skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apparently, Bill Gates and Paul Allen (and Paul Gilbert) started a company before Microsoft, called Traf-O-Data. (wow.)

They did data analysis from traffic controllers.

Despite the name, they actually made a fairly decent revenue for high school kids (some tens of thousands annually). Once Bill's age was discovered they had a much harder time selling anything.

Even Steve Jobs had to stop being a shaggy hippie.

But luckily for founders, unless you're in the consulting business, the market really doesn't care who you are. There are far too many layers of abstraction for your identity to have any meaning, beyond of course, that which is deliberately constructed. (Mac People, Japanese Cars, German Engineering, Scandinavian design, etc) ^.^
A good first project to learn Python?
I'm wondering if people have a good idea for a first project to learn Python with? I thought Hacker News would be the best place to ask! I'm a C++/PHP developer and I'd like to expand my range a bit.
His reasons for Tcl "languishing" were true until about 10 years ago, when 8.0 came out. Tcl was doing quite well then, and only started "languishing" later. It's a long story, sometime I'll write up my somewhat peripheral view of it.
anyone have any experience using merb in production?
The 25 Coolest (and Most Unconventional) Keyboards
Anyone here ever successfully use an unconventional ergonomic keyboard?
Poor kid. His life will suck.
Left-Hand-Turn Elimination
Apparently hulu.com is built on merb.
Apple Macs Likely To Gain Market Share
Jaxtr Racks Up Over 5 Million Users In Under 5 Months
>please don't confuse hard work with anything that happens in college.

You can work hard at anything. Playing an instrument isn't something I consider work, but it takes hard work to become one of the top musicians in the world.

Consistently trying to be the best at something rather than just accepting mediocrity is important, and not a lot of people have that drive. It's the kind of thing that keeps you from having to tar roofs for a living.

>You make the rest of us wish we were still there.

You must have me confused with someone else. I'm not a student.
Black holes may harbour their own universes
Charlie Munger on Economics (pdf)
The actual article can be found here: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2007/12/transitive-decay-in-social-n...
His criticisms really are quite astute. It's a very insightful article.

I don't quite agree with his views on China and free trade: I don't think it matters if America or China or Belize is "1st". What matters is that everyone is objectively better off. Looking at things on a relative scale rather than an objective one is a sneaky way of turning a non-zero sum game into a zero sum game where there can only be one "1st" or "leader".
A lot more information needed as per the questions already asked:

How much has been created already?
Are they part-time also?
* Has any money been put in?

But the truthful answer is that it's a negotiation between individuals, rather than a set amount, so figure out why the really need you and how you will turn around the fate of the company, making their equity worth more, and play on that.
No web server at all is even more efficient. (That's my bitchy way of saying: Apache is the most powerful and flexible web server, and also the most popular. There are more reasons to run it than there are reasons not to run it. But if the reasons to run it don't apply to your deployment, then by all means, run a smaller web server.)
Instead of voting for a terrible candidate, vote for your friend who best understands the election.
Gates' father was a lawyer. It takes seed capital to found Traf-O-Data. Thankfully, the seed capital needed for a startup is dropping dramatically thanks to the web, but it's still a serious problem for people from poor families.
Two points.

1) What's the benefit of doing this research outside of curiosity? Education research is useful, yes, but studying raw intelligence to try to figure out what parts of it are genetic seems like a waste of time, unless you plan to give babies the "smart gene" in a Sci-Fi scenario.

2) I'm not sure why you're bringing up the Italian example. It shows that Italians were performing really low, but when their culture changed, the problem went away. So, it wasn't genetic. To show something comparable about the IQ gap for black people would be really hard, because Africa is poor as hell, which depresses IQ scores, and Africans living in the First World aren't a part of the majority cultures. So, you'd either have to get all black people to be rich for a generation or have them all look white somehow but keep living in a white culture in order to make a fair comparison. It's not a repeatable experiment.
All concepts are fuzzy by nature, including the concept of race.

There are so many breeds of dogs, you can hardly find a common thing among them. This doesn't mean dogs don't exist.
Gladwell cites a lot of US research that has somehow been funded.
But none of those schools have big-time football programs.

Ever watch a game on Saturday afternoon? Mixed in with all the ads for Nike, etc. are messages about how "this school really cares about academics", etc.
ive never seen my perfect project management app, but I use basecamp for the to-do lists. I think that my biggest problem is forgetting to use basecamp, because it is not engaging. Maybe you could make something that texts/emails you or calls you on a daily basis and lets you know the top 5 projetcs you have something due on? Or maybe make it more like a whiteboard in style.
Amateur Time Hackers Play With Atomic Clocks at Home
Why has this gotten so many votes?
they are working part time and as it is their startup, they are not getting paid the only money they have poored in is for a vpn, incorporation and myself.

i am the third developer in a team of 3, the other 2 being them.

i am also contributing ideas for new features and refining current ideas that they have.
Pen and paper + Tinderbox (http://eastgate.com/Tinderbox/).

I use Basecamp more as a structured way to communicate priorities and timeline. It's helpful as a central place around which people across time zones can orient themselves. Look at it as project-oriented blogging. It's not very helpful (or interesting) unless there are multiple people involved in the project.

For a game-oriented take on project management, check out David Seah's The Printable CEO Series (http://davidseah.com/blog/the-printable-ceo-series/).
Buy your own video startup
StartUp Beat Launches Job Board
Not now, but maybe when he gets older and has kids.
Checking in on the progress towards Artificial Intelligence
I created this at the company I worked at a while ago:

http://stufftodo.dedasys.com/

It's basically a fancy todo list with sharing between people. I decided to open source it after seeing that there wasn't a lot of interest, and moving on from that company (I developed it on my own, so I own the rights to it). It's probably not right for everyone, but I use it and like it as it's very simple and direct.
I'm pretty happy using a bug database for this. We're using FogBugz which is capable of remembering tasks, who they are assigned to and when we expect them to be finished.
http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/12/11/not-without-a-fight/

(Cosmic Variance's response to the article)
Improved startup repair tool, media throttling among Vista SP1 changes
If they had only limited the spec to include Ogg Vorbis it would have sailed through... The problem is that most people companies have no idea what the difference is...
My thoughts exactly on seeing this article. Looked on google and found this: http://chneukirchen.org/repos/darcsum/

Only limited support (you'll still be using the command line) but the whatsnew and record functionality is really useful (just make sure the cursor is at the bottom of the whatsnew buffer before hitting R otherwise it misses all the changes for some reason, at least on my machine)
Search, Google, and Life: Sergey Brin - Google
Rails 2.0
Scheme (via DrScheme) caters to mere mortals more than any other programming language ever has.

In every powerful language, it's easy for a typo to create a valid program, but one that doesn't do what you intended. Usually you get an obscure error message related to the advanced feature you accidentally invoked.

DrScheme takes you through a series of learning languages, each increasingly powerful. Mistakes in the early languages create helpful error messages. You don't get a better on-ramp than that.
Hehe...perhaps it didn't really surprise me so much, maybe I was just hoping for it to be a bit better!

I really don't like code that "hacks together" a solution and then requires a substantial remedy later (who does?!) so I'm quite interested in getting it right from the beginning.

Assuming that many of us here develop web applications, and that some are going to need to scale heavily, what do you recommend as a good solution?

I have yet to read either of these two books, but they are on my list (I only have one at home, the other I'll order):
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Building-Scalable-Web-Sites-Henderso...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Performance-MySQL-Advanced-Technique...

Both are O'Reilly so I'm assuming they'll be good!

Let me know if you have any other resources for this, because I imagine it's a very common issue for successful startups.
A coder's guide to coffee (cheap, easy, and delicious)
He he, but if the makers of that CyberLover don't realise that the "personal details" they harvest from chat rooms are actually 99 % lies and 1 % wishful thinking, they should have their own intelligence checked using something other than a Turing test :-)

But seriously, even if that bot tricks some (small) percentage of people into thinking that they're talking to a real person, that isn't passing the Turing test.
Gates' mother was richer than his father. And well connected, with a friend on the board at IBM. Though I doubt that mattered much...
Who else here is using PostgreSQL, and on what sites?

Mine: http://ourdoings.com/
This was already on the top of the front page for like two days.
Skeptical Scientists Urge World To 'Have the Courage to Do Nothing' At UN Conference - with evidence
Facebook X an unsocial network?!
Mmm, just now I'm enjoying a wonderful Nespresso espresso. It's an easy and clean way to have good (by Spanish standard, which are pretty similar to Italians...) coffee at the office. It's more expensive than buying the coffee beans but a lot cheaper than a coffee shop (about 0'30EUR per coffee), the biggest drawback is that you become bonded to a single vendor :(
Monsters of the Programming World
I really wish I liked coffee. I've tried time after time to get hooked on coffee but couldn't manage to stomach it - even loaded with cream and sugar. It smells great, has ample caffeine, can be bought cheap, all the makings of a perfect drink.
Hacker - a machine that transforms caffeine to lines of code
Best-designed websites by popular vote - it's like Hot or Not for web design
Lightning Farms - could lightning actually be harvested?
Comparing the design of someone's child to the design of someone's MySpace is horrifyingly scary.
You are doing it wrong, you are not supposed to cover the taste of coffee with crap like sugar and cream.

It's like trying to fall in love with a girl by putting more clothes on her, our biology works in exactly the opposite way.

A good double espresso sugarless and cream-less is the way to go.
Now all I need to do is give these monsters stats and I'll have the next big role-playing game "cubicles&bugs"
What I've Learned From Sales, Part I: Don't Feed the Trolls
Stories we want to see in 2008
WTF? MIT Eliminates Popular 6.170, Famed Software Engineering Lab Course
Ask YC:  Anyone using *BSD for hosting instead of Linux?
Advantages? Disadvantages? Love to hear your stories.
If you're on a Mac, try OmniPlan: http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniplan/

Or Merlin: http://www.merlin2.net/

Both are superb & Merlin's a bit better.

We use OmniPlan (got a cheap license).

As for webapps.. haven't seen any good project management apps.
I perceive the author to have been favorable to one side, therefore I discard all his evidence and argumentation.

Not discard, simply distrust. Remember all those Microsoft studies comparing the total cost of ownership of Windows and Linux? Finding flaws in the studies was hard. Discovering an a priori reason to distrust the studies was not.

Simply put, any article like this is going to make claims: "X is a fact." When the source is biased, and X confirms the bias, it's much harder to trust that X is true.
By the way, similar things apply to tea.

The stuff you buy in grocery stores is dust from leaves. It's a stretch to even call it tea.

Buying in bulk over the Internet and making it with a French press is much, much cheaper and amazingly better.
Neonray: New startup with online desktop service
If he has a trust fund to support him for his entire adult life, then he's all set.

Otherwise, at some point he's going to have to do more than hang around, look cute, and do occasional odd jobs for free. I saw no evidence from the article that he's prepared for that aspect of adult life. It doesn't seem like his parents are even trying to prepare him.
Embrace the chaos. You'll just look like an old fart to your kids otherwise.
Removal of Ogg Vorbis and Theora from HTML5: an outrageous disaster!
Rogers ISP of Canada breaks into your browsing session to tell you off for using the net too much
Sleep, Attention, and Memory: Not (Maybe) What You Thought
People don't truly care about privacy
Actually OSU only has 30-40 million in revenues.
http://www.pbs.org/nbr/site/features/special/subdir/college-...

What they don't tell you is that they are lucky to break even if you take into account the hidden costs. The next time they do a 15 million stadium renovation, it won't be counted against the athletic department's budget.
Beats moisture farming!
So, you are getting paid at a decent rate, plus getting 7-10% equity?

That seems like a good deal to me, almost a great deal, if they accept it.
Um, yes: http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/thesis/
Right, but no one here is arguing that humans don't exist . . .
Ask YC: Accepting Credit Cards as a Bahamian company
I'm building an e-commerce site for a Bahamian company and am having a hard time finding a solution to accepting payment via credit card. Any internationals (non-US/UK/Canada) doing this?
So when this becomes a Law and Order episode, will the kid be the victim or the murderer?
I used to hate coffee most of the time but gulped it down since it kept me awake.

And then I visited Barcelona. The coffee I had in the small cafes in the town was the most awesome, fresh and tasty beverage I have ever had. Interestingly, Barcelona's airport had the same stale, tasteless coffee that Starbucks sells!
The "free crap" has a huge survival advantage, speaking in Darwinian terms - it can be copied, remixed, linked, shared, brought up to date, and improved upon. Paid content is locked out of the culture. It's dead data.
"High Performance MySQL [and other oxymorons]"

Not a bad book, though, for letting you know about all of the random features MySQL has. It's hard to get the same information in one place otherwise.
We really need an Ask rms section :)

He may know about this from his business experience.
MS Support Article (least used page on microsoft.com)
Digital Tombstone Fails To Catch On
<tease>

Coder/Hacker needs coffee to code

Coder/Hacker needs weed to code (yesterday post? coder high?)

Coder/Hacker needs MacBook to code

Coder/Hacker needs Hacker-Music to code

Coder/Hacker needs Coffee Shop to code

Coder/Hacker needs super-genius teammate to code

Spoiled?

</tease>
Family Life and Startup Life Don't Mix
Devshop (http://devshop.com) is helping us keep our project on task and understand where our distractions are coming from. If someone wants to unfreeze requirements they know it's their fault we're not going to meet the schedule.

Basecamp is basic. 37s develops simple apps for a mass market of simple needs. If you exceed the need for simple you have to find something else. Since your here you're probably not that simple. ;-)
Making Ruby Look Like Smalltalk/Haskell/Erlang/Ruby
It's actually a really good idea. The curriculum's now separated into a class where they teach you how to code and then a bunch of project lab options where you learn how to code something useful in specific. So if you want to be a web app developer, take 6.005, and then, I guess, 6.171 instead of the hell that was 6.170. GizmoBall and RSS Readers are pretty dumb projects, too...

The real loss is 6.001. :(
Hey, hello from Barcelona. Well it's curious here in Barcelona I always used to drink "cortados" or "tallats", an espresso with a little bit of milk. Until I visited Roma, where I tasted the best coffee!

I think you should visit the Italian capital ;)

And yes, Barcelona's airport food/coffee is awful.
"We now have quite a lot of evidence that carbon emissions definitely don't cause global warming."

"The UN conference is a complete waste of our time and your money and we should no longer pay the slightest attention to the IPCC"

"carbon trading is more about fraud than it is about anything else"

This is the sort of nonsense that makes me ashamed to call myself a 'climate skeptic'. Then of course, I watch Al Gore's film where he shows Florida sinking under the ocean and that is ridiculous as well. Climate change is a potential-problem about which there are great (truly gigantic!) uncertainties and therefore no easy answers.
I'm pretty sure the Ruby mafia at Powerset uses it.
Microsoft FolderShare AutoDeletes Files. Whoops.
Sociopathic, perhaps... but psychopathic? I'm not sure he fits the description even based on the symptoms you've listed.
- Glib and superficial charm: Is there any other sort of charm?
- Pathological lying: Yes, there are depictions of lies (lady in the swimming pool), but are they substantively pathological?
- Conning and manipulation: These are mistaken for being the same thing; from the article, he is certainly a manipulator, but perhaps not a conman.
- As for lack of remorse, callousness, poor behavioral controls, impulsivity, irresponsibility, and failure to accept responsibility for one's actions... couldn't these be symptomtic of adolescence as well???

That said, I agree that this kid needs a dose of humility, and I'm sure he's going to get it in spades over the next few years.
All of their customers are dead ;).
How I stopped missing Darcs and started loving Git
The microwave magician - Frank Pringle has found a way to squeeze oil and gas from anything
Engadget review of new Dell Latitude XT tablet: Sweet but too expensive
Anybody up for a meet-up?
In Gore's film he talks about Antarctic ice melting much faster than scientists projected. That's part of the gigantic uncertainty you're concerned about. When there's gigantic uncertainty, a valid question is, "What is the worst-case scenario here?" Gore presented the Florida scenario as something that could happen if all the ice melted.
Friendster developer platform goes live with over 180 apps
The Alphanum Algorithm - an interesting sorting algorithm for strings
basecamp is already pretty intuitive and pretty good for average consumer usage. competing with them is going to require a lot of catch-up.
Should I pay my investor's legal fees?
How could understanding the brain be a waste of time?

I've heard this objection before and I often wonder if the people making this argument secretly think that some races really are inferior, but that we mustn't talk about it.

Or, perhaps you are implying that such research might overturn our egalitarian, meritocratic society. Personally I have no fear about that. It's obvious that some people are born superstars in pure physical ability, and yet we all still enjoy sports and not all physical work has been dominated by one race.

And I think you can see that there would be huge benefits in learning what the non-genetic factors of intelligence are.
I can get your kid into an Ivy
"What's the worst case scenario" may be a valid question, but it's not a very helpful question...particularly not in a mass-market film where the caveat 'this is extremely unlikely' will be forgotten and the take-home message is that Florida is about to disappear.

People should be informed about the issues in a manner that is as honest and realistic as possible, particularly when the uncertainties are so great.
Micro-dust Can Weaken Hurricanes: Future Katrinas Preventable
Ask YC: Is there a recession/depression coming?
The economy seems to be heading to a recession, but how will this affect the internet startup world? I ask because I am planning on quitting my job with the federal government to start my own startup in January. And no, I can't keep the job and do the startup, I've been trying for 8 months to do that. Is venture capital going to dry up? How about online advertising revenue? Should I wait until the recession is over?
Yes, but the human notion of "race" is just "people of a certain color". In dogs, this would group black yorkshire terriers and black labs together.

Furthermore, dog breeds are nothing like ordinary human populations. We simply don't have human populations that are subjected to the extreme selection pressures that we apply to dogs, which produce breeds with strong natural talents and lots of natural deficiencies that would kill them if they were turned loose in the wild. Chihuahuas versus Great Danes. People vary, and natural selection matters, but it's nothing like dog breeds.
Have you looked at PayPal?
worldpay might work
Microsoft Altair BASIC legend talks about Linux, CPRM and that very frightening photo
The article at no point says that those genetic traits which are linked to race could not have an impact on intelligence. Instead, it says that what evidence there is for that is very weak, and that the effect (if it exists at all) is small.

Furthermore, your understanding of race appears to be different than mine. You say that race has bearing on "whether you develop sickle cell anaemia" - this is untrue. A particular mutation in a particular gene has bearing on that, and that mutation is more prevalent (statistically) in groups of people we label with a certain race. But it is in no way casually related with race.
pxigorth, why did you submit this site?
now I can't stop clicking!

:P
IBM's Choice: Why did Gates get the DOS contract?
I've heard anecdotes from Microsoft of some new employees challenging Bill on some obscure tech, only to be out done.
Mob wisdom means business
It is a helpful question when thinking about what action to take. It's basic game theory, and it's why nobody ever launched a nuclear first strike during the Cold War.

Why is this being modded down? If you don't consider the worst case scenario in strategic decision making, you're a fool. Especially when the worst case is famine, plague, etc., not "my startup crashes and I move back in with the parents".
i dont think anyone can deny that are a great many 'gigantic' uncertainties related to the science behind climate change.

some simple logic, however, is more than enough to convince me that doing something is the vastly superior alternative to doing nothing.

if we choose to spend vast resources curbing emissions and such and we are wrong, those resources go to waste. given the current deployment of resources by our western civilization, such waste would need to go a long way to amount to more than a drop in the bucket.

if we listen to the most passionate of skeptics and choose to do nothing and we are wrong, by worst case estimates we're going to lose in a very big, spectacular fashion. we wont be counting beans to see how much money was squandered 'going green', we'll be trying to find a patch of green to grow some food.
He's very good at acting like he's isolated and far away from the code - he puts his hands together and talks using the typical pundit bullshit phrases: "what we're seeing more and more is a shift towards...".

It's all an act, like the President pretending he's a Texas cowboy when he went to Harvard and Yale.