skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting. By the way, 6.171 is much harder than 6.170
Another interesting quote from the same message: "repeat after me: client = flash in the browser, server = erlang.
Intermediate protocol = flash AMF"

Now that's opinionated software.
I agree. As the 37 Signals people say- Embrace Your Constraints.
Ask.com privacy "eraser" misses a few spots
Since I have no idea what your product is, how big your team is, how much experience you have and what resources you have access to, it is hard to say how much saving is good and how much time you can spend with it (since the costs are also unkonwn).

But I would say in general you would spend about 6 months developing your product, and having something ready anywhere from a good working alpha version to something more of a working prototype and work in progress. I hardly doubt there are too many companies that can start generating revenues (let alone profits to spend on living expenses) within six months from the day they start.

So I would say the best way to do this is to start working on the idea before you quit your job, try to get a prototype or something together, and start looking for funding. I think in your case at the end of six months you will def need outside money (again since I doubt you'll be generating revenues by then and you are out of savings).

So regardless, if you do quit, I would recommend you looking for money right away. The worst thing to ever do is to ask for money when you need it, and when you are under pressure. Take your time, do your shopping, find out how interested people are in your product and try to raise some smart money before your time is up.

and please do keep us in the loop, and good luck to you
If they get what they're asking ($25k), then based on those traffic figures, I've got a few sites worth $50k+!

Something tells me they'll have to settle for a bit less.
1) This is wrong.

2) Why didn't I think of it first.
I just wanted to point out that in the black/white terminology, where Asians are yellow and Indians are brown, the Jewish aren't necessarily white. Jews are from the Middle East, whereas the common white-folk are from Europe. That is, depending on how you look at it, they are "racially" different (quotes significant).

Also, I am not a Jew, but Jews are a particularly interesting group by themselves and are not to be ignored. IQ and the Wealth of Nations is not really what you want to read. Gregory Cochran is (regardless of how vilified he may be). The list of Nobel laureates is also nothing to shrug off as simply a result of environmental factors. Steven Pinker gave a (supporting) talk on this topic. Statistically speaking, the "Jewish" (which is a fuzzy definition if you look into it) are, without any doubt, the group of people with the highest collective scientific and financial achievement in the world.

Meanwhile, who has ever pointed out that there are no Jewish basketball superstars, sprinters, weight lifters...? Are they endowed with inferior physical ability? Perhaps I shouldn't say so, but this "deficiency" is as glaringly obvious as their accomplishments, and it doesn't seem as sensitive a topic.

It's all about relative distributions. If a patient goes to a hospital to treat Torsional Dystonia, 99.9% of the time, they are Jewish. It also happens that heterozygotes of TD have higher myelin density. It also happens that Einstein had abnormally large glial growth (which affects myelin density). It is also common knowledge that Einstein's brain was structurally different than most humans and this difference was a genetic alteration.

No matter how you look at it, there are genetic influences in intelligence. It is logical that certain genetic traits may be more prevalent in certain localized populations. Now I said nothing about these groups based on skin color, but as a group that has been highly in-bred, the "Jewish" group of people are, statistically as a whole, incontrovertibly, "superior" in certain areas, that the current society finds valuable.
A better link is http://www.vinvesting.com/docs/munger/
which provides his full "Art of Stock Picking" speech in which he gives his opinion on mental models, as well as the UCSB speech & another.
I know a lot of people who were able to get into ivies or ivy league caliber schools without paying 40k. They did it on their own, for free. If you have to pay 40k to get your kid into an ivy, they probably don't belong there in the first place.
That sounds logical but unfortunately it's not that simple. In 2001 I was part of a telecom related startup. All of the telcos were severely affected by the downturn, not just the bad ones. After the bubble burst nobody would do any deals that didn't have a positive effect on the balance sheet within that same quarter. So, effectively, they just stopped to launch new services. They all just stopped at the same time. Period. End of story.

So my advice to CarpeDiem is this: In a recession even more than at other times, don't depend on big deals you have to close in order to survive. Lots of small customers that value your product and pay real money is what you want in that situation (and probably in any situation). I wouldn't rely ad revenue either because it's notoriously volatile in recessions.

Ah yes, before I forget (although I'd rather like to forget that) we did actually have venture capital funding, but the VC went bankrupt before the second (already agreed) round of funding went through. And that VC was a subsidiary of a major corporation, an icon of stability, not reliant on the tech or telecoms sector, but it still went bust :-)
The AI, or something like it, is probably used at every school in the country as one of the many pieces of the evaluation. It's nice to have one number that sums up the academic goodness of a candidate.
The other guy's argument was much, much better.
She's not necessarily creating drones here. She's helping kids go to the college of their choice. And since their families have money, they were probably going to get there no matter what. The only difference is, Hernandez gets a fat check, too. Cool work if you can get it.
And much easier to agree with.
As I read this article, part of me was disgusted, but another part kept saying, "Brilliant!"

What a business model...

Find prospects with essentially unlimited resources and find out what they CAN'T buy. Then provide a service to dramatically increase their probability of getting it. Do that service excellently. And, most of all, find a way to guarantee (if even only semantically) your success.

I know tons of people with lots of money who constantly surprise me with how they spend it chasing something they CAN'T BUY. They chauffer their kids back and forth to every imaginable activity (to improve their chances later on). They take vitamins, eat weird foods, and go to "holistic" retreats to "insure" their health and longevity. They even donate tons of money to religious and spiritual institutions to insure their place in the "world to come".

They can't buy any of it. But they sure can pay to improve their odds. I say this woman is really onto something.

Now if only I could find my angle...

For only $49,995, I will guarantee your ycombinator application gets accepted in the next round. This includes personal start-up business counseling and 2 weeks at my exclusive retreat at a world class resort.

(This guarantee doesn't apply to lame ideas or applicants. "Lame" to be defined by me at a later date.)
Expletive deity, just this report? That triggered the 2+% drop in the last 2 hours!??!?
ISP adds user notices to Google Homepage
It's been interesting to notice over the course of this morning the modding activity on this subject. Seems like comments on both sides of the issue are being both up-modded and down-modded at a furious pace!
It only makes sense to consider the worst case scenario in the context of the probability that it will happen. On my drive home the worst case scenario is that I will be killed in a car accident, yet I'm going to take that chance. Also we have to consider the worst case scenario of the other course of action. What if the actions taken to combat global warming cause worse famine, plague, etc.?
Culture Speeds Up Human Evolution
> Antarctic ice melting much faster than scientists projected.

This only proves that those models were crap.
Agreed. I was fairly entrepreneurial in College (at the expense of my grades) and I'm really glad of it. I wish I'd traveled more and done a bit more on the intramural front, but am damn glad I didn't invest the time necessary to get straight As.
"For type-A personalities like myself, it is very difficult to turn my passion for achievement off and on like the flip of a switch."

Basically all that needed to be said.
This is a great point, IMO. I'd add to it that, if you have a choice, SOLVE A PROBLEM. A recession is certainly a good time to solve a business problem (save your customers time/money) but may not be as good a time for an ad-supported social "fun" site.

Either way, keep it lean (in terms of investment and burn rate).
Connect Evolution to Gmail's calendar? That actually sounds like something I'd like to hear more about. Most of the rest of this stuff aren't things that I find terribly exciting, but they might be useful for some people.
I don't doubt that you're right in the stated purpose of the AI, but that doesn't necessarily mean the admissions officers don't use it for anything else.
Their promo reminded me of a clip from family guy that showed the rap video from M.C. Escher...

"I'm going up the stairs, I'm going up the stairs.."
Facebook's Beacon May Have Broken the Law
I guess if you wanted to be snippy, you could say that Erlang isn't good at doing something it wasn't specifically designed for, which isn't a great feature for a language.

I actually like Erlang, and have used it professionally, but have a feeling that it's just not going to be a language that's used too much outside of its sweet spot.
Yeah... I kind of wish topics like this would be left to reddit or elsewhere, as the debates end up looking a little bit too much 'belief based' for my liking. I guess I shouldn't participate if I think that...
You comment is very intriguing. Can you recommend any references to strategic decision making in basic game theory? Thanks.
It doesn't matter. First of all, it is notoriously impossible for anyone except a few pros (if even them) to time the market. So don't even bother trying. Just live your life.

But second, even if you were sure that a recession was coming, you shouldn't let it affect your plans for starting a startup. Yes, funding does tend to dry up somewhat when the economy is bad. But if you look at startups that succeed vs. those that fail, the quality of what they built has much more effect on the final outcome than the state of the economy when they were getting started.

So this is yet another case of founders worrying about the wrong things. Recessions don't kill startups. Making mediocre stuff kills startups.
Here's a video exploring a game theory approach to the climate change problem: http://youtube.com/watch?v=zORv8wwiadQ
You should still test BSD...we've actually had Linux software run FASTER in linux compat mode on BSD than on native Linux. It really depends on the software in question...
PostgreSQL 8.3 vs 8.2: A Simple Benchmark
This new usage keeps throwing me off.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/Denier_L...
Rapid acceleration in human evolution described
I like Postgres, but one thing you might infer from this chart is that the defaults stink.
IIRC this law has amusing origins. During Robert Bork's confirmation hearings, the press reported that he'd rented some porn videos. Congress then rushed through a bill with amazing speed to prevent the same thing happening to them.

You can generally be sure the laws will provide a level of privacy sufficient to protect politicians. You may not be able to get privacy in the sense of anonymity (as public figures, politicians don't have it anyway), but it's likely to be illegal, for example, to record phone calls secretly, lest people who have illicit dealings with politicians record theirs.
If you're actually using that extra time to pursue entrepreneurial activities and you're sure you don't want to attend grad school, then you're probably right. For the vast majority of students, though, I don't think that is the case: much of the time saved by not doing well in class is just squandered doing the typical things college students do. If you're willing to put in the effort, you should have enough time to get As and still do lots of worthwhile extracurricular things (I certainly did, in any case). Also, having good college marks (plus good letters of recommendation from profs) is always a useful backup in case you ever decide you want to go to grad school in the future.
How many of you are interested in M&A dealmaking as a growth strategy?
Hey, if she was a publishing agent, she would take 15 percent of all the kids' future salaries.
Here's a post from Netflix's Community Blog that's relevant:

http://blog.netflix.com/2007/08/why-there-is-no-directory-of...
Or is this something completely off the radar for most here ?
I agree with everyone about not waiting to start, but there are ways in which you may have to adjust your business model to account for a global lack of credit, especially when US consumers are so dependent on credit for spending. I think the value of internet ads is going to drop substantially over the next few years as a result of much more sluggish consumer spending.

To me it just means the same thing that you hear all over: make a good product that has tangible value, and people will pay you to use it.
Top 10 Stories we WON'T see in 2008
Is there a database for which the defaults don't stink (across all workloads and types)?

Oracle and MySQL have defaults that are unsuitable for most busy instances; I don't remember offhand whether DB2 needs tuning, but my intuition suggests it does.
"Verily I say unto thee: three rights do indeed make a left."

- Lord Turnington
Can it influence things cheaply enough to be worth it? What are they going to do?

They can dump goods. But that just means we'll buy a larger proportion of those goods from China, when China sells them at a loss. The world is a net beneficiary, even if individual producers lose.

They can dump financial products. But again, that just creates a market opportunity -- it's a small transfer of wealth away from whoever else owns those products, but to have a big influence, they'd also have to have a big portfolio, so they would bear a large fraction of the cost.

China could try to sell shoddy goods. But we'd just learn not to buy them.

China could raise tariffs. But that would just force them to invest more in domestic production while hurting their own economy.

Trade wars are not worth their cost. They aren't winnable either, unless someone has overwhelming scale, overwhelming speed, or overwhelming patience.
"I too was obsessed with getting straight A's in college (undergraduate)."

Makes me wonder about the other casualty besides friends & time -- namely experimentation at the time you should be exploring fields of interest. The drive to get straight A's could prevent students from taking "risky" courses, ones that could ruin that perfect GPA. Pre-meds/law that take Physics for Poets instead of Physics for aspiring Physicists. Going for the grades might lead you to avoid interesting courses that are far from your perceived strengths, or jumping into a cool grad-level course where you don't quite meet the prerequisites.
Just make sure you have enough savings to let you focus your efforts on your startup - maybe 6 months worth of expenses - so that recession or not, you will be okay.
Email me at the address in my profile.
In terms of trade, you're right.

Going beyond that, they do seem to have fewer qualms about dealing with individuals like Mugabe, or the government of Sudan, since promoting human rights isn't really high up on their agenda.

My hope is that once enough people in China start to get enough money, they'll start wanting a better deal in terms of the distribution of power.
Actually in China if you were smart, the standard route was to take an imperial exam to become a bureaucrat. Traditionally, each man could have multiple wives, but usually only the upper class could afford a large family. Bureaucrats, along with merchants, made up most of the upper class, and it was common for a single man to have a dozen children in these families.
How America Lost the War on Drugs
This is nothing new. Use software to save money. Not too flashy but really effective.

I have a client who had me write an algorithm to determine his most popular products and then physically assign them onto the picking system between the "knees" and "shoulders" (the numbering system supported this). Save 2 seconds bending or reaching up, no big deal. Save 2 seconds 8000 times per day and you've got something there.
I hope this article isn't too off-topic/political. I just thought it was damned interesting.
How to Network: 12 Tips for Shy People
The tide goes out, then comes back in. Those not on the margins should be fine.

Carpe, are you sure you don't want to keep your govjob while working on the startup?
We already have a feature complete beta, we've been working on it for 8 months while keeping the day jobs. Most of the remaining work to do before we launch is superficial, just refining the UI and "making it pretty". We have been actively seeking money, but have gotten blank stares from investors when we explain that we have kept our day jobs thus far. So, I think I am agreeing with what you're saying, thanks for the input!
Africa had some of the world's first high culture societies which are probably older than Europe's or China's due to the tremendous history of that continent. I mean it is the cradle of the civilization after all. But you wouldn't think that way today with a lot of that history having been nearly eradicated and not taught.
Ask YC: Best smartphone?
I'm going to be giving the one-month notice to Orange (in the UK) in January and move to another operator. So with the move I get a new phone and I want a smart phone.

In consideration: anything but iPhone or anything Orange-"exclusive".

Thanks!
Pierre
Why don't sports teams use randomization?
Handbook of Applied Cryptography (free book)
Skimping on sleep in undergrad and not regretting it, chalking it up as "practice" for life sleeping in a cube? That doesn't sound very fun. I think there's a saying. . . something like "A students end up working for C students."

I've always wondered where that leaves B students. I have no ideas how many A's I earned, exactly, but I do recall my GPA to a vague notion of a range between 3 decimal places.
It's often the dumb ones who take the stance on discussing other people's intelligence. There is a wealth of circumstances and complexity of the issue that never crosses this posters mind, yet he is quick to make definitive claims of such gravity. Racism has the interesting tendency of exposing the fools even amongst the most educated individuals.

Oh, where would I start... The structure of the brain? Our understanding and concept of what is "intelligence"? Nonexistentent genetical variation between the so called "races", which are themselves based on fallacious premises? The theory of races after all started in Germany as measured by the differences in the shapes of skulls, and was mainly categorized as an issue of beauty. With Germans obviously appointing themselves (aryans) the most graceful and beautiful "race" of them all. And now people are trying to retrofit genetic explanations on such an old theory based purely on pseudo-science? There is at maximum 5-15% genetic variation between the continental populations, and note that this is not the same as our naive notions of "race". There is less genetic variation in humans than in any other mammalian species. Worldwide genetic variation in humans is less significant than in 2 closely related chimpanzee species having evolved closely together in western Africa, to give you some magnitude for comparison. 90% of the genetic variation occurs on a local level as opposed to globally, if you can wrap your head around what that means? And every instance of "child genius" that has been studied has boiled down to no innate ability, but rigorous practice from an early age. Meaning that "intelligence" is largely learned, mind is an empty plate of neurons waiting to be connected. The only thing conceivably affecting their training are chemical balances, malnutrition, toxicity of the environment, and so on...

Basing your theories directly on empirical evidence about the economies of the world obviously can't factor in all the relevant facts. You say that all the African countries with no whites are poor? Did you know that a lot of them have been paying the debts created by the colonialists ever since they were "liberated"? Do you know how the West still sponsors guerillas and pays diamond merchants in many parts of Africa? Only a secluded mind could have such delusions of grandeur. I recommend debating with some intellectual and educated black scholars.
"How could understanding the brain be a waste of time?

I've heard this objection before and I often wonder if the people making this argument secretly think that some races really are inferior, but that we mustn't talk about it."

Perhaps you should wonder if they're being sarcastic.
Raising Start-Up Capital
Ironically, your username is carpe diem!
A trip to Italy sounds great... but until then, how do the coffee shops in North Beach stack up for espresso? I've heard that this was the spot on the west coast to get good coffee (long before good coffee was much of a concept in most of the US). Anyone know a spot that gets it right?
Just a note, recession strictly defined means 2 quarters of decline. If there is 1 quarter of decline, then 1 of gain, then another of decline, there is no recession.

My question about your startup would be along the lines of how you are getting paid - are you depending on online advertising, or is this a service you are going to sell someone? Is there any chance you can have 1 or 2 customers ready to pay you something, even a token amount, while it is in "late-alpha" stage?
Erlang was designed for building scalable, highly available distributed systems. If it's not good at building other things, e.g. first person shooters, that's not a meaningful disadvantage.
Yes, of course a recession/depression is coming.

However, it's possible that the implications of Nanosolar being about to cut the price of grid electricity by 80% will bring us out of it middle of next year.
That does not prove BG wrote the code - perhaps Allen wrote those "brilliant" parts. Did they comment out which parts each one wrote?
On the non-Linux front, Joyent's accelerators (on-demand scaling via virtualization) use OpenSolaris, with the virtualization being provided by grid containers (virtualized userspace on a shared kernel).

Joyent have a good reputation but I'm not a fan of Solaris ancient userspace tools - something as simple as checking the size of a disk is made complex by Solaris not bothering to include an 'h' option - so you have to count your terabytes of disk in kilobytes.

The Solaris filesystem layout is non-FHS and a rather odd mess, with binaries in var and etc, and variable files in usr.
Amazing. Blockbuster's incompetence just never ceases to amaze me. They're in deep financial trouble, are closing stores and they don't even know about the law that's critical to their industry?! Wow.
We are using FreeBSD for ours. We've run both Linux and FreeBSD and have a preference for the latter for stability and speed
Mars rover finds signs of microbial life habitat
The code for the program was left mostly up to Bill Gates while Paul Allen began working on a way to simulate the Altair with the schools PDP-10
1. VC funds are already committed, so that is one point.
2. people are easier to hire in a down turn, so its cheaper.

If you are a start up that will help businesses save money, or reduce fiscal risk, a down turn is good for your business.