skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with doing a business plan/idea competition. I would also do a startup weekend where people can come together on a weekend and do a 48 hour competition where people come together to start an idea and implement the business in the 48 hours. Then hold a panel of judges from professors to give feedback and vote for the best.
Could we please give this a more descriptive title?
If you share something with your 300+ friends on Facebook, I think it's obvious it's no longer private. I have always considered Facebook a tool for _finding_ interesting stuff intead of _hiding_ it.

A more open, non-evil alternative would be cool, of course. But good luck rebuilding the whole social graph there. Almost anybody who has tried that has failed.

(I view this as somebody who follows the Facebook News Feed all the time, posts several times a day, and often participates in long discussion threads about news, politics etc. with my friends.)
I attempted to make clear what I said was purely my opinion and personal preference. The author gives the impression that he is doing an objective analysis when in fact he is just giving a personal opinion. It is deceptive.
I think you're conflating privacy with exclusivity. Facebook was originally only for those in college because it was an electronic version of a book that was put out by Zuck's college.

Secondly, I don't think that Facebook's privacy controls were ever a big selling point. The fact that it was for cool kids combined with the fact that all of your friends were on it was a huge selling point. Yes, people use the privacy controls, but never the fine grained stuff, it's all "don't show info to people that aren't my friends."

Or maybe my perception was skewed. Facebook came to my school in September of my freshman year of college, so I'm literally in the exact cohort that grew up with it.
Am I the only one who expected a conspiracy site after clicking that link?
For solar that might actually be true, for wind I'd be more surprized if we went from the current cost per Watt of installed power to a much smaller fraction.
I agree completely and they're halfway there so it makes plenty of sense to take the last step - there are already open source and commercial alternative IDEs like FlashDevelop and FDT.

Open sourcing the flashplayer will rapidly make them a standard on every platform instead of being a defacto standard on Windows and generally poor results outside of it.

Open sourcing the FLA format can only help developers ... every new version of Flash devs everywhere pray that this time Adobe'll do nothing more than just fix everything and the threat of someone else doing that for us that might be the motivation Adobe needs to do it themselves.
Defending a company whose stock you own, because you own the stock, seems more like self-interest than integrity.

Implying, as he seems to, that it's okay to knowingly sell junk to clients ("It's a little hard for me to get terribly sympathetic for a bank [customer of Goldman Sachs] that made a bad credit deal") doesn't seem to fit the definition of integrity.
In my own experience, as a brain matures, it does not really slow down in its important functions but rather incurs occasional and seemingly inexplicable lapses - the "foggy moments" associated with entering into middle age. Nothing to do about them, since they are an inevitable part of aging. In my business, I do complex and strategic analysis all day long in innumerable situations involving often difficult problems and not once has any lapse of this type affected anything that really counts (I am in my late 50s).

At the same time, there is a quickness in grasping large volumes of factual material when one is in his 30s or younger that does recede a bit in the 40s and 50s and beyond. That is why learning a foreign language becomes harder as one gets older - but, in that task, even a 12-year old has advantages over one in his 20s. There are just certain phases of life in which the brain is like a sponge and, if one is bright, all manner of detail can not only be pretty quickly absorbed but made to stick.

The lesson here is not to take the quick-absorption phase of life for granted and squander it - that is precisely the time to throw yourself into the deep things of learning (in whatever field) and get the most out of them.

Beyond that, though, there is no need to fret. In almost every way, in my experience, an older person is able to function "at a higher level" (to borrow a sport metaphor) in terms of thinking and decision-making than is a younger one. This may stem from other elements that supplement raw brain-power, such as experience, wisdom, and maturity. Thus, in spite of the occasional lapses and the loss of some of the old quickness, I would not trade my current mental capacities for those I had at a younger age even if I could.

This piece makes excellent points about the importance of exercise and other forms of mental stimulation being not only helpful but also indispensable to staying sharp.

Therefore, as long as you have prepared yourself well when you are young, the rest is a mere continuation of the old pattern, maybe not as vibrant but nothing at all to be dismayed about (at least until dementia sets in!).
I'd recommend checking out University of Michigan's entrepreneurship club, called MPowered: http://mpowered.umich.edu/

I don't actually go there, but I subscribed to their mailing list when I considered starting something similar at my college. Definitely a great group to model!

NC State also hosts some great entrepreneurship events for their students, including spring break trips to Silicon Valley and China.
http://www.ncsu.edu/ei/events.php

Finally, I'd say Stanford BASES pretty much sets the standard for student entrepreneurship groups.
http://bases.stanford.edu/

Good luck!
if most people "don't know about it", then i'm not sure it's fair to complain that people aren't following "the etiquette".

more likely the writer is in the wrong, and not behaving in the way most people expect. perhaps the correct thing to do is for the person being contacted to briefly signal that a further email is ok?
One thing to keep in mind: there are no signs I know of yet that the 'unwashed masses' are going to quit using Facebook: they love it and don't seem to care about the privacy thing overall. So by leaving, you're missing out on a significant perspective of what users (read: customers) experience everyday. It's like refusing to use Windows during the 90s. Not saying you shouldn't, but just that it's a cost to keep in mind.

Also: how confident are you that Facebook won't still be HUGE 10 years from now? Many smart people think FB will only expand in its importance on the web. Again, not saying it will be or that people shouldn't quit if it offends their sense of propriety, but I'd hate to reopen my account 5 years from now after publicly committing a principled FB suicide.
Definitely a great idea! RPI (my college) recently hosted one, and was even able to bring in an alumnus who is now at a Silicon Valley VC to judge it.

More details here: http://www.eship.rpi.edu/elevator.html
By the way, have any HNers actually been part of any of the above programs?
I've noticed that also, but I suspect it's mostly how people use twitter, rather than the overall population of twitter users; i.e. black twitterers are more likely than white twitterers to post in large public hashtags as a sort of chatroom.

A study (http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/17-Twitter-and-Statu...) did find that 26% of blacks vs. 19% of whites use "Twitter or another status update service", but it also found a large correlation with age. Since black demographics skew younger than white demographics, my guess is that the 7% racial gap would disappear if you controlled for age.
Questions to Ask If You Are Constantly Broke
Instead of a business plan competition, how about a competition where students must create and refine a value proposition and launch a real product or service (alpha version). The new ventures in the competition can be judged based on a range of tangible criteria, such as (a) how many customers have agreed to trial the product, (b) what kind of feedback have customers provided, (c) how much revenue has been generated, etc. I think such a competition would provide much more value to students than a traditional business plan competition, in part because it would force students to not only formulate a venture idea but also execute and test the idea with real customers.
I wrote an additional entry on how to find to optimal nameserver:
http://www.kubieziel.de/blog/archives/1343-Improving-your-re...
Because it looks like a B to anyone that doesn't speak German.
Yeah this is quite clever and funny. Plus Zardoz?!? Wow, nice crazy old movie reference, that's awesome.
Old School Pseudo 3D
I totally agree. But who knows maybe this generation will actually learn from entertainment, I know mine didn't, but there is always hope.
Someone should just build a bot to accumulate Buffett Bucks by 'exploring' the site 24/7. Guaranteed upside! :)
Flash/Silverlight/etc are very agile, it's May now and there's still plenty of time for any of them to roll out significant new features this year while browser vendors and the W3 debate which video format to use and consumers click ignore on the update your browser screen for the 1000th time.
On OS X I use à little app called HTTP Client to do THE Same.
And unless you explain this in some detail, many will continue to do that.
I'm pretty sure it says more about the show. I'm no expert, but I think the tone is strikes might work for younger children, but likely not very well for the older children I'd think they'd be targeting with investing education.
Also, Twitter is disproportionately popular among mobile users, many of whom don't even access it via a webbrowser. I'm not sure it's exactly the same as tech-savviness, either; I'll see if I can look it up, but I remember reading that Twitter is particularly popular among non-traditional internet users, especially African-Americans, who have a mobile device but rarely use a laptop or desktop computer. Facebook, by contrast, is mainly a website.
I wish I had those bugs. The install disc for Ubuntu 10.04 doesn't even work on my MacBook Pro 7,1 - it hangs at a BusyBox/initramfs prompt.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1458341
Make sure people are making things, rather than just talking about making things.

Don't have idea competitions. Have an MVP competition.
"Learning a set of very similar languages is of limited utility because your not actually gaining anything new."

This might be true if you completely diminish the importance of syntax. Likewise, there is a lot to learn from those little gaps between where any two similar languages diverge.
I assume that the problem is that because they're using Redis, the available memory was filled up with data from the database.
Kind of tough for me to tell. :-)
Here's what it shouldn't do: have meetings where they read many different theories of entrepreneurship off a powerpoint. That represents our Entrepreneurship club.
A Russian Star Rises in Silicon Valley
Good old Postel's Law.

If all browsers actually paid attention to Content-Type then this site probably would have fixed the actual problem. Instead we have a world where it works in only some browsers, and naïve users consider the one that is technically more correct to be "broken".
There is plenty of time for them to improve this year.

But since it's taken 3 years to get into beta, I'm not very confident that rapid improvement will be happening.
seriously. this is the primary reason i've stopped going to some of the entrepreneurship clubs on my campus
Here's an actual link to the trend - http://www.google.com/trends?q=facebook%2C+twitter&ctab=...

If you sort the Rank by Twitter, you'll see Brazil is the only place where Twitter outranks Facebook, which I would attribute to the Orkut dominance that pre-dated Facebook in that country.
They promise to be a clean blog engine. Also there are some common assumptions with human interactions. However, further discussion is futile. If there are people who don't mind, I don't blame them for using Posterous.

Apparently this is a matter of taste.
If you're curious what it looks like:

http://www.wwlp.com/dpp/news/massachusetts/boston-water-main...
You are describing the Internet. Self-run web sites, blogs, and instant messaging systems:

1. allow you to fine-tune who sees what,
2. do not require extra accounts (save comment systems, etc.),
3. are not tied to any one provider or company and thus will last for a long time.
One of the major advantages to actually making things is that the students will be making things with each other. As many have said before, figuring out who to build a product with is just as important (or more so, even) than figuring out what to build.
"Yes, people use the privacy controls, but never the fine grained stuff, it's all "don't show info to people that aren't my friends."

Exactly. People didn't care much about the granular stuff, just that only their friends could see what they were posting. With the changes FB has made to its settings (namely, the 'Everyone' setting that is now the default), that's no longer true.

For what it's worth, I was in the exact same group as you — Facebook came out while I was in college and I joined the day it came to my school. Exclusivity definitely played a part in helping it catch on, but I think Facebook's reputation as a "safe" site is what helped it make the jump from high school/college kids to everyone else.
we do something like that at UT: http://3daystartup.com/
your previous submission suggests that you go to georgia tech. i think you should encourage students of the club to participate in the already established events such as:

1.the business plan competition: http://bit.ly/dcT6TP
2.the inventure prize: http://bit.ly/4xGF6T
3.social entrepreneurship competition: http://bit.ly/94WkWn
4.yahoo hack week & the like.
5.participate in the atlanta startup weekend
I have not, but that's probably because I tend to buy mac's used since I'm near a university and the prices are just too enticing. Plus, I suspect like most other HN readers, I don't mind doing repairs myself if need be.
I'm not a "security expert", but it seems to be problem #1 with your approach is that C just totally dominates the mindshare in the embedded space, and until you solve that problem and its underlying causes, you have lost before you start. The average developer simply doesn't think security is a problem unless you exploit it right in front of them, a goodly number of those people will still deny it's a problem, and a good fraction of those who do agree it's a problem will declare that only C has the performance they need, with no interest in either a debate about the matter or the presentation of a language just as performant as C but also more secure.

Personally, I value security, and I think the evidence at this point is that you have to be a freaking genius to almost correctly code C programs and that's just not scalable, and thus the first thing I'd do is cross C off my list and just live with the results... but then, I'm not an embedded programmer, either. It was time for C to be taken out back and shot in 1980, before the world was networked together, but here it still is, providing us exploits by the cartload. Hooray.

("What should have replaced it, then?" Pick your choice of safe C dialect, which is a productive Google term. I don't deny C's performance or nature as "portable assembler", what I deny is that either of those two things necessarily requires security vulnerabilities to come in by said cartload.)
Many people have thought this too. A sort of p2p social network? You solve a handful of problems but create many new ones to overcome. For example, using Facebook on multiple computers is simple right now. Now lets consider a p2p model. How do you handle uploading photos from a computer that isn't your main/home one? You'll need to basically synchronize content between the computer involved and your main one. There's also the case where I want to share a photo and not store it locally at all. What happens when some of the computers involved in your friend network are turned off and those friends want to view photos? I'm not sure you can make it completely P2P. You might need a central 'cache' of new content which then just gets pushed down to your friends once they sign in. And since everyone is disconnected that sounds like everyone needs to have a copy of their friend's data. I'm not interested in storing their photos on my PC. Just some random thoughts that came to mind.
No, I'm really happy with the service that they provide. If there's something that's actually private, I'm not going to be posting it on the Internet in the first place.
I don't know why I would. I decided early on that I wouldn't use any of their apps, play any of their games, and actually introduce disinformation into the medium from time to time. (I went to the "Barnum and Bailey Clown College", "The School of Hard Knocks" and "How High". No really! I did!)

I view FaceBook as being purely frivolous, for casual interaction w friends & acquaintances, and treat it thus. There are other "social networking" sites (for instance, LinkedIn) for other types of (real/purposeful) networking.
Ask HN: Ruby, PHP, or Python?
I want to learn a web development language. (I think) I've narrowed it down to these three. Which should I commit to? (If none of these, than which?)
From my personal experiences, I don't think that would work as well for a few of reasons:

- Students don't have that much time - just creating a business plan and convincing presentation/pitch was hard enough for most groups at our school. Actually funding an idea and executing is much harder and more time consuming, especially if you're taking a lot of credit hours.

- With our business plan competition, we would start out with a large number of interested students and that number would drop with each meeting. I'm not sure how many students would be able to manage (or have interest) in pursuing their business until the end of the competition.

- This would only work for certain businesses and eliminate ones that require research or a significant time investment. When I took part in the competition, we were competing with a group working on a medical product that will hopefully save lives one day. They were at the very early stages of their prototype after having researched the principles behind it for a couple of years. They won the competition and I think(hope?) used the funds for their business.

- I assume it would also be harder to judge, as different businesses have different measures of success (based on revenue, # of customers, etc.)

All that said I do wish students would actively pursue a business to learn the ins and outs of it through active involvement. I just don't think it's feasible to do it through a competition. Maybe the whole entrepreneurship club could work on a business together though? Or find a struggling local business and help them - that would be an immense learning experience in itself (I wish there was a class that did that).
Penny-Arcade TV on chronic anxiety and antidepressants
I too was a FB-absente for a long time, but a friend of mine (non techie) explained its usefulness to me in a very good way.

"It lets you keep updated on what your aquintances does on a daily basis". Not your good friends (because you call them). Not your collegagues (because you chat/mail them). But all those highschool and childhood friends you dont see on a day-day basis because they're in another country/region/world/whatever.

Now, I could argue that that information is quite, uninteresting, and in many ways, it is. It is however quite nice to know that if I want to reach those people, I can.
As I said to someone below, though, it's not surprising that Facebook makes everything public by default. Facebook is highly incentivized to get people sharing with each other, and the more public things are, the better it is for them. I'm not sure what the answer is to this, if it needs answering. It's possible that the privacy people are in the minority.

That's another thing, though; we've both really only got data from our own anecdotal experiences and interpretation of our friends' descriptions of what makes Facebook valuable to them. Who knows, maybe we're both outliers, and the vast majority of Facebook's users use their ACL based system heavily.
European Central Bank head argues in favor of global governance
I'm already gone. They annoyed me after forcing me to link to pages in my profile.
I honestly hate I can be tagged in photographs and cannot turn this off.
This has been discussed endlessly before, and is really likely to turn into a flame war.

Try them all. Do a 'hello world' project in each. Use the one you love. They're all fine, and many people have written many successful sites with all three.
I'm not a "security expert", but it seems to be problem #1 with your approach is that C just totally dominates the mindshare in the embedded space, and until you solve that problem and its underlying causes, you have lost before you start.

"My approach" is not to do all embedded development in Smalltalk. I'm only applying facts from the language I know the best (not only as a user but from an implementation standpoint) to discuss what must be possible.
Google Trends is an extremely poor source of data if you're trying to extrapolate any real-world meaning.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/04/fun_with_secre...
The Basil II regulatory monoculture had more than a little to do with the global nature of the Great Recession, so let's make financial regulation even more uniform and global!
Question: If everybody has "any piece of knowledge, ever created, accessible literally at [their] fingertips", how does the author know whether people are taking advantage of it? Is the author privy to everybody's online habits? Getting "the" top 10 web sites is tricky because it depends on who you ask, but Google and Wikipedia are generally on there, among other things that could be interpreted as at least potentially "searches for knowledge".

And I think that's a pretty good ratio. It's OK that Facebook is up there too; we're still human, after all.
Why demonize HFCS (over sugar) before science shows any of the conspiracy theorists claims are true? It sounds like the vast majority of anti-HFCS claims have no supporting evidence. As far as obesity is concerned, HFCS and sugar are probably equivalent.
Right, but that's cause Adobe sucks at building software. But they do have the ability to deploy updates that actually reach consumers in a timely fashion, massively faster than any W3 spec or browser vendor can even dream of pushing something through.

Everything Adobe, Microsoft, Unity etc push to their own platforms between HTML5 and HTML6 is stuff that HTML5 doesn't have and can't include until the next release beyond fragmented and browser-specific implementations.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1311412
Ask HN: VisualStudio 2010 - Have you upgraded yet?
I have not upgraded yet, wondering how it's gone and what people think of the latest VS
I like this one:

Q: If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?

A: Sorry, you're not my type.
How do you see the internet providing built-in ACLs? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_control_list

Even if it did, your assertion is like equating assembly to a high level language. Just because you theoretically can do anything in assembly that you can in a high level language doesn't mean you would want to. I am trying to specify a set of attributes for a non-existent tool that would let me more fluidly publish what I write and create.

----

edit: if anybody reading this would care to explain why I am getting downvoted & the parent is getting upvoted so much, I would appreciate it.
No, but I regret it after having my top cover replaced to resolve a dead trackpad. I never buy extended warranties, I'm probably ahead nonetheless.