skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ok, twice now, you've boiled the benefit of higher education which doesn't result in placement at jobs requiring higher education as partying for 4 years, and a weak lingering familiarity with literature. I don't think that's fair. No one here is arguing for higher education for apathetic, disengaged students, or for low standards in higher education.

Also, this is twice that you've pulled out this 40k figure. Is that from some other article? I didn't think most degrees are subsidized that heavily, or that most college students have access to funding at that level, although if you have sources you'd like to cite, I'd be interested to see them.

[W]e are discussing workers who are choosing not to make a productive use of our investment in them.
Three points:
(a) it's not always obvious whether a person's education is being put to productive use. Taking a job which directly requires that education is only one way a person might put their education to productive use.
(b) among people who aren't putting their education to productive use, are these really all about choice? All of the friends I have that graduated in the past couple years who haven't ended up in jobs which specifically required their education haven't chosen to not make productive use of their education. The job market for a lot of areas is tough right now, and a new graduate attempting to put his or her education to good use has to compete with more experienced applicants even for low level positions.
(c) even if they haven't found jobs where they can put their education to good use yet, doesn't mean they won't when the job market changes.
I think a lot of the people you'd like to paint as being deliberately bad investments are actually victims of poor economic circumstance.
I don't think the LED chapter is the one that the publishers were concerned about. Other chapters include "Reverse Engineering Xbox Security" and "Sneaking in the Back Door", as well as a chapter on legal implications.
I didn't know this, thank you:)

The use case my wife has is she wants to mark math homework, similarly to how you would mark it on paper, ie arbitrary pen input anywhere.

Does the iPad allow for this? or is there any app that does this?
I think he was glossing over the details because it's just a blog post.
There isn't enough porn in marketing.
Oh cool. Then YC will either pick us, or my friends and I will unceasingly try countless creative ways to change their mind, and they might not all be legal.

Your choice, YC. ;)
I don't think it'll motivate people to start up a company any more than "the replacements" motivated people to be pro footballers. I think it might get people thinking about ideas, but in the end, it's the execution that counts.

Whilst it's always great for society in general to have as many innovators as possible, I think movies like this tout the "sexy" idea, instead of the grind-it-out reality. As soon as people who were inspired by a movie notice that fact, they jump ship as quickly as the hopped on.
iOS notifications are as disruptive as notifications on a mobile device can possibly be. A box pops up in the middle of the display, interrupts whatever might be taking place at the time, and prevents the user from doing anything else with the device until one of two things happens — the user must either interact with the notification (dismiss it or open the related app) or turn the display off and back on.

I've never used an iPhone before, so I had no idea this was the case. This seems like a fatal design flaw. How can you just interrupt the user like that?

Edit: after reading about it a little online, it appears that the iPhone doesn't have an LED light that blinks when you have a SMS, email, missed call, etc. - do you really have to turn on the screen just to see if there's anything new?
It may be "deeper," but for me information theory only really clicks in my head in the context of compression. Without compression, I see some voodoo hand-waving with logarithms and I don't even know what it means for an event to have X bits of entropy, or why I should care, or if I should believe the result. With compression, the entropy is suddenly a concrete measurable value with real-world import, and it's cool that you can prove hard lower bounds like that. So it may be deep, but at least to me it makes the whole thing make sense, rather than just adding complication.

You may be able to dodge the issue by not mentioning compression explicitly. It's nonsensical that a single die roll takes 2.58 bits, but it's perfectly believable that 100 die rolls could fit in 258 bits. Then with a little work, you can show that 258 is the smallest expected value of any encoding. That uses the concept of compression as an intuitive model, without having to formally define it or call it by name.
In the article it mentions the runtime is s[log(s)]2 - Does this mean slog(s)log(s) or 2slog(s) ?
The problem with this analogy is that Google had no intent of invading privacy. If you leave your shades open and someone starts taking pictures of the inside of your house, they are breaking your reasonable expectation of privacy. If someone happens to glance at and see the insides of your house for a split second, they are not necessarily invading your reasonable expectation of privacy.
Research Project: AppScale at University of California, Santa Barbara
"$300 dollar themes are generally mass produced and not favorable for brands and companies, regardless of how beautiful they might be)"

Yeah I was only referring to prefab themes in that price bracket

"What you are advertising right now is that you will give a free trial for a year... hosted by you guys for free... for a $999 setup fee? If that is the setup fee alone what will the cost of the CMS be?"

Okay so this is obviously a problem with how I'm communicating the deal. I was really pitching this at people who have a website already, whether it has a CMS or not, we'll "Decalify" it for $999 and host it free for a year. After that, you pay for the hosting.

"I've been developing websites for ages and acting as sysadmin for longer even, so I kind of don't appreciate the patronizing, specially since I'm saying I like your product. In any case my advice is this: develop a scalable and sensible pricing structure that will fit your target audience, listen to what your potential customers (read everybody here) have to say, and for gods sakes if you're going to offer a free trial make it really free (and for a month or two, a year is just overkill for a cms)... People will gladly part of hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars a year if they like your service, but paying a thousand dollars to try a CMS out just doesn't make much sense. Edit: Also you really need to spruce up the design of your CMS's website. It really takes away merit won by the video"

I wasn't meaning to patronise you - I suppose I had assumed we were essentially talking about "the same thing" however I clearly didn't articulate what was involved very well. To be honest I assumed the type of viewer I was pitching that video/deal at at the time would be unable to make the distinction between "website" and "CMS" - ie. they just want to know what it costs

And yes the design sux :) That was basically something I threw up there to give this thing some presence and it worked to an extent - we got a few early adopters mostly through an extended network and having a video online was a big part of that.

The design and launch pricing structure is something we're currently working on - and it sounds like HN is going to be a great place to get some feedback so thanks!

Incidentally what is the etiquette on hijacking someone else's thread like this??
http://www.linkup.com - scrapes corporate boards and gets direct feeds from companies. (if you guys are looking for other sources of job info)
Cheers - very good of you. For now I'm going to just work on the fundamentals before going for a permanent brand. It's easy to get tied down on a name, but if I can't make it profitable it's not going anywhere.
Is paying for my hosting a good idea?
My freind and I have been working on a project for a while. It got a lot of traffic when we first started it, but began to get bored and didnt maintain it at all. We've been paying $8.95 every month with hostgator. We are re-coding the site and are planning on deploying it soon. Should we still use Hostgator, or is there a free alternative we could use for the small amount of traffic we will recieve? (Around 500-1000 hits a day)
The Truth About Thorium and Nuclear Power
> Second, later this year, we will be introducing lending for Kindle, a new feature that lets you loan your Kindle books to other Kindle device or Kindle app users. Each book can be lent once for a loan period of 14-days and the lender cannot read the book during the loan period.

Hmm, I'm currently Reading Steven King's "Under the dome" I'm about half way through and it's been 14 days. I'm not sure this will be all that useful.
Bay Area folk: Win a ticket to 10/27 James Cameron/Eric Schmidt event.
This seems like a pretty serious thing that I'd want to get behind, but the FSF has freaked out over such stupid stuff before that I don't know if I should trust them.
I think, in order to have a compelling argument here, you'll also need to include:

4) Deprecate Safari on Macs

5) Deprecate Terminal.app on Macs

6) Deprecate XCode.mpkg from Mac OS install media

But you won't, because you're trying to fit facts to a theory, rather than the other way around.
Why can't we model it like a real book? Even if they limit it to owner -> borrower -> owner, it'd be great to just not have time limits. A market will be created in any case.
I'm afraid you are too kind in attributing the definition of "pure monopoly" to me.

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=...

I'm sorry that you got downvoted. Take it easy.
It is incredibly painful, and there are some egregious offenders which I find hard to believe went through any testing (I'm looking at you, New York Times iPad app).
Can someone explain more about "iPuke"? I'm curious about this as a prospective first-time iPhone owner.
If you don't then the answer is moot
It would have been better to just link to the campaign Aaron Swartz has been running for at least a few weeks now.

http://demandprogress.org/blacklist/

I've donated a little money and would encourage you to do the same.
At Creative Commons we use Lucene/Nutch for our educational search prototype DiscoverEd: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/DiscoverEd

It was easy enough to add in our special sauce like a triple-store for consuming and displaying semantic data (I guess I can say easy since I didn't do it myself).
Meritocracy: Mission Accomplished?
I'm guessing there will be some kind of prompt along the lines of "Your load period for this book has expired. If you would like to continue reading, please select the 'purchase now' button below."
Yes that is one of the risks of doing the rewrite...if we don't make it in time, it puts us wayyyyy behind the 8 ball.
I disagree about YouTube; I love watching video on my iPad. I have no opinion of widgets. And he's completely wrong about multitasking; as an iOS developer and iOS user I think the iPhone's approach to multitasking is marvellous.

Other than that, it's all true (although, my mom seems to think that the iPhone auto-correct is great).

I think everyone should own an iOS device. I think the iPhone generally represents the highest-quality hardware and software that's currently available and I often recommend it to people, but it still does not come close to replacing my Blackberry as an email and messaging device, for exactly the reasons he mentioned.
Geographic prejudice should be a crime on the Internet.
Immediately suspend sales to anyone in the state of Texas.
It's part of a bad trend at Apple. Used to be the best part of their operating system was how unintrusive it was: non-focused applications could never overlay a notification over a focused app. However, that behavior was changed with the Spaces feature, or at the same time.
Thanks for the service! You don't know how many countless hours this service has saved me...I think in the past year I've used this over 20 times for all the computers I've had to reformat for a IT job.
You might not even get that far. Since it's left to the publishers to decide if the book is lendable, expect many best-sellers not to be.

Assuming the book could be re-lent to an individual after the first 14-day period has expired and can be returned early without penalties I think this is pretty good. Two weeks is a nice break-even point for shorter works and massive novels.

Now I can recommend the kindle to friends and family without losing the ability to lend them some of the book I've purchased and would like to share.
I agree, build something, put it online, and promote the hell out of it. That's what I'm doing now and it constantly amazes me how open people are to giving advice and sharing experiences. I haven't met any co-founders yet, but I am making a lot of great contacts and getting the word out about me as a developer and my product. Good luck with what you're doing.
I'm currently the only founder for my startup and have a CS/Engineering background. I find that almost everybody I talk to seem to think its crazy or impossible for a single person startup to succeed.

I wonder what the whole deal is about:
- is it because they feel its too much work for one person?
- they assume that one person cannot be motivated/determined enough to make a startup successful?
- or is it just based on the fact that most of the successful startup were stared by 2-3 person teams..

I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this guys..
I'm golden on all counts ...except for the general lack of friends. :-/

(Do grown sons who are insanely loyal make a good substitute? I'm hoping they do. :-D)

Um, not that I am applying to YC. Just hoping to escape BigCo and go do my own thing.
Amazon EC2 micro instance for free? http://aws.amazon.com/free/
I recognize that I'm posting an article by Cracked here, but anybody who's a regular reader knows that Cracked hits the nail on the head at least 2% of the time. They recently had an article about the future and artificial scarcity (using a colorful acronym), and this is a perfect example.

You don't have to "lend" books, you can just make a digital copy and give it to your friend. Anything less than that is software and hardware that is purposely crippled in order to manufacture an artificial scarcity.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18817_5-reasons-future-will-b...

--

#4 To Stay Afloat, Businesses Have to Pretend Unlimited Goods are Limited

A. Why can't the library just buy as many digital copies as are needed for the customers, and keep them forever, if they don't naturally degrade?

B. Wait a second. It's just a digital file. Why not just buy one copy, and just copy and paste it for every customer who wants to read it?

C. Wait a second. Why do you need the library at all? Why can't a customer just buy a copy from the publisher and "lend" copies to all of his friends?

D. Wait a second. If no printing and binding needs to be done, why do you need the publisher? Just buy it directly from the author.

E. Waaaaait a second. Why buy it? Once the author makes one copy available, why can't everyone just grab it for free?
Full-time: Consultant to senior finance leadership @ Hitachi Global Storage in the Bay Area.

Side: Web Development Consultant

Past: Serial Entrepreneur

Next: Looking to join a new startup!
Video showcasing effective hiring process (honed over 10 years)
what a lame excuse to not do anything to prevent what you consider a "serious thing"
unsure if i agree or disagree with that. is there evidence for this?

also, the counter-argument can be made that the initial actions of the invading forces also contribute to such things as getting even more innocent people killed.

maybe the two should be measured or compared on some sort of scale? that killing some innocent people (thru wikileaks) is much less than the continued killing of some innocent people (thru invading forces).
The main problem that I have with the Kindle is not the lack of lending. What I want more than anything for the Kindle is support for ePub books, including DRMed ePubs.

The Kindle would be enormously useful to me if I could navigate to my library's website, check out an eBook, and read it right on my Kindle.
Call for YC companies to improve Stargate
Yes that would be possible - sorry didn't mean to leave that out of option 1. To be honest in the time available it would improve our bottle neck, but not get rid of it.

Option 2 would certainly produce the fastest development setup.

I have realised that in trying not to cloud the decision by telling everyone what the tech was, I may have done you all a disservice by not giving enough information!

So here it is: The existing tech is Adobe Flex. Provides great RIA, but not good for iPhone/iPad. It makes up only the front end of the app, with everything else php based.

The new tech would be to re-write the front end in HTML/JS, leaving the backend php as is.

So another reason for rewriting the code is that we will likely want to dump flex at some point.
There is no justification for doing wrong.

The motive for keeping incriminating evidence hidden is to continue engaging in nefarious behavior without being caught.

The fact that people's lives will be in danger after releasing the information is even more reason to not engage in that behavior in the first place. It is NOT justification for continuing to hide the horrendous things that have been done.

The only thing that will bring this behavior to an end, is for the world to see what is really happening.
That won't help with the ongoing litigation. It won't even put pressure on the state officials. It would just cut into Amazon's existing business with people in the state.
Thanks for the info. Good info to know to pass onto some of my aspiring fashion school/designer friends.
What would the ideal split be to be called the best of friends? 50-50? I can make a case for that and an uneven split too. Doesn't the split also depend on some combination of effort and potential of each founder?
“It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right”

— Thoreau, _Civil Disobedience_ (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Civil_Disobed...)
For example, if a college only accepts a certain number of people and you come up with clever way to get accepted, that's changing a zero-sum situation in your favor, and I would still call it a hack.

It's not zero sum, though; if you're a genuinely better student than the student who didn't get accepted because you got his spot, it's you++, him--, university++, so still positive-sum.
This was always a question in my mind, as to whether the risks of openness would outweigh the rewards. According to recent DOD report, the leaks to date do not appear to have resulted in any casualties:

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/10/17/170227/DoD-Study-Con...
This is a good documentary about parking lot attendants: http://www.theparkinglotmovie.com/
It would be nice to see a neural network learning how to land a plane safely... even with crosswind. I think it'd be able to pull that off.
i'm looking for a co-founder, but i don't feel it's imperative to find one at the idea or pre-prototype stages. not having a co-founder shouldn't stop anyone from pursuing their idea or working on a prototype. if it does, you're missing ingredient #1: determination.
I believe that notifications is one are where Android does it better.

You have a bar at the top (where the clock and signal strength is), and any sms or emails or any other notifications appear at the top. You can then drag this bar down to see more details, and selecting (for instance) the sms notifications will then open the sms app.
The iOS notification system was originally used only for phone calls and SMS. Things you would want to interrupt the user for in most cases. It hasn't scaled well with push/local notifications. I was disappointed they didn't address this in iOS 4 but at the same time I would rather they get it right so the end user experience can be consistent until iOS9 when it has to be reworked again to scale. I generally don't mind that Apple takes their time to get things right since the payoff is usually worth the wait.
Thanks for another awesome article!!!!!
Android can run whatever you want it to. See "NDK".
Its always hard to tell which one of these things is going to be the "serious" one.
I found the "things you've hacked" question very interesting. My answer to it was something that is not actually "legal" so i was a little wary of putting it, but it puts noone in real danger and was an example of what was basically my first endeavor into embedded programming and RFID. I hope the YC crew saw it as something fun and interesting and not criminal lol but it any case I found it relevant to the topic and really enjoyed the question
I'm pushing back on how friendships likely develop during a startup effort and how that's different from existing friendships that lead to a startup. Jobs and Woz, based on FaW, seem to fall more into the former category. Brin and Page too. By contrast, Gates and Allen, as childhood friends, seem to better fit pg's model. I'm not sure where you got that last bit from what I said.

I'm working with some great folks now and we simply started by trying to build something. We're still in that mindset. We didn't start out as friends but after eight months, we are. There's the pressure to get stuff done because we don't want to let each other down. We laugh more than we disagree. It feels like the friendships and the startup are growing together. I have a hard time thinking that the team could be flawed because we didn't start out knowing each other well.
I also agree that having a "number" in there isn't that good an idea.

I think the important things to focus on with a domain are that when you say it, people don't ask you to repeat it or spell it, that you can easily say it on a radio advertisement and people will be able to remember what it was to type it in when they get home and that there are no other words in it so that when it's read, they definitely say your company name in their mind (ExpertSexChange.com anyone?) I think it needs to say something about your product - but not necessarily everything.

Here's my next burst:

stuffsoldonline.com

youpackwesell.com (possibly reads as you pack weasal? :)

for that matter ... packweasel.com - although weasel has a bad connotations ...

sellchimp.com

sellmyelephant.com

sellmygorilla.com

(I like animal ones because the logo draws itself and they're fun by default!)

packsellpay.com (this is obviously a direct description of the transaction)

yougotthestuff.com

packagerider.com

packedintight.com

packedandsold.com (this doesn't read particularly well)

actually i would just like to note there that in terms of being easy to read, say and spell packadoodle.com should really get another look-in.

takethissellthis.com

takeandsellthis.com

takesellpay.com

annnd i'm spent.
it is too much liability if something goes wrong when filing papers.

Interesting. In the countries I know of, the company directors are responsible (and liable) for the accounts being correct, not the accountants.
Yep the time it might take to do the rewrite is the biggest red flag for choosing that path.
Ok, check it now. I added a little bit about that, though I'm sure I could still improve the wording.

Now we have something whose unit is "bits" but whose value includes fractions of a bit. What can we do with this? After all, if we're only storing one roll, we still need 3 bits to store 6 possibilities. The trick is that we can use fewer bits if we are storing more rolls at once. There are 2 wasted possibilities in those 3 bits we used for the first roll, and if you're clever, you can use those to encode some information about the next roll. If we're clever enough, and storing enough, 2.58... is the lower bound on the number of bits required per roll that you'll converge to with an optimal compression scheme.
I had to chuckle about this too. Journalism and mathematics just don't work together at all...