skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I think it all comes down to people wanting to be like the "business" people they see on TV. The persona of the rigid professional suit-wearing business person is attractive to a lot of people."

No, it comes down to protecting a brand. If you're doing a startup then it's ok to show up to meetings blazed, because your job is just to get work done and if you can still get work done while high then that's fine. But at big companies your job isn't to get work done, because the most valuable asset of a big company isn't the work that gets done but rather the brand. How does this tie into suits? Well, suits are sort of the crescent wrench of attire. If you are a startup then you only have to dress in a way that pleases the niche you're serving. But if you are a big business then by definition you are interacting with people from multiple niches all day long. Everyone is comfortable dealing with someone wearing a suit, whereas if you wear surfing clothes to work then that only works if you trying to send a message to a small niche of surfers.

The vast majority of the YC kids aren't starting out with a personal brand, so it doesn't matter what they do as long as they get work done. In fact, screwing around will help them build a brand as long as they are only dealing with people within their community, because unique culture is a purple cow that helps you stand out. Luckily most of the YC companies make products where even when they get more marketshare they won't have to act much differently because of quirks related to the high-leverage of software, but most big companies eventually do adopt a different culture as the ways they create value as businesses becomes more nuanced.
It should be easy to fund this.

Have a "sponsor a synapse" program.

At $1 / synapse / year you can be listed as the benefactor of a synapse!! Cool!! Since there are approx 10^14 synapses (or something like that), that should be plenty of money.

Hell it could be $1 / synapse / century.

So if My_Estate sponsors synapse _S, then I pay $1 for the maintenance and upkeep of synapse _S for a 100 years. That is 1 cent per year.With 100 trillion synapses, that is 100 trillion per century, or 1 trillion per year. Which comes to an average of $200 per person on the planet (with 5 billion people on the planet). So some people and governments would sponsor more synapses than other people and governments obviously.

But if we all came together like this, we could very well fund this, at 1 trillion per year (100 trillion per century) paying 1 cent per year per synapse (1 dollar per century per synapse). Small price to pay to create a new form of consciousness, and perhaps a new era of prosperity for humankind in my opinion.
Matt argues that the best lawyers are probably as intelligent as the best hackers, and they have been generating knowledge about the legal system their entire careers, so they're going to be ahead of hackers in making predictions about how lawsuits will turn out.

I don't see that he's arguing for credentials. Just that smart+experienced > smart+inexperienced.

Some arguments can be judged by what they say. But ones that involve a prediction of how a complicated system will behave can't be judged by people without much experience. Most of the comments on the Lessig/DMCA story revolved around what precedent would be set by a lawsuit, which I don't feel confident to judge merely by reading the arguments.
"That’s what they did, and it’s what I’d do too, and I have standardized tests to prove that I’m at least not an idiot. But everyone in the tech industry just assumes they’re stupid and they don’t get it."

Well, as you say, the alternative is that they're knowingly using the legal system to bully people into bankruptcy to stave off having to actually produce value for the money they're getting. We may hope that they're ignorant or stupid, because the alternative is worse.
It's time for Wolfram to shit or get off the pot. Has anyone ever seen a single use of it that wasn't scripted?
"They just eat, poop, sit around and reproduce every so often." - where do I apply?
Google's gym is free.
Looks like it has great potential. I hope there will be an API and am really looking forward to trying it out. The dynamic parsing aspects of it are what appeal to me. Some searches I plan to try when it's live;

(some company) revenue - and I hope to get graphs for past years, and a pie chart for the current year, given that all that info is in a [public] company's 10k filing.

Napoleon relationships - hopefully I should get a tree showing positive affiliations with Josephine & others, negative ones with Wellington & others, and ambiguous ones with with Talleyrand etc.

I can think of a lot of others, but I'm keeping my mouth shut in case they have commercial mashup potential :-) I hope there will be an API or licensing terms which offer a low barrier to commercial entry.
Doesn't he mean mistaking knowledge for intelligence?
You can also eat tasty goat.
Have you read Founders at Work? The interviewing is exceptionally good. It feels like the founders are just telling their stories. JL's questions almost disappear, even though they're right there in the text. You don't achieve that level of invisibility as an interviewer without a deep understanding of what your interviewees are talking about.

There are probably other ways you're undercrediting her. I only mention this one because it's the one I have personal experience with.
screw grass and the compulsion to turn everywhere into the Savannah, let the forest grow.
In the long run, as more and more landowners turn to goats for their landscaping needs, it will become more sustainable. Whereas as more and more people put gasoline into lawnmowers, the less sustainable it gets.
A new look for Spread Firefox
Not for Google.
I'd like to read it if you don't mind and still have a copy lying around.
Quicken for iPhone: pretty basic, but also pretty good.
This article made me go back to Wikipedia again and figure out how the whole "removed" nomenclature system of kinship works.
Very informative article, definitely provides insight into the business of "freemium". Numbers dont' "look" so good for ThreeRings, but I hope they do well.

I tried puzzle pirates for a bit, years ago, on a free account. Their games were good and the people pretty friendly (rare for an MMO). I wonder what the secret "missing" ingredient for stickiness is then. Why did something crudely made and garishly full of ads and product placement like NeoPets succeed and Puzzle Pirates did not?

Perhaps I should try again, pay and find out.
<shameless self promotion> I use goaloc ( http://github.com/mattknox/goaloc ) for rapid prototyping-it allows me to blow smart scaffolds out into rails code, which I then style. Usually, this gives me about the level of functionality I need for clickable prototypes. That said, I often prototype on paper, too.
How would you recognize someone on HN who probably is a real lawyer, or law student?

Often enough, by their very reluctance to contribute opinions in threads that are discussing legal issues. I AM a lawyer (although I'm not particularly experienced about many of the legal issues that show up most on HN). I often don't hazard an opinion at all, because the thread leaves me feeling I have too little sure knowledge of the relevant facts to offer an opinion. Someone who spouts off an opinion instantly after reading an "Ask HN: . . . ?" post is, as you correctly suggest, almost certainly not a lawyer.
Or barbacoa? (not the crappy beef stuff chipotle sells - the real stuff)
Speaking of the law, I would advise anyone, whether interested in becoming a lawyer or not, to buy and work the problems in LSAT practice workbooks. It is a serious exercise in forming logically coherent arguments that will provide across-the-board mental benefits.
Ask YC: Any suggestion on a good bug tracking and project management open source software
I have been reading about bugzilla and trac. Is there any other software that is worth to try for a mid size project we are working on. Thanks
Think about it this way. The potassium from the potato chips you had last week is now the memory of your 10th birthday party in your brain.

Quite literally none of the matter that was you 10 years ago is still part of you. Even the human skeleton is replaced on average every 9 years, faster in children slower in older people.

Are you still you? If so what makes you you? Is it the sum total of mass + thoughts? What if you change your mind, are you different person? What if you piss out the water was you yesterday? In 10 years?
I checked Google results for the queries in the screenshot.

"internet users in Europe"

Top link is:

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats4.htm

One more click, but I think at least as much information in that page as the Wolfram results.

"weather oakland"

Google has cute little icons for rainy/cloudy/sunny, current temperature and conditions, and hi/lo for next 4 days. Probably more of the data a "normal" person wants, in a more concise format.

"oakland"

First link is Google maps, more close in view. If you don't already know that Oakland is on west coast of U.S., the Wolfram map could be more helpful. The other information that Wolfram has likely saves some clicks to the Wikipedia or official city of Oakland site.

"uncle's uncle's brother's son"

This is the classic kind of query that Computer Scientists obsess over answering correctly, that is utterly useless to any normal human being. If they think the kind of inference necessary to answer this query is also needed for actually useful queries, they should have demonstrated the actually useful query instead.

"water 550C 3 atm"

OK, if you want an engine to answer your Physics questions, looks like you want Wolfram Alpha. Google did not have anything useful here.

"integrate x^3 sin^2 x dx"

Again, nothing interesting from Google. I wonder if it would be hard for them to tack this on, if they wanted to. But then, they would likely get scolded by all of the Calculus teachers that they are making it too easy for students to cheat on their homework. :)

"bob"

I like how Google finds various common "bob"s, and divides the page to make it clear which is which. Bob Dylan, Bob Strollers, B.O.B. as acronym for Bank of Baroda. This is the kind of thing that is difficult to replicate without watching the kinds of things the world actually clicks on when they search for "bob."

So, if your question is physics or math (maybe other sciences?) use Wolfram Alpha. Anything else, stick with Google.

EDIT: I see Techcrunch has a similar take away:

"The engine looks awesome for science students and researchers."

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/30/the-wolfram-alpha-demo-...
No, they meanings are really the same. You're telling the person that you did not do something. That something, no matter which word you stress, is the acting of saying she stole your money.
"The carbon in the goat methane comes from the grass, which took that carbon out of the air a few months back. Net effect, nil."

Can you explain this? The grass absorbs CO2, and the goats turn the grass into methane. Except that methane is a way more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. So how could the effect be nil?
It depends if the goes will be raised anyway and just happen to make use of that grazing or if they are razed specifically for nothing but that grazing.

Also how often you would have to mow and how much energy goes into the production and transportation of the mowers.
The problem with methane is that it's more efficient at keeping heat in than carbon dioxide is. So while the net carbon effect may be nil, the carbon is producing more trouble because of the cows.
EDIT: [Last Sentence] >So, if your question is physics or math (maybe other sciences?) use Wolfram Alpha. Anything else, stick with Google.

You pretty much just summed the point of alpha in your last sentence, only people who don't understand label it as a google killer as soon as they see that it recognizes common speech.

But well see as it improves maybe it will replace "just google it" functionality.
But that is totally contrary to the blog post you just made :P I was trying to point out the extreme fallacy in your argument.

At the end of the day you suggested that postulating an opinion on a subject should be left to the experts.

I think were looking at things the wrong way: people should be free to express themselves and their thoughts how they wish. It's up to each of us to decide who is "right" and who we wish to listen to.

I think basically I approach this the opposite way from yourself :)
gsiener.. I have a similar background to yours; I was writing a lot of C and doing systems programming for a long time. Pretty recently I started playing with Ruby and Rails, and I found some online tutorials helpful, but had the best luck with following along through some books. Just using the following resources I have become a decent ruby/rails developer. If you are interested in Python or another framework, I am sure there are equal resources for that as well.

So for ruby:
http://qa.poignantguide.net/index.html (got me up to speed)
http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/UsersGuide/rg/ (Good reference)
http://www.whytheluckystiff.net/ruby/pickaxe/ (great reference)

Once you have a fair grasp on Ruby, Rails is really very simple. I got my hands on a copy of Sitepoint's Simply Rails 2.0 and went through the first half of it in about 10 hours. If you paid attention to what you were doing you should be able to make your own basic app(which I did at that point). I then went back and finished that book up and redid a lot of my first app.

After things are starting to click the railscasts at railscasts.com are really very useful, and are a way for you to 'learn from someone'. I enjoy these a lot.

Also don't forget you can ask questions in irc channels (For ruby or rails it is #rubyonrails and #ruby or #ruby-lang on efnet)

So my post is long and rambling, but I want to encourage you to try. There are a lot of resources where you can learn as you go, and while tutorials and books aren't as good as someone with you they are a great start. Also IRC is a great place to get help.

Give it a try, I think you'll find that web frameworks are much more simple than they seem from the sideline.

Jer
Not a Google killer, but a Google augmenter. Like Wikipedia.

This is a completely separate service, and from what I can see, it's going to absolutely rock in its domain.
Did you know that there's an algorithm for symbolic integration that always works?
Jon Stewart, John Ellis & LHC
Having had fresh goat, it's pretty good. Mutton, on the other hand, can be quite gamey at times, IIRC.
"uncle's uncle's brother's son"

I'm always confused by familial relations. The diagram seems biased to maternal grandparents (assuming square/circle is boy/girl) - an uncle could also be on the father's side. Also, your "uncle's brother's son" could be you.

I'm pretty sure they discussed these alternatives (and probably deliberately chose this very example as an excuse to do so.)
The algorithm will find the answer if one exists or tell you that there is no answer possible.

I wonder why it's never mentioned in high school Calculus classes. Symbolic integration as presented there looks very magical -- not algorithmic at all. You might mistake it for an AI problem (which it was for a while).
> they still estimate themselves to be in the top quarter and they also estimate themselves to be better than those in other quarters.

Isn't a top quarter member 'better' than those in the other (lower) quarters by definition?
I've often wondered if this were true in general or only in the tech industry. Do Doctors, Lawyers, or Nuclear Physicists think they know about everything else?
I imagine it was the name calling.
Indeed; I kind of did the spec a disservice in calling it multithreading.

Moz states it uses OS-level threads, though, and I expect that's what all the common JS/DOM implementations will use.
Does much grass even grow around there without watering it? I thought it was quite dry. If they're wasting fresh water with a sprinkler system this whole thing is pretty funny.
If you're being strict about REST, you're absolutely right. But I have spent a lot of my career building REST APIs for people and from that I've learned that what most people mean when they say "RESTful" is "easy to use, and easy to read". Arguably including the foreign keys as URLs makes it easier to use, but I'm arguing that it's not :-)
True, but the top quartile only estimated themselves 6 points higher than the bottom quartile estimated themselves. The top quartile is the only group to actually underestimate their abilities, and do so by over 10 points.

Ironically, the third quartile is the most accurate at estimating their own abilities, being almost spot on. The people in the other three quartiles generally also believe they are in the third.

To quote liberally from the paper to save everyone reading the whole thing:

"As Figure 2 (page 5 of the pdf) clearly illustrates, it was participants in the bottom quartile [...] who overestimated their logical reasoning ability and test performance to the greatest extent. Although these individuals scored at the 12th percentile on average, they nevertheless believed that their general logical reasoning ability fell at the 68th percentile and their score on the test fell at the 62nd percentile. Their estimates not only exceeded their actual percentile scores, [...] but exceeded the 50th percentile as well. [...] Thus, participants in the bottom quartile not only overestimated themselves but believed that they were above average. [...] Other participants were less miscalibrated. However, as Figure 2 shows, those in the top quartile once again tended to underestimate their ability. Whereas their test performance put them in the 86th percentile, they estimated it to be at the 68th percentile and estimated their general logical reasoning ability to fall at only the 74th percentile"
I figure most people already internalized the idea to some extent, (given that this is a site geared towards online ventures), but my gut feeling is that, unconsciously, we might be putting a tad too much focus on the "virtual", and at some point we'll need to swing back to "real" side of the world when considering going into entrepreneurship.
Well okay, not nil. But the methane eventually oxidizes back to CO2, half life 7 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane.

Contrast with fossil fuels, which take a looooong time to get (permanently) back into the ground.
Google is much larger than Twitter.

And twitter's reputation is for product design, not on technology.
Computational Complexity for Dummies
More importantly, could the author of this article become self-aware?
So basically the service is the digital version of one of those constants tables at the end of notebooks.
The article is persuasive in showing that people tend overestimate their own skill level. For example, people who have very poor social and intellectual skills (below 25th percentile ) still seem to think they are "above average" (roughly 62nd percentile).

However, it is also very clear from their graphs that, overall, people simply seem to map the normal range of abilities (0% to 100%) into the compressed range (50% to 100%). I wonder if this has anything to do with how we grade in school, ... namely, anything below 50% is a "failure".
awesome! I love this. Now I can finally build my Ruby Web Crawler. Thanks Ezra.
Also see http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/readings/sim...
There are actually plenty of businesses that rent goats for clearing property
I've used Trac in 3 projects now, and I like it a lot. The wiki is great (works even in tickets). Trac integrates with Subversion, has milestones, timeline, etc. There are also some great plug-ins. My main gripe is that it would take some effort to move tickets between Trac projects.

This topic has also been discussed before, you might dig for it at "http://searchyc.com/".
That's just like saying the gas has already been processed and would be used anyway.
Microsoft releases final Windows 7 system requirements
Yeah lol.
Rails Maturity Model
A single exception, no. But environmentalism takes a lot of forms: Greenpeace hippies, Sierra Club hunters and naturalists, and humanists interested in long-term sustainability (which is where I fall). Though there's still a strong residual echo of the (understandable) knee-jerk reaction to nuclear from the 70s, there are now many environmentalists who support nuclear as a lesser evil compared to coal.

Apologies for having an easily-struck nerve, re: implied "All X are Y" statements. :)
I was under the impression that goats present the same problem? Here's an interesting article from a couple years ago on some effects of overgrazing of goats in China, including desertification, starvation, and dust storms.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003498352...
Game AI bugs caught on tape... and fixed
Your doppelganger walks in the door just now. By asking probing questions, you establish he has a perfect copy of your memories and experiences, in every detail. He laughs at the same jokes, and cries at the same point of sappy movies you do (even though you never told anyone this). You can not discern any difference. Furthermore, he (apologies if you are female, just global replace the pronoun) has been engineered in a way that he will not age, or forget, or degrade in any way over time the way you will. Given the awkwardness of there being two people with one identity, he carefully explains that it only makes sense that he goes on as the "real you." To facilitate the process, he hands you a loaded gun, and tells you that you know what needs to be done and leaves the room.

Do you put the gun up to your head and pull the trigger? If not, why not? Surely, the fact of your memories going on is enough to assure you that you are not really "dying," just making it easier to resolve this complex situation?
The examples that Matt points out are more examples of tech culture groupthink than a phenomenon that is unique to hacker news. That is, they are ideas that are widely and passionately agreed upon within the culture to the point that disagreeing with them makes you look like a curmudgeon. This happens in lots of cultures. It is not something unique to hackers, smart people, or Hacker News.
Flagged for celebrating a 'personal attack'.
Visualizing Bayes' theorem
The only place you mention pricing (that I can find) is in your FAQ, and the answer is "Please contact us at 1.866.563.7748 for pricing details" - that makes me think it is WAY out of reach for the startups and smaller businesses that are on HN.

So, roughly, how much _does_ it cost?!
"The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool." - Shakespeare

You can also find similar quotes attributed to Socrates and Lao Tzu.
Don't miss the great response from Alex Payne in the comments about "best practices" vs real word realities.
Episode 1 of "Connections": A Series that Follows the History of Science and Technology
> I highly doubt there's any drive at anytime in the future that will be able to hold every piece of music (no matter how bad) produced .. ever.

And at one time it appeared there would be a world market for five computers. ... On a long enough timeline, statements like yours will be trounced.
Communications of the ACM (new site, longtime publication)
His "Art of Stock Picking" is a good read

http://www.vinvesting.com/docs/munger/art_stockpicking.html
Smartphone technology for large screen displays