skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
False alarms abound. A general sense of alarm is maintained. The government sets itself up as a protector. People do whatever the government wants. The system is working perfectly. What problem is Bruce Schneier trying to solve here?
congrats on the launch - maybe its just me - but it took me a while to figure out what the site does - I don't think that info belongs in the FAQ section.

Design is clean - well done.

Again I'm not a big Fantasy player or online gamer but there are terms and language on the site (Draft lobby) that I simply did not know what they are referring to.

a short demo video, or "new to fantasy sports?" tab would be helpful. I guess I felt like I wanted to use the site but did not know what to do.
I think it's a good idea. People are obsessed with originality, but the reality is that most truly great businesses are just taking an existing idea and doing it BETTER (Google, iPod, MacOS, Reddit).

I think the first mover "advantage" really isn't.
A little striptease for your Web password? - Security
I like the sounds of that approach.

Could be a good opportunity to get your team working together, learn from some small mistakes, etc.
MySpace to announce OpenSocial with Google today?
Logic and price rationality have no more to do with it than buying a McMansion or a Mercedes instead of what you really need.

Having a kid at Swarthmore is a great way for boomer parents to further differentiate themselves from the pack.
Business Natural Languages - Introduction
To better educate yourself against a common "false alarm" check out this movie--all TSA screeners are req'd to watch it before Thanksgiving. It's produced by the Department of Justice.

http://sikhswim.com/2007/10/16/video-on-common-ground/

-Savraj
It doesn't work, though, because all the boomer parent's friends' kids went to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Amherst, Williams, and Columbia.

I think they do it to avoid falling behind, because while having a kid go to Amherst is nothing special with this group, having one go to UMass is borderline shameful. Which is idiotic reasoning IMHO, because that UMass student can take the exact same courses as the Amherst kid, taught by the same professors, and might be just as smart, but parents can be illogical sometimes.
My only explanation is that a country is globally as intelligent as the mode of the 51% less intelligent of its citizens (it may even be much less than that due to bipolar politics).

I can't explain the braindead politics we have to deal with in western countries otherwise.
Sorry, Schneier, but I have to report this to the authorities.
The Invincible Man
"In criminal matters, law enforcement is experienced in separating legitimate tips from unsubstantiated fears, and allocating resources accordingly; we should expect no less from them when it comes to terrorism."

I don't think you can expect untrained citizens to distinguish between false alarms and something genuinely concerning. However, it is asinine for a trained police officer to then investigate, find nothing, and arrest someone anyway. There needs to be consequences for anyone in a position of authority for arresting an innocent person simply to cover their own posteriors.
[citation needed] for everything this article says.
"PHP will probably do OK here, all it needs to do is spit out some JavaScript, but anyone who has coded in it knows the vast potential for fail[sic] it presents."

Now that's a compelling argument.
Behind the scenes at 37signals: Design
Tumblr 3.0 Released
> The question is whether the current security system is appropriately tuned to the security threat. Does it do more harm than good?

Let's see... The current "security system" of the US seems to consist in attacking other countries, turning its citizens into paranoids and implementing counter-productive policies. It kills thousands of people and destroys wealth. Kind of like a second 9/11, with less intensity. So I guess it does way more harm than good.

And please, don't mod this as a troll; that's basically the thesis of Schneier's book "Beyond fear".
300,000 dollars? They couldn't take out a few 2nd mortgages?
I don't think anyone "needs" to graduate from a top college. But I think it's also true that the quality of the engineering education at, say, MIT is much better than the quality of the education at an average university. Part of that is the quality of the lectures and lecturers, but another major factor is the environment -- the quality of your fellow students, and the social norms in a place like that.

I think that is even more so for graduate programs, but significantly less so for degrees in arts or the social sciences -- if you're taking poli sci, I think most of the advantage of going to Harvard is in the social connections you can make.
6. search for "monta~na" and find spanish sites about mountains, not english sites about Montana. Yay Yahoo for respecting accents!

Edit: Boo news.yc for NOT supporting unicode. Or HTML-entities, for that matter. Blub supports Unicode! http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
I like the basic idea, and think it should be easy to build.

You then could run with the idea, and maybe be able to provide this service for free and charge for something else. For example, provide this service for free and make money from tshirts and advertising materials the runners receive (or any of 100 other similar ideas)

I know registering for runs is kind of a pain right now, so maybe you chose a good spot.
this is an excellent article, good point on both sides and tons of YC themes, people, and companies.
The problem with the classic argument of "whether or not it is worth paying a hefty premium to go to an elite school" is that it discounts the impact of intangibles, such as positive peer influence and brand value.

I say yes. The effect is even more pronounced in highly competitive industries like finance. I've found that an overwhelming majority of successful recent grads in that industry (2-3 yr exp analysts making $300,000+/year) are top 20 grads. I doubt the average 18-22 yr old is going to exhaust the knowledge that their professor can impart, but you put an above average student at a school where he's rubbing shoulders with future entrepreneurs, politicians and thought leaders there's no doubt that it will increase his likelihood of success.

So back to the question: Is it worth paying $200,000(over 4 years at Skull and Bones College over paying $10000 at Big State U? In many circumstances, yes.

And yes--there are always exceptions to this rule but the discussion is about the overall trend not particular instances.
Scheme in the real world
Is anybody here using Scheme in the real world? Common Lisp has been my language of choice for a while now, but I'd like to try something a little less bulky. There are two types of projects I'm working on with very different requirements. I'm considering Scheme for both.

The first is standard webapp development. I've been using Hunchentoot, CL-WHO and friends here, and I'm experimenting with Weblocks. I generally like these tools, but I'm open to trying tools that work differently. I'd like to know what tools the Scheme users here prefer for web work.

The other project is a desktop/embedded (fairly fast PC hardware) system with soft real-time requirements (for the curious, it's a DMX lighting controller). I'm looking for speed, multithreading and some predictability in the garbage collector.
Please. Tell us what you really feel. Stop holding back so much. :)

I know it's fun to lob rhetorical hand grenades around. The nice thing about the US is that we have a system where failure is accepted. If you don't like the policies or leaders, there will always be someone along later that's more to your liking. We've done all kinds of screwed up stuff -- and all kinds of good stuff. I think it's absolutely important to point out where we're wrong, but a little perspective can be useful too.

In my perfect world there would be a lot less government involvement in all of our lives. We would be armed and take care of things like terrorism ourselves right when it happened, instead of farming the responsibility for our security out to big government. But both the left and the right want to take away all of our freedoms and do all the worrying and thinking for us. So that means we turn what should be personal things like health care, personal security, property ownership, and privacy into a huge multi-generational political argument without resolution. And then people complain that the government gets it wrong! I think people are all too happy to take away somebody else's freedom for their pet cause. It's just when somebody else does it to them that they squeal the most. That's why I can only answer what freedoms I am personally willing to trade in the war on terror. I can't and won't make those decisions for other people.

I can make one observation, though. As democracies are attacked by terrorism they have a tendency to get more and more restrictive. I would expect the US to follow that pattern -- it has in the past. The thing I am watching is whether those restrictions are temporary or permanent.

I don't countenance too much the argument that politicians use fear to keep the war on terror machine humming along. To me that sounds a lot more paranoid than just simply acknowledging that there are people right now who are actively plotting to kill lots of Americans. It's nothing to go beserko about, just something to consider when you make decisions to vote for representatives. If attacks continue over the next few decades, voters will punish politicians who downplay the threat of terrorism. That's just political reality.
You used it to post this question. News.YC is written in a version of Arc that runs on MzScheme.
"Obviously some people find value and fun in facebook applications plus they generate pageviews and ad dollars so everyones happy."

They generate externalities, which make some people unhappy. When you see Facebook Vampires, think of Facebook AIDS (http://www.byrneseyeview.com/byrnes_eye_view/a_little_more_o...).
I can vouch for Miro (formerly Democracy Player) - the content it starts you out with isn't that good and I had never previously bothered with it, but there's a decent amount of good stuff in the channel guide. Eg Nova, Frontline, several others. These aren't the full shows, but shorter segments. Because the seasons are fixed-length you get a bonanza at the beginning which runs out, but you can still use Miro as a podcast player (and queue up those Google.edus you've been meaning to watch), which is nice. Unfortunately Miro doesn't accept audio-only channels into their guide, but you can set up your own just fine.
MySpace To Join Google OpenSocial (confirmed)
Incredible news!
Those things aren't sustainable competitive advantages, though.
It's a self fulfilling prophecy.

That Harvard grad looking for a job at BigPapa Stearns might get the job because he happens to know the secret handshake or presents himself as trustworthy but in reality, at worse, he might be an idiot, and, at best, he's simply good enough to do the job. But BigPapa Stearns only hires Harvard grads because no one was ever fired for hiring Harvard grads.

In the end, if you don't make your life an empty pursuit for the almighty dollar that consumes 16 hours of your days for a good 3 or 4 years before succumbing to that coke addiction and none of this would matter. A Savile Row bespoke suit doesn't necessarily make you a better man, or a hero.
Ask YC: What streaming radio stations do you listen to while hacking?
I am adding sort of a streaming radio ripper to my site, but different streams use different methods of the address for the stream, .m3u and .pls contain different data. I am looking to gather a bit of test data. So if you could let me know what is the address or the name of any stream you listen to. I'd be grateful. Thanks.
This was downmoded? wtf. My girlfriend does a Phd in relationship therapy and she says that it is interesting to her because it has both and emotional component and an analytical component. For me anything to do with emotions is a no no. Women are into those areas because they need something more than what the hard sciences has to offer not because they have less to bring to the table.
The nice thing about the US is that we have a system where failure is accepted. If you don't like the policies or leaders, there will always be someone along later that's more to your liking.

I wish. Some of the top layer changes in elections, but it seems like the bad guys in the government have very long careers, alternating between government appointments and jobs in companies closely tied to the government. Cheney is a famous example, but there are thousands more like him.

The culture in this world seems to be quite different from that of startup hubs. These people are suits squared. They fail a lot, but not because they try wildly imaginative things. They fail because succeeding (as we'd measure it) is not their goal; power is.
Along these same lines, Malcolm Gladwell examined the so-called "advantages" of going to an Ivy League school in his piece "Getting In". http://www.gladwell.com/2005/2005_10_10_a_admissions.html

Some would probably argue that going to a big name school allows you to make better connections, etc, thus resulting in a higher income.

But as pointed out in the Gladwell article, this just isn't the case.

While it's easy to point out the kid that went to MIT is making more than the kid that went to state college, this just isn't a proper comparison.

From the article... "As a hypothetical example, take the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State, which are two schools a lot of students choose between," Krueger said. "One is Ivy, one is a state school. Penn is much more highly selective. If you compare the students who go to those two schools, the ones who go to Penn have higher incomes. But let's look at those who got into both types of schools, some of whom chose Penn and some of whom chose Penn State. Within that set it doesn't seem to matter whether you go to the more selective school. Now, you would think that the more ambitious student is the one who would choose to go to Penn, and the ones choosing to go to Penn State might be a little less confident in their abilities or have a little lower family income, and both of those factors would point to people doing worse later on. But they don't."

The moral of the story is that if you're a hard working individual, connections and money are going to follow regardless of where you go to school.
Wow, 10,000 times thinner than a human hair! That's, like, a hundred billion times smaller than a football field! If you stacked twelve double-decker buses on top of one another, the pile would be 43 billion times larger than one of these radios. If you put 3.8e14 of these radios together they'd stretch from the earth to the moon.

Seriously though, I don't know why science journalists like that unit of measurement so much.
So all Harvard grads in big i-banks work 16 hour days and are coke addicts?

Let's put something else in context, one could make the argument that a majority of college grads from any school embark on "a journey of empty pursuits for the almighty dollar...". I hardly think this is symptomatic of going to a top20 school, but how much blind ambition a person has.
Zak, why does it matter to you if someone is using Scheme in the real world? The question you should be asking is if you can use it to your advantage to outperform others who aren't using it.

So far, the biggest issue with Common Lisp I ran into while writing Weblocks is lack of continuations. There were other issues but they were minor annoyances that were fairly easy to overcome. Right now I'm working on a delimited continuations library for CL. Writing one really isn't as bad as it sounds - I think On Lisp unnecessarily scares people from rolling their own code walker.

Out of curiosity, other than continuations, what advantage do you see in using Scheme over CL?
I'm using Scheme both in the real world of my daytime employment, and in the fake world of my personal project. It was web development that brought me back to Scheme after 12 years of C. I wrote BRL in order to make server-side web development easier, especially when making database-driven sites.

What I don't understand is why you want something "a little less bulky"? Can't you use a subset of CL?
USA is becoming a scary place to live.
One of PG tips is to have evidence that you can build cool things. Doing that app in a week probably qualifies.
The problem with your argument is that you don't isolate factors when arguing your point. I'm not arguing that there aren't other factors that make a person successful. I'm saying that all things equal, the influence of one's surroundings can have a significant positive effect on a persons chance of succeeding.
Do you mind sharing where you work?
I really hate it when someone answers a question with "your question doesn't matter. What you should be asking is [whatever I think you should be asking] "

I assume the person asking the question has good reasons for asking it. If I can I answer. If not, I don't.

Coming to the question proper, there are often good reasons to ask if other people use / don't use a particular technology.

To answer, I use a custom variant of scheme to write machine- learning systems on a cluster of cots machines. It compiles down to optimized C, but I write in scheme.
Like most people I know of who use Scheme or other Lisps in the real world, I'm in the financial services industry. Here's a job opening for someone who would report to me:

https://tbe.taleo.net/NA4/ats/careers/requisition.jsp?org=EA...
Harvard Crimson article on Facebook the week it was launched
Power from the final frontier
I think everybody who uses CL uses a subset. The problem is that everyone uses a different subset, which can be an issue when using libraries.
"I'm pretty happy with the amount of people that have been to it so far," he said. "The nature of the site is that each user's experience improves if they can get their friends to join it."

also

"While Zuckerberg promised that thefacebook.com would boast new features by the end of the week, he said that he did not create the website with the intention of generating revenue."

and

"Zuckerberg said that he hoped the privacy options would help to restore his reputation following student outrage over facemash.com, a website he created in the fall semester."
Basic rules of Web User Interface?
I'm beginning to work on our site and wondering what are the basic do's and dont's from a useability perspective. The site is intended to educated customers on our new product and entice them to download a free trial. We expect all our customers to be US based, predominantly english speaking and varying education levels. Suggestions on do's and dont's for color theme would also be very helpful.

thanks
> Please. Tell us what you really feel.

That's what I just did!

I could have sugar coated my words into a more politically correct form so that they don't look like the typical reddit comment, but what's the point? That's precisely what I think. And I'm pointing out mere facts, not speculating about some crazy conspiracy theory.

But I found your comment very interesting, nonetheless. It shows a profound cultural difference between you and us (europeans) (again, I'm not implying that one is better than the other; just pointing out facts). You trust your fellow citizens to "wake-up" when enough is enough ("[...] whether those restrictions are temporary or permanent.", "[...] voters will punish politicians who downplay the threat of terrorism.")
Most european countries woke up too late at some point of their history; that's why we tend to be more worried about the whole situation (and not because we're anti-american).
Clam claims oldest animal record (405 years)
I don't know, Paul. I just am not the person to sit around wringing my hands over how bad the political system is -- and I'm a political junkie :)

I've consulted with large government agencies and I've seen the alliances that form between various players, congress, and various agencies. My opinion is that any cohesive group of people with a lot of time on their hands is going to try to take political power from other people. The caricature people use is Cheney and the military, but it happens all over the place. I remember back in the 80s environmental groups would go around to state legislatures, getting them to write very complex laws. Then they would hit all of the local governments, offering to consult with them so they would be in compliance with the laws they helped write! So the big old wheel just keeps turning around and around.

I will agree that the structure of the system is broken. Complex systems have a tendency to spin out of control. But in general the whole thing kind of hangs together anyway. We're not out in the streets with M-16s shooting at each other. Instead we can sit in our cushy chairs enjoying all of the benefits of freedom while we craft pithy arguments to toss at one another.

I remember when the economy was in the toilet during the late 70s. Carter used to get on TV and say not only did the country suck, it was pretty much all our fault. Here's hoping that form of leadership doesn't return.
Mr. Andreessen posted an update on this article which includes some examples, http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/10/open-social-scr.html

the following quote is from this article and I believe it should answer your question

"... You'll notice in those Ask A Ninja examples that the Flixster app is not as visually integrated as in the other examples. In a real production system, the Flixster app will pick up the styles of the parent page."
Bountii - New YC Startup
Linked on paulgraham.com
A big part of it is the fact that Scheme is simple and Common Lisp is not. This is a "soft" feature, but I think it's important. I want to try out Scheme and see if it feels better.

I ask because I'd like to get a perspective on the tools that are available from people who actually make things with them. The programming language I use might be a "secret weapon" in some situations, but most of the people it would give me an advantage over wouldn't even understand why it's an advantage.
Here is more screenshots (from TechCrunch), examples include some other sites than Ning. http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/31/google-opensocial-image...

It is very interesting to see all these. It gives me the feeling of build once, play anywhere is coming true. Which should be great news for any developer out there that is seeking to promote their products virally and find new users for them