skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reddit, LiveJournal, FaceBook?
Apparently you have a problem with the source, but this pretty well dismantles the China study.
http://www.westonaprice.org/bookreviews/chinastudy.html

Other major flaws are readily found through google.

Elsewhere it comes to light that Colin Campbell has ties to animal rights activists, calling into question his motives.
You can criticise many aspects of Facebook... but it does a lot of impressive things.
What I see in this article is that they should make there products be "everything to everybody" which is impossible.

When you make a change to your commercial web application it is more then just simply programming in some new functionality and making it live. You can do that in your free app or if you have a small user base, change away.

The bigger the userbase the more training you have to do, you have to justify your additions because they will confuse people who will see the new feature and won't want it and actually don't want to pay for the feature (even though there monthly fee never goes up).

End users minds are complex, you might think that programming everything under the sun and making it live would be a huge plus for consumers but it just isn't so.
Er, not from inside my tummy, though I have no shortage of allergies.
While I totally hear you... there's not much YC should do about it.

I've got myself into sticky situations befre re: money, and have had to get out of them myself.

All of the money-managing books & articles I've ever read say that one of the most important decisions you'll ever make re: your financial future is the spouse you get married to.

The right one could be a net positive (moral support, financial support, etc), while the wrong one could lead to disaster in your financial life.

Kids? Now that's a whole different story...!
DrScheme + S3/Shards + EC2 + AllegroGraph + Varnish
another pointless project. yawn.
I heard these people are wannabe jokes. They're iranian carpet dealers that deal with tech startups like they're in a middle-east bazaar.
My favorite is...

I send an email out explaining that the staging server is staging.foo and the IP is 192.168.1.20 and that people should probably add this to their HOSTS file.

Then everyday when it comes time to test on the staging server, everyone is like "what's that IP again?" !?!
and the iPod was the first hard drive based MP3 player to use the new 1.8" hard drive.
Awesome. A Web 2.0 version of 'echo'! My old joke about Web 2.0 version of "hello world" is not funny anymore.
What were your answers?
Wut? That joke is still around?
Interesting how few comments there are here compared to the neighboring story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=54977

Seems like a corollary of that law of Parkinson's involving the bike shed.
#11 --Postings that advertise 10 online marketing trends to ignore with exclamation points and warnings.
That really was the deal of a lifetime. No vesting needed -- here's a third of the equity upfront.

w00t!
Green tea. I get the good stuff from a Chinese grocery store nearby.
The good ramen. The imported stuff with big thick noodles, recognizable chunks of dehydrated vegetables and the kind of spice that our pathetic Western palates are unused to.
Yes I think the professor realised this -- he was one of the founders of lavalife IIRC.

I have seen the show and my observation was: The dragons are really mostly into funding sauce-makers, innovative clothing accessories, etc. and they apply the same principles to startups -- doesn't work well.
PG, this is a very interesting comment to me. The reason I say this is that I cite your article 'Mind the Gap' at www.paulgraham.com/gap.html as a an excellent distillation of the key points of Atlas Shrugged with a bit of a technology focus. I had believed that Atlas Shrugged was an inspiration for this article. I guess I was wrong and you have independently argued a lot of the same concepts.

Yes, I have read both Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged in the last couple of years, and they were viewpoint-changing events for me. They are lengthy, but it was worth the read for me. My key takeaway is that personal freedom and the ability for individuals to focus on their goals with as little artificial interference as possible leads to the greatest societal gain.
Students buy into masters degrees
Question is: what do students actually learn by going to school for an extra couple years instead of learning the ropes in the real world?
Yeah. Even on Reddit the article generated an interesting dicussion: http://reddit.com/info/2pspb/comments

I guess it's more fun to pick on someone than to talk math. (Hey, that explains high school.)
Parkinson's law
Parkinson's Law states that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."
the story has a good point, but the example is weak.

if you're willing to pay for a ferrari, one would think you'd be willing to buy a regular parking spot for it.

and why would you drive it to the airport in the first place if you're planning on going out of town for a couple weeks? why not get a ride from a millionaire friend in their ferrari?

i'm not a millionaire, but it seems like being a good planner is at least as important as being a penny-pincher if you want to make serious money.
If I'd been summarizing a book of someone else's, I'd have said so.
Dang, people on reddit are smarter. How humiliating.
claims-redemption registration isn't effective for a majority of the sites. when security is a prerequisite for your application, this isn't the way to go.
From their About page: "This website layout was humbly borrowed from Twitter original layout, since we believe we are creating value for its own community from which we belong."

I wonder how Twitter feels about sites replicating its layout. Companies using your API is great, but I'd get uncomfortable if a company made it look to unattentive users like my company was involved with their product. (In this case, I just wouldn't want to be associated with that grammar).
That's how any merger works.
I like the user interface a lot. The color scheme picker is sweet, and it's fun to see changes in real time. Since it's so easy to use, I'm sure there will be people who find it useful.
I mostly agree with your statement that "personal freedom and the ability for individuals to focus on their goals with as little artificial interference as possible leads to the greatest societal gain", and I probably agree with whatever PG wrote in 'Mind the Gap' (it's been a while), but Rand seems like something else. She turns it into an extreme ideology, throws in way too much certainty (do her hero's ever consider the possibility that other people are right and they are wrong?), and wraps it up in a long, boring book.
Bye, Bye B-School, or why even hedge fund managers no longer believe in MBA
I didn't mean to imply that essay was merely a summary of another book. 'Mind the Gap' is my favorite essay in the collection on your site. To me, it argues very convincingly that capitalism is the best economic model the world has. This is a very big picture question, and the fact that the essay argues this so concisely and effectively makes it great.

My point was poorly made. Stated more clearly, in my view, this essay is a work that shares the spirit of a lot of the same lines of thought as AS (though wholly unique in its focus). In addition to this essay being great on its own merits, I recommend this essay to anyone who is interested in getting a flavor of some of the big picture questions AS discusses.
Who cares on a site like this? You only see pages entering their specific url - nobody will actually see spam pages.
Well, there's two separate philosophies -- one says that enabling SEO is bad because it distracts from the legitimate use of the site and the other is Squidoo.
Agree that she takes the message to an extreme that isn't realistic in many cases. It's hard for me to imagine a person being able to live a happy life taking the message to the extreme Rand does in AS. Also, Atlas Shrugged is extremely long for the message it delivers.

However, I actually enjoyed the book and the story. Before I read the book, I had a lot of random and poorly formed ideas about what was economically moral, and this really helped me to crystallize my viewpoints.
security is likely not a serious prerequisite to the target demographic here
carbohydrates, a good night's sleep, coffee in the morning, Rockstars in the afternoon (not at night -- makes me sleep poorly, even when I go to bed tired).
So nice and so simple. I'm amazed
I agree. What is more, the professor's show in the board room was so good that it made for highly entertaining TV. If you're going to turn down a $200k, you might as well get some free publicity out of it.
Wow, I'm quite surprised that so few of the people that have commented see the value in this. I just took a look at the site and I have to say it looks awesome and I can definitely see exactly what it was trying to address. It's not a blogging tool and it's not anything like Wikipedia. IMO it's simply a place to take notes, have them be available from anywhere else and I'm guessing to share them with others. As the name implies you simply jot something down. I love the fact that you can do that right on the home page, no annoying clicks. It reminds me of OneNote which I used to use on Windows or Google Notebook.
Care to explain? It is my understanding that they are being driven out and killed by armed thugs. I'm not sure what percentage of said thugs are government agents but I know it's not 0. How is this John Galt (who desires a world free of the aggressive initiation of force) "in action"?
The notion that "I know exactly what people need and my ideas are all rational and brilliant while other's are stupid and irrational" in one that people are absolutely entitled to. Arrogant, yes - wrong, I don't think so.

The funny thing is that in the Fountainhead, Howard Roark really sacrificed A LOT for his singular focus on the types of projects he wanted to work on. His measure of value in his life was not having steady jobs, but achieving his vision. If someone wants to focus on something that doesn't match the conventional goals, I don't see that as being a problem as long as it doesn't inhibit other's freedoms.

Rand again takes this to the extreme, but it helps her to make a point (and makes for a more interesting story).
I don't get it. Can you really "win" with an application just by making registration easier? I know the "every field, half your users" rule, but... is there anything more to this application?
Now that makes a difference. I didn't like at all the way the professor behaved but I liked the fact the guys from jobloft stuck by their gut feeling.
I'm not sure on the policy, but linking to articles that require registration seems like a bad idea.
All due respect to aaronsw, but, the iPod's "one feature" was EXTREMELY FUCKING IMPRESSIVE. Help me understand what's impressive about this site, other than that it still has me talking about it hours after its launch?
It just makes life easy to have a website without having to do anything else. It's a central place where you can put up stuff and let people see it. No hosting, no payment and its simple. It's nifty for many applications: its an open wiki for anything.
These crazy Rand zealots have no sense of humor.

:P
I'm reminded of the story "The Emperor's New Clothes". Jottit is the emperors invisible clothes.
You mean like... Writeboard? An application so simple that even 37 "We'll Charge You $100 For A Calendar Plugged Into An Address Book" Signals gives away for free? I wonder why Google doesn't have something just like this already... oh, wait, they do.
This is similar to how I get the most creative ideas for solving a problem. As a friend of mine once said sometimes you have to go out and do unrelated things to seed your random number generator.
NYT is free now.
Easy? Please enlighten me what's so easy about filtering spam these days...
Ginormous amounts of h2o, and quick access to a bathroom that isn't unpleasant to visit. I dig red meat, but for long sessions, more vegetarian-inspired faire. Progressive trance if I'm insufficiently disciplined to choose the better option: classical music.
I said exactly one thing: Suggesting "a product has a narrow focus" == "a product is bad" is lame. I didn't compare Jottit to the iPod, I compared the number of features. There's a subtle difference.

Also, sorry for the 'hominem, but it's people like you that turned Reddit into Digg. Keep your fucking language clean, your caps lock off, and your rhetorical questions to yourself, or get out. This is not Slashdot. It's really sad that you act like a total troll since you're an excellent hacker, judging by http://www.matasano.com/log/thomas-ptacek

I know you have more to contribute to News.YC than your ego and your snarky remarks. Try harder.
Balance (protein, carbs, vitamins) and variety. To save money (and keep the girlish figure) eat half of large-portioned dinners and have the leftovers for lunch the next day.

Coffee in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, just to get revved up. A liberal nap-taking policy, because sleep is the best cure for fatigue. Exercise and sunlight, go running/cycling/tree-climbing outdoors for efficiency.

And oatmeal! Plain old oatmeal is cheap, healthy, and filling. Try it with bananas or blueberries.
Grow up. You compared Jottit to the iPod. Ludicrous.
This article seemed a little strange to me: it seems almost obvious that getting an MBA is a bad idea for many areas of finance. I interned on a trading desk at a major investment bank last summer and will be starting a full time job there in a week. Very few of the younger people there had MBAs, and hardly anyone was planning to get one. The people who had MBAs seemed to be people who hadn't started off in trading but came from another career (e.g. computer programming). The MBA gave them an "in" at the bank, when they otherwise wouldn't have been considered.

It seemed like MBAs were more common in traditional investment banking and corporate finance. The people I knew in IB seemed to think of an MBA as a symbolic, but useful credential. That opinion may be changing though.

Finally, the article was spot on about people who are getting MBAs two years in. If you did well in your first two years at a bank, you're looking at 200k-300k in total compensation. Why would you give that up to get a degree that won't significantly increase your future earnings potential?
What tx says is funny. The site is absolutely simple.

I love it though. I just started learning html and javascript last week and now this thing provides an instant compiler. I change the border size on a table and, BOOM! Right when I finish typing the border shows up with the correct size. I see what it looks like instantly and can change what I want when I want. There isn't any clicking, switching windows, sftp-ing, downloading software, or anything.

It's simple and I love it. Since it handles Javascript I now have an instant way to deploy simple functions and tables. I can figure some useful relation, put it up using html and Javascript, and suddenly anyone anywhere has easy access to my results.

This thing also provides an instant way to write and test content for Google Gadgets, something even more useful than the editor Google provides.

And I think the design is clean, nice, and simple.
What's your favorite editor to hack with?
this looks pretty interesting. I'm curious how the virtual reality advertising is going to pan out. I've never been a very big fan of SecondLife
Why can't we all just get along?

This argument is about nothing. Jottit doesn't have to be the greatest thing since the iPod. Aaron doesn't need the money and he wanted to do something with his code wizardry. Here we are.
Referring to Spearman's g?
I love TextMate on the Mac. Personally I think it's the best thing since sliced bread :)

The only problem is that it's not cross platform and it's not available when you're connecting over SSH into a server to fix some problems. I use Vi most of the time to just edit configuration files, etc, but I found it lacks the power I need for doing serious hacking (for all the vi lovers out there, I'm willing to admit this is due to my ignorance).

I'm re-trying to learn Emacs to do some Erlang hacking but I've always been turned off the by the relatively cryptic key combinations.
Mark Shuttleworth says how Ubuntu community was built. Advantage: Not in Silicon Valley
Indeed it is, but it still requires registration AFAIK
Woah, you're right. http://jottit.com/s2r9f/

Fun!
business school is good for: 1) building a network 2) changing careers 3) getting a brand on your resume.
Lately I've been using Komodo edit from ActiveState, for a few reasons: It's free (but not open source), cross-platform, optional vi (or emacs) key bindings, built-in FTP support, cool "toolbox" feature, code completion for a few scripting languages...

And it is based on the Mozilla platform, so it has extensions just like Mozilla products.
Caffiene doesn't do it for me anymore, so I've been experimenting with energy drinks. They seem to work better, but generally taste awful (Red Bull is the prime offender).
Why regular Vi and not Vim?
This article doesn't really say much, but it raises an interesting point. As a user I'm often annoyed by ads (especially big flashy banner ads that also happen to come with sound). Google's ads I don't mind so much except for sites that seem to have ads placed in 3 or 4 different places (across the top, a side bar, in the middle of an article and somewhere at the bottom). So I can see AdBlocking being useful (although I haven't used ad blocking tools for a while).

From the point of view of a web startup however advertising is what pays for the content so the users don't have to. Users end up paying with their attention instead of dollars. So when they try to subvert your ads they are essentially violating your terms of service.
You are right, I actually use Vim not Vi, I don't like Vi much as it doesn't seem to like certain things, like key movements in insert mode.
Might want to get out the pesticide before the Ayn Rand-ers pull a Ron Paul-ing of YC News.
I never understood why redbull tastes the way it does. It reminds me of bad bubble gum. Other energy drinks seem to have gone in the same direction? Is it required for energy drinks to taste the way they do?
mountain dew (regular or code red). caffeine is like a legal performance enhancing drug for coding. Outside of that I try to keep hydrated by drinking lots of water (and keeping a restroom nearby).
Now that's something different that I don't see come up too often in the Ruby vs Python vs PHP debate
Almost none of the energy drinks have enough of their extra ingredients to actually do anything... ginseng and taurine can be stimulating, but you need to take a lot more than they put in Red Bull.

If you're willing to branch out into other stimulants, I'd strongly recommend Kratom, feel free to ask if you have any questions.
I was considering posting something making fun of MBAs, but then I realized that would have made me feel guilty. Which almost says something in itself.
I've been using 'e' a bit. It's supposed to be the Textmate equivalent on Windows:

http://e-texteditor.com/

Intype is another editor that's trying to bring Textmate to Windows, but it's not as polished as 'e':

http://intype.info
I don't think I think a core critique of 37S should be because they are 'opinionated,' but rather because they are spread too thin. Would be better to focus on fewer webapps and respond better to customer interest. I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that I have stopped using Basecamp because much of the attached and desired functionality is simply not there.
I was following intype from the beginning (because of the snippet functionality to tell you the truth) but while a usable version didn't came along i had to learn another one, so i went with emacs... if was love at 42th sight.
Depends. I'd prefer to have an OS that the end-user can use easily so that fixes are less frequent. However, if the payoff is sex then perhaps I would reconsider.
I wonder if Apple settled out of court or they just wanted to drop the claims to make it look like Apple settled and perhaps entice others to do the same. Their claims seem to get a little ridiculous when they start going after hardware manufactures for building computers which can run Windows. WTF?
Web 2.0 Widgets for big businesses
vim, obviously.
Bah! Visual editors are so new-school.

You should use ex :)
Data Errors during drive communication
Vim.

At work, it's Visual Studio 2005 + ViEmu + Visual Assist.
I dunno my RA was pretty cool the one summer I did it. Any disciplinary actions taken were definitely deserved.
Don't like Sunzi? Try the Book of Five Rings.
I've stopped using Basecamp as well as it lacked some necessary features and it didn't look like they would come anytime soon. On the other hand there seem to be enough people that love the current product otherwise 37S wouldn't be making money.
I did a 5 week summer academic program at Penn State the summer before my senior year of high school. The rules were fascist (no touching people of the opposite sex) but we managed to get around all the rules, the RAs were cool, and living in such an intense closed social group was so much fun that it was all worth it.
The bicycle powered supercomputer
I dunno, maybe this article is discussing 'when to have tea'.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Avoid_Parkinson's_Bic...)

He points out an interesting correlation. The meter is based on pi---whoopty shit. What's to talk about?

A lot of interesting articles get voted up and then nobody comments on them because there's nothing to say. Sounds like the system works pretty good to me.

As for redditt, looks to me like they're having a hard time understanding it. The comments page is basically scratch work. A preponderance of mathematical symbols isn't an indication of interesting math.
cold arizona green tea :D
lol: Look at me trying to learn Ruby on Rails...
Things are coming along well, Starting my first app, 2nite

Just waiting for InstantRail to finish UnZipping..

Come back for updates..
Hey, Google has this same layout but when I click the button it gives me back something useful
PluggableTextMorph
Mountain Dew is probably one of the worst things you can put into your body that comes in a can and can be bought under the age of 18.
Taurine a stimulant? I thought that's a relaxing aminoacid they put there so you won't get too nervous with all that caffeine.
It does. I had to get a login from bugmenot.
The Entrepreneurial Mind: Managing with Assumptions
I learned it for Slime, and started using it for everything else when every other editor felt crippled.
Vi. The simplicity, speed, and the fact that it is installed on any *nix system by default are my favorite aspects of Vi. I've played around with Vim, but haven't migrated to it because I just don't use the features.

At times, I have been tempted to move to Emacs due to all its cool features but have not yet, maybe some day. Emacs in slime mode has been great to use while learning lisp.
Yahoo Mash: The Social Network for Graffiti Lovers
Probably true, but it tastes a lot better than redbull.
Depends what I'm hacking. I actually use both vi and emacs -- vi for quick edits and emacs for more serious work. Eclipse for Java but nothing else. I'll resort to ed if I'm on a system where I don't have my emacs customizations and vi isn't vim.
I think Aaron's evil plot was to use machine learning to provide an automated friend-of-a-friend introduction service based on what you wrote on your infogami page. I'm pretty sure he posted about it somewhere - I remember because I had the same idea. Maybe this is a new platform for that idea.
Print yourself an emacs cheatsheet, key combinations get a little cryptic but they are the fastest way to interact with an editor (I think its probably good to use them even in other editors)

This sheet's a little basic, but its a start:
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/guides/package/emacs/emacs.html
Sorry, taurine is not actually a stimulant even though it is commonly referred to as such.

http://www.erowid.org/ask/ask.php?ID=3016
Intype.