skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Its not that PG writes so much gold.

I think he sees the world through his own views and everything follows.

So when he writes about anything i feel he's just writing how he views the world. He always gets upvoted because there are lots of people who like how he examines the world.

He doesn't write that much gold but how he views the world has been judged golden by a many reddit readers.

Some people agree some people don't.
"The intent of reddit is that users vote for posts they find interesting and against posts they find boring. Any situation that leads to posts gaining or losing points based on other criteria is a sign of a flaw in the system."

No, the intent of reddit was to get as many users as possible, whoever they are--even if they like Ron Paul stories and pictures of cats--and then sell it for a profit or go public. It's both the most logical conclusion and also the advice of Paul Graham, their investor and advisor. Is Reddit (and digg) not more popular than ever, and did Reddit not get bought? There is no stipulation in Paul's articles or speeches about making something the perfect x, y, or z, but about making something users want.

Paul says that News.YC is better, but it's because it has a much tighter focus with the addition of moderation and the aspect of sharing news and ideas with real people about real issues. It's also because those who have a lot of free time on their hands and want to go where many users are, have the choice of Reddit or Digg. If this site had been the first social news site, it, too, would have deteriorated quickly.
Most of these people live in Russia (or former satellite states of USSR); apparently, their government has better things to do. Add to that the fact that such botnets are not operated by random geeks who seek fun or fame but by profit-minded organized criminals (who usually don't brag about their acts on IRC channels, for example).
I got this link from Joshua ala delicious's blog. He was saying how auto increment on primary ids isn't a good idea--especially when it's exposed as a part of the URL. Too bad this is the default in Rails.
Scroll down to the comments and you will see.
Interview with Nintendo's President (Mr. Iwata)
the icons?
do we have the right tools yet?
if not can why don't we try to think of what would help us with this massive and rapid doubling of knowledge.
looks cool to me!
How to Be a Leader in Your Field
The internet has been a pretty good tool to take us this far.
This is a well written document. Sometimes motivational pieces for business people seem to state the obvious, but this article chooses to focus in the connection between leadership skills and general productivity outside of pure leadership roles, making it inspirational for anyone.
totally useless now for a new company.
If you are happy with the posted speed limits and see the police as only law enforcement then nothing I have to say will make a difference.
Or they could just get a copy of Timesprite now, which does the same thing (windows only)
Client is Offline

25hoursaday.com

The DNS2Go customer you are trying to reach is currently offline.

How ironic.
There are more crimes committed than the police can ever keep up with. So they prioritize crimes of varying types.

Why have they prioritised ticketing members of the public on the freeways for minor speed offenses?

The freeways are the safest roads by an order of magnitude when measured by accidents per mile traveled.

Going 10mph over in a 60 mph compared to ten over in a 25 is a trivial increase in speed and danger.

The freeway speed limits were set due to a temporary economic condition, why do we still have them?

A blanket speed limit is madness when taking into account differing vehicles and differing driver abilities. A trained police pursuit driver with ten years of high speed escort duty, driving a modern porsche on a day off is limited to the same speed as a new driver in a 20 year old POS.

So in answer to your question, yes the police should not use cameras or speed traps on the freeways and rural roads. A marked highly visible patrol car is a much better solution.

Instead the police cars should be in town controlling speed where it is most likely to be fatal, should be concentrating on tail gating, should be prosecuting inattentive drivers, ticketing drivers with no lane control etc etc.

Ticketing drivers on freeways for speeding can only be for one of two reasons either it's $$$ or it's bumping up the arrest/prosecution figures.
You are implying that said startup is nothing more than a basic website (ie. MySpace, Facebook).

What if the startup includes mobile features (twitter), or deals with video/music (Slacker, YouTube, etc).

Licensing, lawyer fees, scaling, development costs - they are all relative to what action your startup is taking.

Yes, if you are just building a blog or the next MySpace-killer (which will fail and you suck at life if that's what you are attempting) - yeah, you could pull it off by yourself with a $7 per month shared hosting package.
Self-discipline is a very conscious effort. But when one needs to be creative one needs to be operating out of the sub-conscious and the conscious mind. However, it seems a certain amount of distractions and randomness are needed for any truly great creative thinking. I think the goal is to balance the two. Therefore, if adding discipline to one area of your life might help it could be totally worth it, like how Einstein would wear identical clothing everyday to free his mind from the business of deciding what to wear...
I think this might be an exercise left to the readers(us).

So let's make our own.

1. Flashing Xbox/IPod Ads

2. Extreme Fox-related whoring (i understand why though)

3. Tom's cutesy messages about your friends NOT being deleted.
We already seem to have a nice tradition of giving lots of votes to "hey, check out what I did ..." articles. I really like that - it adds to the sense of community that other people are supportive of your efforts.
Yes looks like we disagree on that, hence our differing conclusions. I believe the speed traps do more good than harm.

You have to admit that this service's tag line "find cops before they find you" does make the user sound like a criminal :). They've gotta change that.
"As for the poor, they do not appear in Locke's little book at all."[45] In his "Essay on the Poor Law," Locke turns to the education of the poor; he laments that "the children of labouring people are an ordinary burden to the parish, and are usually maintained in idleness, so that their labour also is generally lost to the public till they are 12 or 14 years old."[46] He suggests, therefore, that "working schools" be set up in each parish in England for poor children so that they will be "from infancy [three years old] inured to work."[47] He goes on to outline the
economics of these schools, arguing not only that they will be profitable for the parish but also that they will instill a good work ethic in the children.[48]"

Contrast this with what he suggests to an Aristocrat in Some Thoughts Concerning Education which should be taught to all children regardless of class.

The point; slaves are taught a "good work ethic"(the same as "working hard") and the ruling class are not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_Thoughts_Concerning_Educat...
To be fair, I've found cops check for traffic violations more in safe areas (e.g. Silicon Valley), than in unsafe areas (e.g. Berkeley/Oakland) where cops are busy busting real criminals. So they do prioritize to some extent.

In the Silicon Valley area, I've seen more in-town speed traps than on the freeway; I received one citation for 40 in a 25mph zone, and had other close calls. Maybe it's different where you live.

"...should be concentrating on tail gating, should be prosecuting inattentive drivers, ticketing drivers with no lane control etc etc."
They probably don't do this as much as these violations are more subjective and harder to prove in court. Also there's some correlation between people who speed and people who tail-gate, etc.
If those 100 are only upvoting to push it in the face of the 100,000, then those 100 will leave if the 100,000 do.

"More likely many of the 100,000 see reddit as their best source for all the Ron Paul news the 'mainstream' media is 'trying to hide' from them."

Please tell me you don't believe that. The RP posts are worse than lolcats.
With new systems, amateurs mashing up / Free technology allows users to customize data
http://www.paulgraham.com/vcsqueeze.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html

yeah unless you're doing hardware (or some other capital hungry biz), I think angels are better

It's kind of like multi-threaded programming... don't do it if you can avoid it

Then again there are VCs with special terms nowadays like Charles Rivers and Bay Partners....
Besides throwing piles of money at the problem how does a vc help (as opposed to say an angel)?

I could be wrong but I would think it would help more if you figured out good SEO and maybe targetted some heavy bloggers in your industry... and if your product is good enough - people like Arrington, Needleman, and Malik will talk about it for free.

Angel money is good enough in most cases (unless your site is cash hungry like say another Youtube).
If Ron Paul is the worst thing you found on reddit lately, you haven't been paying enough attention. The site has more or less been 'owned' by the batshit crazy fringes:

http://reddit.com/info/2n64e/comments/c2n7nd
It would be cool if scientist could record their research in a machine understandable format. Then people could either state their assumptions or conclusions and the computer would provide the other side, or state what information is missing.
How to choose the right web developer
"Go West, Young Startup"
The Face of Entrepreneurship Gets Younger and Younger
If we are only talking about creating an artificial general intelligence, this should do: Nature created a general intelligence through natural selection, which is a less powerful process than what humans are wielding (if only because humans can implement natural selection with computers and in addition have intelligent tricks that evolution doesn't have). Hence, if the human brain follows the laws of physics, it should be possible to find out how it works and implement it without all the messy parts that are bound to have accumulated over the years.

If you believe the estimates for the computing power of the human brain, we only need a few more years of growth in the dollar/flops ratio to make the required computational horsepower available to smaller organizations. In fact, supercomputers being designed today already touch the lowest estimates of brain computational capacity. So if these estimates hold, we only lack the knowledge of how to copy this process artificially. Which certainly doesn't mean that it is right around the corner, but not looking into it would be stupid.

Then, of course, the regular pro-singularity lament goes like this: Once we have created one machine that faithfully copies what the human brain does best, the exponential growth in processor capability will ensure that we soon have an army of intelligent machines. This sentiment is easy to attack. But even if processors stop getting better overnight (which is a grossly conservative estimate) we can still find improvements to our algorithms to make our hypothetical artificial intelligences better. In nature, brain mass doesn't equate with capability. (This last sentence is anecdotal evidence, but I won't bother to dig up the papers to see whether it holds).

You cite the sorry state of machine learning/artificial intelligence to show that we aren't anywhere near what is required to implement strong AI. I agree that the fields of cognitive science and artificial intelligence are in a sorry state that barely make any effort at copying what biological brains do. But didn't you just warn against extrapolating future change from history? It is obvious to any young, ambitious scientist that our parents have been banging away at the wrong problems for the last 30 years.

This isn't a pro-singularity post, because I believe that what Ray Kurzweil and his cronies preach carries too much resemblance to a cult. They may or may not have ulterior motives, but as you say, things always look better on paper than they do in the real world. What I am trying to say is that is would be incredibly stupid not to investigate these things closer (not to _try_, throw our full weight on the problem), because the implications of successfully pulling this off would be profound.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem
Twitter's mobile "features" are a joke. Twitter is the who's who of easy technology. Your basic forum site has more technology then Twitter does.
"Programs developed using this [sic] techniques are significantly easier to write, debug, and maintain than programs written with mutexes, CRITICAL_SECTIONs, or semaphores."

No, they damn well aren't. Or, at least, not always. Like most things, it's horses for courses.

This article got under my skin because I had the distinct "pleasure" of maintaining/debugging/enhancing a system designed according to these principles. The problem that crops up over and over and over is that one wants to compute f(X, Y), where X and Y are members of different objects, assigned to different threads. So, one must send messages to retrieve the values and trigger a computation .... and then the result of the computation has to make its way back to the caller.

It. Fucking. Sucks.

I'm sure this isn't a problem if the data is laid out just so, and the system never diverges from its original design, etc. But there are cases where a mutex would be just fine, thank you very much.

As an aside: Can performance considerations _really_ play a role in arguing for messaging as a interthread communication solution? Even if you can construct an environment specific argument that messaging has lower overhead than mutexes (and I find the linked article unconvincing) isn't the latency going to go through the roof? Doesn't that matter?

Bah. Another example of taking something hard and simple, trying to make it easy and complicated, and leaving it instead hard and complicated.
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Isn't the existence of the human brain rather compelling evidence for the possibility to create intelligent machines? I almost see no way to not believe in AI.

As for people not caring: most people don't know how the world ticks, they take for granted that electricity comes from the power socket and food comes from the super market. They will have to care when everything changes (ie their jobs are being taken over by machines).
My last company progressed essentially as you described. We went from nothing to acquisition on $0 of outside investment and essentially $0 of inside investment. So I am here to say that it is possible.

However, there are a number of reasons taking VC money would be "desirable or necessary." Here are some I can think of:

1) Good VCs are often hooked into potential acquisition targets. They can get you noticed and possibly help you fetch a higher price.

2) If you need good targeted seed traffic to get you going, that might take a substantial amount of money. This can take many forms, e.g. a PR firm, adwords, traditional advertising, etc.

3) If you have a working customer acquisition channel that requires money, and more money will help you grow faster, you might want to do it just to grow faster, outpace competition, etc.
At least in my cases, I have found this to be simply untrue unless it is related to ad spending. A good hacker or two can develop quality scalable software as fast or faster than most VC backed companies.
This was answered 5 hours before:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=52322
Apple iTunes glitch reveals movie rental preparations
1) This was an IRS benefit and guideline. As I understand it, every state likely offers it.

The form is at http://www.ksrevenue.org/pdf/forms/k-53.pdf

2) If you were using your savings to live on so that you could do prototyping, can that be treated as an expense? (payroll or other). This assumes you were incorporated.
I think his point was that Twitter's mobile feature costs them a lot of money per month in fees, as would a video streaming site.
Holy crap very useful find nickb!
Haro on Making Habbo Hotel a Success
Selling your own software vs. "Working for the Man."
The difference between Marketing, PR, Advertising and Branding
Working 70-75 hrs/wk is just not sustainable over the long term, you will get burned out, fired from your day job, and won't want to continue working on your project.
VC money, gives you capitol weight, and if you wanted to negotiate partner relationships as part of your business plan, the VC $$ will help demonstrate that you can execute. If you are working on an app, that requires page views only, then you might be able to cost through on your own; but if you are building an app with a new model, you will need some time time to tweak things for your customer/ partner relationships before the dollars roll in.
IP legal fees might be another one to lead revenue.
Coding Horror: Rainbow Hash Cracking
Can Michael Dell Refocus His Namesake?
As stated in the last few paragraphs, the simplest way to guard against this sort of attack is to salt the data before hashing it. What he doesn't discuss is how to choose a salt value. In a good hash function, every bit should affect the output, so really only a couple of bytes are needed for a good salt. Additionally, the salt value can be random and may include unprintable ASCII characters. Furthermore, a new salt can be created for every password. Now, if two users have the same password, the ciphertext will be different for each.

I've used this technique to store sensitive personal data which must be recoverable (i.e. credit card numbers.) When a new number is obtained, a few bytes of salt are randomly generated. The data, plus the salt, are passed to a symetric cipher, and the ciphertext and salt are stored in a database.

[edit: there's some discussion of this in the article comments.]
I don't know why, but Bram Cohen (of the bittorrent fame) blogs on livejournal. That's why it seems 'serious', compared to most that you'll see on livejournal.
Top 5 tips to become a productive student entrepreneur
Voting Games: Part I
That assumes that you aren't reading anything prior to posting. My guess is he blows 30-60 minutes a day.
Linus shouldn't talk about something he doesn't understand. He couldn't have found a better way to advertise his ignorance about C++ to the whole world than this.

He is telling the whole world that "Hey, here I am, you know, the guy who created the linux kernel, the best designed piece of software in the whole universe(don't listen to Tanenbaum though, he didn't learn OS fundamentals), so you better listen to me when I say that C++ _sucks_. Don't give me the BS about how so many large applications have been created in it, because they would have been only better had they been created in C(it's a magical language btw, solves _all_ your problems in the blink of an eye). If you go and read about people like Stroustrup, Sutter, Alexandrescu, Koening, Thomas etc, take it from me that they missed lot of their CS clases, so they don't know a thing about programming. How do I know? They use C++!"

Sage Linus at one point or the other has to wake up to the fact that he is not the guru of all things that is programming and his opinion of the C++ language is taken as seriously as that of my hair dresser.
Dilbert: "I was wondering if our new service is Web 2.0 or Web 1.0"
I agree with PG on this. I'm trying to fix this problem with Wildfire: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2007/09/problems-with-social-news.ht...

John.
Correction: passwords are routinely stored in plain text (or reversably encrypted); there are a variety of challenge-response protocols that you can't run if all you have is the hash. It's a tradeoff; what do you care more about, passwords at rest or passwords in motion?
Also: stunningly bad exposition on "salt" values. A salt is a public nonce. Each password hash should have a different salt. An attacker shouldn't be able to construct a "your-salt" rainbow table to crack all the passwords on your machine; she should have to constrct N rainbow tables, for each of the passwords.
Polymers are forever (scroll down to the excerpt)
The Dark Side: What we have lost to light pollution
What SAT Scores Say About Your Hedge Fund
This is such a wonderful article. Since I first found it on PG's site several months ago, I come back and read it about once a month. Not only is it a good motivator to stay after whatever I'm working on, it's also a great way to make sure I'm working on what I'm interested in. Without fail, it makes me focus on what I really should be doing, which, sadly, is not always what I AM doing.
Oh, I know that scientist currently use computers to prove things. I mean as a general method of organizing and correlating knowledge that anyone could use. I've seen a similar project, an ontological Wikipedia, but it's probably too tedious for the general practitioner.
This is much less surprising than the research on Omega 3 fatty acids and hyperactivity.

Researchers found that supplementing problem kids with fish oil had dramatic effects. Youth offenders showed something like a 40% drop in recidivism vs the control. Low grade-level readers mostly rose to grade level within months.

The implication of this is that lousy food is causing criminality and stupidity. The UK government concluded from this research that it would be very cost effective to provide fish oil supplements to school children.

But here's the scary bit: there aren't enough fish in the world. Once they ran the numbers they found it would be impossible.
He overlooks an option in his arithmetic: Move to a low cost country.

Move to Buenos Aires or Bangkok. Even a less exotic place like Berlin is way cheaper than the US. You could afford a far higher quality of life on way less money. Continue to target the US market with your software.
Great essay. Thanks for posting.

One thing I feel is important which is not explicitly stated in this essay is to form your opinion / views on existing arguments in your field. This process gives you an immersive experience and helps you get into the details and interconnect different facts.
It doesn't say why this formula works. Does anyone know?

Does it depend on other assumptions about tank production not mentioned in the article, or can you use this exact formula for any problem of this type?
If you can tell me how to do this using only a website (no phone specific programming) it would dovetail nicely into a startup idea I'm considering.

I figured it would require getting users to install my software on their phone somehow, dealing with phone companies, and learning something called "Symbian".
Looks like a very elegant product.

As with anything solar-powered,MCube's success will be based on how its pricing compares to the current average home, not other MCube like homes. Government subsidies are helping solar electricity generators to narrow that gap with conventional utility companies on a cost / watt basis.

I believe a policy decision like that will be necessary for MCube's mass adoption.