skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My one suggestion would be to avoid labeling yourself as an 'introvert' too quickly. I went through most of my childhood/adolescence as the shy/quiet type with few friends and not a whole lot of social interaction, and would have been quickly labeled an introvert. But it turns out I really like socializing with new people and doing things like going to (non-techie) parties or similar nightlife type things, although I'm still not the most outgoing person among the people I know.

Am I an extrovert? Was I really ever an introvert? Are you? Does it really help to label yourself one way or the other?
Since you asked for feedback...

Your statement that all T.A.s do care a little about teaching is false. I was a T.A. that Did Not Care. There were no consequences to doing poorly, and student grades were controlled across T.A.s so my performance could have no affect on student performance.

Also? Be nice to your T.A. Sometimes I was allowed to wildly inflate grades for students who were enthusiastic/tried hard. Sometimes not. But it can't hurt.

Another random piece of advice I would give is for students to take sections later in the week rather than earlier. My first section was always a disaster, I had no idea what I was doing.

If there is a rubric, follow it to the letter, and don't try to be creative. Rubrics are for larger classes to make the grading even, and they are followed exactly. I knew an A paper from a B paper, but sometimes A papers got Bs and B papers got As because of the stupid rubric (or worse...)
When you ask how you get an “A,” they’re likely to be annoyed because you’re indicating you don’t care about learning, which is the best way to earn an A.

I cannot stand it when a professor says that the best way to get an A is to learn. It shows a fundamental ignorance about their own system of instruction.

If there is anything I've learned about universities, it is that learning is at best orthogonal to getting an A. More often you have to actively sabotage your actual learning in order to get an A.

When you get excited about a subject enough to explore it on your own, you will almost inevitably end up either spending too much time on one part of the curriculum or neglecting the rote memorization and tedious busy work that is necessary to get an A. Classes are just small factories, treating and evaluating every student the same way. It is and ever was a game of points and percentages. If you want "learning" out of this, you need to balance it with playing the game.

Professors have either never known this or have completely forgotten it. They constantly whine about how students seemingly strive to get the least out of their education as possible by taking as many shortcuts as they can. What they fail to realize is that all of their classes are set up as silly little point games, and each student has about 5 or 6 of them. Then they give out so many busy work assignments and so much reading per class that it is impossible to accomplish it all. The students are essentially learning how to prioritize and cut out all of the unnecessary fat in order to maximize their points. They're kept so busy that they don't even know that they're not really maximizing for learning. Learning is not what the professors tell them to do. Learning is not what the professors hold over their heads. They live by points, and die by points. It takes a special student to pull his/her head out of this firehose of tasks and decide to pursue their own education.

So Bob the student comes into class and he hasn't done the reading. Why? Because he has spent 102% of his time on the various homeworks and deliverables for this and other classes -- the stuff that actually has an effect on the bottom line: his grade. He'd sure like to do the reading, but he knows that he can get the assignments done just as well without it, and so it goes to the bottom of the priority list. He will never get around to doing the reading, because the list of grade-impacting busy-work deliverables will never cease.

The professors then complain about the students like Bob, who don't seem to want to actively explore their subject. They complain about the work of their own hands, the inevitable result of their own system. The professor actively molds students to be this way, and then they complain about it.

That is what I wish I'd known as a freshman.
Quitting your day job is one of the best things ever!
There is a ton of scholarly work on the effects of unequal funding on public education. Google Scholar is a good place to start:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=unequal+funding+educatio...

A good "primer" book, although a bit old, but not outdated, is called "Savage Inequalities"

http://www.amazon.com/Savage-Inequalities-Children-Americas-...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savage_Inequalities

Another book is "The Shame Of A Nation" by the same author. These are just starting points, though, there's no shortage of studies, essays, books, and scholarly works on the subject. What I'm presenting here, in terms of social critiques of education, is by no means unique.
Time zone conversions in BASH, looking out for better ways from you guys...
If such cases occur often enough, then the list of symptoms is not particularly useful. It can only have some use as a warning, if there are non-symptomatic tests available, but such is not the case here - you can't lab test your brain cells for the source of your opinions. What you seem to suggest is looking for more symptoms if you already experience some - but that "method" is flawed, and known as medical student's disease: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_students_disease .

In any case, if someone could reasonably check off all the items on the list, but be a very objective person; or respond to none of the items, and base his opinions entirely on groupthink; then I maintain my belief that the list is useless.
It seems entirely possible to "store" data in ways that are not dependent on things that are traditionally said to have weight. For example, you could stream data as electromagnetism, making how much it weights completely dependent on your definition of "weight".

Imagine streaming the entire internet into outer space with a pulsating laser. In transit, it would weigh very near nothing (IANAP, but it's weight would probably be the mass-equivalent of the total energy of the photons), but could still be read at a later time.
Twilio CEO Offers Tips for Pricing Your SaaS
What makes sense for one company may not make sense for every other. Groupon is great at what it does, so I don't see a point of being critical of something that isn't an expense unless the company opts into it. From my experience, Groupon tries to help you understand full well what you are getting in to.

The truth of the matter is that many business owners don't make the right decision 100% of the time, especially when it comes to new marketing opportunities and trends. Every brand is different, and it's every brand's responsibility to represent itself how it wants to be seen. Blaming Groupon for lowering the value of your brand is projecting your failure to maintain that on a company who offers a great service.
http://web.mac.com/ben_moseley/frp/paper-v1_01.pdf
What K. Told Me About Starting Up
That’s not human arrogance. That’s just how it looks to be at the moment.

Human arrogance I say (and that is not aimed at you personally).

We're making assumptions based on a ridiculously small and sparse amount of knowledge. We assume the universe is 14 billion years old, we assume other lifeforms are carbon based like us and evolve the same way we do, we assume faster-than-light travel is not possible.

I don't see how this is any different to how we assumed the earth is flat, just a few hundred years ago.

In the grand scheme of things we simply don't know enough to make anything but the wildest guesses about alien intelligent life. Considering ourselves to be the pinnacle of evolution at this point seems very naive.
Almost 2 weeks over. No response from them so far :(
While I wouldn't recommend this route, it might have worked in my case. I used to know nothing about tech/startups and I ended up outsourcing the initial development of my site while still a full-time student. I learned a lot during the process while fully immersing myself in the tech and startup scene (online, since I'm not in an ideal location yet). I then used the initial traction to get my foot in the door to talk to developers. Without the initial traction and product, I don't think I would have been able to start as many conversations about the future vision and ultimately find a good partnership. Nothing's 100% yet, but I'm on my way. I know time is crucial, but without something to show for yourself, it will be difficult to attract the talent you are looking for.
A point to consider is the probability that microbes ever evolve into something more complex (multicellular organisms). After all, there are huge amounts of bacteria on Earth these days, but I'm not aware of any cases of them evolving into more complex organisms in the last billion year or so.

A book called "Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life" provides some insights. The author argues that the only reason multicellular organisms evolved is that one type of cells ("host") engulfed (or engaged into symbiotic relationship with) another, that became mitochondria and was used as a "power plant". This probably happened only once in history and under very specific conditions, which are very unlikely to be repeated.
It is fun to see the phrase "save the world" used in its literal meaning for a change.
Intellectual hipsters and meta-contrarians
Not sure if you were paying attention, but Zuckerberg was on Oprah, and he is giving the state of New Jersey $100 million in Facebook stock, in a matching grant.

How much stock has Google given NJ?

</sarcasm>
The problem with articles written by ESR is that the actual discussion gets drowned out by people complaining about the author. The signal to noise ratio goes way, way down.
My degree is in Engineering and I'm still constantly amazed at the amount of sophistication that goes into all the things we take for granted. Scaling web apps to x-million users? Ha, that's nothing compared to what other people do every day.
Here are my thoughts on registration forms:

You should always have absolute minimum number of fields required to start using the service.

Don't have any optional fields (there are plenty of better places to ask for that information).

If there is information required to use certain parts of the service then ask for it when they want to use that part.

http://tumblr.com and http://posterous.com examples of this. I'm actually a fan of the single password input too... I implemented a similar form recently: http://hellohype.com/accounts/register, only with a username field instead of a url field.

I'm not a big fan of going to the extreme of Instapaper though. They don't require a password at all, so a malicious user can access and modify another user's account.
No ASCAP shakedowns?
I agree that Play shows a lot of polish and attention to detail. I haven't done anything significant with it but it was very pleasant for the few simple things I tried.
No, but their assistants or someone else might be getting to them. Who knows.
Isn't that the same link as in the post? Am I missing something?
Ask HN: Best Books on Economics
I'm wanting to learn more practical information on economics, and wondered if anyone had any good suggestions on books that you've found uniquely useful in learning economics. Most college textbooks unfortunately let the dismal science keep its name and seem to make it more confusing at best. But, there must be better books/resources to make economics make sense and actually be useful.

Some books I've seen recommended on HN and elsewhere include:

- Economics in One Lesson

- SuperFreakonomics (or the original Freakonomics)

- Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science

If you had to purchase just one economics book, which would you find most useful and why? Any suggestions are appreciated ... eBooks/Kindle edition are best. Thanks!
Agile covers product tasks and is generally tasked at the iteration level (week/2 weeks/ month whatever your iteration length). Though there is the standard "what are you working on today?" "What will you work on tomorrow?" and "What's blocking you" that comes up in Scrums.

That being said this stuff seems to cover all the daily tasks (meetings, emails, etc) that is not covered in Agile. This is my main issue with this process. If you're already an agile shop then now every thing you do is being tracked. I'm not sure all teams would respond well to this. Personally I wouldn't like it much - I, personally, would feel micromanaged at this point.
This is important.

You shouldn't trust a lawyer someone ELSE is paying.
Girls Hope
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I actually keep most of my files in Dropbox, which lets me keep everything the same between my desktop and netbook. I add the appropriate Dropbox folder to my Windows 7 libraries, and that makes it feel the same as saving documents in the normal Documents folder. Then, I keep portable apps in a Dropbox folder so they're synced between machines as well. Works great for me!
> This probably happened only once in history and under
> very specific conditions, which are very unlikely to be
> repeated.

Anything not forbidden is compulsory. -- Murray Gell-Mann
Just some formatting feedback. I noticed that there were three hard breaks (ie: <br>) in the content, and they didn't seem to belong (possibly an artifact of your wysiwyg editor).

Look for:

"assuming you want to graduate on time."
"Go to the professor’s office hours"
"whether the question he has asked is the right one"

Having recently graduated with a B.S. Degree (pun intended), I really appreciated your article. Even with two parents who did it before me, navigating the college experience in under four years was difficult (mostly because of the hoops you must go through to graduate on time: "ABC 201 is a Prerequisite of ABC 202... but don't plan on taking it in the fall, it's only offered in the spring semester.")
It is ok as long as you don't feel isolated. The moment you feel is hurting you or not allowing to live the life you'd like, it may become a problem.
How Tea Party Organizes Without Leaders
Ask HN: YC in SF or TechStars in NYC?
Both programs have high expectations, 'big league' connections, and amazing locations. I would like to know what the HN community thinks...

Also, if anyone has entered either in the past, can you please share any wisdom on how to a.) get in and b.) get the optimal learning experience?

I'm sure a lot of us are wondering the same thing as things are changing faster and faster and more of us are starting to believe we can make a valid contribution.

If you haven't decided to apply or not, just do it anyways for practice. What do you have to lose?
of course its ok. being whoever you are is ok.

but if you want to stretch your capabilities, consider taking improv classes or joining Toastmasters.
Ads from The Deck, Fusion Ads, Yoggrt, and other similar ad networks actually get my attention and clicks because they always have ads from quality services and companies. I even find myself peeking at The Deck ads just to see what new app/product/service is being advertised. When ads can actually be useful and informative, that's when they're really, really great.

That and affiliate ads. What person in the HN crowd hasn't given (MT) a thought after seeing all the high-profile sites recommending it?
Absolutely. For example PLY (http://www.dabeaz.com/ply/, "Python Lex-Yacc") has been used to implement simple C and BASIC compilers.
It's an interesting problem, because there is some benefit in intellectual areas to not over-signalling "intelligence", imo. Nobody likes the hipster, but nobody really likes the insecure mid-level intellectual who goes out of his way to speak like a thesaurus, either (the intellectual equivalent of buying too much jewelry). Seems tricky to find exactly the right balance!
Yeah, there was. I remember acting outraged and complaining loudly to them about it, then paying what was really a tiny fee anyway.
Uproar in CA as private company takes over financially sound libraries
Motivational gadgets
Why It's Important To Annotate Your Wireframes
Perplexed journalists keep looking for the movement's leaders, which is like asking to meet the boss of the Internet. Baffled politicians and lobbyists can't find anyone to negotiate with.

radical decentralization embodies and expresses tea partiers' mistrust of overcentralized authority, which is the very problem they set out to solve. They worry that external co-option, internal corruption, and gradual calcification -- the viruses they believe ruined Washington -- might in time infect them. Decentralization, they say, is inherently resistant to all three diseases.

It will be interesting to see how much impact they have.

Headless organizations have other problems. They are much better at mobilizing to stop a proposal or person they dislike than at agreeing on an alternative.
I don't know Chris Sacca and I've never met Mike Arrington, but reading this email and the original article Mike wrote, Chris has a lot more credibility than Mike to my eyes. OF course, Mike wasn't actually there so his allegations are pretty much by definition unsubstantiated.

I think it is a shame that Mike gets the attention he does, and that his website gets the traffic it does. This is not the first time he has impeached his credibility.
Robots are better tweeters than you are
Raymond wrote a post about the koans and some of his other stuff Saturday, Mystical Poetry and Mental Postures - http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2596 ; that I linked on HN - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1729978.
> I'd prefer to see certification programs that people raising money must apply-for

I like the gist of your point, but this line scares me a lot. Too much opportunity for political favors or political blackballing.
I don't think social people are inherently nepotistic. In fact, I consider the expectation of ongoing free anything to be a primary characteristic of anti-social individuals.

That said, if you identify one person that appears to be a social hub, giving them free drinks might be good for business. YMMV!
From talking with a "bar designer": Every bar should have a choke point, that is a place where customers have to squeeze past many other customers. This isn't an annoyance, but an essential part of the experience.
This story makes me happy. There is opportunity out there.
Don't look to solve the piracy problem in an absolute fashion - meaning, don't think that you can prevent people from hacking out your security measures. They can and they will. Starting with this frame of mind will help you to spend far less time (and money) on a problem that you can't really control.

Some people actually recommend not worrying about piracy of your software: think about it for a minute. You're going to need distribution and marketing for your product. If it's a good product that will be useful to people, then pirates will spread 'the word' for you for free.

If you then ensure to update the product frequently, you have a chance of keeping pirates out of date - inconveniencing them, so to speak - and they will likely crack and re-release the new version (more marketing for you).

The frequent product updating also helps to reassure your potential and paying users that you are actively supporting your product. They need to see this to know that they're getting their money's worth. :)

As far as how to do patching, likely whatever installer utility you are using supports patching, so you should look into that some more.
I cannot meet those "accredited investor" requirements, which if you think about it, are really meant to cut off dealflow for anyone who isn't already rich.

Meanwhile, I have easily lost an angel investment's sized amount of money in equities and derivatives I've controlled. (and made many times that in positive returns... but it is the losses the government pretends like they are protecting me from.)

I could have been putting $15k-$20k into several startups a year, for the past 15 years, up to one a month in recent years, if the government would let me.

Think about that-- it would have been ILLEGAL for me to invest in these companies (or for them to take my money)... while at the same time I've incurred complete losses of the same size in the public markets, and could blow all of it and more at any casino on the country in a weekend.
I think the key is not falling prey to popular notions of what the word 'introvert' means. Very few people are introverts across the board. As you note, you yourself are communicative with people who share similar interests.

What may not be as plain to you is that shared interests take unexpected forms. You may not think of yourself as interested in sales, but chances are, if you end up developing physics simulation software and try to sell it, you will find you enjoy the process.

That's what happened to me. Techie turned sales guy (founder). Never thought selling software would be so much fun or so satisfying, but it is (probably because I wrote much of it). When I am selling software, I find myself as extroverted as any other sales guy I've met.
Especially since high humidity keeps things from cooling off much at night. I grew up in the Washington, DC suburbs without AC - it bothered my father's sinuses - but I would seriously try to avoid living without it now. I remember all the crap I had to do to keep from dripping sweat on my schoolwork in the early fall and late spring - not fun.
If you haven't, listen to this: http://techzinglive.com/?p=409
Specifically, what in the article is crap?
Anything with a bit of judgment call about the kind of site you want returned is really bad, imo. Say I asked someone to search for blackberry-pie recipes, but specified I only wanted recipes from individuals, e.g. stuff posted on personal/university/etc. websites, not on content farms, TV cooking shows' websites, aggregators, etc. A human could trawl through a few dozen pages of results and pull out some recipes, but afaik there's no search term on Google that will do that.

It's also bad at summarizing information. I can get a scattered set of results for lots of topics, but it can't synthesize those results into a nice executive-summary paragraph for me. Never mind even better summarization, like searching for a topic that has no Wikipedia article yet, and having Google's algorithms write the article for me to read!
Ive done something similar in my life.

I took a year off from working the web and did things like courier work, bush regeneration and bus driving.

After a couple of months in each of these jobs i would get mentally restless and i soon discovered that the reason that i was working in the web world is because it is interesting and i am good at it.

Sounds like the OP took a step back to see all the other amazing possibilities in life, but didnt step back long enough to appreciate his own position.