skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have rethought what you have said, and I think I am now closer to understanding what your question is. You are posing the question of what to do with an input, not the operation itself. For instance, if I feed the network an image of 5 and 3, with the output being the image 8, the network would not perform addition but some other functional mapping. Is that the feature you are suggesting that it should 'understand'?
Most programmers are not nearly as good as they think they are. Learning how much you suck at programming is the very first step to getting any good at it.
Coming from a country that doesn't tip, I agree completely about that tipping is all about custom and social expectation. Its not a transaction that makes a lot of sense without a lot of societal rules governing it. I certainly don't think that markets that operate with tipping run more efficiently than they would without.

The desires that might lead to a micropayment, like for respect and identification with a particular band, would perhaps be better served with a different macro good. If you can get the music for free, then you're paying out of a want to support and connect with the band, maybe that would be better served by asking people to buy a t-shirt or something.
I wish somebody would have told me they were having a contest.

Here's my entry from my last job: http://darkcalgary.com/mydesk.jpg

My workspace is the grease stained chair with only one arm. I chose that one on purpose because if I had a nicer chair it would be stolen every two days.

I worked at that desk for more than five years.
DARPA Urban Challenge Live Webcast
Starts at 7am Pacific. Some serious hacking, dynamic programming, and tire-screeching action.
I don't like the way the article presents hard work: "the very best rise because they take great pains to maximise that gift". Pain? That way, no one's going to try. The part in which they say "that's a task not everyone's up to" is particularly discouraging. So, informative as an article, lame as an advice.

Also, I think that they left out the inner spark (curiosity in the case of smart guys). What drives you to practise? It ain't discipline, or at least you don't consider it like that. You are not forcing yourself to pratise/read/study/train, you truly want to do it. Granted, you sometimes trick yourself into doing it, that could be considered discipline, but not the bulk of it.
If anyone has more substantial information or discussions about this, feel free to link it. 5 minutes on Google turned up very little.

http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2006/11/scheme_out_python...

From what I recall, most of the examples from the first few lessons can be trivially rewritten in Python.
One thing that's missing from the article is that there isn't just one kind of hard work. Some people work very hard and very inefficiently. They never analyse how they do things and how they could do them better.
I had read it somewhere before: it's known that genius is in the hard discipline, but it's not known where the genius takes such a great motivation to involve in that kind of discipline.
(Against) the cult of genius
ah ok, still though - requires the user to make a mistake. I'm not too worried about that sort of thing. If I make a mistake, I only have myself to blame.
If something can infiltrate my computer without me making a mistake, that's the time to worry...
Larry and Sergey Won't Respect You In The Morning
If you want them to learn a specific concept that we know, they can learn it, yes.
I too would have liked the article to mention that, it would be useful. But it's probably out of it's scope, though.
You tend to find that 'hard work == discipline == genius' is the illusory conclusion made by those on the outside looking in. When we are truly inspired, in the 'flow' if you like, doesn't that feel like the easiest, most natural state you have ever experienced?

Ptn nails it in his comment - "they left out the inner spark". Absolutely. Genius is simply the release of the inner spark and that process is not something that could be characterised by effort.

Here's an alternative perspective -
http://www.life2point0.com/2007/02/learning_to_fly.html and
http://www.life2point0.com/2006/06/the_little_book.html
TagATune: a Game for Sound and Music Annotation [pdf]
Hey Michael - I just sent an activation email your way. Have fun.
"It's as easy as starting a blog. [What's the metaphor?]"

Well, that is definitely a simile. It is pretty embarrassing to mix up fundamental literary devices in a writing analysis, which reaches the single conclusion that you simply ought to not make writing mistakes.

( http://members.ozemail.com.au/~ddiamond/analog.html )
I was out for there a while ago for an interview. Are there any females or nightlife? For your average single male in his 20's early 30's, other than the possibility of getting rich, being a cube drone in a city populated by (mostly male) cube drones is not an attractive prospect. It is very close to my definition of hell.
Old one, but pretty good about hard work's criterias:

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/...
F+%$ it. It worked.
as an alternative to going to a proper Ivy league school
Depends what you want. The pioneer valley (Amherst/Northampton/etc.) is incredibly beautiful. OTOH, there's not all that much to do. If you like outdoorsy stuff, hiking, woodlands, and rolling fields, Amherst is for you. If you want a bustling social scene and lots of people with common interests, stick to Boston. There are a couple of nice coffeeshops & bars in both Amherst and Northampton, but these are towns with a population of 7000 vs. 600,000 for Boston.

Personally, I can't stand living without some green in my life, so I loved Amherst. But I was in college, and it's rare that college students lack a social life. I have friends who stayed behind after graduation and some of them complained about being bored (though one of them ended up in Vermont instead, go figure).
The history of the digital camera
they're talking about passion
Thanks. I look forward to it. I have an open mind.

Regards,
MM
In Hungary using Lisp?
I wonder:
a) Where else YC advertised.
b) If they stopped after "News from the Front".
If people need to be coerced or prodded away from a cube job, they are not startup material. Maybe GOOG is the YC entrance exam.
This comment is definitely under the wrong story. I don't know whether it is my fault or a bug. Sorry.
I will have to disagree with you there. If the gap between you and your coworker/chessopponent is too great there are no lessons learned. Trying to assimilate knowledge too fast will only lead to superficial understanding and frustration.
Can anyone here draw?
I need some anime/kid like characters drawn for my site.
"Potential" is just a term created by lazy parents as a justification for doing a half-ass job at raising their kids.
My cousin is a caricature artist and can draw up anything you imagine. noasart.net
Sounds like meditation.
What does Sarbanes-Oxley have to do with locking down parts of the source tree? I worked there a couple of years after you did, and there were a few parts of the source tree that were not public, but that was usually for crypto reasons. Config files, not algorithms.

I'm not sure what to tell you about Google today versus then. Yes, you will be a cog, but in one of the shiniest and most well-maintained machines ever. There's a non-negligible chance of doing a significant 20% project.

The one thing you'll notice is how much stricter the standards are for testing and code quality generally, while the codebase has expanded exponentially. Sometimes this results in code that's so great it practically makes you weep. Other times, especially for the really old projects, it becomes a morass of incomprehensibility but whose quality is carefully husbanded. I knew of a guy who spent weeks getting one change into the basic webserving code, because running all the tests took an entire day, and by the time he was done, other people had committed new changes that broke his change. It was Xeno's Changelist.

Maybe you can answer me one thing: in the early days, did people think they were a moral force for good in the world? As Dave Winer correctly notes, one of the amazing/insufferable things about Google is that many engineers there really think this -- especially the pre-IPO crowd. It's the sort of attitude that enables them to open for business in totalitarian China, because how could you deny the Chinese the wonderfulness of Google?

Also note the proliferation of teams which make promotional videos starring themselves. This started with a team that happens to have a very charismatic dude working for them, but it seems that everyone's doing it now.
That the tip is a percentage of the bill makes no sense whatsoever. Bringing you Filets de venaison frits sur leur sauce a l'echalote is no more work than bringing you a Sloppy Joe with fries.

The only explanation I can think of is that it is a way for restaurant owners to encourage waiters to encourage customers to buy expensive, high-margin food.
I'm not seeing that? Could you explain? (Maybe I didn't read thouroughly enough though)
So backwards compatibility isn't an issue?
UK; Saudi visit. (yes, the band really did play that music!)
Can I see the mashup?
What kind of salaries do people get working there?
You're right, but remember that an infiltrated computer is bad for everyone on the web, not just the owner.

(Also, I'd place at least some blame on the people trying to trick you into installing malware, however stupid you'd have to be to actually do it.)
I didn't see the change I wanted:

* Works at all and doesn't insert 100 unclosed div tags into your code.

Sorry I'm bitter with that thing. It's the one in WordPress, right?
Brown uses Scheme for one of the intro tracks - it has two, the other is taught in Java.
There's 1% of chance an entrepreneur would look forward for a job.
Your upbringing has a big influence on the type of career that you'll consider. Someone who is "startup material" might simply not have been exposed to the right stimuli.
Steve Ballmer was prodded away from an MBA.
wikipedia?

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising
Type-Level Instant Insanity [PDF]
Check out article 3 in the issue. He writes a program to solve a simple puzzle game entirely in the Haskell type system. Including building up notions for booleans, lists, functions, and map/filter/comprehensions from scratch.
They should not have prodded.
If they haven't been exposed, in the area where that ad was posted (Stanford) they are comatose or clueless. In either case, who has time to "stimulate" in a startup context? My guess is a person like that would end up being a net drag on moving quickly and executing.
Was this Google fault or the 3rd-party fault?
Is this meant to be a double entendre?

People that work for big companies, don't earn Larry and Sergey's respect "in the morning". So big company employees == sluts.

PLEASE SOMEONE TELL ME, HOW CAN I GET A JOB AT THE BIGGEST COMPANY ON EARTH?
15 best websites to sell your photos and earn money
Reminder: The DARPA Car Race is on
The webcast doesn't seem to be working ( :-(( ), but I am trying to follow the action from various blog posts and it seems that 3 (of 11) robots have already dropped out. The Stanford vehicle (Junior) has completed phase (one of 3).

I envy people who can follow the race from the race course - this years challenge is Urban Navigation, following traffic rules etc.

I am vicariously following the race from Bangalore by reading blogs on the race (here is the latest post I could find http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9810371-1.html).

I thought others might be interested and hence the reminder. please vote down if inappropriate.
Thanks for posting this. Being in Arizona makes it easy to lose track of when the time changes for the rest of the country.
The 6 essential things you need to know about Google's OpenSocial
3 days to reality [Startup Weekend Boston]
It's a bleak conclusion to this "startup social experiment" when it took 52 people and 54 hours to create that, erm, company.

Looks like good times though.
"Work hard".

Okay, thanks. Actually, we already knew that--you know, the purpose of research is to discover how to reduce the amount of effort required for a given result. That is, "How do you move a boulder?" can be answered with "Work hard" or "Invent a bulldozer." ONE of those answers didn't require much hard work to conceive.
Yeah. That's what happens when you have Dan Friedman and Kent Dybvig on staff.
If so, Wozniak was not startup material.
"PLEASE SOMEONE TELL ME, HOW CAN I GET A JOB AT THE BIGGEST COMPANY ON EARTH?"

Just walk into any Wal-Mart[1]; I'm sure they've got applications lying around somewhere.

[1]http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2007/perfo...
Yes, if by "something mean" you imply that there is some damage (e.g. if you break your neighbor's window when no one is watching). When you download some file, you can't do damage.

I both pirate and buy movies, music, books, etc. Whether I choose to pirate or buy something is only a matter of convenience, not a matter of moral. I bought your books while they are available legally and for free on the web just because I prefer the convenience of a book to badly rendered fonts on a LCD screen, not because I felt good giving you money :)

edit: it's no surprise that a fundamental assumption of economics is that individuals only act in their interest.
Ah, I knew the Woz would be on the way. I agree, but in his case Jobs had incontrovertible evidence that he could execute: the Apple I, teletype terminals, and probably dozens of other things that he had built. He also had evidence of a large market: the inferior Sol computer was selling at 1000 a month. I am talking about the situation that YC is in, where you don't have great evidence of superior skill and craftmanship and a proven large market.
You would be surprised how few people at Stanford have any idea what's going on in the tech world.

Most people are so caught up in studying for the next exam or finishing the next problem set that they let all these opportunities pass them by.
but this ads social networking features and a tag cloud: THE FUTURE IS NOW!
I could care less what Larry, Sergey, or anyone else thinks. I'd rather have respect from myself.
Well, this is awesome. I am throwing away my cell phone immediately.

But, keep an eye out for your completion: http://www.zombo.com/ .

Good luck with your Series A.
You have shattered my illusions of Mecca.
Very funny, especially coming right after Bush referred to Cheney as Darth Vader.
It seems to me that if you can get 5x more work done than someone who's a competent professional in an area, that's genius-like in of itself.

I'm sure reading news.ycombinator.com on Saturday afternoons will make me 5-15x more productive.
Work is overrated.
Is this real or a photoshop job?
I'm watching the webcast. 6 of the 11 have made it to the 3rd challenge.

Really amazing stuff.
"Thats a lot of places for one state" -- Not if you consider the huge distance from each other. SF to LA 6.5 hr of driving, SF to San Diego, over 9 hrs.

In the same distance in europe you would have Rome, Milano, Paris, Berlin, Zurich, Vienna, Frankfurt.... and so many other cities in between.
real... look at the deformation and ridges and translucency
Stanford is the first to finish the challenge. They won't know who the winner is until the points are tallied.

Carnegie Mellon is the second to finish the challenge.
Virginia Tech just pulled in to be the third team to complete the challenge.
Ericsson's research is very informative, but it is fallacious to use it to discount the role of genetics.

To illustrate, basic perception of quantity is an innate skill that develops as the brain matures; it generally solidifies when a child reaches something like 5-7 years of age (don't quote me; I'll dig sources if need be). Now when a kid learns calculus at age 10, it is impossible to explain it simply by hard work. And unlike the article, I would put Mozart into this category.

What is deducible from the research is simply that P( successful | no hard work) = 0, but P( successful | work hard) > 0.
The next team has 4 more submissions to complete, so it is going to take a little more. Current order is Little Ben (Ben Franklin), Talos (MIT), Skynet (Cornell).

I think to this point there have only been 2 collisions, both involving Talos. They were relatively minor and clearly did not cause a DQ or cause any noticeable difference in behavior.

This is an impressive leap in technology from the Grand Challenge. At this point, I think that the remaining three are going to finish too.
He got it wrong; Apple is Nikon of course. Apple needs a Cannon :-)
Identical Twins Separated at Birth
Google vs Yahoo! over the years
Don't do 50-50; do 51-49 so there is a clear majority partner. It can be you or the other person but you need a way to avoid deadlock. You can involve a third person and go 49-49-2 so that you have a tie-breaker (or 49.99-49.99-0.02). Packard was 60% and Hewlett was 40% as an FYI.

The advice to do a vesting schedule (or a buyback/unvesting) is also good. You need to look beyond just this one person and think about what other "hats" or capabilities you are going to need to achieve your objectives. You may want to setup an option agreement. But you are going need to create some kind of company, and should consult with an attorney.

Denny Miu's advice to reach a "meeting of the minds" first and expressing it in plain English is spot on, don't rely on an attorney to help you reach an agreement with a partner, rely on an attorney to point out risks and issues that you may not have considered (e.g. setting up a buy-sell agreement).

Many more companies fail from a lack of customer development than product development so finding a partner who can help balance your strengths and offering them a substantial chunk of equity is not unreasonable.

I hope this helps./SeanM http://www.skmurphy.com
Interestingly, MIT just got snagged by a gate that had swung open. It was a very thin gate, like a triangle of pipes. It had been blown open in the wind.

It was interesting to watch because it was clear that the robot didn't know what to do to get around it. This was probably because it was at an intersection, so it was seeing the gate and the stop line. The bot had its turn signal on, so it new that it was at the intersection.

After watching the bots religiously adhere to traffic rules, it was an interesting comparison to watch the course officials speeding down the road to remove the obstacle.
"Genius is simply the release of the inner spark."

Good remark. I think you still need effort, but that's the kind of removing obstacles between the spark and the outcome, rather than the kind of blindly digging here and there hoping you'll find a gem. I guess that's the reason of the importance of the mentor mentioned in the article.

And yes, it's simple, yet so difficult to achieve for even a slight bit of ego, lazyness or even over-eagerness get in the way... (from my experience of >20yrs of practicing instruments and acting; yet there's long way to go).
The Old College Try: Who Will Give Students Their Facebook Back?
4th vehicle to finish: Little Ben from team Ben Franklin Racing Team.
Google broke off talks with Free411.com to start a competing service? So much for "Don't be evil."
Can someone please explain me why Google stock price is so freaking high and doesn't involve some conspiracy theory?
MIT just finished, that makes it the 5th to complete.

Skynet (Cornell) is the final finisher.

That means that ale 6 that made it out of the 1st mission have completed the course. They'll still need to add up the points to figure out the actual winners.

More than half finished the challenge. I think that is pretty huge. I can't wait for better journalists than me to write about this. Robotics took a huge leap today.
Sorry...

One more thing before I shut up.

If you only watch a single video about this, look for where two bots are stopped at an intersection and are in a right-of-way situation.

Only 2 collisions that I'm aware of, and they were very minor.
More GPhone Details Leaked: gPhone OS Codenamed Android, Is Full OS With SDK?
Most people are not 'startup material'. When you're searching for low-probability events it helps to cast the net as wide as possible.

So rather than try to second-guess why every source of people (GOOG offers to Stanford) is unlikely to give you what you want, give every source the chance to stand up and grab an opportunity.
Sending his cancer a signal - Radio engineer invents machine that targets cancer cells. And it works!
Ask HackerNews: New website launched QCrunch.com. Feedback?
You are quite right Shiro.. it does take effort, but only as long as we believe that it takes effort ;-)

The central thesis of 'The little book of Flow' I linked to above is that those sublime moments when we get in touch with our inner spark, where inspiration gushes, answers flow from us before the questions, and we have all-on just keeping up... are simply the moments we, per chance, relax into our true nature, our natural (though perhaps forgotten) state. Notice that these moments invariably occur when we are happy and relaxed and the mind lets slip it's incessant control over of our life.,, and we suddenly feel more alive and connected to everything. If this is true (and it's not difficult to test this for ourselves) then what preparation or effort or understanding could be needed to know our own nature?

Of course, the ego doesn't want us to hear this - as our 'self-concept' it's under threat as once our mind expands to a greater awareness of reality it's impossible to shrink back again. So it's the nature of the ego (the human condition if you like) to believe that we must strive, practice, seek answers. But that doesn't make it either necessary or true.

At end of the day it can, if we wish, come down to a simple choice: - Shall I be true the truth as I find it - 'the spark', or true to the latest idea about what is still needed?

What I am long-windedly trying to say here Shiro, is that from my experience the problem is not the 'obstacles between the spark and the outcome' but the belief that there are obstacles between the spark and the outcome that need to be overcome. Does that make sense?
Apple. Sony. There.
Is Ruby the New VB?
Okay I get it, the joke was a bit of a reach. can i keep some of my karma?
i dont see this competing very strongly with

1) my bookmarks
2) google homepage
I, Robot: The Man Behind the Google Phone
Thanks for the feedback! We started with the Google homepage, and just tried to add a few links to make it better. That being said, it only adds a little bit to the google homepage. But it does make that Home button a lot more useful. And we will post statistics on what pages people visit the most.
In more ways then one I think this is true. VB was never powerful enough to implement itself though, not sure about ruby (time will tell).
I think it's fine for your homepage but I don't see this becoming very popular.
The difference is that ruby doesn't suck.
Don Dodge: 50M Facebook users don't care about OpenSocial
being a cube drone anywhere is hellish. I'd take Palo Alto over Scranton. SF vs. Boston, I'm going to have to go with SF. Boston vs. Palo Alto... I'd probably go with Boston. SF vs. New York... that's a tougher decision.
why not grab the feed from each of those links and create a collabpsable div that opens with the recent headlines and links from each site. that would go a long way towards making your site useful, sort of like a hacker's version of popurls.com
I agree with Don. Facebook was growing fast and gaining market share before they released their platform, not because of it.