skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a little misleading to say that philosophy is useless. You can get that feeling by looking at what's called philosophy today, but that's because branches of philosophy that became useful are now called something else.

Many useful studies started out as branches of philosophy. As a topic develops standards of evidence, it tends to calve off from philosophy. So natural philosophy turned into physics, biology, astronomy, etc. as practitioners got serious about observation and modeling. Likewise, logic and geometry grew into mathematics, parts of epistemology turned into psychology, and social theory is turning into social science. Today psychologists and evolutionary theorists are starting to take a fresh look at questions in ethics and aesthetics.

What's left in the philosophy department, then, are topics that have been hard, so far, to get purchase on. If you focus on these topics, you can get a feeling of futility, but it's like staring at the bare patch in an otherwise fertile garden.
Hackers are supposed to be smart people, and smart people don't go for this sort of stuff (Also, hackers don't go around asking people to paint paintings for them for negative compensation).

Look at the front page: the top link is this crap, and then of the top 10, we have 5 completely content-free links, and then another 5 links that are vaguely informative, but none of the kind of insightful fascinating long articles that make one's day (e.g. the violin string thing).
I understand that's simple in Lisp, but I also need interoperability, and that implies different languages, among other things. Perhaps the reason nobody's adopting Sexp's is that you will never get an answer from lispers, other than "you can do it in Lisp". Great, but I need C++, Perl, then C#, Java, PHP, Python and all kinds of crappy languages to support that format.
and the answer is "Paul Graham"
Paul Graham's brain is a nondeterministic Turing-machine.
I see it right in the middle of the links at the bottom of the home page.
Picking through the pieces of dying business models seems like a poor way to avoid "the herd". That's like trying to avoid competing with the lions by hiding out among the sick and wounded antelope. ("Gosh, these antelope don't look very dangerous, with their open wounds and their expressions of terror! I am certainly safe from them!")

If you think you hate being part of a herd, imagine what it feels like to be running away from one.

If you prefer to avoid the well-traveled path, you might prefer to look for a healthy business that has not yet been mortally wounded, and try to compete with that. Remember the words of Eric Sink (http://software.ericsink.com/Choose_Your_Competition.html):

"The big problem with avoiding competition is that you are also avoiding customers. The existence of a competitor indicates the existence of paying customers. If you can't find anyone who is making money with your idea, you really need to wonder if there is any money to be made there at all."
Ocean's Eleven: The perfect agile model?
One of the developers at Netflix describes the culture there as very much like the team in Ocean's Eleven: They recruit the best of the best, everyone gets a good cut of the take, there is the flexibility for individuals to do what they do best, and the whole team stays focused and united on a common goal.
The other question to ask: Is Markus really doing a good job of fighting it? You would have to use plentyoffish to get an idea.
Presentation Zen: Pecha Kucha and the art of liberating constraints
Yeah, but the thread it linked to is kaput.
love the board of advisors made up of 3 year olds idea.
Here's Paul while hacking:

http://www.voguehost.com/ims/u/ptn/ptn/pg_hacking.gif
Here is a link to the report: http://www.oecd.org/document/56/0,2340,en_2649_201185_340162...

The statistics speak for themselves, but his reasoning is totally out of touch with reality. Math teachers in Canada don't make any more than teachers in the US (less probably.) But Canada is ranked towards the top. Why? No one places the blame on the most obvious culprit - the teaching methods. What you're seeing here is the legacy of progressive education which placed more emphasis on "socializing" students than on actually teaching them. This is the cult of self-esteem, where the goal of making the student feel good about himself trumps things like standards and discipline.
I'll bite.

We likely have more information about product quality than at any time in history through the Internet. This is also an argument for allowing legal action like the class action lawsuit to discourage faulty and negligent craftsmanship. Although, if that is an argument for or against market forces I'm not sure.
Some get things done irrespective of constraints. Some look for excuses no matter what. Your choice.

And who are we to tell you if it is possible? Go forth and kick ass!
Ah, I see. Every item with id < 10000 results in "No such item"
We had a female hacker employee over the summer that came to a couple of the YC dinners. First thing out of every guy hacker's mouth - so, are you likebetter's graphic designer?

I'm sure we all have the best intentions, but face it, we're a bunch of chauvinistic bastards. I hope more women apply and serve as counter examples to an outdated stereotype.
Paul Graham is so good, he can beat corporate death into a submission with his bare hands.
GTD: Lean for your head
Nope, it's been working for me!
Here are some contrarian positions (to go with those already presented):

The article currently refers to "a society's wealth" but not the distribution thereof. The American economy has grown significantly since 2000, for example, but the median wage has not. Is there any point to a growing economy when the median citizen is not benefiting from it?

There is a brief mention of the irrationality of voters who do not trust increasing market forces as a means of solving health care problems. However, one can argue that we have a more market based health care system than the systems of Western Europe, for example, but worse health outcomes. How can we be sure, then, that increasing market forces even more will improve the situation?
I like JSON. Easy to read, easy to work with.
Paul Graham is so good he can count up to 32 just by counting up to 16.
> Why would the JSON version of that fragment suck pretty hard?

The fragment uses attributes and mixed content - something that would be quite ugly to express in JSON. I wont event try.
I think maybe you missed the point.

If most people stop using and buying records, that's a "dying business model", right? So riddle me this, Batman: are there people who are going to keep using records? If so, it's certainly not for the ability to hear the music -- that problem has been solved better. Is it a lifestyle choice? Is it because they are anti-technology?

So while one definition of the record business shuts down, is there another definition that will take its place? Hey -- the answer might very well be "no". But if it is yes, it's certainly not the same business model that died. It's a whole new market, with new drivers, new players, and new distribution channels. It's also a market where there is going to be lots of talent lying around that isn't being used any more (like how to design good covers, various custom record production techniques, etc)

Continuing on in my example, if you could find 10 million folks all over the world interested in something to do with records -- custom records, records as bird houses, records as the new frisbees, whatever -- and you can market something to them that they want, that's called a business.

Running away from the competition has nothing to do with it. I'm asking a simple leverage question: given two markets of equal size and a limited budget, do you compete with a hundred other small businesses, some of which with a lot of funding? Or do you compete with 4 or 5 business, all of which are figuring it out just like you are?

I'm not taking a position. In fact, my question was "is there a contrarian play to be made?"
Another name for the "wisdom of crowds"
> Of course, this works just fine in Mathematica...

Works just fine in bc(1) too.
I hate to say it because i only wish that it was not true, but my girlfriend is always questioning my authority.
There is an infinite number of primes, but Paul Graham is the greatest prime.
> Why would the JSON version of that fragment suck pretty hard?

["p", "this is a", ["a", { "text" : "link", "href": "http://example.com" } ], "." ]

I don't do much JSON so maybe that can be improved, but I wouldn't imagine by much.

Certainly there are lots of other factors to be considered, but that just goes to prove my point; that "XML Sucks" rarely looks at anything beyond very simple uses of XML.
Or as expressed by Glenn Reid, quoted in the article:

"A markup language is predicated on the idea that the markup is an exception in a river of text."
Data isn't really a good word for it (because obviously a document is a kind of data), but I can't think of a better one.
"Create disposable tattoo..."

Iron-on tattoos. Water-based temporary tattoos have been done. Iron-on ones would guarantee some sort of press coverage!

Seriously, though, wouldn't it depend on the nature of the audience you're trying to attract? Three-year-olds would be great for a preschool games site but not so good for, perhaps, helicopter pilots. Can you be more specific about your startup?
But how would you express attributes and mixed content and named character entities and namespaces and encoding declarations?

S-expressions are beautiful for lisp code and for many kinds of structured data, but it gets ugly when you try to use it on something as messy as a human-writable hypertext document format. XML syntax on the other hand is designed for this.
I'd say the contrarian play is in figuring out what need these places used to fill, and understanding where the business is going to go.

For instance, record stores are almost certainly a shrinking business. Between walmart picking up the high volume on top hits CD's and iTunes covering that and everything else, it seems like it would be hard to get into the business of selling hard copies of music...

But people still really like to get together to appreciate music. I'm old enough to have browsed for hours at Tower Records - using a CD purchase as an excuse to enjoy being in a record store, around all the other music geeks. The 90s were not exactly a match for the glory days of the 70s at record stores, from what I've heard, but it was still pretty great, and I'm sad they're going away.

Maybe this will create an opportunity somewhere new. Not in a record store, but in something that will give people what they used to get from the record store. iTunes and WalMart may very well take the business of selling copies of music, but I doubt they can replace that atmosphere... so either it will go away, or it will live someplace new. I'd bet on the second.

Of course, the new venu may just be some speakers in a dorm room, so this isn't necessarily a business opportunity... maybe just a cultural shift.
Capitalism isn't perfect but it's the best income redistribution method we've come up with combined with a small government tax. What scares me is that capitalism is probably still going to be around once scarcity of energy is eliminated on Earth -- it seems like copyright is keeping a market around for information when there is no reason for one to exist anymore.
Ok, so what have the girls done? Certainly women have different tendencies than guys.

Help us correct our stereotypes.
http://okmij.org/ftp/Scheme/SXML.html
BTW, thanks for the link.

Obviously, you want competitors. But as the article points out, you want to pick them well. My intention was not to suggest to enter markets without competitors. Sorry if if that's what it seemed. In my mind, there's no dumber and bigger competitor than a big industry sitting on top of a "dying business model". That's because as I point out, it's easy for the most profitable business model to change without the industry being able to acknowledge it.

Seems to me that 4 or 5 competitors who are making money in a new field where there is no main player is a good spot to be in. Sometimes differentiation in a large hotly-competitive market is more hype than reality.
Sure, but having that information is not the same as being able to utilize it. I can't look up everything I buy every day, nor would I really want to. It makes things easier if I can basically trust that people aren't trying to rip me off. I think in most markets, it's in the interests of the vendors to not attempt that, but still, it's an interesting question, and I'm suspicious of all-or-nothing answers on any side (the market/government should take care of everything).
Cognition in the Wild
I don't care about karma, but to the person who downvoted my comment above, seriously?
NP-complete problems are for sissies.
Paul Graham can solve any problem in the Arithmetic Hierarchy in O(1).
Ask YC: How much commenting do you do in Ruby/Rails? (or other expressive language)
When I used to do C/C++/JAVA my code used to be heavily commented, but as I have gotten into Rails I have found myself not leaving much comments and when I try to it seems like a waste of time since I just end up saying "Executing function blah" or some other bit of information that is very evident if you were to read the code.

So my question is what commenting conventions people use in rails and have they found like me that ruby/rails generally requires less/no comments. Maybe doing this in a startup means I just try to go through stuff as fast as possible and have become a bad commenter.
Close, but no cigar.

Women take less risks than men, and are less motivated by money and status.
Immigration shouldn't be debated in the same way as other sorts of trade. It's 90 percent externalities, good or bad.
Paul Graham is so good, he can recurse infinitely. Twice.
Just kidding. ;-)
we have a more market based health care system

Health care, whether anyone likes it or not, can never be a free market. A free market requires willing buyers and sellers. Health-care consumers are uniformly unwilling. This prevents the occurrence of something you see in penny stock markets: The formation of a spread, in which buyers and sellers are unwilling to trade. In health care, the sellers can force a sale in such situations.
Is that a photo of the "ConnectR telepresence unit" or the "Looj gutter-cleaning robot"? =)
I mostly agree with you and Google has already been accused of mixing paid listings into their search results. However, it seems that search engines are really sensitive to being labeled with this stigma. If this becomes common practice again, then it opens the door for someone else to be the new Google.
>Hackers are supposed to be smart people, and smart people don't go for this sort of stuff

That's a ridiculous assertion. You mean that you don't go for this stuff.

If you don't like the links that are on the page, spend some time finding a better link. It doesn't do any good to complain about something you have control over.
Jajah releases free 1-800 number button (call from an email)
Two months of hard work. What do you think of my startup? ZoooV.com
lisp syntax is a lot simpler than XML. a basic lisp _interpreter_ would take maybe a night or three in any language, a mere parser much less. but why you don't see many such parsers is a different issue, not closely related to s-exp's themselves
Note: I had to put the description here because it didn't show below the title.

So, this is my second attempt at building something people want. How am I doing? ZoooV is a social news site for niche subjects. Here is why I built it:

With the big social news sites: Digg, reddit, and recently after the name change, news.yc, the discussions tend to become more general as the communities grow because we, the readers, have different interests. And because of that, only what's common to everyone goes to the top. Smaller communities have more focus, but it's hard for them to survive because there is less to read, and therefore, we tend to visit them less often and eventually forget about them.

I'm trying to solve this by keeping the communities smaller and focused, but allow the individual reader to choose the communities they like and I create a custom page for them where they only see what they're interested in. This way, even though the individual communities might have low volume of stories, the reader will always find something interesting to read in one of his communities or the other. It's like how an RSS reader allows us to keep track of low volume blogs because we don't have to remember to visit each one of them.
I'm skeptical and I'd like to see some data to back this up, but in the mean time, modded up for saying What You Can't Say -- which brings this comment up to -1. Stop the kneejerk downmods.
Paul Graham's memory is so good that he doesn't need to have a search box on Hacker News because he can remember all the topics and urls.
>I doubt they can replace that atmosphere... so either it will go away, or it will live someplace new. I'd bet on the second.

I never truly experienced it, but I suspect the user experience of oink.cd blows away any record store. It's a community made up of music geeks with instant access to almost any album recorded in the era of popular music.
Sorry, I do not know if I really get your argument. Could you please elaborate?
Paul Graham is a default constructor. He takes no arguments.
Maybe like this:

["p", "this is a", ["a", "link", {href: "http://example.com"}], "."]

If that is uglier is debatable, maybe a little bit. However, the point is really that suckyness is not just a matter of esthetics. All the more I agree with your second point.
As a price inelastic service a pure market based health care system unreasonably favors the service providers.
Paul Graham can compress ANY data by at least 1 bit, including binary 1.
Remember the color-blind in your web design
Cool! So bcts example

<p>here is a <a href="http://example.com">link</a>.</p>

would be:

(p "here is a" (a (@ (href "http://example.com")) "link") ".")
Why A VC May Call You
Venture capital funds find investments in different ways. Some passively receive executive summaries from their personal networks and do very little searching. Others actively scour the marketplace for interesting companies. Those that actively scour the marketplace may contact you directly without warning and without an introduction.
Well, if the people who are buying it don't know enough about computers and just want the office program that they are used to using, then I'd argue yes. I have absolutely no doubt that millions of people would look at that auction and believe it to be selling Microsoft Office, many people in my family are certainly in that group.

If you setup the auction to sell a cheap Office alternative and make it clear that it's not Microsoft Office, then that's not a rip off, but if you just want to catch people that don't know better, then I think it is.
So.. like a web forum meets reddit/digg?
From Scratch - a weekly radio show about the entrepreneurial life
Congrats!

The front page seems a little noisy.. Perhaps the box on the right that explains what the site is about could be colored to draw attention to it?
I like the concept.

However the question is, why would people go to this site as a destination instead of a niche site itself. Example: If I wanted to learn about internet marketing news - which isn't covered by digg, reddit etc, i'd go to plugim.com which is focused on that. Why would I go to zooov as a destination site? and then would you be able to build an audience enough for each and every niche. That's the problem with building a site that's wide enough ...

good concept though - good luck.
I understand that its niche subjects but I wouldn't describe it that way in your tagline. Its doesn't sound very interesting. I also wouldn't say "social news". keep it simple. Say: news about "all" subjects (instead of niche) or "new/fresh links about the topics you want to read about" or something along those lines.
It's simply that economists often assume that all markets are (or potentially are) free, when that isn't the case. Some markets come close (items on eBay, stocks, commodities, currencies, etc) while others don't. If you start with a naturally "unfree" market, the same set of rules don't apply.

It's just economists' long-standing physics-envy coming through. They want to think their field has "laws of gravity" that are always true.
Interviews: http://www.fromscratchradio.com/show/?page_id=12
Something like that, yes, but attributes (a (@ (href /path))...) are ugly in particular.

I think it shouldn't necessarily be parsable by Lisp. Attributes, for example, could be as simple as

(a (href=/path) ...)

Why '=' - because this character is not used in attribute names historically, so with this syntax you can move from XML to Sexp smoothly, automatically that is. Formally, the syntax I suggested is not Lisp, of course.
"are less motivated by money and status."

you need to go out and meet some women
I rewrote my senior project in Common Lisp two weeks before the due date because I was running into too many bugs in mzscheme. Then I switched from clisp to SBCL because of a bug in clisp.
Also where it says "Customize this page to see only the communities you like", "Communities" is too confusing to someone just landing on the page. And the names of the communities are kind of cool but too confusing. When I read "Beautiful Mind" I glossed over it.

This could really work if executed right. I think tighter focus might be something that could partially solve the social news "lowest common denominator" problem.
Follow the process?
i like the idea of customized social news gathering, but i'm not sure if a community structure is the right way to do it. i don't think most people want to limit themselves to a particular community of stories. most of us have pretty broad interests and, while we may want to read more about a particular field over other fields, that doesn't necessarily mean we want to read ONLY about that field.

i envision a system where you sign up for an account and you subscribe to your own personal RSS feed with content similar to Digg/Reddit and over time the site learns your interests based on the stories that you click on from your RSS reader. each feed would have user-generated tags associated with it and will begin showing more (but perhaps less popular) feeds that share tags with feeds that you've previously viewed. over time, your personalized RSS would contain only feeds that it knows you're interested in, and the random feeds it included at the beginning in order to learn your interests would gradually be phased out.

the layout of the site is great though. i'm just not into the community/forum idea too much.
All JS Passengers,  Attention Please ("Follow the rules" is sometime a rule one should follow)
I believe (or hope) that it's not an either this or that situation. I read digg, reddit, and news.yc. Each has a different flavor. My favorite is news.yc because of the narrower focus and the quality of people, but I read reddit when I'm looking for random stories.
Does Your Startup Need Its Own Digg?
Good summary of the different kinds of Web 2.0 tools and how some companies have used them effectively. One company set up their own Digg site to share news with clients and each other.
.tfel ot thgir si GP
From Scratch: A NPR Radio Show About the Entrepreneurial Life