skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How to find the most effective dandruff remedies
Yes it can be extremely annoying and embarrassing having a scalp condition like dandruff, eczema, scalp infections or a nasty itchy red rash on your scalp. If you are suffering from: is your scalp flaky itchy or do you have dry scalp with…
Related: BravoNation http://bravo.yahoo.com/ -- an experimental site launched by a very small team at Yahoo! in 2007. I wrote about it on Waxy, describing it as "a web-native equivalent of XBox Live's achievement system, abstracted to work with any online community." http://waxy.org/2007/12/exclusive_yahoo/
Freakonomics: An Economist Thinking About Love
True, it will just mean that homosexuals won't be treated to required mind-altering drugs (not the good stuff) and barred from working.
Is depression really an evolutionary adaptation? A second opinion.
Part 2 can be found here:

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/08/30/is-depres...
Essentially all of Apple's products are single disk. There is virtually no win there.

Well, if you're data-paranoid, like me, you can set your ZFS filesystem to keep 2 copies of every file on different parts of the disk. Then if your single disk has a sector or two go kaput, ZFS will notice the bad CRC on read and get the other copy.

I've also heard of other improvements for single-disk, and SSD specifically, but alas, I can't find citations right now.

Time Machine really stole the thunder on this for regular users.

Time Machine's "snapshots" suck. Entirely new file every time a bit changes? Really? My 500 gig external disk just filled up. And it's only backing up a 250 GB drive. And I only started using Time Machine a few months ago. Virtual machines & TrueCrypt volumes that change often are a royal pain with TM. ZFS, on the other hand, can store 4 months worth of backups of a 1TB RAID array on my fileserver in way south of a gig.

Also, ZFS send and ZFS recv are awesome ways to stream a filesystem snapshot over a network to, say, a Time Capsule. If you were so inclined.
What Kate saw in Silicon Valley
There are two steps to any collectivist system
1) Collect all the resources
2) Stop
I'm sorry but this sort of thing is so unbelievably, blatantly obvious when it happens that if you genuinely believe that somebody is "casually" saying these things, you're a social buffoon.

One of my friends is notorious for this. She is currently traveling around in Europe...every so often there will be something like

"laying on the beech in the south of france today! France Je t'aime!"

This sort of thing does not come across as even remotely casual, because it isn't casual. Why did she feel the need to tell everyone that she was in "the south of france"? Why not just "on the beech"?

Because that sort of thing is abnormal for her. It isn't something that she normally does. She's bragging, and everybody knows it.

Now, I don't mean to pick on my friend (who may actually be fictional), but I just want the people that do this sort of thing to know that it is very, very transparent. You're making yourself look like a fool, and informing the world that the very things you are trying to purport as normal for you are, in fact, novel. That is why you're mentioning them.
I was thunderstruck by the following:

"By inverting this list, we can get a portrait of the 'normal' world. It's populated by people who talk a lot with one another as they work slowly but harmoniously on conservative, expensive projects whose destinations are decided in advance, and who carefully adjust their manner to reflect their position in the hierarchy."

And:

"Interestingly, while Kate said that she could never pick out successful founders, she could recognize VCs, both by the way they dressed and the way they carried themselves."
Hi, post author here. A couple notes:

1. It seems that the comments are focusing on the value as related to the student-- that's certainly one part of the equation, but don't forget that there is value for the financing companies that give easy credit access to students, and I feel that is where the excess demand is coming from.

2. This is a very volatile argument, especially in educated circles because people take it personally. Whenever I have this discussion it seems to boil down to anecdotes and how my degree is of value. That's something to avoid.

3. This is part one in a series and I'm currently working on the data to test the hypothesis. I will be looking at per-major opportunity cost, total amount financed versus {cost, time} and a couple others.

4. Just because I'm calling it a Bubble does not mean I'm calling a top in either tuition rates or financing. As the recession begins to hit states harder, more budget cuts will trickle into state public education and revenue gaps will need to be filled somehow. IDK if it's through fed stimulus or spending cuts, but it possibly could lead to an increase in tuition rates as financing is still available and the students won't recognize the true monthly cost until after graduation.
http://tweetingtoohard.com/top
news.YC is an aggregator.
The nail in the coffin occurred the moment it became illegal for newspaper companies to telemarket. The US government granted no exception to newspapers when passing the 'National Do Not Call Registry' and thus signed newspapers death warrant. It is worth nothing that Canada DID grant exception to their newspapers when passing similar legislation. More here http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05...
I like the comment "So how exactly do you get one of these 'analyst' jobs?".
I'm running Cupcake here, and it's pretty painfully slow on my ADP1. Scrolling is a bit unreliable, as is trackball navigation. It looks great, though. Best of luck getting it working there.
The problem would not be much easier if the resumes were in Word, RTF or even plain text. There are numerous tools to extract text from PDF documents.

That is not entirely true. PDF can be (and is frequently) generated in a way that doesn't even allow you to extract the sequence of words deterministically. A text, Word or RTF file always makes this possible (the pathological case of text embedded in images notwithstanding).

There are tools to extract text from PDF, but all of them have to use more or less reliable heuristics in order to recover the original order of words and letters unless the PDF file was generated with particular settings that appear to be non default in many tools.
"Frankly, I really don't understand what the fuss is all about, so what if some people like other people from the same gender. Just let them be, it is their lives after all."

Do not let yourself use the "to each his own" argument. Its PROVEN (like 2+2 = 4) that that outlook is plain ol' wrong (you can find it on wiki or something).

What about people who roam around naked? Whats wrong with that? Its their bodies, who are we to discourage them? What about child molesters, they are having CONSENSUAL sex with young teenagers, who are we to stop them its their bodies.

Please pick a better argument.

Now: Treating homosexuals as outcasts is no worse than treating black people as outcasts for the way they are born. These people are not doing anything wrong (some might even argue that they are doing right by our society by helping with overpopulation problems) and they just want to be treated as normal people who happen to do something you don't completely approve of, not as criminals, or outcasts!

In any case people have discriminated against groups for all of recorded history. So we need to stop it as much as possible because from ALL of history we can see what good comes out of discrimination.
...we are trained at the core to manipulate conversations, control the direction of conversations, get you to feel good about what we are saying, and convince you that the things you are looking for are not what you are looking for - but you are instead looking for the things that are good in us.

Fortunately, he does not speak for all salespeople. Good technical salespeople are trusted advisors and business partners working toward mutually beneficial solutions.

If OP's "Sales 101 for entrepreneurs" lecture was about manipulation and control, I'll pass.

Whether it's building or selling, I prefer to do what is always in my customer's best interest.
As a soon-to-be graduating college student, this just makes me more and more sad that my tastefully yet interestingly laid-out resume will be reduced to a set of data that I could have spent 5 minutes putting into an email or a web form. I guess it's nice to hand out at a job fair though...
Had a great time this year, only gripe was that hotel food was exorbitantly expensive. The first talk on Cucumber/BDD moved really quick for 9AM, but it was still informative and introduced me some new things.
I've tried to solve this on my own and, while it seems simple, it's hugely complex. What I want is just a black box that I can stuff data into and have it be semantically tagged.
What if the assignment to the boolean was only one of the things you wanted to execute based on the result of the if statement?
Only if we assume all readers are familiar with European-style names. And even then it's rather rare.
> Just to make sure I understand: you could view a PEG as having an ambiguity that is resolved by implementation.

I wouldn't quite put it that way, because PEGs are defined abstractly, not in terms of any particular parsing method. For example, lpeg (http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/docs/peg.pdf) parses PEGs also, but does not use packrat parsing to do so.

> It's a small and subtle difference that both LL(* ) and PEG grammars are by definition unambiguous and produce only one tree; they just accomplish it in different ways.

Yes, though I will editorialize a bit here and say that PEG's method of defining away ambiguity makes it impossible to know when there are true ambiguities in your grammar. With PEGs, if you have:

a -> b / c;

...it is undecidable whether this is the same as:

a -> c / b;

Take a common ambiguity like the if-then-else problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangling_else). This is a real ambiguity that will affect how programs in your language are interpreted. But a PEG based tool will never tell you that an ambiguity exists, because to a PEG there is no ambiguity. It gives you no help in understanding whether any of your language's productions are ambiguous to a user.
SWIG is a hassle.
I do a lot of high-end stuff now, but let me tell you about how I started:

I went door-to-door downtown asking small businesses if they needed any help with their computers. By the time I got to the second business, I had my first gig, setting up a small network.

That gig led to others, which led to others. I installed printers. I created small database applications. I had this one job that for two weeks I just ran around downtown helping users at their desks -- it was a lot of fun! The guy said "You're filling in for me. When this beeper beeps, go to the person and help them with their problem". He handed me the beeper, it immediately beeped, and I spent the next two weeks running around like a madman. Had a blast.

Later on this "odd jobs" method of starting led into project work, then into programming-consulting.

A lot of getting started is just having a good attitude and being able to figure out answers for people's technical problems. I found starting out to be the most enjoyable part of building a consulting career, actually. Have fun!
>Kate Courteau is the architect who designed Y Combinator's office. Recently we managed to recruit her to help us run YC when she's not busy with architectural projects.
I was scratching my head on this one - thinking why a person with architectural skills would be chosen to help run YC - and then it struck me that originality and creativity is perhaps the hallmarks of YC or am I missing something?
Although it's funny, I think it's a waste of time and talent.
> Essentially all of Apple's products are single disk. There is virtually no win there.

You can have multiple copies even inside a single disk. And this is useful when you use cheap disks.

> The checksumming is a nice feature and desperately needed as disk capacity continues to explode but bit errors remain the same, but in practice probably the biggest risk is bugs in FS code:

This is not true. At some point, a heavily used disk will start failing. It is really nice to be protected against that - and very important to know when it starts happening.

I talk from experience - I had a zpool scrub detect silent file corruption once. Curiously, it never happened again with that disk. But I keep using that disk (of course, with frequent backups) - and I would never do that (continue using a disk that failed) with any other Filesystem.
Waiting for the new patrons in next week's Mickey Mouse Clubhouse!

(Rhetorical: how's that hacker news?)
Google's Ascii Easter Egg
On a side note, can someone from YC post pictures of YC office? Just curious. :)
As spydez points out - ZFS does offer a major benefit for machines (laptops) running SSD: "[it evens] out write activity to avoid hot spot failures [in flash]."

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/not_a_flash_in_the

You also have to think about the possibilities that would have been possible with ZFS, like hybrid storage pools: efficient use of a Flash + Conventional HD setup

http://blogs.sun.com/studler/entry/zfs_and_the_hybrid_storag...
What do you mean, how far in front?
It has always been known that:

Lying may(!) bring you some advantage, short-term only; but you always have an alternative way: you can tell something great, without lying, but you need your phantasy for doing that.

So, my dear friend, do you simply lack phantasy?

;)
Many thanks. Definitely need to get some test devices — Would love to focus on making it functional/accessible on these devices, but then forwards compatible. Love the fact that more and more modern devices are including auto-update features.
This is not Apache specific. If you take a look at the HTTP protocol, you will see why: Every request has the full path in it (e.g. GET /images/xyz.png HTTP/1.0) , but it is actually optional (in HTTP 1.0) to specify the domain name/host that you want to reach (most browsers send the Host header anyway, because serving multiple domains on one IP would be impossible otherwise).
Time Machine's "snapshots" suck. Entirely new file every time a bit changes? Really? My 500 gig external disk just filled up.

Yeah, this has been far less useful than I imagined it would be, just because it takes so much space for the backups.
Agile Software Development made easy
Information-packed blog all about agile software development, agile project management and agile methods such as Scrum, eXtreme Programming and Lean...
Yes, I've seen- it's definitely lacking. Hopefully they'll update with more features, but ultimately, my main goal is to provide the page animations, history management, AJAX, etc. — Someone could create a Pre theme which doesn't use CSS gradients, etc-
Not perfectly- See some of the notes above-
YC is a business of friends. The companies are made of friends, they try to get startups who come as friends, they try to make startups become friends.
You would have to buy the disks anyway.
"2. Be your own customer. Try (if you can) to eat your own cooking. A product works out much better when you use it yourself. Solve your own problems. Fix the things that annoy you the most. Beyond just 37signals, there are lots of examples where people built software that succeeded in part because they use it themselves. GMail comes to mind."

This is kind of ancient wisdom in the software industry (even Microsoft does this), but as you say, it may be worth repeating.
In a private conversation some years ago, Tim BL told me that he used to use Apollo workstations back in the 1980s and that he really liked Apollo Domain/OS, so he took the // from the Domain distributed filesystem, which used // as a way of addressing possibly remote files, i.e., //hostname/path/to/file . I suspect the \\ in Microsoft UNC pathnames is also derived from the same, probably due to Paul Leach's influence there as he was also from Apollo.
With regards to being able to pick out founders and VCs, I wonder if the inability to pick out successful founders is due to the fact that they look just like everyone else who is trying to create something and do something cool, and after they have become successful they see no need to change themselves because thats what got them their in the first place. As for VCs this could be due to the fact that they in order to maintain their position need to have a certain composure.
"These days, when everyone has a blog and a Github account, sharing code is easy. Doing “git push” requires almost no thought, no investment of time. Why not release everything, even when it’s untested, undocumented, or unfinished?"

Indeed, why not? Getting code in front of eyeballs is one way to improve testing and documentation, and getting features finished.

You don't have to grab stuff from a repo, but often it's nice to be able to use something even if it's crap, when the alternative is nothing at all.

"I concluded that it’s just too early. Clojure is a scarcely two years old. It just released “1.0″ this year, and is still developing rapidly."

Wrong approach. Rubygems made it way easier for people to try things out and have some fin with other people's code. Likewise, Cabal for Haskell has made it much simpler for me to poke around in a language I'm just learning.

Ruby got a big boost from Rails, and the reason Rails got traction was because it was stupid simple to install and start using. If people had to run arcane compilation tools or track down dependencies, things would have been very different.

Every new language designed should include a simple and accessible package management process from the very start to boost adoption and contribution.
Global Bicycle Registry
<a herf="http://www. BikeRegistry.com /Bike registration</a>
i thought he was going to say people with expensive hobbies hang out with other people that have money - and therefore rub elbows with potential buyers or people who are connected to other buyers. I think this would be a good secondary effect. You are much more likely to meet the owner of the bay area's biggest XYZ company skiing at Squaw than fishing at the docks in Alemeda
I believe this a group of pictures from the DemoDay that just happened at YC: http://demoday.fanchatter.com/
Our frontpage has some good photos.
And that would have been awesome.
SSDs already wear level internally; ZFS makes no difference there. L2ARC would have been nice though.
9. What a solitary task startups are.

This is the hardest thing for me to explain to others. And still one of the hardest for me to get used to myself. It takes a lot of time working alone to get anything done.

It may also be one of the many reasons Hacker News is so popular. I don't know about you guys, but if I didn't have this place to break up the loneliness, I'd probably go nuts.
Well I may have mistyped, but the "since" part of the statement dates back to the summer of '07 when we started hearing about the great moves in university portfolios due to alternative asset classes like VCPE and timber. Clearly that has changed a little bit.
Very interesting to get a "third-party" perspective on things, having never gotten to work out in that environment myself.
It is an art form in itself to copy what's working rather than what's incidential to the success of a firm.
"It's really fascinating how certain words need a sentence-long definition when translated from other languages to English. So much is captured in one word!"

That's also true for many English words translated to other languages, and for English words simply being explained in plain English.

What's particularly interesting is when one culture decides that some concept deserves a single-word moniker, while other cultures have no corresponding word, as if the concept never (or rarely) comes up. (The German word Schadenfreude comes to mind as an example.)
An excellent article! I agree with many of these points and comments.
here's the punchline: http://www.google.com/search?q=ascii+art
No - the idea might make for a fun Twitter app, though.
I am not a big fan of flash slide shows. They literally suck.

edit: One cannot control it. Move the slide show faster, slower, go back, stop, etc., which makes it time consuming and inefficient.
I'm not sure most people could tolerate the risk of failure. I think the change for the future is that large organizations will be collections of small groups run like startups, but without the large update and downside.
What about people who roam around naked? Whats wrong with that?

Nothing, unless the owner of the place they're roaming objects. There are, in fact, places where the owner(s) do not object, and few people are up in arms about it, especially in Europe.

What about child molesters, they are having CONSENSUAL sex with young teenagers, who are we to stop them its their bodies.

Molesting is not consensual, by definition. You might want to argue about what activities are or are not molestation, but if you make your argument about "child molesters", you've already lost any hope of convincing any of us that only non-molestation was going on. ;)

I'd say that the "to each their own" argument works really well in many situations.
Yes, but there would be a couple of problems as well, specifically the DNS would need some major revamping. The DNS was already operational long before the web came along and it already used the '.' notation.

http:/com/test/www/someresource

and

http:/uk/co/test/www/someresource

Would have both been valid resources but it would be harder than now to figure out where the machine boundary is located.

You can't go by 'count' (because of subdomains) and you can't go by www either.

I think if they would have gone that route for practical reasons the // would have been 'reinvented', and it would probably be placed like this:

http:/com/ycombinator/news//some/path/resource.html

I'm not sure what the implications for phishing, certificates and humans interpreting URLs would have been in that situation either, but I know that I find it convenient to be able to fish the 'hostpart' out of a URL without further knowledge on my side.
How would you rewrite it?
I was more curious about how the office setup is designed. How startups are allocated space, what is the interaction model between different startups, is there a white board to post story/question/idea of the day?
> In the same vain

I think you meant "in the same vein" ... :)
Product Management For Hackers (My Startup Weekend slides)
Ask HN: What to do with my $100 adwords coupon?
I received a $100 coupon for adwords from Google the other day in my e-mail. As a programmer what are some fun/good ideas of what to do with this?
That's a piece of the puzzle, but I don't think it was the final one. A confluence of circumstances seems to be the cause, a proverbial death-by-a-thousand-cuts, so to speak. I would cite the conglomeration over the last few decades of most newspapers into large, profit hungry corporations that became used to solid profits with little investment in development required. An industry steeped in decades of pride and tradition (What other industry still measures things in picas?) has further dampened innovation. There are many other things I could point to, but I think the do-not-call registry is nothing if not another industry scapegoat.
pg/jl/tlb/rtm: as you're primarily advisors and investors now, do you feel like you've started adopting any habits of VCs (either positive or negative)?
Great insight. Launch fast and iterate. Learn from mistakes, edit, and continue to build something that people want.

The "Founder" next door is like "The Millionaire Nextdoor".Keeping it simple, frugal, and staying cash-flow positive wins the game. This is why your millionaire next door and your founder next door are probably one in the same. Similar philosophies.