skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the things I would consider a basic criterion for being able to call yourself an "independent thinker" is coming to the realization that when people think for themselves, they come to different conclusions. Which leads to a number of obvious conclusions, including: While "the sheeple" may not have the truth, by necessity the majority of the "independent thinkers" can't either, and you can't measure how independently someone is thinking by looking at what they believe.

There is no single monolithic "the sheeple", and it is possible that low-carbers are simple a sheeple that were told to buy a book instead of watch a show like Oprah.

I say this as someone who at least intellectually is very sympathetic to the "low carb" nutritional picture; I don't think it entirely corresponds to reality, but the old-school "low-fat" diet seems outright wrong. (By "old school", I mean the old dietary standards that treat fat as a single monolithic entity. Newer stuff is getting more nuanced and, I believe, more correct, at the cost of being very difficult to describe to people in detail.)

But going back to my main point, if you still measure the "independence" of somebody's thought by what they believe, you are not your own thinker; you've simply chosen a different crowd of sheeple to run with. Nobody's really immune to this, and by this standard I have seen precious few truly independent thinkers. (Even some people who have dedicate great time to an "independent thinker" shtick almost invariable slip in some belief touchstones into their definition of independent thought, whether or not they realize it. I am not thinking of anybody in particular here; I've seen this from many such people. (I'm not quite a hypocrite on this point; the first sentence of this post is more of a definition of what I consider an independent thinker than a touchstone belief, and I freely acknowledge the existence of other useful definitions... but I'm certainly slicing things awfully fine here... but I realize it.))

This may not be directly related to the original article, but it is certainly indirectly related.
Paying for machines by the hour opens new opportunities (ad-hoc staging environments, for example). We can do things now that we could never do before.

You may not be ready to move production to the cloud but there is an opportunity for you to improve your development process.
Technically, everyone but you (me, in my case) is a p-zombie.
13 iPhone Apps That Need to be Made -- Add Yours in HN Comments
How are you planning to make money ?
Standing Workstation
What apps do you want to see built? Branded or not...
I tried this. It was trivial to install, and it seems to work quite well.
This has more to do with misinvestment of resources than any fundamental ceiling to demand for better technology. Scaling up existing capabilities to be slightly better reaches a limit at some point; increasing capabilities does not.

Consider games for an example of poorly invested resources. The graphics have improved dramatically in video games between the era of Chrono Trigger ('95) and now. The quality of the games has declined. These two trends are linked together. Now that the budget for a game is in the 7- and 8-digit range, business people have creative control over games, and games are more likely to be designed by committee. Thus, they end up sucking. Improving the graphics will not solve this problem, but there's still demand for high-quality games that is not being met through traditional channels.
yowza-- check out the photos/screenshots at the sniper software firm's site:

http://www.knightarmco.com/bulletflight/
The people who think this way are the ones that the rest of us are hoping the recession will push out of New York.
I'll try to answer your questions:

How is a general framework useful?

When you're coding a simulation, you spend about 10% of your time coding the actual algorithm, and 90% of your time coding other things. The purpose of my project is to do that 90% for you, and to do it thoroughly.

For example, saving the simulation data to a file. Or being able to rewind the simulation and change something in its world, and then running the simulation from that point and watching what that change will cause. Or having the machine calculate two different "possible futures" concurrently.

These are the basic features, and I know it doesn't sound like something very complicated, but if you think it's simple, I challenge you to find me a framework that allows to work comfortably with simulations.

What sort of game theory problems are you thinking about

Generally, whatever you want. I'm not a game theorist, but here's what I coded a year ago: A hundred computer players play 50 rounds of the prisoner's dillemma with each other, and they get paired randomly after every session. Every player had a certain strategy chosen from a pool of strategies. When a player lost a lot of points, the computer replaced it with a new player with a random strategy. It was very interesting and I saw some very cool behaviors. So you'd be able to do stuff like that on my program.
the next metasystem transformation.

uploading & sharing myself on the internet, having my multiple identities living a complete life, chat with myselves and learn from them.

cloning me in into the digital, no life expansion but more parallel lives
Scribd on your iPhone
I know, it's the question. But I recall pg claiming something to the effect of "if it's something people want, don't worry, we'll find a way to make money from it." (I'm probably not 100% accurate with this quote, I don't remember exactly how he said it.)
"There might be just a point here where the culture is changing on what's legitimate behavior online," said Mike McCurry, the former White House press secretary under President Bill Clinton and co-chairman of Arts+Labs, a collaborative group of technology and media companies. "I think perhaps something of a tipping point has been reached where people are finally saying that activity we thought was just okay or skirting around the edge has tipped over into something both dangerous, criminal, and unfair."
Duplicate of

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=569398
There are quite a few Linux apps that run on Mono: Banshee, Tomboy, F-Spot, Beagle, Gnome Do. Moonlight (built on Mono) provides the Linux version of MS's Silverlight plugin.

Second Life uses Mono for scripting. Quite a few games (including iPhone and Wii games) are written using Unity, which runs on Mono. Mindtouch Deki is a web wiki/CMS that runs on Mono.

Not overwhelming, but not far from being a failure.
I also think often that it would be much greater to be working standing. Anyone tried?
Are there absolutely no innovators out there among investors?

It seems that there are lots of incubators just riping off without really understanding why yc actually works. They don't even bother to try and reflect on their own situation and shape a program reflecting their individual strengths and weaknesses.

YC is heavily tech and somewhat hackers only. Presumably because at least three of the founders are nerds themselves. This gives an obvious bias that YC has leveraged brilliantly to attract great hackers.

Why the hell doesn't someone do the same in another industry? For instance, if someone with credilility in greentech started Greencombinator that did the same thing just geared towards Greentech and ecological startups they would be the hub and powerhouse of greentech within two years. Same probably goes for a lot of other industries.

Or why doesn't someone do Universitycombinator that would specialise in spinning university research into viable companies.

I mean seriously, there are so many possibilities, yet all we see are stupid clones.

</ end rant >
If Dell could deliver it, it was ordered from Dell.

Well, there you have it. If you are Dell and you secure that exclusive deal, you get to charge high margins on certain incidental products.

Of course, as has been pointed out by olefoo, to get a deal like that Dell probably had to give up a lot of margin on other products. And throw in support contracts, and expend a lot of sales time...
Don't look at what is said but who is saying.
I'll always take an advice from PG, DHH or Stanislaw Lem but never from Anonymous.
Sounds interesting, is there already code up somewhere?
I still don't see a justification for charging the at home devs for this. The benefits of a more vibrant development community around MS software FAR outweigh the peanuts they get from charging us that 300 dollars.

On the bright side they can still charge their corporate customers for the seats which is where all the VS revenue's come from anyway.

Running around screaming about "It's the best IDE evar!" doesn't justify charging independent devs for it. Provide the tools so that devs can build your ecosystem.
Yes indeed:

http://github.com/cool-RR/physicsthing/tree/master

Please keep in mind that it's a very young project. Run gui.py in that folder to see a demonstration. The code requires wxPython and that Windows Extensions thing by Mark Hammond.

The readme is a bit out-dated: When I wrote it I was mainly thinking about physics simulations, and today it's more general.

Come back there in a month and you'll see some serious stuff.
The Richest Man in Babylon:

http://www.amazon.com/Richest-Man-Babylon-George-Clason/dp/1...
Finished with FaceBook
Tipping point my ass.

Saying something in the newspapers doesn't make it true. Those industries are going the way of the dodo, whether they want to or not.
Wasn't Webmin an open source project?
That's not the problem with consulting at all. Consulting is, if anything, far more defensible than a typical product.

The problem with consulting is that it doesn't scale. You can only deliver it with trained consultants, who cost lots of money. Build a good product and you can sell it to 100 people as easily as you can to 10. That's why products are considered better money than consulting.
The major problem is that you don't really have a competitive advantage. What will stop your potential competitors from simply downloading the open-source software and start using it themselves?

When you do a startup you want to find a good niche that makes good money, and where competition won't start pouring in once you've proven that there is a market. So you need some kind of barrier, with YC startups it seems to be technology.
Actually, there was a contract. It's called the terms of service.
I fully expected this to be an article about piracy going the other direction.
These me-too funding programs are starting to look more and more like gambling / indentured servitude.
He said:

"Because making something people want is so much harder than making money from it, you should leave business models for later, just as you'd leave some trivial but messy feature for version 2. In version 1, solve the core problem. And the core problem in a startup is how to create wealth (= how much people want something x the number who want it), not how to convert that wealth into money."

Cheers
Very cool. I like the idea of building games with relativistic physics, kind of reminds me of the short "Carousel" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YFkcwtpGZo)
I think people tend to look at the SNES days with rose coloured glasses. There were plenty of crap games available then, too.

Remember when every game was trying to push an adorable cartoon mascot? Do you think the business people weren't behind that too?

While good graphics are certainly no substitute for good gameplay, there are certainly far more AAA titles available now than there ever has been.

Some come from large studios: Left for Dead, Bioshock, Fallout. Others are coming from the emerging indie scene like World of Goo and Braid.
They really don't get it, do they:

I'm not fussed about whether it's free or not, it's convenience that matters.

When my girlfriend and I would like to watch a movie that's no longer in cinemas, I don't care if it'll cost me a couple of euros if it only takes a few clicks to start the download, and the connection is good enough that we can watch it a few hours later. Just the fact that I don't have to look at porn ads on some torrent site ghetto would be worth money to me.

Right now, it depends on what country I happen to be in whether I can download a movie from, say, iTunes, at all. (I can't at home, certainly) But wait, I don't even want to "buy" a movie off iTunes, as that would force me to watch it within 24 hours. If I wanted to have my life scheduled by the entertainment industry, I'd watch TV.

We're finally at a point where I can buy non-DRM music if I jump through a few hoops and lie about where I live. Except of course it's easier and inexplicably costs almost the same amount of money to just order the CD from amazon. Okay, it takes 2 days to arrive, but music usually isn't as spur-of-the-moment as "let's watch a movie!" Plus, I get a nice booklet (if the artist cares enough to persuade the label to spend a few cents on presentation) and I don't have to worry about backups once the CD has fulfilled its original purpose of facilitating a rip to FLAC and moves into the CD rack, rarely to be touched again.

I don't see how they wouldn't make a killing if they sold downloadable, DRM-free movies for about €3-4, albums for, say, €4, and TV series episodes for 50 cents to 1 euro. Sure, it would destroy the industry of shops that sell DVDs, but amazon and play.com are doing that already.
Kinda surprised Apple approved software meant to help kill people. This seems like an app best meant for the enterprise distribution method.
Few obvious things which come to mind.

1) Dual licensing
2) Charge for commercial support
3) Sell hosted versions (might not apply to you)
4) Advertising?
Thoughts on the Y Combinator interview process
The method still works
The Phusion guys tried doing it and have had a really hard time making it work. And these are guys who have essentially turned the Rails world upside down with their OSS.
What's "aardvark"? Google throws up a bunch of possibilities, none of which look especially likely.
The crux of the matter is how are you going to make money? After all investors want a payback. The best advice I've seen here is to find a consulting niche in security. See if DARPA has something on their wish list or apply directly. I suggest you do some serious networking in your city/state. Maybe team up with someone who needs your platform to leverage their expertise.

Tell us where you are. Maybe someone might have a lead.
'The first question I will ask myself when it comes to any changes will be "can I achieve the desired outcome without hurting my userbase?"'

Judging from their growth rate, it looks like they asked that question and the answer was yes.
Am I the only one who's clueless as to what this is about?
Older generations adopting new technologies faster than young
5 Reasons You Should Add Single Property Websites to Your Real Estate Marketing
Is it feasible for all the ISPs to be taken to court? I feel like they want to head towards mass censorship.

also, is the computer in that picture running Linux? It looks like a GNOME panel on the bottom of the screen.
Pretty sure the article is referring to: http://vark.com/

It's a social expertise-based Q&A site. Email me for an invite.
No - but they should be. Or, were you about to make a case for dishonesty?
Reprap (http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome) is an open-source 3D printer that can print out most of the parts of itself. The things that can't be printed out include "trivial" things like the metal rods and the flat platform, and "non-trivial" things like motors and electronics.

This is a step towards printing out the electronics. I believe there were efforts in printing out motor components as well, although no results so far, as far as I know.
From my personal experience, it's a bit overrated. After 45 min. of standing, my knees and feet start to hurt -- resulting in an irresistible urge to find the closest chair.

Perhaps, its best to have access to a variety of working positions/environment and switch to one that best suits your disposition. In my case, (bed <--> recliner <--> desk <--> standing desk).
Whatever happened to last next big thing, the memristor?
What percentage of total users does that add up to?
File sharing sites amplify the market control of big music business
years ago, when I got my first PC with a copy of Word installed on it, I actually enjoyed to create "letters" using the Comic Sans font. with the years, this special sentiment vanished and I started to dislike the font. I actually know a professor on our university that uses the font in his wiki and that is a little bit gross.
Bill Moyers Journal: David Simon: the Charles Dickens of our time.
A great tour of an operational nuclear power plant by Charlie Stross, one of my favorite science fiction authors. Charlie is one of us, a unix/web guru before he became a full time author and, I believe an HN regular. Take a look at Accelerando or The Atrocity Archives.
People who enjoy driving will have to do is in such way as to not endanger regular commuters

As if the two groups don't overlap! As if the regular commuters are completely innocent and the people who enjoy driving both have and cause all the accidents! As if robocars could not and would not have any accidents! As if people who commute to work by car are forced into it and have no choice about being road users!

I disagree with all four implied statements.

a good half of driving accident victims did not and could not see it coming.

Then why do so many other countries have fewer road deaths per hundred thousand people and also fewer road deaths per miles travelled?

http://www.driveandstayalive.com/info%20section/statistics/s...

See how the USA is way down in 40th position - more dense countries, countries with more dangerous driving weather, other big sparse countries, other rich countries, much poorer countries are all above the USA. Switch the table to deaths per vehicle miles travelled and the USA is still barely in the top 10.

Just luck? Or better driver training so their drivers can see potential accidents coming and avoid them?

I know, arguing not hacker news. But someone is wrong on the internet. It might even be me!
oh RGBA, I was expecting someone would post elevated in a thread like this. Here is a homepage from IQ from RGBA http://iquilezles.org/www/ - lots of useful stuff here. He is working, I believe, on Infinity engine (not bioware one) which will, hopefully, yield a game like EVE/Elite one day. Here is a devlog: http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infinity/index.php?option=c...
So, what do folks here use?

I was a fan of XHTML for a while, largely because it made it easier to use XML tools to verify my documents. But that became a non-issue as HTML parsing tools (specifically what I could use in Ruby tools while developing) got better.

I wasn't serving my pages as application/xml, and on consideration of what Ian Hickson wrote (http://hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml) I went back to using HTML 4.

I'm puzzled by suggestions to use HTML 5. it seems a peculiar reversal from the "design with Web 'standards'" mantra. It's not a W3C recommendation, it's still a draft.

If XHTML is not working out as planned, why not use HTML 4.0.1, a current W3C rec that works?
The articles are more about building a 3D engine than generating terrain, but still a good read.
My advice: You've given up a lot of copyright protections on your code. Register trademarks, and defend them. Your code is freely distributable, but you can still protect yourself against people using your name for their own profit. Look at what Mozilla does, for example.
Using Promotional Hats To Market Your Business 
Hey guys great idea, not so new but still very good. Promotional hats are everywhere.
Sticky legal battles await for captured Somali pirates
A sugar publishing app
French Fury: Parisians Hit The Streets In Protest Against Facebook Redesign
RT (Best Practical) is a pretty decent system. http://bestpractical.com/rt/
Are you trying to tell me that Apple's equivalent USB optical mouse was significantly cheaper than Dell's?

His comment said nothing of the kind.
You mean something like this?
http://www.firstascentventures.com/blog/?p=26
some embedded controllers in racks in the auxilliary deisel generator control rooms have EPROMs which have been known to be erased by camera flashes in the past

Am I the only one terrified of the fact that any part of a nuclear reactor can be tampered with by a flash of light?
Excellent! But too bad it's a blog post and not a wiki. It's missing a few that I know of, including this NYCSeed.
I don't see how they wouldn't make a killing if they sold downloadable, DRM-free movies for about €3-4, albums for, say, €4, and TV series episodes for 50 cents to 1 euro. Sure, it would destroy the industry of shops that sell DVDs, but amazon and play.com are doing that already.

Agreed. I'd pay those prices. Those are reasonable prices, and for the convenience, they would be worthwhile.
Near the end of the interview, Jessica said, "so do I make the check out to you?" I said yes. "Did you actually spend 700?" I said I'd spent most of it. I actually spent more than 700, but I only had receipts for slightly less. So she wrote a check for 700 right there on the spot. I was kinda speechless.. I was expecting a bunch of paperwork. We kept laughing about it later. That little incident tells you a lot about why YC is awesome. No bullshit.

And there's an important lesson to be learned here, too: Sometimes it's worth simply trusting people. It's possible that someone who spent only $500 could have gotten a cheque for the full $700; but even if everybody was in that position and was dishonest enough to take advantage of the trust, the amount of money YC would lose would be insignificant compared to the total amount of
money involved.

So guys, remember that they interview a bazillion companies all at once, so don't assume they remember what you said in your application.

I think this pretty much applies to all interviews: The job of a resume / YC application / scholarship application is to get you the interview, and once you've got an interview you shouldn't rely on your written application for anything.
Your account is thirty-five days old.

You're on a web site for a company headed by a notorious Macbook Air user.

To italicize, use astericks.

I don't know why the word "how" was stretched out to awful proportions.

A carot for a nose is just silly.

The word "kidiot" is worse than the word "luser".
Tell us where you are. Maybe someone might have a lead.

(Drumroll...) Jerusalem, Israel.
Hmm, seems like this writeup is missing the vital recommendation that you have a foot rest and alternate between elevating one foot, elevating the other foot, and having both feet on the floor. I've tried working standing up without a footrest and found it intolerable after a short time, but with alternating feet height I can work standing for extended periods of time - and me feet/knees/back are happier than when I work seated.
How do kids these days get started in programming?
As I keep saying on HN, if people hosted 9mb clips on their own webserver, with Flash video streaming technology, there would be no way of censoring it.

Not quite off-topic, but related is: Can you currently stream Flash video off an Apache webserver? If not, would a startup writing a plugin for it be a good opportunity?
Did they operate like a startup? Where can I read about it?
Metaclasses in Python 1.5
Yeah. It was our first time pitching/interviewing. We're learning :-)
I think the implication was that having any human drivers on the roads negates a lot of the potential benefits and safety provided by robotic cars. The drivers don't have to be bad to be worse than a robot. Driving a car yourself might go the way of riding a horse for transportation. You can still do it, and have lots of fun, just not down most city streets! Robocars would still have accidents, but hopefully more on the frequency of planes :)