skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd say be careful of native bias. Usually, native speakers of a language think that their own language is easier than others--especially if they grew up with it. Each language has strengths and weaknesses.

English has its share of headaches, but you don't notice them as often if you're a native speaker. Pronunciation is a big headache. How do you know that you pronounce the "t" in "skillet", but not in "fillet"? You memorize it. How about "through" and "though"? You memorize it. Sure, there are standard pronunciation rules in English, but because there are lots of borrowed words from other languages in English, you end up with lots of exceptions--that you have to memorize. I went for a long time calling "fajitas", a fah-gee-tuhz instead of a fah-hee-tuhz.

The fact that we have a National Spelling Bee in the US and Britain only attests to how difficult it is to pair up the spelling of a word to its pronunciation. Other languages don't have this. In French, they have grammar bees for kids. Chinese speaking kids join dictionary look-up bees.

Verb tense is something that needs memorization in English as well. Verb tense changes by pronoun, by present/past/future, and by active/passive. They're just something you have to memorize. In Chinese, there is no verb tense. So that's one less thing to memorize.

Korean has a pretty simple alphabet, and it's easy to pronounce too. So by your argument, Koreans should be able to innovate a lot better than the Chinese and Japanese. While I don't have any studies to point to, I kinda doubt that's the case, because there are lots of other factors to innovation besides language, and we don't know which has more weight--we can't run a SVD on it. Therefore, I think it's quite a leap to go from native language to correlation with innovation.

If you said something to the effect of language on speed of education, then you might have something. But innovation...I'm very skeptical.
We actually have good extra space in our SF SOMA office. Let us know if you need any - maybe we could work out an arrangement. (We also have a phone system that allows multiple companies to have their own call-in identity)
Great News.YC Greasemonkey Script
Good concept, but poor execution.
Have you seen CoWorking? http://coworking.pbwiki.com/
that looks neat. however, i don't quite get it.

is it a place for people working on a single project or a place where people working on many different projects can come together?
Thinking outside the niche: "Proust Was a Neuroscientist"
The description reminded me of Hackers and Painters.
Ali Partovi of LinkExchange and iLike on scaling to a million users in one weekend
"Testing on the Toilet," and the idea stuck.

This I think stems from another cool googly initiative to have the highest-quality toilets in the industry. Basically, the seats are so generous and comfortable that googlers sometimes stay as late as 9 or 10PM so they can pass waste at work rather than at home. Fits in nicely with the catered meals and other homey accomodations.

Supposedly, they're going to start have cool group "bathroom times" so that engineers can discuss cool new projects and initiatives during moments that would otherwise be spent only on body functions.
It's a place where people working on many different projects come together at the same time to work. It is sorta like working at a coffee shops full of other startups, without having to pay for the coffee.
Indeed. Each company requires user input and manual validation. The selection bias is self evident.
Vancouver has something like this, only more elaborate - http://abetterplacetowork.com/ . I can also say, from DabbleDB's experience, that:
- 5-6 people can work quite well together in a boardroom type space, all sitting around a long table together, especially if they're all used to working on laptops anyway
- having the executive office in the back is important so you have somewhere for private meetings and phone calls
- sharing office space is fun if you like the other company (we've had both Snipshot and Auctomatic subletting from us at different times)
- even if you have the office space full time (which we do), people will probably only show up 3 days a week or so (at least for us, we're most likely all found in the office from about 11-6 on Tue-Thurs, and spend the rest of the time working from home/cafes/etc).
There's no search on most pages, and I get this error (not sure if it's related):

filter((function (a) {return a.href.indexOf("comments?id=") >= 0;}), articleReferences[i].parentNode.parentNode.nextSibling.getElementsByTagName("a"))[0] has no properties
file:///home/.../components/greasemonkey.js
Line 556

BTW I'm on Firefox 1.5.
To me, it's worth paying a little money to be close to your team all day. You can do it cheaply. For example, http://bunkerstudios.com/ offers space in San Francisco for about $200/month per person.
I grew up in the US since I was five, and I'm a native Chinese speaker. I don't have enough vocabulary to read very well, so when I read Chinese online, I use http://www.popjisyo.com to assist me.

I don't know about the rest of you guys, but when I read English, I tend to see the whole shape rather than individual letters. It is not that much different than reading the hanzi that I do know. And just as you can pick apart English words based on its Latin or French or Gemanic roots, you can also pick apart the meaning of the hanzi based on the component radicals.

With regards to the speed of education, the Chinese and Japanese cultures as a whole has a much stronger literary tradition for the educated social class. In America, you can upgrade your social class by upgrading your financial statement. In the Chinese culture, social status is directly mapped to level of education. You prove it by taking nationwide tests, though the importance of this practice has been declining in the past two decades. Traditionally, the language and the mountains of literary history was what allowed the Manderin class to stay in power. I suppose that was why Mao Zedong went around breaking the traditional class power attacking the educational process ... and simplifying the pictographs.

As for innovation, having access to two different languages has helped me think and express problems in different ways. It is the same phenomenom of using two different programming languages, one more expressive in certain problem domains than another.

However, I don't think I'll ever actually _code_ in anything but English ...
And you know, I kind of miss the colors and design from the original YC news. This makes it have a white background. Who knows, maybe I'll get used to it.
Default manufacturer passwords for many devices
Hackers and Painters:  Rails apps at the Museum of Modern Art
Ah, I see. I thought the word there had a restricting meaning, that you both said 'limited' as opposed to something else.
$10M isn't real money?
A relevant quote:

"We're past the days of using machines as amplifiers of our physical efforts. It's not enough to jam more features into code just so we can eliminate one more position on the assembly line. We're at a point where the machines can help amplify our imaginations."

The idea of software as art is hardly new, but it's nice to see a cool app get some formal recognition.
It's erm... nice looking. That's about it.
Why would they put music on the internet and invent mp3 players if it was against the law?
ah, fond memories of programs crashing, and then eventually being thankful they were only crashing if i used bad device drivers (but if you did, the entire OS would go down), and then rarely crashing at all.
His last "last lecture" was very inspiring except for the part where he describes how he got into grad school at cmu. Was no one else disturbed by that?
Wow, I'm surprised to see someone dug this up.

A lot has chanced since I hacked this script together and I'd expect that most features are now broken -- take that as a warning!
I would definitely have ranked Boston MA, approximately between Roma and Salerno (Italy), on the startup hub list.

(Nothing against Roma and Salerno... just sayin')
Hmmm... not sure "provides evidence that the universe will expand forever" really becomes "proof that universe will expand forever."

Maybe on slashdot it would.

Still an interesting read. Those pictures are crazy addictive!
I was fine with it until he said "Ajax Goodness". Makes my skin crawl.
Sounds simple. But they need a Fixit for Google Groups right now.
Chinese and Japanese are constructed via "strokes", which build into simple characters (like letters, if you will), which then constitute more sophisticated characters. Chinese characters are not pictograms, in the sense that every character is distinctly unique.

Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding, but you seem to imply that Chinese and Japanese do not innovate or integrate ideas as well as Westerners? If so, this observation seems to contradict reality.
Ask YC: Best Resource for Configuring LAMP for a Windows Geek
So here's the deal: I've got a new project that requires some database and mostly static web pages. My plan is to use VMWare and LAMP environment for the server-side because of scaling and licensing issues.

I'm a MS geek, though. Where's a good resource to get started with something like this? All I want to do is to connect to MySQL from a windows client, set up the IP of the box, and copy some files over to the proper directory for them to appear on the web. Seems like that shouldn't be a lot to do. Hey -- how hard could it be, anyway?
I like one of the comments; that everything gets commodified in time, the only thing that will stand is ongoing creativity. - The same spirit as the message of 'The Whole New Mind' (I'm surprised similar books haven't come out, it's not like he can possibly have said all there is to be said on it).

In that vein, John Gero (http://mason.gmu.edu/~jgero) and Rob Saunders (http://wwwpeople.arch.usyd.edu.au/~rob/publications.html) are researchers in exploring design space, and automatically generating novelty, creativity.
It's only disturbing if you believe that grad school is a meritocracy based on grades and test scores.

Like most everything else in life, success in grad school depends heavily on luck and networking. Randy Pausch claims to have been admitted to CMU because he knew someone powerful who could vouch for him, and that's actually quite common. Most graduate admission committees consider a glowing recommendation from a successful researcher to be far more important than a standardized test result.

You can argue that this system was/is unfair, but most people would argue that the outcome is still a good one; after all, Randy Pausch is an extremely successful researcher.
He was already rejected though. He got a second chance while others didn't.
I wouldn't call it native bias, but it may be an error of adjacency instead of causality. While living in Japan (in the early 90's) it was very common to hear from Japanese that their mode of operation was to copy and then improve on the copy rather than to make any great new discoveries. Also, at the time I was there, the educational system enforced strict conformity - common saying "if you see a nail sticking out, you hammer it down."

In any case, I was there as an architect, and I was amazed at how the building designs there, which were typically very strange attempts at copying other styles, were horribly integrated. Sure, each part of the building was executed beautifully, but the whole was horrible. I was among many foreign architects broght in to improve on the local design talent there. This is primarily where my observation of lack of integrative ability/innovation comes form - the built forms .

For the kanji discussion, even though there are many idiosyncracies about pronunciation in spelling for English and other languages, you can get pretty far phonetically. With Japanese/Chinese, you can't get far at all without learning so many separate images (except for the few words using phonetic alphabets.)

As far as innovation, Toyota has revolutionized business processes with their lean system, but their car designs (the look) when they are good, are most likely done out of country. (Many car design exteriors come out of California, including the look of the Porsche Cayman and Boxter, etc)

I'm seeing a pattern in my post here: maybe the memorization of all those images makes it more difficult (but certainly not impossible of course) for the language user to create visually integrative designs?
This is simply an utterly brilliant and original way to explain the Chinese writing system!

Still, in this age of 100dpi 24bit color monitors, why stick to monochrome line drawings for yingzi? One could create the world's first photorealistic writing system!
Doesn't matter. Life isn't always fair (not in the way that you want it to be, anyway).

Make it more extreme: if you got rejected to a grad school, but Don Knuth called the chair of the admissions committee and insisted that you -- based on his intimate knowledge of your skills and talent -- were the perfect student for their school, wouldn't they be idiots to ignore him?

I don't want to preach at you, but if you're really disturbed by this small bit of favoritism, you're going to have a really tough time as you go through life. The smart thing to do here is not to protest, but to take note of the phenomenon, and do your best to exploit it to your advantage. Otherwise, you're just pissing in the wind.

(You can be as fair as you want when you run the show.)
How about a link to the ppt files?
his smile sais everything!
Govt and states have persistent interests. They do not have persistent allies.
Why don't you use WAMP instead of LAMP ? http://www.wampserver.com/en/
Oh shit the stupid 90s are back. Welcome bubble we greet you you are our friend.
If I release an open-source project with a logo of a little horse, and don't trademark the horse, then someone else can use that horse, completely separately from my project, to represent another project that has nothing to do with mine, and thus dilute my project's brand. Is there any way to reduce the impact of this without closing the source to the artwork?
"make up more than 100%"

How is that possible?
Or maybe in the rush to imitate the Western styles, the Japanese at the time discarded their traditional arts. Until they gained experience in that new style, they could hardly create visually integrative designs. They obviously were able to create visually integrative designs when they weren't trying to imitate someone else.

I don't think the use of a visual language impairs that part of the mind as much as you seem to think it does.
Tectonic Forces Shaping The Web
What is interesting is that it seems that there was a person or persons who developed the traditional Japanese style including modularity, scale proportional to humans, space usage flexibility, about 1000 years ago. That style was copied again and again. There are also many non-integrative contemporary buildings that do not try to imitate a style, so I'm still not unconvinced about this - but again this is clearly a pretty big generalization without any significant research, but something to think about.
Project Steve: Humorous Test of Scientists' Attitudes Towards Intelligent Design
I thought about that.

I'm not opposed to going with WAMP. It's just out of everything that's stuffed into Windows, I only need a very small subset. With an imaged LAMP, I can copy and scale very easily. I guess I'd rather have 20 boxes whose CPUs were only the doing the few things I care about than all the other stuff that goes with Windows -- patches, updates, Active Directory, Kerebos, etc.

But no, I'm not ruling WAMP out. I was curious to see what kind of learning curve we're talking about moving from a windows to a LAMP environment. A couple of months ago, I downloaded a LAMP vritual appliance, but didn't have a good grasp on how to do even some very simple things.
This article reminds me of a quote from a Bruce Sterling lecture:
http://uscpublicdiplomacy.com/index.php/events/events_detail...

"Hackers love IP. I mean, Eben
Moglen, I saw this guy. He says, you know, we're not going to be able
to convince the ruling class to change things the way we GNU freaks
like it, so let's just make it really complicated! Just go
in there and hack the living daylights out of intellectual property!
Just quibble, quibble, quibble! Raise hell! NIMBYize all the time!
Until people just become critically bored with it, and they just
throw up their hands, because I just can't be bothered. I can't keep track of all my licenses, and my this, and my that,
and the other, and it's just completely unmanageable."
Nickb keep at it. You're my research associate.
I'm also a big Gentoo fan.

I never used BSDs much, though I imagine you would be familiar with the following:

- With Gentoo you would be able to setup masks for a specific version of glibc and compile everything against it, stage the binaries and distribute them en mass to the other systems. This would allow you to stay with a specific version of a library and less dependent on the whims of the distro staff.

- You also have the option of using a cluster of compilers to compile the packages, though you may not want your production machines to be a part of the cluster.

- You have control over the CPU optimization flags.

- You have control over package features. This is the equivalent of turning them on or off with ./configure --enable-xxxx, but it is abstracted away into USE flags.

- Each package is downloaded from upstream, sometimes with Gentoo-specific patches applied to them. In otherwords, you have access to pristine sources as the authors intended.

- You can also define an "overlay" so you can write your own custom ebuilds, should you have specific patches you want to apply to any or all of the packages

- You can use the overlay to do an internal release of your proprietary software using Portage. You can define package dependencies with your proprietary software.

It is a lot more work than setting up a Debian or an Ubuntu box, but you also get more control.
http://www.howtoforge.com/installing_a_lamp_system_with_fedo...
Ask YC: Is it a bad idea to...?
Is it a bad idea to build a product where the distribution model relies heavily on sales?

Here's the problem: our product fulfills a big need (not a want) for a certain group of individual consumers. However, they're not part of the TC50K and it won't be easy to get the word out to them. What we're thinking about doing instead is selling the product to HR departments in big companies (a few of our competitors are already doing this). There's a lot more money there, but the product doesn't fill as big a need anymore and selling to the enterprise seems a lot harder than selling to individual customers.

Any suggestions? Thanks.
I think you're supposed to trust the commons. The commons can do no wrong.
20% time is really great. But my God, look at what some of the programmers are doing with it:

"Consider the collection of engineers who wanted to promote 'agile programming' inside the company. "

How could your soul be so dead that you want to spend your precious 20% hacking time to evangelize a Methodology? Can you imagine such a person?

And our author is one of them: "In my 20 percent time, I started the Testing grouplet." Yep, he means software testing.

I guess it's good news for us startup founders that Google has an infestation of Agilists, burrowing into the company with their sharp little teeth. Still makes me sad, though.
A bunch of people seem to be thinking along these lines.

CIT in Cambridge is one example. In the Bay Area you have CitizenSpace and HatFactory (both coworking spaces, but I've heard that CitizenSpace is the better of the two).
I think PG should look at this design, I prefer it to the normal one any day.
For windows - http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

I recommend linux though. :)
The Windows 95 sound (which I rather like) was done by Brian Eno, a noted ambient composer. From an interview Eno gave (found on his Wikipedia page):

"The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I'd been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, "Here's a specific problem X solve it." The thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional," this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said "and it must be 3 3/4 seconds long." I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It's like making a tiny little jewel. In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time."
"... TechCrunch illustrates the new blogging math. It sells sponsorships that allow advertisers to display on the home page at $10,000 per month. It also uses Federated Media to sell display ads, keeping 60 percent of the revenue ,,,"

From a hacker and software company perspective there is a real difference between writing about software or technology to make money and blogging to make money. The biggest difference is with software once the software is written, thats it. It just keeps chugging along. Sure there might be bugs or additions but you can stop work on it for periods of time and do other things. So it makes more sense to write software than just blogging or blogging about it. But can you also make money writing about technology and software as well?

Blogging and other types of writing, (unless you are JK Rowlings) require you have to stay on the writing treadmill whether you like it or not. Churning out articles at regular intervals. If you stop your traffic stops. I'm sure this is the case for sites like Techcrunch.

"... writing does not scale very well ..."

Thats the problem with writing, it does not scale well. Thats probably the reason hacks and stringers have been traditionally paid by the word. It's one of the only ways to reduce costs. And the only way to increase words is more writers. The other confusing bit in the article is the lack of specifics on how money is made. Do you make money "by" blogging or make money "off" blogging? Most already intuitively understand this distinction but not the reasons why. Here is a list of things that you should also think about. So it makes more sense to make money "off" blogging because:

- "People come back to places that send them away. Memorize that one." Dave Winer [0]

- use blogging to "Sell software, services"

- use blogging to "Brand yourself, get leverage for other things"

- use blogging to "Do good"

The list goes on and I've added the references to Dave Winer who seems to have thought about this particular subject the deepest. [1]

"I wanted people to look past the
subject of making money with blogs,
to making money because of blogs." [2]

Understanding the key differences means you can get on with the task writing software and concentrate instead on being paid indirectly instead of merely "blogging for money". [3]

[0] http://www.scripting.com/2005/12/12.html#howToMakeMoneyOnThe...

[1] BloggerCon IV, Day 2: How to Make Money, Harvard Law School
http://www.scripting.com/docNography/bloggerconIv/Day002/how...

[2] http://www.scripting.com/2004/11/10.html#When:7:50:58AM

[3] http://www.scripting.com/2006/04/19.html#When:2:01:39PM
Its called "challenge-response" or C/R, for short. Its been around almost as long as email has and its not new or innovative. Nick would have had some trouble productizing that even if he wanted to, in that its a terrible "solution" that almost nobody wants.
Cool. Did he ever publish the other short pieces?
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/Randy/Randy/TimeManagementTalk...
i think you would have more luck if you were more specific in your question about your product and your customers.