skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That does not make a great deal of sense from an evolutionary perspective. For bisexuality to be selected for in women, it would have to confer an evolutionary advantage. I would guess that it simply has not been selected against because it does not confer a great disadvantage.

However, tolerance for homosexual acts between men seems to be strongly selected against. Creating sperm is expensive and wasting them with a man is not to your advantage. It was also important for men to be highly focused on interfacing with females; females could be apathetic and reproduce, because they didn't really have a choice.
Isn't it interesting how you can take the exact same technology product and take it to market 2 very different ways? The is the opposite of the currently popular "Get Eyeballs & Monetize Later" approach. If you can get people to pay for your web app, there's a lot to be said for bootstrapping. You keep all your equity. Hitting singles and doubles are probably more likely. Homeruns, less likely. Good tips for a viable approach. (My default if funding never materializes)
awesome post. flame me. i think PG is one of the smartest people in Web 2.0, but I'm not drinking the lisp koolaid. I write in descendants of c - C++, C# and php.
Einstein didn't really investigate his hypotheses either. Your first sentence is dead-on, though.
I found this part interesting:

"I asked him why he'd worked on it. He said he'd seen it as a nice puzzle. That at first he was pretty sure the Turing machine's behavior was simple enough that he could prove that it wasn't universal. But then, as he studied it, he realized that there were little bits of behavior that were more complicated. And it was with these that he managed to show universality."

Just another data point in favor of tinkering, I guess.
Video: Irish Startup Patents Privacy Solution For Social Networks
The fact that you have to ask this question should be your answer. Duh.
I think you are contradicting yourself:

1. Women can't have children when they are old.

2. Women have genes that promote healthy organs in old age.

So how exactly can those genes be selected through evolution, if the advantage they give doesn't have effect on the number of offsprings.
Why D kicks serious ass over C++, leaving it dead and broken on the sidewalk
Google Declares Jihad On Blog Link Farms
Oracle's complexity isn't where application developers see it. The Java platform doesn't necessarily mean the Java language. Ning can be nimble.
Ask YC: Yet Another Voting Scheme Idea
Reddit, Digg, News.YC.

What if the number of votes would be invisible? They would still influence the ranking, just the values were not public. Otherwise it's difficult to escape the reflex of upvoting stuff that is already at +50 or downvoting stuff that is at -10, perhaps one would think more about how to vote.

Or, perhaps the number could be visible to the poster only?
Social intelligence video game reduces stress hormone
McGill's news release, linked from ScienceDaily:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071023163918.ht...
This is why I hate Seeking Alpha: they can stretch a factual sentence ("Google is overpriced, given their P/E of X, because a fair P/E is Y.") into a whole article -- with fewer actual facts. I like how, for illustration, they (almost!) told us Google's past growth rate. That to defend the statement that "Although this exponentially growing income is really unprecedented it is a huge mistake to assume it can continue."

Thanks. Everyone I know who owns Google stock also thinks their growth rate will be exactly has high in the future as it was in the past. We all expect GOOG's market share to hit 47291% in a decade.

Did the writer just not bother to consider his assumptions? Look at a chart of Google's stock price and P/E: http://www.byrneseyeview.com/pictures/googwithpe.gif

Their earnings are going up faster than their price. If investors think Google's growth rate is this high permanently, why has the stock's P/E dropped about 70% from peak?

"It is my contention not that Google is necessarily overvalued, but only that investors in the stock at these levels, if they think it is not overvalued, must realize what they are conjecturing as to the company's growth."

Thanks. So it might be expensive. And it might not. And investors should keep that in mind. Yes, that's what he's saying: investors should be aware that buying Google is not necessarily as safe as just keeping their money in cash.

"Let us think about what the current implicit future growth rate suggests about the dominance of this company in our economy. Within ten years, Google will be earning as much or more than over half of the Dow 30 components."

He doesn't defend this math, so I have no idea where he gets that idea. I have little trouble believing it, if true: Google already earns more than some Dow components ($4 billion for the last 12 months; Alcoa has around half that). But I don't see why Google must achieve this growth to be worth its current price: as long as investors continue to expect steady above-average growth, Google will have a long-term P/E higher than most.

"Where such capital can be deployed in the virtual world in which Google operates is not readily apparent to me."

Oh, good! Google operates in a 'virtual world'! Clearly they buy their servers for Linden Dollars and Flooz.

Full disclosure: I agree with the author's conclusion that Google is probably overpriced. But I've thought so since it was at $150.
Upgrading to Prototype 1.6: real world refactoring examples
In some ways this is a chicken and egg problem, and the conclusions in this article are not satisfactory.

http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/1998/10.01/WhyWomenLiveLo...
"Studying people who live 100 years and more leads Harvard researchers to conclude that menopause is a major determinant of the life spans of both women and men."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060526083618.ht...
Study about birds, but interesting: "Elevated testosterone levels increased activity--possibly attracting more predators--made the male, dark-eyed juncos more susceptible to disease and shortened their lifespan."

And I won't go into estrogen.
I have in fact never read any of these, and have honestly only heard of The World is Flat (by way of the entire shelf at Border's once dedicated to it).

I'm not saying I would never read them however. In fact, I just added How to Win Friends and Influence People to my list, after several recommendations I saw for it here as well as from a friend.

What I am saying is that roughly all books start at zero in my mind, and get positive points whenever they are recommended to me by people I know or respect. A listing on the NYT list is like getting -5 points. (FWIW, Oprah's Book Club is more like -10.)

I'm not saying everyone should choose their books like I do, but that is what works for me. I would like to say that any book that deals with current politics or current leaders is nothing more than thinly veiled marketing, and no one is missing out by not reading those. Real history has to be written after the fact, and I'm sure that when it is, I will enjoy it, but no book about a current candidate will be anything more than another campaign outlet.

Edit: Oh and I almost forgot... everything I just said aside, I often do resist reading a book that I know I will enjoy just to be different (like Harry Potter, which I'm avoiding for another decade). It's not a crime to avoid the herd, and I'm sure everyone does it in their own way. It's hard to think for yourself, if you do not question authority (of the masses)... to paraphrase one of my favorite quotes.
If you're going to decide that an idea is right based on how many people agree or disagree with it, you have a problem: anyone who creates something new is tied for wrongest person ever.

Also, http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
If the SEOs Go, Does Google Go Too?
Twitter is low-expectation IRC
The GoF patterns implemented in Ruby
Does Outsourcing for your Startup Compress Time?
I won't flame you -- I agree that it's pointless to bash C programmers. However, you should note that C# is mainly a descendent of Java. When you use it you've been dragged about halfway to Lisp, even though you get to keep your curly braces and semicolons.
Haha! SBC bought AT&T, and yet, here I am, still stuck with AT&T.

Sadly that brand name will never die, unless they got bought by Coca-Cola.
Did all the members of the prize committee agree that this submission should win? Or did Wolfram make the final call based on their feedback?
Some things I like about C:

'void' means an empty parameter list, a function that returns no result, or a pointer to anything.

There is an array type, which you declare with brackets[10]. It's a real type on par with all the other real types in the language. Yet, accessing the values in an array is done exclusively via pointer arithmetic.

int foo(); declares a function with unspecified parameters, unless it is C++ where it means no parameters.

char x[5] = "Hello"; //Is an array of 5 chars, and has no string-terminator
char x[] = "Hello"; //Is an array of 6 chars, with string terminator.

You can declare functions that take matrices of variable size, but only in one dimension. int bar(char mat[][4][5]); Unless you're using variable-length arrays which were added to C in 1999, but aren't widely supported in compilers.
I am not familiar with Wolfram's style, but there seemed to be an unsatisfying lack of Alex Smith, but lots of Me, NKS, and PCE, in that post. The headline deserves note because the proof is by a 20-yo but the post doesn't do him justice.

Interesting nevertheless and I hope to get to read more news about the author.
I'm learning to develop OS X apps and have been learning C / Objective-C and have to say I enjoy it.
Create a blank virtual machine for VMWare's VMPlayer online
no.

To state the obvious, SEOs will never really "go."

Some seos will slip, others will rise.

Pretty dumb article.

(Probably done by an SEO.)

(So if it was done to get links, maybe not so dumb :)
This blog post comes from the humble version of Wolfram!
Melbourne Grad student squeezes 200 mbit/sec from copper
Start-up warms up personal robots
That the "business person" in a typical startup doesn't have anything better to do during the build phase creates typical startups, in my opinion. Brilliant people should be doing brilliant things. If they're not, maybe they're not.
Not showing up for me yet.
If you're counting results, it might be worthwile to consider the loads absolute garbage written in C and C++.
Women could have genes that promote old age so that they can feed and raise their children longer. Children of long-living mothers have a better chance of survival, and thus a selective advantage, all other things being equal.

My point is not to prove my personal "theory" about women living longer than men. Rather, I contend that there is almost never One True Cause for anything in evolution. All we can do is propose many different competing factors, and say, with a lot of hand-waving, that factor X was the most important in such and such cases. Newspapers often translate that into "Y happened because of X", but that's just bad reporting.
I'll reserve my surprise for the first time someone using this nice theory in some real, traceable experiment...
Objective C is a heck of a sweet language.... It's one of the few C based object oriented language that feels enough like ruby to make me like it ;-)
Better post on social media being used to spread news about the California fires
Goladus, thats why we have this wonderful concept called iterative development...or whatever you want to call it. If something is good, you iterate on it, otherwise no one will use it.
Well, it won't beat the Blackberry any time soon, but an interesting perspective anyway.
It's time the Mozilla Foundation starts talking out louder about exactly what they are using this money for. Very few free open-source applications are able to generate as much cash as Firefox, and the Mozilla Foundation therefore has a responsibility on behalf of the entire community to manage this fortune.

I'm thinking something along the lines of ransoming source code, supporting full-time coders for projects not related to Mozilla, etc. Why aren't people discussing this?
C and C++ and Java, etc, were written for practical reasons, and they attract practical followers. When someone writes a blog post about Java, it's rarely to show a "trick" or to prove superiority, but rather to solve some problem.

If I'm typing away in Java, you KNOW I have an end-goal. No one plays around, because...it's not a toy.

It's like saying, French is a more beautiful language than English (it is, you know). But compare the import/export ratio of the film and popular music industries. I can't recall the last French pop song I heard...

Wait, I do: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-sUzR71wpQ
1- This doesn't belong here.

2- Reductive, over-generalized and oversimplified.

3- Men don't age faster. They often die slightly younger (more like 3 years rather than the stated 5). Men age more slowly and gracefully (if you have to generalize). Don't believe it? Take a look around you.
I can see how that would be valuable in some cases.
I haven't noticed as much C-bashing. It always seemed to me that people recognize that C programming is pretty damn hardcore, and that the people who have mastered it are accomplished programmers. I still see quite a bit of reverence for kernel programmers. Yeah, there's some C bashing, everything gets bashed. But Java has taken much more of a beating lately than C.

Otherwise, I largely agree with the article (although I don't actually think C particularly needs defending right now). The only point I disagree with in this article is the exclusion of server-side web applications when he says "show me the code." Server side web apps aren't the dull, stateless things they used to be - trememdous innovation is taking place here.
I wouldn't judge anything by how many people agree or disagree with it. I would simply acknowledge that a lot of people feel one way or the other.

Why not view programmers as customers, and languages as products? Are the customers buying the products that provide them the most value? I believe your argument is that they are not. Then why? Are they dumb? Misled? Controlled by people who don't know any better?

It just seems like there is some missed communication going on here. I know I'd like to see somebody who is an expert in both functional programming and some ornery imperative/OO language, like C++, make some observations. By expert, I mean several non-trivial deployed production systems in each language, not somebody who played with language A in college is now infatuated with language B.

As for me, I'll pick whatever language makes my startup get to market and adapt to customer's needs the fastest. I hear PG says that's probably one of the functional languages. I'm game. I can prototype and change a web site very quickly in several other languages (with the right tools), I'm always willing to see if something else will work better. But I can certainly also make the observation that there must be a lot more functional programmers who moved to imperative programming than the other way around. Surely they all can't have done so for the reasons I've outlined above.
Here are some alternative sources:

http://www.newscentre.bham.ac.uk/press/2007/10/24Oct07Turing...

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/071024/full/news.2007.190.ht...

The second link is particularly informative.
"It's just that in our normal efforts of engineering, we've been too constrained to see with such things."

Who is he referring to here? Pretty much any CS or ECE student will encounter the Turing machine at some point. Wolfram talks like he is the only one aware of something that I'm sure is common knowledge among the "normal" engineers responsible for creating the computing machines we use every day.
Then we can all use our iPhones on the Verizon network without jailbreaking them!

That is, if I had an iPhone...
Languages as products rings a bell:

http://www.welton.it/articles/programming_language_economics...

A lot of the 'value' in a language is its network of users. For every X users, depending on how much your average user is likely to contribute back (some constant C), there will be Y contributions in terms of libraries, help on lists, user groups, articles, things like that.
Sure. Emacs, for example.
"A lot of the 'value' in a language is its network of users."

I wish Common Lisp programmers would realize that. Many are outwardly hostile to the very idea of their language becoming popular with the barbaric hordes of uncivilized Java and C# and PHP programmers.

Well, those that post on comp.lang.lisp that is. I suspect the Common Lisp "community" is one of the reasons pg is developing Arc.
That was good, although I'm not sure I agree with all of the analysis.

Perhaps there is a difference between "language as a solution" and "language as a development platform". If you are looking for the best solution to problem X, choose the language best suited to solve the problem. If you are looking for the best development platform for problems X1..X1000, then the calculus comes out differently. Dunno.
MySQL to get injection of Google code
MySQL laid out its software road map through 2009, including code contributed by Google and security improvements due in MySQL 7.0.
What if we created a democratic republic, and voted for leaders to vote on stories for us.
Stem Cells Bring Sight to the Blind in India
My thoughts on that are that most developers are not going to be proficient in more than 2 or 3 "full fledged" languages at a time, with some other things like SQL thrown in that they're ok at. So a lot of people really are looking to learn something that does a lot of things pretty well, or that at least doesn't fail horribly at anything.

More here: http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/10/09/languages-wor...
I didn't vote it up mostly because I didn't feel strongly one way or the other about it. It's unclear whether the author really understands why C was chosen for many of the apps he lists as evidence that C programmers deserve respect.
Displaying the number of votes is a key factor in usability and feedback. It is a very effective way of providing instant gratification to voters and submitters alike. Hiding it would be a mistake.
Makes sense to me.

I think if you strip aside the emotional reasoning that's going on, some languages naturally fit with some people more than others. Thinking in terms of functional decomp and association is just different than thinking in terms of objects. Some people build their own "language within a language" each time they solve something. Some people just want a language that is easy to find help for on the internet. Perhaps the trick is to identify which of those paradigms best fits your long-term goals for your both you and your problem.

I once interviewed a guy with a bunch of different languages on his resume. "So which do you like best?" I asked. He responded, "Java". I said, "Why's that?" He said "Because when I hit the compile button most of the time it just runs."

I thought that was a good answer.
The Facebook Funny Money
Platforms Want To Be Free
Along those lines, how about giving the votes to the poster and not the article? Then you put a picture of the poster and his total number of points next to the article. That way if I'm a great poster, I'll have a huge score. But the articles would sort based on something else.
Logicians on safari
It'd be great if things like this could be tested and implemented by the right people in a matter of months rather than years.

When was the last time you heard of or saw something cool but never heard of it ever again?
Bruce Sterling: The Wonderful Power of Storytelling
An interesting sidenote-- seen in the del.icio.us bookmark notes for this article, by a facebook employee:

"nice article on operations. we're going to open source the shit out of this space."
CenterNetworks is not an SEO group, think more like a Techcrunch. Although, bloggers do like to linkbait.
YC submissions
What is the formula YC uses to rank submissions on hacker news?
What is the Google Collections Library? Interview with the Developers
A lot of software has a base runtime written in C with much of the higher-level functionality written in a higher-level language. Firefox does this with Javascript and Emacs does it with Lisp.
That quote is pretty vague, but I don't think he is trying to say that people haven't heard of Turing machines, which they obviously have.

I think the point is that "textbook" turing machines, just like other "textbook" forms of engineering, are typically constructed by hand, top-down to have a specific, predictable behavior.

What is interesting about Alex Smith's proof is that it implements the reverse approach, starting with an empirical discovery of the 'natural primitives' of the emergent behavior and building up the construction from the bottom up.
C is the language of the operating system. It's also very portable. It doesn't require that any other packages be installed - it compiles to machine code. LISP/Haskell/Python/Java don't have this quality, and so desktop software will probably always be dominated by C and it's sad offspring C++.

Other "high level" languages are however, becoming increasingly dominant on server-side or hosted products, since the developers can control the execution environment closely.
How NOT to bootstrap
> some languages naturally fit with some people more than others

Precisely! Because, in the end, languages are for people, and people are fickle and weird, and often irrational.

I think there are some things that make some languages more or less objectively better for some tasks, but like anything that revolves around people, it's often not so clear cut.
Otetsudai Networks - Just In Time Work
Also http://www.easyvmx.com/
I think his economics are off when he says that "The network effect is being repriced to zero." What's happening is that a strong competitor is emerging, and the network effects of eBay aren't that strong that people won't migrate for a significantly better price on a network that sees a reasonable amount of business.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38704

But PG wrote that before he implemented vote weighting. I don't know if he's turned it on yet. If so, it's more complicated now.
"Name me a herd animal that hunts." (Hilarious book review)
Where's the paper? And most importantly, how the hell did he go about proving that?

Published proofs are often so opaque, but I always wonder what the mental thought process was to get to the proof. What were you tinkering with, what were the failures, etc
From the little I understand, it's also likely that a patent like this would be bought up by some company which would find the technology disruptive (competitive) to their current business, just to keep it out of the market.
Why does YC not accept applications that have anything to do with porn? Do you find it distasteful, or is it a PR decision?
If you like C/C++ you may like D even better
There have been a couple of attempts at D, but this one is gaining traction. Have a look at the specs. It's clean, portable, compiles to a runtime and has many innovative ideas. It's just very well designed from a practical perspective.
We need an F.A.Q.
Audi unveils metroproject quattro
char*____="RDCO$Utho{kfah||0R}wq5\x7fy8Z;";int main(int _,
char**______){return _>!0xBADC0DE?main(!0[______],&____):!
(-_)[*______]?!putchar(10):putchar((*______)[-_]^-_)?main(
--_,______):0xDEADBEEF^!!"Valid C89 but not C++ nor C99";}
Inside Microsoft's New F# Language
20-year-old student's proof that a 2,3 Turing Machine is universal
The Significance Of Patents
When discussing their barriers to entry, many entrepreneurs cite their pending patents. While obtaining patents is worthwhile, many IT focused VCs do not believe that they alone create sufficient barriers...
Here's the paper:
http://www.wolframscience.com/prizes/tm23/TM23Proof.pdf