skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Man, do I know the feeling of guilt you describe. And yes I am going to change the world. And hopefully I will become loaded (as if not the majority of the western world already is). But I will always be a Calvinist, not by choice, but by guilt. But I have realized a long time ago, I was not only lucky getting the proper physical and geographical properties, but also getting a real talent in one specific area: abstract reasoning. And so I can do 2 things; Be a volunteer for something in which I am not incredibly good (I'm not so much a 'sensitive' guy) or I could feel obligated to exploit the talent to the best I can (and enjoy it) and earn money of people that are living well enough, and spend that in the best possible way. Then I would be helping the world more. I feel it is everybodies obligation to reach for the best in themselves and use that for the interest of mankind.

Cornelius
I wish him the best of luck. This is a classic David v. Goliath story. May his victory prevent injustice around the world.
Programming in Haskell is not difficult. It is easier to program in Haskell than it is in most other languages, or at least the ones I know of. I don't find Haskell particularly interesting for any of its so-called mind-blowing features, it's just a practical programming language that lets you get stuff done and communicate your intent to the computer.

I do not want the programming part to be harder.
I dunno about math. But conclusively telling people in clear terms that we were all monkeys once asserts equality of humankind in a brutally ironic way.
Steven Pinker's papers and books, although you have probably already encountered those.
He is different, sure. But no "true hacker" made a better web framework. Perhaps there is something in his mentality we can all learn from.
Five must read entrepreneurship books
Contractors Finally Have a Web 2.0 Tool
This tool, launched at the TechCrunch 40, promises to save thousands of dollars and many hours for contractors.
Dubai gets stake in Nasdaq
Parsec is indeed a pain in the behind -- it could have been written as a monad transformer (with the current version implemented as a transformation of the Identity monad). It takes a bit of work to make a monad transforming version out of the Parsec source code, a bit more if you want to generalize it out to support parsing byte vectors (as opposed to linked lists of characters) or other things, and overall it's just a pain, and you end up with three monad transformers atop one another, if you do it "right." So then you think, "ok, I'll just make a general parsing typeclass so I can newtype derive solid parsing types," and then boilerplate instances begin, and that takes O(n^2) code overall, where n is the number of monad transformer typeclasses you want to have playing nice with each other. And don't get me started on functional dependencies.
Social network not social graph?
Tech tycoons dominate US rich list
Neutrons not so neutral after all, study says
But if you have to do new features, you're screwed. So, yeah, I guess it is the final version...new ones are such a pain. (I don't dislike C++. It's fine for systems-level programming. But I'm not using it for anything else.)
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.

Insights such as?
Winer makes a good point here. Don't let the technologists hijack a meaningful and understandable description with something that belongs in a CS lecture. Exclusion comes in many forms, one of them is language.

Keep it plain and simple in public.
I'm sure you know that the idea of using code in templates is controversial anyway. But I do like it, and Mako, imo, solves the issue with Python very well.

% for row in rows:
* Here is a row: ${row}
% endfor

http://www.makotemplates.org/

That's kind of 'hackish', but not bad at all if you ask me.

Compared to an ERB snippet it is about the same (though you'd probably use each and a block here in Ruby.

<% for row in row %>
* <%= row %>
<% end %>
i agree with both of you, but i agree with tyler more.
Cause and effect is a complex thing, but at least partly because of Paul Graham, I quit a 9-5 job and tried to start a startup. Whether that was a wise thing to do or not, given the circumstances, is quite another question. :-)

So PG's a pretty useful philosopher, at least according to his own test: "The test of utility I propose is whether we cause people who read what we've written to do anything differently afterward." Good stuff, PG.
modern medicine technology could sooner or later cure all gene-related dieases, i am pretty sure of it,all we need is TIME
Tech and mobile events of note in the UK
I'm going to be at Future of Web Apps, MobileCamp and Future of mobile. Any other news.YC'ers at those and want to meet up?
It's going to be much, much easier to cure gene-related diseases in our children. Eventually we'll get both, but it's much easier to genetically modify the unborn than to engineer the living.
Vodafone in mobile web storm
How are valuations for startups established?
How exactly do VCs and the like figure out how much a company is potentially worth? X amount of user, demographic coverage + allure, X% growth month-to-month?
Why are we here? - Colleges ignore life's biggest questions, and we all pay the price
With companies that are too new to be profitable, it has more to do with what the venture capitalist is willing to invest for a certain % ownership than an appraisal of the actual value of a company.
A profitable company has earnings.

A public company (or even one that has recently sold shares on SOME market) has a price.

Divide the price by the earnings, and you get the P/E ratio.

There is a range of sane P/E ratios. No stock ever trades at a P/E of 5,000. 1,5,and 10 are plausible P/E ratios.

One rule of thumb (advanced by the Motley Fool guys) is that the P/E ratio should be about the same as the P/E should be around the percentage annual growth (P/E/G).

Anyway, let's assume that your startup is going to sell someday for a P/E of 5. That tells us that the price will be 5 times the earnings.

So: tell me what you expect your earnings will be at this future date?

Let's say that you're entering a $1 billion/yr market, and you expect to grab 10% of it: your revenue will be $100 million. You expect that of every $100 that enters the company as revenue, 90% will be spent on salaries, Jolt, and Aeron chairs. So you've got a 10% profit ratio...and on that $100 million of revenue, you expect to earn $10 million of earnings.

Jump back to the P/E stuff. If your P/E is 5, then you've just described a company that might be worth $50 million.

Of course, maybe it would actually be worth $300 million because it's a strategic buy for someone else. Or maybe it would actually be worth $0, because it's based on a stupid idea that will be killed by someone else.

...but that's a first stab at the valuation if everything goes right, and the company succeeds wildly, and someone else buys it at a typical P/E ratio.

There are other valuation formulas, but they tend to boil down to this one at the base (i.e. the demographic coverage, etc. that you mention are ways to figure out total market, or your share of the market, etc.)
Isn't it true on any platform that you could be shut out if the APIs or underlying technology changes?
Unmatched Style Gallery: Great place for design inspiration
I also had problems with the sentence, probably because it doesn't ring especially true. I can name the discoverer of most of what I know about physics, right from the names: Newtonian physics, Bohr's model, the Schrodinger equation, Euclidian geometry, Gaussian curves... E=Mc2...
Speaking of hacker food, this is the breakfast I pretty much live off (but use less oil)
Give me a scenario in which it is in Google's interest to shut down their social networking API overnight without warning. Just because they can doesn't mean they will.
Higher-order functions do entail a sacrifice to readability compared with plain loops. The reason should be fairly obvious: loops use indentation and syntax to show visually the structure of what they do, but that goes away when you pack the logic into a higher-order function. A function call is a function call; they all look the same.

Fortunately, there exist solutions to this problem. The Haskell solution is to make your code so damn concise that you don't need to add any structure to it. The Lisp approach is to allow you to program the representation of your code in arbitrary ways.

Both are, I think, superior to the Python solution, which is simply to revert back to the imperative style.
Personally I see Galt as something of a disproof-by-overextension of some of Rand's ideas. Galt was her "perfect man". For a character to be human, the author must be able to get inside their head. For even Ayn Rand herself to be unable to thus think like Galt indicates to me that she was unable to make her own thoughts follow her own ideals. As any Rand follower will agree, the quickest way to get your thoughts to stall and boggle is to try and deny a natural axiom, or push through a contradiction. (Similarly you get much the same stall-and-boggle leading to an authorial 3rd person stance, when other erroneous ideas are tried to destruction - compare most utopian fiction.) So that's a strong warning signal.

What could be the fault she ran into? I think she had a bit of the "chasing words" disease. The words for her were "rational", "mind", "self-interest" - and those are words that break down quite quickly and thoroughly when you look at the brain and the human organism in context. (In her defense, she was writing some 50 years before the science would become any good.)
Here's what I don't like about Rand's work:

It flies in the face of economics - while many economists tend towards the libertarian side of things, the honest ones acknowledge things like externalities, merit goods, and other market 'abnormalities'. People live in communities and have for thousands of years, and there are aspects of that that you can't simply throw out the window in favor of The Individual. Her thinking strikes me as some sort of utopia that is about as relevant to the real world as Karl Marx, albeit in a direction that I personally find more appealing. However, I find the writings of people like Milton Friedman more compelling, because they discuss the real world, human frailties and all, and are less absolute/extreme.

I also find all the scenes involving female protagonists being more or less raped as weird and disturbing. But that's perhaps tangential to her philosophy.

All told, though... I'm just not interested in "philosophy" as this wishy washy thing, that's not my thinking style. I prefer things like economics, or at most, going one removed from that and talking about what a society wants to accomplish and how it wants to treat its citizens.
AJ's Jewish.
CSS Frameworks + CSS Reset: Design From Scratch
You don't have to write the same CSS-code or (X)HTML-Markup over and over again. Whatever project you're starting to work with, at some point you have to define classes and IDs you've already defined in your previous web-projects. To avoid unnecessary mistakes you might want to start not from a blank file, but from an almost "perfect" scratch.
Video of Michael Moritz interviewing Marc Andreesen, David Filo and Chad Hurley
It's a guess by someone with experience making those kinds of guesses.
Someone suggested mind uploading too:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42607

But that, like your Star Trek example, is more pie-in-the-sky science fiction. While it may make you think about the issue, it doesn't force you to confront it in the same way. Brain splitting seems more plausible; I wouldn't be surprised to see something like that in a few years.
I think you'd get more interesting answers if the question were asked like this: Why do people discuss the relative merits of programming languages instead of spending that time learning a new one?

As currently stated, it's loaded with presuppositions that are hard to overcome if you want real answers. (eg: This post is language advocacy, language advocacy is a waste of time.)
It's done totally by the seat of the pants, based on how formidable the founders seem, how sexy the idea seems (as far as the investor can tell), and above all, how much interest there is from other investors.
Speed Up Your Torrents With Ono
The robots.txt Adventure
Zero-Energy MkLotus prefab in front of SF city hall
The Pirate Bay files suit against big media cos for DDoSing them
That's one weakness of Objectivism which has become more apparent to me in the last few years. The philosophy seems to almost construct a platonic form of "rationality" and "self-interest" and never really reconnect with concretes, staying entirely in the abstract. So it ends up handling most cases pretty well, but a lot special cases get left behind.

Still, when I re-think through her reasoning again and again, I don't see how one could reach any different fundamental principles. Special cases are just that, and the best course seems to be to just deal with them as they arise.
>So if you're still feeling guilty, target some investment money in saving time for scientists -- all scientists. If you could save them a few hours each week, imagine how much value you could add?

One very useful webapp would be a personal bibliography database, i.e. BibDesk for the web. Let me create an account, and upload papers. Give me tags, comments and full text search, as well as bibtex output. Maybe even the ability to share papers with other authors (possible copyright issues here).

Organizing papers is painful right now. My home and office are rsynced together, but that's useless when I'm in other locations, and I don't have full text search (just a list of folders by name of author). Most of my coworkers don't even do that.
Should Local Search Show Cross Border Results?
This has been a long time frustration of mine that while searching in the NYC area I often have to deal with nearby results from NJ/CT and boroughs I would never ever go to. Sorting by distance just doesn't cut it in densely populated places.

Any ideas for a solution aside from forcing users to check off boxes or selecting predetermined neighborhoods by admins?
If you haven't already, I highly recommend reading, "Philosophy for Dummies" by Tom Morris, Ph.D.. You may find some of the presuppositions you present in your essay to be challenged.
Why is it so important to learn new languages all the time? Wouldn't you rather just get your startup going as quickly as possible?

The implementation is not inherently interesting. It's just a means to an end.
I have always thought that the goal of philosophy was to change the way I behaved or thought. Likewise, I minored in psychology to understand the nature of my own behavior so that I would be more capable of changing it. To loosely quote everyone's favorite philosopher "everyone is a philosopher whether they realize it or not". Meaning most people are living by their subconscious impulses, but the philosopher becomes introspective and question how they are living. Nothing could be more practical, but as PG points out philosophy does not usually have this goal in mind.
Nice minefield metaphor. I usually call C++ a pointless annoying trivia contest but I really like the image of a minefield.

Maybe programming in C++ is like a game show where if you get all the answers right the grand prize is not having to go in to work every weekend for a month to hunt down memory leaks but if you get even a single one wrong you have to walk through a minefield while a bloodthirsty studio audience cheers you on.

"Oops, sorry contestant #1. You forget to say that what you were deleting is an array. Since your code compiled you can still stay in the game by walking across that minefield."

Step, step, pause, step, pause, breathe deeply, step, step, KABOOM!
I've worked as an analyst for an early-stage VC firm, and at that stage valuation is much more an art than a science. With pre-revenue companies, there are two important questions for the VCs to ask themselves:

1. How much money do they need?
2. How large a percentage of equity do we want?

#1 can be easily determined. #2 needs to be played with a bit, as a good VC firm won't want to take enough equity to demotivate the founders at all, yet still wants to see an attractive return (based very roughly on their own financial projections for your startup).

#1 * 1/#2 = post-money (after investment) valuation

post-money valuation - #1 = pre-money (before investment) valuation

This is, of course, how it works after a firm has decided to make an investment in your startup. Good VCs won't really even bother with pre-revenue company valuations until after they've decided that they want to work with you.
Define 'precise'. :P

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_the...
I started plunking out twinkle twinkle and star wars on the organ when I was 4 or 5 or something. I started saxophone lessons in 4th grade, piano in 5th grade. I 'wrote' one piece as an exercise while taking piano. My teacher gave me a chord progression and I came up with a few patterns that sounded an awful lot like the overworld music in Final Fantasy IV. I stopped piano after 9th grade and did drama and choir instead. I sang in a Vocal Jazz ensemble, and played sax in the Jazz band, and had lots of opportunity to improvise.

In college my introductory computer science classes were really boring and easy, while the introductory music classes were challenging and interesting. Sophomore year I declared a double major in Music Theory. I took composition lessons for 1 or 2 semesters, I can't remember exactly, but I didn't get much out of them. Two of the "Three Short Pieces for Piano" were written in lessons. Writing for class was really hard, because I felt like I had to please the professor, though he tried to tell me to write whatever I wanted. I agonized over every detail, which got discouraging, because usually there was no correct answer. I also had huge confidence problems because of the rigid, mathematical way I thought music should be appreciated. That is, I thought there was no way I could ever come up with anything original, and I thought original==good.

One day a few years ago, after listening to dozens of Mozart pieces dozens of times, hearing how amazing it was, and knowing how many people poo pooh'd Mozart for using predictable harmonic progressions; I said 'screw it, I'm writing a classical sonata and don't care how unoriginal it turns out to be.' I did it because that's what I liked and that's what I wanted to write. I've had a lot of fun since then, though I haven't made any money.
Damn, now I have to learn Haskell.
FWIW, I too got stuck at that sentence like nowhere else in the text; it took me some tries to macro-expand. Maybe your proofreaders got past it without blinking because they are more acquainted with that point?

(Although Newtonian physics and Euclidean geometry are not really counterexamples.)
PG, Does this mean you are starting a project of some sort?
Gee, imagine waking up hungover after a total blackout and discovering that on your arm...
Possibly The Coolest Facebook Application To Date
"If this is half as effective in humans as it is in mice it could be that half of patients could be cured or at least given one to two years extra of high quality life." Um, Dr. Cui, there's a big difference between those two outcomes.

Research like this is wonderful, obviously, but it speaks to the general crappiness of science journalism that articles like this are the norm. It just strikes me as reckless when stories appear about how researchers are on the verge of curing cancer. Is it just me, or have they been two years away for about 40 years?

So few drugs make it to market, and the ones that do take so long, that it's high time for underpromising to become the norm. If by 2009 Dr. Cui accomplishes half of what this article says he will, I will very happily eat my shoe.
"Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, I am here today to convince you that the Great Gatsby could not possibly be an allegory for animal beastiality. I have three reasons for this belief. First, none of the main characters in Gatsby are animals. While Daisy does have a pet dog, there is no reason to believe that Gatsby ever expresses an interest in man-on-dog relations. [insert paragraphs two and three.] In conclusion, the Great Gatsby could not possibly be an allegory for animal beastiality, and it would be simply absurd to believe otherwise."

/Agreeing with pg, intelligence can only be demonstrated by finding what is, not what isn't.
Heh,

"I hate you with the radiance of a thousand suns. I wish you get the Y Combinator tatooed, in Java!"
Is he serious about this being the coolest application to date? I mean really, a music video that will end up embedded on even more people's profile page and which will be interesting maybe the first time I watch it but then I'll be annoyed with because it has no point whatsoever?

If that's the best Facebook has to offer...
It is the internet. You can build an interesting app even faster without touching Facebook's platform at all.
is it a facebook only app? is the idea so simple and obvious that you're scared to even say what it is? are you just the idea man or are you also going to be doing some development work on this project (css + javascript count)?
The Mobile 2.0 Start-Up Ecosystem
I hope the following links will help you ...

http://www.venturehacks.com/term-sheet-hacks
http://paulgraham.com/equity.html
Here's what happened: I added the app, made a message to see what it looked like, and then sent it to no one because I didn't think my friends would care. Then I removed the application. Granted, some people will definitely get a kick out of sending and receiving this, but its replay value is close to zero.

It's weird how TechCrunch has some occasionally interesting insights but usually manages to revert quickly to ridiculous pronouncements like this. This "app" is certainly one of the coolest ads I've seen in a little while. I'm definitely more likely to buy the next Dylan album I see.

But it is far from being a real application, let alone the coolest one ever. The coolest app on Facebook four months after the platform launch is a one-trick pony pushing a Bob Dylan album? That says a hell of a lot about f8, but it says even more about TechCrunch.

The tech print media has earned a trend-monkey reputation, but tech bloggers make them look like the Encyclopedia Britannica.
People seem to have different expectations of Facebook apps. It would be useful to understand those expectations well.
I swear the comment section attached to that link has an average IQ of somewhere between fish and salamander.
http://paulgraham.com/articles.html
Is "Do Unto Others" Written Into Our Genes?
Actually, there is a good reason TO teach pseudo-science in science classes: to expose the student to literature which is not science. One of the most critical features that defines a person as a "scientist" is his healthy skepticism. This is very often NOT taught in science classes.

Since most pseudo-scientists have a genuine concern over some problem, and they have obviously acquired what little scientific exposure they did from their schooling, then I claim that if more science classes covered pseudo-science, explaining why it is not true science, then I predict a distinct drop in pseudo-science will result.
"Self" and "interested" never appear in isolation in the above example, so we can only speculate on their precise interpretations when used in isolation. However, the compound concept "self-interested" has a well-defined meaning, even in casual, every-day conversations.

Calling into question the meaning of "self-interested" is merely a filibuster.