skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's interesting. I, on the other hand, was so disgusted by the RIAA's tactics and lobbying that I stopped buying CDs altogether without resorting to (currently) illegal downloading of music.

I can make my own music. I decided many years ago I didn't need theirs that much if they couldn't play nicely in the sandbox.
>>Justin fed the man pomegranates until he fell victim to an overstuffed slumber. He created some lemonade, which the man then poured down his gullet -- level complete! Randy created a coffee shop. It appeared, the man ordered a cup o' joe at the carry-out window, drank it -- level complete!

I'm very interested about the freshness. Speculation: did they take a load of probable phrases from the dictionary and describe how each will function in the level? If the objects are to interact with each other at all, the data necessary seems to grow too quickly. So, I'd like to see how (and to what degree) they were able to describe this much of the real world.
I saw both threads and I think that you're probably wasting useful energy by dwelling on this (true or not - I don't spend much time analyzing it).

At the minimum, if you feel inferior because of something like this, try to find a way to turn it into a challenge to succeed at whatever you want to do in spite of it. There are many successful people out there with non-name brand college degrees.
I agree with you completely; Erlang is indeed the best tool for the job, if you know it well. But my point is that none of the other tools he glossed-over make high-performance server programming impossible; in fact, it's trivial in most of them.

As a matter of fact, Erlang is the only one in that list that has a bondage-and-discipline evaluation model and runtime; all others allow you to interface with native system calls and you will get your requests the instant they arrive and you can process them in $HLL of your choice.

His application domain does not at all suggest a requirement for seamless distribution. A poker server! And if you look closely at the languages of his choice, you see that he didn't have a clear idea; Delphi?

He could have easily "distributed" the application with primitive load balancing. Have a single server handle requests and player signups up to a certain high water mark. I mean, how many players are in a given poker table anyway? Then direct new requests to your standby backup server. Repeat, in round-robin fashion.

By the way, I remember him from comp.lang.lisp; and my memory might have tainted my judgment of the article.

Also, a lot of $HLL programmers have this weird prejudice about C and proper systems programming. They want to do everything in $HLL, down to <insert lowest threshold>. That's silly, C is the native language of most OSes, use it for its power, but only just where necessary.
I disagree that it's as easy as Nginx or Apache (webservers), but with Google, there are treasure troves of information about doing it yourself.
The state confers special privileges on degree holders that are denied to everyone else. It also regulates, funds, and grants degrees itself.

Examples include credential requirements for many different occupations, licensing laws, and job eligibility.

Of course, there are also the more "unofficial" effects of these policies. Credentialism is widespread in society thanks in no small part to the massive, state-funded school system.
No, this is satire: "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" http://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgres... ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair )
As part of this community, I am embarrassed that your comment has 23 points.
Guantanamo-like indefinite detention is hardly new
Leo: "My opinions are my own and have never been influenced by any vendor at any time"

Arrington will never say that for most of his content is pay-per-post. Like a giant billlboard, you pay Arrington for what you want the tech world to see.

And he receives a lot, and I mean lots and lots of money from microsoft, facebook and twitter.
I only feel inferior when I haven't done enough to maximize my potential.
all of these name-brand colleges are private, so if the state has a role in all of this, it's quite indirect, right? of course the government has a role in accredidation, grants, laws, etc., but it's hard to imagine eliminating those ... sorry, i don't want to get into a debate on libertarianism ;)
Oh, please. "New journalism?" That's mostly about removing all the ethical limits involved in the old journalism. You can almost guarantee that Mike's whining is entirely about him being denied an exclusive.
That doesn't make it a title of nobility, especially since the government also grants things like military commissions, presidential medals of freedom, and appointments to high positions all the time, all of which are more similar to titles of nobility than university degrees.

Either you're speaking metaphorically or you're pushing some crank theory, I can't tell which.
that's probably the most healthy attitude ;)

i suppose it's harder when you are around people from name-brand colleges, no?

if nobody around you went to a name-brand college, then of course there's no point of reference
There goes the realest mofo on this forum.

People don't see this is what we're trading real journalism for. Diva bloggers that have to be kissed up to.
Nursing Home Abuse Victim
Nursing Home Abuse Victim
Re:alcoholism, yes that was whajt I was trying to say, apologies if I was unclear. But as for fast genetic change 99% or so of Danes are lactose tolerant. Among Chinese less than 5. Agricultural populations will only have less variation than h-gs due to population bottlenecks or if a h-g variant is selected against in an agricultural environment. For a small effect gene assume a 1% higher survival rate. I'm not really up on the maths but with 10k years with 25 year generation time we have 400 generations. I think that's plenty of time to reach fixation. If I was at a computer instead of doing this at my phone I'd do it properly, but if you google the Hardy-Weinberg equation something useful should come up.

As a thought experiment consider the polynesian migrations. Assume that given the longer distance between islands each migration event between islands culls thd weakest 20% so each new founder population has a higher mean muscle mass. That's a one generation selection a lot higher than 1%. With 5 such events it wouldn't surprise me if you moved 1or 2 standard deviations in the mean. Look at the difference in physiogonomx between native Taiwaneese and Maori. Less than 1000 years in those migrations, IIRC.
How To Repair Windows Errors
Do you get numerical error codes often using windows? Learn how to repair them.
I sort of dread the idea of defending post-modernism, but here's my opinion. There are some interesting ideas, but unfortunately it's become buried under reams and reams of mediocrity. But that's science, and that's how science has worked for a very, very long time.

In the long run the mediocrity gets stripped away, and we're left with the interesting ideas. Phlogiston dominated scientific discourse for far longer than it needed to.
The incredible shrinking venture capital industry
I'm sure that losing $X, where X is large compared to your wealth, is generally a bigger event than gaining $X in terms of utility. But can't we always repeat the argument so that the game is fair when measured in utility?
Well, they are private in name only. They are massively funded by the state, both directly and indirectly through exclusive student funding grants. The degrees they grant have the same special status as those granted by "public" schools, and they are regulated the same way.

I don't think this is an exclusively libertarian issue. Your original question could be generalized to include all titles of nobility, and that seems relevant because one of the purposes of such titles is to make titleholders feel superior, thereby making others feel inferior. In other words, you don't have to be a libertarian to oppose titles of nobility.
A little off-topic, but it's made my day seeing one of Lipton's posts on the front page.

It only started relatively recently and it's been a really good computational complexity blog so far.
My understanding is that you can create any object in the database at any time, that the objects interact with each other according to general rules, and that they have on the order of 10,000 objects.

But the example you gave...it sounds like all you need to do is give the guy something to drink. It's nice that you can do that with lemonade or water or a coffee shop, but I don't think it will be fun if it's not challenging, and that doesn't sound challenging.
Venture Capitalists Head for the Door
I took 'brand name' to mean any college with an excellent reputation in its field, not just the private Ivy League colleges. A degree in physics from UC Berkeley (semi-public) is nothing to sneeze at, for example.
No, but I have felt inferior for not going to college. For a variety of mostly personal reasons, it didn't seem like a life-enhancing decision at the time (~25 years ago, in Ireland).
Well, it may be a little different in the UK due to our many-tiered higher education system (Oxbridge, redbricks, ex-polytechnics and a moderate spectrum in between), but I'll chip in my two copper pence either way.

Actually, this is a question I've thought about a little too much, I'd wager, because, as a prospective undergraduate, I actually turned down an offer to read mathematics at Cambridge and decided to study at the University of Bristol instead. The latter is in itself a well-regarded institute, no doubt, but it cannot be said to have anything near the Oxbridge 'name-weight' (for want of a better term).

Do I regret my choice? In some ways yes, in some ways no. The decision was very much informed by my particularly working class background - I did not believe I would have 'fit in' to the predominantly upper-middle-class culture of either the university or the city that surrounds it. In hindsight, my opinion hasn't changed at all. Bristol suffers many of the same problems as a university, but as a city it is as colourful as they come.

I believe that forgoing the 'top tier' university worked such wonders for my social development (and, hence, my subsequent happiness) that I cannot bring myself to regret it wholesale. However, I can't help but feel there's an undeniable magic that happens when a highly selective and competitive institution brings a bunch of smart, young people together to explore their interests.

Being a part of that could, as the "Disadvantages of an Elite Education" article suggests, have ended up insulating me from the 'regular world', but there is the odd occasion where I cant help but wonder what could have been if I'd chosen to experience it. Maybe that's what it takes, you know? I try not to dwell on it for long, though - I've left that to my folks!

I've not planned to become a high-ranking politician or appear on BBC Radio 4 (yet), so a non-Oxbridge education hasn't hindered me much so far... Either way, though, I'm still (relatively) young and it will be a good few years before I can evaluate these decisions with any great degree of accuracy.

We'll see, I guess.
Honestly, this thing is stabler than the latest Firefox on Linux!

And on top of that, it takes 1-2 seconds to open up vs. 14 seconds for Firefox.

(My PC has 3GB RAM, 2GHz Intel Dual core 2 processor, Ubuntu 8.10)
Alt+arrow keys works fine here for forward/back. On Linux.
I barely went to college at all. I wonder if I feel better about my situation than does someone who went to Grand Valley State instead of UMich CS.
Instead of trying to define by example, let's use an actual definition:

"A title of nobility grants special legal privileges to an individual at the expense of the rest of the people."

If you have a different definition, that's fine, of course. Then we're just down to semantics, and I guess you could say I'm speaking metaphorically. But I hope you're not just excluding certain titles because they don't fit the preconceived idea of a title of nobility in most people's minds.
Is there any good source of data about the best place to start a company?
There may be a lot of relative economic mobility in the US, but less than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway, Denmark, etc.

Watch your own sense of entitlement; as a Harvard man yourself, you have all the usual reasons to appeal to genetics, meritocracy of intelligence, instilled values, etc. My suspicion is that you can't see all the obstacles that would be in your way, had you started from somewhere else.

Remember the quote in the article? "Grabbing what you can get isn’t any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists."

Those that work the system to their unfair advantage through mere cleverness are not necessarily to be admired. Intelligence is a long way short of the most admirable qualities in a man.
The issue of macro is that it is, by itself, not a power. It's like how knife by itself is not food. However, knife can make you food. That's the main point.

Imagine this Christmas, Perl 6 is out with some killing features. Now, your language (Python? Haskell? ML? Whatever) does not have these features. What would you do?

You have 2 choices, basically:
a. forget about that features, write a long blog in which you prove how your language can do just the same thing, albeit "a little" less elegant
b. Switch to perl. This is not always possible, btw, since you may sacrifice some OTHER features that your language has.

How about a LISPer? Well, simple, let's implement these features. Keep in mind: All languages are Turing equivalent, meaning they can do roughly the same thing. There are two differences:
1. some do some task more elegantly (aka easier to maintain) than others.
2. Some have better support (eg. corporates, community, etc.) than others

Thus, you CAN always write the exact same features in LISP. Now, the definition of the macros WILL be messy. However, as a good practice, you spend 2 days debug that holy mess, and jam it into a file you banish somewhere with a dot precede the directory. Next time, you can use the features, pretending that you are using Perl 6!

This is my strategy. My Scheme code always has for-loop (purely functional, too), foreach-like, OO-like features. Of course, Scheme (remember, it's not even CL) does not provide these, but I can either implement them or find the implement somewhere. I have once even try to implement Icon-like mechanism with Macro + Continuation (okay, the Scheme implementation that time was a bit fuzzy, so I failed. But, with pure Scheme, it SHOULD be possible). That's the main power: you can copy others' ideas extremely fast! Without throwing away your old code, too. Hurray to Macro!
TechCrunch, Coding Horror -- both make me pine for downvotes. Nothing else does.
you're right, i've never seen a story but i've seen comments that are at 0 or negative. I assume that there are a bunch of moderators that can downvote?
Have you ever use the combination of LISP + Perl? Okay, maybe not. The idea is to use Perl's ideology (aka copy everything) with LISP technology (macro, since perl does not provide that).

A has X? Well, implement that. It takes 2 days, but it will save you months later. B has Y? implement that. Now you have BOTH X and Y. A users will wish for Y, B users will wish for X. You? Both. Sorry, I meant "Lisper? Both".
Oh, sorry, I read this post like 10 times looking for something to rant about, and nothing about it "stuck", so I didn't recognize it as a direct question. Shows you how I think.

What do I think? Bad. I have a reason:

http://www.matasano.com/log/460/modern-cpu-architecture-thre...

This is one example of the tens of different side channels that exist on modern CPU architecture when you can run code alongside crypto on the same microarchitecture.

How serious are these problems long term? Nobody knows. The full microarchitecture of an Intel or AMD processor isn't documented.
(In case it's not totally obvious, I completely agree with you).
Did you just make up that definition or do you have a citation? Because that definition isn't particularly useful: for instance, any elected or appointed office would then qualify as a "title of nobility"--a police officer has the legal privilege to execute warrants, detain people, and carry arms at the expense of the rest of the people (who must subsidize his training, equipment, operating expenses, and salary). That's not the constitutional definition by any means.

Inventing a deliberately weak definition and declaring victory isn't an especially effective or honest debating tactic.
LEGO D-DAY
I found this article deeply significant and easy to identify with. I was particularly struck by the example of Steve Jobs, but don't know enough to tell if it's an accurate characterization of the man or not. It would be nice to hear about this from other HN readers, as it would any insights on how to leverage this particular skillset. I dry up and wither on my own, but am very good at refining something by gradually eliminating its flaws in pursuit of a collective win.

The author's experience of being told by all and sundry that he was terribly creative while being acutely aware of the flaws in his own work ring very true for me. Indeed, this particular combination can be quite oppressive as people form extremely unrealistic expectations and then express inordinate disappointment when they go unmet...and meantime, one's real skill (which is diagnostic and often therapeutic) is widely regarded as a form of negativity - in extreme form, this manifests as anti-science claims founded on the idea that doctors have a vested interest in keeping people sick, or the like.
Anyone with 101 or more karma can downvote comments.
In other words:

Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid? - http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html
ADD is pretty much the deepest evolutionary change that would have happened to humans post-agriculture. I'm not sure if lactose tolerance is genetic, or if it is the result of acidophilus symbiosis (or both?)

Here's a couple other nitpicks:

1. Lots of white people have ADD

2. Lots of East Asians are descended from the Mongols, who were hunter-gatherers well into medieval times.
Top 5 Used Luxury Cars
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The interview is disappointingly light. Not that I was expecting to read a bunch of Sequoia's secrets, but given their previously good judgment in tough times, more specifics would have been nice.
Surely what you want is the best data about good places to start a company.

The real answer: it depends on your criteria. Delaware is the cheapest place to incorporate, but nobody knows where it is. Nevada is the best place if your business involves lots of cash and/or hookers. Silicon valley may still be the best if you want to meet like-minded geeks. Hollywood stays in LA both for the infrastructure and the weather. Michigan has great incentives right now if you don't mind the cold winters...see the problem?
Hacking Startups, A Declaration of Institutional Independence
as part of this community I am embarrassed that your comment has -2 points.
If we're going to keep this on the frontpage, then Valleywag gets to come back. Same kind of thing.
Although I'm a fan of Nolan Bushnell, this kind of blog posting is so lacking in content as to be useless. So regulation is onerous in California - fair enough. When did the burden of regulation reach a tipping point that made it too much of a handicap? how was it in the old days? What regulations, specifically, are the problem - taxation, employment law, consumer safety, or what?

California's government is the problem. The state is business-hostile. It is merit-hostile. It has the highest tax rates and returns less in services to its average citizens. Massive pension abuses are not dealt with.

One wonders if California's emphasis on citizen democracy is at the root of the problem. It's certainly left us with the best democracy that money can buy, which turns out to be a pretty bad one.
> And [Arrington] receives a lot, and I mean lots and lots of money from microsoft, facebook and twitter.

And you know this how? (I'm not suggesting that you don't. I'm asking how you verified this information.)
Never.

I don't know what doors were never open to me because of my college.

I do know that for every door I did enter, it was only a matter of time before the only thing that really mattered was demonstrated performance.

If more people would just forget about B.S. like "pedigree" and focus on delivering value to their customers, we'd all be better off.
That's a fairly sharp claim. Do you have any evidence to back it up? If it's really that common there should be plenty of evidence laying around. People who've been approached to pay to play, email archives, chat logs, payments. It shouldn't be that hard for someone to come up with something that shows that it's going on. And if someone wanted to earn their muckraking journalism merit badge that would be a very meaty story indeed.

I doubt you'll find anything that obvious, not that Arrington is some sort of paragon of virtue; but my impression is that he's smart enough not to do dumb things like that; and that his main motivation has more to do with being a kingmaker than making money off of his blog.
Summary: The recession is acting as a great filter that keeps out non-passionate founders. Also, Sequoia does some of its best investments in recessions.

The interesting thing is that this recession is acting as a filter not just for founders but also for VCs. See WSJ's "VCs head for the door" [1]

My favorite part though was this line from Mr. Moritz:

"Oddly enough in recessionary times, customers are prepared to take more risk with a young company if they believe that that company offers them a tremendous advantage that will help them become more efficient or lower their costs."

I have one data point in support of this at my start up but would love to hear if y'all are seeing more.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124416376153487535.html
Prof Motwani: Mathematician at heart & his early days in his own words
> Examples include [degree] credential requirements for many different occupations, licensing laws, and job eligibility.

Many? I can come up with law, medicine, professional engineer, architect, and CPA. What else do you have in mind?
You don't have to accuse me of lying or being dishonest. I admit the majority is on your side, but I'm more interested in accuracy than how useful something is for you.

I'm not the first person to use such a definition. Here is one from over a century ago, from an opinion in a court case from Alabama:

"To "confer a title of nobility" is to nominate to an order of persons to whom privileges are granted at the expense of the rest of the people. It is not necessarily hereditary, and the objection to it arises more from the privileges supposed to be attached than to the otherwise empty title or order. Horst v. Moses, 48 Ala. 129, 142."

Again, if you have a different definition, fine. But don't accuse me of being dishonest when it's quite clear mine is at least as valid.
Startup needs June beta customers
The police officer definition rather sounds like the definition of a knight(knights were required to keep the peace in their territories), except a knight got land instead of a pay check. And yeah minor elected officials carry out the same duties that minor lords carried out in their day. The primary difference between nobility and modern authority is duration, legal status and lineage.
Indeed I do. MIT grads are automatically understood as smart. I can often convince people after a few minutes of conversation, but I do not always get those minutes.