skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't need to be forced to learn about a variety of things and do what's best for myself. A lot of people don't. Why assume that kids do, just because they are young?

I realize some people think everyone needs to be forced to do what's best for them, which at least isn't an ageist double standard. But in that case, what exactly is purported to be preventing reason from informing our decisions, and why can't we overcome that obstacle?

(BTW I do think there are various obstacles to a reason based life. Just not insurmountable ones. I'd rather face them than "force" people. Using force has downsides beyond being unpleasant. Like what if the forcer makes a mistake? The student will say, "I don't want to", but that was a given anyway. So how will errors be discovered and corrected?)
One of the premises of the Montessori method from the article is:

That children learn in a distinctly different way from adults.

That isn't reasonable, and isn't backed up by any serious theories of learning. There is only one known method for creating knowledge/complexity (evolution).
It's funny, on TopCoder, prizes count for close to nothing to most of the top competitors. More than anything, respect is what people strive for -- from others and from themselves. People are extraordinarily excited about the prospect of being 'red' or getting a rating above 2200, and seems to motivate people far more than prizes.
BellKor is officially the winner of the $50,000 Progress Prize in the Netflix Prize competition
Guys, I'll tell you the same thing that I tell to people who attack Paris Hilton: lay off. If I see Steve or Alexis make a post like this, which I haven't, then I'll pay attention. For everyone else, what the hell did he ever do to you? He's contributed an impressive portfolio to the open-source community before even turning 18 -- bested, off the top of my head, only by Blake Ross and Marcello Tossatti -- and if he's created six half-baked startups, then he's done three times as much baking as the vast majority of the people reading this thread.
Meebo and Facebook have puzzles too.
pg, can we get one down arrow per month?
any other douglas adams fans in the house? =)
YES! Absolutely! Personally, I've changed the focus of our startup to do some good in the world by first releasing a free product for the non-profit cause. I've been a huge fan of OLPC and we're developing a product for that market first. I don't think these two - making money and doing good - are mutually exclusive at all. Changing the world (for the better hopefully!) goes hand in hand with wealth and doing good can be highly lucrative. It's all about finding balance and being a good global citizen. Many companies have positioned themselves to be global leaders and also to have impeccable ethics and do good.

If you can afford to delay monetization to do some good in this messed up World, definitely do it! You will be rewarded for it.
Ikiwiki: integrating documentation and bug tracking into version control
It's great to hear that!

Sometimes, it seems like the products that succeed in a free market are not necessarily the products that will make consumers happiest in the long run.

For instance: Facebook has a ludicrously high valuation, but is it actually creating that much value? I don't think so -- the monetary valuation of Facebook is mostly due to the fact that it is addictive and contagious, rather than due to any substantial consumer betterment created by the service.

(That general critique is also applicable to most of the facebook apps out there so far, I think)
My Nokia N95-8gb would beg to differ. It's not Symbian's fault that Nokia took two years to finally give their smartphones enough memory.

http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/Nokia_N95_8GB.ph...
See "The changes" and tell your friends to upgrade =)
I think there are details that are missing from your post, e.g. are the cofounders first time entrepreneurs / are they more senior than you? If so, how much? How senior are you? Are the seed round investors all angels? How good are they? How many?

What is the startup's next proof point / how far away? How far away from launch are they? Are they 10% burned through their seed round, or 80%? I.e. when is their out of cash date?

How big is the option pool? What do you and the founders think your dilution will look like through exit?

Do you get [ partial single ] and/or double trigger acceleration? If single, what do the founders have? (Note: the founders acceleration can affect valuation at early stages of company.)

How much does this startup need you?

(Would be happy to chat with you briefly to give you my thoughts on your situation. Email: my username with a period inbetween first.last + xobni.com.)
Why so verbose? Am I the only one who likes concise code?

'pos=solvepuzzle&auth='+(new Date()).getTime()

edit: yes, that's milliseconds
Another issue is that people who want to learn worthwhile stuff are often forced to go to school instead. I for one was often torn away from chess to be extremely bored at school. That is one of the results of indiscriminately forcing everyone to go to school with no regard for personal circumstance.
Maybe I shouldn't have read so much Douglas Adams and got a little more focused on learning Javascript. The idea that I still haven't got past the first step pisses me off.
Personally I've never been a big fan of Aaron and wasn't impressed by all the hype around him 'co-authoring' RSS. But I have to saw my opinion of him changed after playing around with web.py

Although I dropped web.py for Pylons for new project I really like the idea behind web.py and applaud him for starting and continuing to oversee this project (though a bunch of new work is being done by other great hackers like Anand).
Did it work?

I broke down so that I could change the string more easily.
Denny,

That was beautiful! Thank's a lot.
Despite what's said everywhere, I think I'm too old to do anything else, so I'll give it another try (and another, and...:)

Rafael
This is my favorite post on News.YC so far... I'm really happy to see something like this here.

Anybody working on a "do-gooder" startup that they want to share here?
qwertyy: Did you create a new profile just to post this? Gosh, get a life dude!
ummm... well, how might one convert milliseconds to seconds? here are a few ideas:

- write a screenscraper to get the answer from here: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=1000+milliseconds+t...

- or perhaps hook your function up to the search API to get the answer that way (not sure if you can access the calculator through the API, though)

- or maybe just divide by 1000.
I think it creates value in the ability to keep track of your personal social network. Its not entirely difficult to manage contacts on your own, but I think its nice that at the very least I can send a Facebook message to someone (if not gather their contact information via their profile if they choose to include it) if I'd like to ask them a question or catch up with them. In the past, you might have to ask a mutual friend or spend some energy figuring out how to reconnect with them.

But I agree that their revenue is generated mostly because most of their users have trouble limiting their time on the site, which can be considered a negative impact.
If you don't like JS, curl should be your friend :D
"That isn't reasonable, and isn't backed up by any serious theories of learning."

I don't know whether that's true or not; I'm a developmental psychology ignoramus.

"There is only one known method for creating knowledge/complexity (evolution)."

Are you saying that other known methods for "creating knowledge/complexity" like those employed the human brain or artificial computers are really just evolution working through indirection? i.e. evolution made humans, therefore, anything we credit to humans should really be credited to evolution?

Well, then I see your "evolution created all known complexity" and raise you "fundamental laws of physics created all known complexity". HA! Check and mate!
This is rather unfortunate. A lot of the folks that simply attend college is because they believe they NEED it in order to get a job, be successful, etc. While they're right to some extent (you're going to have a hard time being lawyer with no formal education), people generally miss the point that there are ways to make a living outside of working a boring job.

Some people are simply not meant for college and instead of being forced through by parents, etc, they would be much better off simply dedicating four years of their life to practicing something they enjoy.

I've met several people with no formal education background that now own a couple of small business (nothing fancy, cellphone stores, gas stations, etc) and make more money (and have more fun) than most folks with a college degree at their age. It doesn't take much college to do something entrepreneurial just the motivation to learn and the willingness to fail.

The problem is a lot of folks don't realize that is a feasible option. For the most part everyone is force fed the same routine: "get good grades in high-school to go to a good college and then get good grades in college to get a good job otherwise you're screwed".
He can't be -- Robert Scoble is the Paris Hilton of Web 2.0.
The human brain uses evolution, computers today don't create knowledge.

I thought this was well known. The famous question, asked by Paley and others, was: where did complexity come from? And the presumed answer was: a designer (God, who imbued some other creatures with limited design abilities themselves). This was never a great answer, because where did the complex designer come from? But anyway, then Darwin came along, and he came up with a different way of accounting for where complexity came from. Imperfect replication + selection -> complexity/knowledge. That's what evolution is. Human brains create complex ideas and new knowledge. No one has ever come up with a different solution to the classic problem. Therefore, human brains do evolution. they do replication and selection of ideas. and this can't be different for adults vs children.
qwertyy: news.yc is as good as you are. If there's stuff that you want to see, post it. If you don't, just STFU or get down with Greasemonkey to edit out whatever you don't want to see.
First world pain is a term for things like going to the ATM and having it eat your card inexplicably. That seems close.
After watching said video, I must say I second this demand.
it's not really meant to be a hard puzzle, per se (that would be pointless and a waste of time). it's just intended not to be really really easy, and useful enough for us to say "this could be a good candidate" based on getting the correct answer.
you're about half way there...
Hmm, you can try using a Greasemonkey script to disable the override button, and then another Firefox plug in to disable disabling Greasemonkey, and a Kernel Level Rootkit to prevent you from disabling the Firefox plug in, a random BIOS password to prevent you booting from a CD device and a padlock on the physical box to prevent you from disabling the BIOS password.

Seriously, the nonprocrast has worked out well for me. I need to tweak the timings a bit. I wish there was a gradual setting though, so the longer you used it continually the longer the lock-out period was.

One way around the nonprocrast settings that doesn't make me feel as guilty though is pulling up the list of newest submissions and leaving it open. You can then click on the titles to read the off-site articles without triggering the lockout (but you can't read comments).
A Theory Of Everything
If it looked something like this you're not done:

YWxlcnGZvbGxvd2luZzogQoJ1zZWNyZXQgY29kZSB1zZWNyZXQgGZvbGxvd2luZzogY29pczYioyK==
Is quertyy the Paris Hilton of Trolling 2.0?
If he's Paris Hilton, you're another Star Magazine. You're only contributing to his fame. I only point this out because you seem to have a problem with him.
You could get a crap job for some non-startup company and start your own thing for 100% equity...
What he didn't admit is that they were there to help him install TeX... ;-)
I nominate "trompulauma". Selected because it makes little sense and takes more syllables than "High-Tech Grief".
For the first step, yes... but that's just the first step...

And actually, I couldn't get curl to work... I'm guessing I wasn't setting the referrer or user agent right or something.
At the risk of getting downvoted due to a negative-sounding comment, I must say that I don't find Xobni's plugin so useful (at least to me) by what I've read about it. I use Outlook at work and Gmail for my personal email, and I think that the main feature that's missing from Outlook is good search. All the other features that Xobni provides sound, like, well, features. Just because my emails my contain implicit information about my "social graph" (whatever that means), it doesn't mean I care about it in my daily work. All I want from Outlook is to give me a decent search feature like Gmail and I'll be happy. It's great that Xobni provides better search than Outlook, but that's not enough to get me excited about the rest of the product. I certainly don't see myself using a plugin that "enhances" my Gmail experience -- it's already quite good as it is. Gmail is my inbox 2.0. It came out a couple of years ago.
Don't lay into qwertyy for laying into Aaron. For a start Aaron's a public figure and qwertyy's not.
Does anyone know of any other job puzzles like this? The only ones I've seen are Facebook and Meebo:

http://www.facebook.com/jobs_puzzles/

http://blog.meebo.com/jobs#web
I'm inclined to wonder if 18 real users voted this up, or if qwertyy created a bunch more sockpuppet accounts.
Off the bat, my little startup is in no way better then something like OLPC, but with my startup I am trying to make the world a better place by providing a place to get unknown music tracks identified. Hopefully I will expand into other media.

I know for myself, how music has enhanced my life and it may sound lame, but I still think that if you discover a new band or some band you never knew of, you might go to a show, experience different music, meet new people or just learn something new.

Beside my awesome answer, I think this is a great question and want to hear others responses.
You need seconds. Also make sure your system clock is accurate and that you're in Weebly's time zone.
> For a start Aaron's a public figure and qwertyy's not.

qwertyy's a throwaway pseudonym with one post to his name. If he gets publicly humiliated, he can simply create a new account, and nobody's the wiser.
This is why I'd want a down-vote on submissions.
"computers today don't create knowledge"

Whenever a computer program discovers a new prime number, or any of a zillion other things, a computer has created some knowledge. If you want to say that this is really a human operating through indirection, we need to again follow the chain all the way back through evolution and say that it was the fundamental physical laws which "created" the knowledge.

If I am misunderstanding your definition of "create knowledge", please clarify.

"human brains do evolution. they do replication and selection of ideas."

I'm not sure if I'm understanding you correctly here, but I'll respond to it as I interpreted it.

Let's be more precise, since "evolution" can pretty much apply to anything. e.g. The Grand Canyon "evolved" from a big chunk of rock. I assume that you're referring to the process of natural selection when you say evolution.

It's true that memes replicate and undergo a process analogous to natural selection in biology, memes float around the memepool, and their success at "infecting" minds (getting that mind's owner to agree with the meme) determines their fitness, which in turn allows it to reproduce, etc. But this is entirely separate from the process used within the mind/brain to determine whether or not to agree with the meme. Through some process brains arrive at decisions and opinions, and those decisions are what put selective pressure on the memes. But this says nothing about what's going on inside the brain to arrive at the decision, so we can't say that the brain operates by evolution. All we can say is that once the brain arrived at a decision, that decision added a bit of selective pressure on the memepool.

Saying that decisions themselves are produced by an evolutionary process is analogous to saying that death operates by evolution. Death is a biochemical process, and there's no natural selection going on inside the organism to cause it to die. We don't yet know what's going on inside a brain to arrive at decisions.

Anyway, having said that, there is a theory that brain development operates by something called "Neural Darwinism", but I don't know how valid it's considered to be. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_Darwinism

"Imperfect replication + selection -> complexity/knowledge"

Yes, but the converse is not true; complexity/knowledge do not imply imperfect replication and selection. Natural selection doesn't have a monopoly on all complexity. It's entirely conceivable that the brain uses some "algorithm" other than something analogous to natural selection.
Well the problem with this puzzle wasn't its level of difficulty, just that it was awkward to complete. It seemed more like a test of my Firebug abilities than anything else.
"The only thing I can point to is that one great teacher we've all had (or I hope you've had). That one teacher who was able to just turn you on completely."

Yes, I had one of those! I absolutely LOVED going to her class every day. I didn't really learn much, but that's OK!
the fact that you're using firebug, know some basic concepts, can debug javascript and can formulate your own POST requests puts you above quite a few of the applicants we've seen.
sounds like you've got a crush!
>(Xobni, Weebly, Justin.tv etc) are hiring as well.

Why don't you interview with Xobni, Weebly, Scribd, J.TV, etc? Shop around.
This is one of those no-duh moments.
Sure love the fact that they're letting her work on this. Feels great for the shareholder value!
I left for Italy after enough university level Italian to learn more on my own, and fended for myself for a year. That was probably the biggest single "learning experience" of my life, and a lot of fun to boot.
But the 'startups' that get posted here from him are lame IMHO
An on line book library catalogue thing? A text based wiki thing?
I mean come on.
Credit where credit's due, and it's certainly not due IMHO.
Hi,I'm a uk based lawyer (also doing a start-up - looking for a co-founder), in the UK we have a free council run service for small start up businesses called "Business Link", is there anything similar in the US for you? If not, I think if you pick up the phone and call 3 or 4 law firms, explain that you're a small start up doing whatever and ask if they know anywhere/one that can help you for free at this stage. You should try and avoid paying legal fees just yet. If it were me, I would pick a very large, prestigious law firm, get some email details for attorneys in the corporate/business areas and email them and ask if they can recommend where you can look for some free guidance at this early stage. They are often quite helpful and like to assist if they can. Hope this helps.
Hi Cibermole, worked for you at codies, dragon empires Lead P. what a dog that game!!! gotta thing you can help me with. will email. Magic1234.
Where else does complexity/knowledge come from, besides evolution, then?

While it's possible some answer to that question will be invented in the future, it definitely doesn't exist now, and is not known to Montessori.

--

A computer finding a prime number isn't creating new knowledge. The knowledge about prime numbers was in the program. Following those mechanical instructions isn't a creative act. The chain doesn't go back further because the programmer created knowledge that wasn't a mechanical/simple transform from some previous chain link.
I do, but it's been coming down ... so, it's turned out to be a pretty useful feature actually.
Have you read PG's "The Equity Equation" (http://www.paulgraham.com/equity.html)? Please do, it's instructive.

The short version, imho, is if you're worth employing as the 4th employee, you're worth more than 1%

Good luck whatever you decide ;)
feature request: tour to include some case-scenarios? my home pc has literally GBs of photos - can you provide some scenarios that would tempt my wife to invest some time in using your web app? examples include: backup your photos with our secure server, using filters to make your beach photos awesome, batch renaming functions (prefix suffix etc) etc. not hassling you at all, i just can't see the hook to a non-PS user
This is terrible journalism and the subject of the article doesn't claim to have a complete Theory of Everything. He is working on it. In his theory he postulates that this shape is important in the universe and that makes a lot of sense to me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E8_polytope is the highest dimensional regular polytope.
Works! Thanks!
i don't think you understand evolution. BTW children's brain structure is fundamentally different from adults, the neurons literally are different - one concrete example of this is how children seem to learn languages effortlessly until they're about 8 or so; adults can never become as fluent. japanese people literally cannot hear the difference between 'r' and 'l' - again, brain hardwiring is different.
In Search of Inexperience
That was a great read zach, thanks.
Scarey place to be.
did anyone read this by a cibermole?
Burnt-out programmers:: Existential Depression - the biggest threat to your brand?
www.intrench.com
I kind of see what you are inferring to, but "There is only one known method for creating knowledge/complexity (evolution)" is not a strictly true statement.

If "evolution" implies some sort of selection among competing candidates of "knowledge," then the above statement is strictly false.

Say, a -> b, b -> c |=> a -> c.

The consequence ( a -> c ) is newly "created" knowledge, because you may not have known that fact when the two premises were stated, yet the consequence required zero competition. Point shortened, logical reasoning requires no competition, hence logical inferences, which can be new knowledge, are not evolved. They are "merely" deduced.

I'm just attacking that one statement of yours and not discounting your criticism of the Montessori method. It is a worthwhile clarification though, because you are talking about "serious theories of learning." I have not thought much about it, but I do think there are merits, at least theoretically, to the Montessori method.
Airlines in "a computer-programming frenzy to reduce embarrassing service lapses"
They're planning on extracting social data from emails when most people use social networks for that task now?

It seems they're asking that people 1) start using their system instead of facebook et al 2) change their email address (unless it works as a plugin on other clients).

If they plan on option two then I think they'll encounter problems: most people I know only use outlook for work use and the web-based ones are unlikely to allow this plugin when they could implement something similar themselves (as gmail already seems to be doing...)

Besides, if they do want to extract social data I'd guess they would need to structure their site like a social networking site which means it will merely become another social networking site.

It seems a very good idea, except for privacy concerns, but I wonder where they'll obtain the users when everyone uses facebook et al for online socialising.
I think if you're going to say something like this, you should sign it with your real name. Whatever his flaws, Swartz wouldn't sink to what you've done: if he was going to criticize someone he wouldn't do it anonymously.
I think ours is.
It's fair to criticize an idea you don't like, but nastier to attack the person. Think of what you might say to his face, that's what's appropriate to post.
qwertyy - put your rubbish up on http://www.iheartrant.com/ - there you can write anything you want and get it out of your system.