skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Subsidies are definitely part of the problem, since they make students less price sensitive.

Another part of the problem is that there is no incentive for cost control in the university.

I can give a great example of this, from my current university. I'm currently teaching a "Quantitative Reasoning" class right now. Basically, take Weeks 1-2 of Prob&Stat and expand it to fill a whole semester (half a semester, due to poor planning and miscommunication). Some of this is my fault, some of it not (2 syllabuses floating around, both of which I was told to ignore). Plus, my students are all art/history/literature majors, and just don't need it. Everyone in the room would be better off keeping their $4,000 and not sitting through my class.

So why is this abomination required? Because the department needs money (1) and requiring everyone to take our courses is a way to get money.

In principle, someone in the university should put their foot down and say "this is nonsense, lets just require 1 less class and charge $4,000 less". But there is no such person in the modern university system.

(1) I'm told some of our "beat the Soviets through mathematics" grants were finally cancelled. But I'm not sure about this one.
That's really nice! I like the fact that you control the output and that it's web accessible. Does it include a way to mark items as read or do they just drop off the bottom?
Small Business Software - Intranet
I think this is a great contrast to the recent fury about "free" destroying the Internet. These guys are making something that people who pay for software will pay for.

Also, Brought to you by HN's own gibsonf1

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gibsonf1
Rather than using several web 2.0 services to manage your business, we've wrapped all the core small business systems into the single customized intranet.

Critical business process tools such as time tracking, billing, project management, online calendars, shared documents and help desk software have now been integrated into a single, easy-to-use web 2.0 application.
Here is a 1 page tour:
http://www.worketc.com/tour
Ok, guys. isn't it working as intended? People build a reputation over time and are judged according to it. It's nothing untoward or unexpected.
Voted up, I agree.

Sorry...what were you saying? Why can't people take you serious? That's ridiculous.
A key to making student performance highly predictive of job performance is customizing curriculum. As nearly as I can tell, this customization requires the introduction/popularization of particular online markets.

Naturally, I'm working on said intro :-)

The BigCo-praised details of my analysis are online at http://www.loveatmadisonandwall.com.

Best,
Some great stuff in here. Very inspirational - especially when you're hitting a tough spot it can help to pick you up
The idea is, as others mentioned, is not new. Hopefully someone with traction of Spolsky or Atwood will gain enough momentum to make this viable, useful and keep it on top of google results.

I know I'll attempt to contribute
"If a programmer is hardwired to only use emacs or vi (for example) and could never consider using anything else, they may also fight any efforts to do unit testing or use version control or your build system."

If a programmer insists on using vi/vim, that may be a very good sign. I would bet that someone that insists on using a powerful editor is the most likely to do unit testing and use version control and probably already has/does.

Poll anyone?
Clever name.
Sounds like Paul is continuing to underline what Zuckerberg has been saying, stressing the importance of the "social graph."

It's amusing to see people involved in industry X continue to blog about how industry X is worth more than people give it credit for.
Science, Gadgets & Cogsci are not bad either.
There are lots of people who need food and water. They might like a solution to their starving to death and have no water problem.
That's a great idea. I think it would probably work, but I can think of one potential case where it would introduce some complications.

If user1 sees 'pg' as the submitter and user2 sees 'blah' user1 might comment something which gives away that it is actually pg to user2. Now user2 might realize this and act on their pg bias.

Can you think of a way to prevent this?
Why does everything suck?: The Stats Are In. YouTube Really Is A Turd
We went to a financial planner and he projected how much it would cost to send our kids to college. He plotted out these graphs and then told us "we'll assume that college costs continue to outpace inflation by 2%, since they have for the past 20 years..." I appreciated what he was doing but I know there is no way that can continue. At some point in the very near future, you can live off the interest of the cost of 4 years of college.
I'm glad someone else pointed out that Google's ad-funded largesse won't last forever, and the free web will take a big hit when it does.
I would love to come to this, but I will be in Mountain View for my team's YC interview then. Can't we make it a different day? I don't want to have to wait another seven months to meet some local hackers!
yes they let me know it was going to be covered 24 hours in advance and I switched the server to a larger one with 300Mg more ram. It handled it all well, but Im glade I migrated it as I was down to 20% head room during the best of it.
Very good. That is rule one of negotiation: Always ask for more than you think you will get.

Rule zero is: Never be the first person to name a price. The opener is at a disadvantage: Once they offer to pay you $5, they can't credibly claim to be unable to afford $4. You can counteroffer with $15 and then -- in the simplest scenario -- offer to split the difference, ending up with $10.

Following rule zero can be very hard. It takes a lot of social skill to deflect your opponent's request for an opening bid. I'm not sure rule zero even applies in a lot of situations -- for example, as a consultant I often just use rule one, because your customers will often be scared away if you act like the canonical Oracle salesperson and attempt to determine the approximate size of their bank account before you even name your rate. But you can give them a rate and then negotiate the project scope or schedule. ;)

I'm cribbing all of this from Dawson's Secrets of Power Negotiating, BTW. I find that book kind of cheesy -- perhaps because, like many techies, I'm a terrible negotiator by nature -- but it's a fun way to get inside the mind of a sales guy. I wish I'd read it before I went to China. Chinese shopkeepers saw me coming a mile away. I console myself with the knowledge that the profits from my few small purchases are probably putting some very nice Chinese kids through college now... Plus, my Chinese friend was highly entertained by the sight of my negotiating, and that's worth something.
Building a search engine with Appengine and Yahoo
If that's the case, then couldn't we measure the bias by having some other user post under pg's name and see if it gets more or less upvotes than when posted under the user's own name?

Edit: To take this idea a step further, maybe have a random chance of any post being attributed to pg and keep track of which ones are actually pg, to see if there's any difference between them.
Study: Google gained advertisers in Q1. Yahoo, MSN down.
I agree with most of the points but it seems some of these attributes can be conflicting. For example

- A lazy programmer may not be that meticulous

- A curious programmer may not be that meticulous
Traffic serge has been interesting, as a result of TC article it also made the popular list on delicious and as you know here too, then other blogs kicked in, one Spanish one which seemed to bring a nice flux of traffic too. The main serge lasted about 8 hours, then flattened off, and now its back to a mix of natural traffic and some residue from the articles. Id say at this point I had about 15K uniques hit it as a direct result but thats a guess and wont know for sure until tomorrow now. I think that's not bad given TC isn't a music blog per say with limited interest from many in this sector. But I'm v pleased to have been given the opportunity and very proud to be a part of this community here.
:-) IMO your words carry more weight because of it... (more knowledge, experience etc)
Oh, I misspoke, or was at least unclear. Sorry about that.

We have been having roughly monthly hackathons. This one will be #8. It has just been 7 months since we posted one on news.yc.

If you sign up for the group, you will be able to join in the process of selecting dates as well as get updates, RSVP requests, etc.
The author of this, David Beazley, was a professor of mine for two courses as an undergrad at UChicago. He taught Networking and Operating Systems and was one of the top 3 professors in the CS department. He left teaching for a while, but it looks like he's back now, which is extremely encouraging for all CS students!

If anyone has the chance to listen to him speak or teach, I highly recommend it. (Also, if anyone has the chance to see him perform jazz music, I highly recommend that, too!)
Exactly. I'm sure Jeff and Joel are both fine programmers, but their audiences, SEO, brands, etc have to be much more valuable. Also, Atwood has shown he can cultivate a large community with his blog comments, and Spolsky has run a pretty good discussion community for years. I think this will turn out well.

(ha - totally unintentional switch from first names to last names)
Ask YC: How would you sell your business?
Hi. We have an existing software business (provision of encryption software) that brings in a good level of regular revenue but the income at the moment isn't stratospheric (We're bringing in around $120k per year). In the right hands this business could increase, but my main goal is I'd like to concentrate on a new startup and don't feel I can do both. I appreciate that most people wish to sell their business for millions, but if you were after something in the region of $400-$500k where would you look? How would you do it without causing problems (ie people thinking you're up for sale)? This is not something I've ever done before so would really appreciate any advice from anyone who has done this kind of thing before.

Thanks for any input
they cost more because they need a reasonable barrier of entry. if pretty much anyone can get an MBA, they need to be expensive, or pretty much everyone will get an MBA. don't need that for an engineering degree -- if you price people out of the degree, even fewer people will sign up than already do.
>What else is highly profitable on the internet? Search.

Actually, what is profitable is traffic, not search. Google gets paid by website proprietors to send traffic their way. They do not get paid by users for their search product.
Father of Chaos Theory dies
I think he is probably onto somthing with the lazy programmer idea. It's something that I have thought about a lot too. Although I thought his examples of what a lazy programmer might be doing sucked.

In my experience, lazy programmers write tools to automate stuff. It's the guy that wrote YACC that automates parser generation. It's the person that reads the yacc file and uses it to generate c/h files for each symbol, filled out with all of the initialisers specified in the yacc file. It's the person that generates test scripts from an xml file, etc etc etc.

Actually, the longer I work as a programmer, the more I'm bemused by people that talk about how they never do any interesting programming at work. If you are only doing boring stuff, then you are not doing it right. Build a system to automate that boring stuff, that'll get your creative juices flowing!

In my case, I work for a company that does embedded software . As we often work on devices for which there is only a C compiler, we have to use C as the language of implementation for our product. But personally I haven't written any C code for over 18 months - I'm using ruby to put together a whole series of tools that generate c code from, for example, UML diagrams. There's still a bit of tweaking to be done to the C code at the end, but it is just tweaking, which improves productivity for the whole team. Leaves us time to go and get an espresso from the cafe down the street instead of slaving away on boring projects.
Quoting Stroustrup from his 2007 History of Programming Languages paper:

'Alex named his containers, iterators, and algorithm library
“the STL”. Usually, that’s considered an acronym for
“Standard Template Library”. However, the library existed
—with that name—long before it was any kind of standard
and most parts of the standard library rely on templates. Wits have suggested “STepanov and Lee” as an alternative explanation, but let’s give Alex the final word: “ ‘STL’ stands for ‘STL’ ”. As in many other cases, an acronym has taken on a life of its own.'

http://www.research.att.com/~bs/hopl-almost-final.pdf
Posts & discussions like this make me cringe a lot worse than actual praise of pg.
Ok, first off, the formal definition of what you describe is Network Effects - i.e. Metcalfes law. Facebook benefits from that just as well as eBay

no. building a connection on ebay (i.e. buying or selling something and leaving feedback) requires a lot more effort than building a connection on a social network (adding a friend). that's why users are more locked into ebay than any social network.
Comcast’s Concession to Net Neutrality
I think what Spalding wants to get at is the fact that as entrepreneurs, we're overlooking the real change that we can induce at the whims of the VC community. There are other ways to finance. There are other ways to innovate. Isn't it time that we decided to take action on this "problem"?

I think that there are plenty of problems to tackle, especially in the way we handle information. Let's get out there and change the world.
In the words of pg himself "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by math" ( http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html )
From the horses mouth: "Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit"

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001101.html
I was in the Liberal Arts CS program at my school and, with 20/20 hindsight, am absolutely sure I made the correct decision (for me).

Being in the LA college at my school (we had both Engineering and LA schools on the same campus -- you could take CS from either side) I was exposed to a much broader range of topics that the rigid and intense engineering curriculum wouldn't have allowed me the be exposed to. I took a lot of Human Factors/Design courses in my last 2 years which gave me a new perspective on the CS that I'd been learning.

The takeaway for me was this: being able to see your CS degree in context of a broad range of other seemingly disparate topics ensures that you aren't narrowly defining what the degree can do for you. You can apply the degree creatively to a broad range of problems that aren't necessarily even taught in the CS department (or, for that matter, the Engineering school).
I was a little surprised that the genlog.py program is said in the slides to be slightly faster than the nongenlog.py... That is, several chained generator expressions actually ran faster than an explicitly written "for" loop. I suppose it may have something to do with using the C-implemented sum() function rather than doing a running total in Python; nevertheless, I expected more overhead from the generators. Very cool.
Paul Graham Should Fill the Startup Funding Gap
Most of the people on facebook are more than just "adding a friend". There is a lot more depth to it. These are genuine relationships that have been there before they hit facebook.
NOTICE: The following message contains hearsay.

I heard that Justin from Justin.tv sold his first startup on eBay, but that could be entirely fictional. You might want to e-mail him to find out.
Shouldnt the title have been "StacOverflow.com : the new venture from Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood"?
Actually, after being in the industry, I would have to disagree.

Google makes so much money because of the high volume of traffic combined with the targeting they can do as a result search queries, knowing users and all that. I actually click gmail links occasionally because they relate to the email thread I am in. Discussing a camping trip the actual campsite I wanted to go showed up as a link! That combo of high traffic and highly targeted (and therefor high conversions) is what creates the value.
Way:

group1 that contains user1 should be isolated from group2 that contains user2. They can't see each other's replies.

But I wouldn't want such things to happen here except on Apr 1.
Tips for Building Next Generation Web 2.0 Applications
What Can Micro-blogging do for Marketing?
The other side of the coin would be interesting to see too. Is it difficult to determine the number of +/- votes, and could this be displayed on the leaderboard?

It would be interesting to see who is controversial, who makes very passive comments that are always agreed with, etc.
New support channels for AWS
Nice writeup . . . made me want to check out the software.
If Y Combinator were to offer an additional round of funding to the best startups then this would radically change the social dynamic of the program both between the founders and the YC parters and also between the startups themselves, in a way that undermines the qualities of YC that attract founders in the first place.

C.f. No Contest: The Case Against Competition by Alfie Kohn.
Amazon Web Services Launches AWS Premium Support (one on one technical assistance)
NSFW Blocker Using MooTools and CSS
There is also Bloglines. I recently switched from Google Reader to Bloglines' beta version, since I felt the latter was slightly faster, and it is supported in my blackberry browser.
Inc magazine has a section for advertising deals like these, I think. They at least feature one of these each issue.
Native font rasterization limitations in Java 6 Update 10
Amazon Web Services status
Amazon listens to developers.
i didn't comment on the depth of the relationships. i commented on the investment needed to create them online.
You can read in the history books ( and I have) that these laws were pushed hard by the relevant professional associations. But the motives are a matter of interpretation. They aren't going to come out and say, "We want to establish legal education requirements so that we can make more money". The argument they make is that we need to make sure everyone is "qualified." Perhaps they were being sincere, perhaps not. But if even if they were wrong out of ignorance, the idea could out compete the truth because it has a built in ratchet affect.
Ask YC: Payment as a method of quality retention?
Just wondering how many people would be willing to pay a small fee like $5 to have a YC News account. There's been a lot of talk going around about how to manage the influx of visitors to YC news, and after reading http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=165621 it occurred to me that a small one-time payment might actually be conducive to maintaining post quality.
Alexa change, good or bad? Take our poll and share your thoughts
Wow noodle, thats an interesting point. I never thought about that. That makes a ton of sense.

(caveat: another barrier is work experience and GMAT score to determine what "level of prestige" school you can get your MBA from)
Of course there are, but I have to say that problems will be solved when they are painful enough for people to pay for a solution, or to work one themselves, (opensource).
At least search engines can be told not to touch a certain link, if a bored user did the same thing who would you blame?
A very tall young woman had her photo taken with me in a nightclub, with requisite big grin. I'd assume that's 16 inches or $96 million dollars, money I don't have! I think she was picking up the wrong vibes from a screenwriter cum software developer.
Alexa change - big time! Read more...
Pretty cool app.

What I'm missing, is a way to get info on the current image.
Maybe a click on the image could bring up the Flickr side in a new tab?
Even post obvious one liner comments with no real substance
Couldn't it be done in such a way as to not radically change the social dynamic of the program?

What if funding was just offered as a last resort, i.e. the potential "Googles" that fell through the cracks of the current venture capital landscape?

What if the fund was set up so the YC principals did not make funding decisions in the new fund, but instead determined the basic structure of it?

What if the fund would not fund YC companies? That is, assuming there are lots more potential Googles that aren't being funded and are also not in YC, it should still be easy to get quality deal flow.
Sure, why not. I'm not implying one way or the other if it would do more good than harm, but I would have no problem with paying a small fee.
Fat chance of that! Not until those funds are driven to death by successful, innovative funds that provide better returns because of better incentives. Even then, there's so much capital out there that the old style funds would still exist.
Highly recommended reading (mentioned in passing in the article): Colson Whitehead's "The Intuitionist", a magic realist novel about a black female elevator inspector. No, really!
Hey can you publish the source code of the search tool?
I entirely agree. I wasn't trying to prove anything -- much the opposite: I used an intentionally silly expression to indicate that while the fact agreed with the conclusions drawn in the article, it had no real statistical relevance. I nonetheless found it interesting.
Exactly - just because every car has air condition now, doesn't mean that it's no longer worth putting air conditioning in the cars you sell.
When people post sites for sale in the sitepoint.com forums, to prevent the general public from stumbling across the sale, they usually use a tinyURL pointing to the site and avoid using the site name in the description text. This prevents the sale post from appearing in most search results. You could also check out the robots.txt for wherever you list.
Google Is Saved! YouTube Money Machine Mints $1 CPMs
OpenPanel: The Server Control Panel Alternative
I've never applied to YC, so maybe I'm not qualified to comment, but I'm not sure your remark fairly characterizes what's going on. It seems to me that if YC gets hundreds and hundreds of applications, and if most founders who are accepted say yes, and if people know the situation going in to the interview (which they clearly do), then it's just not worth YC's time to futz around dealing with the few people who can't decide immediately.

Now, if YC and all their clones could agree to a similar cycle, so that founders could pick between different offers, then I would say that YC were the bad guys. But that's not the case (yet).
That would be if a FriendFeed user wrote this article. Paul is like the home builder or developer. He has product that he needs to move and he's marketing. (I'm sure he believes it too, but that is the effect of his writing. But it's no different than pg writing about startups or Joel writing about issue tracking)
Curious... what kind of expenses do you have selling software that the income on 120 revenue is bad?
gibsonf1 emailed me to tell me template editing would be available on Saturday or so.
No one, it's just a fairly safe assumption.
Kiko, previous startup of justin.tv founders, was sold on ebay.

But I would not advise that for your startup, since I don't think you would be able to get enough attention to it from the right people.

I think the best idea is to figure out who the best people to buy your startup are. Either because they can leverage the product best or because they are your competitors or because they have enough money and interest in your space. Then start conversations with them.

Some people use investment banks or hired investment bankers but you need to be looking at a higher valuation to interest those.
Don't Serialize Java Objects in Hadoop SequenceFiles