skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to foster hacker culture at my school (Cornell)?
Maybe it's an unfair criticism, but my school (Cornell) seems to lack the kind of ambition/enthusiasm for startups that you hear about at a Stanford or MIT.

I've got my own ideas about why that's the case (see below), but my real question is what I/others can do to get other talented and brilliant people excited/passionate about startups, open source and the future of tech (among other things -- given that these are very broad and not always overlapping areas to begin with)?

Possible causes:

0. Location location location -- Ithaca, NY is not Silicon Valley or Cambridge, MA. Cornell is pretty much the central hub of activity. But I do think the conditions are ripe for a Research Triangle, NC type of scene (Syracuse was recently named among the most affordable cities in the US, there are major research institutions like Cornell, RIT, University of Rochester, among others in the area)

1. A certain amount of group think -- CS at Cornell seems to focus a lot more on theory/research. I know this is the case at any reputable CS school but the top CS students either aim to go get their PhDs and pursue the most abstract research or go work for an IBM/Accenture (in my experience, a lot more people opt for MS over Google and I know of a handful at FB)

2. Lack of a nurturing environment -- There are some brilliant minds among the faculty (Jon Kleinberg for example) but again the focus seems to be almost solely on theory and not as "modern" languages (Cornell is for all intents and purposes now a Java school, C++/Matlab/Functional languages). Profs seem way too absorbed in their own research and much of the "teaching" falls on incompetent/inexperienced lecturers/grad students so it's hard to really motivated. Doing CS at Cornell feels more like surviving the gauntlet then doing something you're passionate about.

Part of this is that every major/school at Cornell is like its own little silo, you really have to go out of your way to "embed" yourself with the art students, stats heads, etc. That's why even though Cornell has a big emphasis on "entrepreneurship", it seems to focus on the "business co-founder types" and it's really sad how absent software/tech is missing from the scene (the entrepreneurship seems to revolve a lot of times around tech transfer and turning research into companies in materials, nanotech, etc.)
Affective labor
A meta-comment on the article:

Apple-centric observers weren't the only ones to get the facts wrong, and phrasing like that title is only used to make a point. This implies that non-Apple-centric observers got the facts right. I don't know about you, but I'm not an "Apple-centric observer" and I had no idea H.264 wasn't free.

And since I'm one of many, then the goal of this article was either to a) notify Apple-centric observers that H.264 isn't free and/or b) point out to everyone how biased Apple-centric oberservers are, how they just eat up everything Steve Jobs says, and high-five non-Apple-centric observers for being so coolheaded, rational, and informed. And since "Apple-centric observer" is clearly a codeword for "Apple fanboy," the implication here is essentially "smart people don't like Apple" or worse yet "if you like Apple, you're stupid."

This is just flamebait disguised as news. Fanboys accusing fanboys of fanboyism. Move along, nothing to see here.
Is Microsoft's runtime any more open? I've been more and more impressed with Mono lately. Does it potentially face the same issues Java is facing now?
The simplest way is to simply go to Yahoo Finance and look at stock for insiders for tech companies. You'll find plenty of techies. From Sergey to Bill to Jerry.

But even non-founders, those in purely technical roles. People like David Cutler or Jeffrey Dean or Amit Singhal. At virtually ever major tech company you'll find a continuum of these.

Go to the federal gov't and you'll see much flatter pay structure. I don't care how rockstar you are in the Air Force, you are never going to see Sergey or even Jeff Dean type of money. Never.
sidenote: I did not know this but pg went to Cornell. I wonder what it was like for him then?
The pic looks like something straight out of "The Forbin Project." Also, holographically projected monoliths in those seats with letters reading "Seele 01" and the like wouldn't seem at all out of place.
The success of the iPod made the Apple brand young and hip, but their core customer has been (and may again become with the iPhone and iPad) people who value their time and are not computer geeks per-se. That's a difficult thing to say in a crowd of computer geeks, but may contextualize the iOS/Android debate around here.
I realize this is not your typical HN submission, but I think it can provide some motivation to those who need it.
Did you know of the company before they contacted you? Do you know of their reputation or have common-contacts with which to check it? Do you know them well enough to know you'd want to work with them?

Those would be the foremost questions for me.
BTW, don't get me wrong: Heroku is a standout service, and I use it as an example of how dramatically easier it is to start a technology business compared to even 10 years ago. I just have this little nitpicky complaint, that they ought to include one background process for free. The lack of it is actually blocking me from using Heroku for a startup idea at the moment. (I could always pay, sure, but when you're at the proof-of-concept stage, you're reluctant to put out even that much money.)
If I’d known about the anti-suit culture, I would have worn Dockers and a polo shirt. I just wanted to convey that I took the interview seriously. Apparently the feeling wasn’t reciprocal.

This isn't the first time I've heard of candidates being looked down upon for wearing suits to interviews, and I'm really curious what the thought process is behind this.

I've done interviews where the candidate wore a suit, and where they wore jeans and a button-down, and nobody felt offended. The only time someone's clothing made a truly negative impression was when it was clear their suit had most likely been crumpled up in a ball 30 minutes before the interview -- some of his answers to technical questions suggested he was generally sloppy, and his appearance was just one more data point to support that conclusion.

Is there some inherent distrust in someone who shows up in a suit?
Yeah, as soon as Apple removed "Computers" from their name they also stopped being a "tools for the passionate"-manufacturer. They now sell primarily media consumption devices.

Nothing wrong with that, it's just not the same core Jobs talks about in this video.
That's got to be the mother of all patent lawsuits to date.

I hope that it will now become clear to the world at large that a patent without any intention to produce a product is simply a waste of time and money. I'd much prefer it if all these patent filing clowns would keep their 'research' locked up in their vaults and called them trade secrets, that would give nobodies like me a chance at just getting on with our jobs without stepping on someones patented toes.
Thanks, I'll give it a try! If you're ever in Greece, I'll buy you that beer!
So he's suing Apple, Google, AOL, eBay, Facebook, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo and YouTube.
SizeUp is great to move application windows around with keyboard shortcuts.

http://irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/
Aristocracy is completely out of touch. Good news in a way.
I think it says a lot about how much Apple's brand is damaged for me that I can't think of one of those people in the ad, if they were alive today, using a mac without it diminishing their image in my mind.
Except it completely tanks XHTML pages that are served as XML.
Also, this isn't a trustworthy source to obtain malware/spyware-free files.
This may answer some of your questions:

http://www.mono-project.com/MonoConcerns
A/B testing prices would be ideal when trying to find out how much people are willing to pay for your product. Unfortunately it's a rather risky practice, so doing it over time as suggested by Jacques may be a better approach.
You're right on most counts. But this is the tradeoff.

Private:
Can make it rich. Really rich, And on average probably make more money while working, assuming the same type of work. OTOH, if you don't make it rich your retirement may not be as nice as you'd like.

Public:
Will never be rich. You can solve P=NP, factor large numbers in constant time, and create a revolutionary new UI that every loves, and you'll still get paid as a GS-13, but you'll get a level bump next time your promotion comes up. But when you retire, you'll be comfortable.

It's kind of like the same deal judges get. Almost all federal judges would make a boatload more money as attorneys. But they take the lower pay with job security, salary for life, and a different kind of prestige.
This is a common view on HN, but I will suggest that you don't "get it." The AppStore may be a thorn in the side of some developers, but supports Apple's stated core value of enabling people who are passionate. The store reduces risk and variability, while rewarding (through ease of payment and reduced piracy (if you believe piracy to be a demotivator)) those who make great things for the end user.

Computer geeks are only one kind of passionate person. Apple's view is that annoying them is a small price to pay for making everyone else's experience better.
Actually, it faces even bigger issues, since you essentially have to be using a version of Mono that is paid for. Java at least has a solid grant of patents so long as you're using the GPL version.

Microsoft has intentionally worded their licenses to allow them to sue anyone who isn't paying for their software in the future.

In a certain sense, this is the intent of the GPL rearing its ugly head. When Oracle says Android violates their copyright, it seems like what they mean is they've taken GPL code (the Java standard) and re-implemented it under a different license. Though I'm in no way deep in enough to say that authoritatively, and like the entire suit the rationale seems questionable to say the least.

A potential Microsoft suit looks to be allowed by the Mono licensing.
Real-time Relationship Analytics From Large-scale Graph Processing
Python has it too:

* foo.get(bar) will return None if the element is not there
* foo.get(bar, "beebop") does what your Scala example does
* foo.setdefault works just like foo.get. However, if foo did not have key bar when it was called, it will fill the key in with the default value before returning.
* collections.defaultdict is also worth a look.
I see, thanks for the update. It would have helped if the title was Fennec 2.0 Alpha, not just Fennec Alpha. I would give it a try sometime this weekend.
Whoa! The UNIX shell's pipelines!
Well, it is a hiring pitch, but beyond that, you're right.
Maps: How Mankind Remade Nature (historical demographic visualization)
> I often have to navigate the project folder structure to look for stuff, I need to compare files, work with the source control and so on.. all of this I feel I can do pretty efficiently from within Eclipse.

For Vim, there are a lot of plugins to deal with source trees, but I get along fine with Vim's built-in wildmenu and tab completion. Both options are nicely configurable. For emacs, I like ido-mode. I find it much faster to browse a directory and open a file with the keyboard and tab-completed filenames than to use a mouse.

There are also commands to jump to other files to find the definitions of functions and such. It depends which programming language you're using. Vim has `gd` and friends to do the same. And then there's ctags, which integrates with Vim wonderfully. Editing Lisp code in Emacs with SLIME (for example), `M-.` will jump you to a function definition in another file.

For comparing files, it'd be hard to beat vimdiff, which provides built-in, cross-platform colored diffs of buffers. Emacs has a diff mode as well.

For source control, Vim and Emacs both integrate well with Git and others. You can stage and commit files and such via a keystroke or two. But personally I use the command line for git. (Of course you can embed a shell right in Emacs too.)

Vim and Emacs let you use "windows" (panes) instead of tabs for editing multiple files; don't overlook how awesome this is. You can view files side-by-side without having to close or hide one to open another. It frees short-term memory for other things. Once you set up keybindings for opening, closing, resizing and moving between windows, you're set. I haven't found anything faster or easier to use. Finding and viewing a buffer that isn't currently visible again uses tab-completion and is very fast.

So yes, a lot of typing. But typing is more efficient than mousing, I find. That's part of the point of Vim and Emacs to begin with.

I often work on Ruby on Rails projects in Vim with 2 dozen files open, or more, and have a very easy time.
Vim + Screen has been my "IDE" of choice for 5+ years. At this point I probably could not hack on code using any other toolset—it's so ingrained. And compiling Vim with Ruby bindings has also allowed me to whip up some very useful scripts to performs routine tasks like you'd see in Eclipse.

Vim ftw!
Unfortunately in the U.S. looks matter more than taste. I guess it's the wonders of advertising. Thanks for your answer.
Well, Baby Geniuses was a proper movie released in theaters that just happens to be terrible.

A bit higher class than Pool Party: The Movie.
How to introduce young students to the modulus operator
This video is awesome. Think Different is my favorite ad of all time. Unfortunately it feels like they have lost something in the last decade. While before it was about enabling passion and challenging the status quo, now it is more about reverence for old heroes. Before it was a call to arms to be inspired by those great men and women and do great stuff, now it is just to adore what they have done, while we continue to live life in our pods.

This makes me sad.
It would be really cool if mainstream media would link to the patents the article talks about because their description is horrible.
If it works as well for any of you as it did for me you will not regret trying this.

It's amazing how much you can be 'off' about what your product is worth to your visitors if you do not do drastic experiments like this to figure out the range of prices that are acceptable.

I think we all subconsciously price based on 'cost+', we price based on what it costs us to provide a service, tack on a profit margin and then we round that to the nearest reasonable sounding figure.

But you should be pricing based on perceived value. Not on your costs...

And the perceived value may be a lot higher than is apparent to you as the creator of the product.
The advice I've always heard is to wear the suit and adapt as the day goes on. If you are confronted with a room full of blinking shorts and sandals types then you gratefully pull off the tie, drop the coat, unbutton the collar, and roll up the sleeves while saying something about "glad you guys won't expect me to suit up".
Why should inputs ("5 months old, $50K in") cap valuation when something unique has been created?

That'd be like setting prices by costs rather than value!
The App Store the is epitome of "Think Different".

It has done an astounding job of attracting developers to their platform, and no competing "Store" does a better job of connecting developers with actual users.

Yet there was no shortage of people who said it would never work, and there's still no shortage of people who keep saying they're doing it wrong.
Do not just send them the source code. Agree to show it to them for as long as they want, on your laptop, and in person.
Use Cmd-w to close windows and Cmd-q to quit applications.

Also, when Cmd-Tab'ing, you can hold down Cmd and hit q to quit an application. It's a quick method for closing a lot of applications.
I train BJJ and, less often but still regularly, MMA. We call it grit: when the going gets tough, a person's tendency to grit their teeth and keep going. When you get mounted, do you mentally give up and wait for the guy to submit you, or do you look for every opportunity to escape? When you take a knee to the stomach, do you double-over and try to get a break in the sparring session, or do you clinch with the guy and re-double your efforts to pin him against the cage?

I've seen many different people train over the years, and I think grit can be acquired. Hard training encourages it. But, on the other hand, I think some people start out grittier than others. I have some training partners who never really acquired much grit. Those without much grit in training tend not to have much grit off the matt.

This is a long way of saying that while those examples aren't particularly impressive, I still think grit matters in areas that don't require physical exertion.
Paul Allen and Nathan Myhrvold (former-Msft CTO) must be two peas in a pod:http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100217/1853298215.shtml
Great! Glad to see we're back to anthropological alpha-maleness as a signifier of business fitness! That's TOTALLY THE SAME as savvy planning and competent, persevering execution. And it's worked really well for Wall Street, right? ...Liar's Poker, anyone?

Or, to put another way, he's taking "tough" and using that word to mean a whole bunch of other traits: resourcefulness, perseverance, endurance, motivation & ambition -- and smashing them all into the word "toughness". Echoing swombat & enjo in this thread, yes, toughness can help you get things done, but it isn't what lets you get things done. Nice but not sufficient.
Most of the time I'm not searching for function definitions across the whole base. This is just an example.

That, and I haven't really fooled around with ctags much, though I've been meaning to for the longest time. No time like the present, I guess.
... Which doesn't change a thing about it.

I finally found a reference, it's called the Cloward-Piven strategy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloward%E2%80%93Piven_strategy#...

>>Cloward and Piven’s article is focused on forcing the Democratic Party, which in 1966 controlled the presidency and both houses of the United States Congress, to take federal action to help the poor. They argued that full enrollment of those eligible for welfare "would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments" that would "deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the white working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor. To avoid a further weakening of that historic coalition, a national Democratic administration would be constrained to advance a federal solution to poverty that would override local welfare failures, local class and racial conflicts and local revenue dilemmas."
I'm currently into vim/screen, but actually thinking of jumping ship to emacs/tmux [mostly due to orgmode]. Anyone ever done the same?

From the looks of it, the screen to tmux transition will be the easy part :)
I used to be pretty anti-stealth-- in fact, I have a blog post draft attacking the whole idea. Meet the post that turned me around: http://trada.com/blog/2010/03/31/the-stealth-mode-trada%E2%8...

I think a hybrid approach is best. Talk to as many people as you need to to move the ball forward, but don't start shouting from the rooftops until you're ready.
Ask HN: Are Angel investors interested on startups selling hardware?
I see that many Angel investors are investing in many companies, however, it seems that most of these companies sell a software services. Is there any interest from Angels for startups with new and innovative products? Most successful tech companies sell hardware (i.e. Dell, Apple, HP, etc...)
This is disorienting. What is your recount of what happened in the California Energy Crisis involving Enron? Can you tell me which of those points are questionable, please?
Sorry, idea taken already :)

http://www.appsumo.com does that. And my tool is part of that bundle :)
Because it doesn't want their money, so reddit is now running them for free:

http://www.reddit.com/r/ads/comments/d68xv/reddit_is_now_run...
I don't really understand the fairness of being able to retire at 55 with a full pension. The retirement age should be 70.
Sad to see him become a Patent troll.

Also, what could be the point of such a lawsuit? Surely Paul Allen cannot think that he can have out-of-court settlements (no cross-licensing since his company does not produce anything) with all the listed companies. Some of them will surely fight back.
we hang around the young and hip

Is that not the same as Evian's slogan - live young, or pepsi's marketing way back to the younger people. Everyone wants to be young and perhaps hip, even really old people want to get into the beat. Not that many people really want to or aspire to change the world however. Let alone the older age group, say in their 40s.
"More than just the quality, I was amazed by the toughness of the founders. These guys (and gals) were not the young, sheepish, technical founders you’d expect. These guys are operators – savvy, confident, operators."

Stereotype much?

In general this sort of post is vapid bullshit. Success in business comes from:

1) Having a product or service that people want.

2) Having a way to let people know that you have it and persuade them to try it or purchase it.

3) Having a way to deliver that product or service that costs less than the amount you take in as payment.

That's it. Everything else is bullshit, including whether or not the founders are "sheepish" or are "operators."

Business is actually very superstitious. There are so many factors that go into success in business that it makes rational analysis from hard data or from first principles hard, so people fall back on superstition. A lot of this superstition revolves around this almost mystical notion of having "what it takes," which tends to reduce to some notion of alpha maleness combined with luck.

I actually had an investor type tell me once that one of the things he looks for in potential founders is a "prominent jaw line." It was the funniest fucking thing. I am not making this up. Very very hard not to laugh out loud...

It reminds me of the Superbowl winner who wears the same pair of socks that he won the Superbowl in for every final game he plays... without washing them of course. Correlation != causation.

Superstition always causes people to make bad decisions. The big one I see in business is that amazing amounts of money gets thrown at superficial correlates of success and at empty cargo cultist alpha male types. Ever wonder how CueCat got funded? Why, it was going to <buzzword buzzword buzzword> and the founder I'm sure had a square alpha male jaw line and was very assertive.
proof:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/03/eveningnews/main67...

Enron also pulled power out of states like California, causing emergency conditions to worsen.

"Sorry California," an Enron trader says. "I'm bringing all our power out of state today. I moved out six — over six hundred megawatts."

The "shut downs" and "pull outs" triggered sky high power prices.

"We're just making money hand over fist!" one voice is heard saying on the tape.

And when states complained, the guys at Enron seemed to have a response.

"Get a f clue," one says. "Yeah," another chimes in. "Leave us alone. Let us make a little bit of money."

"Exactly," says another trader.
FTA: Oracle’s recent lawsuit against Google and open source

I wish the Google people would stop saying that. Oracle didn't sue open source. That doesn't even make sense, you can't sue open source any more than you can sue Santa. Beside the fact that the open-sourced Java implementations are explicitly unaffected by this lawsuit.