skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dude. Dominant assurance contracts look ingenious. I had never heard of them before.

http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2005-June/00...
Oh yeah, absolutely. It's just that it seems that half an hour of CSS would make it cleaner and I'm surprised that nobody at Twitter finished something on a Friday afternoon and thought "ok, let me clean this up a little bit" instead of starting something else :)
Stanford scientists turn adult skin cells into muscle and vice versa
The strongest point in favor of seasteading is that, if successful, it will allow people to experiment with many forms of government, including variants of democracy. Currently, the government industry has an extremely high barrier to entry, which has resulted in stagnation and inefficiency.
Walk me through the mechanics of a hypothetical market for IP law service providers.

Who sells what to whom?
Yeah, that was another wrong assumption. In this market, probably only around a third of YC-funded startups could get a $2m valuation after YC, let alone before.
While they're equivalent from a monetary perspective, the line between good taste and poor taste is gray and blurry. There's a big difference between a website that informs and makes money from ad revenue, and one that hocks crappy merch which makes light of a serious situation, especially to those affected.

It's a bit hard to see the distinction as it relates to this swine flu nonsense, since it's already an enormous, alarmist media circus. But imagine you bought a shirt in '91 that said "I survived the AIDS epidemic by wrapping my willy!" Would you wear it today? And how would you feel about where your money went?
I don't see what's so beneficial about direct democracy. Sure, it whets our 21st century egalitarian appetite. However, while populist sentiment is sometimes correct and sometimes disastrous, it is never created by any sort of rational decision-making process.

I have a hard time thinking of reasons why direct democracy is an optimal government structure.
Protocol Buffers: A flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for serializing structured data.
That's exactly what he's doing. You do know about the Seasteading Institute, right?
Thanks, I appreciate that. You've addressed (a), but what of (b) and (c)? Or is it more that sensible people would prefer C++ for multicore
(who are largely recognizable as being sensible people by the mere fact that they hold this view.)

Incidentally, I have an entertaining alternative theory, that silicon will becomes specialized in the way that organs in the body are (and firms), perhaps mimicking the architecture of large programs which have intercommunication patterns that are established and predictable. A games examples: a Lua CPU, a physics CPU, an AI CPU. The Enterprise is even more ripe for this, as they have been trying to separate architectural components with SOA (which is a form of concurrency). It doesn't seem to have gone well, but something may have been learned there. Another example of large-scale concurrency is the internet: perhaps replicate a google server farm on a chip?

These ideas are a bit horrific, because they are horribly inefficient through standardizing on large scale components, so we lose the opportunity to optimize between them. But they work.
You won't be able to use Greasemonkey to surface information that is inaccessible, like who upvoted what, unless I'm missing something?

You could write a Greasemonkey script that would would track what users who have installed it have up-voted. Although that is not very elegant (users need to be convinced to trust it and install it) nor effective (your dataset will be self-selection-biased to that segment of the community), it would be a kind of an interesting solution to play with.
The only time I am personally interested in java applets anymore is when looking at physics demos from 1999 from MIT or Stanford engineering students. That's it.
When did ninja become so popular? The term is all over company 'about us' and hiring pages. Frankly, it's strange. Equally strange to include it in your app's info page.
HN is open-source. You could get the source and submit a patch.
> Buy a cruise ship or rent land from a country somewhere.

Obtaining land is not the most difficult or expensive part of the proposition. Rather, finding modern weaponry (and people willing to man it, to the death if need be) is the real deal-killer:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_minerva

One could even argue that nuclear weapons (and strategic missiles) are necessary for true sovereignty. Without them, any "real" country is free to "spread democracy" to your shores.
World's fastest camera relies on an entirely new type of imaging
H.L. Mencken: Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
I don't think starting a new country with a new, untested system, which people don't know a lot about, will work well. I often advocate for anarcho-capitalism, but only as the result of an existing system being changed one step at a time. This gives time for any bugs/kinks to be worked out at each step, and for people to gain a better understanding of what it means.
Can you get sued for software that some people think encourages users to do bad things?
As an example, my iPhone app idea for combating the swine flu could be used to get revenge on people you don't like, destroy businesses, etc.

The idea is described here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=586037.

If I build something like this, is there any chance I could get sued?
So is that my answer to the question that started this thread? We know how to make good hashes, but they are slow. And all the fast hashes get broken eventually?
I also recommend binaural beats. Look up "Mindwave" on your iPhone, it's $1.99 but it's really good.
It sounds like you're missing the point. It's not about creating a top-down libertopia to prove that a "libertarian society" can work. It's a matter of facilitating technology such that many such little jurisdictions can spring up, and individuals can easily move between them.
>"What system of Government does Thiel imagine libertarians would use if not democracy?"

Perhaps neocameralism?

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/against...

But seriously, I expect that many seasteads will attempt some form of democracy. Markets are beneficial because they allow producers and consumers the freedom to innovate, but the outcome of their decisions is impossible to predict in advance.
A must-read for would-be seasteaders:

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3328/floating_utopias/

"Big capital will support tax-lowering measures, of course, but it does not need to piss and moan about taxes with the tedious relentlessness of the libertarian. Big capital, with its ranks of accountant-Houdinis, just gets on with not paying it."
Yes. Number 1, product advice, and number 2, advice about dealing with investors.

http://ycombinator.com/about.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/ycombinator.html
Experts Warn Internet Is Running Out of Bandwidth
One of the crappiest article I have ever read. The crust of the article is based on the author's assertion that android is a threat to Windows 7!!
Blatant self-promotion, but people interested in PostgreSQL query processing might also be interested in these slide decks:

"Query Execution Techniques in PostgreSQL" http://neilconway.org/talks/executor.pdf

"Inside the PostgreSQL Query Optimizer" http://neilconway.org/talks/optimizer/optimizer.pdf
The imaginary property industry would look pretty much like it does now, but the content cartels would be hiring goons with bats instead of goons with law degrees.
Chrysler Bankruptcy Plan Is Announced
Awesome article! Also check out ch. 24 of Beautiful Code, which is about implementing STM in Haskell.

<brag>Now seems like a reasonable chance to brag that Doug Crockford signed my copy of BC the other day! God I'm such a geek.</brag>
Fun with Class.new
At least in the United States that isn't true. In the U.S. the republic was constructed as a way for the well educated to trump the masses if need be. That's the original reason for the Electoral College and that's why the U.S. Senate was originally filled with people appointed by state governments.

I'm not saying our Government wasn't built around a populist ideal and in the end I think the Framers trusted the public to appoint worthwhile people. But the republic our system is based around was created specifically to shield government against the knee jerk reactions of the masses
It's not a standard 6% for all though. 6% is the median, but it has ranged from 2-10%.
Sure, assuming there's no more suitable language than C, and assuming all the C libraries you use abide by the restrictions. The article says, "Library functions that
are opaque to the GC remain safe as long as they do not invoke callbacks or retain copies of pointers," which helps, but isn't a complete pass. (Plus, even though C got void* before I entered elementary school, I still occasionally see library APIs that use int or long instead of void*.)

Also, the article says, "Custom allocators, in contrast,
typically break these invariants permanently, because they allocate objects of statically unspecified shape in a block of primitively allocated memory." I'm not entirely sure, but it sounds like this means you can't use any library that uses a custom allocator. Certainly you'll have to manage resources from such libraries by hand. At that point you might as well use any garbage-collected language with a good C interface.
I just don't buy into the idea that the Government knows how to run these companies better than the private sector. Having a president as the de-facto spokesman for an industry, as this article seems to make him out to be just puts a bad taste in my mouth.
Just start writing. See where it takes you.
Why I don't love JavaScript's Module Pattern
Good info. Did not know this. I'll take a look...
If you're into this sort of thing, I highly recommend Goenka's 10 day Vipassana retreat:

http://www.dhamma.org/

I did the course in Kyoto years ago (there are locations worldwide: http://www.dhamma.org/en/alphalist.shtml ). The entire 10 days you do nothing more than watch your breath. First 6 or 7 days are hell, the remaining days are heaven. Just need some time for the dust to settle.

The entire course, accommodations, and meals are offered completely free of charge. They won't even accept a donation until you've experienced the course. Even then, there was no overt push to collect money from participants.

They ask you to leave your existing practices at the door, and offer no new dogmas other than watching your breath/mind.

I haven't been back to another course or otherwise involved with the group since then, but it had a profound impact on my life.
This is a litigious (law-suit-prone) society.

If you're visible you might get sued, just like you might get acclaimed... somebody just needs to feel injured enough to seek out an eager-beaver attorney who believes he can win the case. Plus: the deeper your pockets (or your company's), the more worthwhile it starts looking to sue you (but the better legal defense you may be able to mount).

One reason that startups form corporations (LLC, etc.) is reduced risk that lawsuits could touch an entrepreneur's personal assets.

If you've got a (potentially) hot startup, you might want to CYA... and get an actual attorney to provide actually useful legal advice.
Ask PG: What if I forget my password?
I tried to log today (just by now), but I forgot my password, I even forgot if I had signed a simple account or using the click pass (i finally logged by trying the different signs up and the Google one worked for me).

I wander why HN don't implement a simple Passowrd recovery application, that let you recover your password using your username and send you the password reset to email.

Or what if I did forget my pass??
My assertion that Java is displacing C++ is admittedly very anecdotal, this is a difficult claim to discuss in rigorous terms. My claim is based on personal experience, the experience of colleagues, and "some people I've talked to on the interwebs", so by all means take with a grain of salt and do some research yourself if you're skeptical.

For any long-running process the JIT is going to turn your Java (Clojure, Scala, ...) into extremely well-optimized machine code. In fact, the amount of knowledge that the JIT has about the actual run time behavior of the software allows it to do better optimizations than you ever could by hand in certain situations (an ever-growing number of situations).

GC is another point, the HotSpot GC is arguably faster at allocating small, short-lived objects than malloc is. It is reeeaaaaallllyyy good these days, probably the best GC that you'll find in production just about anywhere these days. The thing is a monster. And the new one, the G1 collector, was sent from the future by SkyNet to kill John Conner.

Add to this the fact that you can easily exploit common multiprocessing patterns (thread pool, consumer/producer) with almost no code, and that advanced multiprocessing code can be written in a platform independent way, and it's a pretty small subset of applications that still make sense to write in C++.

Add to all of that the fact that even Java (let alone all the other amazing JVM languages) are orders of magnitude more productive than C++ for your programming staff, and the set of situations in which it makes sense to use C++ rather than the JVM is looking pretty tiny.

Oh and then there's portability. C++ isn't even portable across compilers (versions of the same compiler!), and for all the early trouble with Java portability, it really is write-once-run-anywhere now. Really.
duplicate one http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=586881
Thanks for the info, is it written on PHP or PERL ??
The Great Library was bigger than a single bookshelf, and pre-Gutenberg.
Well worth repeating. Most of us here can code a site up, some are exceptional at it. But even getting that initial press to get those first customers can be daunting.

That's one advantage I can see with something like YCombinator -- that initial traffic. It might not be much, but it's a few links from reputale blogs, some visitors and maybe even those first conversions. It's certainly no guarantee, but it is more than my first startup had.
This is relevant to me because I've been playing with Processing (the Java version). (I have also been playing with the JavaScript version, but it is MUCH slower, which kind of limits the speed of my physics simulations. Interestingly, Safari runs Processing.js much better than FireFox.)
Cute. Not "Hacker News".
Rich Media Ads and Google
Well yeah, I was more talking about people outside looking in, like the author, since he can't judge the quality of the advice he resorts to just comparing the monetary terms
"while you shouldn't hire the guy that walks in one hour late, and didn’t notice a Cheerio stuck on his lip, anything else is fair game."

As far as I can tell, The author is suggesting that interviews are completely worthless. He's saying that until you actually deal with someone in the workplace, you have no way of knowing how they will perform. He's saying that there is no way to effectively differentiate applicants.

This, to put it simply, is complete bullshit. It's clearly possible to remove the absolute worst applicants through interviews (i.e. can't put two lines of code together). Furthermore, how do you get absolutely zero idea of the work ethic and ability of the person you're interviewing? The only conclusion I can come to is that this author has no technical knowledge whatsoever, and therefore can't distinguish between applicants.

This author is suggesting the 'spray and pray' method of hiring: hire a new developers, fire those that don't perform in the workplace, rinse, repeat. This is pure insanity.

I really hope I'm missing something, but the author really is pretty clear: "your skill as a manager is not based on your ability to get good people into your group, but on getting bad people out. The sooner you cull weaker players, the sooner you can replace them with stronger players...and improve the human composite of your firm."
"Another mistake is the assumption that the universe can support "unlimited" intelegence."

One thinker who seeks to address this point is Frank J. Tipler with his notion of the 'Omega Point' - a theoretical point where-after the contraction of the universe means that the available computational power, while still point-finite, will be increasing faster than the time remaining can decrease.

I don't know how much stock I put in the concept, myself, but at least somebody's thinking about it!

Read a little up on it - the guy may very well be bonkers, but it's certainly worth a look if you're into mind-bending metaphysics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point_(Tipler)
Judging by Twitter's uptime record in the past, they probably have had an experience where someone thought that, started coding, and crashed the whole site.
Neat idea, but checkout that horrible horrible synchronous message pass to the gtk idle thread ...

def execute((R, function, args, kwargs)):
R.result = apply(function, args, kwargs)
while R.result is NoResult:
time.sleep(0.01)
return R.result

ouch.
Wolfram is a salesman first and foremost. I'll believe it when I see it.
There Is No Such Thing as Nuclear Waste
Answer: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=codenique
Singletons are Pathological Liars
YC on CNBC
Tony Wright from RescueTime, a Y-combinator funded company, was interviewed today on The Tech Effect on CNBC. Have there been any other Y-combinator companies highlighted on TV (not internet)?
Really dude, stop talking about this.
You've never sat in an audience and felt uncomfortable/embarrassed when the presenter or speaker started making a fool of himself?

What the fuck are you, some kind of robot? You're full of shit.
The one modern site that I find Java applets incredibly useful and fun is Wowhead's model viewer [1]. They have a Flash and Java version, and while the Flash is faster to load, the quality and performance of the Java version can't be beat.

[1] http://www.wowhead.com/?item=45472#modelviewer
Would it be possible to publish your product/dealing with investors wisdom into a book?
Jeebus, anyone still thinking about this is thinking too hard. And anyone upvoting it is wasting my time and screen real estate.
Hand the guy a podium, a megaphone, and a gold-plated opportunity to argue that fair use needs to be much larger - yeah, quite a win </sarcasm>. They stand to win on the law - he could leverage a change in the law. They're taking a knife to a gunfight.
Hey, I appreciate it! :) Feel free to school me anytime. Heck, I live for it.
I have an easy time thinking of examples of why direct democracy is an optimal government structure. Switzerland. It has a long history of direct democracy, compare how it has been governed with how the other democracies have been governed.

There's no need to get all abstract when there are real world examples.
Newsfeed RSS Makes Facebook Streams More Manageable
The last message was posted about one month after the first post.
Methinks there must be a ninja-based easter egg buried in this version...
Fair point. I was referring to the canonical works (i.e. everything by Plato, but not everything about Plato), and was thinking about the period just before Gutenberg. The available body of knowledge was pretty irregular before Gutenberg (the burning of the Great Library, etc.), but monotonically increased afterwards.

My question stands, though: haven't we already hit our individual saturation point for knowledge? What is the Singularity, if not that?
I agree with what you're saying, but I'd be curious to know what the response to the program would be if terms started to move towards the funders and away from the founders. YC gets a lot of attention from their current terms, which means they have more choice and can be picky about who they fund. If they start asking for more equity or offering less money, I'm assuming they'll lose some of that choice. How much they'd lose is anyone's guess. Startups as a collective "product" certainly don't fit nicely on a supply/demand chart. It will be interesting as the years pass to see if the terms are adjusted and how the quality and/or quantity of funded companies moves with those adjustments.
It is written in Arc, PG's language in development. It is in the Lisp\Scheme tradition.
Clojure revolts me.

It is the most explicit to date abandonment of the age-old Lispers' Dream, which was "Lisp All The Way Down." Clojure is the antithesis of the Lisp Machine. Rather than a crystalline pyramid of comprehensible mutually-interlocking concepts, behind every Clojure primitive there lurks Black Magic. The Clojure user who is missing some routine or other will run crying to Java for help, rather than implementing the feature himself correctly - that is, as a natural part of the entire language, built on the same concepts. Clojure pisses on everything I've ever loved about Lisp. It rejects even what little consistency and intellectual rigor there is to be found in an abomination like Common Lisp.

Clojure is the False Lisp, which Reeketh of the Cube Farm.

I don't care if everybody really is more productive in Clojure than in Common Lisp. The latter is not my standard of comparison (Symbolics Genera, the state of the art, is. Or, if you want something that is distinctly inferior but is currently available on the market: Mathematica.) Clojure is the gutted corpse of a dream.

I am tired of this abomination being hailed as the future of Lisp. Users of real Lisps, such as myself, will keep hoping, dreaming, and working on systems which do not betray the original virtues of the language.
Tired of (rubyists) arguing? Do something about it.
I really wish people would start switching to v6. I'm sick and tired of having to do UDP hole punching whenever I want two user nodes to talk to each other. I miss TCP, but I can't push it through a NAT unless I have sufficient privileges to set the ttl's on the packets, which only root can do.
Very odd. I do enjoy Google's sense of humor, though.
Good to see a fellow Java fan here. But C/C++ is still faster than Java (and assembly is faster still), if you really need performance. A big minus for Java is hard realtime performance (illustrative eg: it's hard to get regular framerates); which of course doesn't matter on the server you're discussing. A counter-argument is that if you need multicore, it's because you need performance; and if you need performance, you probably need C/C++.

Java has many benefits as you mention, especially ease of development, and I think these are what drive its adoption rather than any multicore benefit. So, I accept your (a); and (b) certainly has some truth, but I doubt the causality of (c).

The stats (terribly unreliable) show that C and C++ combined are ahead of Java, and the proportions are fairly static (C and C++ are steady, but Java is itself being javaed by even easier languages like Python (which incidentally supports my reasoning above):
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... (about as reliable as a slashdot poll, but it's probably basically right).
A regime that punished people outside of its jurisdiction would not last very long. It would be the equivalent to what a war is today.

I suspect that people would join such a regime for religious reasons. If you're the only member of your congregation who chooses not to be punished for having a beer, not having a kid, flipping a light switch on the Sabbath, etc., your peers may take note and decide you're not really serious.
Do you see the current system's bugs being worked out any time soon?
Seasonbeauty Mehndi Styles and Designs.
Has it occurred to you that Warner hires lots of very smart people who ARE IP lawyers? Perhaps people who are just as smart as you, with 1000x the legal experience, looked at the case and decided it was most likely winnable.

Of course not, they're not a tech company, no way they could have anyone intelligent working for them right?