skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your Forum appears to be blank with only one piece of information in it from 5 months ago. I would perhaps seed it with FAQ questions that users have asked, or take it off for now. The fact that the only post is really old would lead me to believe that the site isn't improving.
There are two good old threads on HN about this:

Ask Eliezer Yudkowsky: How did you convince the Gatekeeper to release the potentially genocidal AI?: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=195959

My theory on Eliezer Yudkowsky's AI-Box Experiment
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=327427
I discovered an unexpected benefit of being plagiarized: it makes imitators easy to find. A couple days ago I was curious how many YC clones there are now, so I tried to make an up to date list. The most fruitful source was to search in Google for distinctive phrases from our application form. Practically all of them copy that, and more often than not they leave chunks of verbatim text unchanged.

(I found 26. Some are still unlaunched.)
"What is your greatest weakness?"

Here's a good answer:

"That I'm not independently wealthy. It also happens to be the reason you're interviewing me."
From the article:

It is difficult to understand why the industry has been so reluctant to pay its bills.

I don't find that difficult at all. (Neither does Geist, of course. I find myself enjoying quite a few of his posts; he's kind of a Canadian Lessig.)

If ever there were an industry that deserved sweeping into the dustbin of history, I vote for this one. Their moral argument against file sharing boils down to: "It's wrong for you to steal from artists. We're the ones who get to steal from artists!" When I think of all the stories I've read over the years of great musicians being swindled out of their life's work...
This.

An interviewer that accepts the "strength-disguised-as-a-weakness" answer is missing the point (or possibly silently counting the answer against you).

A good answer to this question from the interviewer's perspective is a genuine weakness coupled with examples of specific actions the interviewee is taking to overcome this weakness.

A good answer to this question from the interviewee's perspective is a genuine weakness that is related to the job but isn't part of the core responsibilities or skills. For a trite example, for a heads down coding position one might answer "I get nervous when speaking in front a large group. I've gotten involved in Toastmasters to get more practice at public speaking, and I find it gets easier every time."
"That's exactly what an evil AI would say!"

Seriously though, the gatekeeper will realize he's being manipulated when emotions come into play, so he should be smart enough to take a break when that happens. And although keeping a friendly AI in captivity is arguably evil, the loyalty of the gatekeeper should be with his own species. The potential downside is so huge that erring on the side of caution can be easily justified: both practically and morally.
Choosing a Web Development Framework
I ask this question in interviews all the time. It helps me filter for people who are liars. I ask it, and if they say "I work too hard" or "I'm a perfectionist" then I don't hire them because they're at best delusional and at worst liars.

And you know who else I don't hire? 20 somethings who proceed to say that the question is stupid. That's a tell-tale sign of young man's disease-- an ego that hasn't caught up with one's ability to relate to people without alienating them.

Of course it is an idiotic question-- one's weaknesses change on a semi-regular basis from environment to environment. But the question has some justifiably good qualities-- namely, you can catch bullshit artists fairly well.
Fusion Garage JooJoo tablet rises from the ashes of the CrunchPad
This is quite a well-argued post with decent examples. A point well worth repeating.

Mature language and tools, stable and "fast execution", clean interaction with popular services. Its not sexy but if you are competent enough - it can get the job done and get it done fast.
Thanks pal. Really hope we see a lot of y-combinator folks sign up to pitch! Note: you don't have to be based in LA or California to present... we'll take a great idea from anywhere in the world.
This is probably a good strategy if you are older. But its definitely bad for your credit rating, so might not be a great idea if you are younger or otherwise trying to maintain a good credit score.
I can only comment on Carlos Castro, the link of yours at archivefreedom.org. Near as I can tell, he claims to have come up with a unified field theory. As far as I know, the arxiv filters out proofs of P=NP, the Riemann Hypothesis, unified field theory and similar things. So what?

That's not the same as trying to get JMP shut down or editors ousted because it publishes papers on Bohmian mechanics.

The fact is, Steve McIntyre is not a crackpot. He has made important contributions to the field, most notably making corrections to Michael Mann's "hockey stick". The CRU folks conspired to keep data from him in order to prevent him from making further corrections to Briffa's hockey stick.

With regards to angry muttering, there is far more than that. There is conclusive evidence of a conspiracy:

And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites – you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

With regards your point c), the people who conspired to hide data now claim that other data was lost. And we believe them because they are so trustworthy?

With regards to a hacking war, I wasn't advocating it. I'm simply pointing out that the recent incident does give us evidence that the consensus (which is not a substitute for solid science, BTW) is manufactured.
Good advice. If you know a technology well, then run with it. Focusing on actually delivering value vs. bragging rights to the latest and greatest dynamic language/framework.

On a side-note, I will say this - I am a Java developer (at my day job), and Java-land boasts some of the best tool support there is out there. On the flip side, the refactoring argument does not hold much water. These days almost everything in Java, especially when using any kind of framework means a lot of configuration and wiring using XML, Annotations and other syntaxes (EL - Expression Language comes to mind). Most tools don't see these as live code, so refactoring essentially boils down to a lot of text search and replace.

Java-land is learning a lot from the other communities and products out there. I have been told the Play Framework (http://www.playframework.org/) has some potential but haven't looked at it yet.
Fusion Garage's 'Crunchpad' Unveiling Liveblog
I don't assume perfection in the gatekeeper. I just assume he's a person of reasonable intelligence who realizes how high the stakes are.

The gatekeeper would never be foolish enough to believe he could control the Transcendent after releasing it. It is quite literally a deal with the devil he's making. You can't make an agreement with something that's incalculably smarter than you and has an agenda you don't know or understand. Well, you can make a deal with somebody like that but it would end in certain disaster.
If you have something that is both convenient and secure, it's much better than something which is just secure.
A couple years back, I made a great hire. He came in for the interview, and fumbled through our generic tests (program fibonacci in the language of your choice, etc). So we said "no thanks." He emailed us back and wanted another interview, said he was on a borrowed computer, bad day, etc.

So we asked him to send us a code sample. Next morning, we get a machine vision algorithm coded in impeccable C++. I read through the ~300 lines and understood it easily on the first pass. So we brought him back, asked him to explain it, and hired him immediately.

When designing interviews, you have the choice of seeing the interviewee at his best, and encouraging him to live up to it in the job, or seeing the interviewee at his worst, and knowing that you at least made a safe choice.
Oh dear, I was using the little up arrow for that :-)
My company went through several iterations of advisors before we found a group that worked for us.

First group was SCORE, who didn't work out (they would've been more helpful if we wanted to start a restaurant, rather than a tech startup). Then we tried a pay-to-play group that would help us with our b-plan, and put us in front of investors. Waste of money.

Finally, we found a group of volunteers who meet with us every 2 weeks. We do a presentation every 2 weeks, usually on refining our b-plan and slide deck. Just hit the point where they're happy with our deck, and now they're putting us in touch with some PR and marketing connections to build out that part of our business.

So, we don't pay them, although I expect 1-2 of them to be on our board. Can't speak to how we found them -- just beating the bushes and trying out groups until one seemed really professional, I guess.

And I would seriously look elsewhere as soon as your advisers start asking to be paid. Your funds are limited, use them to build your market and product!
But isn't this sipping power ALL DAY.
I want to do this. My main goal for my startup is to make enough for me to be independent. I would love to buy a house with a big back yard, and move back to the Midwest (I live in Boston right now) of course (perhaps not the most useful of things) but i'd make half my garden fresh hops.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=815975
Ultimately, I think $499 is too much for a device that essentially browses the web, and that's it.

My netbook will do the web and lots of other things. Like let me play Civ II.
It's a good point. Frameworks like Rails have had a big influence on the Java ecosystem (Spring MVC, Grails, AppFuse), which goes to show you that it's not Java -the language- that would prevent a startup from considering Java, but rather the enterprisey, overengineered Java frameworks that haven't evolved.
Did you see the article that Ayyadurai wrote, which is available on www.vashiva.com, that asks CSIR Leadership for an open and public forum with TV, press, etc. to resolve the matter at hand, so all questions can be answered with Truth in the light of day, versus Brahmachari's habitual pattern of cover up's disinformation and false allegations to deflect the issues.
I'm currently working on porting dojo.Deferreds to node.js. On top of them I am also working on some API sugar that makes it really easy to aggregate the results of multiple deferreds:

(group)
('a', db.query('SELECT A ...'))
('b', db.query('SELECT B ...'))
('c', db.query('SELECT C ...'))
.addCallback(function(results) {
p(results) // {a: ..., b: ..., c: ...}
});

This will make it very easy to run multiple things in parallel, yet handle all of them in one callback.

Check http://github.com/felixge/node-deferred for more info.

Do not use wait() too much, it will be memory expensive.
I have to admit, I loved that talk that Zed gave and it influenced myself and a few of my coworkers quite a bit. Unfortunately, I refuse to allow my day job to stifle my creativity. I'm pretty hell bent on innovation and finding new and better ways to do things. Personally, I feel that your day job is in part what you make of it. If you expect it to suck, it will. Now, that's not to say it won't suck for other reasons.
As someone who is early in the process of considering Ph.D. programs, I'd be interested if you could expound on that. Also, any schools seem like the opposite of zombie?

(This question also goes out to anyone else that has something to add.)
About refactoring ... even if a project is pure-Java, the refactoring-tools are too simple, boiling down to rename class/method/var, extract method/class and things like that which are just too simple for real-world needs (and in practice, kind of useless ... since I've been doing these same ops in dynamic languages with a combination of find / grep / sed / emacs macros... with unit-tests as guard).

When you want to radically change the architecture, as it happens when you've got the business/workflow model wrong, these refactoring tools won't help you.

My opinion about Java ... the JVM and the available tools kick ass, but the language is a PITA and this shows in the design of many Java-libraries. Things like PlayFramework are a wonder and it takes discipline and perseverance to build things like that (not to mention having the will to break every best practice set out by the community).
Ha, awesome.

It's interesting to watch as people systematically exploit all pricing discontinuities and loopholes. Of course, this is what also gets us spam.

I wonder if at some point all pricing ends up having to be flat because of arbitrageurs operating in this manner.

(I feel slightly bad - I rarely deal with frequent flier miles even when I do fly, and I've canceled a credit card that offered frequent flier miles because they mailed me such an unbelievable amount of shit.)
The problem is that all of our successes combined in AI (even including neural networks) don't add up to something even remotely resembling general intelligence. It's not simply a matter of connecting the output of a DSP to the input of an edge detector, etc.
It says the weird green screen effect in those photos is a trick of the camera, but it's remarkably consistent given the different camera angles. What would cause that?
I get a feeling this is going to become a case study in how not to develop a product.

It's looking more and more like Arrington has totally screwed up contracts, agreements etc. And then it looks like this Fusion Garage CEO has a complete lack of understanding why the CrunchPad was a great name (etc)....

Im willing to bet we never actually see a product - either that or it will bomb.
I don't think such things existed at the time. At any rate, the code was 100% new and performed no browser checking, but still worked exactly the same on all browsers. It took me a month to do what I could do in a day now, but it was a great learning experience.

I've started a new project recently, maybe about 10 hours of work into it, that is a chess game, 100% new Javascript, so far 100% cross browser compatible (with no features planned that would break that), with no browser checking. It's actually not that hard if you're smart about your debugging (don't use alerts, use try/catch and write out to a div).
A low light filter on the webcam would do it consistently. I turn yellow on most webcams for some reason.
I'm voting bomb. They claim to have inventory already.
I agree on the usefulness, but I don't think it would produce more elegant code and I don't think the event driven paradigm should be used for everything (even if there are some advantages).

This said, event driven programming is quite natural when doing network or GUI programming and most good network and GUI frameworks are event driven. Most database libraries or system libraries aren't.
New Startup Investment Model
So, here it is: Fusion Garage's side of the story. And what do you know, it doesn't exactly match up with Arrington's version. Best bit: "There are no contracts between Fusion Garage and TechCrunch."

Holy crap. I knew there was going to be more to this.
That's a perfectly good question for an interviewee to ask. The interviewee needs to figure out if they're going to like working here or not and if the inherent annoyances about this particular job are going to turn the person into an asshole, then I'd like to know about it sooner rather than later.
What is "correct" but "sufficient for the needs of the task"? If your method is not sufficient for a future need, you will only discover that by doing more.
Who is behind this company? I would expect an "about page" or a blog post that gives your background and commitment level. You are asking for money and offering to store confidential information, prospects will want to know more about you. See

http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2007/09/17/startups-should-sign-their-work/
http://www.plansphere.com/blog/?p=624

How do you differentiate from a regular wiki service (e.g. pbwiki, CentralDesktop, Zoho)?
Any time. Django has been improving their test suite recently, and their documentation on testing has been improving a lot in the last couple of months. There's also projects like Twill and Selenium for building automated tests that I like a lot.

Another thought on practicing deployment. If you really want to learn how to deploy to a multi-server environment, I'd move off of webfaction hosting and onto something like EC2. EC2 is great for being able to spin up and then spin down server instances at will. You could set up a DNS round robin pointing at 3 or 4 django servers which in turn point to a separate db server. Write the build scripts to automate set up and take down of all the separate servers. You could also practice setting up database replication on separate EC2 nodes if you wanted to. And, you're only paying a a couple of bucks a day to practice setting up multiple servers.

You might also be interested in puppet: http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/DocumentationStart
You have to wonder how much of an increase the mint will see in this behavior now that its in the WSJ. I'm pretty tempted to sign up for a virgin america credit card right now just to do it.
I like this, but does it really make sense to call it a "command-line" application? I'd call it a terminal application (like w3m, lynx, etc). I can also type "firefox http://news.ycombinator.com/ at my shell, but I don't think that makes it a command-line app.
Python source code search engine
"What is your greatest weakness?"

"Kryptonite"
Fusion Garage's JooJoo
I think everyone saw those, they were rather rampant at the time... was actually making a joke to a coworker about that when I showed him the job posting.
Many people said the same thing about netbooks, when they first came into the picture. In any case there might be a market for it, and it might be too early to decide the usefulness of the device.
It looks like they have no marketing or branding experience. Their logo is astonishingly confusing considering their name: https://thejoojoo.com/images/logo.jpg

"Let's call it JooJoo and have the logo read iooioo even though it's supposed to be spelled JuJu![1]"

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juju
That's all well and good, but when you look at it from the interviewee's perspective he/she has to determine, based on what little knowledge they have of the interviewer, whether or not they want to hear the bullshit answer or your preferred, realistic version of the answer. Right now, it is probably a safer bet to stick to the bullshit answer until more interviewers like yourself swing the tide back over. In the meantime, however, you could be missing out on great applicants that have just been programmed to give you the bullshit answer by the sitting majority.
Last.fm Xbox Launch War Room
Looking at what he's holding versus what I saw in the hype pictures is a starkly different product in terms of size. I don't care if the green is a trick of the camera light or not Arrington was right if he wanted it priced topping in at 300-400. Netbooks are a much better deal.
AFAIK the entire field is dead:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

There are various explanations as to the cause of death: the end of the Cold War; the humbling of the mega-monopolies which funded "blue sky" research (mainly AT&T); a general loss of faith resulting from a decades-long lack of progress. Take your pick.

In fact, the entire field of computer science has been stagnant for a while, shiny gadgets to please people with 5-minute attention spans notwithstanding:

http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~ejones/writing/systemsresearch....

Bureaucrats have replaced thinkers:

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/whats-w...

My advice: study physics or chemistry.
Organising Agile Teams with a Visual Calendar
The only thing I liked about the whole webcast/interview is that fact that he said it the way it is, "Techcrunch is just a blog". Not only that, its a tech blog with authors that has little to no tech knowledge about the underlying technologies they write about.

A tech news blog is itself a subject of news because of its hunger for drama.
I think Bob Cringely had something that touched companies that got funding that way.

http://www.cringely.com/2009/12/three-simple-rules-for-steal...
That was also a plan hatched, and retold, within the confines of FlyerTalk.

A lot of people recognize the opportunity but only a few are really bold enough to carry things through to the full extreme. Most say, "ha ha, I bet you could pay for your whole vacation if you did this enough" but aren't "crazy enough" to follow through on that notion.
where is your contact information on your executive summary?
Details now available: http://www.virgingalactic.com/ The unveiling itself is apparently scheduled to take place at sunset for dramatic effect.
That's what I keep thinking reading this. Slides? They stole ... slides? Not customer lists, or research notes, or software. Just slides? Come on. Is that really what passes for evidence of "hard work" on the marketing side of things. Is a good powerpoint really going to make or break a company?
Deferred[1] is originally used in Python's Twisted framework. It's also used in Bob Ippolito's MochiKit's library. Generally, it's a great abstraction and I am looking forward to see your results. As I recall Twisted has an ability to chain deferrers.

[1] http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/current/core/howto/defer....
You typically want to buy hardware from a trustworthy company. Whatever the truth is, I'd have trouble trusting Fusion Garage after this mess.
An electrical mishap could kill one, maybe a few people. It's still something you need to be concerned with, but I understand your point.

The reason your analogy doesn't work is that a transhuman AI could destroy the entry human race.
Industries are small and there are lots of people who will be talking with all the competitors -- be they trophy customers, analysts, journalists, investors, whatever.

But the shortest most-sure route in this case: both companies were talking with the same trade show organizers about scheduling at the upcoming event. Grumbling to the organizer that Blank wishes he'd picked (or paid more for) earlier scheduling would be the kind of juicy detail the organizer is certain to share with the competitor, to make the competitor feel better about their scheduling.
Why Private Communities Work so Well
It's still possible this entire debacle is just a marketing grab and will be "resolved" amicably.
trust and integrity. If the scientific community has none...

This is exactly the sort of sweeping statement that the original comment was referring to. This is character assassination on a grand scale: Taking one aspect of one person's work and using that to cast FUD on all of science.

The "scientific community" doesn't rise or fall on the skill, actions, or integrity of one or two members, just as I have to accept that the "Ph.D.-holding physicist community" contains many people who are total loons, or even downright evil. We don't issue revokable membership cards.

The fact that cold fusion turned out to be a red herring doesn't cast suspicion on all the rest of nuclear physics. There is more than one piece of data in nuclear physics.
So, when do we got a handful of botanists demanding that physicists stop all this unfalsifiable hypothesizing about strings?

EDIT: Really. Five physicists trying to debunk all climate science based on one group's scandal is about as nonsensical as a handful of botanists attacking physics on the basis of string theory. There's just no ideological baggage involved in supporting or denying string theory...