skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
pg himself said in his essay that they end up passing on a lot of founders who seem qualified, but didn't make themselves clear enough. I bet having to choose between too many well written applications submitted by qualified people would be a great problem for yc to have. =)
Introduction to Web Development with Emacs
I wanted a map.
Fair enough. Modern day society has guns and less predators though.
I would say "Tools" is important to access the download manager and the addons (preferences...), they would justify a prominent "Tools" button.
Maybe a Google Native Client approach would have better luck. You would have to require your users be running Chrome, but it would be damn fast.
How about a OS X version that looks and acts like an OS X app?
Im getting about 3100/sec, on my duo centrino2 / thinkpad
Are we really feeling better because of these modern comforts?

I can only speak for myself, but: well, yes.

Ok, there're different ways to feel better. But which one is a fake? Is there any fake? Or is it just cultural habit?

That was a bit of a troll, on my part. I don't consider Zen to be "faking it," necessarily -- it may well be the Right Thing for some people. But I do think we'd have even cooler stuff and greater knowledge of both ourselves and the universe around us if, instead of endlessly creating and destroying mandalas to force ourselves to accept the impermanence of all things, we all fought impermanence tooth and nail.
Currently getting ~1840/second on Firefox 3.5 (Windows) and ~620/second on IE8.
Good point. In a related note I really wish the download manager was implemented differently anyway. Having it as a seperate window is a nuisance and all of the addons that try and solve this seem to be buggier than a native solution. Particuarly on Windows 7, getting to that Downloads window seems tedious (forever hitting ctrl-j).

Secondly, do people need to customise their addons often enough that tools is given such visual importance?
I own one and can't tolerate regular keyboards anymore.

The main disadvantage is that it's incredibly expensive (note that you can find it for as low as $260 if you search the web). I spilled water on my first one and had to buy a second one because I just can't get used to normal keyboards.

It also has some minor bugs:

1. If you hold down = and press certain keys (as programmers often might), you get put into different input modes which may confuse you.

2. Shift and Ctrl get stuck sometimes (not the keys, but the input).

3. The Esc key is tiny and inconvenient, especially since I'm a Vim user. The function keys are also tiny, which is terrible if you use them for gaming. Some games where you have to reach to the right side of the keyboard with your left hand are impractical to play.

If another company makes a keyboard with the same shape, but at a cheaper price, I'd buy it in an instant.
It's on my list. Every time I wander through Powell's, I pick it up, read a few more paragraphs, and think "Hmm, I really should read this."
Very cool idea, I wish you good luck!
Last: Hacker's Handbook 3.0 by Dr. K (waste of time)

Current: Last Light by Andy McNab (awesome)
I am currently reading "beautiful code" by Greg Wilson, Andy Oram(and all the contributors)
Chrome uses different processes per tab. It's their sand boxing tech for security.
I hope you aren't disappointed when you a see a new update on your AJAX postback page that looks like a new winning string, when you see it is simply a note from me. :)

(I also generated a few hundred thousand hashes for you)
New York law firms for tech startups?
We're a young online education startup, looking to build a long-term relationship with an NYC-based law firm with experience working with startups.

We have a working version of our site, and we're just starting to meet with potential partners and customers, but our advisors have strongly urged us to focus on working further on the legal side of things before proceeding any further. In the long run, here are the kinds of things that we would want help with from our lawyers:

- straightening out our incorporation
- taking on investment
- online terms & conditions for customers
- employment contracts
- IP issues
- service contracts with partners

We would be willing to pay, but would also consider some kind of equity agreement, if that were a possibility.

Obviously, we're talking to our advisors, googling and seeking advice from many quarters. But we'd love to hear recommendations (or war stories!) from other startup founders who had had experience with law firms in NYC.

Many thanks for any suggestions you can offer.
The last book I finished was Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.

I am currently perusing numerous books for summer research.
oops :) I intended to comment on racymorgan implementation not this one. But this is good too. Opening tabs sometimes cause these mistakes. Sorry for both parties.
I don't think authorities ever helped this idea. The rebuttals I've seen have always been tenuous at best (maybe it's hard to rebut such wild claims) and when you hear things like the original footage was taped over due to a shortage of tape it doesn't seem all that surprising that people will be skeptical. Interestingly, the wiki page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Moon_Landing_hoax_conspi...) probably does the best broad analysis I've read.
Did you just get a hamming distance of 0, or is something broken?
I'm not sure if that's really the problem. I'd hypothesize that if you needed to type in a credit card number, name, address, etc. into a badly designed interface every time you saw a newspaper for sale, they wouldn't sell a lot of them, either.
I think the biggest debunking argument there is is that even if the public could have been duped there is no way they would have been able to dupe the Russians, they had by far the best incentive to prove that the Americans had pulled a hoax. That would have been the PR coup of the century.
Just finished "Anthem" by Ayn Rand (it's like 100 pages so it only took a few hours)

Started "The American Political Tradition" by Richard Hofstadter, pretty engaging history of our major politicians and founding fathers...
copying from my faulty comment on silentmac implementation: Sorry for dual post:

This idea is a really well thought and implemented. This may be a new way of cloud sourcing. Have you considered making a facebook app? It would definitely attract many more people than this. Of course you should offer some carrots for users that do not have any idea what's going on.
no

and

it doesn't matter since it isn't a valid question.

The internet is a collection of computers connected through various links that transfer data between themselves and the end users of those computers.

If you would rephrase your question a bit it might start to make sense:

Would it be possible for a computer connected to the internet to run an application that could pass a turing test ?

The answer to that is 'yes', it is possible but that misses the spirit of the Turing Test, which was to mimic intelligence, and so far we've only been able to 'fool' a panel of judges but without any actual intelligence present in the device doing the fooling, merely clever programming.
Would YC consider accepting founders who can't work full time on their idea? We have been working part time on our product for the last few months and will launch later this year. We don't expect to clear immigration hurdles till sometime in 2010. Does it make sense to apply?
I was expecting a less painful way to try FogBugz.

I wanted to get a feeling of the app but filling a form with loads of inputs is definitly not what I want to undergo before a quick overview.

Some access to the real interface one or two clicks away from the main page would be great.
And that's why I love arch :-)
In that case, the Indians and Chinese are completely full of it. They have their own satellites orbiting the moon and have surveyed the six landing sites. Even if it were possible for the U.S. to keep a hoax under wrap, wouldn't another country like to blow the hoax wide open?
last book: The Dark Tower II

currently: The T Programming Language
uhh.. sorry if I broke it. It now says the smallest hamming distance found is zero, so either you had a major breakthrough or something went wrong.

Edit: it's back up to 43, a nice improvement from 48 from a few minutes ago.
When I started it said: The smallest Hamming distance we've achieved so far is: 48

Now, I opened it also in Safari and says: The smallest Hamming distance we've achieved so far is: 0

0? Does that mean you got one?

Edit: Ok. Solved.
Nah, some script kiddie messin with me. Fixed and patching the hole now...
Well, 43 isn't that bad :-)
Previous: Anathem

Current: Programming in Scala
Interesting. We actually put a lot of work into making this easier in FogBugz 7. Now all we need is your name, email address, and a password. That was still too much?
We have lots of biases, but I don't think we're much influenced by how memorable usernames are. It's the comments that make a username memorable, not the name.
They didn't mention the word "GNU" once. Is it a deliberate snub? They said "General Public License" and "GPL," leaving out any mention of Stallman, GNU or the FSF. Seems like they're targeting this release more toward corporate IT that view "Linux" as another platform like "Windows" rather than the free crowd.
Uh either it's a bug or they've easily won - the current best score no my screen says 0.

http://screencast.com/t/Q4c50esrBpf

EDIT: meh sorry, apparently chrome is a bust :) I see it's 43 in Firefox
Unless of course, they are lying as well in order to have bragging rights of their own. ;)

I don't buy into any of the moon-landing hoax theories. I just don't see the evidence for them, and I think they do a disservice to the brave men who went to the moon. Having said that, in the cold-war era, I can absolutely understand how some people would question this as reality. Given the understanding of technology and the geopolitical landscape during those years, its no wonder that the moon landing was scrutinized by skeptics.
I'd be curious to hear how many people/cycles you get to help with this.
The big switch

before that

Accelerando
Yes. There ought to be at least one person who will work on it full time in the fairly near future. You sound close enough.
Haha, he left a message in my database.

"Oh but for your trouble I generated a few hundred thousand hashes for you. --Phil Freo"

Thanks Phil :-) Your message's hash had a hamming distance of 73
There certainly is a management bureaucracy in MSM, but this is not specific to the so-called old media. But I think there is yet a bigger expense - when you do original reporting or investigations, that will cost you a lot of money to do properly. On the contrary, he is a blogger who probably just sits home most of the time, watching media and react to them in the form of commentaries.

Now, I don't mean it in the derogatory means, it's perfectly ok to make money by blogging, but still...his perspective is rather limited and there is still a difference (in terms of business) between really covering news and just blogging about them.
I am not a proponent of the moon landing hoax theories. But you have believe that if the United States could land men on the moon they could fake it.
Cat's Cradle, by Vonnegut.
"The Screwtape Letters", by C.S. Lewis

In the middle of "Roughing It" by Mark Twain now.
Just got done reading 'the fountainhead' by ayn rand.
Peak Oil Overview - July 2009
It might be worth discussing the "are any of these the case" (sole founder, keeping an existing job, can't move, etc.) question a bit -- the form says that these are not automatically disqualifying, but if you can give an example in each case of when they would or would not be disqualifying (and thus give people some idea of where the grey area is) it would probably help some people.
Well, then, hell. We've got enough smart people here on HN. Let's send someone up there for a look. :)

EDIT: I nominate pg for commander. He could then write an essay from the surface.
escrow.com -- that's what it's specifically made for.
Apollo 11 landing on TV as it aired 40 years ago
Indeed, I'm using CUDA (PyCUDA) and getting about 200,000 iterations per second.
Agreed. Point being, we oftentimes overlook the very powerful ability to de-escalate a conflict by refusing to respond in kind.
I enjoy rereading this. I am forever getting into trouble (since high school, at least) telling people that i think "it is a moral imperative to do what you love". And if you don't know what this means in your life, the first thing is to figure out what that means for you.
I used to have a fan and a switch wired to two bits of the printerport on my computer with a very early version of the webcam software streaming the video out to the viewers.

The number of times that I received mail that it was faked and that I should put up a special text for some viewer somewhere to prove that it was real were beyond counting.

The funny thing is that even though it was peanuts to set this up faking it would have been a lot harder.

Same with the moon landings, imagine how many people would have to be in the know, how would you ever get them all to be quiet, you can't just go and bury them in a pyramid somewhere...
Mine peaked at 3,450 or so on a Core2 Quad @ 3.2Ghz
Is "obsolete" the correct word here? Just because a software package isn't the most recent version doesn't mean that it is obsolete. Depending on the distribution, it could be that the older version is better tested than the most recent version. In that case, you may value stability over the hottest new feature. Let's put it this way: if half of your distribution can be considered obsolete in 2 weeks, your metric is BS.
Last serious book : http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Cryptography-Practice-Hewlett-P...

Last fun book : http://www.amazon.com/Woken-Furies-Takeshi-Kovacs-Novels/dp/...

I can't resist the body swapping stuff ever since reading Lord of Light as a kid
Virtual reality and mobile phones, do they mix?
I've got 6 tabs on Core2Duo in Chrome, barely uses 25% CPU total.
Yep, Israel and Judaism are a bit tricky when it comes to religion vs. ethnicity vs. nationality.
I have just opened another 6 tabs on a different Duo Core machine, all sliders set to max. I will tell some more people ...
Washington/Moscow Hot Line
Agreed. Point being, we oftentimes overlook the very powerful ability to de-escalate a conflict by refusing to respond in kind.

I think part of this stems from the way people often picture the response of the other party in their minds when they formulate a piece of communication. If that response is level-headed and downright nice when they expect it to be rude, you can completely unman them diffuse the situation. Just the fact that the response is very different from what was expected is often enough to cause the other party to reevaluate their position. "(Hold on, this reply is not what I expected, my understanding of the situation could be flawed, must reevaluate.")

The crazy thing is, the substance of your reply can be absolutely the same, but if you phrase it humbly and nicely you can often obtain a much better result. Call it social hacking :)
Thanks Phil :)

I added a word checker, so no more of this tomfoolery!
Web2.0 : an introduction
Please increase delta range down to 1ms, Chrome barely uses CPU power at 10ms. 6 tabs @10ms uses 25% of Core2Duo.
I started to read it but I lost interest quickly.
Especially so emphatically -- "Was the moonwalk faked? No!" Usually, you'd see just "Was the moonwalk faked?", and no actual decision to the verity of the moonwalk. This was very nice to see.
Last book: 1984
Current book: Master & Commander
Also decrease rate at which HTML stats are updated - DOM update slows stuff down, it should update stats only once a second or so.
Augmented Reality Twitter App Looks Awesome. Hope Apple Thinks So Too.
Essentially the same idea: http://pluraprocessing.com/. I reached out to Ray to see if they'd be interested in using us, but if anyone else would like to as well, just drop us a line.
The title is overblown, even for TC. The article talks about short term cash loans to individuals- hardly a core component of the finance industry.
I suspect that "How obsolete is your distro" is to be taken less than seriously. This site provides interesting statistics regarding the uptake of new versions in popular distributions, the meaning/worth of which is very much left open to the reader. I certainly didn't find any implication that more obsolete means less valuable on the site.
Concepts has been removed from the C++0x draft
Imagine the compute power a large site like Google or Yahoo could harness just by including some JavaScript that performs some computation in the background.

Might be interesting to port something like Folding@home to JavaScript and offer a simple <script> tag sites can include, a la Google Analytics or Disqus. The first time the visitor encounters a site with this script it would prompt them with a brief explanation and options to opt in or out of the program on this site or all sites.
A New Plugin: Mockups for FogBugz
I think it's pretty clever how Balsamiq and Fogbugs are partnering on this.
Updated to 1ms! I'll work on the HTML stat updates

Edit: fixed and fixed
Cool, thanks. I think it would be interesting to compile an online free resource which covered all of this material. There are plenty of free course videos online...I feel a side project coming on...
I have to say, this feels like an example of how not to write a changelog. I skimmed it looking for what was actually improved and only noticed something about the CLR. The signal to noise ratio was quite low. I remember something about fruit and supersonic, but have no idea what those are supposed to mean.
Is there a PDF/PPT link anywhere? I am not in the mood to put up with a flash nightmare.
I would be interested to see if you could get something like this running using the Google NACL project (http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/). Wouldn't that give you then benefit of having native code running on any machine that went to the page and had the plugin installed? You could have the user install a plugin when they went to the page and then reload the page. Just popped into my head, probably too late to implement anything now, but might be fun to give it a go.
A question that is not directly related:

You said

My initial goal is to figure out what kind of group I'm dealing with. Three friends about to graduate from college? Two colleagues who work together at a big company and want to jump ship? Are they all programmers? A mix of programmers and business people? There are maybe 20 or 30 different configurations of founders, most of which I've probably seen by this point.

Is there a subset of these group types that work(s) better than others in your experience? If so, founders might be able to choose cofounders that increase their chance of succeeding.

Also, having worked as a member of a couple of types of groups (startup with room mate / recruiting talented programmers with a similar outlook and goals), I have found that there seem to be problems common to each type.

Since you have a much larger dataset, you might be able to outline the common pitfalls each type of group runs into. Could you do that, at least for the common types of groups?
As a CPU contributor, I demand that you give us stats as to which browsers were the fastest for your computation! This could be an interesting comparison point for the bundled javascript engines. (Maybe :))
Consider this - if they in fact did NOT find the lander where it was supposed to be, that would be a huge bargaining chip in talking to Americans on virtually any subject. I.e. they would keep it under the wraps at all costs. Rebutt this :)
WSGR has a NYC office.
great for applicants, but not for the process overall. I imagine if you told people exactly what you're looking for, you'd only just get that from applicants. In essence, you'd have just diluted the power of your discriminator.

What pg's doing here seemed mostly to tell applicants what not to do. He's trying to make his application process scale better, and to increase the signal to noise ratio on the good, but not obviously great teams.
Too true. I was never a huge editor, but I did a decent bit here and there, but also quit after having to deal with bullshit like this all of the time.
Sure, many thousands of people were involved with the Apollo project. But, maybe only a few people would have to be in on the fraud.
NHibernate 2.1 Released
Also, are you logging IP's for your best results? Would be cool to know if my machine was the one that came up with the shortest hamming distance (obviously IP's aren't a guaranteed way to figure this out, but still...)
The net is nowhere near being able to kill the finance industry. Do you know how hard it is to get data in an immediately usable format without dropping a significant amount of money? There's a lot that can be done in this area in just laying ground work. If I weren't loaded down in student debt and knew how to do more than just writing code that values financial products, I'd gather up two more people and apply to YC.
Ah! I thought it had something to do with holidays...

Also, on the US graph there's also a discernable a mini-spike right on or just before the first quarter. I can't come up with an answer for that. One guess is that people are looking into planting flowers for the springtime around then.
> Besides seeing my housemates in Palo Alto I had no social life.

If you can look at yourself and say that, its time to sort out the social thing immediately IMHO. No project, success or amount of money is going to make you happier than having fun with your friends.

Personally, I cannot even imagine working 70 - 80 hour weeks, I have no idea how folk can do it!
It's pretty well though out and is awesome in principle. The problem is that our interpreted javascript cloud network is getting owned by the awesome power of nVidia GPUs.

"Yeah, my 5 GPUs are currently cranking at a total rate of 800 M/sec. (Best score of 39 after running for a few minutes.)

(Hah! Just got lucky and hit 35 on one card after an hour.) "
- The nVidia CUDA group