skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Those people don't exist" is a bit of an exaggeration. Eliezer Yudkowsky exists, for example.

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=eyudkowsky

His research is in making AGI (artificial general intelligence) not go skynet by building in morals. That seems fairly pure to me.
Most people that I've talked to about this (maybe 10 people?) think that it's bad to block ads on the grounds that we browsers collectively owe the content providers a means of revenue. Maybe I didn't talk to a representative sample-- I'm not sure. I generally don't hang out with many people who read HN or Reddit. But I think something like "I think granola contains meat," is a better example of something "breathtakingly hard to believe" than that I think I'm in the minority. [1]

Your example with the cardboard vendors is an interesting one. I'm not familiar with those things-- are they like an honor-system cookie jar or something? It's an interesting comparison, because I wouldn't steal from an honor-system cookie jar. Also, I think the raindrop/flood analogy is pretty good, except I totally accept that I'm part of the flood. I just don't care at all if the content providers want me to look at ads. They didn't build the internet, they didn't buy me a computer, and they didn't pay for my connection. They're trying to leverage a public good, like putting a billboard next to a highway, and I don't owe them my attention.

Thinking about it a bit, maybe it's because I do actually remember the internet before ads. It was kind of nice. If I hadn't experienced that, maybe ads would seem more palatable.

[1] I did actually know a kid who thought granola was made of meat. He was 12.
check this one out :-D

http://www.modeemi.fi/~chery/lisp500/lisp500c99.c
> “Tell me about something that you failed at and what you learned from it”. [..] Folks, if you plan to go to an interview, please think about this in advance and have a good answer to this one.

If you are not getting honest answers, you might want to "tune" your question. If you really care about the answer, IMHO, the best way to ask this question is by discussing the topic of how _your firm_ has failed in the past and what _you_ have learned from it. If the candidate thinks that the description is an honest one, they might reply to your question with honesty.
It seems like a nice idea, although I don't fully understand it. Where does the mobile part come in? Do I post ads from my phone, or do I receive replies via SMS. I think foreign markets are really under-served when it comes to services like these. My only concern would be having the numbers listed on the front page like that. Could those numbers be spammed in some way? Best of luck.
The Web Has Feelings Too: What Startups Are Learning About Online Sentiment
I've always had good experience with health insurance at the startups I've worked for.
Ask HN: How many of you are actually using Lisp in your startup/projects?
I saw lot of enthusiasm for lisp related stuff. Also I am very much influenced by PG's essays. So was curious about how many of us use lisp for our startup and what tools do you use for development.
Voting quota on hn
I was wondering if it would be a good idea to try up/down voting quotas per day or something like that on hacker news.

So right now, assuming there isn't some transparent quota in place, someone more keen towards voting(maybe because he or she has more time) has higher influence on the ratings overall.

Instituting a quota can make votes more valuable and meaningful, and standardized in terms of value to each person.

So for example if I voted on ten comments one day because I'm more liberal in voting, and someone else only gives 3 votes, I end up having more influence because of my lower standards for an upvote.

A quota of 3 upvotes Per day means those 3 votes will be rationed by everyone for the top 3.

Obviously the problem would be to find the right quota and determining how to let comments posted at the end of the day get a share of votes.
So let me know what you think. And if I have any holes in my reasoning.
I don't think that's strictly true. A shareholder, somewhere, lost value. VC's are just shareholders that make riskier bets.
It makes sense that even if the mean quality of work experiences at a startup, the standard deviation would be so much higher than in a corporate environment that the worst experiences are much worse.
I wrote a long article and at the last paragraph, I decided to edit a sentence, I selected the "region" and pressed C-w to remove it :-(

For uninitiated, C-w is "yank text", i.e. cut it, and Firefox it is "close current tab without warning".
I use Scheme (Bigloo, PLT/mzscheme) all the time, even if the project isn't in Scheme itself. If I hit a point where I know I don't fully understand the problem, I'll usually break out my Scheme stuff play around until I have a better grasp, and then redo it in whatever language/platform the project is in (right now, usually JavaScript.)

I usually use an emacs cvs snapshot, with paredit and geiser http://git.hacks-galore.org/gitweb/jao?p=geiser.git;a=summar...
Somewhere in there there is a really nice prank with a novice programmer and a one letter change.
what's the problem that you are planning to solve?

Clearly, someone who reads more should (and will) have a larger influence on popularity.
Is that an IOCCC entry?

Off topic: are you still in the NOVA area or overseas?
I love bgpatterns.com. One of the tools I donated to the first time I tried it. You've got to check it out if you use (or want to use) tiled backgrounds for anything.
Do you know anything other than PHP? If you don't, you are in a bad place. It almost doesn't matter what else you pick up, stop looking for a language without "horrid drawbacks" and pick something up. Anything. Even Java, and it pains me to say that.

By the way, specifically PHP isn't important here; the question is really "Do you only know one language?"
In my experience, this is a crappy question because interviewees tend to prep for it. It's way better to ask people about the history of a project they worked on, what challenges they faced, how they overcame it, etc. Stories of failures usually arise from that.

Well, they should anyway. Some people try to dance around their failures, but those are no-hires. Confident candidates don't even think to not talk about their failures because it's all part of what made them successful.
I just ordered 5 books.

They came in one tiny custom box that was folded over the books. The only waste was a minimal amount of cardboard. From an environmental perspective I would support giving businesses some form of tax credit for minimizing waste and packaging.

Pressure from large distributors will help force every company to comply.
If anybody is looking for a competent Erlang guy, give Rusty a shout:

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=RKlophaus

I met the guy in D.C. and he lives and breathes Erlang.
Not and IOCCC entry; just something Lispers carry with them when heading towards obscure and very small territories. You might like XCL better: http://armedbear.org/ has a native optimizing compiler and compiles to ~5MB for compiler + runtime.

I live in Australia now, mate. Sydney. It's like D.C. but with a beach, nicer beer, better public transport and laid back people :-)
To satisfy your curiosity, I work for Internet Brands. The name change reflects its "grownup-ness" over the past decade since it started off as CarsDirect.com back in 1998. I like that each vertical is like a separate company with a startup feel, but all sharing one big office space.

Since the company started out in an incubator (Idealab), I think they (subconsciously or consciously) kept that incubator feel. For example, when my team is working on a site and we have a vBulletin question, we can walk to the other side of the floor and talk to the people who wrote vBulletin.
I still call it post-erous, despite knowing better.

A friend with a Russian accent just pronounced it hilariously today - something like Post-air-ee-ous. I think they should roll with that!
Mine, though I've (mostly) moved to emacs these days:

set nocompatible
source $VIMRUNTIME/vimrc_example.vim
source $VIMRUNTIME/mswin.vim
behave mswin
set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
set gfn=Consolas:h10:cANSI

set number
set cin!

colorscheme evening

map <silent><A-Right> :tabnext<CR>
map <silent><A-Left> :tabprevious<CR>
map <F10> :browse tabnew<CR>

set diffexpr=MyDiff()
function MyDiff()
let opt = ''
if &diffopt =~ 'icase' | let opt = opt . '-i ' | endif
if &diffopt =~ 'iwhite' | let opt = opt . '-b ' | endif
silent execute '\"!C:\Program Files\vim\diff\" -a ' . opt . v:fname_in . ' ' . v:fname_new . ' > ' . v:fname_out
endfunction

EDIT: Updated formatting.
Apple's Next Revolution- And What You Can Learn From It
The default is 72, in my understanding, because of the historical use of email.

As folks successively quote each other in a thread, the prepending of '>' to the quoted text requires something narrower than 80, else it'll hit the 80-chars-wide limit and wrap.

72 would allow 4 or 8 quote-levels, depending on if your client decides to insert spaces around the '>'.
I'd wait until the end of the court case. Even if it gets through all the Italian court system, there's still the EU courts. It seems extremely unlikely Google will lose in the long run.
Your proposal fits well in the feature requests thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
if you have trouble keeping up with your inbox, let alone all your rss/twitter feeds this is going to be like trying to monitor multiple active irc channels in real time.

i do not deny there is good value here, especially for bot stuff. the information overload is going to be daunting for many.
That's my thought too. There might be political pressure in Italy to hinder competition to traditional media, but once this goes to the European courts, it's only going to go in Google's favour.
Fundable comes to an ugly end
Capone's Vault.
And 20 years after the introduction of the personal computer into the world of business, hardly anyone has a secretary anymore, although the very elite do have "executive assistants" who may be thought of as doing some of the same work functions.

I'm not being facetious in bringing this up, just attempting to point out that a computerised version of intelligence may not look much like the activities it replaces.

I think Dijkstra said it best "The question of whether computers can think is no more interesting than the question of whether submarines can swim."
Downvoting seems to be in fashion lately. I've noticed a lot of perfectly good comments voted down without any apparent cause, only to float back up later on.

This is something of the last two weeks or so, before that it was happening too, but much less frequently.
I think your perceptions of other people, what you think they think, are misguided.

I block ads and flash because I find ads distracting, animated ads in particular. When web sites use interstitial ads before content comes up (such as javascript popups, or delayed redirects) - I normally close the page and don't bother with the content. The fact that you don't find ads distracting is not proof that I don't find ads distracting. I have the same feelings towards TV; so I don't own one. I have similar feelings towards radio; so the ones I own are multi-purpose devices, like my phone or alarm clock, and are not used for radio listening. I have similar feelings towards magazines; I don't buy them. I have similar feelings about going to the cinema, so I always turn up late to avoid ads, especially trailers, which almost invariably ruin the film before it can be seen with fresh eyes.

Now this has nothing to do with "obligation". Me having my attention degraded by advertising, my focus and concentration broken, is harmful to my being. I resent it, and I would resent the products presented in such a manner, in just the same way as I never buy products from door to door salesmen. I actively seek to avoid those products that were presented persistently enough to lodge in my mind. If anything, I'm doing the advertiser a service by preventing it from harming me. I have a little economic suspicion in my mind: if the advertiser has sufficient margin to try to buy my attention, there's probably a better value option available somewhere else.

Coming back to "obligation", the content producer who believes that viewing ads is payback for producing the content, is confusing their chosen payment mechanism with their self interest. The mechanics of advertising is that the advertiser pays the content producer for the number of eyeballs that the content producer can deliver. The content producer, having bought an eyeball with some content, thereby feels robbed when the eyeball exhibits free will and doesn't do as it's told.

The only advertising that I don't find offensive is that which is extremely relevant, such as affiliate links discussing the product at hand, but simultaneously don't require tracking my behaviour, but rather rely on my being interested in that niche.

In other words: advertisers, don't come to me, I'll come to you.
> when it's 3AM and you've been up for 67 consecutive hours

That can't be healthy. My longest stretch (age 17) was something like that and I fell down half a flight of stairs without waking up when going home.

Please be careful.
Here is my email within mailhide, please send me a invite to GoogleWave as well.

http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/d?k=014s-aMx2vlpytIAIucX9SyQ==...

Cheers,
Bobby
Segmentation certainly pisses people off who just need that one feature that's only available in the higher version. Think of Stack Overflow and Windows Server's memory limits; memory is dirt cheap, but Windows won't let you use it all until you pony up the extra money to buy a whole bunch of other features you don't need.
First of all, the guys at Google have been padding this landing pretty well. At least for people who are paying attention. They're quick to stress that wave is a protocol and a platform with take-over-the-world potential and that this initial client that we're playing with is just one example of what can be done with it.

That said, I agree with this article completely. The wave client is an absolute nightmare to use. Stuff is blinking and flashing all over the place. People are adding comments up and down waves will-nilly and there's no good way to tell where changes are happening. There's a decent amount of latency with every single character I type, which basically kills my thought process and typing ability. Switching waves is a multi-second proposition that beach-balls FF on my Mac Pro.

Even if all these bugs were ironed out, I don't see why or how I would ever use it. I would have given pretty much exactly the same review a couple of months ago when I started using the wave sandbox, so whatever progress they've made hasn't made much of a difference so far. Maybe they're onto something and wave as a protocol will end up replacing a bunch of old web protocols which people have tried and failed to replace for years, but, at this point, I wouldn't bet on it.
I do. Common Lisp stack.
I would be shocked if Microsoft could ship this thing in the next 5 years. To put things into perspective it has taken them (at least) 3 years to ship one significant Windows Mobile release. This could easily slip to 4+ based on current WM7 time-tables. We don't really know how long the Zune was in development however they basically just re-branded Toshiba players with new software so I would guess it was a pretty short pipeline. Took them about 3 years to develop the Zune HD which is the first Zune model that is unique compared to its competition. I just don't see how, given their track record, Microsoft could move fast enough to get this thing out the door anytime soon.
US relinquishes control of the internet
Anywhere south of Beijing, other than industrial towns of Guangdong, is almost always pretty sunny.
Ok, so working for a company is better than working for a doomed startup, full of racists and incompetents. Really? That certainly is good advice, I am just not sure that anyone else needs that to be explicitlt pointed out. I can't wait for your next article, eating a donut is better than being punching in the face.
"Google’s Wave will crash hard onto the beach of overhype" coming from the man who said World Wide Telescope made him cry. (WWT is nice, but I can't imagine it making anyone cry). Why does the web always seem to reward those who make the most exaggerated and outlandish statements?

He only seems to addresses the Google wave client in his complaint, when there's much more to it. If he doesn't like their implementation he could implement his own with their federation protocol.

On a side note, why does he say new things can come in at the bottom? From my limited use of the dev preview new stuff is always coming at the top of my wave inbox.
Yes, postings of ads from a phone by sending a text message to a short (or long, not decided yet) code number. SMS is really widely used in India so a service like this we envision could be useful.

It is possible that the numbers could be spammed - we're considering putting them behind a "show number" kinda button.
Yext Scores a $25M Round from IVP
Well, they clearly don't have infinitely more to lose, that is ridiculous. Don't throw that word around, it make you look stupid to mathematicians, and you don't want to make a mathematician angry, They understand the language of the universe.
Wow, that's not good for anybody. I guess this is really a case of "be careful who your partners are", jeeze.
Not sure why the whining. Wave is not for everyone the same way twitter is not for everyone and IM is not for everyone.

I haven't got any invite yet on Wave, but I can see a lot of potential of this platform and I can already see myself using it extensively when it hits "mainstream".

I don't think wave is just "another thing" that will distract you from your work. I think wave already has the potential to get rid of 3-4 external services I depend on and it just started.

Most important. Its free and open source.
Put your vimrc under revision control. Watch it grow from 5 lines to over 500 in the span of a year.

It seems like switching the developer bit in the brain for config files does wonders for environment personalization.
Pretty one-sided, but I suppose a domain name can only belong to one side of any argument.

For the uninitiated, Fundable was a site where you could input a dollar amount and accept donations towards that 'goal'. If the goal wasn't reached within a certain time period, the money was returned to the individual donors. If the goal was reached, the money was released to whoever initiated the campaign, minus a hefty 7% commission fee.

As far as I could tell (I used it back in 2007 but quickly jumped ship when I realized how rickety it was) it was pretty much a giant Paypal API with bad UX and even worse customer service.
Arora Browser 0.10.0, shipping with AdBlock built in
I agree entirely. One of the great things about the Internet, which I believe we still don't appreciate fully, is the degree to which it allows us to step back and see the mosaic formed by these fragments.

The post in question is a good example. It's much more valuable when combined with the comments on HN, many of them by people with first-hand experience of startups, than it would have been as an isolated article in the print media.

Merely enabling us to collect and collate information we already "knew" is surprisingly valuable. The clearest example may be open source software, but I think we will see similar gains in almost all fields.
I wish I could upvote you more than once because that is so true.(I know I COULD if I created a few throwaway accounts but that kind of hacking the system is not for me.) The unfortunate reality of HR is that a lot of them are looking for a polished answer to this question even though what they should be looking for is what you said.
Louis Helm programmed the the payment system.

if this is an indication of their attention to detail, it's probably a good thing they had to close before they lost their user data to some hackers.

Based on what was written, I'd be surprised if both "founders" aren't 18.

edit: googled, and found some photos(Pratt looks to be ~26, while the coder guy does indeed appear to be ~16:
http://emilychang.com/e/go/ehub/interview/fundable
I treat Scoble's view of Wave with the same reverence I'd apply to his views on TokyoTyrant. He's not an opinion-leader on this one as far I'm concerned.
Netflix Grand Prize technical presentation
Yes, I've done professional work in Perl, C#, and Java. These silly stereotypes need to end. Think what you will about PHP, it's not as horrid (now) as most people like to assume, it's mostly just misused. Oh wait, it's trendy to hate on PHP now, which is really the problem I'm was originally addressing. People want to jump to another language as soon as they've worked with one long enough to truly become aware of it's handicaps (or even be able to parrot other people's gripes) and then repeat the cycle. Even as much as I (regretfully) look down on ASP/.NET, if that's what you want to be good at, go for it. I'm sure it's plenty capable if used correctly.

All-in-all it's plenty fine when I see people writing off PHP devs, in my case, it's mutual. I don't write off ASP devs just because I think ASP is restrictive to my style of programming. There are "better" tools for the job, but often the claim that something is the wrong tool is rooted in... well.. yeah, I'll stop there.
> After John Pratt contacted Louis Helm's father, Louis Helm called John Pratt and agreed that his actions were immature.

16 sounds more likely.
Could it have something to do with the mechanism for voting and the prevalence of iPhones? I think it would be the cats meow if when detecting the iPhone or any mobile browser the down vote arrow was moved to the right of the title bar area. I say this because my fat fingered attempt at upvoting a comment has the reverse effect of my intent on many occasion.

PG, Are you still looking for a specific iPhone interface?
I used almost everything from thoughtbot articles :

http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/166073596/intro-rails-vim

and

http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/159805668/2009-rubyists-gu...
EyeTap: The eye itself as display and camera
I have to really ask, "Why is this upvoted so much?" There aren't really lessons in here; it's just bitter drama.
http://sources.defmacro.org/emacs-conf/
That is parallel pricing or price differentiation.
*

Voting quota on hn
1 point by chrischen 55 minutes ago | 2 comments | edit | delete
I was wondering if it would be a good idea to try up/down voting quotas per day or something like that on hacker news.
So right now, assuming there isn't some transparent quota in place, someone more keen towards voting(maybe because he or she has more time) has higher influence on the ratings overall.

Instituting a quota can make votes more valuable and meaningful, and standardized in terms of value to each person.

So for example if I voted on ten comments one day because I'm more liberal in voting, and someone else only gives 3 votes, I end up having more influence because of my lower standards for an upvote.

A quota of 3 upvotes Per day means those 3 votes will be rationed by everyone for the top 3.

Obviously the problem would be to find the right quota and determining how to let comments posted at the end of the day get a share of votes.

This is not to make it so that people who read more get less influence, but so that people who tend to read less comments per vote do not become overrepresented.

This is more of an enhancement idea.

So let me know what you think.
And if I have any holes in my reasoning.
So they can what? Talk to the universe? I'm so scared.