skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
'Web 2.0' Deals Spread Beyond San Francisco
> Rand's entire philosophy was carefully contrived to justify the conclusions she wanted justified, and that makes it worthless as philosophy

"Worthless" is far overstating the case: in general it is hard to prove very much about the true motivations of philosophers, particularly long-dead ones. For example, it is quite likely that the exact lines of reasoning in Descartes' Meditations was contrived to reach the conclusions he wanted to reach beforehand, but to say that makes the whole thing "worthless" is pretty silly. Many philosophers can be criticized as developing rational arguments for positions they hold intuitively.
This could be good news for India-focused Web 2.0 startups given the Orkut demographic.
Considering that one of his "results" is a philosophical proof of the existence of God, I'd say he might have gone up a bit of a garden path...

> Many philosophers can be criticized as developing rational arguments for positions they hold intuitively.

Indeed, but the key is doing so from a position of trying to prove your intuitively-held position wrong, and I'd suggest that this is what distinguishes philosophers. Some of them - for instance, Wittgenstein - even manage to do it.

Going back to the science analogy, new hypotheses are accepted not once supporting evidence is found - even UFOs have supporting evidence, after all! - but only for as long as attempts to produce confounding evidence fail.
Someone else has come along and downmodded every single post I made in this thread. Result? Instant karma drop of 10%. By one person. Because I said something they didn't like.

pg, please delete or disable my account forthwith. I am not prepared to stay in a place where that's acceptable - and by allowing the behaviour, you make it acceptable. I would do it myself, but news.yc doesn't even allow me to change my fucking password. (I hope you're not storing them as plaintext.)
INTERVIEWER: What do you mean when you say programming is a religious experience for a lot of people?

[GARY] KILDALL: Well, if you talk about programming to a group of programmers who use the same language, they can become almost evangelistic about the language. They form a tight-knit community, hold to certain beliefs, and follow certain rules in their programming. It's like a church with a programming language for a bible...
But I'm not putting myself in a special category either; I can preach about the wonders of LISP all day.

--excerpt from Programmers at Work, S. Lammers
The Facebook platform makes it possible for one person to build an interesting app in a week or two. Google will need to match this to be competitive.
Isn't an essay based on the assumption we don't exist doomed from the beggining?

We are not cells and molecules. We are souls. Strange that an essay that talks about philosophy doesn't have even once the word soul.

Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotel seperates animals from humans as beings that have soul and the ability to think.

His work "Physics" tried to capture concepts people ignore even these days, and tried to examine in an amazing use of reason various metaphysical phenomena trying to find balance between whats real, fake and imaginary.

If you read the works of Aristotel and others, in original Greek you will be amazed by his astonishing ability to convey truth in a wonderful ingenious word of speech.

--

Plato talked about many not-connected subjects in a very indirect way to put the reader in becoming part of his works. Ingenius!

A very important concept of Socrates and Plato is the world of ideas. A seperate existance/entity/world that we all have access to. Modern science doesn't accept that, as there is not proof for that. But doesn't the fact that a lot of people share similar ideas at different place and time may be a small clue of exactly that?
That being said, I am very much in favor of hacker philosophers.

1. Creative, logical thinking is an inherent part of what we do and love.

2. We created and own the best communication and research network in history.

3. Programming brings our ideas into existence in very short order, and allows us to model pretty much every aspect of reality.

Unfortunately, we also tend to get stuck in our own little world of ideas, a important strength which is our major flaw.
wow -- anybody know the rule that says you have to have a beard?
That's a good point. I'd have to research the issue.
Elaboration: keep in mind the whole point of creating a city in words was to get a look at the soul, and Socrates hints at the fact the city wouldn't be practical in real life.
Forget Micropayments, Try Nanobarter
How much can we trust a Google-driven 'open' social networking platform? They did purchase doubleclick after all. While these social networks are interesting projects, I don't think it's a good idea to allow a single company like Google to run the underlying network and maintain the user information. Certainly such a "platform" is not stable in the long term for building startups on if for no other reason than the social graph owner(s) can shut you and your applications out on a whim.
It's a compact desktop PC from a major manufacturer. Most of us could build a better one for less money in not much more time than it would take to order this. Is there something exciting about this?
See, the problem is that you are simply wrong. I do not believe in the soul, and I cannot say for certain that it does not exist. I CAN say for certain that we are just cells and molecules. Our brains are composed of neurons, which are simply complex chemical reactions. The cell is basically a test tube, separating off the chemicals from everything else. A certain threshold of a chemical interacts with a molecule on the neuron surface, and it "fires", which causes it to release chemicals to an adjacent neuron, and this repeats.

If we had a powerful enough computer to simulate the physics of how each cell works or simulated the connections of neurons, do you really think it won't be able to "think" like we do? Our brains really aren't any different from a computer. A neuron either fires or it doesn't; on or off; 1 or 0.

Humans aren't special. Other animals can clearly think and react to their environment to make "decisions", but they just aren't as powerful of a computer as we are.

On that note, I assume you also believe we have free will? Well, we don't. With a certain set of stimuli, you will make the same decision/"choice" every time. If you understand what I said above, this would become apparent.

With regards to the soul, where did the soul come from? Do primates have souls? If they don't, then it had to come into existence at some point. Was there a set of parents who were soulless and had a child who magically had a soul? What about groups of people that had a long time in isolation to evolve separately, such as the indigenous peoples of Australia and the Americas? Do they have souls? How about the "hobbit" that was found in Indonesia that's 12,000 years old and is a separate branch from homo sapiens? What about neanderthals?

If a human gets a soul upon conception, and identical twins are caused by a zygote that splits, does each twin only have half a soul?
Actually, there already is stuff that's far more refined (and empirically true) than Ayn Rand. It's called evolutionary psychology. Unfortunately, understanding it leaves one feeling rather unedified. It's like realizing that you've been a pawn in somebody else's game, and will continue to be one until your life ends. With Ayn Rand fans, this kind of message doesn't seem to be in demand.
Any good links/more info on evolutionary psychology?
I was under the impression (from documentation, not from experience) that map/filter were the more "optimal" way to do things when you had a choice. I certainly find them more intuitive then the alternatives.

Another feature is the nested defines - that is quite nice (considering that you can put very little into a lambda).
I find it very strange, and revealing, that neither he nor the interviewer mentioned Christ or the New Testament.
DNA evolved from RNA and it took billion years to do just that. DNA tried to perfect it self through its evolution. Your human body to evolve during its growth a lot of cells are destroyed of course while you are shaping.

So basically we are all derivatives of that process. Everybody knows that.

The point is that philosophy is not about getting a claim and considering it substantial to eliminate other probabilities.

Metaphysics is not feasible they are part of a material world. they react with it of course but it exists whether you can accept it or not.

Everyone is trying to understand what happened to all that antimatter that was created during the bing bang. For every molecule there is another anti.

And what about time? who can explain that mystical concept? in the possibility that you can go beyond it, means it may not even be valid as a concept as we know it.

In all these strange ideas, it's impossible to be satisfied that everything is only molecules.

If everything is a chemical random chain reaction how can we all have similar ideas or visions of the future? and note that Greeks never considered chemistry as different from Physics. Only recently did Chemistry claim it's independence.
Okay, you are now officially smart in my book. I'm going to apply.
Why do some people like difficult programming languages such as C++ and Haskell?  Here's my theory...
I think that some people like difficult programming languages such as C++ and Haskell mostly because they would find the work unrewarding otherwise.

So they actually want the programming part to be harder!

A better solution would be to take a more difficult course or find a job with more rewarding work. It's better to work on more difficult algorithms and/or more creative specs.
Ummm... if you've read about any entrepreneur types, their personal lives suffer at the hands of their passion for their idea and startup. Read Founders at Work. It's a recurring theme in the book.

But tomorrow holds no promises. There's no promise you'll be alive tomorrow. No one can guarantee that. My objection is that it does take some blind passion to work more today for more relaxing time later, but there's no guarantee that you'll be alive.

And of course, not everyone is going to run a series of successful technology startups. Newsflash, I'm not Paul Graham! I'm sure that he's more competent than I am.

Get a little perspective.
Social Entrepreneurship: Ten Questions with Daniel Borstein
That's probably pretty on-the-mark.

I know that for me, most of the appeal of Haskell is that every new language feature I learn is something mind-expanding. It's not just that it's difficult, though - it's that it's conceptually mindblowing, where each concept is widely applicable to a bunch of different programming situations. And it doesn't do anything like other languages, so you have that feeling of clawing your way up the learning curve and exercising your brain at every step.

I know a decent amount of C++ too, but not enough to be an expert at it. In my view, life's too short to get good at C++. It feels like when I learn a new C++ feature, it was bolted on to solve somebody's particular problem, and isn't conceptually educational like Haskell.

And I did end finding (well, making) a more rewarding job, and am perfectly happy using Python & JavaScript for it, but it remains to be seen whether this "job" will ever make any money. There's a set of hard problems, and a set of problems people will pay you to solve, and fairly little overlap between the two of them. If you're in the overlap (like Google), good for you. However, even in a startup, about 95% of the work is dealing with nitty-gritty details that really aren't that difficult or exciting. (The remaining 5% is what makes you rich, but you can't ignore the boring 95% without having all your customers ignore you.)
I don't mind writing boring code provided that I'm working on my own idea.
Hm... shall I take a picture of my dog and post it here?
now I'm smacking myself. Yeah, should be obvious.
I think there's an important difference here. Early mathematicians started with an exact definition that turned out to be incorrect (ie., that all numbers could be represented as either integers or the ratio of integers).

The refinement you're talking about here isn't so much a matter of modifying an incorrect but exact definition as it is clarifying an irrefutable but ambiguous definition.

That said, maybe something could come of this if you truly got to the very basic building blocks. For instance, an integer is just a definition - an exact one, but a definition nonetheless. So we can define a rational number as the ratio of two integers, and then build a refutable hypothesis from it - that all numbers are either integers or the ratio of integers.

I have serious doubts as to whether "self interest" could ever be defined as precisely as an integer, though.
Leviticus 19:27 says (in the KJV translation) "Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard."
Charlie Rose: An Hour with Bill Gates
i think it's precisely the opposite. analytic philosophers try to say clear and precise (yet admittedly, often trivial) things while continental philosophers take on grandiose-sounding concepts and discuss them nonsensically (but with FEELING).
And so I think pg's arguments don't apply to highly-regarded philosophy done in the past 30-odd years (highly-regarded, that is, by other philosophers). I don't think Lewis was confused about how he used words when he developed functionalism, or modal realism in On the Plurality of Worlds. Nor was Kripke in Naming and Necessity, carefully separating epistemology from metaphysics in his theory of reference. I don't think searle was confused about words in his Chinese Room argument, and I don't think Parfit is confused about words in stating his ethical paradoxes and reductionist account of personal identity in Reasons and Persons. Nearly all of these arguments are terribly controversial, indicating that their conclusions actually matter to people, yet they are considered paradigms of good philosophy, and all were written in the past 30-odd years. Chinese Room was in fact a direct response of sorts to john mccarthy's argument that his thermostat can have beliefs.
So the point is that there is good philosophy being done out there, even if it may be too recent for pg to have been exposed to it in college, and may be more cautious and exact (and therefore, far less grandiose) than the old "proofs of god's existence."
People enjoy programming in C++?

Many people enjoy learning difficult things for the challenge of it, but no sane person enjoys using tools that remain difficult once understood. There are concepts in Haskell (and Lisp, ML, Smalltalk, etc...) that are considered difficult or confusing by the mainstream. They're also powerful, making it rewarding to learn them. Languages like C++ and Java are difficult simply because they're big and inconsistent - memorizing them is not very rewarding.
Relax, was a joke.
I don't program in Haskell, but I find the language to be incredibly alluring and appealing because it seems almost like a way to access the Comp. Sci. gnosis. It's so different, and so incredibly elegant and amazing in what it does and how it does it, that it feels as tho it reveals some arcane, secret knowledge that, once appreciated, will change how you view every aspect of reality itself.
Why Apple won't become a phone company
Ok, I am hitting a wall here. I can imagine ways to classify ideas and put them in boxes. It will take some work, but I can see it there. But as for the method, it keeps slipping me. What more, I have this uneasy feeling that we might not have one which will be unlike the scientific method. For me the scientific method is obvious, common sense, of course-it-is kind of method. Just like Darwin's evolution. Once I saw it I simply cannot imagine how else things could have been. If I am right, then we should just open another branch of science for this. Its like one of those big company buys small unsuccessful company and makes it rock kinda stuff.
most lucrative hiring for anyone

Uh, Ballmer, who is somewhat less effective than Schmidt.

Dammit. While typing this the stupid Forbes website advanced the slide, EVEN THOUGH I pressed "stop".

Worst. Web. Design. Ever.

Oh, there. It did it again...
Alright I admit it, I'm one of these crazy people. I've been programming in C/C++ since junior high. It was the second language I learned (the first being Pascal.) I guess because of that I never really saw it as "difficult." Everything is at least somewhat difficult when you're just starting out. Since C was one of the first things I learned that's where all my intuition about languages came from, so everything seemed "natural."

I still program in C++ as my primary language, but that's mainly because of the area that I work in - computer vision. In this field your production code has to run fast. Using something like Python or Java is just not an option (unless you want to wait 3 days to process an 8 hour video.) All the major computer vision libraries - OpenCV, Gil, ITK etc. are in C/C++ so I'm pretty much stuck. Prototyping is done in MATLAB so that speeds up development a bit.

Still, I love it. I don't even know if I can really articulate why, but there is just something fun about having to work with a language that's so close to the hardware. My undergrad degree was in electrical engineering, so to me the low level behavior of the processor is just something that's always in the back of my mind, and with C you can clearly see the assembly level code right through every line - and that's kind of pleasant.

I've always been kind of a math guy - so I have a bit of an obsessive need to understand how every element of the system I'm working with functions, right down to the physics of the transistors. If I don't understand something it's kind of like using a theorem or formula that you have never seen the proof for, or don't really understand. I'll be honest, that kind of scares the shit out of me.

Anyway, so that's a look into the psyche of a person who likes to program in C :)

That being said, nothing beats a nice high level language like Python, and for most tasks that's the best choice. But there will always be room in the world for a highly optimized language like C.
I wonder if you looked at Lush? (http://lush.sourceforge.net)? Created by Yann LeCun, a prominent Machine Learning researcher, it is one of the quirkier lisps but it interfaces with C/C++ easily and takes away some of the pain. I have used it to work with OpenCV . You can prototype like in MATLAB and end up with very optimized C code for deployment.
It is legal to steal a business idea. It is not legal to steal copyrighted material. That is the difference.
Singularity Summit 2007 talks audio
Part of it, for me, is that you know a C++ version is the /final/ version, it's as fast and efficient as it can be. It's canonical, you won't have to do it again.
Sounds cool. I'll definitely look into it. Thanks!

I actually haven't looked at Lisp at all, but Paul's enthusiasm about it is pretty contagious, so it's next on my list of skills-to-learn.
Better question: why do people continue to waste time starting language advocacy wars, when they could be learning new languages?
Microsoft leaks its own search plans
Don't generalize, they're hard in different ways.

C++ is hard like tiptoeing across a minefield is hard. "Don't forget to make destructors virtual! Use auto_ptr! But don't put it in an STL container! Don't subclass the STL containers! Watch out for that implicit copy constructor!"

I found Haskell to be hard like trying to take a walk in the fourth dimension would be hard. "Okay, I want to do I/O, wrap that in a monad. I want to use the Parser monad too, Parsec is so nice! Ok, now I need a monad transformer to work with the I/O and the Parser. Oh yeah, and I want to pass a State around, another monad. How do I get anything done at all with all these monads?!" It was fun writing pure functional code in Haskell, real world interaction seemed to melt down into a horrible mess.

I think the true easy languages are Python and LISP, mostly because they're consistent and pragmatic. Even C or Java are easier to use than C++ because they're more consistent and predictable.
Too Many Chiefs not enough Indians (pun?)
Recently i started working on a little side project developing Facebook apps. I started looking for talent to join my small team. I was overwhelmed by the type of responses i have been getting. If seems that everyone is interested in starting their own company rather than working with a team to accomplish something.

What many of us must remember is it's better to own 1% of something than 100% of nothing.

This by the way happens to be my 5th simultaneous company. So i'm pretty sure i'm part of the problem.
Some C++ wizards took Greenspun's 10th rule as a challenge and developed template metaprogramming libraries like Loki and Boost :P

Its kind of interesting to observe how C++ typelists do compile-time metaprogramming, they use a cons linked-list of types in templates. Its kind of sad to watch though because there's no REPL to set the cons free.
Cancer cure "may be available in two years"
C is not C++. You sound like a C programmer more than a C++ programmer.
i hate to be repetitive, but ideas are cheap... execution is what matters

Besides most ideas for the Facebook platform are even more simple than the typical web 2.0 startup, so simple that it would really be surprising if other people didn't have the same exact idea....

no offense to the people that up modded this crap - but did you guys even read the article?

here's what was "copied": http://doomlaser.com/the-misery-of-being-a-third-party-faceb...

it's essentially just an ajax powered facebook user search. hell I could accuse the guy for copying 37 signals' Highrise web app...
Oh, of course! My mistake. Now, Ballmer has been with Microsoft since 1980, so perhaps factor in the extra twenty years between the two. But yeah, he's almost cracked the top ten.

And yes, Forbes's inscrutable affection for slideshows is exasperating.
I definitely agree with the criticisms of philosophy. I did a minor in philosophy, and its an absolute complete waste of time.

PG's redefinition of philosophy is something I've been thinking/writing about a bit recently. I prefer to call it insight, and I don't think its worth trying to define by itself. Insight is the abstract thinking that gets to the heart of a real problem or class of problems, it by definition illuminates our understanding. Calling it philosophy will just cause everyone who attempts it to miss the point. Plus philosophy has a history and a workforce, all of which will completely derail any attempt to redefine the field.
Nah, I use C++ features pretty heavily. I'll even admit that I use Boost. I use STL when possible, because it's usually more efficient than hand coding and saves some time on implementing common algorithms.

C++ gives you the ability to put together really powerful frameworks to work with, but deep within the code you're still working with the same fundamentals.
Totally true. Plus you can have editors "present" the lisp tree however you like to see it (ie "whitespace" or parens !). Although I practice, I don't know if anyone really writes code without the parens (for the reason you say).
This is exciting news. Someone very close to me has had cancer for a long time. She has been surviving remarkably well. I always told her if she could just hold off long enough, a cure would be developed.

Let's hope this is the real deal.
I'll be writing about podcatchers