skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My brother did this - taught French in a Louisiana middle school for two years after college. However, he was a humanities major who went on to a PhD program afterwards; aside from a bit of stats in R, he doesn't do any hacking.

It was a good experience for him, and it is an admirable thing to take on. He said that it was largely crowd control, and a little bit of teaching. The schools that serve low income people in Louisiana are in pretty grim shape, evidently.

I don't think it would help a hacker much at all. But there are things other than hacking in life, right?

I dunno, from the sound of it, I don't think it would be in the best interests a 22 year old hacker, who is almost bursting to get out there and work with an innovative startup, to step out of the game at age 22 to teach basic math in an underfunded school. The excitement, creativity, and freedom you have at that age won't be there forever.

I'm sad to say that, though - because I personally do think that talented teachers make a positive difference, and I think that a more public-mindedness among technology workers would be a good thing (there's a strong undercurrent of distain for politics and legalisms - but if we don't participate, lawyers will be more than happy to regulate technology for us...)
I seem to recall that he invites, or used to invite, people to send him their stories.
This election is fundamentally different from others.

Clinton, by virtue of having breasts, makes women feel good about themselves. That's an X-factor which was not present in any past election. And she plays this up, by crying and planting fake sexists at her campaign events (http://michellemalkin.com/2008/01/07/bs-alert-hillarys-iron-...).

As for Obama, you are right. His supporters are projecting. But they project onto him (rather than Hillary) because he is incredibly charismatic.
I totally agree, and I would go for it.

And I think that it actually is sexy, you have to make order out of huge amounts of data that is different for each customer and present it in a nice formatted way that a manager can understand, make sense of, and base decicions on.

That is actually a really hard and really interesting problem.
I was a little worried about Bowie's performance of Tesla before I saw the movie. In the end, however, I was very pleased.
What's the consensus here? Is MS going to bid higher or just go straight for the throat?
VentureBeat Takes $320,000 First Round (its a blog?)
How to Write a B2B Complex Sales Lead Generation Letter That Attracts Sales-Ready Leads
This is free 57 page report where I break-down every single element and thought put into an actual complex sales lead generation letter I wrote and successfully used to sell a client's expert service to county government, school districts, and F1000 enterprises. It had a 75% response.

There are likely a few ideas others can use to attract new accounts.
Yahoo Acquires Maven Networks for $160 Million
Businesses that aren't growing anymore usually get valued based on earnings. The P/E of the S&P 500 is about 20 (perhaps a little less after the recent market turbulence), which means that HotOrNot's price would be about half the average publicly-traded corporation, including all the old-line manufacturing businesses and companies in decline.
IE 7 does the same thing. A few months ago we had to set up a special 404 page for a broken link that was accidentally emailed out to hundreds of people. It was simple, the 404 page would check to see if the requested url was the bad link sent via email, if it was, it would redirect to the appropriate page. If not, we'd show a 404 page.

Worked great in FF but totally broke in IE7. Why? Because the 404 page size was under 1Kb, IE7 decided that our 404 page wasn't informative enough and supplied it's own.

The solution, as stupid as it sounds was to add enough white space to the file until it was larger than 1Kb.

And, you know, also stop sending broken links out.
Want Bloggers To Cover Your Startup? 5 Simple Tips To Make It Easy
Thank you. No, that is not strong enough: THANK YOU!!!

> It would be interesting however to measure things like the probability of your interviewers making correct decisions, or (if you use standard questions) the correlation between answers to questions and performance (in the event of a hire).

That was my objective when writing the post, although judging by responses on reddit, most people thought I was saying that naive bayesian filters could outperform human hiring managers.

All I was suggesting is that people "Apply what we know about classification to hiring." And one of the things we know is that any classifier--human or machine or human assisted by machine--can be improved by regular investigation of the correlation between the features you observe and the results you obtain.

> The real problem with resumes however is that anyone can put absolutely anything on it.

True, although security by obscurity works for hiring. It's a lot more like CAPTCHAs than it is like Spam: if you are the only one who thinks that Io and Self language experience correlates positively with performance as a Javascript programmer, I think you will find that Io and Self are keywords that will maintain a high correlation.

Then one day Joel Spolsky writes a post about that, someone reads it and puts it in a job listing, a head hunter sees it and adds it to some candidate resumes, and within a year the correlation drops off the map and you have to start looking for something else in resumes or you have to aggressively fizzbuzz it in phone screens.

C'est la vie.
I've been using SliceHost for almost a year now and I'm very happy with their service.
I think I'd rather be put in charge of pacifying Gaul than implementing an ERP for a public company.
Ouch. This is sort of the conclusion I came to by observation (and my mom is an excellent teacher). But I guess it's better to know and not like the answer than just bury your head in the sand for the sake of ideology.
MooTools: Combining Flash and JavaScript
tip - dont bother building an iphone app - the installed base is tiny - you'd be better off targeting the wider mobile market ?
Companies funded by Y Combinator
Um, okay....

Sigh. Here's where I explicate my own words. "who actually has almost none" references Ron Paul. Obama's charisma is similar to RP's in that much of it comes from the fact that his supporters are looking at him sideways. One instance from xkcd:

I want, for once, someone I can vote for not because I dislike the other candidate, but because I’m proud of mine. Obama is the real thing.

Obama has shown a real commitment to open government.

Now, the above expresses an actual liking, not just an agreement policy-wise. I really like Ron Paul's platform, by contrast, but frankly find him annoying. It's important to spot the difference there. Now, Munroe, who is by all accounts a smart person, is supporting Obama because of something called "open government", which Obama has "real commitment" to. I don't see this commitment in the platform, which doesn't contain any references to it:

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/national/politics/2008/bios...

What I see in the platform is standard leftism. But even that is not where Obama's "real commitment" is--his real commitment is "civil rights", if that is understood properly.

Fine. It doesn't matter. The point is this: To really like a guy for something that is a completely negligble part of his platform is quite dangerous. I'm sure a lot of his supporters are actually supporting him for an even worse reason: Because it is the "moral" thing to do, in and of itself.
Where it becomes a problem for people who own a website is when this behavior causes additional support calls due to a more informative 404 page being masked.

It will likely result in incidences where support staff have a checklist of "do you have the Google Toolbar installed? Uninstall it first." However, I don't imagine there will be a ton of cases like this.

I do think it is a mistake that the Google Toolbar enables this by default. Taking this power away from the website owners is not good. And let's be honest, At least 50% of people who have the toolbar installed are not technically savvy and a good portion of them probably didn't even intend to install the software (it was bundled with another download, etc).

Also, I don't see a problem with the practice of putting sensitive data in GET variables if the website is protected by SSL - Am I missing something? Edit: Thanks for the reply aaco, those are both valid reasons and I appreciate the insight.
Must Read:  A Software Design Manifesto
ADDENDUM: There are some standard ethical declarations of the sort Munroe is talking about here: http://www.barackobama.com/issues/ethics/
Here's a way Microsoft could begin to redeem itself and be a genuine force for good in the world: start a whole division dedicated to finding truly innovative startups with useful products and buy them. Then have another division that nurtures them.

That would be cool. God knows MS has the cash to do this, and it would inspire (more than ever) people toward innovation.
Google (Yahoo, MSN, etc) ask people to and offer a benefit that is already provided by a decent browser (blocks popups! persistent search box!) and since many users simply take the defaults and do as they're told, voila! Millions of users!
Dear god, if you have the people skills to manage a classroom full of teenagers, and the pedagogical skills to teach stuff, software engineering needs you. Can I interest you in the Drupal project? ;)

I know one person who used his new B.S. in Physics to Teach for America, and was unhappy. I know another person who loved to work with kids, worked for years in a science museum, then got a degree in education and worked as a high school teacher in a rural county, and is now... unhappy.

I think that teaching is like medicine, law, marriage counseling, postdoctoral research, and just about any other career: It's hard to know if you'll like it until you try it for real. You can't really learn what it's like, day-to-day and year-to-year, by watching from the outside. I've certainly met teachers who loved their jobs, but you have to love the reality, not the Platonic ideal in your head.

Honesty, if not my sense of social justice, compels me to observe that the long-term happiness of the teachers I've met has been correlated to the selectiveness of their schools -- they work at Catholic schools with tuition, magnet schools, private schools, or schools in districts where only doctors and lawyers can afford to live. I think the main reason for this is that the students in such schools are relatively well motivated: they either care about the material or care about their grades. (It's not just pay -- the Catholic school teachers I knew were paid considerably less than their public-school colleagues. But then, if you've read Peopleware, you could have predicted that.)

The happiest hacker-turned-high-school-teacher I know started off in industry, burned out after a couple of decades, then switched to teaching. You might consider that path. OTOH, the advantage of Teach for America is that it gets you in front of students (a) quickly, without having to go through as much bureaucratic hazing -- no education degree required; (b) temporarily -- you can quit in a couple years with no dishonor; and (c) when you're young, so that it will have minimal impact on your future career.
"Bill Clinton is even more charismatic..."

I would say that, in 2007/2008, Obama is far more charismatic. Bill Clinton has tried to inject his "charisma" into this campaign on his wife's behalf and has not made a dent in the "charsima gap" between his wife and Obama.

Trying to compare charisma of 1992 Bill to 2008 Barack is like trying to athletes across eras. Different issues, different prevailing attitudes among the populace, etc.
None of them got elected president (except Bush 41, and he was running against Dukakis). All of the data pg used in his argument was about winning presidential general elections.
That is frightening: only the richest fifth save money. Or to put it another way, instead of saving, the poorer four-fifths live as much like the richest fifth as they can.

I bet this was not always so in America, and I bet it is not so now in China.
The opportunity would be golden if you were competing against other hackers. But you're not. You're competing against other companies' sales forces. And if you think you're ready to go head-to-head against the sales forces of IBM, Oracle, SAP, etc. etc., then you may be in for a very bad-tasting dish of reality.

Having said that, if you can succeed, then there are millions of people using unbelievably crappy software in offices around the world that would thank you for your efforts.
Is that your list or the official list? The point that started this wasn't that Person X is charismatic while Person Y isn't. It's relative. Second, who judges who is more charismatic, even relatively? Again, the person above says that Bush Jr. was more charismatic than Gore, but the popular vote said the opposite.
303 or 307 redirection had to be used in the first place, I think.
I would love to tackle this problem. The problem is that even if you had the greatest technical solution, you would still have to sell it to big companies. This means having a big sales force and long sales cycles, which means VC investment (in a non-sexy area, good luck). Alternately, you could start with smaller companies that would be more reasonable to sell to, but then you'd have to bootstrap a reputation before you could sell to bigger companies, and that would take many years, also requiring VC funds. I think it would be doable and ridiculously satisfying to succeed at, but it's a very different business, structurally, than most YCNews readers are interested in.
"At least 50% of people who have the toolbar installed are not technically savvy and a good portion of them probably didn't even intend to install the software (it was bundled with another download, etc)" - If you think this can't be possible, then you don't talk to enough normal people!
"think you're ready to go head-to-head against the sales forces of IBM, Oracle, SAP"

Been there. Done that. For certain customers (mostly midmarket), it's like shooting fish in a barrel. Accountable people in small to medium size businesses see right through the B.S. and are desperate for alternatives. I wouldn't even attempt to sell to a Fortune 1000 bureaucracy.

"millions of people using unbelievably crappy software in offices around the world that would thank you for your efforts"

Hundreds already have. I'm planning on using more modern technologies to reach the millions.
"Also, I don't see a problem with the practice of putting sensitive data in GET variables if the website is protected by SSL - Am I missing something?"

GET requests are logged by the web server and in the browser history in plain text, even for SSL requests.

Therefore any server administrator or computer user can have access to those information just reading the server log or the browser history.
Gore did not win the popular vote by a large margin. According to Wikipedia, he was ahead a mere 543,816 (0.5%) votes. [1] It was only the third time in history that a candidate lost while winning popular vote. I don't think you should dwell on that particular point. Can you find examples in other elections where the theory falls apart?

Also, the second footnote in the essay offers the reason that Bush did not focus his campaigning on the popular vote. [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._presidential_election,_200...

[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/charisma.html#f2n
being around longer makes it better? you crazy?
I tried snacksby and it didnt tell me what extra ingredients i needed to complete a recipe, a deal breaker for me.
I won't speculate on the nytime's possible editorial status on the question of class politics, but the bulk of the disparity has to do with the fact that young people tend to go into debt, adults tend to earn and save, and old people tend to divest.
I think the reason enterprise isn't "sexy" is that it doesn't get chosen based on quality. It isn't bought by the people that use it, it isn't chosen by technical people that can appreciate differences, heck, it isn't chosen based on likelihood of success, etc, etc, etc. Because of this, software excellence isn't rewarded and so those that can produce excellent software go elsewhere. The market for it is broken and enterprise software won't get better until it's fixed.
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Boston Launch: www.genotrope.com could you please check out the site and critique and comment? As a cold start peer produced database, the data is only robust for the Boston Market currently. If you are from Austin..etc.. the experience will be less than fulfilling for now, so to get the idea, use a Boston company like Lotus or ITA software in your profile. Then you will be able to see what companies are matched to you. Feel free to add your companies and founder/investor connections. thanks
When you get to a stage of using a VPS or your own dedicated machine it's highly recommended that you begin to learn how to use your server without a control panel. You'll be glad you did.
I can relate to this. Vicente Fox, last president of Mexico was like that. He was fiercely attacked and he made some very stupid comments. Still his popularity remained high. But you could see that he was really happy when he interacted with poor children or old people.
Just 999,449 more to go
Interesting commentary but not factually accurate, Ustream actually was ahead of JTV in its launch. JTV has found a comfortableniche in lifecasting which was never Ustream's business model. Virtually every feature found on live video sites was a response to Ustreams features. You only assume the founder were inexperienced because you havent really delved into their history, try again..
Dup. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=113846
The thing that makes me say that a lot of people don't even realize this software is installed is due to two main scenarios:

1. When downloading other software, I have seen several instances where the Google toolbar is bundled, and you have to go into an advanced menu to de-select it.
2. Many OEMs are now shipping computers to people with the Google Toolbar installed.

I believe these two cases account for a large number of the installs. Possibly even greater than the number of users who intentionally go out and download it, but more likely in the 30% range of new installs.

Of course, I have no real numbers on this, and so it is pretty much a guess.
I'm pretty sure they do.

Here's the post that convinced me to try it out:
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/12/28/12-filtering...
Reactive programming
People want charismatic leaders, but I don't think we need them. In fact, I think they are extremely dangerous. Think for a moment about JFK's catch phrase:

"Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

Compare it to catch phrases of other charismatic leaders:

"All within the State, Nothing outside the State, Nothing against the State"

"The common good comes before the private good."

(Sorry for invoking Godwin, but it's important to point out how his charisma obscured what JFK actually said.)

I think it's far better to have a leader that everyone hates. Just think of the outcry if Bush suggested the people should serve the state.
Why Ray Ozzie can't save Microsoft
I tried it and the site seems innovative, and a quick google search/blog search reveals it is spreading like wildfire, all with rave reviews.
Flash support has been "just around the corner" for over 4 months. Although I think the SDK will finally put the needed pressure for apple to do something official about it. If they dont, someone else will probably write it anyway (as we have seen happen in Linux).
RecipeMatcher works the same way as Super Cook, but additionally tells you what you need and you can add these to a grocery list to take to the grocery store.
There are some open source efforts out there that are kind of interesting, although incomplete. Apache OFBiz for example:

http://ofbiz.apache.org/

(Yes, they have been told that a bit of white space wouldn't hurt).
Sometimes the Paintbrush is Mightier than the Pen: Hiring a Star Web Designer
Interesting; I've often wondered what running a business would be like if variables were presented in a, say, World of Warcraft II display type software with live feed of changes in variables ...
From a developer's point of view:
HTML 4.0 and table layout stinks! Use CSS. Write in UTF8 and add a DTD. Use mod_rewrite to rewrite your URL (port number in a URL doesn't look profesional).

From a visitor's point of view:
The colors suck. And why do I have to log into the app to read the FAQ? The "welcome page" doesn't have navigation, other pages have it. BTW your home page is different from the welcome page, fix that too.
the article is actually about how consumption -not income- is the best measure of financial well-being.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/opinion/10cox.html?_r=1...
This was great - I submitted it as a story. Hope you don't mind!
Accessing functions from a shell is available to lots of programming languages. Be it naturally or through an add on.

It sounds like Mr. Carper just likes what's familiar to him, which is the real benefit.

I do like the idea of a command line style interface to a blog.
It's funny how the buzz has died down on this after such a huge hype-up and grand talk of "changing the way people read." Reminds me of the Segway.
Barack Obama and The Long Tail of Politics
I once ran across a book with a similar theory. It was one of those hybrid self-help-business-motivational type books, called something like "You Have To Be Believed To Be Heard". I picked it up idly and happened on a really interesting analysis of presidential elections. The author's point was that the candidate who is better able to establish a positive emotional connection with voters almost always wins, and that ideology and policy had nothing to do with it. (I can't remember if he used the word "charisma".) His main thesis was that the primary emotional brain decides first whether or not it likes something, and only secondarily do rational considerations kick in; therefore, before communicating rationally one must, so to speak, establish positive credentials with the limbic system. The rest of the book was ostensibly about how to go about doing this. Unfortunately it didn't really deliver. But I remember watching the Bush/Kerry debates with this in mind and thinking, there is no rational basis on which Bush should be re-elected, yet if that book was right, Kerry's finished.
Yeh, that's the tricky part. Mention huge flaws in the system and everyone folds their arms and nods their heads knowingly, going "Mmm-hmm, mmm-hmm."

BUT ask for follow through with different behavior, ie, "action", and all of a sudden it's the rolling of the eyes, and "yeh, well, you know, the thing is .." and lots of cricket-chirp cricket-chirp cricket-chirp
Building a Killer Web App In 45 Minutes
Yahoo Confirms Maven Networks Acquisition
The images are fuzzy, and the large image is distracting.
UK Proposes Three Strikes And You’re Out Illegal Downloading Law
True at the Fortune 1000 level. Not so true at many midsize and small businesses. These guys HATE buying enterprise software, but in many cases feel they have no choice. That's changing. Just like microcomputers ate at the underbelly of IBM's mainframe lock 25 years ago, web apps are poised to do the same thing to enterprise software now. And in both cases, the change happens at smaller companies, where I intend to be. The giant dinosaurs are the last to adopt.