skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sam Altman told me he thought we'd see a bump. I believe the thing that deters the most people from starting a startup is the sheer unfamiliarity of the idea, and this should make it seem more familiar. So possibly.
It's now over half an hour, the toolbar still doesn't function.

"We're sorry...

... but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now."

Right...

I'll try to file a bug with them, but my experience with google and support issues so far does not lead me to believe that anybody will actually read the report.

"I know this form is used to track new issues so I won't receive a response"

Does not give me great hope.
I'm happy with using a one click logon that uses a facebook cookie so that I don't have to create a new account or even type in my facebook credentials if they are already saved. It's just an option, they aren't forcing you to use it.
I agree. I think making it work beyond math and science will be a bit challenging, I think the style would need to change quite a bit, away from just the white board and more toward something like a real lecture.
Ask HN: How worthwhile is Startup School?
Fortunately I was accepted for startup school. As I am based in Australia however it will not be a cheap/quick affair to attend so I am wanting to reassure myself that its a worthwhile expedition.

Can those who have been before enlighten me as to what I can expect and whether or not it is worth the trip (approx $3)?

My big fear is that I go to find the content is fairly general and a more encouragement/pep talk style rather than content-rich information that is useful to moving forward. No doubt it will be an awesome event but just a little more detail would help convince me to come! My only hesitation is I may be better saving it and coming over for SXSW instead... or maybe I should just do both. What would your preference between the two be?

Also if I do head over I will likely come for just over a week. Any other events on around that time or anyone keen to meet up would be great!
Maybe just a bad example, but the QT doc says:

On Windows, Mac OS X, KDE and GNOME, these static functions will call the native file dialog when possible.

http://doc.trolltech.com/4.7/qfiledialog.html

QT is way better than Swing. It's a laughable comparison, really. QT does such a better job at being native.
My take on is that it's a language and a bunch of libraries - no more or less evil than, say, Perl. If there is evil to be found, it will be in what is created with the language, not the language itself.

The only exception to this rule is Lisp. It's parentheses all the way down to Hell and back with that one.
I think consulting + contracting is definitely the way to go.

When I consult through MetaOptimize, part of my goal is to work with smart people that I couldn't get otherwise, who work with me because they can set their own hours and work from where they want. This means that I have access, for example, to smart engineers + scientists in academia who want to keep doing research for pleasure but make spare cash on the side. (p.s. we're hiring people for part-time, remote work arrangements: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1748833)

It's sad to see in the Who's Hiring post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1748045) that so few employers offer flexible work arrangements. I think a lot of top talent is lost this way.
I think that's what's great about the whole concept, if you want to replace a lecture with a better one at a later date you actually can, so in the long term it can only get better, this just establishes an initial baseline, nothing will ever make it worse than this.
Fair point. I'll get right on it!
Madison Avenue is about demand generation not demand harvesting. You can't market to people that don't realize they have a problem or a need.

You could invent the wheel and there will be no demand to harvest because everyone has always dragged their dinner back to the cave. A caveman will never do a Google search for a wheel.
I have a similar, but not the same idea. I found a cool clothing company when I was traveling and I think that their designs would sell here in the states. I've talked with them about importing, but it seems pretty expensive. The bulk discount they would give me on their sticker is only 50% (they sell shirts for about $20 so it would be about US$10 a shirt+shipping). I mean, the quality is good and it is all hand made, but I'm not sure what, if any profit I could make after taking into account shipping and storage (since it is all hand made I assume I'd have large inventory costs to make sure I could handle any unexpected volume). Do you think my idea of bringing the designs here are crazy?
I disagree. Initially players and fans were skeptical and didn't treat T20 too seriously. However opinions changed and these days most players and fans take it very seriously. T20 is without doubt the fastest and most entertaining format, recently there has been a lot of talk about what can be done to save ODIs from dieing. Here in New Zealand T20 has a huge tv audience and pulls great crowd attendances while ODI support has continued to dwindle. Has this not been the case in every country? perhaps with the exception of England.
We tried FB ads at a company I've worked for. The return was so bad we canceled the whole campaign. Compare that to Google SEM, which is the largest channel by far.

FB may have a ton of data about you, but no amount of demo data can beat a person who searches for "i want to buy x" when you're selling x.

Interestingly, Google has had the same difficult time monetizing gmail (compared to search), even though they are targeting based on the content of your inbox.
I did this 6 months ago. I'm still alive and social. This is the five-step program, folks.
If you review the movie, there might be an even greater bump.
How we got 100,000 visitors without noticing
I wonder who still believe they live in a democracy (i.e. people rule). Modern democracies are supposed to represent 'the people', yet in practice people only get to vote once in ~4 years and large businesses (using lobby) can use their money to pressure every day.

Every political science prof will say lobbies are more powerful then votes. so why still call it a democracy? What would be a cover-up lie then isn't it?

I think businesses should not run coutnries because they are not creative -- they simply and soley try to maximize profit. People can make a nation friendly, homey and caring; business cannot.
I think the big problem with this idea is that Facebook is far more vulnerable to changes in fads and so forth than Google is. For the forseeable future we will need something like Google and Google will probably continue to stay on top (if they don't keep putting out Google Instants) but Facebook could much more easily be hit hard by a new social networking paradigm or some kind of fad change. Also, interestingly, it seems like probably the vast majority of Facebook's users use Google but converse is probably not true.
Food for thought, thanks! Off the top of your head, what's rent like?
I've attended a few T20 IPL games past year while being in India .. it's anything but boring and slow... the atmosphere certainly beats some of the sports events I've been to around here (including games at Fenway park where for some reason most people just come in to drink and make merry and not give a crap to what's going on field until the very last inning or so) ..
Looks cool, I never even heard of it. Gratzi
Nobody is trying to do science here, that's one very cool dad and as far as his son is concerned it might as well be space.

Petty bickering over definitions doesn't matter much, after all no balloon could take you to the 100Km mark simply because they'd explode long before you got there (as did this one), but 30Km is three times as high as your typical passenger jet will fly and that's good enough for most people.

The article about the Karman line literally reads:

"Some people (including the FAI in some of their publications) also use the expression "edge of space" to refer to a region below the conventional 100 km boundary to space, which is often meant to include substantially lower regions as well. Thus, certain balloon or airplane flights might be described as "reaching the edge of space". In such statements, "reaching the edge of space" merely refers to going higher than average aeronautical vehicles commonly would.[5][6]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line
Beware: 2/3 of content is a hardcore math - algorithm behavior analysis and theorem's proofs.

What good with this course - they teach you the way of thinking and how to approach problems. So, don't skip proofs even if you don't have appropriate math skills.

But it is course is easy, compared to machine learning course form Stanford. That math is a real nightmare. ^_^
Does someone know the source?
I m waiting for spolsky to comment.
Why I love ? Because almost after a decade from high school class, I realize why it is that way. His lessons are short, engaging and teach you the basics. I could only wish I had someone with quarter of Khan's talent to teach me math and science.
Facebook? Why should I sign into Mark Zuckerberg’s site to download a presentation...somewhere else...it still felt like a kind of category error. This was Facebook pushing its nose too far into someone else’s business.

That's exactly what I don't like about Facebook being everywhere....my solution was to setup privoxy and expunge any script debris from Facebook and google.

Your time online should be slightly more productive and private.
repeat after me: yum on top of rpm ecosystem are more flexible and friendly.

yum is the great step ahead in both flexibility and user-friendliness compared to apt.
Cyber wars
"This sentence is self evident, almost a tautology." - Ok, probably I misinterpreted your comment about the NATs being evil, apologies.

"About the load balancer, wouldn't the problem be solved with SRV records?" - the SRVs would certainly help a lot - however, the predominant user of the load-balancers, the web browsers, are not using SRV and not planning to. The http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-jennings-http-srv-00 which proposed it (and which possibly could have been used by the clients too) - now got pushed into something that would never be possible to use by the browsers.

Re. agreement - yes, I think we do agree.
The entire backend of www.thinkgeek.com is written in Perl and that's a relatively high volume, big e-commerce site.
It's been a while since I ate in at a mcdonalds in the US (admittedly in an airport) and I'm pretty sure I paid more than 5 USD.
http://www.milligazette.com/Archives/2004/01-15Sep04-Print-E...
With Apple, I was actually referring to mobile phones.
On this Dell Mini 10, X will eventually crash following a resume from hibernate, then I drop to low-graphics mode and avoid doing an actual reboot for as long as possible, just hibernating my low-graphics state.
If you can manage to deal with silverlight, I'd add Richard Feynman's Messenger Lectures. (Thanks Bill Gates)

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html
I'd say "Everything just works as expected"
It's quite possible for someone to rationally think that an action / service / startup is bad for humanity in general. How this interplays with humility is somewhat more subtle. People write what they believe. If you had written a blog post about twitter being a service that shouldn't exist (which you apparently thought), how open would you be to someone asking, "Who do you think you are to have an opinion?" He had clearly written out reasons for believing as he did. Agree or disagree with them, don't try to attack the person.
"They had a couple of offers -- another one involved more work and less pay"

Just out of curiosity, what was the reasoning behind that? Was it something that could have ended up being a good position, or was it a hand-wavy type thing?
You can get a lot of CS lecture series on Academic Earth including MIT's Intro to Algorithms:

http://www.academicearth.org/subjects/computer-science

There are other disciplines there too:

http://www.academicearth.org/subjects/
Tell HN: Read Maxim and other trashy "guy" rags.
I went out to get a haircut today and had a chance to scan through crap magazines before my appointment.

Extremely worthwhile.

Anybody who is out of business ideas, specially "social apps" will do well consuming that garbage from time to time. It's simply full of insight into the mindset of a sizable segment of society. The ads within the pages are full of hints on what works.

I had a short stint as a reseller for luxury motorcycles, and I am 100% certain that my business would have benefited from an earlier exposure to these publications.
I, and many others, get measurably better click through and conversion rates from Facebook because I can target people who are interested in certain topics and likely to buy. A person's search term is not the whole story.

Do you really think marketers want to blow all their money without returns? Why do you think Google Adwords is so popular in the first place?

And a final note, from someone who worked at a large agency that focused on media buying: display ads often reinforce a keyword/CPM/CPC campaign and lead to better overall results, despite how ridiculous that sounds.
FYI, it is impossible for any single company to generate demand, they can only create products that meet existing demand. Demand rises organically over time through the combination of all market forces, cultural trends, etc.

Trying to educate a market that they need your product is a losing proposition. Trust me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azim_Premji
I've been a few times. Do plan some days before and after, as the people you meet there are the big thing. Email me (in my profile) if you want to hang out!

You can decide if the talks themselves are worth it by watching the previous year's videos:
http://www.justin.tv/a/startupschool

Most of the talks are brilliant.
I recommend watching this video where Khan discusses his vision for the future of online education.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRf6XiEZ_Y8
They should have used Lenna in some of the "beard transfer" photos.
Same here. First I thought I was just going to have a bit of a time-out, but I haven't been back and don't miss it one bit. The previous privacy flaps were stuff to deal with, annoying but manageable, the 'like' buttons (incidentally it was a fellow HN'ers name popping up on a third party website) did it for me, end of FB.
Unfortunately, boxee doesn't have a way to link to apps. The best I have is a link to my site - http://www.roshweb.net/projects/ - which is also very light on details. I need to work on getting more information up there.
Facebook may become bigger than google, but they'll never be more important than google.

If facebook would suffer a 1 month outage it would be a 'meh' event, nothing you couldn't live without. If google would be down for as much as 24 hours it would seriously impact a very large number of people and businesses.
"Pop quiz: If you are making a lot of money with 5% market share, how much money will you be making with 10% market share?

That’s right, twice as much."

No, that's a misunderstanding. Double market share != same product/service at same price x double number of sales.
Brainfuck Interpreter in one night
My friend decided not to sleep or do homework. This is the result of his procrastination :D
A couple of years ago, there were heavy floods in the city I live in, many homes in the low lying areas got severely affected. There was a lot of community activity in organizing help for those whose houses got affected. I participated in them - tore up walls and floors that got wet, crawled under mobile homes and removed insulation, helped people move stuff.

Another time, I participated in a school kids career counseling event (it was a one day event)

For quite some time, I used to attend the meetings of a local NGO involved with energy conservation. Helped them collect over 200 signatures for a petition. The petition was presented to the Governor of Indiana for increasing energy efficiency of government buildings. I think I was the highest or the second highest collector of signatures.

Also helped them a bit with their website - back then my skills were too basic though.

I also keep cheerleading my mom :). She helps a few kids with their school/college education. There have been times when some abuse those good intentions and trust and she gets disappointed. I keep telling her to soldier on (not that she can't without me telling) and that these are opportunities to learn how to select better.

I wish I could participate more often. Hopefully, once my goals are on track and self-sustainable...
I asked about this when the event was announced:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1618894
The general consensus seems to be that it's worth the trip.
San Francisco, CA. Greplin (http://www.greplin.com/jobs)

We need superstar hackers to solve some really hard problems.

Keep terabytes of data in sync. Extract relevant information from large data sets with intelligent indexing, machine learning, and NLP. Display results extremely fast on the web and mobile phones.

We use Python + Twisted, JavaScript + Node.js, Objective C, Java, PHP, and/or whatever you're an expert in. It's early so you'll have a huge impact.

Investors include YCombinator, Bret Taylor (Facebook), Paul Buchheit (Gmail, AdSense), and Ron Conway (everything).

jobs@greplin.com

(no telecommuting at this point)
I agree with you in condemning running red lights/stop signs and reckless behavior. However, I recently found out that statutes in my area state that bicycles may treat red lights as stop signs.

On my bike, I occasionally take refuge in cross walks in order to check cross-traffic. After reading your post, I'll look into the specific statues applicable to this practice.
I'm confused why the author is mad at Facebook because Scribd gave him the option of logging in with a Scribd account or a Facebook account.
OP, any chance you could say how many total tabs+windows you had open? That should be useful while this bug is open.

Thanks for the tip!
Wrong Way of Seo - Black Hat Seo [ Tips for Webmasters ]
That's a problem that will solve itself in a maximum of about 70 years.
The Day I UN-quit my job at Punchbowl.com
About 50 in all. And I'm on a 10 Mbit link, possibly on a slower link it would not have triggered. More than an hour has passed now, I think I'll give up for the day (3:50 am here anyway) and hope that by tomorrow things will have normalized.

What a silly situation to be in.

I could change my IP by calling my provider but it is also entered in a fairly large number of ACLs that will not be updated automatically.
An isolated light switch on a wall is easy to produce with a sensor and marking showing where to wave your hand. A panel full of buttons and switches is another thing altogether.
Greplin - search engineer - SF, CA
We're building search for your personal data. We're inventing new ranking signals for personal data, extracting informative snippets, auto-classifying documents, and more. We're primarily using Lucene, Java, and Python.

For more info please email jobs@greplin.com
Sounds to me like you have a form of eidetic memory. That's a pretty cool ability to have. Being a lesser human, I'm lucky if I can remember what Mom told me five seconds ago. (I'm not exaggerating.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidetic_memory
Depends on the monitoring that you want. Nagios monitors sites to the extent that they respond with a 200, but I don't think it will tell you if some part of the page is broken.
But I don't use Facebook. I work in a department of seven, and they all are extremely reluctant to even check their Facebook accounts. Google? We use it all day. Google is like Linux, you can't even count how much you use it until you actually talk to an engineer.

Facebook just reminds me of ICQ. It was all hot shit, everyone thought it was going to take over the world, but it was just left to little old ladys who LOL'd at everything you had to say. Which, according to schedule and my wife's age, is probably going to be about another 10 years. Facebook gets another 10 years before it's ICQ.
I'm not sure why you are being downvoted. There are plenty of non-pornographic applications, but the porn industry could very well accelerate the adoption of this technology. It won't happen in months, no, but I can see holographic porn becoming a reality within 10 years or so.
Air isn't the snappiest, but it works, and you can easily hire programmers to continue developing in it.

Appcelerator I'm less certain on, but they do seem to keep tossing effort at things.
Naïveté vs. Experience
Trolls and griefers are a real problem, there is not so much that you could construct that can not be destroyed by a small number of motivated people, online as well as in real life.

Creation takes time, energy, intellect and inspiration, destruction can be done instantly, requires much less energy, zero intellect and pigheadedness will do just fine.
Releasing "standard financing documents" like this is a win in two ways -- it saves you from the legal costs of creating documents from scratch each time, AND provides an "objective" "standard" set of documents, so people are less likely to waste a lot of time and energy negotiating. Or, if they do negotiate, at least there is a fair starting point.

If foreign countries wanted to try to recreate Silicon Valley (as the Startup Chile people are doing), they should create equivalent financing docs under their own national laws and publish them. A well-understood legal environment with lawyers/etc. familiar with the process is one of the big advantages of Silicon Valley and the US.
The problem with government involvement is that it bails out or assumes the costs of disastrous behavior as it regulates to reduce risk.

Then over time the lobbyist weaken the regs and another disaster develops, even bigger this time, with the taxpayer holding the bag. Only this time everybody piles in because they know the government will clean it up.

And the government, taking the path of least resistance, plays along, amplifying the problems, even passing more laws to subsidize the risky behaviors. They'll get you a tax write-off, help the first time buyers, lower the interest rates, get rid of the capital gains tax. You name it. But the last thing they will do in the midst of a bubble is take action to counter it.

Then once the bubble collapses, everybody else pushes for regulation again to restart the whole cycle, most never questioning whether government should be involved in the first place.

And government, in control of the debate, finds the exploiters of their policies and offers them up as the chief perpetrators. And live to trash the economy another day.
> If you take the lane, you're out of the "door zone", and motorists have no choice but to slow down and pass you like they would pass any other vehicle on the road.

Yes, but all it takes is one that doesn't and you'll be in the same position as the guy in this article. (dead).

Not getting 'doored' is easy, spot which cars have occupants when passing on the left and simply assume that any of them can throw open their doors at any moment.

Driving in a car lane in the middle of the lane is going to get you murdered by the first person that doesn't expect you to be where you are. Being right doesn't matter much when you have a ton-and-a-half of Detroit (or Japanese or German) steel on top of you.

In some countries the laws are such that if you injure a bicyclist or a pedestrian you are automatically in the wrong, this sort of legislation actually helps a lot.