skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd vote middle class in 2011 for the modern internet alone. Not to mention medical advances, every bit of culture and knowledge since 1973, modern attitudes toward women and minorities...

I can always make more money in 2011, but I can't turn 1973 into something it's not.
I agree but I think that applies to technologies like Java that are insanely popular.For example I know my company bought a front end proxy software which kinda sucked , I asked the guy who in my opinion was the best front end proxy guy in the company to see if they took his opinion and he said no.So that decision was made way way high up than him so in this case the critical mass of tech experts were so low that the guy in suit did not even bother to consult the best tech guy he had
Hope you make a full recovery!
I am reading his book now and it is superb. I think if you get his book along with Rob Walling's start small, stay small you have the equivalent of a bootstrappers MBA.
Ha. The pickle here is that we (the government, the bleeding hearts, those capable of compassion) have to acknowledge that these kids were dealt a pretty bad hand, and that they are, after all, still kids. So we owe them a fair shot and some patience -- it's not acceptable to give up on them as products of the system. Because in one way or another we're part of the system. And they're kids.

My sister participated in the New York Teaching Fellows program (similar to TFA) and worked in Spanish Harlem and her experience was much the same as the author's. So I'm not saying the current situation and the current programs are ideal or well managed, but there are interesting hope-inducing projects and people out there.

p.s. Go watch season 4 of The Wire and see if it tugs at your heartstrings a bit. It also paints a good picture of how screwed up the school system itself is in poor urban communities. Not to mention how pedogogical innovation is treated in the academic setting...

p.p.s. If you're curious about the role of academic philanthropy and the Broad Foundation which the author mentions, have a read: http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=3781 . I haven't read a counterpoint to that piece yet, so I'm not sure how well the criticisms stand up.
The most romantic city on Yelp
No means of rapid transportation over extremely long distances.
I deal with consultant price negotiations all the time and quite frankly it's one of the hardest challenges that consulting companies face. I think I might have lost you with my rent-a-center analogy; my point actually was to say that they aren't like rent-a-centers. In the case of a consultancy assessing the value of these transactions is extremely difficult do as a customer and more importantly as the owner of a newly established consultancy owner. Not to mentioned some of those transactions hold more value (and thus price/hr) to different sets of customers. This is really where the unfortunate math behind a starting a consultancy lies. At maturity (i.e. when you have consistent client pipeline) these are much easier to decipher.

EDIT: I just realized I did actually say "let's pretend a consultancy is a rent-a-center". I should have probably worded that differently - hence the confusion.
When it comes to computers, I think I'd pick 1985 over either one. Access to affordable home computers, networkability via BBSs and BBS networks, a sense of cyberspace-can-be-anything possibilities, a nice mesh of connected-but-not-flattened online communities, etc. I guess I don't care that much about truetype rendering; I even like 1985-era videogames better.

Wikipedia, open-access academic literature, online reservations for various things, and home data-crunching abilities are nice, though.
In what way would it help society to have more uneducated young people hanging around?
This is really quite silly. The addons.moz site will have to be modified to deal with version increases as well as extension authors will have to start paying serious attention to version bumps or users will either end up with non-working addons (due to incompatible version numbers) or having to overrider the compat check (how many people do you know that aren't technical that know how to do that)?
I would have loved to have been rich, or even middle class, at the start of the home computer revolution.
Shades of MicroStrategy.
> every contributor gets equal say on issues of user interface design and technology prioritization

This must by why they shipped those abominable Personas.
Stated (and binding, as far as I know) license terms currently displayed for BBC websites:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/terms/personal.shtml#4 - personal use, excerpt:
"Nothing in the Terms grants you a right or licence to use any trade mark, design right or copyright owned or controlled by the BBC or any other third party except as expressly provided in the Terms."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/terms/business.shtml#2 - business terms, excerpt:
"2.1.1 you may not copy, reproduce, republish, disassemble, decompile, reverse engineer, download, post, broadcast, transmit, distribute, lend, hire, sub-license, rent, perform, make a derivative work from, make available to the public, adapt, alter, edit, re-position, frame, rebrand, change or otherwise use in any way any BBC Online Services and/or BBC Content in whole or in part on your product or service or elsewhere or permit or assist any third party to do the same except to the extent permitted at law ("Restricted Acts");"

FWIW I think that BBC created content should be under a liberal license like CC-BY-NC but it isn't; whether they press for legal action is orthogonal to the matter of it's lawfulness.
Looks awesome, trying to find something where i can use that.
Hope you do, and that you release the mods. Really sweet job!
The visualization sub-reddit might be worth trying.

http://visualization.reddit.com
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Thank you! Although probably not as interesting, it would be great to add Mifare Classic support to FareBot, if you're looking for stuff to work on.
It's still BS. A consumer level analog camera captures around 1GB of data with each picture. The peak of film sales was in 1999 when 800 million rolls of film were sold and 25 billion images were captured and printed which works out to around 25 EB of data just from analog cameras in 1999.
Only sort of. There's a case to be made that, without government assistance, bondholders would be receiving less money in a liquidation than they'll wind up receiving post-haircut. Of course, they wouldn't get to blame unions for their poor investment decision, so it might not be worth the lack of emotional gratification :)
>Cyrix, an Intel competitor at the time, boldly parodied the "Intel Inside" campaign with their own "Cyrix Instead" campaign.

Which is their CPUID vendor ID.
Congratulations on your success Paras! It's really inspirational.
You entered a competitive niche where most customers don't even know they need your product, took on huge players like Omniture and Google, and gained market share by building a superior product and excellent execution.

I get the sense this is only the beginning of VWO's growth :)
What interests me most about Anonymous is the fact that it's actually two groups: the small group of technically-competent individuals, and the LOIC script-kiddie griefer minions who can be dispatched at will. The griefers get the media attention and do it "for the lulz", while the folks with actual skills penetrate systems and expose private information. If I had to guess, I'd say that HBGary got a little information on a bunch of the griefers, and near nothing on the people who can do real damage.

If I were a hacker, Anonymous - that is, the 4chan script-kiddie bunch - would make for incredible front line. They generate an unbelievable amount of noise, and a very particular kind of hacker-ish noise, which I'd imagine is fantastic for redirecting attention and covering tracks as necessary. The recent FBI raids, for example. http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110128/tc_afp/britainarrestwik...
Just to play devil's advocate, if you remove truancy laws, aren't you effectively turning disruptive students in a semi-controlled environment into disruptive people at large? It's not as if most of these kids are full of potential and just aren't getting reached by their teachers or schools. I bet that the kid who threatens to beat his teacher's bitch-ass is probably going to continue to behave unacceptably outside the classroom if you remove the expectation that they have to stay there. How do you manage this new source of unacceptable behavior that was previously contained in schools?

Do kids who would have been truant give up some of the legal protections they enjoy as minors? Do we set up some sort of public "work camp" in lieu of schools for kids who aren't manageable in the classroom? It's not as if these kids have parents who will take responsible custody for them - that's a huge part of the problem. I'm not sure what the best answer for society is, but I'm not sure you're quite there with your suggestion.

I'm not saying that your idea doesn't have some merit, and I agree that there are good kids getting screwed because they are stuck in crappy schools. But I think that unleashing the worst of that demographic from the only "responsibility" they might have is a dangerous idea.
"So it’s a case where the hackers break in on a non-important system, which is very common in hacking situations, and leveraged lateral movement to get onto systems of interest over time."

=

"We're too lazy to make sure each level of security is protected from the last."
I only saw a few of them. And what's wrong with maze algorithms?

I want to see 3D maze algorithms next!
> I'll bet the food then rocked

Really?

Sure, sun-ripened fruits eaten at their peak would be delicious. But you'd be stuck eating whatever could be had within a few miles of your home. You could migrate with the seasons to widen your annual food selection, but that would be extremely costly.

The quality of many individual food items in the early 1900s would probably be better than 1960. Take instant coffee, Coors, and Wonderbread for example. But Starbucks and micro brews have paved the way back to high standards for these items nowadays.
And I think I figured out how to do it... Google needs to announce that they won't give anything away this year!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2190278
Uhh uhh, bad news for Karl Kot ("Karl Shit") and Daniel Düsentrieb (Gyro Gearloose).
I wish Taggar had addressed how this is going to impact the application review process. It sounds like the YC partners already have their hands full with the number of applications coming in each round, and I assume those numbers are shooting through the roof this round. Are all of the partners still going to read all of the applications, or are they going to need some triage this time around?
ZAMM and the follow-on Lila are both worthwhile reads. However, I was uncomfortable with Persig's (pervasive) discussion of insanity.

He defines insanity as, roughly, holding beliefs that differ widely from those held by an overwhelming majority of society. There seems to be an explicit avoidance of physical causes for mental illness to the point of rejecting the idea that mental illness is an "illness" to be treated. His "insanity" is a natural result of pursuing complex paths of thought to their logical end (beyond where most people take them).

Can anyone shed light about the current (medical) take on mental illness and whether it jives with what Persig has to say?
https://twitter.com/#!/aaronbarr/status/34508448984989696

> Via IRC: <MGMX> Posting his SSN number was way the hell over the line though. << Anonymous finds the line and then crosses it. #noregrets
Try emailing popular blogs that are related to your service, and not just startups in general. It's hard to suggest anything specific without more details.
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A Webproxy with Everyrhing you always wanted :)

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The combination of making quite a bit more money than I need where I am now and a self-imposed duty to finish this contract.
Nobody drinks the local water in Mexico, including Mexicans. It's the food that carries novel fauna.

And it isn't the food that would get you. It's the smallpox.
StuffBuff Feedback
Great points!

Most educational institutions prepare students for the average life style.

However, to go beyond just comp sci curriculum most businesses classes don't focus on the true skills that matter in running and starting a business. They, just like in computer science, focus on what the majority of the population will probably be doing after graduation.

When I decided that I wanted to do a startup and not join the masses in the corporate life, I did not have much experience or course material to leverage.

These institutions should try and find a balance between offering courses for both types of peoples. Even those going into the corporate world could learn and use a bunch of the skills entrepreneurs use everyday. Most executive leaders of these big companies have the same qualities as entrepreneurs.
I was paddled in public school and I'd say that works pretty well for maintaining order.
Could you explain how you find it patronising - is it that I'm pointing out they're breaking the law if they use this specific font [file] without a license but you think this is obvious, or that I'm assuming they know they're committing tortfeasance when you feel it's not obvious.

There are of course other possibilities, hence why I posed the question, they might be outside the Berne Convention/TRIPS countries and not be bound by copyright law, for example.
The question you should be asking is, why do you want Facebook fans?

Is it to retarget visitors to your site through Facebook ads? In that case, a Like button on your site would work well.

Is it because your app has a viral element that requires appearance on profiles/News Feed to grow? Then you should be incentivizing users to friend you by offering them something of high perceived value in return.

Or do you simply want a high number of fans as a growth metric to show off? For that, there are numerous enterprises online that will sell you as many fans as you want at a reasonable price.
See also the ansible:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible
Yep, I know. I remember reading Bob Parsons' writings about it.
Grown right here. I grew up here - Good Food.

Well, in the summer, anyway. And in the winter I shall take the train to Cuba and have oranges till I burst.
"The Last Question" and The First Coming
I went to CMU with the author; in fact we worked together on one of the semester projects he mentions.

There's no doubt that CMU prepares students for the corporate world. In fact some programs are expressly tuned for this.

But this is exactly what the market demands, so why are we surprised? Industry wants employees that integrate well and work in teams. Students want to be hired by industry. How can we be surprised that the curriculum is tuned for turning out cogs for corporate machines?

The demand just doesn't exist for startup education. It's the nature of the beast. How many hardcore entrepreneurs do you know would have been content to take classes on it and be told how to do it? That's the exact opposite of their natural character. :-)
I would like to know if Facebook fanpages are useful for marketing. If you use a Facebook fanpage, does it drive new users to your website?
I know of this company because of the great articles they publish about A/B testing, I guess this proves that when you produce good content it can help drive business! Congratulations, keep up the good work :D
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This wasn't justice. It was revenge. There's a difference. Justice accomplishes something. It keeps a bad person from doing bad things. Revenge only makes things worse. I mean, if Barr was going to turn over their information to the FBI before, he sure as hell is going to now. So what dis they accomplish by releasing Barr's personal info? Nothing, morally or practically.
Thanks -- this is just what I was looking for.

For anyone who's interested, here's the link to their data visualization sub-forum:

http://forums.flowingdata.com/forum/statistical-visualizatio...
I read the book excerpt that is linked (http://www.american-pictures.com/english/book/book-9.htm) an it's fascinating!
Thanks. Yes, every month I sort of worry if we have reached the the inflexion point (after all, A/B testing is B2B and even by standards of B2B not that large). But thankfully number of users and customers keep growing every month. I, now, think that all the top 100k sites from Alexa could be potential customers, so yes this is just the beginning!
I agree. I suspect the problem is these children were disruptive at age 8 and no one did anything.

I don't think letting a 12 year old decide they don't have to go to school is the answer. But I do think they should not be allowed to disrupt the education of others.

There are some intereting alternative schools that may be a way to tackle the issue. It's not an easy problem.

With that said, I think what this essay addresses, while seemingly obvious, is one of the biggest problems we face, and education reform generally doesn't mention it.

And I do speculate it hides one of the reasons why places like Promise Academy do so well. The students, even from broken homes, who go there are strongly pushed by mothers (or grandmothers) that this is special place. The expectation of good behavior is much higher there.
This was handled ridiculously bad. I am a member of press, last year's sandbox presenter, and an early reg invitee.

I emailed googleiopress@ on the first day but didn't get a reply until 5 days later, after emailing them again. They said no to press passes and by then, early reg was already sold out.

I would have gladly registered for full price, but now I was forced to wait for public reg. This morning, after posting about the reg within minutes (on AndroidPolice), I had errors for an hour and ended up without a ticket.

Needless to say, I'm less than thrilled with how Google strung me along.
Very cool - tried it with my MBTA Charlie Card and it returns "Unsupported card type: Mifare1K". Are we Bostonians out of luck?
io2011 page has been up for a bit yes but the registration was just opened this morning
Put it on a $100 2TB hard drive and give it to Google or the WayBackMachine.
Students don't want to be there for a variety of reasons. I agree with you - if they don't want to be there, then don't force them. The solution isn't to kick them out, though - give them alternative environments for education. Some students are frustrated at the material, having a poor foundation. Allow these students a gracious way of catching up, out of sight of their peers that are ahead. Some students would rather learn something hands-on. Let these students build something with their hands, and learn a trade.

I'm certain that I'm mischaracterizing why kids are misbehaving in class, but what I am sure about is that the standard method of bucketing 30 kids into the same class, and expecting them to learn the same material at the same pace does a disservice to them and the teachers. I was a math tutor in my younger years, and all too often I saw how many kids were left behind (even in the suburbs). Alternatively, many kids were ahead of their grade level and boredom became inevitable.
It's kind of gross the admiration people are expressing here. I work for a security firm that does work with all kinds of organizations. At the heart of the matter, we are scientists investigating the truth. If a break-in occurred, who was responsible, and what was compromised? If someone is being charged with distribution of child pornography, did they willfully download and distribute it, or was it part of a wide net that was cast to download a whole bunch of porn at once? This DDoS occurred: who was responsible? You have security in place: is it sufficient to protect the data in an appropriate manner?

We are a small firm. Our yearly revenue is probably nearly $1-1.5 million. Including the founder, we have eight people employed: a mother of two, three people who have poured over ten years of their lives into building the company to its current level, a cancer survivor still undergoing treatment, and three others who are doing good work while making ends meet and paying down school loans.

Something like this happening to our company, an event that led to $1MM+ in losses, would wipe us out. It would end a company that provides a valuable service to dozens of law firms and other organizations (colleges, hospitals, local political entities, etc.) each year. It would immediately put eight people out of work and negate 50+ man-years of effort.

Call me crazy, but I am not patting these guys on the back. It's all fun and games until you're ruining lives.
Glasshouse, also by Charlie, is another scifi that deals with the idea of the information economy, as well as a great deal of things Cory Doctorow has written, and to round out my list, The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson.
If universal education was intended to solve these kinds of problems, it seems to me it has obviously failed. I strongly believe that social ills of this sort are FAR better addressed by trying to eliminate poverty than by trying to force kids to attend classes they are getting nothing out of.

That being said, universal education can certainly be seen as an attempt to eliminate poverty. The problem is that the cause of learning is not being advanced, for the majority of students, by forcing kids who don't want to be there to keep coming. All many kids are learning from this experience is to hate learning and to associate it with painful experiences. The ones who don't want to be there resent their teachers, and the ones who want to be there resent their classmates.

It seems likely to me, then, that we are making it more difficult to escape poverty, not less, by forcing school attendance on every student. Though the analogy can only be taken so far, I can't help but think of a lifeboat onto which everyone is fleeing as a ship sinks. Will we try to force everyone onto the lifeboat, in the name of egalitarian principles, even if that means that the lifeboat sinks and no one survives?
> Few interesting books.

Except for Dickens, Shakespeare, Poe, Austen, Twain, Dostoyevksy, Tolstoy, the Bronte sisters, Melville, Arthur Conan Doyle, Victor Hugo, Dumas, Thoreau, Marx, Henry James, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Joseph Conrad, Ibsen, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde ... (I could go on.)

Yep, it was a real literary dark ages back then.
I don't think his account ever claimed to be a factual, science-based analysis of mental illness, but rather a subjective account from someone who is/was mentally ill.
Yes but you're talking about life-altering technology...That's the author's whole point, most of that stuff already happened by 1973. That's why he'd take 1973 instead of 1900 or whenever. We mostly live the same way now as we did in 1973, just with more gadgets. If you said "I miss not having holographic phones and VR porn" that would be a better example.
I'm reminded of the mitnick/tsutomu tales. I think Anon may be in for some hurt with a guy like Hoglund pissed at them. He's been on the front lines of security research for at least a decade.
What the hell happened to Gizmodo.com?
It feels like they just turned it into slickdeals.com, no?