skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Interesting - it would be helpful to have a definition of "fast-paced". The phrase is far too vague.

Welcome to the wonderful world of MBA-speak.
Philip Greenspun has an interesting explanation of this (tldr - senior pilots run the unions).
http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines
Sounds like a case of similar to safety systems at a nuclear plant. Not pressing until it is REALLY PRESSING! Its the usual dilemma, investing time/moey on something that most likely wont be needed versus adding that cool feature all the users will immediately see the benefit of. In a competitive environment, it isn't difficult to understand how they ended up on one vendor.
There's no documentation, but as far as I can tell from the code it knows some distributions and can do some plotting -- but won't analyse any actual data.

Am I wrong?

(If I'm not, I should perhaps put on Github a simple correlation/OLS regression JS library I wrote using Sylvester, http://sylvester.jcoglan.com/).
Fast paced is generally code for "we have the attention spans of fruit flies. We'll expect you to pick up the slack for our failings."
If you're not talented at math when you're younger, there's practically no hope for you to be good at it later. Given that Einstein did a good bit of math for the physics he was involved with, you can be pretty confident he was sharp when he was younger.
Yea, thanks for the feedback. I changed it and also dialed down the translucency on the white background area for the text significantly. Hopefully readability will now be improved. Thanks for reading.
Geek irony. We like!
I read speculation that they were detecting the tethering at a lower level so SSH tunneling may not help you. I think the idea was when a packet hits their network from a device it has a particular TTL (X), if it comes in with a TTL of X-1 then it's obvious that the user is tethering.
100K in student loans for a doctor?

Not even close...that's what just a normal bachelor grad tends to have(well those that go to private schools).

For a doctor, those numbers are much more closer to 250-300K.

And that's not even the worst part...once they graduate and get their medical degree...they have to do their residency, which means they spend a few more years working for peanuts while their debt continues growing.
I will be using this for my project
Here: http://statgadgets.student.iastate.edu/teaching/binomialci/

And here:http://statgadgets.student.iastate.edu/teaching/LeastSquares...

Thank you
Yes this is definitely possible and a multi-vendor approach in the cloud is achievable at quite a low bar in terms of customer size. You only need to look at outages at Reddit and many others to see the benefit of that approach.
I want to apply to YC funding competition, but I'm not a techie. Any advice?
Hi All,
I just reviewed the YC funding application for Summer 2011. I can answer all the questions thoroughly, except the obvious ones relating to my previous experience with programming/startups/IT projects. I have no experience, I just have ideas and an insane work ethic to make things happen.

I know ideas alone are worthless. Everyone has ideas. But, right now all my close peers/family are advising me to get involved in Startups, because I've been generating great ideas regularly only to do a Google search and find them already funded and being implemented. This has happened at least 7 times in the past year, with unique ideas that have received $1M+ in initial funding.

Now I have an amazing new idea that I know will be a big hit. If I don't do it, someone else will very soon.

I'm 27, I've been doing medical sales since I graduated college, but I left the corporate world last year primarily to venture out on my own. I have a house, housemates that cover my expenses, and I have savings. I mention this, because I'm not just a daydreamer. I'm a daydreamer with great ideas and successful track record of accomplishments since I was a kid.

Every time I read about a Startup's success, I can see myself in that same position. I just need to better understand how I can get involved in the network.

Given that I do not know how to program, I am considering outsourcing all of the work to get this website running. It's not my preferred method, but it's better than nothing.

If I can get the work outsourced, get the site running, establish a GREAT revenue-producing model, prove the substantial NEED in the WORLD for this service (it's currently being serviced indirectly), then what is the quickest way for me to tap into a network of Angel Investors / VCs that can take this business to the next level?

If you were in my position, what would you recommend for a guy like me to get a Startup running and funded?

I'll do anything (legally, ethically, morally) to make this work. The world is waiting for this service. I've even seen websites that ALMOST (about 40%) similar to my idea and they've had tremendous success.

Please help a newbie out with any advice on taking action and getting in front of the right crowd that will hear out this idea.

Thanks for reading.
I have the great misfortune of working at a big company which has tons and tons of specs AND frequent spec changes.

Our process is waterfall that refuses to accept the reality that marketing runs this company and they change their minds a lot.

My point is only that if there was something better I would quit mediately. But I would rather deal with this at a biotech, then work at the most wonderful company working on social apps, or advertising apps, or ticketing, or booking, etc.

Pick your poison kids.
Opening for an intern, Paras?
You clearly don't think in Unicode.
I tether on iOS 4.0... but can someone explain the difference to me between the "personal hotspot" feature in the 4.3 iOS release and tethering in previous versions? Do you still have to pay the extra AT&T fee for the personal hotspot feature like you do for tethering?
I'm reminded of what was probably my favorite single Calvin and Hobbes strip: "You know how Einstein got bad grades as a kid? Well, mine are even worse!"
The Road to 1k Users: The Story of How I Grew My Startup
@jk215: This is junk. Did you consult your dictionary before you wrote this? It makes it look like you do not know what you are talking about. Here is a definition:

professional standards: the skill, competence, or character expected of a member of a highly trained profession

use of professionals: the use of professionals instead of amateurs

Maybe you mean "beaureaucrats", or some other word; but not "professionals"
I guess you looked into my competition: cambiumned.nl or extraned.nl? The main purpose for us to start our site was because the geocities like of those sites.

I guess you nailed it here:
- Your wife doesn't sound committed. No selling the thing (migrate to a new domain now to get rid of the name association, what's the problem?), no charging more out of fear, fear of losing control. If it's a hobby for her, and you want it to be more, you have a problem. Solve this first.

We must decide if it is hobby or business :)
It can be a differentiator but it's a hard one to sell. Telling someone your software is easier to use will usually be met with an eye roll or a snarky "of course you think it's easier to use, it's your software...". Ease-of-use needs to be either demo'd or experienced during a trial period. The question is how do you get a potential user to that point?

Further, you'll notice very few companies that make highly usable products advertise them that way. Look at an Apple ad or Netflix or Toyota. Very rarely do they ever talk about ease-of-use. They always focus on what the product can do and how it makes you feel.
I think what the author is really getting at is 'amateurs' tend to be people who are in it for the love and excitement of what they do and 'professionals' tend to see what they are doing just as a job.
Haven't read TFA and I'm not going to because the answer seems obvious. I'd say this is mainly because a huge portion of (at least older) pilots were in the air force/navy and historically (unsure about now) women weren't flying in the air force/navy. The military is still pretty much a "men's world" and I think its probably the last place in society that we'll see an equal number of men and women on each task. Is it right? No, but that's what it is.
Theory: Large Hadron Collider Could Be Used As Time Machine
Challengein "The first board game of the location-based era": get early access
Hi dear HN community!
I'm asking your help to get the first feedback and to prove the Value proposition of our new product, to launch our startup.

In few words, Challengein brings the fun of a match with board games, funny jokes and stupid challenges in your smartphone.
Challengein is an app that one (just one) of your friends will open, when you and your company will arrive into the venue where you'll spend the night.
The group of friends will form two teams who will compete playing mini-board-games, telling jokes and funny facts (proposed) and will do stupid challenges, such as telling a really ugly joke to a waiters, meanwhile your friends are laughing!
Doing so, you'll earn badges to collect and coupons to use.
If your team is the most winning ever in this Venue, you'll conquer it, becoming the King!

Here to download the iPhone app: http://bit.ly/gyCU9T
Here the official website: http://challengein.com
Here the press release and some images: http://bit.ly/fvi6Y4

Use the invitation code "BNMBNM" during the sign up process to get early access.

You just have to take away some friends from their desks, order a coffee and start playing! Remember that is the first public beta, so signal us problems and ideas.

Thanks,
Claudio ;)
Charlie Sheen, Isis Taylor and Interns?
Anecdote: the first time I ever had a captain was about 10 years ago on a Thai Air flight. (Bangkok to Chiang Mai.)

Since then, I've had a female captain on precisely 3 other flights (Laos Air, Thai Air, and United Express). This is out of probably 600-700 flights.

(And to those who are wondering, "are you sure you didn't miss any", I suspect you've never had a female captain. It turns out it's almost impossible to NOT notice a female captain's voice on the PA, because it's so unusual.)
cool video - neat idea to track that. any stats about engagement/clicks that you could overlay or include as well?
Thanks for the reply:

Currently most of our sales to schools go to teachers (that's why we keep the prices low, a teacher might even be tempted to pay by themself. We sold to over 40 classes.

I'll follow up on the invitation and e-mail you shortly!
Need Tools?: Add Alterian to your List
Okay, so... it's definitely possible, just really expensive. Depending on the lengths of words you cover, you have to crunch though a few trillion combinations of letters, looking for the false positives manually--- like computing a rainbow table, but without punctuation, mixed case, etc.

What I'm wondering, though, is if one could select a hashing function where the collisions were easily discoverable. For a "hash" function that's just m mod 8, the presence of a 1 bit means that you had to have had an input that was either 1, 9, 17, 25, 37, etc, up to the maximum word length. This may be a problem that's just as hard or harder than the rainbow table approach, but I'd be interested to explore its feasibility.
AT&T didn't sell you generic fungible data. Because you are a nerd on a nerd site, you're natively inclined to determine that any connectivity is generic connectivity, measured and priced only by $/bps. But $/bps isn't a product AT&T sells with generic iPhone plans.

The reason AT&T charges you to tether probably has little to do with technology and everything to do with segmentation. They have two choices. They can raise their data rates for everybody and attrit customers to other providers (or to less lucrative featurephone packages). Or, they can find ways to charge higher rates to less price-sensitive customers. You are a person who wants to plug their computer into their phone and use it to get on the Internet from the Acela train. There are not that many of you, and you are uniformly wealthier than most other segments of AT&T customers. Finding a way to charge you for that behavior is marketing 101.

If you're an entrepreneur, it's good that the rest of the world sees things AT&T's way (to wit: when you agree in a contract that you're going to use a service in way X and not in way Y, the provider is within its rights to enforce that contract). It's this force that allows you to charge money for things and thereby make a living.

If you're anyone earning the anomalously high income accorded to technology professionals, you're run a slight risk of hypocrisy complaining about this. A complex web of similarly nerd-arbitrary contracts keeps the money flowing through the conduits and manifolds that eventually feed your bank account.
How do we change this?

Here are some suggestions for improving the mathematics education of pupils who show early advanced abilities in mathematics:

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Resources/articles.php?pa...

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Resources/articles.php?pa...

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Resources/articles.php?pa...

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Resources/articles.php?pa...

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Resources/articles.php?pa...

(Summary of the advice linked above is make sure students learn mathematics beyond the standard school curriculum, which is not designed for the top students, and make sure the top students have a chance to meet one another and to challenge themselves with difficult problems that they can discuss afterwards. The site that provides those links provides many of the opportunities necessary, largely for free.)

Here is commentary by a Fields medalist on what successful mathematics education looks like over the long haul:

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/math/pdf/0503/0503081v1.pdf

(Summary of Thurston's advice is emphasize connectedness of mathematics and deep understanding over racing through the standard curriculum.)
Having not enough work to do is slightly worse than having too much, IMHO
I disagree, ease of use often comes through in attention to design (although that can be superficially true, it's a good selling point).
Heh, that sounds very familiar. When I got my job, it was told that the reason for using a waterfall model was that "the specifications are very clear, and developers just have to implement them".

Reality is so different... :)
I was wondering how ABNB would compete here as well. I guess just better/more marketing.
Experiences from launching a teaser page on HN
>they must've done their research.

I doubt so.

There are 1210 billionaries in the world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billionaire

Five from them do A.Y. Less than percent.
But for Verizon it's free??
Candidly speaking, "my family thinks I come up with good ideas" does not appear high on the list of things I see on resumes of people who build successful businesses. Most of them have a history of having built stuff. Even if they cannot themselves build stuff, then they can Jedi mind-trick a builder into building their stuff and that guy will thank them for the opportunity.

You're good at selling stuff, right? Sell one person the notion that this is the project that is going to change their life for the better. Have that guy build it.

You're not nearly done at that point, but one guy who has actually built things plus one guy who has the magic snake charmer reality distortion field thing down is a powerful combination. Besides, after you have a prototype, its Achievement Unlocked: Not A Bozo, and then you can sell, sell, sell to customers/investors to your heart's content.
Sure: DM me at www.twitter.com/wasigh
Iran Claims to Have Built a Robotic 'Flying Saucer'. Really.
It's definitely something to do with the one of the points the article mentions: the fact that women don't even consider it as a career, unless someone introduces them to flying (relative, friend, whatever) at some point in life. It's an interesting thought, and I wonder how much of that also applies to women and technology, particularly CS and open source.
You're assuming your prospective customer is able to tell a good design by just looking at it. Has that been your experience? How do you show them attention to design?
Thanks, I just had a weird message from a customer saying they never received their order... but I have no record of a payment from them. I suspect this is the cause :(
I think your definition is spot on. To say that "professionalism" merely entails putting on a suit and speaking in a certain way is a poor articulation of the term. I can see where the author is coming from, but there could have been a lot less fanatical talk (e.g. Google this and Steve Jobs that) and a lot more insight on the value of skirting the traditional concept of professionalism.
I don't know what Verizon does (I'm at AT&T customer) but "Personal Hotspot" is simply the new term for "tethering".
Except T-Mobile, FWIW, who doesn't charge me extra for anything (at least on my N1 - not sure if it differs by device, though I'd doubt it)
The 5 Minute Guide To Cheap Startup Advertising
Is your idea medical related? I was in that world on the sales/strategy end for a few years. I'm applying today at YC for a non-medical related startup, that I programmed.

If you want to bounce around some thoughts, shoot me an email.
Wow, that's impressive. Well, at least it sounds impressive to someone without a lot of math knowledge.

Which has me puzzled. I can't think of anything offhand that I "discovered". I suppose you don't need to have been the first to discover it; it merely needs to be relatively unknown to most people? If that's the case, then nevermind: I'm full of obscure knowledge.

I've actually "invented" an impressive device, but I'm not sure if "something you invented" is what they're looking for.

Of course, I'm probably reading into this a little too much.
Also make sure that enough people need it. There are a lot of unoccupied niches that are currently not sustaining life for a reason.
Thanks, I'll put this on my ipad and go through it because I am interested in stats.

Did a professor use a non-commercial book for their class? If so, that is amazing.
It's mind-boggling what some people consider worthy of an upvote around here... didn't read the article, guesses what it says, then pats self in the back for such a good job at commenting. Subsequent upvotes tell other people that this comment is somehow meaningful for the discussion. Cute!

Edit: and of course I'm downvoted. Thanks!

Edit2: I'm no longer downvoted. Even though this might be relevant to a discussion of the voting system, I don't want to intrude on the discussion of the article itself, so no need to vote anymore on this. Thanks for the upvotes, everyone. Nothing to see here, move along... :)
it also doesn't seem anywhere close to sophisticated enough to appeal to adults.

You mean, like Farmville is sophisticated?

As for iTouch devices-- that sounds like a reasonable idea, but first things first. If they get some traction with the Facebook app, there's plenty of further opportunities for them to explore.
WOW (QING) is up today 14.85%
Still, whats the probability of random people meeting each other and creating ad-hoc teams. How realistic it sounds that this whole group (not a team yet) will form a real startup company and build a product for the next 2-5 years?
I equate bubbles with cycles. So in that sense we're always in a "bubble" of some sort. The question is are we at the bottom of the bubble, the mid-point or the top. It's everyones job to workout at which point in the cycle we are so that they can adjust the risk that they are willing to take accordingly. Thus the constant speculation.
The browser is quickly becoming the platform of choice for a lot of what would previously have been desktop native code.

With the recent massive improvements in both Javascript performance and screen update performance, and the general availability of the canvas tag (and SVG and libraies like raphael that work using either XML in decent browsers or VML in IE<9) for client-side drawing beyond what is easy with HTML+CSS, running just about anything including some number crunching in the browser is getting more and more practical.

The browser is very attractive if you can make your app work well in that environment, and even worth some performance drop over specific platform native code, because it is a cross-platform platform: you can target Windows, Linux, Macs, and mobile platforms all in one codebase (with perhaps a few "platform" specific variations in your display code to make reasonable use of the small screens on mobile devices while still making best use of large display areas elsewhere.

I expect to see a lot more tools that you would (as little as a year or so ago) have assumed would only work well as a client-native app or a dumb-client-with-servers-doing -the-grunt-work online app, being done in browser based code.
Here in Europe dedicated machines are so cheap (100$/month for QuadCore CPU, 24GB RAM, 2x1.5TB SATA) that most startups and companies just order a bunch of dedicated servers [1][2].

Hetzner[1] e.g. has pre-provisioned servers running that get delivered within 10 minutes (24/7) (if you're a customer). You can also cancel every server every month. And they have an API [3]), too (I made a Ruby gem for that[4])

This pretty much kills all needs to use AWS or any other cloud provider for 98% of all startups/projects.

Ah, btw, they've 10 times [5] the connection of e.g. AWS Europe and provide native IPv6.

[1] http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/eq8

[2] http://www.ovh.co.uk/products/dedicated_offers.xml

[3] http://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Robot_Webservice_en

[4] http://github.com/rmoriz/hetzner-api

[5] check on http://bgp.he.net/
The Awesomeness of Convenience
What would be great is an auth and billing abstraction layer so that a customer could buy services from multiple providers on the same account.
Many friendly Linux User Group members volunteer to install and administer Ubuntu at public schools in the Bay Area. Ubuntu's a decent experience even with 256MB of ram, so schools can even reuse those 8-12 year old computers.

Free software's great for all kinds of technical, practical and cultural reasons. It's existed my whole life, but I didn't really feel its presence until using Debian in a research lab 4 years ago.

We don't all need to be RMS, but it's a worthy thing to think about for anyone who makes a living off free software.
It's more of a humorous remark more than something we've really discovered (though spending all day and all night hacking away isn't something that's uncommon for us) which is why I'm not 100% sure we'll be keeping it as our final answer to the question :-)
At every job I've ever had, in the interview I have mentioned that I'd rather have 10 hours of work to squeeze into an 8 hour day than have 2 hours of work to expand into an 8 hour day. Thus far, nobody has taken me seriously.
AT&T didn't sell you generic fungible data.

A lot of people would argue that beyond internet access, any more nuanced distinction is just profiteering. Imagine the power company telling you to turn off your computer because you only have an "Unlimited Light and Heat" power plan.
Many of those criticisms are completely irrelevant now. The post is from 1994, which means RMS is probably talking about Tcl 7.3, which is worlds apart from Tcl 8.5, the latest official release. People certainly can and have developed large applications in Tcl; Tcl has long since introduced an internal representation to efficiently handle numbers; etc. Posting links like this that are so old and out of date borders on irresponsible, because not everybody will take the time to realize that the criticisms are no longer valid.