skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gaming isn't making all those Billions off of PC users, it's dedicated game consoles that make all the money. The reason console gaming is growing so much compared to PC gaming is because of ease of use, which is the main reason web apps are so popular.

PC gaming is broken precisely because of the problems with writing software for the millions of PCs out there. Web development, on the other hand, is like building a game for a console, you don't have to worry about all the hardware that's out there, you just write to the environment. While writing web apps is not like having a unified development environment it's a lot closer than trying to write a program that will run on every hardware configuration out in PC land, and Mac, and Linux, and Solaris, etc.

Just as console gaming is slowly killing the PC gaming industry web applications will slowly kill classic PC applications. That doesn't mean that the PC is going away, but the future definitely lives on the web.
Search for logos here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus
For fiction, I'm surprised no one has mentioned:

The Dune series by Frank Herbert. Unlike anything else I've read, and one of the most compelling and detailed fictional universes in literature.

The Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. Don't confuse it for fantasy - it's brilliant satire. Littered with geeky references and clever wordplay, I actually enjoy it a bit more than the Hitchhiker's Guide books. If you like Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett is a pretty safe bet.

Anything by Stanislaw Lem - clever and funny science fiction. A good match for my weird sense of humour.

All of the above can slightly change the way you see the world.

For non-fiction, another vote for the Mythical Man Month.
It's sad that we have to be reminded of it, but this just reaffirms that the little bubble world of YC, TechCrunch, and Web 2.Oh really don't mean a whole lot in the grand scheme of life. This guy wouldn't trade some extra time with his family for all the startups and VC cash in the world. It just puts things into perspective.
The thing about philosophy is that it ultimately questions everything and is the gateway to every new realm of knowledge. Useless philosophy is just stagnant thinking that has given up on truth.
Oh man, that was extremely painful to read yet it was so inspirational! Cancer in family is so hard to get over and as someone who has experienced it first hand, I can tell you that it impacts the whole family, not just the person affected by it. He's a fascinating man and we'll all be at loss if he passes away.

I wish him and his family all the best.
As I see it, the YC & startup world is consistent with the philosophy of that article. At least to me, the whole idea is that if you're a highly competent person and willing to tolerate some risk, you have a reasonable chance of being able to spend more time doing the things that you love in life in the long-run -- seeing your family, traveling, and having the freedom to hack on whatever you want -- if you can do a successful startup while you're relatively young.
indeed great speech & life lesson
Papillion by Charest, amazing inspirational true story.
Voltaire's Bastards - John Rolston Saul - Timeless
anything by Nietzsche
The economist and the New Yorker
anything you can get your hands on but with a grain of salt.
The internet is definitely a great example. But I guess what I had in mind was more along the lines of things that haven't borne their fruit quite yet. Things that in retrospect people will see as seminal, but that are currently still hidden in research journals.
Digg goes deeper with social networking
Does anything like this exist that you are aware of?
A few weeks ago, I was out to dinner with my parents and my grandparents. My grandfather is 90 years old and in relatively good health but he's slowed down a lot recently. My family has gotten much less religious over the years (we're Jewish) as it has come out that no one really believes in the religion, from my grandparents on down. The thought of my grandfather facing his own death with no faith really depressed me.

Have any secular individuals here come to terms with their own mortality? I haven't yet, but I sure hope I have a while to figure it out. Right now all I've got is a hope that a singularity will grant immortality. Or that this reality is a computer simulation and we wake up in a bigger computer simulation where we get bored sometimes and choose to spend lifetimes during interesting periods of time.

Either of these are much more likely than the eternal afterlife of a theistic god, but not nearly likely enough to give me any comfort. Dr Roth's lesson on mortality seems to be that death is inevitable, but that doesn't give me any satisfaction, for now.
The internet is just a more sophisticated version of the cave drawing. The Genome is a discovery, not a breakthrough. The last true breakthrough was splitting the atom. Perhaps creating life from Methane gas and electricity would qualify.
Yeah Sun's support for Ruby was also pretty evident at their JRuby hackfest a few months back in the SF Bay Area...

Free beer and food to boot - not to mention a good overview by Joyent on Sun's efforts to get Rails running on the JVM
Nano-technology is one of these buzz words that's been applied to everything from MEMS to car polish creams. It's so amorphous and vague that the only definition I can think of is "anything that's pretty damn small." I'm really not sure if it's a useful term at all anymore, or if it just obscures whatever it's used to describe.

One of my good friends is doing his PhD on MEMS micro-manipulators. But his work falls under non-linear control systems. Can it be described as nano-technology? sure, but what does that tell you? it hardly clarifies what his research is about, it just makes it sound like he's seeking funding from gullible VC's :)
My guess is that all people -- religious or not -- are completely terrified towards the end. But maybe religion can bring comfort to some, so that they are terrified to a lesser degree.
Probabilistic Robotics (think the Darpa Car Races)
You can find a streaming video of the talk here:

mms://wms.andrew.cmu.edu/001/pausch.wmv
Better to live a day as a lion... you know the rest.

Maybe I'm not old enough, maybe it's because I don't have a family, but I'd rather do something few others have done than just lay around with my family until they send me off to the retirement home.

So, I disagree with your position 100%.

Anyone have a link to video of the guy who rides on top of the high speed train shortly before he dies of cancer?
PlaySpan, run 12-year-old founder, gets $6.5M in venture capital
CPA (Cost Per Action) advertising is the a good solution to address this $1 Billion loss. Google just launched a beta of their CPA platform.
That's one that I definitely had in mind!

Some of the work done in computer vision in particular is pretty incredible. The SIFT result by Lowe for example has just barely started to become applied (take a look at Photosynth by Microsoft - that's entirely made possible through SIFT.) Particle filters in their various forms will become more and more widespread as computation becomes cheaper (the Condensation algorithm is a good example.) All of this is just now starting to add up to allow people to create truly intelligent systems that can interact with the world.
Yeah, nanotechnology was coined to mean molecular manufacturing -- mechanical chemistry. Unfortunately, it's been applied too widely, and so we now have to use these clumsier terms to describe Drexler's idea.
"... Regexps. John tried a beautifulSoup parser, but it turned out to be more trouble than it was worth ...'

Took me a bit of mucking around to get it working. My trick was just utilising the FOX HTML Validator to find the page structure, then CUT+PASTE the text into IDLE and call up BS in IDLE, then write the BS expression to oarse the string till I had the right data.

"... I don't mind sharing the code if PG doesn't mind the potential flood of screen scrapers. ..."

A better suggestion might be supply the raw data you collected as a service and let others do what they want with it. Most just want the data and are not particularly interested in the HOW. If they are interested in the HOW then it's better to point them to some scrapers to play with.
This is the one.

No more big rigs, ups drivers, fed ex drivers, taxi drivers, pizza drivers.

The tech seems extensible to store shelf stocking, so a pretty big chunk of all transportation of goods should be automated.

It's easy to envision a retailer that has automated delivery from the factory floor to the store shelf.

This will be huge.
How about some gene therapy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_therapy
Has anyone tried Mongrel clusters on Niagara CPUs? Google is silent on this one.
being my friend doesn't guarantee you get the presents... but i'm always open to meeting new people.
I think this will be the one, but we've got a couple years, at least.
Cloning and aerogel
Any South African news.YC'ers?
Are you from SA? If so, have you submitted an application for YC? Your thoughts on getting to Silicon Valley?!
In the same vein as 'Rails is just a WAR', there's 'PHP in a WAR' -- Quercus, by Caucho, the makers of the Resin Java app server. See:

http://caucho.com/resin-3.1/doc/quercus.xtp

I'm surprised it hasn't gotten more attention... though perhaps the way quercus.caucho.com is currently giving servlet errors is part of the problem. :(
Seems like a good guy. I don't think I'm nearly as strong. Good luck Randy Pausch.

"Somewhere during my treatment, somebody asked me if having cancer had made me believe less, or more, in God. I replied that I didn't know, but it sure had made me believe more in people." -- http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/news/index.html
"Design Patterns" in Dynamic Languages (Ruby)
Machine translation of language. In 10-15 years time, given improvement and dissemination of the technology, we might massively open up the world's communication. This could be significant as we massively increase the marketplace of ideas and communication.
Yes, I also enjoyed reading it. I think their blog is also good.
I give it a 6/10 I guess. While I like the simple approach ... I am also missing a few basic bells and whistles. I'd love to see a search feature and/or a way to tag or categorize posts for later reference. Sometimes I think "oh, I remember reading about that on YC" but its nearly impossible to find again.

Also the text (as I'm typing this) in the form field is too lightly colored and the text area is too small for me.
Just as console gaming is slowly killing the PC gaming industry

What an odd statement. The atari had a larger share of home games than any PC of the day. I don't play many games, but the superiority (economic and practical) of PC gaming is pretty obvious. Consoles have a marketing advantage...they're toys and don't have to mess around with on the matter.
I only just started using it. It is definitely an interesting community. There are other projects like it, but CambrianHouse seems the nicest from what I have remember. It seems if nobody else cares to comment on your ideas, they might even throw in their own employees to do so.
I think many people are not terrified, or even particularly afraid. I certainly don't want to die (like, ever), but I can understand those who "are ready" to die, now. Ten years ago, I couldn't even understand that. It was incomprehensible to me.

Generalizing improperly from my own experience and that of people I know, it seems to me that it gets easier to accept the idea of death for many people as they age. Hopefully we'll crack the aging thing ASAP, but I wonder how many will die of old age even after aging is more-or-less optional.
Cisco was founded by a married couple, Sandy Lerner and Leonard Bosack.
From the comments, that's a pretty deceptive way for a company to start out.
1) Measuring the age of the universe to a few percent ~14 billion years.
2) Determining the dark energy (70%) / dark matter (25%) / regular matter (5%) breakdown of the universe to a few percent.
3) The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Hubble Space Telescope and Wilkinson Probe

I'm purposely being biased :)
That site sounds a little suspect. I'd definitely avoid it.
Think of it this way: you don't have nearly as much to lose as you once thought. On the other hand, you'd better start living a good life now, because while you're alive is all you've got.
I scanned the whole of reddit and this is the one article that I clicked and read. And in the next few minutes this is hitting the top in news.yc. News.yc feels like a reddit that finally understood me. :'(
the points mentioned in the article works for small and medium level projects. but given the scale of projects that are evolving today, these points need to take a back sheat. The point of the programmer being the owner of the project does not exist, there are multiple hierarchies and it works from one level to another.
Support vector machines and other practical realizations of statistical learning theory research that began in the 1970s.
I followed him around and healed him in WoW.
Coworker.
15 Excellent Examples of Web Typography. Part 1
Perhaps some of the hesitation is due to the fact that FB is seeking "proposals for building a business on Facebook Platform". I think a lot of people are considering making a FB app to augment their main offering, but most probably aren't building a whole business on the platform. My interpretation of the common blogosphere opinion seemed to be that focusing only on Facebook was too risky given that you could be screwed over by the whim of the growing giant.
This guy is very inspiring. Such a great attitude!

I recently found a red mole on my wife's skin. It was just a fluke that I noticed it. I once designed pattern recognition software to help recognize skin cancer, so I knew what to watch out for. Anyway, she had it biopsied and it came back as malignant melanoma - the worst form of skin cancer. She had surgery to remove it and several of her lymph nodes two days after the diagnosis. She is cancer free now (PET scan), but it was quite a scare. She is young and had never had much sun exposure, so we were initially surprised with the diagnosis. It turns out that some skin cancers are predominantly genetic. And skin cancer is one of the most common types of cancer, especially among young people.

//PSA Portion of post//

Check your skin monthly to see if you have any unusual changes. As with most cancers, early detection is the key to higher survival rates. If you notice something unusual, go to a DERMATOLOGIST (not a GP.) Dermatologists have much better detection rates than regular docs. My wife had a GP and a surgeon tell her the red mole was nothing, and she only had it removed because I kept nagging her. Dermatologists measure size/penetration etc. with skin cancer to determine survival rates. My wife's survival rate was 85%, but .02mm deeper and it would have dropped significantly. My doctor had a patient with the same type of melanoma, for example, and she died within three weeks of noticing a new mole. She took a "wait and see" approach and it killed her. So don't wait!

A mnemonic for things to watch out for: ABCDE.

A=Asymmetry (Uneven Surface);
B=Borders (Irregular mole borders);
C=Color (Varied colors are bad. Reds and blacks are bad);
D=Diameter (Larger than your pupil/a pencil eraser = bad);
E=Evolving (Any changes, such as bleeding, crusting, etc.)

//End PSA//

Wow. My posts are too long.
Wireless electricity.
Quantum teleportation.
Any webpy developers in the bay area looking for high impact startup jobs?
An early stage VC funded company... do comment if you are interesteD
Monthly subscription.
Apple Loves Inconsistency
In my HCI class we're taught all about consistency and predictability, then Apple goes from being a good role model to f'n it all up. (slight sarcasm)
For those having trouble, try running 'bash' first.
+1 (Insightful)

This is why democracy + free speech (in theory, at least) works. No matter how unpopular, a voice cannot be silenced. If you don't like a person's viewpoints, you can't shut them down by downvoting them; you can only upvote the viewpoint you do like, and / or present your own position yourself, if no one else has done it.
I disagree, as noted further up the thread. Preventing downvotes doesn't remove the dissenting opinion. In fact, it allows and encourages it. Downvotes allow groupthink to silence disagreement. If you disagree with something, instead of downvoting, post a comment explaining your position.
You couldn't be more right.
I don't like downvoting because downvotes are so ambiguous in meaning. An upvote clearly means "read this!". A downvote could mean disagreement on the subject, dislike of the author or just disinterest. I might want to read a story with wich many people disagree, but I might not want to read one that everybody finds completely irrelevant or shallow.

The trouble is that the meanings of up and downvotes are different for news stories and comments respectively. For a comment, the votes almost exclusively mean agreement/disagreement. Only in rare cases do I disagree with a comment but still find it so important that I vote it up. This is different from, say, a scientific paper where this happens frequently.

Overall I think downvotes are unnecessary and cause a lot of bad blood.
Yes, I'm a fellow South African, and while we've not submitted an application, I'll be heading to Silicon Valley shortly to have a second go at launching a startup there. Feel free to get in touch. markcpt-g-m-a-i-l
If you rarely downvote and others allways downvote items they don't like, your opinion is going to be underrepresented. I think that is a harm. As I said elsewhere, downvotes are too ambiguous in meaning.
I've never heard of anything like this, though I've thought of it quite a long while back for Reddit. The problem is that it won't solve anything. Most people will still downvote / leftvote things they don't agree with and upvote / rightvote things they do agree with. If the desire to silence a dissenting opinion could be controlled by the majority of people, free speech would not be such a rare thing, let alone need to be written into law.
My startup is in the life sciences field. My partner Josh is a genius. I'd love to run a private lab with him, but we need some measure of success first for us to fund it ourselves. Send me an email, we (mostly Josh) have a lot of ideas that could positively impact the world, either through improving lives, making energy less scarce, or one specific idea that involves commodifying "kits" to help perform a specific type of cutting edge medical research.

See his HIV curing idea midway through this post. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47751

If you're looking for a business model for a Y Combinator for biotech, here's my suggestion. In biotech, patents are king. There are almost no startups in biotech that don't have patents. Institutional investors will not consider startups without patents. While it's possible to write a patent without the help of a lawyer, you drastically increase the probability of getting a patent when you have a lawyer.

So you could provide people with the resources to help obtain a patent in exchange for a percentage of royalties and equity in the company that owns the patent.
GEB slowly builds up an analogy that likens inanimate molecules to meaningless symbols, and further likens selves (or "I"'s or "souls" if you prefer -- whatever it is that distinguishes animate from inanimate matter) to certain special swirly, twisty, vortex-like, and meaningful patterns that arise only in particular types of systems of meaningless symbols. It is these strange, twisty patterns that the book spends so much time on, because they are little known, little appreciated, counterintuitive, and quite filled with mystery. And for reasons that should not be too difficult to fathom, I call such strange, loopy patterns "strange loops" throughout the book, although in later chapters, I also use the phrase "tangled hierarchies" to describe basically the same idea.

-- Douglas R. Hofstadter
Have you seen Aubrey de Grey's Ted Talk?

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/39

He's doing life extension research. He might have enough funding now, but if not...
It's tough to say it without drawing out cynicism. Warren Buffet used to talk about why he didn't donate money earlier purely in terms of a return on capital. He felt (correctly, it would seem) that he was better at making his capital grow than many other people, and as such, would leave charity to others in the meantime, and give his money later (which he has).

The way I think about it is that I'm confident I'm better than most people (not news.YC'ers for sure, but most people) at larger perspectives, or at least feeling confident that I can tackle large problems. It would seem there are (relatively) few people who feel like they're in that position, and so I find a need to fill that.

What people forget over time (and this I think is what draws out the eye-rolling in general from many people with respect to the above) - is that if they're successful, they get caught up in the success and forget about the world changing they intended to do. And if I turn out not to be successful (after repeated attempts) - every failure should bring me closer and closer to tackling world-changing problems head-on.

In the meantime, I try to think big, I try to execute big, but I try to pay attention to the smaller details where I can have a positive impact with low opportunity cost.

Mainly, I think there's a high risk that people lose their idealism and empathy for others in the world over time - and that's tough to stave off.
Buddy from college. We hung out enough so that my ambition rubbed off on him, and his positive spirit and good humor rubbed off on me. We've also pulled a good many late nights together working. I don't think you can truly know someone until you've been sleep deprived together.
[Right Wing] Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt is primarily a 1940's take on the 1840's essay What is Seen and What is Not Seen by Frederic Bastiat. You can read the original here: http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html
The most important thing in the near future of life extension is Sirtris Pharmaceuticals's super-resveratrol, SRT501. Resveratrol is one of the beneficial substances in red wine. SRT501 lets you have the equivalent of 10,000 bottles worth of red wine with none of the poisonous effects of alcohol. SRT501 is much more economical than natural sources of resveratrol, which are currently too expensive to be useful for life extension, unless you want to spend around $100 a day. If I had money right now and they weren't denominated in the US Dollar, I would buy their stock.

The death of mitochondria hastens death from "old-age". SRT501 and resveratrol increase the number and function of your mitochondria. SRT501 is currently in clinical trials for diabetes and I fully expect it to increase average life spans by at least 10%, though this is not what it is getting FDA approval for. The day it hits the market I'm going to get an off-label prescription for it, as long as I can afford it.
I'm interested. I've already tried to invest in lower-cost diagnostic kits for other diseases, but the company never achieved their price goals.

I am, I might add, probably the last person on earth that should be investing in life sciences since all my experience is in business/financial services, marketing and software. I have a decent amount of experience with patents, though.

Quick question: What is the real benefit of the saliva test you mention on your site? I mean, your HIVgene diagnostic kit seems to approach the issue from the wrong angle, IMHO. If anything, it seems like telling someone they have heightened natural resistance to a disease is almost irresponsible - it's like handing a "Get Out of Jail Free - MAYBE" card to them. Am I missing something?
Warren Buffet rocks.