on individualism over groups and disregard of what other people think.
> And I'm not convinced there's much middle ground between these two models.

Amazon wishlist? (Granted, it does require the participation of the recipients, but that's the price of privacy.)

Edit: There could easily be an automated system where you type in things you know the recipient has and likes, and then it trawls through an Amazon-style recommendation system to find similar items.
I guess that would depend on the cost.

This reminds me of the story of the old man who was picking up beached starfish and throwing them back into the sea. A young man came by and said, "You old fool! There are thousands are starfish dying here - you can never save them all. Don't you see that what you're doing doesn't matter?"

As the old man threw another into the sea, he responded, "To that one it does."
VC Fundraising Manual: Why You Should Facilitate Due Diligence
Some entrepreneurs view the due diligence process as a threat to their access to capital. As a result, they do not make their best effort to facilitate the process. This is the wrong approach.

The due diligence process is an opportunity for the entrepreneur to achieve three key objectives: