skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
See also Art Devany's writing, at <http://www.arthurdevany.com/evolutionary_fitness/>. He sometimes (but not always) refers in his blog entries to recent supporting research for the 'paleolithic' diet ideal. There's a lot of similarity to 'low-carb' diets that have been popular.

An overview of DeVany's health outlook is in the essay, <http://www.arthurdevany.com/webstuff/images/RevisedEssay.pdf.... Interestingly, in DeVany's view, endurance running (as in a marathon) is a very bad thing for long-term health.
Google's Acquisition Strategy
How does Google makes it acquisitions?
Will Super Smart Artificial Intelligences Keep Humans Around As Pets?
I don't think it's stupid -- I think it's the basis of every subway system in the world. There are, however, lots of issues that would make this a very difficult project.

First thing, and I think the largest issue, is that it's an "all or nothing" system. Until all of the infrastructure was in place, the 'cars' would be crippled relative to our current vehicles. Almost all large society changes have an organic method of adoption or they don't gain any momentum. So until you've 'paved' rural Texas, no one who has ever considered visiting rural Texas will ever buy one. Worse still is that you'd probably have to bulldoze existing roads for the tracks (at least in cities where space is tight).

If you could overcome that obstacle, I feel the other issues would be easy (like how to pay for such a system, getting people to buy the cars, etc). It would be an interesting solution, somewhere between mass transit and autos, but a tough sell to everyone. Notice I didn't say impossible :-)
Agreed. Anytime someone starts talking about toxins to explain complex processes it starts to smell like pseudoscience.

It's like a microbiologist using the word "germs"
And that is the answer to the old question of "When is it a good idea to plug my site?"--when you've made something people want, in that particular situation.
An insight into how billionaires think in NYC comes from Mayor Bloomberg who takes the subway to work. That's way cheaper than parking in Manhattan.

John.
You mean how Bloomberg has his SUV motorcade take him to the express subway that is 20 blocks from where he lives.
Renowned Scientist Defects From Belief in Global Warming - Caps Year of Vindication for Skeptics
A great point, but it is perhaps already economically viable on a small scale, if done correctly.

Consider a place like Manhattan. Getting around in a car is already extremely impractical. Because it's easy to suspend a rail in the air, compared to a traditional road, it could be built right over the existing infrastructure. Population density is high, so you don't have to build very much of it before it becomes convenient. And few people in Manhattan would care that they can't get to rural Texas in their sky-car.

Now, if you supply electricity through that rail, it makes the cars much easier and cheaper to make. They would also be much lighter, which means the rail itself doesn't have to be as strong and so can be cheaper to build. And they would be more compact, which means people won't pay as much for a parking space.

Can somebody give me half a billion dollars, I have an idea for a startup...
A "Lucky" Building in Palo Alto for Startups
Maybe electric cars won't become mass market, but the Tesla Roadster is just plain cool; perhaps it helps the global warming cause by making energy efficiency a cooler problem to solve in the eyes of the general public.
Elevator Expertise from an Expert
I don't want a job
Wow, that's very cool -- I remember thinking about elevator scheduling in the past as an interesting theoretical problem. Scheduling algorithms for taxis, bus services, and similar systems is another related problem that seems interesting. A friend of mine spent some time writing software and setting up a small compute cluster to solve variants of the traveling salesman problem for a courier service.

More broadly, I think there are many situations in which CS can be applied to yield an incremental improvement in some every-day task where the standard solution is perfectly reasonable, but could be made by efficient by an intelligent algorithm. As the cost of building in these algorithms continues to decrease (and as WiFi + RFID becomes more pervasive), the number of problems for which it will be feasible to apply a sophisticated solution will continue to increase. An incremental improvement in a single elevator's dispatch time might not mean all that much, but when it's applied to tens of thousands of elevators that operate every day, that's a nice productivity hack.
novel ways to create wealth + novel ways of avoiding expenditure = novel ways of get rich & stay rich!
I get it pretty rarely.

My folks are both entrepreneurs themselves, and have been running their own business or contracting as long as I can remember, so I definitely don't get it from them.

My girlfriend is of a distinctly less entrepreneurial bent, and occasionally gets frustrated, since I work such long hours. She works for a company that demands a lot (starts with G and ends with oogle), and she escapes as fast as she can at the end of the day, and so me being intent on my work when she leaves in the morning (or sleeping off a late night) and well past when she arrives home at night bugs her. So, given that I don't want to inspire jealousy, or poke fun, or whatever, my answer is generally, "I'm sorry. It's just the way I am. I'll take some time off this weekend."
Thanks to this video, I discovered the main TED website:
http://www.ted.com

It's a nicely constructed web site with decent resolution videos of TED talks. Just checked out Dean Kamen's prosthetic arm demo... very cool.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/82
Oops, spelled it wrong: Fernand Sarrat. Try googling with words such as 'lawsuit', and 'sexual harassment'. Also look around for 'Doug Nassaur' (not the object of Sarrat's affections, but hired by him).
MS-DOS 5 Upgrade Promo Video
Zeno Could Be Next Robot Boy Wonder
I think that notion of "experience design" is very important, and that people's perception might differ from reality. Like I think I have heard that Menus are actually faster on Linux than on Windows, but on Windows it feels faster because they are animated immediately.

I also read somewhere of a case where designers solved the waiting problem by putting up mirrors next to the elevators. That way, people were busy looking at themselves and didn't notice the wait time as much.
I agree that hybrids are a sorry excuse for a "green" alternative. Aside from the fact that they currently cost more as Khosla points out -- just because a car or SUV is a hybrid, doesn't make it truly energy efficient. Auto makers are slapping hybrid engines in cars to appeal to the growing buzz about going green, when in fact, many of the hybrids out there are only a very dull shade of green.

Take the Ford Escape hybrid, for example. It's currently considered the most efficient SUV on the market ... getting a whopping 30mpg. 30mpg! Big friggin deal! You can get better mileage in a regular gasoline Civic.

The worst part about hybrids is that THEY STILL USE GASOLINE! Sure, maybe a little bit less, but as long as we are driving hybrids, we're still dependent on burning fossil fuels, contributing to CO2 in the atmosphere, and making the oil companies richer.

Hybrids are a marginal improvement in fuel efficiency. Marginal is not good enough to make any difference worldwide. We need to focus on orders of magnitude of increased efficiency. I believe that one day, hydrogen will be our answer. Solar electric is on a good path, too ... but still far from being feasible.

What can you do right now? Save your money on the fancy-shmancy hybrid, and buy a diesel car, and fill 'er up with biodiesel. It's carbon neutral, totally renewable, and requires no special modification to your car.
"hopefully never"
"why would I want that?"
7 Ways to Make Your Own Good Luck (applies to startup hackers)
Paul Graham's (defunct) Blog
Problem with correlation vs. causation -

"The researchers also tested a vowel sound that is generally associated with negative meaning (e.g., the "yoo" sound in the word "putrid")"

That company in Mountain View had a tough time overcoming their negative sounding name.

Sorry, your brand is what you make it.
One of My Competitors Owes Me A Favor
At Least on Wall Street, Wages of Sin Beat Those of Virtue
Helping Computers to Search With Nuance, Like Us
That link is interesting but I can't find any evidence that it's true. How can I tell that he didn't just make up the story about cereal being bad? It seems like any easy experiment to reproduce -- just buy a rat and a box of corn flakes.
I've seen claims like this a lot:
"There are races of people who are all slim, who are stronger and faster than us. They all have straight teeth and perfect eyesight. Arthritis, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, depression, schizophrenia and cancer are absolute rarities for them. These people are the last 84 tribes of hunter-gatherers in the world."

Is that actually true though? It seems like the sort of thing that should be easy to verify or disprove. Whether it's actually caused by diet would be harder to prove, but if these people really are free of all those health problems, that would be quite remarkable and should be studied more carefully.
They did get out of the hardware business, kindof. Apple only does the design (and not all of it). The low margin stuff is handled by companies in Taiwan or China.

Apple seems to be the only device manufacturer that understands usability and is capable of producing ok software (microsoft is problem #2, amazingly).
I like to read his essays on paulgraham.com better anyway. Having to check both feeds (you use the unofficial rss feed for pg.com right?) was just annoying.
ONLamp.com -- An Introduction to Erlang
Most important VCs
How Windows Update Keeps Itself Up-to-Date
Dubai tower now world's tallest building (planned height still secret)
>but on Windows it feels faster because they are animated immediately.

Context menus take between 3 and 6 seconds on my Windows XPSP2 machine to load the desktop context menu as it thrashes the hard drive. That's after a memory upgrade where it took half a minute to load the desktop context menu. My slower KDE machine loads context menus instantly.

Where are these Windows machines with instant animating menus?
This is like one of those arbitrage opportunities that disappear as soon as they become public knowledge. Now that the owners think of the building as a "kingmaker," they'll demand such an exorbitant price (in stock) from startups that want to rent it that only a desperate one would take the deal. So paradoxically the one thing you can be sure of is that the next Google won't be coming out of this building.
I have a client that drives a $130,000 car, but won't stock paper towels in the rest room.

Another sends clerks home when it gets slow, but will have me spend 50 hours (at substantially higher rates) chasing down a 23 cent imbalance in his books.

Another shares a corporate jet, but won't let his people eat at their desks to save on cleaning crew expenses.

I know one who will make his lunch companion get out of the car to find a parking meter with time already on it. Really.

I could go on and on...

Many people say, "Thats how they got rich." Bull. They're just stupid and cheap.

I know many millionaires of both kinds. IMO, it boils down to this: How did you get your money and, if you lost it all, how would you get it back?

The confident ones are not cheap. The inheriters are.
3 Serial founders share their 'Success Hacks'
Thanks. It wouldn't really work for us but we'd considered it.
Well, to some degree it may be true because if you are afflicted with something nasty, you die, quickly. That, and not living a sedentary lifestyle are two things that would leave the survivors pretty healthy.
Mathematical ideas are among the most timeless and beautiful of all the things discovered by civilization. The fact that such pure knowledge (often researched for purely recreational or aesthetic reasons) has so many useful applications in so many areas is something profoundly surprising and humbling.
"it's the intangible quality of what users are experiencing that becomes the toughest nut to crack"

Good thing Microsoft isn't in the elevator business.

Imagine what a splash screen would look like.
>Save your money on the fancy-shmancy hybrid, and buy a diesel car, and fill 'er up with biodiesel. It's carbon neutral, totally renewable, and requires no special modification to your car.

If only it wasn't destroying the rainforests:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825265.400
Google Presently Powerpoint Clone (based on Zenter) Could Be Days Away
Salesforce Enters Custom Application Market ("potentially game ending for...a slew of startups")
one solar explosion affects the earth more than all mankind could ever do.
He rides subway to appeal to people. He's a politician.
What's a job? .....lol

I get paid for having fun, learning new tricks and meeting kick ass people. where else can you do that.
Erlang is a good example of "crossing the chasm" in a programming language (http://welton.it/articles/programming_language_economics.htm...) - despite many other shortcomings, it is great for distributed environments, and for its concurrency model. This is enough to give it a boost into the 'big time', if they play their cards right.
Like you I grew up poor, and I don't want to say it's good experience, but I think it definitly gives you a better mindset on life. I work on a computer all day, but on the week-ends I love to get out and do physical labor.. there's nothing like the feeling of blisters on your hands from a hard days work.

and the whole "when the trust fund runs out" I think I'm gonna start using that line. :)
When does an Angel investor become a VC?
At what point does an angel investor become more of a VC? when they're investing more than 1/2 a million? a million? or when they want more then their share of the company.

I've heard of "Angel Investors" giving 100K for 51 or 52 percent of a company... to me this is more of a VC move...

Any thoughts?
The Birthplaces of Some of the Most Successful Startups
humble beginnings. think big. believe.
Launch vehicles are a service now. If I were to work on this, I wouldn't work on a launch vehicle, just the package that could survive the launch & landing.
No, no. These guys aren't amoral blood suckers -- they're just "keeping the market efficient!", haven't you heard? (My time in the financial industry was the most repugnant professional experience I've ever had. I'm a little bitter.)
Computer Industry and Aesthetics
i wonder if the computer industry will be infiltrated by the non-sense luxury products industry...
we have seen a bit of it in the mobile phone industry with D&G Razr and LG Prada phone. are we on the verge of seeing something like a gucci powerbook?
the major difference between an angel and a VC is that the former normally invests his own funds. on the other hand, VCs manage a pool of money invested by others through a fund.
Yahoo Makes Tiny Acquisition: BuzzTracker
that story is either fiction or that specific millionaire is dumb.
it takes a significant amount of time (i.e. several minutes to hours to days) to get a loan. a person driving a ferrari would not invest the time for that amount of money.
I don't think salesforce is a threat to a lot of startups. Maybe to other big companies, but startups should be able to outhack them.
Nice intro. If you haven't picked up "Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World" by Joe Armstrong, I can not recommend it enough. One of the few programming books that you look forward to reading.
I agree with that, especially having used their somewhat kludgy product.

The interesting thing though about this is that it's a platform for other startups to use. An infrastructure really. Seems directly up against startups like Coghead.
This Saturday is Software Freedom Day
World's First Facebook Apps VC
On July 4, 2007, Altura Ventures announced the "Altura 1 Facebook Investment Fund," becoming the world's first Facebook-only venture capital firm. On July 10, 2007 Bay Partners announced appfactory, a venture capital seed program dedicated solely to Facebook applications.

Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#Applications
It's expected to rise more than 2,295 feet ...

http://phoja.com/show/666/Is-the-height-of-the-worlds-talles...

http://www.newser.com/story/4627.html
What is Intelligence?: Beyond the Flynn Effect
That is a good point, but where do you draw the line between somone wanting to help you, and someone wanting to rape your business.
More like 20 billion. Light rail is rediculously expensive to build.
Dubai is run by folks with vision. Folks who realize that oil is a finite, non-renewable resource and they need to spend their petrodollars preparing for the day that it runs out. Apparently, its quite the tourist destination. Indoor skiing, snorkeling and duty free shopping just a 4 hr flight from Frankfurt.
The link you posted is a year old. Stop posting junk please.
Google's Chief Privacy Officer Kicks Off Worldwide Consumer Privacy Crusade
Google streetview may be illegal
These are debunked in "[How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World](http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Mumbo-jumbo-Conquered-World-Delu...)"
Dunno if it's true, but Jared Diamond made that claim around 20 years ago: http://www.mnforsustain.org/food_ag_worst_mistake_diamond_j....

I did find a couple peer-reviewed journal articles that seem to support the claim:

http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/reprint/71/3/665.pdf

http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/73/2/353

http://www.thepaleodiet.com/articles/Meat%20Paradox%20Final....

http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=GqvJhxyH...
Microsoft, Blackberry and a multibillion-dollar rumour
Most of what he says seems pretty intuitive. Evolution takes a long time to work. It seems like it would take a while to adjust genetically from a diet that humans had had for almost a million years to one they'd had for only several thousand years.
SilverStripe - Open Source CMS, Has Support From Google
But of course:

"The record of the Vice Fund has not been without blemishes. Its founder, Richard A. Sapio, and two other executives at the fund's advisory firm, Mutuals.com, were accused in 2003 of securities-related fraud and in 2004 of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, wire fraud and mail fraud."

Maybe the kind of thing you should think about before investing in something proudly calling itself "The Vice Fund".
I guess I'm not clear on the correlation between age of information and junkiness?
Which parts indicate that? BTW, the original is on line...cool!

http://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Il_Principe
Falcon 1: how to get something into orbit
I've seen the MS Live recording car around Burlington MA. Every time I drive by it, I roll down my windows and give it a thumbs up with a big smile.

I've noted the locations, and can't wait to see myself grinning like a fool :)
yes they are keeping the market efficient. and if people investing in "vice" type companies are amoral blood suckers, what about people that work for casinos, beer companies, tobacco companies? the delivery guys? the brew masters? what about the regulators that allow those companies to do what they do? what about consumers of those products, keeping the companies in business? when is the last time you drank a beer? played online poker?
Most oil producers are net savers when oil prices are high. That's one theory behind the mortgage/LBO boom: that Russia and China and Saudi Arabia are desperate to invest their money, so the end up investing it in incredibly stupid ventures in the US.
This makes a lot of sense. When you invest in a stock, your returns aren't just financial: buying shares of a solar power company pays a dividend in pretension (sort of like buying Amazon in 1999; it wasn't the money -- it was the .com). Since these stocks have a negative 'dividend' in the sense that nobody wants to admit to owning them, they offer higher returns to compensate.

Peter Lynch recommended this with garbage haulers and coffin manufacturers. It's still viable.
What about the huge chunks of ice breaking off the antarctic ice sheets? That seems like some sort of warming phenomenon going on in the southern hemisphere.
Hack hack hack? Hackity hacka hack. Hack hack hack!
They may be amoral -- but whose blood are they sucking?

Also: the only reason this is profitable is that moralists avoid these stocks. If you want Sin Investing to be less successful, you just need to discourage socially responsible stock pickers.
Hopefully one day we will find our silver bullet. With the number of languages/platforms getting touted these days, we are certainly looking hard for it :)
It's generally been said that sin pays of in the short term, while being very bad in the long term.
A bit o/t, but I hereby nominate 'serial', as applied to 'entrepreneur' and/or 'founder', as the most pointless, irritating, and obnoxious word of 2007.

You don't describe someone who works a bunch of jobs as a 'serial employee'. You don't describe an athlete who competes in successive Olympics as a 'serial Olympian'. Etc.

This 'serial' business is nothing more than noise and puffery. 'Entrepreneur' tells me something, though not much. 'Successful entrepreneur' tells me a tiny, tiny bit more. 'Serial entrepreneur' tells me someone is a self-promoting git.

I even saw this term applied to PG in an article some weeks ago. Considering that PG has repeatedly written that a startup is kinda stressful, and something he'd be very reluctant to do again, I think that marked the time the term slipped into complete meaninglessness for me. (Note that PG didn't refer to himself that way, 'twas the idiot writer/reporter.)

Let's drop the adjective, and shun those who use it.

/rant
Writely. Presently. Get it?

PS: That name has been in the works since, as far as I can tell, Writely was acquired.
Any book in which the author introduces a concept named after himself is probably not good.
Programmers and Business (cost of dumb programmers)
This reminded me of a keynote speech at the dynamical systems conference at Snobird a few years back about the limits of computational mathematics, i.e. the human limits of asking the wrong question.

The aged speaker was apparently a consultant for the British transportation authority; they wanted a model that would optimize their highway expenditure to put the money where it would do the most good along multiple criteria, time on the road, overall budget effects, safety, etc.

The team spent a significant amount time getting all the dynamic pieces of the model to interact and then started running solutions. Strangely though, no matter what reasonable weights or parameters they threw at it, it always recommended pedestrian safety expenditure of zero.

After a lot of puzzling they finally figured out what was going on. You see, a significant portion of the pedestrians on English crosswalks were aged pensioners. Since the model incorporated overall budget effects into its preferences, every dollar spent on pedestrian safety lead to the decreased risk of accidental death of net-revenue-drain individuals, i.e. little old ladies walking to the corner shop. So the models did an excellent job of solving the wrong problem, GIGO.

Likewise, actual time spent from start to finish is most definitely not the same at perceived time from start to finish, with the second probably being to most important. Which, in case you didn't know, is why hotel elevators almost invariably have mirrors on either side of the door, you reflection gives you something to do other than thinking about how long your elevator is taking, a considerably cheaper solution than trying to solve the computational problem of maximal overall trip efficiency.

That said I'm totally jealous they get paid to play with that problem. If I were there I'd be like the guys in the arm chairs from the Collins College advertisements doing the "dude, I can't believe we get paid to play games!"