skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Disappointing that this essay (like so many others) talks about Plato without mentioning Diogenes.

Plato is the stuffed shirt know-it-all, and Diogenes is the smart-alecky devil's advocate ready to poke holes in Plato's ideas, thereby cutting him down a few notches: http://faculty.quinnipiac.edu/libraries/tballard/diogenes.ht... and http://members.optushome.com.au/davidquinn000/Diogenes%20Fol...

Ultimately, Diogenes is more important.
Two points:

1. I'm actually very surprised at how many Ayn Rand fans there are on this site. For a fringe philosophy that has fewer followers than Scientology there seems to be an unusually high concentration here. I am a big Ayn Rand fan, so this is a pleasant surprise for me.

2. Ayn Rand's book Intorduction to Objectivist Epistemology is the most interesting book on the theory of concept formation I've read. I have not come across anything that I found more plausible. One of the most appealing parts of it was that she tied concept formation to a similar process as algebra.

Specifically to the point of this article, I would certainly say that it changes the way you think. The chapters on definitions and concept hierarchy make your thinking radically more efficient. Even if you're a programmer and have no interest in philosophy I'd say it's definitely worth a read.
Wow.

That wins for world's dorkiest tattoo. Dorkier than the golden ratio. Dorkier than e^{i\pi} \eq -1, and maybe dorkier than using latex notation in a web forum :)
I'm rereading The Fountainhead presently :)
"They were in effect arguing about artifacts induced by sampling at too low a resolution."

Sampling from what -- "meaning-space"?
I took one philosophy elective first semester of my undergrad and boy did it screw me.

For the longest time I kept asking my friends "how can you prove to me THAT tree is in fact a tree?" It was all part of realizing that current philosophy is just a play on words. I do believe that once you understand that, you can think beyond the frivolous debates.
I have a Lenovo X41 tablet that cost me $1000. It's an inch smaller on each side than an 8.5"x11" piece of paper. It has some very decent productivity apps, some of the best, even. It plays music very well and definitely surfs the web. Unfortunately, it runs Windows and GNU's Tomboy doesn't come close to Microsoft's Onenote.
The Forbes 400 List for 2007
+1 for the use of LaTeX notation.
Looks like a good read... sadly, it was useless since half the code blocks lost their formatting and linebreaks, rendering it unreadable.

also: article is from 2001, talks about new features in Python 2!
thanks for the heads up, sorry for the mistake.
That's impressive. So that's pretty much the only class you take that quarter?
http://www.paulgraham.com/raq.html

though it's really starting to turn into a faq
Oh, I've got one of those, only in Javascript.
"in fact, it would not be a bad definition of math to call it the study of terms that have precise meanings."

What meanings? I think that math is made of structure, not meaning. The latter is a human phenomenon. For example, a proof using geometry and one using algebra might be mathematically identical, but have different meanings (created when they are perceived).
Ultimately, Diogenes is more important.

I don't see how you can say that. He left no work. All we have to judge him by is a few probably apocryphal stories.
I should have been more clear - I meant I used Google to do a site: search.
My understanding was that most CMU students overloaded and took a bunch of classes anyways.

BUT... but I just looked up the class at CMU and it is not 12 credits. It is 4 credits. Which shakes my worldview somewhat, I thought this 12 credit was proof that the CMU CS curriculum was something special.

So either I was mislead by my friend at CMU years ago when this course came up in discussion or more likely, I misunderstood him. Feel free to downmod my post above, it would ideally settle out around 0 points for containing wrong information. Sorry for spreading untruths...
Everything is applied philosophy. That's the point!
I haven't finished reading yet, but for what it's worth, I'm having trouble parsing this sentence:

Few were sufficiently correct that people have forgotten who discovered what they discovered.
Uh, have you read Plato's dialogues? The defining characteristic is that they aren't philosophical treatises, i.e. not pedantic monologues claiming all knowledge. Their whole point is to stimulate the reader to think for themselves on very interesting questions.
"But Joel's assertion that Google doesn't understand the big problems and isn't working on general solutions to those problems is patently false, as is his suggestion that all work on optimizing AJAX apps will be wasted in 6 months."

Peter didn't read the same essay I did, he's fixated on some trivial statement, or he's deliberately setting up a straw man version of Joel's argument. Joel's point, as I took it, is that people too committed to rolling their own everything out of misplaced focus on performance _now_ are going to miss out on the performance and interoperability improvements that will be coming in the future.

Here's an example from Mac software history that Joel may be ignorant of: WriteNow, a word processor, was well known for being blazingly fast. It was the only application in its class written in hand-tuned 68K assembly. Everyone bowed before the WriteNow team's accomplishments...until the PowerPC Macs came along and made their codebase obsolete. Oops!

I'm not sure there's anything that people wanting to build non-trivial apps _now_ can do about Joel's vision of the future, except understand that it very well may be coming.
IMHO Rand is vastly different from Nietzsche. There is obviously some degree of influence, but Nietzsche is subjective, anti-systematic and anti-rational, while Rand is almost the canonical example of a philosophy that attempts to be objective, systematic and rational.

As for Rand's limited influence on subsequent development in philosophy, that's an interesting point. Why is this the case? Even if you disagree with Rand's philosophy, I think it's pretty outrageous that her work isn't even mentioned in more university philosophy programs. There are only a few other philosophers whose work provides as complete a system for understanding reality, the nature of knowledge, and the nature of ethics (I'd include Aristotle, Plato, and Hegel as others that are similarly complete, but there aren't too many after that).

So why is Rand's work not taught more often? I'd say that is mostly the result of the biases and predilections of the typical university philosophy department.
IMHO it's hard to argue that any philosopher is more influential than Plato, especially when you consider the clear neo-Platonic influences on Christian theology, and the subsequent influence that that tradition has had on Western civilization.
yes, but what is "self?" what is "interested?" How does the meaning change when you put "self interested" together as a phrase?

As Paul mentioned in his essay, you're already bumping into what words mean.

I can tell you what an integer is, what a square root is, and what a ratio is, and as a result, I can (by looking it up in a book and typing in the text, heh heh) prove that the square root of 2 can't be expressed as the ratio of two integers. But can we do the same thing with the phrase "self interested"? Without pushing the meaning of words out to their breaking point?
According to Guido, he wants to drop functional programming constructs in Python.

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=98196

What's interesting is the reasons he gives:

"Why drop lambda? Most Python users are unfamiliar with Lisp or Scheme, so the name is confusing; also, there is a widespread misunderstanding that lambda can do things that a nested function can't -- I still recall Laura Creighton's Aha!-erlebnis after I showed her there was no difference! Even with a better name, I think having the two choices side-by-side just requires programmers to think about making a choice that's irrelevant for their program; not having the choice streamlines the thought process."

Basically he wants to dumb down the language to make it more appealing to the mainstream programmer crowd. He wants another java. In the end, I think that mentality is a death sentence for the language.
Microsoft Turns Tafiti into a Halo 3 Ad; Too Bad Few Will See It
Google Sued For Crimes Against Humanity (This is Crazy)
I think the question is whether you can say the terms used in either proof have precise semantics. Any of the terms in a correct geometry proof can be traced back precisely to the initial axioms, which are terms with meanings defined as precisely as possible.
peter was making the point that moore's law won't, for example, make my round-trip latency from sf to boston much less than 90ms, so optimizing to reduce round-trip times (and to a lesser extent, bandwidth) will _always_ be necessary to design snappy interfaces on the web.
I'll elaborate: in systems design you start with nothing. With words, ideas, feelings. Heck -- most of the time people can't even express what they want the system to do! When you start like that, you are in a completely impracticable spot.

Not only that, but when you do get the words out, they're all just abstractions of other things. "We'd like the user to see the most relevant article" Well gee, what do you mean by "relevant"? What do you mean by "see"? It's the same exact problem you face when you're talking about stuff most people consider BS, like are we real or not.

So you start in this totally meaningless set of concepts, you refine, you abstract, you categorize -- in short, you take a trip through each of the major branches of philosophy. When they say "user", do they mean something that is part of an abstract type of "person"? Or is that over-designing? When we look at scaling past ten million users, what's the impact of applying various principles of set theory, such as normalization? When we say we want the machine to learn what the user wants, do we really mean just what his next actions will be?

We do all of this automatically, without realizing that some pretty smart other people have walked many of these roads before. Because those guys have been there, done that, all of these sciences have been created: sciences like hardware and software design, debugging, complexity theory. For the most part, we don't need to learn about all of these smart people and the full stories of their ideas. After all, only about 1 or 2 percent of what they did lived on after them. But by understanding a more complete version of what they thought, sometimes it can save you going down a dead end. And heck, it can just make discovering the answer more fun. And at the end, when all of that BS comes toghether for a real, live, working system? It's a thing of beauty. Did you even build a system for a large organizatino and every department had a different idea of what reality was? Did you look for wrong and right people, or think of the word "paradigm" (Kuhn -- sort of)

You can't take philosophy like you would a hard science. It doesn't progress or evolve from one phase to another, and half of it doesn't even make sense with the other half. That's okay, though. It doesn't mean that it is not useful, just different.
I haven't seen anyone challenging a market where Microsoft practically own except in the browser market (i.e. Firefox).

Journalist/blogger should write stuff about Microsoft when there is something growing fast against it, not when some company purchase Zimbra.

Have Yahoo! ever done anything right integrating stuff they bought?
Plato, despite his intellect (or perhaps because of it), turned out to be, as you say yourself, "naive and mistaken".

Yet Diogenes was able to see that about Plato then, as a contemporary.

And while it's true that he never sat down to write anything himself, his work has endured via written accounts of others (Diogenes was a real person, not a mythical figure).
With an SLA suspension, you could just increase the ratio of bottom arm length relative to top arm to get a faster camber curve. But judging by the pic they plan on using this in McPherson style setups. Even if they left the camber settings the same though, the tire contact should still be better with the reduced roll. Increased roll angle will cause more positive camber than the camber curve will decrease it due to suspension compression. This is the reason why you typically go with more negative camber when you soften a suspension setup.

A setup like this would not work well for a few other reasons too. Like on a sports car, it would have problems with heat I can guarantee it. Looking at the pic it already has heat sinks all over the place, but in a race situation the heat emission would be totally ridiculous. As far as handling goes, it could have problems with grip when cornering hard over bumps. The outside wheel would essentially behave like having a damper with very high bump stiffness. I know they claim it has fast response time, but it would need to have very high resolution to still absorb bumps when it is basically holding up that corner of the car. Oh, and its damn heavy...
Never ask a person of Greek descent if he's read Plato.

The very idea! ;)
This is changing very quickly these days. Rand is mentioned in most courses on contemporary philosophy. Her ethics is usually called "enlightened self-interest" or "rational egoism."

There are now quite a number of Ayn Rand philosophy chairs at various high profile universites in the country.

It's funny, but one of the reasons Rand is coming into universities these days is the attitude that no theory is any better than any other i.e, subjectivism. The very thing that Rand spent so much time attacking!
(I got this from talking to the guys who run the Ayn Rand Institute, which is largley responsible for these developments.)

Edit: Regarding Nietzsche, you are 100% corrent. For what it's worth Rand was adamant that her ethics was nothing like Nietzsche. Here's the most positive thing she had to say about him: "as a poet, he projects at times (not consistently)a magnificent feeling for man's greatness, expressed in emotional, not intellectual terms."
Merck's AIDS vaccine fails, trials halted
If you give the code away for free on your own website that becomes a great traffic source. Build a few more experiments and give those away for free on your site and you will have reliable traffic. You could also enhance upon what you make and charge for others to download the newest versions. As django gets more popular your site will become more popular and you richer as the result.
Hacking for IP Theft
The only thing possible is just branding and text links. The conversion rate will be horrible, why would any one click on a link under neath an icon of a martini glass? The liquor companies would probably pay to have their name associated with the booze but that's most likely pittances.

300k daily usage is insane, but at the same time, it's just Facebook. Has there been any actual success (money-wise) with Facebook apps?
Influential, yes.

Plato was an elitist to the extreme, and his notions of a rigid class hierarchy did shape early feudal civilization in Europe.

But most important? Would you want to live in his Republic?
Irony: the "Intelligent Design" guy is talking about thinking for himself!
People continue to bring this post up. It is 2 years old, and Guido has said he will not be dropping functional constructs in Python.

And the reason he wanted to remove them is not because he wants to 'dumb down' the language, but rather because list comprehensions do what filter/map/reduce can do 9 times out of 10 but end up a lot more legible. He says as much in that post. But again, if you really want those functions, they still exist in Python and will exist in the future.
Google To "Out Open" Facebook On November 5
Basically he wants to dumb down the language to make it more appealing to the mainstream programmer crowd. He wants another java. In the end, I think that mentality is a death sentence for the language.

From what I can tell, Python has always had this mentality. I think lambdas are a rather minor issue anyway. If you're going to slam Python for 'dumbing things down' to appeal to a 'mainstream programmer crowd' you can probably find better ammunition.
Metaphysics: Physics without a laboratory.

[branch of philosophy]: [equiv. branch of science] without a laboratory.

I'm not sure philosophy can really be improved beyond the obvious: ie, introducing experimentation after the theorization. But then it's no longer philosophy.
I think the answer is different for each person. I posted this link to YC a while ago but it didn't get one single upvote:
http://www.amazon.com/Happier-Learn-Secrets-Lasting-Fulfillm...

The author of that book teaches the single most popular class at Harvard.

The field of "positive psychology" is maturing, developing real scientifically-backed theories on happiness and personal development. (a unignorable aspect of this, of course, is financial well-being, which is why many of us are here on news.YC)

If you're not doing what makes you happy, and have no plans nor desire to get out of this vicious cycle (I know, I've been there), then you will just keep spreading unhappiness to those you touch around you. (we all know someone who's constantly whining and complaining about things & being a constant downer to everyone)
I've found this really useful at work too. This product is really great for big companies.
Just to be clear: he didn't say "always." He said, "any time soon."
FWIW, PG's thoughts on philosophy are largely confined to "analytic philosophy", which I agree suffers from the problems he talks about. There is a whole other tradition of sorts (sometimes referred to as "continental philosophy"), taking a different path from Kant, including Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Badiou, etc. This side of philosophy tends to suffer from being extremely difficult to understand, but yields much genuine insight for those who take the time to study it.

There's also the pragmatic tradition, as DanielBMarkham notes. I'm less familiar with it, but many have seen commonalities between Heidegger and the Pragmatists.

Ayn Rand's writing can be inspirational, but her philosophy was poorly conceived.
The observable world. That's what meaning-space is.
The amount of multimedia on the internet will expand to fill the pipes just enough to slow down everyone else's mission critical data. Better find a way to optimize round trips or you're toast.
"There are things I know I learned from studying philosophy. The most dramatic I learned immediately, in the first semester of freshman year, in a class taught by Sydney Shoemaker. I learned that I don't exist. I am (and you are) a collection of cells that lurches around driven by various forces, and calls itself I. But there's no central, indivisible thing that your identity goes with. You could conceivably lose half your brain and live. Which means your brain could conceivably be split into two halves and each transplanted into different bodies. Imagine waking up after such an operation. You have to imagine being two people."

Whew, I'm glad I just watched Star Trek to learn this, and didn't spend tens of thousands at Harvard. (I'm referring to the numerous times someone was 'duplicated' in a transporter accident)
Programming Erlang
Facebook is like a money printing machine for developers. I know several apps that are making thousands a day.
Do you think the advertisers are getting their money's worth? In other words, is this thousands of dollars a day sustainable or should facebook apps ebay themselves while they still can?
I couldn't resist: http://fuzzwich.com/minivid/minivid.php?vid=3917

It's not cartoon animals, but...
I wonder if he has a wife/girlfriend.
>I can tell you what an integer is, what a square root is, and what a ratio is, and as a result, I can (by looking it up in a book and typing in the text, heh heh) prove that the square root of 2 can't be expressed as the ratio of two integers.

Not without words you can't.
Does anyone know the details of how this particular vaccine worked? The problem is that most companies are STILL approaching it as though it's a traditional virus like chicken pox. HIV-1 has a defective DNA polymerase, so everytime it replicates it introduces errors/mutations. This is why it changes so quickly.

Most of these vaccines try to get the body to produce antibodies that recognize the envelope protein. The envelope protein though is free to mutate without changing the action of the virus. People who somehow naturally produce antibodies making them immune to HIV have antibodies that target the active sites of gp120 or gp41. In other words, they need to mimic the receptor that HIV binds to in order to enter the cell. This area CANNOT mutate or else HIV will cease to be infectious.

There are problems tricking the body into producing one particular antibody (it's complicated, but it's based on how antibodies are generated). Therefore, I think synthetic antibodies should be mass produced and injected. These will target HIV-1 for destruction while also preventing it from being able to infect CD4+ cells. The problem with this is that producing mass quantities of antibodies is still very expensive.
What is God's Cup Size?
This might get a rise out of some people, but I believe that DHH is completely out of place in that list of hackers, and his response to the question about mathematics makes it painfully obvious.

So many things he says make me ashamed to admit I use Rails for most of my coding these days.
I think he meant something along the lines of "Few were sufficiently correct that they were remembered for their discovery."
No, it's for the same reason that intelligent design isn't taught in biology classes, or that the timecube theory isn't taught in physics classes, or that homeopathy isn't taught in med school. Rand's output was pseudophilosophy.
Nuclear fusion. Two possible avenues, google "polywell fusion" and look at focusfusion.org.

Polywell is getting the most press and has the best pedigree - its inventor is Robert Bussard, one of the inventors of the Tokamak. He believes he's proved that a new design of his will work...his experiments were funded for 12 years by the Navy. Now he's trying to raise about $5 million for a couple more test reactors. After that though, he'll need about $200 million for the full-scale demo (vs. $10 billion for the tokamak). Given the money, he figures he's about five years away from a full-scale, power-producing reactor. Most likely, once he's proven the concept a little better, the money for the big reactor won't be too hard to get.

Focus fusion needs about $10 million total, some of which is already in the pipeline from a licensing deal. If it works, they're only about 3 years away, and a reactor would only cost $300K to build. They're less well-known but have some interesting results so far, and they've got an active research program going.

Both projects are shooting for boron fusion, which is harder to achieve than the deuterium fusion used by the tokamak, but is almost totally non-radioactive. And both projects believe they can produce power at about 1/50 the cost of fossil fuels.

Both have the potential to make a heckuva rocket, too...access to space for the middle class, manned trip to Mars in a couple weeks.

I really think this is our one shot to get out of the mess we're in. Without it our future looks grim...more and more demand for oil, with diminishing supplies, global warming, wars over the scraps. With fusion, it would all turn around.

If you want to save the world and kick off the biggest economic boom in history, all for just a few million bucks, give these projects a look. I've donated a little to both but I have way less money than Paul Graham.
I wonder how close it will be to this?

http://mindrosity.blogspot.com/2007/09/how-google-could-beat...
Will the immune system accept a foreign antibody?
But software has the shortest feedback loop between high metaphysical concepts and practical instantiation. For example, OO is a variation on the notion of Forms.