skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow. That certainly got a lot of responses.

My .02, for what it's worth. Everything we consume changes the way our bodies and minds work. Some things do it a lot and some are more subtle. I think rms belongs on YC because a) he's got a web-based business, and b) because he's interested in hacking his own body. Additionally, I wouldn't have a problem with somebody selling Ginkoba, herbal tea, meditation beads, self-hypnosis tools, etc.

Having said that, it sounds very unpopular with some people. It brings up a whole political argument that's probably out of bounds for this site. It seems like it hacks your mind and body a bit more than herbal tea. And in the bigger picture of "should we tolerate people pitching us drugs" I'd have to agree that it's out of place. So it's probably one of those things, like extreme flatulence, that's best kept as quiet and far away as possible. There's a whole other discussion about the ethics of selling the stuff which I won't go into. An interesting moral question is: if you could take substances that would make you great at business and able to retire in five years, yet left you a quaking, mixed-up junkie, would it be worth it? That's a rhetorical question!

I do find ironic is that somebody who is taking a form of stimulent can be so hyper and promotive of their product without realizing they sound like a habitual drug user recommending it to others. I have a soft spot for such pitches -- I know I've been in several business opportunities where I desperately wanted people to realize how much my product could help them, yet if you're ticking people off, it's probably time to tone it down a bit. It's going to be really hard to have a business in which you actively offend 15% (offend as in the villagers have torches and are storming the castle) with your marketing. Go for a venue and a message delivery mechanism that doesn't include those folks.
Not having enough sex has also screwed up the lives of many, many people.
How about cycling?
NYT on Loopt: These Phones Can Find You
Your Worst Nightmare: RFID Powder
The world's smallest and thinnest RFID tags were introduced this year by Hitachi. Tiny miracles of miniaturization, these RFID chips (Radio Frequency IDentification chips) measure just 0.05 x 0.05 millimeters.
This needs downmodded so hard.
Thanks for the post. It's good and I look forward to the next ones. Any advice on peninsula living?
I think the question needed to be asked and answered. Is there something off-topic about asking what sorts of Web 2.0 businesses are appropriate for the board? If he had a business selling beanie-babies online with a slick AJAX interface I don't think anyone would care. If he were selling heroin it would be a scandal. So where's the line? I think it is an interesting question as far as being appropriate. It sounds like it is obvious to you that it is not.Perhaps you know something I don't.

There's also the question of what kinds of industries people feel it would be okay to support. Would anybody here write a cool new web application to buy and sell cigarettes? (Assuming it was legal, of course). How about a wine rating and shipping service? I think I would have problems with the first one and not-so-much with the second one. Would you write a web application so immersive it had negative impacts on people's lives? Ouch -- that one cuts close to home, eh?
n00b milk (pic)
rms, with karma of 1888, when do you spend time on your business?
A very Important item left out:

Muni also has a fleet of - not buses - but light rail trains. These trains, designed by Ferrari, travel on the surface away from the city center, and then go underground to become subways down town traveling very quickly without traffic interference. From my location (Cole Valley - just above the Upper Haight) a bus ride takes about 45 minutes to get to SOMA, and the light-rail about 25 minutes.
So, if you can find a place on any Muni line, you will dramatically improve your transit times PLUS you won't have to deal with the crazies - they mainly ride by bus for some reason. The way you can differentiate a Muni light-rail from a bus line is the light-rail lines are designated with a letter, and the buses with a number. Avoid buses - life is too short - go light-rail.

And as ced pointed out, Cycling! For me, its under 20 minutes to ride to SOMA - cycling is one of the fastest ways to get around town, and the cyclists have become a political force here and have been granted a bike lane network in the city. But being right on a Muni light-rail line is perfect for those occasional rainy days.
Why is it in Spanish?
Very cool.

Any chance readers with sites can get it on the ticket adsensing side of things a little early?
The more computer interfaces get like games, the better they get and the worse they get. It depends on the skill level of the operator.
You can easily set up a "reload" button in a global admin part of your website to coordinate all instances, but my founder pointed out that the danger in doing that is you cant see any error messages on the load that were unanticipated, making it harder to quickly fix any problems.

We're using SBCL on Ubuntu, and we have run into some problems with compiled fsl files. Even though we use an asdf load routine with dependencies defined, we sometimes run into certain fsl files not properly getting updated. This is either a dependency error on our part (most likely) or something else, and our work around is to simply delete all .fsl files just before running the asdf (which you can make part of the load process). So our routine is for each machine, (2 net + local instance) is to run an svn update and then run our loader file (sf-load) and thats it. It is most impressive to keep the same process running and update the code with no interruption in service.
Bigloo is a Scheme compiler that supports the JVM as one of its back-end targets.

Kawa is a JVM compiler that supports Scheme as one of its front-end languages.

SISC is an interpreter that runs on the JVM. There are other Scheme interpeters for the JVM, but SISC is the most prominent and said to be the fastest interpreter. In some tests it even beat the Kawa compiler.
We're having great results with lisp. We're over 26K lines of code and about to launch, but the ability to create macros and all the other wonders of Lisp let us create extremely complex pages with very little code. We're using many libraries from db interface (cl-sql) to web server (aserve), etc. We're loving it, and my partner who formerly programmed in Java never wants to go back.
A team of 4 coders, WITHOUT version control?? Oh dear...
Shuttle launch is key for Europe
China to test space weapon in launching moon satellite: rights group+
He's peddling dope, and if you'd been paying attention you would have seen him do it many times before. If you want to talk business, okay:

There is a period in every drug's existence where it is legal. This happened with heroin, cocaine, lsd, etc. In this twilight, money can be made, yes. And if the drug becomes successful, it will eventually be regulated or criminalized. There's nothing special about this.
World's biggest pre-release pirate music site netted
I've only been on a month or so.

Like I said, you probably know something I don't.

But there are also plants that continue to be approved as supplements. I know, because although I don't do any drugs at all (except alcohol and a bit of caffeine), I'm a big into supplements. Not for this board, but I wonder how the decision is made one way or the other -- what becomes an illegal substance and what is okay to use as a supplement? And how would one know ahead of time?
World Series Ticket Sales Suspended After 'Malicious Attack' Crashes Computers
Lack of sleep linked to emotional imbalance, imaging study suggests
I use trac which is integrated into my IDE (Eclipse) with a task management plugin called Mylyn. It's free and it does everything I need to stay organized with the other 6 developers on my team.

What problem are you solving again?
7 Deadly Startup Mistakes
you might find our google group helpful.

http://groups.google.com/group/fireseed-fs3-omecc

we have been collecting information for a year about using gpus and ps3s for Artificial Intelligence and Physics research.
Sessions and cookies in Ruby on Rails
Should news feeds be separated by topic
I can not help but notice, that the YC feed is starting to look more like that of digg, or reddit.

It would be great if we could add tags to articles so that they could be filtered on the fly by the hacker crowd.

I would suggest the raw feed, and then other feed tags might be business news, humor, hacks, edu, questions.

I just think it would be nice to get back to the "pure" news feed that was less a mirror of digg and reddit, but more about the inside details, of startups.
How much is "a few thousand"? You can buy machines like you're describing off the shelf for a few thousand these days. If "a few" means six, Apple will sell you a 3 GHz 8-core machine with a terabyte of storage and 8 gigs of RAM.

You can probably save 20-30% building it yourself. I haven't built any high-end workstations, so I'll refrain from making specific recommendations for components or retailers. A good general strategy would be to use the Mac Pro as a template - look for a motherboard with similar features.
I sort of agree. I'd like to see just:

1) Pure Startup

2) Everything Else

Might be a little bit difficult to differentiate at time, but one of the things I like about this site is that there is not a lot of clutter.
I recently sent this link to my 16 year old brother: http://paulgraham.com/hs.html

There's a lot in there I wish I'd known.
10 Practical Blogs for Entrepreneurs
thank you. I will be making the move in a year and I must have my car with me (I'm a car nut) - although I don't think it will pass CA emissions easily..
Google Obviously Doesn't Use Their New SiteLinks Tool
Follow the Money: The Internet Barons
Nah. I didn't like it when this site opened up to topics other than startups because I thought we'd get a bunch of crap posts. The vast majority has been quality however, so I don't see any compelling reason to change anything.
I can tolerate people who are boring or annoying, just don't enjoy it. I think even really extroverted people have people they don't care for. In any case, it's not like I'm one of those people who consider everyone beneath them - my "boring/annoying" people filter doesn't catch that many people.
Huge pirate music site shut down (OiNK, RIP)
"If it was "poisoning people", they wouldn't have continued using it."

That is utterly false.

"If you are actually into the pharmacology industry, then you would know that most pharmaceuticals are derived from plants, fungi, or other organisms."

Well that has been the case for a very long time. This process is called drug discovery. We are going to be in a very good position to solve the "forward problem" in the near future. With adequate structure-activity models then computationally designed drugs are a real possibility.

It is an exciting time for a hacker to be a chemical engineer.
Launchad [ https://launchpad.net/ ] is a fantastic option if you're working on a free software project. It's free and hosted and has some great features you don't find in any of the other trackers.
Lots. There are a number of courses at MIT that come down to learning MATLAB.
It is a sad day for lovers of music and music piracy.
Dilbert: "I can't do my work because the internet is too fascinating"
Are the bestseller lists made up?
EU tells open source to start paying MS patent tax
I've looked into submitting kratom for approval as a supplement. You send a letter to the FDA and then they inspect the facility where the supplement is produced.

Kratom will become illegal if there is political pressure to do so. I hope that the current political climate has moved far enough past war-on-drugs hysteria for this to happen.
Yes, there is a difference between kratom and what I suspect was one of the true "Things you can't say": X racial/ethnic subgroup is better at n subtask than Y racial/ethnic subgroup
> If he had a business selling beanie-babies online with a slick AJAX interface I don't think anyone would care.

But he doesn't. There's nothing even remotely on-topic about his business... news.yc seems to be mostly about tech startups, or, at the very least, about new and disruptive business models. This is a fairly straightforward product business (with a few regulatory/marketing issues).

Besides the social engineering of this site, there's not a much in the way of 'hacking' going on with his business. Thus, to me (and plenty of others), it's off-topic here.
Change is in the air for old guard Boston area VC's
I believe you are saying that it's okay to have product business (beanie-babies) and also that it's not okay to have a product business (his stuff).

I, for one, would like to hear about web businesses that integrate product sales into lifestyles. I think it's fine to draw the line at "stuff we think might be illegal and/or bad for people" but I sure would like to talk more about product-based web applications if that's okay with everybody.
My compliments to immad for a truly compelling "must see" headline for this site.
Ethics, Morals, and the Law: Where do you draw the line at what to develop?
It is a sad day for lovers of music and music piracy.

I love me some music piracy.
Google vs MapQuest Review on Hubpages
I believe this was actually the first of these sorts of sites...
I'm surprised by the negative reactions to Chinese herbalists. I hope people realize good herbalists have mastered knowledge derived from THOUSANDS of years of trial and error (instead of a few months of clinical trials). It is also very scientifically based. The problem is that it is not regulated, so you do get your share of scammers looking to make a quick buck, but reputable and respected herbalists are as knowledgeable as any pharmacist.
Implement tags and filter by tag.

John.
Unobtrusive JavaScript -- Use It!
- start your spiritual journey asap
He, I was just saying. I've always coded alone, or with only one other person. And that person was using my code as a library. I figured that working like this would scale, modular and bottom-up. Maybe not.

(besides, isn't VC a relatively new proposition? I'd be surprised if PG and co. used it for Viaweb)

Let's leave version control aside. Could someone spell out why bug tracking is so great? Thanks.
Google Mapplets are mini-applications that run within Google Maps. (sound like facebook to anyone?)
This is expected advice from a father, as mine dispensed something similar as well.

But those described are not friends, but merely partners.

To me, friends are those who will be around during bad times as well as good. In other words, they'll be around even when your "worth" is very low.
No, I'm saying that it's on-topic to have a product business if you're doing something truly 'hacker-ish' with it.

If you have a yahoo or ebay store selling beanie babies, that's OT. If you have micropayment-based virtual beanie baby store that uses genetic algorithms to 'breed' new species of beanie babies with other users' virtual beanie babies, then lets you use on-demand manufacturing to buy physical copies of the new species, then you're back on topic.

PS: if anyone uses that idea, give me 10% equity, please. "Spore meets Tamagotchi meets Etsy."
I've considered the similar approach of getting a job as a late night security guard on an industrial site. I've heard of the unending hours of doing nothing, and I think of the hacking potential.

I wonder if anyone has ever created anything notable while working that sort of job.
Admins, please delete this thread. Its purpose is to advertise for and drive business to rms' website. As such, it's no better than spam.
This is the best overview of sessions and cookies in Rails I've yet seen. Much better than Agile Development.

Thanks!
How do you sell a web business?
A vespa or scooter is a pretty good way of getting around too. I had one when I lived there, and it was much more convenient than the car - easy parking (although sometimes the dickhead meter maids would give me tickets for parking the thing on wide sidewalks between trees...hrumph). If it's rainy, you can dress up a bit more than is comfortable on a bicycle. The drawback is that you're still pretty much stuck in the city, as you don't want to/can't take scooters on freeways.
Not all that much, really. I'm mostly satisfied with the decisions I made up until my 3rd year of college or so. And given that a lot of the problems that began then were related to a relationship, I'm not sure that there was anything I could have known that would have made a difference.
We have topics!

1. Ask YC: ...?

2. This is my startup, feedback please!

3. YC Application

4. Everything Else
It's sort of mysterious, in a way. So many people around, and nothing much to do.
http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/
Introvert != Shy
I enjoyed the post until we hit Kant. This "imperative": "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." is the kind of idea that makes it "rational" to go out and kill all the Jews as the Nazi's so aptly demonstrated. They felt that the elimination of Jews should become a universal law. Note that this is a very different idea than: act only as you would want others to act towards you. It is rather: act only in a way that you think all others should act. A very different story, and a complete void as to the defining of "should".

Kant was not only confusing to himself and others, but his ideas were "dangerous" to the extent that ideas can be when used to justify actions.
Vilayanur Ramachandran: A journey to the center of your mind (includes a simple cure for phantom limb pain!)
Ask YC: High-Level Webapp best practices?
Does anyone have any really good resources on some best practices for website development? I'm not looking for coding/architecture/design practices but something more higher-up that outlines things like using wireframes for mockups, the interactions between the coders and the frontend designers, and if the frontend and backend progress at the same pace or is it better for one to progress ahead of the other?
I've developed a few sites and I have a system that works fairly well for me, but I was wondering what everyone else does and why you think your way works for you. Thanks.
Some months ago, I put together a web site to service the school and college market.. it is a messaging system that can broadcast messages to hundreds of phones via voice (a pleasant robot female voice!) or by text messages and also email. Ideal for schools, colleges to alert students or parents in case of weather related closings, or other emergencies. The plan was to sell it as a subscription service to schools and colleges on a per student basis (in the range of $ 3 -5 per student per year). Since building the site, my personal situation has changed... more day job responsibilities/priorities and no time to market this to customers (a full time job).

I was looking around to see if I could sell and the landscape is depressing. Options available:
a) Sell it on Ebay: Looked at this, but there is so much crud floating around on this site in the business section that I seriously doubt anyone would actually bid.
b) Advertise with web business brokers: Most of these are scams that promise to put an ad on their site for hundreds of dollars.

Do any of you have any suggestions? I'm NOT looking for a big payout... would like to recoup some costs, and hopefully find a home for this site with an entrepreneur who has the time and the energy to go after this market. The web site is at www.quinalert.com.

Thanks
M
Don't Waste Time
If you're looking for a big data cruncher on the cheap, I think your choice of programming language becomes important.

Ditch Python for something a little snappier. There's a discussion of languages for Machine Learning at http://hunch.net/?p=230.
My personal ethics would prevent me from developing surveillance tools, anything which is mostly military in nature, or any kind of video game which requires a heavy investment of time.
The problem is that I have a lot of things I'm passionate about. Probably too many. And none of them really make money in and of themselves:-/
You have an excellent point, but I do wish you could have avoided triggering Godwin's law. Perhaps you could edit it into a more everyday situation?
I definately qualifies your mom as a geek ;-)
I've also noticed the absence of something to fill in the gaps in existing webapp development guides. Particularly so, with the apparent and predicted increase in webapp startups. Seems like an opportunity for someone to pull this stuff together.
Have you looked at Orange?
http://www.ailab.si/orange/

It's implemented with Python and C++.
I think I could do surveillance, but I would have a problem combining that with data mining.

I know some guys who are doing work for Homeland Security. They don't talk much about what they do. I think "preventing another terrorist attack" sounds better than "snooping into everybody's life" -- although I'm not sure in practice there is a difference.
This is a misapplication of the categorical imperative. Of course, I suspect that you knew that; it's only a naive viewpoint that would cause someone to miss that.

The correct "universal law" to use in this case, would be "Eliminating people who you find problematic." It would take a truly insane person to actually want this as a universal law. Tying the rule to any specific group of people makes it not universal.

Of course, if someone only understands "philosophy-lite," it becomes an easy thing to mix up.
Yeah Kant isn't the end of that discussion. And you hit the ball out of the park with your example. As you can see, I qualified it with a variant on the golden rule. I also pointed out the goal of both maxims was creating the most utilitarian value. I would argue that those bad guys -- you know the ones with the cool uniforms with leather boots and the strange salute who worshiped that guy with the mustache -- were way off base. You can argue that killing the Jews should be a universal law, but you can't argue that one bunch of people trying to kill an entire other bunch of people for subjective reasons is a good thing for society at large or is something that should be repeated.
A fantastic and more in-depth video from Ramachandran:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4684607596399338611

<quote>Lecture 6 of 12 of IBM Research's Almaden Institute Conference on Cognitive Computing. This one takes place during the reception and banquet dinner.

Ramachandran discusses phantom limbs and synesthesia (esp. color-blind synesthete) as a function of neuron innervation. Specifically, he focuses on cross-linking between nearby cortical regions, which he believes to be genetically caused (e.g. synesthesia appears to be found frequently in family lineages). He also discusses the link between mirror neurons and autism, and how language invention is due to an inherent cross-linking between portions of the visual and auditory regions (e.g. Buba/Kiki effect).</quote>
The categorical imperative is probably the single most famous idea in moral philosophy. It would have had some obstacles in reaching that status if it gave the wrong answer on things like genocide.

I think the way you're supposed to interpret it is asking if a universal law which permits arbitrarily murdering people sounds reasonable or not.
What games do you consider to _require_ a heavy investment of time? A Korean who was obsessed with Starcraft died after playing too long. Do you believe Blizzard is somehow responsible?
Thanks for the discussion everyone. I think this thread is past the point of utility and it should be marked dead if an admin feels that is appropriate.
How about just going back to the startup news that this site was great at conveying?
Digging Into Apple's iPhone Numbers
I'm thinking of a person or a small group of persons who are trying to do that right now.
Traffic attracts advertisers, porn-ish alone doesn't do anything. Or why would advertisers be interested?