skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Would anyone else be interested in renting out the services of one or more professional devil's advocates if such a service existed? I thought of setting up a website a while back doing this as a consulting thing, but I wasn't sure if there would be any market.
HBO's The Wire
I'm not giving away the tarsnap code. I'll make the source code available for people to inspect (and compile for themselves) so that they don't have to blindly trust the binaries I provide; but it will be under a "you can use this only as part of the tarsnap backup service" license.
Einstein's Arrogance
inspired by the corroborating evidence discussion in the comments for Paul B's post
Actually I'm pretty sure that developing facebook apps falls under mistake 7 - Choosing the wrong platform.

EDIT: Whoever downmodded this comment, can you please explain to me why facebook is a good platform choice? What advantages does it have over developing a plain old website in your platform of choice? Not trying to start a flame war just trying to understand what I am missing here.
I see. At any rate, you may want to consider divorcing your product from any particular storage scheme. Corporate customers, who usually honor licenses, have tons of unused storage (on every desktop). You might want to consider a distributed scheme where, from a common management tool, an operator could have a virtual encrypted backup across an enterprise.

In any event, good luck and godspeed.
you may want to consider divorcing your product from any particular storage scheme

I've considered that, and might do that at some point in the future. That said, I'm aiming more at the home user / small business market -- large corporations have other options (e.g., backup appliances from EMC and suchlike).

I figure that I'll build the version of tarsnap that I want to use, and if/when that becomes popular I'll decide where to go next based on demand.
Californication is great
I've always enjoyed hacking since I was 12, and when I'm doing it, it rarely feels like something I have to do. I do it because i want to.

I didn't study computer science in college, I choose to study Philosophy instead. Mainly because in highschool programming courses weren't challenging, and the questions I had my teachers couldn't answer.

Fortunately philosophy has been a pleasant surprise, I've learned alot of new things related and unrelated to hacking. But I knew there was no point in going on when I spent my time in class drawing out concepts and writing algorithms for my project instead of taking notes.
Have you ever talked to normal people about software bugs? Its kind of funny. They think all the known bugs in software are fixed its shipped.
The secret of developing succesfull and profitable &#8220;mash-ups&#8221;
The most fun way to do this would be more as a "social" site, assigning "karma" for good conversational points. And, if profit is desired (when isn't it?), competitions with small entry fees could also be set up on the site.
Four things Hotel 1.0 and Web App 1.0 have incommon
Niels Bohr died 45 years ago
He's actually not a student anymore. Using university resources for your startup is a really bad idea!
Heh, I had the same idea, probably because I enjoy arguing and finding flaws in arguements so much. If anyone does start this up, let me know, I'll help! However, I suspect the market for telling people what they want to hear is much bigger ;)

The origin of the term 'Devil's advocate' is interesting,
"Formerly, during the canonization process of the Roman Catholic Church, the Promoter of the Faith, or Devil's Advocate, was a canon lawyer appointed by the Church to argue against the canonization of the candidate. It was his job to take a skeptical view of the candidate's character, to look for holes in the evidence, to argue that any miracles attributed to the candidate were fraudulent, etc. The Devil's advocate was opposed by God's advocate, whose job was to make the argument in favor of canonization." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil's_advocate#Origin]
It used to be that opinion polls are boring and expensive to collect the data. Our goal is to provide a website that is informative, collects polls data instantaneously, allows users to discuss the issues and connect with other people. It's a social voting website that combines polling with Web 2.0.
Black Adder
The Simpsons
Elimidate
"Stale". I have the newest version at work. It blows. I refuse to upgrade to an inferior product. Keep downmodding me, though, if it makes you happy.
I watched the first 4 seasons of The West Wing on DVD. I've enjoyed some episodes of The Family Guy and The Simpsons.

When I was in high school I watched Star Trek:TNG.

I haven't had cable in 5 years though, so watching TV is pretty rare.
http://www.mr-atari.com/afbeeldingen/atariforceENboeken/easy...
Wishlistr: New amazing Web 2.0 web service launched :-)
What's the revenue model on a Facebook app? You're getting a tiny piece of advertising pie? Sorry, but building a company based off of what amounts to a plugin for someone else's software just doesn't seem like a good idea to me...

... that said, I guess it was done with PhotoShop a bunch of times. But people had to pay up front for that software.

Or are we returning to the dot com days where revenue doesn't matter -- it's all about pageviews?
Could A Nigersaurus Get Digg Into Trouble?
Never really had a problem with that - maybe you have an odd programming style (curious). Also, how is it substituting, if you don't have a garbage collector, you still have to free the memory.
Or that you wouldn't want to.
The ones I consider excellent, in no particular order:

Coupling, Weeds, Firefly, House, Pushing Daisies, Top Gear
That just seems like very bad practice. System.gc() usually does not do anything, and it might seem as if a lot of memory is being used. Usually the gc kicks into gear if the memory is really needed, though.

Don't know the OS X jvm, but it can't be THAT bad...

I had some troubles with mobile phone JVMs, usually manually setting all pointers to null was doing the trick, though.

In any case, I wouldn't blame Java for some bad implementations of jvms.
That was the point I was trying to make. Perhaps you get easier access to liquidity and can gather users a tad faster but in the end you have very little control. You don't own the liquidity you are borrowing it, you don't even have a TOS contract (at least that one that I could find) with facebook, they can shut you down without any warning.

Even if you can make a very profitable app, imagine trying to IPO a facebook app... How do you think investors would evaluate the risk.

I can understand developing a facebook app as a part of a more comprehensive strategy as a complimentary tool to your website. That might be a very powerful tactic but as a standalone product, I just don't get it.

Again if anyone understands this differently I'd love to finally see what I am missing here...
I don't live in a place where VC funding is likely and I don't have a partner. I'm also not good at web design nor do I have good contacts among top web 2.0 bloggers.

And from my startup prototypes so far, I have learned that most users have very little patience, understand little, and generally don't contribute much.

For these reasons, toy Facebook apps seem to be my best bet. I also like the idea of playing with people's minds, easily tweaking things here and there to see what sort of psychological/sociological impact they will have, etc.
Agreed. I was reading the latest Entrepreneur magazine where they had an interview with Guy Kawasaki about truemors.com. He mentioned something to the effect of the majority of their traffic came via. the facebook app -- but the traffic wouldn't matter if there's no way to convert that to dollars.

No doubt on the IPO/TOS front. Imagine if someone develops some facebook app that leads to massive litigation. I'm sure facebook would share in the liability as they are the delivery mechanism. All of a sudden, facebook decides to limit access to only a chosen few developers.

Or better yet, facebook has a soft quarter and decides that developers now need to license the platform for some exorbitant rate.
Okay, so you're talking about developing a hobby, not a business. Unless you've come up with a new way to convert "psychological/sociological impact" into dollars.
I think some Facebook apps make quite a lot of money in advertising -- at least enough income for the few developers involved.
Here's the letter on Google Books: http://books.google.com/books?id=HpgNSVS6fUYC&pg=PA390&#...
I don't see any mistake that is obviously eliminated for Facebook apps, and problem #7 (choosing the wrong platform) is a significant risk.

However, it's not clear that single Facebook apps qualify as startups in Paul's sense. At least today, FB apps are more like content that plug into an existing distribution network, like movies + distributors or blogs + AdSense.

If you wanted to found a business that made FB apps, many per year, that's a different story. Then you'd be more like a game studio.
Say that to the people making $500/day++ with their app.
Alright, so 180k a year. Definitely a pretty good paying job. But, honestly, how many people do you think that is at this point, considering that most of the installs are controlled by the top 10 or so developers.
Sometimes you can make a lot of money even if you make a mistake. Sometimes even if you make quite a few mistakes. There are quite a few startups that had the wrong platform and survived, quite a few that had only one founder and survived and so on.

The fact that something is a mistake doesn't mean its a fatal one. And that fact alone doesn't mean it is not a mistake.

The question you should ask yourself is whether your startup be better off if you hadn't made that choice.
If you wanted to go really nuts you could distribute a "one click" version of HDFS that people could run at home, letting their existing network take care of redundancy.
I don't really like this view of hypothesis. Or maybe I just don't understand it.

Take this hypothesis: 2+2 = 4. There are an infinite number of things 2+2 could equal, but I, like Einstein, without any empirical testing of my mathematical hypothesis, believe it to be 4. If you believed the sum to be 5, again without any testing, I don't see how you or I have any different number of bits dedicated to our answers. Your bits, however, are wrong.
1) If VC funding isn't likely how about angel funding, they are significantly less geographically centered and can be found almost everywhere.

2) Web design can be outsourced very easily and relatively cheaply offshore - ping me if you need some contacts or places to look.

3) Look for partners in your wider circle of friends you might be surprised by what you find. Failing that, go to your local college and try to recruit one.

4) Prototypes are actually great tools to test ideas and to improve your technical skills and biz intuition but in the end you need to promote something to a real product status and then facebook is less relevant as far as I can understand the platform.

Good luck
Yes ! waiting for the second season.
If this buyout really happens, I suspect share holders will be really happy. The price has got to go up due to increased demand, and they can all rest easy knowing that the people with the majority share in the company are not actually going to sell it.
House, flat out. I'll also occasionally watch Colbert.

Aside from that, I'll only watch History/Discovery/A&E. Everything else on TV these days isn't worth the time to watch, IMO.
Facebook has a large captive audience and an inherent viral spread mechanism to take advantage of that. Stupid apps that turn people into zombies get trillions of users and couldn't via email. Gift apps, super pokes, etc, can do the same.

More impressive still are apps like Texas Hold'em, which is essentially a mediocre card room for play money. It would never get 10k users as a standalone, but has 300k on Facebook.
C++ is simpler and richer than CL? I've worked in both languages and would say the reverse. In fact, I'm stunned by this statement; I would have thought it impossible from anyone with sufficient experience in both. Our minds must work very differently!

My feeling when I started working in Lisp (CL) was that of a fish who had spent years swimming in oil, glue, and other fluids, finally experiencing water. C++, by contrast, was my wet cement (and cement doesn't stay wet for very long). While it makes sense to me that a Lisp connoisseur would find CL overly complex compared to other Lisps, I am flummoxed by the idea that anyone would think this in comparison to C++.

Programming language preference is far from rational. Not only is there a strong intellectual bias toward what one already knows (viz. Blub), there is a strong emotional bias toward what one /likes/, and that is conditioned by personal experiences. For example, if a language is imposed on you (by a professor or manager), you'll probably dislike it and look for things to hate about it. Conversely, if you discover something for yourself and associate it with the freedom to do and create what you want, you'll probably feel strongly about defending it against criticism. Of course, we spend a lot of time arguing that our emotionally driven choices are strictly rational. Such is human nature.

I don't think anyone is immune to this, and that's why working in a language that one loves will always be more important than working in an objectively better language (by some criteria).
I find it hard to imagine _any_ API more nightmarish than Win32 + COM + MFC + ....
Ugggg. One of the things I really don't like about the Internet are the ugly threads that tear up years of progress toward an inclusive/pluralistic society... I find even the title of this thread offensive...

Sure I am a white male without guilt. But I think that civilized people do not use the N-word in any form. Enough of this filth/anger.
I think YC gives us tunnel vision too...

Maybe it's not such a bad thing, though.
I got the fact that it helps you get liquidity quickly but what do you do with that liquidity? Ad-revenue sharing is not really a very stable business plan.

What can you do if facebook decides to shutdown 3rd party advertising or bans your app, or develops a clone and pushes it aggressively.

I saw some of the stats on socialmedia and I wonder how much revenue of the top earning apps is spent back into the ads on facebook apps to keep the machine working and what is their ROI.

I still think a facebook app can be a great idea but not as a sole product. Instead it should be the booster rocket behind your own website, helping you launch it and spread it.
I think having that degree of modularity is a great thing (granted you have a good text editor). It makes it much easier to understand what's happening in the code and much easier to maintain it (and get someone new up to speed).

I was helping out on this one site built in PHP a while back where the code wasn't organized this way. It took me about a week to figure out where things were, which was a huge productivity drag for the other guys.
single founder comment is complete rubbish. If someone has the drive and ability then why shouldn't do it. Saying that just because they couldn't talk any of their friends into joining them is so small minded. I have lots of friends but none of them are techie and or interested in startups so does that mean I shouldn't have started my business because none of them are into it? I know Paul has a cult following around here but he really does seem to think everyone doing tech startups are collage grads.
Yes, he claims. Or at least his paper is titled: "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything".
I don't know Lubos Motl, but I'm sure you can be a good scientist working in string theory; ie: trying to make it falsifiable. I'm sure if the argument is "Motl works in string theory => Motl is not a scientist", then it's not a valid argument.
There's plenty of empirical evidence for 2 + 2 = 4, it's just so pervasive that we fail to recognize it as such. Take two apples, place them on a table. Now take two more apples, and place them on the table. How many apples are on the table? 3? 4? 5? I have an astronomically high probability assigned to "2+2=4", but if I kept doing this experiment and suddenly ended up with 3 apples every time, I'd have to decrease the probability I assign to 2+2=4, and increase the probability assigned to 2+2=3.

The apples example is from
"How to Convince me that 2 + 2 = 3": http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/how-to-convince.html

Interesting essay on Bayesian reasoning: http://yudkowsky.net/bayes/technical.html
Apple and The Products of the Future
Modified microscope views atoms at the edge of uncertainty
I don't disagree, but my hypothetical assumes that no one has done the experiment before making their belief known.
"I myself often slip into this phrasing, whenever I say something like, 'To justify believing in this proposition, at more than 99% probability, requires 34 bits of evidence.'"

Error: Social robot could not compute. Please input valid parameters into auditory interface again.
Google's Secret 10GbE Switch
Mathematical humor
Sounds like an unreasonable assumption. Either way, it's not about "wrong" or "right", it's only about what can be derived from evidence. Without evidence you have no justification to assign a higher probability to "2 + 2 = 4" than "2 + 2 = 3".

Caveat: It's true that some knowledge does have to be put into the prior distribution. Apparently you can't just bootstrap from a zero-information ("maximum entropy") prior. So it's possible that 2 + 2 = 4 is burned into our brains at birth.
But now I know better about the specific case of Motl: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2007/08/lubo-motl.html
And Now Google Is Making Its Own 10-Gigabit Switches
Knuth vs. Email
I think people should rather find a way to come in terms with the past than change the name of the country of Niger.
Where is the sense of humor on here, this was hilarious.

Part of being young is also relaxing and not being so serious all the time. (pro-tip: Laugh a little more often, it melts away the stress)
Fortune interview with Saul Griffith
Is This the End of Cursive Writing?
You should plan breaks into your lifestyle. Friday nights has always been a minimum for me.
Well, I live in the bay area, so you are right, there is probably something closer.
Great talk by Stephen Wolfram on starting companies
Race, genes and intelligence
Lately I've been feeling really burnt out on social news and the blogosphere in general. The vast majority of submissions are poorly written restatements of facts I already know and arguments I've already seen. Unless someone comes up with a way to filter out non-novel ideas, I really can't see sticking with this stuff in the long term.
Lately I've been feeling really burnt out on social news and the blogosphere in general. The vast majority of submissions are poorly written restatements of facts I already know and arguments I've already seen. Unless someone comes up with a way to filter out non-novel ideas, I really can't see sticking with this stuff in the long term.
By far - The Wire (HBO)
House MD seconded...
> So it's possible that 2 + 2 = 4 is burned into our brains at birth.

Yup, there is plentiful evidence... not specifically the addition, but 2 and 4 are innately perceptible quantities.
Well, just like ISPs are building their own DSL boxes and hosting providers their own servers.
I think that's the majority of the reason. If you're getting a couple million views a day on some silly facebook app, that can be a big deal for a smaller company.

I read iLike added 3 million users in two weeks with their Facebook app (http://mashable.com/2007/06/11/ilike-facebook-app-success/). That's pretty significant.
From the article:

"But from a Bayesian perspective, you need an amount of evidence roughly equivalent to the complexity of the hypothesis"

But what is the "complexity of the hypothesis"? Without a proper definition, there is not much left to the article, or is there?
My favourite:

An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician are staying overnight in a hotel having attended a conference.

The engineer wakes up in the middle of the night and sees there is a fire in his room, so he goes out to the corridor, finds a fire extinguisher and sprays water everywhere. The result is a bit of a mess, but the fire is out so he goes back to bed.

An hour later the physicist wakes up, and sees a fire in his room, so he gets his laptop, codes a quick simulation and then aims the fire extinguisher at the correct angle and for the right amount of time so as to put out the fire using the minimal amount of water and causing the minimal amount of damage to the room. Pleased with his work he goes back to sleep.

Finally, the mathematician wakes up and sees a fire in his room, so he heads out into the corridor, notices the fire extinguisher and then goes back to bed, having made no attempt to put out the fire but happy to have shown that a solution to the problem exists.
I agree some projects are great fits for single founders but you should be able to convince at least one rational person this is a good idea and is worth investing the time, energy, money into.

It doesn't matter if that person is your spouse, a co-founder, an angel - but make sure at least one person whose opinion you respect and has something to lose if you fail/waste your time thinks this is a good idea.
Buffett is pure awesome. Thanks for the link!
I don't even think it is a good idea to think about theoretical physics as the blogger does. Math doesn't require any probabilistic validation whatsoever. Biology needs lots of it because there are too many unknowns. Physics is much closer to math than to biology, and evaluating it like one does a biological experiment, to me, is perplexing. For 2 + 2 = 4, there doesn't seem to be any need for "bits of information." And even though the author is probably talking about hunches and intuition, the probability that a theoretical physics can go about his field thinking in hunches seems small enough... ok, maybe this statement required 27 bits of information?

Maybe I am missing something.
I'm going to go out and swim in the deep water with this comment, but I didn't care for the article that much.

All science is provisional, this much is true. Math, however, is a formal symbolic system for representing things in reality. 2 + 2 = 4 not because of some inner truth in math but because when we observe nature and combine 2 things and 2 things we have what we call 4 things. We could change the symbols around all day and they would still work. So math is just a generic way of talking about that which we can observe.

The interesting thing happens when our symbolic system escapes that which can be observed, or when it is incomplete, say in the case of negative numbers (then rational, the imaginary, then irrational, etc.) At this point the exercise becomes one of either bringing the system of symbols to some application that has observable impact (applied physics) or changing the symbolic tools. There's nothing Bayesain about 2+2=4 -- that's the way the symbols are supposed to work.

Now whenever we get "stuck" we have to go back and check out symbolic systems. Just like geeks build O/S as a hobby or college experiment, I imagine physics and mathematicians build calculi, or systems of symbols and rules for working with them. Wolfram came up with a great question in NKS -- what if the universe is really discrete and not continuous? In other words, when Newton created the integral he might have taken math down a path that ends up breaking when you try to put a GUT together. I think that's a helluva question, but it's above my pay grade.

There was a book George Gamov wrote: 1-2-3-Infinity about the way various counting systems and numbers play together. Go read it -- it's better than this blog article.
The BellKor solution to the Netflix Prize