skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like your answer, though I was actually gonna say the opposite.

They're both wrong! First of all this aim high stuff is nonsense. Facebook did not start with the goal of toppling MySpace. Microsoft did not start with the goal of running on 95% of machines. Twitter did not start with the thought of becoming a billion dollar company. These companies get their through consistent cycles of ambition and execution. There's nothing particular about a "lifestyle" business other than that the ambition has waned. There's literally no business that exists that can not have ambitions and grow into a major corporation through a series of growth cycles. Likewise, there's no business plan for a billion dollar company that someone can draw up from day 1 and have it survive the market on its way to that size.

As for education, that's the qualification for knowing how to run a business? There's nothing about growing a business from nothing to 9 figures that a few years in the trenches of silicon valley won't teach you better than education. Sure higher ed can teach you a lot, and you can make a lot of connections, but there's nothing special about it, and in fact it doesn't really have the same culture that makes successful startups possible. My advice to anybody in college with a project as successful as Facebook was at the time Zuckerberg dropped out is, "yes, you should drop out too. You won't be the next Zuckerberg (that ship has sailed), but you'll likely meet with some success in the valley, and certainly you'll learn more about running a real business than you were going to finishing out school."
I hate to be that guy, but as far as I know neither Tomato nor DD-WRT are fully open source. Both have some proprietary component (and not just wireless firmware blobs). The only fully open source distribution I know of is OpenWRT. I have that + X-WRT on my router, but it's about a year or so out of date. I absolute love it! A friend of mine just installed it on his router with the Luci front end and he was just raving about it to me.

Their source distribution is really nice too--they keep everything in a sort of ports style makefile setup. When you get the source and build, it ends up compiling the appropriate gcc for cross compiling (a bunch of times for different libraries), etc. It was all very pleasant.
Then, unlike the angelgate people, we'd know you were definitely guilty of a crime.

Violence is illegal, immoral, and quite uncool. You should be ashamed. But for some reason you are proud to say this in public. How bizarre.

And don't reply that you were "just joking" as if that makes it ok. Violent crimes aren't funny. If you think it's funny, you're basically denying it really is a violent crime.
PS-HTTPD is a web server written in PostScript.
They don't have a choice - it's their job... So what do you think, will the FBI investigation play out to be good or bad for us entrepreneurs?
I've said it time and time again...college is not that tasking...at most you'll spend 20-25 hours a week on it. With half of that being bullshit classes you are taking as a requirement. Which gives you a ton of time to work on your startup.
Depends on market segment. If you are trying to create a product for people in "fly-over country" then sure being more educated may prevent you from seeing things from their point of view, Walmart came from Arkansans after all... But most of the target audience for tech startups is in the first third of technology adoption curve which is dominated by educated and/or affluent and/or intelligent people.
iPhone/Android/WebOS/Windows Phone 7 app.

You could, you know, look around for ad networks.
Statements that begin with the phrase "The only rational reason to..." usually are not intended as expressions of opinion, but rather as statements about how there is only one rational rational reason to do such-and-such, and this is it.
Not everyone is meant to learn within four walls and from dispassionate, jaded professors. In my view, the best way to learn about life and how to survive using your skills and talents is 'in the wild' or by autodidacticism aka 'learning by experimentation by day and reading classics by night'. Just be prepared for a lot of initial rejection and to have enough conviction to walk to Mordor in your bare feet. It will take a lot more effort but it will make you much greater in the end.

I am 20. I dropped out a semester before I was to transfer to Georgia Tech. I dropped out because I know the surest path to greatness is autodidacticism. It's the way da Vinci, Lincoln, Einstein, and Jobs/Wozniack did it. Being a bit more rebellious and more curious than most, it's the only method of learning that I have ever excelled with anyways. I taught myself to read and write at 3 watching Disney movies with captions. I have been reading a book a week since 5th grade. My dad got me into web design and development while I was in middle school. By the end of high school, I was already feeling jaded with our Industrial Age school system and decided to learn of the Cosmos by direct experience...

HOW I GOT A WORLD CLASS EDUCATION FOR FREE:

1. ) I worked for my older brother's bootstrapped startup (Myriann.com). I watched him build websites from scratch, close big deals while still in college, and manage a team of designers and developers from all over the world. He is profitable and on pace to retire within a few years (if he wanted).

2.) I took advantage of iTunes U, TED, my public library, and free lectures from MIT, Stanford, and Harvard. I read world classics, epic biographies, and all branches of science. I discovered myself by going deeper into all subjects to the root of where each came from and why each exists. I now have a deep passion to be an artist and a scientist for the rest of my life. I will remain a student the rest of my life and apply everything I learn to my work...

3.) MY WORK: I am building a startup by trial and error. I have attempted to launch a startup 7 times since I was 15. All of them have had little success or went up in flames. I learned from each attempt and kept asking, thinking, and creating. I am now on attempt #8 and will try to enter YC this fall. I have never applied before.

DON'T LET YOUR VOICE BE DROWNED BY DOGMA!!!!!!
smackgate!
Everything evolve until they got a Linux heart.
Oops. I seem to remember reading comments from the original Ping announcement story that it was. I stand corrected.

My point is still valid though. To do proper comparison for Band of Horses, you have to take # of users in native English speaking markets. For FB, that is not the majority, though it is a large plurality; for iTunes, it may very well be the majority. Apple products aren't a significant part of the market in SE Asia, but FB is.
One of the issues is that current UIs for computers have very little context information about whats on screen, which would make language based interaction much more convenient.

Also, editing a photo is a perfect example of where language interface would be useful: instead of hunting through Photoshop's millions of menus for the graphic effect you want, you could just say/type things like:

Scale to 200%
Increase contrast 10%
Resize to 400 by 600

I'm pretty sure that language based interaction for photo-editing would increase productivity by huge amounts.

The other thing is that we've somehow locked onto the idea that the computer should be able to understand everything immediately or else it's not even worth it. But in the real world human's constantly miscommunicate, and we solve that problem very simply: ask more questions. So if the user says something like:

Adjust contrast by 10%

The computer could respond:

Do you want to increase by 10% or decrease by 10%?
There is a bunch of video tutorials on their main site that shows how to create a 'tie'.
http://www.anchormodeling.com/?page_id=186

But yeah, I was confused in the beginning too.
The chess entry doesn't support a fundamental game move (castling). I'd consider that a bug but last time someone pointed that out they got blasted on HN.

Anyway, it's a remarkable chess-like game.
Even if you look at Zuckerberg, he hedged his bets quite a bit. He went to Harvard, started facebook, then worked on it full time for a summer, and even when he decided he wasn't going to go back in the fall, it could easily have been just a year off.
Does he have a preference? Tennis is pretty athletic, maybe you're just playing inside your comfort zone.

I like martial arts for a lot of reasons, but it's really hard to find a good teacher, there are a lot of BS artists. the more they're into belts and trophies, the less good IMHO. I also think it requires a degree of mental maturity, maybe 6 is too young. I share your indifference to and worries about football, which strikes me as a commercialized tribal mating ceremony.
Have a look at http://jobs.perl.org/ if you haven't already. Lots of Perl jobs all over the country.
Wow, you're right. It's a crime to start a business. A sad day for humanity.
"Some of the comments go so far as to claim that higher education is this era's biggest scam, which is an extremely ignorant view."

There is a gigantic difference between medical school and University of Phoenix.
There are lots and lots of jobs – but of course - like everywhere - most people are recruited/hired from "know someone who know someone", so making contacts as you work is crucial.
I know a site (gamesforthebrain dot com) that runs affiliate ads of this site: http://www.lumosity.com/partners

Hope it helps.
Dave Beazley: Putting all of my Past PyCon/IPC Presentations on Slideshare
The obvious answer is probably the correct one.

If he wants to play a sport, he should play whichever sport he has fun with and actually wants to play.
Out of the 3 pursuits you mentioned explicitly, I think only one of them actually truly benefits from the education system: medicine. With finance, the fundamentals are easily learned by self study, and to excel really depends more on personality type and drive than stuff that's taught in school. Law you can absolutely self study, there's plenty who've passed the bar exam without a degree in the past, though it's harder these days now that a lot of bar associations require a degree before you can sit for the test. That's likely due to favors to law schools rather than any real qualification reason.

Some other fields do certainly benefit from the resources a university provide though. With many engineering and science subjects, lab work is pretty key to understanding, and you're not going to have to resources to do that on your own general. Computer science is an exception here, since computers are pretty readily available.

However, with the rise of grade inflation and the general dumbing down of university curricula, for a lot of subjects your average school just doesn't confer much actual value.
I clicked and gave it a run, hitting the defaults I was presented with "752 / 8". My mind just lost interest (it is almost 4am mind you) and I closed the tab.

Then it occurred to me that this arithmetic would be much easier if I had built up to it, i.e. I was used to doing sums like that.

So, with that in mind, perhaps you need to offer more? I mean, a lot more. Ways to track my progress as I do build up, ways to give me good places to push the boundaries of my mental arithmetic. I mean, you could go on extending it and making more useful. You could dig out research for the best way to get the user to learn.

I'm thinking along the lines of the "goal" to be able to perform sums like those Japanese students who use abacuses to solve massive sums very quickly even once the abacus is removed.

There are plenty of interesting features you could add to it! Make people grow from it!

I would imagine your target audience would be the younger generation with their parents (schools?) paying their son's education interests. I could imagine every parent seriously considering purchasing if their child was interested.
The plans are all open source, if you think the markup isn't worth it, you can put it together yourself. http://wiki.makerbot.com/cupcake
Infographic of the Day: The Colors Gals Like, Versus Guys? All in the Name
Your best bet is probably to talk to some company that's selling arithmetic-improvement books and mind-skill books, even mind-improvement software and offer to advertise for them. Just tell them up front what they will have to pay etc..

You could also search for affiliate networks that have some of those categories, but that will probably not pay off as much.

I can't see that you'd be able to make any money selling access to your software unless you added some more benefits and made a full product out of this, where you'd actually be helping the user improve his math skills. Heck, I think I'd use that, my arithmetic skills are really poor (despite being a decent developer) and I'd like to improve them.

Your last option would probably be to try to get some partnership with other companies or offer schools or websites in this category white-labeled version of your software so they can set up a widget of your application on their website for value addition, etc. Come to think of it, that might be your most lucrative option, plus you get more users and can continue to develop and add more value for the user...
First of all, flashing gives one party a user-configurable time period (typically 30ms) to fill your order. A full second is nonsense. Also, the person placing the order can turn it off.

Second, the motives in your hypothetical don't make sense. Direct Edge is the venue allowing flash orders. ARCA gets two commissions, but DE gets nothing. Why would DE want to give commissions to their competitors? And if this happened to any significant degree, why would customers continue to set their "please flash me" flag to True?

Lastly, front running based on flash trading is illegal, not to mention pretty easy to prove in court. And it's pretty easy to find people doing it based solely on an electronic search of the tapes. If it happened to any significant degree, how come the SEC didn't find it?
All the interesting information is missing in this article. It’s like writing about technical details of the telephone network under the headline “Man Reaches President With Normal Telephone”. It’s not surprising that the White House has a telephone number, it’s surprising that the call was answered.

Reaching something that is merely a few hundred miles away with no obstacles blocking the signal doesn’t seem very challenging to me. The problem has to be the speed with which the ISS is moving across the sky which doesn’t give you very much time to make contact.

Much more interesting, however, would be why the hell the ISS is listening and responding.
Rape and murder are violent crimes. Smacking someone causes them minor pain that subsides within seconds. It's something you shouldn't do, but it's not violent. Talking about it in an abstract sense is not something that is particularly shameful.

Using this action as a literary device is not offensive. Saying "I want to smack someone" acts to convey a desire to show someone that their actions are wrong, like a parent reprimanding a child for finger-painting all over the walls.

Honestly, in this situation, I find it appropriate. "I think using the suffix -gate to describe a scandal is silly" doesn't have the same emotional and visceral effect as "I want to smack these guys", even though the OP probably means the former.

Writing is about conveying emotion just as much as conveying literal facts and desires.
http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/make-money/101-ways-to-moneti...
Btw. Is your leaderboad supposed to work? Because it's not working for me... I'd like to see where I rank compared to other people.

I also have a lot of ideas of how you could improve the game aspect itself, but you probably have them as well, you just haven't been developing the app for the last 5 years, right?
Who the heck in their right mind spends $100k (on average) on an undergraduate degree?!

My local state university offers a decent education for <$40k. If you knock out the first 2 years at a local community college (because as an engineer does it really matter where I get my Western Civ course credits?) you can shave another $12k off for a grand total of $32k.

Hell, you can an A.S., a B.S. an M.S. and a PhD for less than $100k and have plenty of drinking money left over.

$100k for an education...ridiculous.
I don't think anyone is arguing (on HN at least) that U of P is at all a legitimate education, but surely you can appreciate that even someone who gets a degree from a state school would develop some critical thinking skills, regardless of their major. Going to college just teaches you how to learn and illustrates that you can. Some majors are definitely more valuable/productive than others, but I still think all of them are beneficial. Of course, you need to way the cost vs. benefit ratio on an individual basis because it's probably not useful to take out $130,000 in debt for say a Sociology degree.
I think that saying something like "dropping out of college increases your chance of success in a startup, just look at the Forbes 'Richest People in America' list" is a huge fallacy. Let's face it, most college dropouts will not become billionaires.

But, there are exceptions.

I recently went through the Forbes billionaire list and picked out everyone that made their fortune through technology. I found that about ~35% had no Bachelor's degrees and ~55% had no Master's degrees. Then I looked at the top 7 on the list and saw that more than 50% did not have Bachelor's degrees. It is also interesting to note that billionaire college dropouts are worth $9bn on average, compared to billionaires with Ph.D.'s, worth an average of $3bn.

Most college dropouts don't become billionaires. But, an overwhelming number of tech billionaires are college dropouts. Interesting...

Why is there such a high percentage of tech billionaires that are college dropouts? My theory is that there are people that are born entrepreneurs and will become billionaires whichever path they take in life. Most of these people are very smart, and, as a result, end up going to Ivy Leagues. But, a time comes (usually around age 19 or sophomore year in college), when something just wakes up in them and they decide to drop out and take the plunge. These are the Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world.

Dropping out of college does not increase your chances of success. If you look at statistics, it decreases your chances. It's just that the born entrepreneurs "wake up" right around age 19-20 (which happens to be right in the middle of college), and end up dropping out. Only if you are in this tiny group of born entrepreneurs would it make sense for you to drop out of college.
Currently your game looks Bland. Focus on a niche(may be kids 3-10). Add bit of bright colors. You could either ad support it using HTML5 webapp for ipads and iphones. or built an iphone/ipad app.
I want to believe, but I'm dubious.

I'm almost certain when he says he can "make a web server", he means that he can sit down with a text editor, a compiler, and a standard C library, and produce a program that will serve HTTP requests. There's some gray area beyond this, but he definitely does not mean that he can download, configure, and run a premade piece of software.

Is this what you mean too? Is there really a population of self-described "product people" who have this knowledge? Or did you interpret his statement differently? I certainly agree that such people exist, but I would be surprised that their luxurious gray beards don't blow their cover. Which is to say, do they really work as product managers?
Ideas monetizing this game I built: http://thewikigame.com?
It has ~1500 players per day, w/ average time on site ~10mins.

I'm currently starting on a iPhone/Android app. I've thought about virtual goods and adds, but so far I have shied away from adds, and virtual goods I'm not sure about. There is also that upcoming Chrome app store which might be a possibility. Any other ideas?

Anyways, good luck spicyj, you're not alone in your quest.
GV Mobile + (Google Voice app) for the iPhone now free for a few hours
This successful entrepreneur probably would have ended up somewhere else if he had been able to get a job with a criminal record. Sometimes life happens and people are forced to become entrepreneurs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Bannatyne
10% of the IE9 users is really a huge absolute number. It's probably larger, too, when you consider it could become applicable to all browsers on Windows 7. If it gains traction, it or something similar might be picked up by OSX or Gnome/KDE.

It's still worth investigating doing it right, instead of letting IE define the standard, and letting it stagnate.
> But where is your direct evidence that software patents have anything to do with the US being "one of the most innovative software producers"?

That's not what I'm arguing. All I'm saying is that given the fact that US is one of the most innovative countries in the software area, the burden of proof is on those who claim that the software patent system is broken.
Ask HN: Evaluate my app idea
Simple idea; Automagically capture data from LCD of Health/Fitness machine.

Mockup Demo: http://www.vimeo.com/15179861

You just finished your workout on Treadmill or done with your health test on Glucose meter etc. You pull out your Iphone, start TrakBug
App, select machine you just used, and then point camera towards LCD of machine. TrakBug reads data from LCD using image recognition. To handle
non-LCD cases, Trakbug allows you to enter data manually.

App Goals:

-Automate capture data from variety of health/fitness devices

–Analyze data for trends

-Share data

Questions:

-Would this be a useful app?

-Do you think there is a market for this?

-Who would be most benefited from this app?

-What feature am I missing?

Thanks for the feedback!
The site that sold for $90,000 - please do tell which one.
مسلسل العشق الممنوع الحلقة 72
Most projects I have been involved with were related to my PhD at that time, numerical computing kind of stuff in python. Going to the conferences in Europe or the US, it is already quite exciting because you see a lot of people, in academics and otherwise, using the softwares you contributed to. You make some tasks more enjoyable because the tools are more powerful, etc...

Now, in India, the dynamics are really different. You don't just do something that make people life simpler. You really enable people to do things they may not have been able to before. When the de-facto standard software costs one year of a post doc in India, having open source alternatives do make a difference.
Are you genuinely unaware that many people think smacking children for finger painting is disgusting, immoral violence? And that it should be a crime.

And that the excuse "smacking children is educational" is false.
The chosen research areas of mad scientists, 1810-2010
The article, as ugh points out, that it is very much unencumbered with facts.

Here are some references that talk about the process in general: http://www.arrl.org/frequently-asked-questions

There are other references available on that page.

Several of the ISS crew are licensed amateur radio operators, and they will be available on the air as their work schedule permits. Often contacts are scheduled with school classrooms, as noted http://www.arrl.org/ariss-contact-stories.

So part of the problem is the angular velocity of the station as seen from earth, but with omni-directional antennas on the ground, that is not a significant obstacle. The biggest obstacle is the work schedule of the crew.
Cognitive Slaves
Ask HN: How is justin.tv legal?
I've heard that there's all kinds of sports streamed live on it, including UFC matches.

How is this not illegal? Are they going to get shut down anytime soon?