skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh man! All through elementary school in India, we were taught in every single class that "LOGO is the language of the computer". This was about 12 years ago.

I didn't really like the computer or programming much back then and almost flunked the LOGO exam. That just goes to say how cool the language is--I went into the exam clueless but after typing a few "LEFT" and "RIGHT" I was amazed it did exactly what you ask it to.
They're close on this one ($180+):

http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=013030552...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0130305529/ref=pd_bbs...
That's a bit of a red herring. Everybody "knows" C is fast, but much of the time, it's no more than twice as fast as some higher level languages (Lisp, ML, Haskell, Java). I'm also willing to bet that applications where fast matters so much that half the speed is unacceptable are much less common that applications where small matters so much that twice the size is unacceptable.
IIRC, entanglement does not allow for communication of data.
"User-error" is usually a symptom of a design flaw.
<3 50 cal, slammed the bolt onto my hands a couple of times. Thanks, Browning!
Amherst does the same thing. However, Amherst's Dean of Admission then recites all the little factoids that stuck out at the regional receptions for admitted students. (This is always lampooned - hilariously - at the RC show, where upperclassmen put their own spin on it for incoming freshmen.)

One of the factoids taken from my application was "One student took 8 AP tests, scoring 5s on 5 of them, without ever having taken an AP class." And I remember thinking, "What a dumb thing to fixate upon! My school didn't offer APs, so I couldn't take the courses. And the test was only $75 and could let me place out of several thousand dollars of college credit, so I'm not going to let something silly like not having taken the course stop me." My application had plenty of other impressive things on it, like starting a dot-com run exclusively by teenagers and watching it fail or placing tops in a couple of national math competitions. Yet what stuck out for them was the test scores.

I guess the moral is to put down everything that might conceivably be impressive, because you never know what'll stick in the mind of the admissions person.
You ought to check out Nu: http://programming.nu/about

Inspired by Ruby and Lisp (uses sexps for notation), written in Objective-C so it has great interaction with Cocoa apps and frameworks. Check out an example: http://blog.neontology.com/posts/2007/08/19/a-glimpse-of-nu
I agree with you completely. This has to be one of the dumbest business models out there. (Now that I've said that, look for the Mint IPO, Quarter 2, 2009.)
There is no flipping of data it's more like you hand 2 people (Bob and Ted) a box with the same number in it. They walk to other sides of the world and then Ted opens his box. As soon as Ted opens their box they know what is in the other box but that has nothing to do with the speed of light and there is no way for Ted to use what he knows about the number in Bob's box to send Bob new information.
dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24318
See Figure 1 for a quick overview of the method.
BitTorrent let's you play movies that you have yet to finish. So it's not 50x Faster than BitTorrent.
The field of video games might serve as a nice model for web 2.0 in the way that creativity is combined with technical know-how. Read a book on video game design and imagine something similar that could be written for web 2.0.

The only problem though is that most computer games are not novel. But every once in a while, a true gem comes along. Portal is one of those.
Nokia presents their S60 Touch interface
I use both extensively, and Mint is far superior. You get an immediate understanding of where your money is going that BoA's stuff doesn't even attempt to provide.
Whether or not you'd provide your login details, the business model is far from dumb. They have an amazing amount of information about you that can be used for incredibly targeted advertising.
I will never forget programming an animated rocket that blasts off in my 3rd grade glass... Logo is great.
Unless there's intelligent life, that seems out of the question (assuming no breakthroughs in lifespan extensions). 20 light years is a long way from home.

If you took a picture of the night sky with a 1 zettapixel camera (mega giga tera peta exa zetta) this planet would be about 1 pixel.
Hi-Tech Taskmaster - A Sign of Things to Come?
New software uses Web 2.0 technologies in innovative ways
> And I remember thinking, "What a dumb thing to fixate upon! My school didn't offer APs, so I couldn't take the courses. And the test was only $75 and could let me place out of several thousand dollars of college credit, so I'm not going to let something silly like not having taken the course stop me."

If I were an admissions officer, I'd be a lot more impressed by that line of reasoning than by the result. When I was in high school, AP exams had this impenetrable mystique about them, like they're the Weighing of the Heart in Duat or something. From the perspective of the school administrators it was even more ridiculous. My school didn't offer AP Comp Sci, but I wanted to the take the AP exam anyway. When I asked the principal about it, he almost went into conniptions, because if I failed the exam it would mean that the school would be on public record with a 0% pass rate. Eventually I got him to agree to let me take the introductory CS course at the local community college for high school credit, and then take the lower-level of the two Comp Sci exams offered. (This was a fantastic deal for me, because it meant I got to leave that hellhole two hours early every day, and then sit down in the computer lab at BCC, ssh into my home computer, and play Nethack while the instructor gave his sixth lecture on 'for' loops.)

The mystique is total bullshit, of course. AP exams test a very small body of knowledge that you can acquire by sitting down with a Barrons or Princeton Review book for a week or two. The Calculus and Physics exams are a partial exception, because they require some degree of understanding rather than just regurgitation, but that degree is minimal. The fact that you saw through this charade speaks a lot more highly of your character than your scores do.
The article mentions Oregon Trail as another classic app that changed lives at a young age -- this is dead on. I remember playing Oregon Trail during "computer time" as young as 2nd grade (about 8 years old) and wondering how the computer translated my keyboard input into what to display on the screen. And thus, a future hacker's curiosity is piqued.

If only my family didn't die of dysentery so often...
Justin.tv not cool with porn, but startup pals are
Maybe he's hoping his life will be long.
Not much of an online academic discount ($116 vs $129). Our campus bookstore has no idea if Leopard pricing will be different than current Tiger pricing ($69). There also might be a program at your university for heavily discounted upgrades. (e.g., UTexas: http://www.utexas.edu/computer/sales/applestudent.html)
Does bittorrent necessarily download the movie in that order? Usually, I can't play more than five minutes of a movie before the download is complete (and usually less than a minute until it's 95% done).
In fact I heard from the Scribds yesterday the rise in their traffic hasn't been due to the adult stuff on the site. As you'd expect, frankly; if someone wants porn, there are whole sites devoted exclusively to it.
David Ramel: "I'll switch to a Mac after they pry the PC from my cold, stiff fingers"
Check out the link that he is responding to in his essay (why should I ever use C again). There's an entertaining argument about speed in there - (I'm paraphrasing here)... If speed is so important, why aren't you writing assembly? The mostly likely answer is that slower C is better than fast assembly. But then why isn't slower <your fave> better than fast C?

The logic isn't 100% airtight - it is possible to argue that benefits of C are sufficient to take the performance hit over assembly, but not so great to take the hit from C to Ruby.
i agree with emmett. mint is great. it lets you pull in data from multiple bank accounts and track your spending patterns across all of them. and in a cleaner, simpler interface than competitors like geezeo, or wesabe, imho.

as to the whole security issue -- is anyone scared about making online purchases these days, like they used to be a few years ago? mint is as trustworthy as anyone else in the online finances business: http://mint.com/safe.html
Can't Buxfer do that too?
Isn't this more about bandwidth in China, and not the technology of the p2p networks? I don't know, the title makes a statement but it isn't backed up (and I can't read Chinese).
Interesting...This possibility fills me with profound dread. People meeting other unknown alien people has happened in this planet in the near history _so_ many times. And not in a single one of those meetings was there anything to feel mushy about. It was blood all the way. Pizarro and Atahualpa didn't sit together and play chess over a hot cup of coffee and exchange notes on their childhood crushes.
Mac OS X Leopard arrives October 26
Rising Tide: Email startups are hot
Bonus question:

Let's say you run across an alien during a walk in the woods. How could you ever tell whether the alien was friendly or not? Aliens might act friendly, right up until the time they put you in the big alien stew pot. Likewise, friendly aliens might use deadly force and extreme caution to make sure you pose no threat. Would you want to be sending "Howdy There! We're new in the block! Drop by for some free pizza!" messages to a civilization 20 light years away?
OSI Approves Microsoft License Submissions
I believe it is unusual for a site to get as much traffic as MySpace does. I don't believe I will ever come near that because they really are going after the lowest common denominator.

I have been focusing on collaboration and communication for the last 5 years but now I need to monetize it and turn it into a business. I am tired of starving :)
I use Wesabe to manage my money (I'm not involved in the company and I don't know them). They have a client application for Windows and OS X that downloads your data from your bank and sends it to them, so your bank credentials never leave your computer. For Linux users like me, or anyone who doesn't want to install the client, you can download the Quicken/Money files from your bank and upload it to Wesabe directly. It's nifty stuff, and built with security in mind.

I think they came out with a Firefox extension to replace the desktop client recently, and that works on Linux as well, but I haven't used it yet. Which reminds me, I should probably go sync my data again.

Edit: Now I've used the Firefox extension, and it works like a charm. Apparently some banks allow you to programmatically access your data somehow, and the extension is capable of automatically getting the data that way, but my bank, Wells Fargo, doesn't. In this case, the extension tells you to download your data manually while it records all the actions you take so it can play them back automatically. Neat.

My only gripe with the extension is that it wants you to add a button to your toolbar instead of just using an entry in the Tools menu. I went ahead and added it, set up my accounts to update automatically, then removed the button.
If we're accepted to their YC clone, that would be a sign of intelligent life.
Guess I'll have to wait a long time to hear back from that YC-clone I applied to out there.
You will soon be able to store the Library of Congress in a pocket-sized device. And yet you're holding out for something "truly historic"?

Wake up and smell the history! :)
If you have not received a response from us by midnight on Thursday, please check your spam filter before contacting us. (We've had issues with yahoo mail accounts in the past, for example.)
Whew. I guess the Wumps are safe for now.
Second Earth is not a startup hub. The aliens should move to Silicon Valley.
But they also have old stuff stored away in a warehouse somewhere. P2P's don't. At least not currently.
Gah, Okay; This is why quantum mechanics drives me nuts. I guess what confuses me is if the state in Bob's box changes, then the state in Ted's box should also change as well regardless of distance.

However, reading a little more about the quantum teleportation process leads me to believe I'm wrong on this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation

Thanks for the great explanation, btw.
The computer that beat Kasparov had chess-specific processors. IIRC, they could process a move in one cycle--something that normally takes thousands and thousands of cycles.
It's up to the client what order it downloads chunks in (assuming all chunks are available). I'm sure there are clients that try to download chunks in order.
What title? You mean the four characters at the beginning on the whiteboard? It says "Beware of glass" Presumably, the guy was standing in front of a small eatery.
It bothers me too. Which personal money management sites have an option to just upload statements?
Have they tried meet-ups? if in SF go to SF New Tech http://newtech.meetup.com/15/ which offers a 60 sec open mic for people looking for talent.

Also, consider hooking up with another start-up w/programmers; http://www.us4real.com/ allows consumers to research a metropolitan area before deciding to move.
Catchy title, least informative article I have read on the subject.
If you want to find someone in your area that reads y combinator, you should check http://www.hackrtrackr.com
House votes to renew Internet tax block
Please, please, please...

Don't let the signal-to-noise ratio of Hacker News fall into the tragedy of the commons that befell the reddit front page. As a hacker news reader, I'm interested in cool technology and startup information.
Wesabe, as mentioned by natrius above.
I'm still curious as to whether Wesabe is the only one with that option.
It may be hard to even tell whether they're acting friendly or not..
Long answer to bonus question has already been written and published. "Speaker for the dead" by Orson Scott Card. I am restraining myself from giving a summary here. I don't want to spoil your couple of weekends spent well. Be sure to read the introduction as well.
The title of the blog post makes a claim that this new technology is "50x Faster Than BitTorrent". Also, the site referenced (http://www.blin.cn) is in Chinese.
My facebook has about 10000 users a day
what do you think
New drink app in FACEBOOK - my startup after quitting
please let me know what you think of this app
It would be awesome to discover intelligent life, I think that realizing that we are not alone in the universe will make us all think about being part of the world and not just being some country's citizens.
Thanks. It's in my stack. I gave up sometime during the second Ender book, but I'll give this one a read.
Hahah all Oregon Trail prepped me for was Castle Wolfenstein. I'd spend all my money on bullets and hope I could find some buffalo to strafe.
There is no way that planet can ever support any kind of civilization. With a 13 day year, in less than 300 days they can drink legally!

Or maybe I'm confused about where to draw the line with chauvinism. (shrug)
Because C is (mostly) portable, and assembler is not? Lately it became difficult to match C even using hand written assembly. Intel's C compiler will generate auto-vectorized auto-parallelized code (not as good as carefully written assembly, but much better than assembly a novice would write).
If it takes that to get us to that mindset, then we'll be in real trouble when we need to all think about being part of the universe and not just some planet's citizens.
Much of the responsibility is on the marketing side.

BUT

"Interactive" advertising agencies like www.schematic.com are picking up this business...and charging out the wazoo to develop very straightforward applications.

The new bottlenecks are the platforms that service the markets, networks, and communities that consumers [i.e. prosumers] connect on.

There is a lot of money to be made here.

Umair Haque at Bubblegeneration has a great analysis here:

"...for geeks, marketing, branding, advertising, etc are eeeeevil.

"The challenge, of course, is for geeks to understand that it's exactly this value equation they should be disrupting, not ignoring: making marketing, branding, advertising not evil.

"That they're evil doesn't mean you should ignore them - it means you should be destroying them and then redefining them: making them less about Madison Ave and BuzzAgent, and more about the deep 2.0 principles that in fact, are revolutionizing the deep economics of many industries - principles like peer production, gift economies, sharing, transparency, social capital, anticonsumption, and deep culture.

"Let me be a bit more blunt than I'd like to be: geeks (you too, VCs), this is your Next Big Thing - stop blowing it already.

http://www.bubblegeneration.com/2006/02/industry-note-great-...
Paul Graham Gets Vague when Boston needs analysis
Maybe when we discover intelligent life in another universe. :P
A more methodical approach: http://ycombinator.com/topvcs.html
I suggest an investment in a good high-speed laser printer with a duplexer. Print out the book, then take the pages to your local document store and get them velo bound. (Or spiral bound if you like being able to lay it flat, but I prefer velo for durability). I do this all the time with software manuals.

That said, my adviser forgot that he lent me his copy of On Lisp, and I've been careful to keep it that way.
"No such thing a bad student, only bad teacher..."

- Karate Kid
Vista Runs Out of Memory While Copying Files
997 more and you'd be as persistent as Walt Disney.

I bet you have an interesting story, alaskamiller. I imagine others here would like to hear it. Regardless of outcome this time, you should tell it here.

I admire your tenacity. Good luck.
Translation for slow readers like me: disruptive marketing through technology. I think it's the "disruptive" part of it that I was missing.

I'm all over that. In fact, if I understand you correctly, you just made a case for my application to YC. Because I have several dormant startup attempts, I had a lot of sizzle and flash I could have chosen to present, but instead I went with something exactly like this.
EC2 now out of limited beta; four-core and eight-core instances now available
It sounds like he is asking PG to do his own homework for him.
Does Your Building Need A Social Network?
byteCoder, I wholeheartedly second that motion!

Similar to my sentiments about another recent ill-advised Hacker News post:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=68257
That's not quite the right analogy -- it misses the point a bit. In that analogy the two numbers have definite values right from the start -- they're just ordinary boxes with ordinary numbers written in them. In a more quantum mechanical analogy, the numbers inside the boxes would be undetermined until the observation was made, and yet you would always find that the boxes had the same number inside, even if they were opened simultaneously and many light years away from each other.

Under the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, there is in fact some kind of spooky "instantaneous" communication going on between the particles -- one of them needs to tell the other "oh no, my wavefunction has just collapsed in such-and-such a basis and your value now has to be |X>".

Complicating this even further is the fact that relativity tells us there's no such thing as "simultaneity" when we're talking about things happening at different points in space, and so while it looks to one observer like the faster-than-light signal must have gone from Ted's box to Bob's box, to an observer moving relative to the first observer it might look like the faster-than-light signal actually went from Bob's to Ted's.

Some other interpetations of quantum mechanics (in particular, no-collapse aka "many worlds" interpretations) this faster-than-light signalling doesn't occur... though these interpretations have other counter-intuitive features instead.

Even if there _is_ faster-than-light signalling between particles, though, you still can't use this to send a message, because the information you get is always just a random string of bits -- there's no way to actually send useful information.
As great as YC and Paul Graham's writings are, and as much as they are helping create a extraordinary startup community, there will always be many ways to success in a tech startup. Take 37signals, for example - they suggest that you get no outside funding, and make your startup on the side (while working or going to school). They also suggest that location and distance is completely irrelevant in the internet age. If I remember correctly, worked on their initial products from across the world.

Now, statistically speaking, YC companies probably has a higher success rate than the 37signals model, but your life is not a statistic. Focus on making something people want.
I felt a little disappointed also, but Paul's point above makes sense:

The reason is that there generally are no details to give. Usually when we don't invite a group for interviews, it's not because there was some glaring flaw in the application, but simply because nothing in it jumped out at us.
"Taboo words tap into deep and ancient parts of the brain"
Sorry, there's a HUGE difference between using a credit card ($50 fraud limit) and giving up my private bank information (oops, it's all gone) to a 3rd party. whoever they may be.

I've seen environments from the inside out where credit card and social security data was treated like a joke (HIPAA be damned). The weakest link in any environment isn't the hacker path, it's the disgruntled employee. When it comes to my bank data, the less eyeballs in the mix, the better.
I almost wet myself when I read that.

P.S This guy must have seen some really amazing stuff not to be amazed by aliens.
We've been to a few Ruby group meetings, hoping that community might overlap a bit with the startup minded, but haven't checked into Meetup yet -- thanks for the idea.

We're split between Boston & Washington, DC actually, but looking to base the startup out of NYC.
I've thought of this a lot. What if the alien way to show the finger is to blink or something completely normal like that? They would get pissed up fairly quick.
> March 2000 to 2008: The Web2.0 Cycle

I don't believe that the "Web 2.0 Cycle" started right after the overfunded dot com companies with no profits exploded. There was a time of "nothingness".

That is when I discovered that if I build things myself no one could tell me that I couldn't do it anymore, I couldn't be fired, and my success was my own. I would put the web 2.0 cycle later out maybe around 2004-2005.
I think you are underestimating the impact. Think of what this would mean for philosophy and our understanding of the universe.
The Importance of the Home Button
The Home Button is highly important. Here's 3 reasons why.
I seem to remember cholera being the big killer...
To the poor soul who likes to down-mod every comment I post, hope life gets better!
I never liked LOGO. It was just one of the programs available for us to play with during 'computer lab time', and as far as I can remember we were never taught how to use it; commands were passed on in a sort of oral tradition from older schoolmates to younger. Since then, I've learned how cool it can really be and wondered about it often, though. Anybody know of a good, true-to-the-old-school-basic-program that's freeware for Win32?

*Edit: And while I'm at it with old games and such that I miss...anybody know where I can get ahold of a BASIC with the old nibbles.bas and gorilla.bas that came with QBASIC?
Am I missing something? I just see a 403 not found. No evidence of hacking.