skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"We study the problem of sorting in the presence of noise. While sorting linear orders is a classical well
studied problem, the introduction of noise poses very interesting challenges. Noise has to be considered
when ranking or sorting is applied in many real life scenarios.

A natural example comes from sports. How do we rank a league of soccer teams based on the outcome
of the games? It is natural to assume that there is a true underlying order of which team is better and that
the games outcome represent noisy versions of the pairwise comparisons between teams. Note that in this
problem it is impossible to aEURoere-sampleaEURX the order between a pair of teams. As a second example, consider
experts comparing various items according to their importance where each pair of elements is compared by
one expert. It is natural to assume that the experts opinions represent a noisy view of the actual order of
significance. The question is then how to aggregate this information?"
Awesome. Can't wait.
Short story from Panic about spending forever to perfect three pixels
Gullibility and desperation are separate but closely related things.
Since you've been at both places, can you do a quick compare ...
This Startup Life: Wellsphere's slam-dunk
Some startups have all the fun. Check out this pic from entrepreneur Ron Gutman's health startup Wellsphere.
Well, either a lot of startups are a lot more valuable or VCs can't move the needle on their huge funds without going a little crazy.
They are and it's a direct result of CS's immaturity.

Python is close to something very, very good but not quite there. Logix in "Base Logix" mode seems to fix some of Python's problems while retaining its redeeming qualities.

If only a real Lisp would come along that had the leadership, library, community and documentation of Python.
I have to ask, why do you see every dissenting opinion on a forum where people voice their opinions to be a personal attack on Mr. Graham? I mean, if 1,000 forum members all agree with everything, well then that would make 999 of them redundant, which would leave you with a baseless forum, wouldn't it? Are you his wife/girlfriend/secret admirer or something? Honestly I was joking when I put up the Y-Combinator/Cult post, but judging on some of the replies, Paul's own direct attack on my very sanity itself (as if to imply that he's the very essence of reason itself and all disagreement is a sign of insanity or something) and the wild gyrations in my karma points are starting to make me consider that perhaps my joke actually may not be that much of a joke after all. Look at your response ... "Leave our beloved leader alone!" ... Seriously how old are you? If you answer over 20, well seriously go join the peace corps, get out in the world ... there are many more important things to do than hero-worshipping William F. Buckley wannabes ...
Probably best to avoid attacking the military, all told.
Used to use Firefox livemarks, changed to Google reader and liking it a lot.
I'd love to give it a try... unfortunately, I am down near Santa Barbara. Maybe the next time I am in the bay area (I visit often).

webmaster -at- michaelwales -dot- com

PS: I'm an Outlook user (2K7).
I use the iGoogle pages as a feedreader
It's always a tough call in these situations whether the improvement is worth all the work (and the time spent away from other, bigger issues). Zooming out a little, though, it's hard to imagine how you could develop a well-designed, elegant product without occasionally pulling your hair out over little things. It's just nice knowing that other people go through the same thing.
At least if you're starting a business, you're in the right game. It's extremely unlikely that anyone will ever get rich working for someone else. Comfortable enough that they don't mind, maybe...
I wonder if any ad hoc teams have been funded through yc. And if so, how many? Most (all?) of the startups I know have had founders who met in college or had otherwise worked together previously.
Different Paul Buchheit, but I hate those rich people too. :)
Apple is arguably a very well-designed platform and gets better by specifically limiting apps by offering better quality to counter quantity. And making the pie bigger for all involved only matters if you can control the process to the extent that you decide how much you can take out of the pie to support all the extra effort that goes into increasing the whole pie; otherwise you do all the work (zerox) and everybody comes along and eats your pie (pc industry) and you're just left with war stories ("nobody knows this, but me and my team invented that - it's true"). Lookup Cournot-Nash equilibrium.
You are so right. I don't know what I was thinking with this whole thread.
Google Reader. I use the Next bookmarklet.
Planet Venus. http://www.intertwingly.net/code/venus/

(dear pg, please give us some kind of real markup (or at least make it obvious what we can use). thank you, bct.)
Does the phatic nature of Web 2.0 increase group unity @ the expense of personal productivity?
No, it's not easy, but neither is garbage collection, good optimizations, a clean interface, helpful documentation, or anything that makes a language really great. If I'm going to keep using Python in the future, I'm going to want threading, and right now it sucks.
>And we ended up writing our own very faux-toolbar from scratch.

It SHOULDN'T be a tough call in a situation like this. There shouldn't even be a call to make. I literally got goosebumps when I read that paragraph in the article.

This is a textbook example of goldplating. No, actually... this goes beyond goldplating. It's goldplating combined with reinventing the wheel.

There is NO WAY the extra effort this requires will be worth it. The initial effort to implement it - maybe. The initial effort plus the extra effort to maintain their own faux-toolbar - no way. I'm willing to bet that in version 2 - or at most version 3 - it will be replaced with a standard toolbar.

What happened to KISS? Like I've said in another post - if something is getting more and more complicated as you work on it, it's time to backtrack because there's a good chance that you're doing it wrong.

I'm happy that the designer got nice-looking buttons, but I think the rest of the team dropped the ball on this one by allowing it. I'm not usually this vehement about something, but there's no conceivable way I can be convinced that this was the right decision.
Wikipedia, a fact checker's worst nightmare
And does paul's auto-censoring all my posts in advance indicate a lack of maturity, deep need to be approved of at all times, and spiteful nature?
rss2email - get RSS articles by email. Put it in your crontab and let it get messages for you. Avoid annoying ads and stupid layouts by reading it in a text mail client. It's great.
Google Reader changed the way I think about RSS. It's superb.
The library bit is the real killer here. There are a fair amount of libraries out there, but they don't live in a terribly centralized location. I think asdf is the "central" repos, but it seems like most of the useful items there have been created by a small handful of users.
Good on you.

Don't let your future be determined by the success/failure of your application. Make a decision now to do what needs to be done regardless of your application's outcome. You need to have the mindset "I'm doing this anyway, and if I get funding it's a bonus"

Kudos for doing something to escape. Work takes on a different outlook now, hey?
Personally, I haven't used Outlook since 2001. That's when I switched to a Mac. Then in 2004 I switched to Gmail. I dislike thick mail clients.
:(

1) Don't live in San Francisco.

2) You couldn't pay me to use Outlook.
Frankly, even if the improvement is worth the work, I think this is the wrong kind of work. Writing a custom toolbar (that doesn't, according to the article, work the same as all the other toolbars the user is used to seeing) seems like the wrong call. Better to alter the design to be (a.) spiffy and (b.) compatible with the technical limitations of the system.

I think it's often better to work within the constraints of a system than to fight against them. Sometimes, of course, it's a Big Win to fight them, and sometimes it's fun, but you gotta pick those battles. (As I'm sure everyone agrees. Sounds like Hamming's talk, in a different context, actually.)
OT, but do you really think you'll avoid spammers with cutesy things like "address at domain dot com"? Googling for "(star) (star)at(star) (star) (star)dot(star) com" returns addresses like rasterman |at| rasterman |dot| com, dane AT abetterplacetowork DOT com, and other silly variations that are actually easy to deal with.

Spammers know enough Perl to split by spaces and strip non-alpha characters or whatever you'd need to do to get most of those addresses.
> why do you see every dissenting opinion on a forum where people voice their opinions to be a personal attack on Mr. Graham?

Deliberate misrepresentation of parent post (DMPP) count: 1

> I mean, if 1,000 forum members all agree with everything, well then that would make 999 of them redundant, which would leave you with a baseless forum, wouldn't it?

Baseless personal assertion (BPA) count: 1

> Are you his wife/girlfriend/secret admirer or something?

Gratuitous insult (GI) count: 1. BPA: 1.

> Honestly I was joking when I put up the Y-Combinator/Cult post,

Sudden volte-face (SVF) count: 1.

> but judging on some of the replies, Paul's own direct attack on my very sanity itself (as if to imply that he's the very essence of reason itself and all disagreement is a sign of insanity or something)

(honorary) DMPP: 1. Rampant paranoia (RP) count: 1

> and the wild gyrations in my karma points

RP: 1

> are starting to make me consider that perhaps my joke actually may not be that much of a joke after all. Look at your response ... "Leave our beloved leader alone!" ...

DMPP: 1

>Seriously how old are you?

GI: 1

> If you answer over 20, well seriously go join the peace corps, get out in the world ...

GI: 1. BPA: 1

> there are many more important things to do than hero-worshipping William F. Buckley wannabes ...

BPA: 1. GI: 2 (a double-hit combo).

Total: DMPP: 3; BPA: 4; GI: 5; SVF: 1; RP: 2

for an overall credibility bonus of: -15.

As usual, the numbers speak for themselves.
Bruce Stirling: Why tech design seems hostile (vid 5.30 min)
I'm interested... I actually uses outlook quite heavily (I'm not proud of it... but it gets the job done... :P) so I'd love to see what xobni can do...
Heh-- I had a similar conversation with my team with similar results. Sucks, eh?

I'm 35, I've built and sold two web businesses, and I think the YC program is a freakin' steal for the 2-10% that they want.

If anyone wants to chat about partnering up on a YC app, drop me a line. My background is design, UX, light coding (rails, etc), SEO, SMM, etc. I'd happily chat about any ideas (I've got a few of my own), as long as the proposed revenue model isn't "targetted advertising". :-) I bet we could have a prototype ready for review-time.
Probably quite a few... they might not like it, but many are still forced to use it because of their work...
1) Bummer. We'll be available for you soon enough, I hear the Internets go outside SF. :)

2) Lots of people are paid to use Outlook, and we know a lot of them hate it. We want to brighten their day first.
Vienna for Mac.
rot13 may be the best... Fcnzzref ner abg tbvat gb obgure/svaq (VZB) naq gur cerfrapr bs @ jvyy pyhr-va gur frnepu ratvarf gb fgbc naq lbh'yy nyfb nibvq gur qhzo crbcyr jub pna'g svther bhg ebg13 ;-)
I'd offer them a copy of the whole thing and let 'em compete if they want to. Or buy them out for a few grand. Or put the idea on the shelf and pursue something else.

Or tell them YOU want out for personal reasons, but you'd like to have a written agreement saying you could pursue this on your own down the road at some point.

Next time get a boilerplate buy/sell agreement as early as you can... It's like a prenup and provides clear guidelines for parting ways.
Very true. Spending a lot of time getting the toolbar to look great is good. Doing that by tossing out the system toolbar and hacking together your own is very questionable, though.

The link they put in at the bottom suggests that Leopard might adopt their selection style. Gruber linked to it, citing it as a situation where some good can come of a company's bucking a standard. So it turned out well, if only by luck.
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101001
DefCon 15 Session Videos Available Online (Free)
That is cool, I like it. Now just use Web app apis as commands. Google is grep, gmail is pine, stuff like that. You could finally take the web all the way back around to the command line. ;)
DefCon 15 Session Videos - Batch II
Contains links to the remaining session videos of track 1.
Password-less login that ONLY requires an email address [pdf]
Business is not a game! It's serious business!
No, it's the best idea - that would be the last thing they expect ...
So then someone who pursues power sans permission is, according to you, not compromised? Well, Bush seems to be good at that ... let's see ... how's his "uncompromisability" working out? Let's see ...
Good point. Parents often get confused as to how many kids they have. Why just the other day Homer forgot to count Maggie ... and if it happens on t.v., well then we know it happens everyday in real life. I mean, 1, 2, 3 ... so hard to keep track of them all.
Very good use of your time.
Agreed. You folks should checkout http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/. I think it would be smart for sites that allow commenting to include an option for attaching protected email addresses with mailhide.
Boston VC who passed on Facebook trashes the Valley
Ya I don't know anybody like that ... ever. Lucky.
> If only a real Lisp would come along that had the leadership, library, community and documentation of Python.

Someone was asking for that just the other day. I was thinking myself that it would be pretty neat to write a Lisp dialect that compiled down to Python, and therefore you could get access to all the Python libraries, a decent VM, and also macros.

I've had trouble figuring out where to start, though. Would be a fun project.
The GPL licensing would be an issue for some.

Edit: Unfortunately Logix seems to have been dead since 2005.

http://common-lisp.net/project/python-on-lisp/
500 year-long membership at $1100 is $550,000 a year. Amortize your equipment costs (which is what machine shops do) over a 10 year or maybe longer trend and it's perfectly profitable. Your monthly run cost may just be 20-30,000 a month.

There are few places open 24 hours here in the Bay and I'm so giddy about this I already sent in my money.
Oh really? Why don't you either stop spreading FUD, or back up that statement with some reality. "heard through the grapevine" - give me a break.
Parent speaks the truth. Sadly, I don't think this girl will ever escape my dreams.
You'll pay me to sample your krypto-krato and write a culinary review to all my hippie friends? Hmmmm ... sounds tempting .... How much do you offer?
Whaaaaaa. I bet he'd like some cheese with his whine.

I don't get it. He turned it down and then proclaims that the people who said yes to it despite it's then-lack of stellar credentials are "egotistical snobs" because they took a chance? Isn't battery the snob in this case?
Atomic orbital pictures, including the elusive f, g, h, i, j, k, and l orbitals
Wow - I'm there except I finally gave up Outlook for google apps and gmail a month or so ago - bummer. (It's been great not having to use Outlook though)
Why? Not disagreeing at all, but I'm curious about further explanation.
Fortune favors the bold my friend. Be Bold.
I'm no expert (merely a user of these systems) but it seems to me that the Python runtime is a POS compared to what you find in some Common Lisps like SBCL. The really appealing approach to me would be to pull Python into the Lisp environment rather than the other way around. Python's lib is so nice, coherent and complete but Lisp is nicer to program and the tools seem much more mature.
Indeed I hope pg has a strategy to grow a Python-like library around Arc.
I'd prefer a Scheme implementation (or two) getting better libraries than Common Lisp.

Check out Bigloo Scheme...it compiles down to C, JVM and .NET bytecode. I've only had it compile down to C but it was really quick. I'll have to get the computer language shootout guys to add Bigloo to their benchmarks.
Please see my long-winded previous post further up in the thread but chronologically after this.
Does spam bother people still? I get 150 spam emails a day. But maybe 1 of them gets by Gmail. Even if you use Outlook, why not have your mail routed through a free GMail account first?
Google Reader and http://www.feedity.com (eating our own dog food) for non-RSS pages
Google-reader. I used to use Sage, the firefox plugin.
You are right about the runtimes. SBCL is something else. And there have been attempts to pull Python into Lisp:

http://common-lisp.net/project/python-on-lisp/

The only thing is, I find CL a really baroque language. The issues have been touched upon by many, but CL just has many spots where due to being standardized 2 decades ago, it isn't really consistent.

Python for the most part is extremely consistent and the VM runs on any major OS (SBCL still has issues on Windows). Not to mention the language seems to be evolving naturally (Python 3).

That's the main reason I'd like to see a Lisp on Python.
Well, if you wanted to ship a desktop application or such, you'd have to open source your code. That doesn't work for all companies.
What Google Won't Find
My first Lisp experience was SICP/Scheme and it always felt cleaner and nicer as a language compared to CL. I gravitated towards CL over time due to perceived runtime and library advantages. If any Lisp could pull it all together like Python has I'd jump on board though. And if it was a Scheme then all the better.
I'm moving to the area in a week, so I'd love to, but I also don't use outlook.
The Utimate Linux File Structure Chart
The Braindead Megaphone: a send-up of today's media. Probaby also relevant to social news sites.
Startupmatcher: automated co-founder finding
Understood, and I agree about Python's consistency and coherent evolution relative to CL. Thanks for the link.
Feed reading: filtering and delegation
This is #2 again. I think you're getting to part of the issue here. We need to be coding full-steam ahead and we need more coders - it is the clear bottleneck. We can either do that through money or options. To date, we have been cycling through developers with all options, but we have found that it's hard to source good ones, and they often move on by the time we've gotten a return from the time spent getting them familiar with the code. The current course is to have #1 and #3 crank out some code in the next month, launch Beta, and go after another round of funding to hire some full-time developers to join #1.

I don't think what I mentioned above or what you mention in your post means that I have to "step back" or "step down". I do everything but code, enabling those that code to be as efficient as possible. You said yourself that the product is currently "driven by coders that need to go full steam ahead" and I'm not in a position to help. If #1 had to figure out all the legal documentation, pay taxes, manage cash, put together marketing materials, respond to users, find and log bugs, put together investor reports, file trademarks, etc. would our development would be going "full steam ahead"? Also, do you think the quality of that stuff would be the same coming from a developer? I'm also guessing it would cost a considerable amount of money. I'm not sure how I'm not in a position to help and what good "stepping back" would do. If #1 wants to move, network, and take greater risks, I'm open to talking about re-working equity, but saying that I'm just going to drop off the earth for 2 months until I get a call is just rediculous.
Note that the orbitals aren't labeled by letter, it's just all the orbitals for quantum numbers <=10.

I have a strong feeling that the higher orbitals require more than 3 spatial dimensions to actually be represented.

Why do most high school and intro college textbooks refrain from printing pictures of the f orbitals? I can understanding not printing the pictures of the orbitals that require an atomic number of 200, but lots of elements use f orbitals. You don't need to actually solve the wave function to look at the orbital pictures.
The guy's just upset because he didn't have the foresight to see that Facebook would make it big.
Filters are part of the solution, but you have to remember that spam is a low-grade denial of service attack. It hurts the Internet.
>> BTW can you point http://www.feedity.com to news.ycombinator?

I didn't get what you mean by that.
It seems like your odds of "winning" this contest are not great, and your odds of "converting" that win to an A round are also not great. I like the YC idea and have little more specifically to say about it than that, but if you're investing 10 full time months, the quality of your execution will dominate your chances, not Paul Graham's imprimatur.