skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the feedback!

Right now the site is completely free and will remain that way for students. The next release will include a variety of improvements aimed at teachers, and we plan to incorporate a freemium model of sorts that allows teachers to use the current feature-set for free for a set number of courses, while paying for unlimited use and the more advanced features.

As for marketing, we plan to meet with a few teachers in the NYC area to get a feel for what they would want / need and then promote it through schools in the area. We feel that teachers are becoming more and more familiar with the feel of web applications, especially those recently into the profession. The key for us is to create supporters out of this demographic and work from there.
Ask HN: You must build a backlink index of the web. How do you do it?
I was using Duck Duck Go today, and decided this is a good question for the community.

The question: Say you have to build a backlink index of most (yes intentionally vague) of the web that is updated relatively frequently (at least every 30 days). A full scrape of even a reasonable slice of the web using 80Legs (at least using the old pricing model) would be more than USD $200k. Yet many people are building products, from search engines to SEO tools, that need and use this data.

How are they getting it, and how would you get it? Would you buy this data or build it yourself from the perspective of:

- The CEO/Entrepreneur who has to pay for the creation of or acquisition of this index and the engineers to maintain it.
- The CTO who has to build the index or integrate with someone else's.

It's currently easy to get around Yahoo Site Explorer's per IP/day limits. Word on the street is it's going away soon. Aside from Yahoo Site Explorer, I'm also aware of Majestic SEO, SEOMoz, lots of desktop SEO apps, and then more 'bare metal' sites like 80legs. Are there other ideas or tools or technologies i'm missing?
I think the link is wrong and searches on that blog and Google don't reveal anything.
It's interesting that Cox actually has a price list for these sorts of things. That's ballsy. Most ISPs just see someone with some form of authority and tuck their tail.
A = F/m, So Keep Your Foot on the Gas
100 Useful CSS Tips And Tricks Of All Time
Hundred Flowers Campaign
In general I agree with you. Youtube comments, for instance, are almost always completely retarded, and I'd be happy never to see one again.
What are you using for that help function? That's pretty well done. I like that it shows help relevant to the current page.

I don't really get the reminders. I can't set the date they show up so they're not really that helpful to me.

I made something similar to this as a Facebook application back when I was getting started with stuff. One thing I thought would be awesome would be a Wiki for your course notes that anyone in your class could edit. Probably out of the scope of your project, but I still think it's a good idea :)

I really like the design. It's very clean.

On the Grades page it wasn't immediately obvious to me that the grades fields were textboxes. They have no border or anything to make them look like inputs so I was looking for an "Add a Grade" button.

Also, how do you make money?
Given the success of serious virtualization platforms like VMWare ESX I do think there is a long term danger of Windows becoming a rather thin shim between actual applications and the underlying "real" OS. Especially with the current "Best Practise" of every application running on its own dedicated server as everyone is terrified of the potential conflicts if you have more than one vendor application on the same instance of Windows.
Idiots count lines, programmers write them
This isn't true at all. That EULA doesn't transfer patent rights, except as allowed by the patent holder. It's a license from the software manufacturer, not the party that is going to sue you.
I left MSFT a couple years ago; my experience was in line with the author's. Microsoft was a strange, fantastic, ultimately frustrating place to work. My blog post on it:

http://davepeck.org/2008/12/12/meditations-on-microsoft/
Neither is MSFT.
I believe it is totally redundant. I moved over to Chrome as my default browser when they released the unstable version in the repos and I was shocked at how much better the Dev Tools in Chrome are than Firebug....and I was a big Firebug fan. That said, every time I've used the lite version I haven't been impressed.
Factual - wiki databases
TRS-80 CoCo I here.

Gotta love the chicklet keys - at least it wasn't a membrane keyboard.
“Schrodinger’s Probability” for Error-Checking Codes
Computers shouldn't make people feel like idiots
The gist: not only do people build mental models to interact with the world, but they also derive such models from the world, and the model becomes a person's understanding of the world's inner workings, and it's complexity. And this is where design in general, industrial design in particular, and UI design in the very particular comes in.
If only the average administrator were so forward thinking. Too often they can think no further than the next quarter. Still, there are always consulting fees for him to look forward to.
No, Lisp syntax is not all the same.

'if' has the syntax

if test-form then-form [else-form]

'cond' has the syntax

cond {clause}* => result*
clause::= (test-form form*)

'case' has the syntax

case keyform {normal-clause}* [otherwise-clause] => result*
normal-clause::= (keys form*)
otherwise-clause::= ({otherwise | t} form*)

LOOP has a full page of syntax.
http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/m_loop...

What you think has 'no' syntax, is the syntax for s-expressions. S expressions are relatively trivial, but not every s-expression is a valid Lisp form. S-expressions are a syntax for DATA.

The syntax of Lisp, the programming language, is described on top of s-expressions. Syntax is concerned with the structure of valid expressions of a language. So you have an additional layer of syntax which describes, on top of s-expressions, the syntax of Lisp.

There is some basic syntax:

* data like numbers, strings are valid Lisp programs

* function calls are valid Lisp programs. Function calls have a non-trivial syntax with rest, optional and keyword args, lambda functions, ...

* special forms like CATCH, FLET, IF, QUOTE, SETQ, ... all have their defined syntax

* macro calls, here the macro has to implement the syntax specified in the standard. users can do with their macros what they want.

For example

(if (foo-p) (this) (that) (these))

is a syntax error, though it is a valid S-expression.

Similar

(loop for i below 10 (print i))

is also wrong. Correct would be for example

(loop for i below 10 do (print i))

So, what you may want is to remove the data syntax (s-expressions) from Lisp and replace it with some other layer of syntax that is not based on prefix parentheses-heavy s-expressions.

There are lots of languages that have different syntactical approaches. Lisp has its own, which makes it slightly unusual (the syntax is used to support the code-is-data paradigm), less popular, but also makes sure that it will find its users - those users who want a language with a flexible syntax (one that can be extended by the developer) on top of a simple data syntax.
Just having a special delimiter for code blocks helps tremendously. If you stop there, and don't add more syntax, you're just about at Smalltalk.
The sorry state of payment standards - Stake Ventures
We don't restrict the political speech of federal employees except when they are at work. Public school teachers are free to advocate for anything they want and donate their pay to all sorts of causes.

In 2008, teachers were the largest group of political speakers nationwide, and contributed $13 million more to political causes than the largest corporation (the Penn National Gaming company). In general, government employees contribute more money to politics than corporations. In fact, in the list of the top 10 political contributors, there are 2 corporations (both gambling), 2 unions, 4 indian tribes, realtors, and a left wing PAC.

http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list_stfed.php?order=A

And yes, I do suggest that freedom of speech should apply to all speech, even speech that is heard by millions of people. Similarly, the same laws on vocal speech should apply to me and to Oprah, in spite of the fact that vastly more people will hear and be persuaded by her.
Is the URL it submits to HTTPS?
Earlier submissions, same story, different sources:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1100790

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1099274
Jonah Lehrer: The Isolated Mind - Why "No Mind is An Island"
Now it's appeared via a New Scientist link as well:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1100899
When you say "It's too low to cover my costs," you're not telling him why he should care. "My regular rate is $25; my best clients pay me $20," is probably a better response.
One question that comes to mind: does my teacher have to be using it for it to be worthwhile/possible for me to use?

When you say teachers, who are you aiming at? Would it be helpful for a university student? Would it help if I'm in the UK and not the US (aside from perhaps different lingo)?

I don't think who the web application is for is communicated effectively.
So why not just put it in the job description?
"So why not create syntax that catches 99% of the cases for which you intend the language to be used and abolish the ability to create further syntax?"

Because then I've got a syntax that works for 99% of the use cases you've already thought of, and that doesn't overlap very well with the use cases I have or that either of us will come up with in the future.
People have been doing this for as long as Lisp has existed; the idea "we'll just use these s-expressions until we figure out the real syntax" goes back to the very beginning. If this were really a major issue, something would have been figured out by now. Instead, it's an idea that has great appeal to dilettantes but has never caught on with practitioners. Surely there is a reason for that?
SBA Loans For High Tech Startups?
I also posted it couple of months ago http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=845606

From time to time I see a software development job posts at some observatory ( Hawaii..) or Space Telescope Science Institute (on python.org/community/jobs/)
Dream jobs :)
> The last job I interviewed for wanted me to work as a contractor and wanted to pay me $15/hr. When I said that was too low to cover my costs and taxes, and was much less than I usually make, he insisted that he pays people with years more experience just around $20, and that he though $15 seemed fair!

If that's true, you need to start a consultancy with those "people with years more experience " as your subcontractors. You charge $40-50/hr for their time and pass through $25-40/hr to them. You both win.
The title is in reference to countless complaints that the iPad is "just a big iPod Touch".

You might consider it misleading but I don't see how it's "flamebait"?
Donations to Colleges Down 11.9% in 2009
The help function uses the osx plugin for simplemodal (jquery plugin). You can get it here: http://www.ericmmartin.com/projects/simplemodal/

Reminders are really just like post it notes right now but we're planning to make them more like SMS reminders and tie in to your assignments soon.

I really like that idea about the course wiki. We're trying to eventually gear this as a collaboration tool for students that fits in perfectly actually.

Right now, we don't make money but once we release more features for teachers will begin to offer it on a freemium model for now, but always open for suggestions :)
Thanks so much for going through the site in so much detail! Can't find your email in your profile, would you mind shooting us an email at jason@mygrademate.com?
Very nice design. Love the way it was clear to get to your demo. Love it.
I can really identify with this. A poor UI will drive user's thought processes. Kind of like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity). When new users come into the organization, their thoughts are shaped by the program used to do the job.

Unfortunately at this stage no one seems to really know the business processes, and the software now dictates the process (even when incorrect). It's quite a struggle.
Critical Fans (or how Mixergy did the Impossible)
It's possible to act collected and professional whilst also being obstinate and disingenuous.
Inaccurate, whimsical, but a good analogy to explain the "overnight success" story to non-scientists. I like it.
Thanks mrduncan.. all valid points. Probably best to separate into 'advanced settings' and 'basic', with good defaults selected. As the feature-set grows, the amount of settings will probably grow as well but we'll keep this advice in mind. We want to leave the site as simple as possible while giving the flexibility to power users to customize their experience.
Well, I would hope the first application is to determine if the patient is in physical pain and where that pain is. Reducing suffering should be priority one. The next part I would hope would be to see if the patients can recognize voices of loved ones. I would imagine these two milestones could help patients learn to "write" to such a device, which could be automated to flag down a nurse or turn on a radio for a while or something.

The real question from this though is about the patient's rights to choose. IANAL but if I understand it correctly this could cause difficult questions in consent, especially where minors are concerned.
You assumption is that teachers are motivated enough to actively seek out ways to make their classrooms better. Hope you've insanely tested that assumption out and you're sure it's true.
I said "Polygamy, er, I guess you can write about that"

Then a bit later "Steve and Erin have split up? That casts a different light on the posts about how intimate and great their relationship was, how he wants to focus on relationships more, and how he now wants to branch out polyamorously..."
Yay Savraj!
I remember having a problem with this when I set up an ec2 instance. I don't have any links handy (it was over a year ago), but I remember getting some helpful responses from gmail when my server attempted to send mail to their users. Something about being Greylisted or maybe I'm remembering that it came through in my postgrey logs.

The best I can remember for my solution was to get an elastic ip, then fill out some forms with a watchlist organization, and add some fancy txt records to my dns.

A couple days later emails were going out fine.

Sorry I can't be more specific, but it was one of those things that hat me beating my head against a wall for a few days, and after a few days of the steep learning curve for sending email the number of things I tried vastly exceeded the number of things that worked, so my notes are of little help.
I've always found the whole page to be too low-contrast for quick skimming, but it could just be my acclimation to Google.
As with most things, which side you're on isn't as important as the fact that you're having the discussion. I'm excited to see what Apple's competitors come back with to combat the seeming ease of use and simple interface that the iPad is bringing to market. I'm not a big fan of Apple products, but I'm a huge fan of driving innovation...so I guess I am a big fan of Apple as a company :-)
yeah, they said so at startup school: http://bit.ly/bUfWf
Is open source the right way to the moon?
Thanks _Lemon_. We designed this to be used both ways - teachers can use it for their classrooms, but students can use it to manage their own grades as well. They even work in tandem, so you could be subscribed to a few courses your teachers set up but also make your own private courses.

This will definitely need to be explained on the homepage / website further, I appreciate the feedback.
s-expressions are an external syntax. You can create any data structure you want from them, given the right reader.

S-expressions are not INTERNAL to Lisp, only external. Thus s-expressions are defined on characters. Comparing s-expressions to strings makes no sense.

The representation of code is a different issue. You could read an s-expression and represent it internally as a string.
Even if you deleted your gmail, and it was eventually actually deleted by Google (or even, if you never had a gmail account), the other half of a good many of your messages would still exist in other peoples' gmail accounts.

Depending on how diligent or lax your correspondents were in trimming responses (I'm going with lax), a high 90-ish percentage of everything you wrote could still exist in those correspondents' accounts.

It's out there, man!
Very pretty, I'll give you that.

But it feels like a database. All I'm doing is creating, updating, deleting... CRUD all over the place, and not much else.
Indeed. I find the iPad itself uninteresting. Of all the hype on Steve Day, this was the only part that got my attention, that for the first time, Apple is using its own silicon. Yeah, it's an Arm, but we knew that would be the case. If it's Apple silicon, it can't very well have an Atom core, the only other real competitor (if you can call it that) in the small device space.
Why is being focused on the iTunes Store bad? I understand how reliance on the actual software is a bad idea -- although it's rumored that this is being replaced with a web front-end (hence the acquisition of LaLa).

But I don't see how owning such a powerful distribution channel is something they should let go of. Even now it's looking like they could become a major player in not just music distribution but other media (books, video) distribution as well.
Saul Griffith's House of Cool Ideas
Yeah, maybe it's different here in the U.S. Last month, Librarian ranked #46 in a "Best Jobs" list at the Wall Street Journal - with "stress" as one of the criteria. (Software Engineer was #2!)

http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/st_BESTJOBS...

You do make a good distinction between public libraries and others (school libraries, medical/law/corporate libraries). But even there, you might not have the full picture. The people who spend most of their time at the circulation desk in most libraries are not librarians. Meanwhile, librarians may spend most of their time doing jobs you don't see, like collection development (finding, selecting, and acquiring new which books or other resources).
If only the magical engine was always constant.
The problem is that you let him insist what he pays people and continued to listen. It's easier to meet good clients if you don't waste your time with bad ones. Someone who wants to pay the same going rate as Walmart or Target is not worth your time. Even if you negotiate him up, he will try to screw you later. Just move on.
Sometimes a database is what people need.
What do you do when Google ignores you?
once you logged in, you can't actually log in again.. so since i logged in as demo, when i go to the login page, i can type in anything and it will take me into the demo account again.
Fix all your important file association with freeware tool FAF | beingPC
Zack, it would be nice if you set up a twitter. I'd rather follow new posts there than via rss.
Yes, but then you'd probably have to subtract the amount of time that he would have spent implementing the other type of solution or getting training on how to administer it. The salary doesn't necessarily have to be included; it's a fixed cost.
>Now the European Union and the U.S. Trade Representative office are considering an argument that the Great Firewall violates China’s obligations to permit free trade in services under its agreements with the WTO.

I feel that if anyone were to pressure China in this manner, by citing this economic argument, it'd be quickly rebuffed by the Chinese as a necessary "political" control that can be found in a number of WTO member states.

Examples include limiting or even prosecuting hate speech (anti-religious, Holocaust denial, advocating genocide), blocking websites with illegal content (drug use, bomb manufacture, child pornography), and so on... The websites most noticeably blocked in China allow user-generated comments and videos that cannot be controlled by the Chinese government, but will have similarly illegal-in-China content (Tibet/Taiwan independence advocates, anti-government protesters).

There's little to this argument without appearing hypocritical to the Chinese government, and the firewall (GFW) is too important to their goal of a "Harmonious Society" - it will fall only if the Party falls.
Great job, I'm going to use this when I go back to college this summer. Btw, would it be possible to add email to the reminders section?
Tips for running a startup virtually
I'm somewhat familiar with the research models afforded by both companies, and have a slightly different view.

Research at IBM is mostly product-group driven. Microsoft affords more flexibility- allowing more academic research, for example. This puts them farther into the future, IMO, than solving immediate product research needs. What I meant by investment above is more than monetary- it takes a lot to get a good research team going.

I agree that nothing can save a company with shut eyes. A strong research group is a way to keep them open.
To clarify, I was only focusing on their approach to emerging markets. How many successful products/services have they created and launched in the last year? The last 5 years? The last 10 years?

Also, sometimes it's a mistake to separate wants and needs! People started carrying their music as soon as the technology let them. That's a trend that hasn't abated in decades. It's not just some passing fad, but a symptom of minds that need to be regularly engaged. To compare Apple with Microsoft, Apple creates the device with the story, and Microsoft just creates the device and the ads
You might want add the ability for teachers to share info as part of your premium service. AKA, teachers share the same holidays based on the school etc.
I'm not really sure why you bring up DSL's, unless you consider something like Python or Perl a DSL as well.
In that case: are you saying that, for instance, Perl is only useful for 80% of the cases for which that language is intended to be used?
Many schools have a district-wide system in place for this already, which ties the administrative grade records to a "family access" portal where parents and students can see their records.

My kids' schools use the Skyward system. http://www.skyward.com/

A problem you'll have with any district that's already using a system like that is that teachers won't want to double-enter grades and assignments or use two different systems.
And your basis for the contrary assumption is....?
As I commented, get back to me when you've got a non-lisp syntax that doesn't result in bugs from precedence/associativity errors.

If infix was actually "natural", there'd be only one set of precedence/associativity rules and there wouldn't be bugs due to folks getting it wrong.

With very few exceptions, folks use parentheses to try to protect themselves from their ignorance of their language's precedence rules. (C++ has over 10 levels of precedence.) Even then,they occasionally get it wrong.

And, it's worse than that on teams because different folks have different knowledge (and illusions) of the precedence rules.
You always have the option of saying no. $15 seems fair to him only because people have agreed that it actually is.
Be polite! Polyamory is common enough among geeks and SF area types that there must be a few HN-reading polyamorists. It's brave of Pavlina to write about tabooed topics[1]. And it can't be any more fun for polyamorists to encounter incredulity and derision than it was for the first open homosexuals or interracial couples.

[1] cf. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Experience running a private school.