skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's Nassim Taleb's thing, right? I get the impression from the book and various things (his wikipedia page) that it's not something he's involved with any longer. Is it still operative?
er, "multiple MG" = "multiple MB"
I didn't read GP post as saying the economy would be fine ... but nor will it be the all ending apocalypse where starving soccer moms sell their children into slavery to pay their mortgages.

Frankly if the world really is doomed, what are we going to do about it anyway? Why waste all this effort fretting over a 1% chance that we can't really change or prepare for, when we should be paying attention to the 99% likelihood that we will need to keep working in the existing economic framework.

Sure, it's ridiculous to argue that the economy will always be fine because it always has been, but it's equally silly to say that just because the current situation is new and confusing (and maybe even scary) that we should all quit our jobs, buy land in Montana, and stock up on guns to fight off bandits.

All this economic doomsday talk over the credit crunch is starting to sound like Y2K all over again.
The world's most toxic value system
Wouldn't the ISP be forfeiting its common carrier status if it blocked p2p traffic and certain websites? Or is that just a myth?
Collapse: How Startups Choose to Fail or Succeed
Fighting Evil is more fun if you get to run around wearing pajamas and a cape!
The wealth is in the increased value of the land which becomes as much as 200 times more productive with the new designation.
I think it's a horrible name because newLISP's dynamic scoping with static scope simulated through namespaces seems pretty old-fashioned to me.
Like anything, there should never be an absolute law against using a taboo language construct. Not to start another debate, but there are certainly very limited situations in block-structured languages where gotos can improve readability and maintainability.

Similarly there are situations where eval() is probably appropriate. Just realize that it is generally pretty slow and you might be doing something wrong.

Try to change things so that you don't need it if you can. Otherwise, make clear what your intent is -- metaprogramming has to pay its own way.

Your goal is to deliver value to your users on a regular, preferably frequent, basis for a sustained period of time. This means making useful software which is maintainable. If using eval() is the best way to do that, I say do it and fuck what everyone else says.
Three Unforgivable Usability Sins
eval isn't slow. It's fast. That's why the JSON decoder at json.org uses it. It simply makes sure the input is 'clean' - eg simple json notation data, then evals it.
Fortunately, Congress has given copyright-holders a chainsaw to dismember such petty thieves (see? I'm using a real-world property analogy!): DMCA takedown notices... >:-D

(If it were mere verbatim piracy, I wouldn't care, but mangling the wording makes everyone involved in the original interview look like an idiot).
37Signals is a startup? They've been around almost 10 years.

That's true, but 37signals used to be a consulting/contract firm. Their metamorphosis into a product company is more recent.
Yes, I'm kind of fan of PG posts and this one is also cool. While I can argue a lot about what the future will bring for startups and hackers etc., I'm more interested into that "being in the hub". While I'm from Europe, I would like to know what would be the hub in the Europe (Maybe I'm writing in the wrong place but anyway) and if the cities/areas compete, how come that there are no Silicon Valley VCs present in Europe, if they are present in Israel?

While I like having in my mind all about good stuff from Silicon Valley, VC and tech folks, I would encourage Paul to write about bad things that can happen to hackers when they deal with VCs or Angels like dropping out of the Board, etc. it would be good to maybe prepare us tech folks to handle the truth that not all people will be good people around us that will try to invest in us, or are there only "good people" in Silicon Valley?
The World's Top 50 Microfinance Institutions
How to Exercise an Open Mind
S3 is ~$150/TB for scalable, high-availability, low-latency, redundant storage, with on-demand pricing -- no power costs, or overhead admin. Your post makes it sound like S3 is the latest fashion, but my reasons (and others) are why it's gaining popularity, especially around the startup scene.
Amazon S3 seems to be the "in" solution right now, but when you do the math, it gets pretty expensive as you start nearing multiple TB of storage.

I've done the math, and (at least compared to renting dedicated servers) Amazon S3 is reasonably priced well into the TB range. The cheapest prices I've seen advertised for bulk storage servers online are at softlayer, where it's possible to get down to about $80/TB-month (they have TB drives for $50/month, but you need a server to contain them) compared to S3's $140/TB-month ($0.15 / 2^30 bit-months); but that's for unreplicated storage, and you'll find it very hard to get good performance and reliability (considering that drives will inevitably fail) for less than a 2x increase in price.

I haven't done the math on colocation (and that involves more of a judgement call, valuing capital costs vs. monthly expenses) but I suspect that any system you can design which is anywhere near as reliable as S3 will end up being fairly close to it in price.
eBay launches microlending website
He's roughly correct. Yet if warrior societies are so bad, why are they so common? The answer is that they used to work. In low tech warfare, the fiercest and most cohesive side wins, even if they're outnumbered 10 to 1. So for most of history warrior aristocracies have controlled territories way out of proportion to their numbers.

Industrialization changed the balance. If you have guns and your opponents have spears, it doesn't matter how fierce they are.

The traditions of warrior socities may be obsolete, but it seems provincial to call them "toxic." Members of those societies would be equally contemptuous of our traditions. For example, our lack of loyalty. We're nicer to women, but would we be as willing to die to save a friend? We're more sensitive, but are we as honest?
Bruce Eckel: The End of the Vista Experiment
Use part of the week to prioritise and organise to make sure you don't get behind again.
A proof I will never forget: An algorithms story
Dave Thomas: Ruby 1.9... Right for You?
Prototype (the Javascript library) does this automatically for AJAX responses, and Ruby on Rails makes extensive use of this facility through its RJS mechanism.

http://www.prototypejs.org/api/ajax/request

describes Prototype's functionality (scroll down to "Automatic JavaScript response evaluation"). It also provides some explanation of why it's not much of a security hole.

http://www.codyfauser.com/2005/11/20/rails-rjs-templates

describes how Ruby on Rails uses this Prototype feature.
Find open source software alternatives to well-known commercial software @ http://www.osalt.com/
So, it's just a given the GMail's security SUCKS?
Futurama's Taxicab Numbers
Why Comp Sci Grads Can't Hack (and why you need them anyway)
Depends on what you want it to do. Do you want to learn LISP or do you want newLISP to do a particular task? As a scripting language it does it's job very nice. I first started to use it when I needed a small, but flexible language that worked well on Windows. newLISP does the job just right.

A nice feature is the ability to compile a newLISP script to a standalone executable that does not require a newLISP interpreter. I hacked together a quick and dirsty script that my colleages at work like a lot - a script that cleans up crap in their windows profile directory. :-)

I have no experience with other LISPs though, and thus am not competent to say whether newLISP is a "true" LISP. To me that really does not matter - as long as the tool does the job.

Good luck.
Good points. I probably should have worded my original post differently so as not to imply that S3 was simply being used because of its popularity. It's clear that its popularity comes in large part to its utility.

Still, I'm curious what other solutions are being used out there. (For instance, with 1 TB hard drives {at 7200 rpm} retailing for $200-$300 these days, perhaps someone has come up with a storage method that's an even better deal than S3?)
Viewport width: Size matters, but not in the way you'd expect
As I was reading this, I flashed back to the discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=91794 about traffic jams. One person slows down, forcing people behind him to slow down. The whole thing ripples outwards depending on the traffic density. So it is with generations of "thar" dominant cultures, of blood feuds begetting blood feuds.
It's good to see an article that makes the case that cultural values are not completely relative. Some things just work better than other things. Stuff like private property rights, for instance. Perhaps "right" is the wrong word, perhaps it should be "effective". Whatever.

For an interesting read along these lines, try "Culture Cult" -- excellent book.
Smart Drugs - Academics, musicians, even poker champs use pills to sharpen their minds, legally
Are we as willing to die to save a friend? Are we as honest?

Yes.

In fact, no matter what your opinion of the current politics vis-a-vis Iraq, it seems that not only would we die to save a friend, we would die to save an enemy, or an idea. We've done it time and again. As far as I know, no other culture is like that. As far as honesty, societies with "thar" mentalities are some of the most dishonest societies on the planet, whereas western societies a lot of business can be conducted on just a handshake. Ever try a handshake at a bazaar?

I think western civilization stacks up quite well against those questions. It's not a relative thing -- certain ideas make cultures better than other ones. Societies are all not equal -- that's a late 20th-century mode of thinking that's non-operative.

But perhaps I read too much into your response.
Ask YC: How do I look at my older comments?
I wanted to respond to a post today with a reference to a comment I previously made. But I can only see my comments for the last 6 days. How do I look at older comments?
That's crazy. My friend and I just spent a few days over the holidays building a quote site using Django. Ours is at http://www.snipquote.com if you want to check it out. You install a firefox extension, then highlight text on any web page, right click and SnipQuote.
Interesting. However, the author did point out a culture similar to 'thar' values without its toxicity -- Japanese bushido. It may have helped that the bushi-class outlawed the use of guns for a good while, and they were essentially warrior-bureaucrats.

As a counterpoint to what I just said, the original Bushido code was codified by a ronin, and the most recent literary work on the Bushido code, the Hagakure was written when the Japanese warrior class was already on their way out ... and the author thought the greatest shame was to meet his death in soiled underwear.

Like any career path in any culture, you'll find people who obediently obey the well-worn paths. The warriors of a warring culture is no less the same. They were fertilizer then, and they are fertilizer now. And there's always the minority who are aware of their cultural blinders. The old initiations were meant to give this gift of awareness to the perceptive. In the old days, these were the warchiefs or the shaman; today, they are the military apprentices and the hackers.
SnipQuote: a Firefox extension/site for saving your favorite quotations
It's strange that the kwout site was just posted, since a friend and I coincidentally spent a few days making a quote site over the holidays. This was my first project using Django, and it was quite fun. Basically you just install a Firefox plugin or bookmarklet, then highlight text on any web page you are on. If you're using the extension, you right click and select SnipQuote. If you use the bookmarklet, you just click on the bookmarklet after your text is highlighted. The idea is that quotationspage is nice, but it's outdated and a quote page could be much more valuable if you could quote anybody and streamlined the submission process. Any feedback is welcome.

Edit: It turns out our site isn't really like kwout at all.
Here's the article with no paywall:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-brain_dop...
Joel Spolsky's (Geek) Travel Survival Guide
That one still wanted a login... this one worked from bugmenot whereas all the latimes bugmenots were broken

Username:	mail340660@10minutemail.com

Password:	loginssuck
All the drugs that they're talking about are some form of amphetamine. The idea isn't new, it's been around since coffe was discovered by the west in the 1500's, and other forms have been popular since Jack Kerouac typed "On the Road" while high on benzedrene.

The only thing new about this is that it's now prescribed and more culturally appropriate.
Erdos was almost always on amphetamines as well.
>All the drugs that they're talking about are some form of amphetamine.

They talk about a lot more than Ritalin and Adderall in the article. They mention Modafinil (an atypical stimulant), Donepezil (an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor) and beta blockers.
There's nothing built in the software, what I usually end up doing is searching Google on site:ycombinator.com for words I suspect I used in the old comment.
I could be wrong but I think they fixed this particular malicious site forwarding your email issue. By default, you can no longer set that filter until you change a setting.

Still, I use gmail in one browser (Opera) and surf with another (Firefox).
Best picture quality with 6 megapixels
I am, gasp, actually spending it with family. I feel so bad about that.
Both the sites have completely different application.
I'm doing the exact opposite. I've got 2 weeks off of work, and I've pledged to do no work at all in that time period. I've been burning the midnight oil working on my web app nights and weekends while working at my day job full time. I need some time to really relax and recoup.

So instead I'm reading, walking ~10 miles a day and generally doing things that I've neglected for the past 2 years.
Well, this is, first of all, racist. He doesn't want to use the Spanish term because he thinks it's "really not fair to saddle Spanish culture with the term." But it IS apparently fair to saddle Arabic culture with the term. Considering that Arabia was the birthplace of Algebra and underwent a renaissance that in large part made the European Renaissance possible, no, I don't think that's very fair at all.

But even if I let this racist term go through, what is Thar, exactly? A good deal of time is spent talking about how it isn't various things-- honor, bushido-- but it isn't ever defined. Instead I get this list of things that are associated with the "mentality," a list that, among other things, describes Tokugawa Japan perfectly. As a side note, anyone who thinks Japan's is a culture of Bushido does not know Japanese history. The Bushido code was written by a samurai who never saw combat, whose father never saw combat, and whose grandfather, in likelihood, never saw combat. The Bushido myth is a propaganda piece for convincing daimyos to keep their samurai on the payroll.

So we have a clearly racist document using a nonsense term to describe nothing. What, exactly, is this?
Drupal kind of forces the 3-column layout on you. It's not really very easy to extend (from what I've experienced). I've just never seen anyone have a good Drupal experience.
No problem man, Peru has a lot of problems in public education and health care, but it's also a great country to visit, if you need anything else just contact me.
Mail in profile.
Renewable Energy as a Disruptive Technology
IBM Reveals Five Innovations that Will Change Our Lives Over the Next Five Years
"In low tech warfare, the fiercest and most cohesive side wins, even if they're outnumbered 10 to 1.. Industrialization changed the balance."

I'm not sure who's more 'fierce' between the Romans and the Germans. Technological advantage existed long before industrialization: the macedonian pike, the persian archers, the roman phalanx.

Has anybody read "The Fates of Nations" by Paul Colinvaux? Recommended. Especially if you've read Guns, Germs and Steel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fates_of_Nations
Information Overload Predicted Problem of the Year for 2008
We Just Launched - Tell us what you think
"What, exactly, is this?"

It is a commentary on a way of life usually practiced by Arabs, but also commonly found in other places in the world. It is not a blanket statement about any race, therefore your charges of racism are total BS. You can be a member of a race and participate or not in a particular culture. Race is not culture. It's not a one-to-one relationship. To say that it is, ironically enough, racist. People are free agents and can choose to be anything they want. Cultures are fair game for all sorts of criticism -- we are really good at criticizing our own culture. Thank goodness we live in a world where criticism of culture is encouraged.
"Industrialization changed the balance."

Faith in brands has replaced faith in our neighbors. If honor is obsolete, it's because the individual is obsolete; corporations (and government) have eclipsed the individual as the primary change agents in people's lives. Who cares if my spouse is unfaithful as long as I can trust Apple and Coca-Cola.

</cynicism>
Bloggings a Low-Cost, High Return Marketing Tool
Bring this startup 1000 new users and win a Wii
The standard 3-column layout is determined by the number of sidebars and block regions in the theme (not by Drupal). Some themes have as many as 18 block regions (header, banner, footer, content top, etc.) and blocks and widgets don't strictly have to be in the sidebar. It seems that you didn't know this, so I don't trust that your experience with Drupal is very authoritative.
What's your point? The article makes some reasonable observations, but there is no call to action. In other words, what do you suggest people do (differently)?
well the market for this sort of thing is super saturated, but good luck anyways

also put the title of the article above the line with # of votes, the way you are doing it hurts my head
"Most of these funds have since been traced back to Al Qaeda associates"

Do you have a link to back that up? Haven't heard that before.
I don't know about toxicity of value systems, but there's no more toxic form of debate than a semantics argument, which is what this essay devolves to.
I don't like how the original author failed to distinguish between Arabian culture and Muslim religion. Though they are intertwined, there are non-Arabian Muslim cultures as well. To add to DanielBMarkham's comment, though, Arabic culture centers around the language, not the ethnicity. Some of the original author's arguments are evidence of Muslim rather than Arabian origin. Lastly, just to throw more confusion into the issue, some of the Sufi sages were tortured to death by their Muslim bretherens as heretics, and they died with the same kind of aplomb the way the Buddhist monks were tortured to death. (Not all Arabs sacrifice themselves in hopes of attaining 72 virgins).

The telling point would be to find a non-Arabian culture that encourages 'thar'. Unfortunately, I have not yet thought of an example off the top of my head involving an non-Arabian culture.

The original author also vaguely discusses the rise of 'thar' culture sprouting on the internet without giving any specifics. I've been to forums where where people flame each other for sport. I remember the occasional tiffs here, and people trashing Reddit. I know Digg and YouTube comments are full of inanities. Not to mention the flames on blog posts and regular news articles when someone gets upset but clearly did not thoroughly read the article in question. It often seem to closely track the maturity level of the people involved: immature human beings don't know how to set good personal boundaries, whatever culture that might be.
Bored in the Valley? Go visit Google!
Craig Newmark, of 'Craigslist' fame, looks back -- and ahead
Apple To Offer Fox Video Rentals On iTunes
Google One-Ups Yahoo In Japan
Rasizm is recursive. By noticing rasizm in that text you became a rasist yourself. I just got rasist by commenting on it and downmodding you.

The only way to get rid of it is for everybody to forget about its existence.
As you point out, the term Arabian is more about language than ethnicity. I'm probably wrong, but don't tribal, violence-based political-religious movements possess these same cultural traits wherever they are found, such as Polynesian countries? One could argue that in the case of extreme Islamism this is Arabic culture seeping into other areas, but Polynesians are certainly not Arabic -- or any ethnicity that could be considered Arabic. So race or geography has little to do with it.

But I agree -- the article meandered a bit and one could draw various conclusions. I couldn't see anything racist, though. Seems like any more, people stick the racism label onto anything that might be critical of any sort of generic category of people. I guess if we say fat people are happy we would be accused of racism. It's just a poor choice of words, that's all my comment meant to point out.
That's fallacious. I'm getting tired of people bringing up 'semantic argument', soon to be followed by 'agree to disagree'. The toxicity of a 'semantic argument' comes from two or more people unable to emotionally get in rapport with each other and has little to do with the study and crafting of semantics itself.
Great idea. Why didn't I think of that? Thanks, rms.

I still wish I could look at all my old comments.
Microsoft Complains about Google's Monopoly: Fails to See Irony
A Question of Blame When Societies Fall
Daily WTF: The Complicator's Gloves
Thanks. Yes, the problem you are highlighting did occur to me after I posted my question. I note though that Amazon has kind of a social network feature where you can add friends and family and set privacy options on that basis. I guess receiving random gifts from people or having them add items to one's wish list would need to be limited to such 'friends'.
Cisco opening up IOS
Hmm, "tribal, violence-based political-religious movements." Going that way though, we could start pulling in examples from the Crusades, witchhunts ... I don't remember if they matched all of the factors:

- Restrictions on the free flow of information.

- The subjugation of women.

- Inability to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure.

- The extended family or clan as the basic unit of social organization.

- Domination by a restrictive religion.

- A low valuation of education.

- Low prestige assigned to work.

Given that, Dark-Ages European cultures matches most if not all of those traits.

As a tangential note, Malcolm Gladwell, author of Tipping Point and Blink wrote about these guys who were able to figure things out from people because they have studied the way people make faces. They categorized facial expressions. They were able to distinguish between two South American tribe based photographs of the individuals within each of the tribes. One tribe is very friendly. The other is not -- includes a lot of the attributes listed in 'Spotting the Losers'.

The caveat is that face reading like this is a specialty that requires a lot of training. Would be interesting to write software that can suggest cultural influences though, then run it through say, all the American news footage and see what kind of subcultures we have here.
actually some guy I know did invent heated handlebars for motorcycles/bike
Could S3 be an end-user product?
Kwout, A Simple Quote Tool For Bloggers
Indeed. As John Maynard Keynes put it, The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Study: Ads in online shows work better than ads on TV