skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought that I was a GUI whiz, until an old mainframe programmer told me that the best user interface is no user interface at all.
SPSS?
Amazon has the most useful APIs out there. Don't copy them though.

So many small companies put out giant behemoth APIs with crazy security hoops because that's what Amazon does and Amazon's stuff is really cool. As a result, nobody outside the dev team can figure out how to authenticate, so nobody actually uses the API.

Check out Twiddla's API (http://www.twiddla.com/API/) for an example of how to keep things lightweight. 2 POST endpoints and an IFRAME syntax. Only the bare minimum security, and a huge emphasis on getting your thing up and running without having to sweat the API.
Yeah my view on morals is more egoist than most but I assume that a system of morality is the best-case output of religion.
Good question! I've no idea. Maybe by how often it's used?
Why not create separate accounts for each service? If you are really security conscious, you could even have a separate password for each one.

For that matter, you might simply solve the gmail/blackberry problem by making a second account for your email, setting your primary account to forward to the second account, and setting the phone to check the second account rather than the first.
Hmmm. So imagine tomorrow everyone in the world started acting like Jesus. We all throw away our possessions, and wander around preaching to whoever would listen about being nice to each other. How long before everyone starved?
*"... I left a "something else" category ;) ..."

... and you already have Macs covered but BSD is a big category to leave out.
Seconded. I remember reading his .plan files in the 90s when he was working on Quake II, and I was amazed at how much he'd get done in a day. If you want an education in programming, download some of his source code:

http://www.idsoftware.com/business/techdownloads/
I'd rather blame people that took his advice to extremes and tried to shove everything above the fold, which isn't what he advocated, just to add the most important stuff up top:

"Is all key information visible above the fold so users can see it without scrolling?"

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/screen_resolution.html
Cool, we are in the design stages for a web app right now and this generated significant discussion this week.
MacRuby 0.5 beta 1 Released
This is just another example of the disturbing trend of increasing body of "crimes of omission". These are crimes that involve what might be considered ordinary daily activities that now require permission seeking or special compliance efforts in order to prevent them from being criminal activities. Some of these regulations are clearly reasonable, but they seem to be getting less so of late, and the penalties for non-compliance (even through reasonable ignorance) much harsher.

"Ignorance of the law" may be no excuse but it will not be reasonable for much longer to expect ordinary citizens to be able to comply.
>"So any statement in this thread that heritability somehow constrains the expression of g or of IQ is actually conceptually incorrect."

Then perhaps you can provide an example in which a rat's g is raised to that of the average Berkley student. About 5% of their DNA is different from ours, but since heritable constraints are "conceptually incorrect", surely the right environment would do it, wouldn't it?
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Ian MacKaye - he lives his life completely on his own terms; maintains a purity about what he is doing; is able to see straight through roadblocks; and creates great music. I want to be an entrepreneur like Ian is a musician.
I admire the amazing people I know, the ones who make me think, if I try just a little harder, I can be like them.
Henry Rollins.

Creative, productive, knowledgeable, and funny.
Elon Musk, a man who tries to change the world through his businesses.
I don't think that would really excite most people. Most people probably think mathematicians are largely unnecessary to begin with. Even among people who recognize the value of mathematics, proving new theorems isn't really exciting for them.
This is a bit of a semantic game, and a bit of attacking windmills, but sometimes that can be an enormous amount of fun. So I'll indulge.

In practice, founding a company is a process, not an event, and hence is an interval of time, not a specific point in time. Legally, founding a company is considered an event at a given point in time, purely for reasons of convenience (how do you tax something that came into existence over a period of time?)

If you look at it that way, we're coming from the practical standpoint, not from a legal standpoint, and we feel that on the practical side we're still founding the company. If you look at it this way, poof, the inconsistency disappears like a cloud of smoke :)
Short version:

In our case, the move from flat data to nested data was the killer...We came up with a sweet way of storing the nested data and abstracting away most of complexities of dealing all kinds of data...However, the load on our database was far more than we envisioned...MySQL.
Benjamin Graham, Claude Hopkins. Both wandered into fields full of failed artists and wild gamblers, and turned them into something closer to a science. The Intelligent Investor and Scientific Advertising are the only two books I know of that can give the same person the same epiphany twice.
There's a lot of results like that. You can do some pretty fast algorithms that are provably "not so bad" compared to the optimal solution and run in polynomial time. The problem is that you generally can't combine these with problem reduction to get a "not so bad" solution to a different problem (at least as far as I know).
Bill Watterson (creator of Calvin and Hobbes).

He created an epic masterpiece, never sold out, and left at the top of his game. He achieved fame without being drawn into celebrity, and his ideas have permeated our culture in a deep and wonderful way.
And Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, and pretty much any maker of any complex app. Hell, I bet that's even true for Basecamp.
What's Next for the Netflix Algorithms?
My favorite is Flickr API

http://www.flickr.com/services/api/

Provides a lot of functionality.
Basically anything you can do on the website you can do through the API.
The names of the calls are intuitive.
Provides different formats.

And most importantly has libraries available for different languages that will make the calls for you.
This is a great article and it covers almost all the bases. The only thing I'd add is a discussion of UI refactoring. Over time, creeping featurism tends to take over. Your users will request every possible feature and your marketing department will want to add more check marks to your product's column in the feature matrix.

As this article points out, you have to be the bad guy and Just Say No most of the time. However, when a large subset of your users request a certain feature, the best response is often to refactor your design. Don't just add the feature. Figure out why they're requesting it. In other words, figure out why the current design is lacking. At that point you can come up with a new design which lets your users accomplish what they're trying to do.

User interfaces age like code bases in this way. If you keep adding to them, they get really ugly really quickly. If you instead take the time to refactor them, they can remain beautiful while becoming more capable.
For those who are impatient like myself there is a video with working audio here http://vator.tv/news/show/2009-10-07-aaron-patzer-lays-bare-...
Here I was thinking you meant Adobe Flash - cue massive confusion. You can get an Oracle database in flash?! Well it wont run on the iPhone...
I admire Carl Djerassi. He created the first oral contraceptive and made a lot of money off of it, and then as a chemistry professor he did first-class research in organic chemistry for many years (according to my dad who is a chemistry professor, Djerassi's contribution can totally be considered Nobel-prize-worthy.)

But that's not what I admire him for the most. What really gets to me is that at the age of sixty five, he said, hey, let's try something new, and started writing fiction. He wrote several books, and they are really good and a pleasure to read, and if you took one in a bookstore and started reading it you would say it's a very fine novel even if you didn't know the first thing about the author. Why don't you give it a shot: http://www.amazon.com/Cantors-Dilemma-Novel-Carl-Djerassi/dp...

Think about it. He was sixty five. What will you be doing that age.
And I'd suspect that these two -- serious Web devs who are familiar with deployment -- probably are well familiar with {epoll, select, kqueue}-based and similar non-blocking, concurrent I/O servers.)

Given the self-professed low level of familiarity with UNIX systems programming, I don't image that to be the case.

The examples were echo servers, for murphy's sake -- are you really worried that we'd have a rash of poorly-thought-through, inefficient echo servers bogging down poor servers across the Internet? They're clearly intended to be simple examples about syscalls not the (yes! very important!) issue of how to handle concurrent connections efficiently.

The original post was a strong assertion that fork(2) is correct, and threads are not. The follow-up posts in the 'meme' stretched this idea (with great elation) to fork(2) as a general network concurrency model.

This sort of public disinformation does strongly influence future technical decisions.
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Bill Mollison. Hilarious, Intelligent, and a Revolutionary (in my mind).
...and kind of a jerk, in his early days.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_3g4QPojMc
Aubrey de Grey? You mean the crazy dude that tells people we're going to live forever without any evidence to support his claims?

And Hofstadter, the guy who wrote that really dumb book? (Here I admit that I only read the introduction before being disgusted by his treatment with concept of things which are self referential. It's kind of a noob outlook to find something mind boogling about the fact that a mind can contemplate itself.)

Pity, because the rest of your list is pretty damn classy. Those two are pretty weird additions.
The article has a lot of references to 37signals and is in the same spirit of advocating simplicity. The one link that got overlooked is the one that offers the most concrete advice on how to make a simpler interface - design from the inside out, what they call Epicenter Design:

http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch09_Epicenter_Design.php

I found myself often doing the opposite before reading that - I'd noodle on logo designs, navigation, and general information architecture tasks, even at early prototyping stages. It must be human nature.
My Rogers connections are fine. They fast, but expensive. I bet Rogers has something to do with Amazon not coming to Canada sooner.
"Don't care if the cat is a black cat or a white cat, as long as it catches the mouse, it's a good cat."

Basically for those who are interested in the background of the quote, Deng arose to power at the end of the Cultural Revolution, at the height of Chinese communism ideology when the government was so communist that they broke away from the Soviet's and accused of USSR as "revisionist"; destroyed all of the Buddhist temples in China as "backwards and Confucius," imprisoned the sons and daughters of former capitalists (because there were no current one's left) for being "Western corrupution," and stripped intellectual's of their post in Universities and forced them to "country-side re-education camps" for being "radical leftists against communism." Before he rose to power, Deng himself was denounced and stripped of his political post, and sent down for "re-education."

In little as four or five years, in that kind of environment, Deng has reformed the former Chinese market-command economy to become more capitalistic. Liberalized the political and free-speech in China, that allowed for media/film/journalism criticize the Chinese Communist party which eventually led to the Tienanmen Incident. Deng, confronted tremendous criticism and resistance from the hardliners of the Community party when he tried enact his reform. He used this quote about "black cat" or "white cat" in a speech he delivered to the political cadres to persuade them to be a bit more pragmatic and less ideological about their communism, after 43 million people have died from Great Leap Forward and the Culture Revolution. It was also Deng who eventually issued the order to strike down the student protesters in Tienanmen.

This ambivalent character of Deng, of balancing liberalization versus stability has become a hallmark quality of the Chinese government. See how the Chinese government encourages citizens towards private asset ownership and entrepreneurship, but not towards democratic representation. See how the Chinese government agrees in principle to a Korea/Iran nuke disarmament, but they are more so wary of the stability of Korea/Iran region in the event of a international escalation - that they block the UN Security Council sanctions. Whether the current Chinese/Russian model of free markets but central strong political oligarchy without an ideological emphasis, versus the American model of free markets and free democracy with a strong ideology (leader of the free world), the viability of either models remains to be seem.
Saved western civilization.

From western civilization.

Other than that, I pretty much agree with you.
And that through charisma, you can become more famous than physicists that do better physics than you.
So happy to see him mentioned - I recently read a collection of his short stories (The Voice of the Dolphins) and highly recommend it. His writing is somewhat dry, but really gives you a perspective on how people thought during the cold war era.
The Democratic Republic of Congo is getting the Kindle but not Canada, what the fuck!?
Ayn Rand, for her development of Aristotelian philosophy (normative ethics, hierarchical nature of knowledge, theory of concept formation)
Google has new map data in USA
Also, check out Startup Bootcamp next week at MIT. It's free and features many founders and entrepreneurs, including some from YC.

http://startupbootcamp.mit.edu

It will likely be streamed as well. Details will get posted to HN on Monday.
my favorite book to date
In this case -- start by picking something you know to scale well, and find out how it does it.

For instance, if you're familiar with nginx through web development, you'd find this on the nginx web page:

"Architecture and scalability:"

* kqueue (FreeBSD 4.1+), epoll (Linux 2.6+), rt signals (Linux 2.2.19+), /dev/poll (Solaris 7 11/99+), event ports (Solaris 10), select, and poll support;

Once you've narrowed your search, start looking for well-respected books on the subject -- there's a long list of them in the thread below.
Old-school HP was so awesome it would have made Google look like a Communist labor camp. As long as you did what they paid you to do, your time basically was your own, along with a key to the company stockroom.

One (admittedly high-level) guy built a stereo amp -- http://www.hpmemory.org/news/barney_ampl/barney_page_00.htm -- and the company indulged him by allocating some surplus factory capacity to a limited production run.
Gandhi. For being fearless _and_ inspiring an entire country to be fearless without a single weapon in hand. Think about it, it's nothing short of a miracle.
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I also like this josh bloch google tech talk video "How to design a good API and why it matters.": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw
Great cultural disconnect from his autobiography:

Japanese envoy: Is the sale and purchase of land in Amsterdam freely permitted?

Dutch merchant: Certainly it is free.

Envoy: Do you sell land to foreigners also?

Merchant: Yes, as long as a foreigner is willing to pay for the land, we would sell any amount of it to any person

Envoy: Then, suppose a foreigner were to put down a large sum of money to purchase a great tract of land in order to build a fortress, would you allow that too?

Merchant: We never had occasion to think of such a case. Even though there are many rich men in England and France and other countries, we do not believe any merchant would spend money on such a venture.
I like Chris Rock, I like it that he is frank and forthcoming and always thinks a lot about what he says, whatever he says is logical and makes sense, sometimes you get inspired by watching his shows, especially with all the crowd !

Try Bigger and Blacker and Bring the Pain, two of the funniest shows I have ever seen !
Satan, because without him we would have no free will.
He was also responsible for the Tiananmen Square massacre. Even as communist regimes were falling around the world, he ordered tanks and troops to gun people down for wanting reform in China, extinguishing any hope for civil or human rights in China for decades to come.
From the guidelines:

"Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."
and Dr. Horrible
I find it a little odd that you think Aubrey de Grey is crazy but Eliezer Yudkowsky isn't, given that EY is a vocal supporter of de Grey's research and claims that we'll live forever for considerably more speculative reasons than any that de Grey asserts. Any explanation of the distinction other than that EY is probably reading this comment and that de Grey probably isn't?
MacRuby is extremely impressive, even if you aren't much of a Ruby guy (like me.) It lets me do nearly everything I'd want to do in a Cocoa application, but much more easily than with C/Objective-C. It really is fantastic, and a lot of work has been put in to make it easy to integrate with other software (both as a host and a guest – there's a direct object mapping, no bridges or anything.)

I'm sure a lot of people think "yeah but what about performance?" and from what I've seen, direct calls/messages on objects are faster in MacRuby than Objective-C. Writing with just C (and no Obj-C messaging) is still going to be a lot faster, though.

But you rarely hear people complaining about messaging not being fast enough in Objective-C. You probably wouldn't be using messaging in those situations anyway.

Edit addendum: Since I know there are a lot of fellow functional programmers here on HN, I'd like to add that MacRuby has added real tail-call optimization, and (I was surprised to find this out recently) that Ruby has continuations with callcc. It's very, very nice. It's not exactly Lisp, but it's damn good and the platform integration blows anything existing away.
Thanks. Just registered.
The answer to your query is that I confess a blazing ignorance of EY. Basically, the only people that buy the whole load of nonsense are folks that desperately want to live forever, like my ex (who regularly makes donations to fund longevity research).

Aging isn't a disease, because lifespan is something which is subject to evolutionary pressure. Our lifespans are what they are because they evolved to be that way. It's a little unintuitive, but consider the tarantula. The female tarantula lives 8 years; the male tarantula only about 2. This is because it's advantageous for females to live longer. For the males, it's more advantageous to live for shorter periods, so they age and die earlier.

You're not going to be able to treat aging because it's programmed in. The only solution is to fix the source code.
It's a long, complicated story...so even my abbreviated answer will be very long. I'm going to make a new post about it, because I don't want to hijack this thread.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=868325
This just reinforces the need to use ECC ram in ANY application that you care about the results. It should never even be a question for servers or workstations. I've personally seen lots of RAM have errors, and with non-ecc, you start to get corrupted documents, OSs that won't boot etc.
When I'm sixty five, I'll be playing WoW and listening to the nostalgic popular records of my day, from fine artists such as Soulja Boy Tell 'Em and T-Pain.
Somebody forgot to send my users the memo, apparently.
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China has continued to become much more free since 1989. The comparison with Russia or the East European states is particular interesting, because China's growth rates have been much better.

As for Tienanmen, every single mob revolution in the history of the world has caused far more deaths than the number of people who died at Tienanmen. Imagine how many millions of lives would have been saved if Louis the XVI had acted in the same way as Deng. The Chinese government did the right thing in putting in forcefully dispersing the mob. Any government, when faced with a armed, violent rebellion, needs to put it down. Revolutions and civil wars are the worse than any government. (And yes, the protesters had weapons: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0385482329/ref=sib_dp_srch_p... )
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> Aubrey de Grey? You mean the crazy dude that tells people we're going to live forever without any evidence to support his claims?

That's not what he claims. You have apparently only heard the soundbites. All the details of his proposals are in his book (check Amazon). After reading it, I happen to think that his engineering approach is brilliant compared to the traditional gerontological approach. Periodically repairing the damage (of which there are only 7 types) before it accumulates enough to create pathologies is much smarter than trying to learn how to cure all pathologies, or trying to fiddle with metabolism. For a quick overview, you can google his TED talk (but it's a bit old and doesn't contain much biology).

>And Hofstadter, the guy who wrote that really dumb book? (Here I admit that I only read the introduction

Once again, you seem to be commenting on something that you don't know much about. I'll admit I like Hofstadter more for who he is and how he writes, not for a specific idea or achievement, but GEB definitely isn't "dumb".
My Dad. because of the person he is & i want to be.
Steve Wozniak.because of the engineer he is & i want to be.
Absolutely beautiful. I wish him the best of luck, and his optimism will inspire me for months to come.
The question was "Whom do you admire most?", which I answered honestly.
the ineffective free-market principles that they knew to avoid

Compare and contrast:

The US, Canada, Japan, and western Europe, Australia, New Zealand.

Maoist China vs. Hong King, socialist India, the Soviet Union, Germany under the National Socialist German Workers Party versus today, East Germany vs. West Germany, Africa, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc, etc, etc...
I remember reading that Woz used his time at HP to invent the first Apple computer. (Then HP decided that microcomputers were a silly waste of time so they gave Woz back the rights to it.)
False all around. Aging is a result of evolutionary neglect, not evolutionary pressure. We haven't evolved to live longer because until extremely recent times, only a negligible fraction of us lasted long enough for old age (or menopause) to become an issue. Furthermore, your argument about tarantulas rests on group selection, which is discredited.