skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A year is hardly enough time to gain perspective on grad school. Give yourself some time. Eventually you will find a research project that interests you. In the meantime I'd suggest you continue cultivating inter-departmental relationships, eg, by working on the project you mentioned.

Also, worth noting, most people find the first couple of years of grad school the most frustrating because they don't align with their expectations. Once you are past that and you have a well defined research project things get better. Finally, regarding "finding elegant solutions to difficult problems that have wide-reaching implications": you'd be surprised to discover that incremental work can also be elegant and make an impact. Especially is CS that's how most research is done. So, don't set yourself up for disappointment. Pick a small problem that interests you and start reading on it...

Good luck.
The other amazing thing is that you pay for cheques in the US, and you pay a 'convenience fee' for doing online transfers. I would hate living in a country where banking for individuals is not free.

In the UK I don't think many shops will accept cheques any more...

The US is great at marketing itself to "seem" advanced, but when you look at banking, or internet access, or mobile phones, or even land lines (They never work)... ;)

It also amazes me how credit cards don't seem to have progressed in the US. Here in the UK/europe probably, we enjoy chip+pin security on cards, but afaik in the US it's still just a magnetic stripe easy to clone.
hi, first post ever!

basically... what you have, sir, is a day job with low expectations and no IP ownership conflict of interests. Please don't waste this opportunity. Of course you have to keep delivering value to the project, but if you are disciplined you can be done by lunchtime and devote the rest of the day to your own pursuits.

When you get a corporate job, you will feel the same. But then, you will have to moonlight and be careful not to use your employer resources (including IP and other intangibles). In the worst case, you will have to pick different domain and technology stack to avoid the illusion of IP theft.

If you endure in grad school, you might get your credentials and eventually decide what to work on... or you might not. But in any case, you don't need a paper that says you can solve complex problems. Read Paul Graham's article on Insiders vs Outsiders.

Good luck!
Maybe hes just the MrBabyMan of HN — just like everyone else here, except he really likes submitting ALL the cool stuff he finds on a daily basis?

Though I am interested what his startup is. :-)
Data Mining You to Death: Does Google Know Too Much?
Phoenicians may be forgotten but not gone
In my experience, true motivation like you seem to have is not very common in university, so you have a leg up over most. There are plenty of reasonable professors doing great work. Send them emails, attend conferences. Find professors that are 1. Smart 2. Friendly 3. Financially well-off. You sound destined for academica, don't give up. And don't be afraid to exile yourself to Australia if that's where the opportunities are.
Apple more undervalued than others tech heavyweights
I was in Law School for 2 years... It actually worked out quite well. One of the things that you forget about when you are a student is that professors love looking for real world examples that they can incorporate into their curriculum's and classrooms. I had professors, students, and even librarians helping me collect everything from incorporation papers to market research. Eventually, as the company began moving a million miles a minute, I took a step back from my education and decided to get 'the baby out of the crib' before I return.

My point? Utilize what you can from where you are... engage fellow classmates, professors, and faculty. My number one suggestion is pull a professor aside and talk to him, can't hurt can it?

At the end of the day... everyone loves helping a student.
The Entire Video of John Doerr Giving 10 Tips for Start-ups to Avoid the Econalypse
I applied knowing my company didn't fit the profile and that my chances were slim (one founder, a couple decades out of college, family, not based in MV or Boston.) Rejection is never pleasant, but the experience was positive overall and I take my hat off to Y Combinator for pioneering this unique approach to helping startups. I know other investors are watching closely and some are beginning to emulate them. All good. It would be most helpful if YC could provide statistical profiles of companies that applied and those that made it to the next round. Would also be interesting to know how many YC is planning to fund (given the current economic stituation.)
I would like to add that BrainTree our Vault situation well; they did honor they said on their website.

Another great thing about these guys is that you can actually email or call them and a person will pick up the phone. Good luck doing that with GCO, PayPal, or AFPS.

Also, as Jamie said, they offer an API to query payment data; while this isn't an asynch API like what Google offers, it at least opens up the possibility of writing a batch process that reconciles data between your application and Braintree.

Overall BT has been very responsive to our needs and, as a result, I have recommended them to many of the YC Summer '08 companies, along with many other companies I've talked to outside of YC.
Interesting. So what does it say when you override it? "From web"? Isn't that hard to accomplish via API?
Great Business idea #2: Managed MySQL or PostgreSQL on SliceHost and EC2
Aw. Just based on the title, I thought it was an app that lets you guess possible future tweets, and alerts you when anyone actually tweets your guess.

That could be fun too :)
SocialMedian - Digg's Fiesty Little Brother
IPod hack for better last.fm statistics
Haha that's pretty cool as well! Like an automated Twitter guessing game! :)
I don't know about ubuntu, but Kubuntu sucks(at least the RC did).
Hi jfew-

Just wanted to let you know that the current version of Scrumy Pro has both a product backlog and burndown charts.
Don't think he's FriendFeed, the whole FriendFeed team is listed on their website and there's no Nick:

http://friendfeed.com/about/team

NickB also said his startup uses a lot of Ruby on Rails, and Friendfeed's a mostly-Python shop.
I do believe that design patterns in design and usability are really helpful and are penned after a lot of consideration, usage, observation and tuning.

When the ipod launched with the click wheel feature all the usability experts were busy looking for the good and bad.

If you stuck to rules it is hard to come up with new stuff.
I appreciate the thought of bring old-school wisdom here, who knows this can possibly lead to some better sign-up forms.

On the iPod incident Steve Jobs responded by redefining Design with a very simple meaning - "Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,...That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
My advice is to see what other projects are available in your department/university. Talk to other grad students (especially friends) to get a feel for what the other projects/professors are like and switch if something else looks better. People do it all of the time.

It's very common for a grad student to realize after a while that their project or advisor is a bust. Going into it, you have only a small amount of information and usually have to make a decision in a short amount of time. Choosing a project/advisor is always a gamble. I've seen a number of students who went on a few years before their advisor became unbearable, or suddenly there was no funding left. It's sad, but usually as a grad student, it only sets you back in time, which, as you'll see is your main, cheap resource.

Always try to do good work. It's very easy to get burned out or frustrated by your project/advisor and let your work quality go down. You hope that even if your advisor turns into a jerk, your personal work will still stand up for you (yes, it can suck being a grad student at the mercy of others...).
Whoa. Strangely similar to an idea I had recently too. Yes, ideas are cheap but the plethora of public domain information is immense: housing, census, financial and other is just begging to be wrapped in an intuitive interface that welcomes research and exploring.

edit: informal project anyone?
Ask HN: Best CSS resource
I'm looking for the best CSS resource for a programmer turn web programmer. Online and offline.
This is actually a serious problem when using complex data structures that consist primarily of pointers between memory locations (example: linked lists or trees): this is the one case where 64-bit can actually be significantly slower than 32-bit. Imagine a doubly linked list that contains "int" values: on 32-bit each node would be 96 bits, on 64-bit each node would be 160 bits.
Nickb - when is your startup launching?
There are no ownership rights in a twitter name. I had some company names and they were reverted over to the companies by twitter itself.
That feeling of something being rotten at the core, even it though looks okay to the external world, really sucks. I had it once, too. I looked up at the ceiling and asked myself, "What am I doing here?" I was out a few weeks later, and have never regretted the decision.

I think that given that you're only a year in, you should switch labs if at all possible. You should look around at other projects in your vicinity, and evaluate the vibe of the people working on them, using your newfound experience. Go to group meetings if you can. Do you see the cast of characters you're seeing in your current environment (politicos, slackers, and friendly ignorami)? Or do you see neat, intense people, working quietly in a deep way on problems that interest them?

When you've identified a new lab you might like to join, pitch your transition as a surge of interest in the new area, not as discontent with your old lab. You likely do not have enough demonstrated accomplishment to bring to the table to make the new lab want to take the risk of bringing on a malcontent.

This approach will also keep you from intentionally or inadvertently burning bridges with people in your old lab, some of whom are likely quite good people, who you will meet again in your field.
Agile SDL Streamline Security Practices For Agile Development
by your standards, hemingway has no artistic merit either.

i'm sorry but to me what you are doing is very much like trying to measure program quality by counting lines of code. it's like you spent all these years trying to understand the details of writing you have gotten stuck in one mindset and don't realize that there are many other ways to see the world, there are many others forms of beauty out there.

For example Hemingway's famous six word short "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

My standard for literature: does it touch your heart? Yes? It is art.
Sorry, don't have the link to the HN submission, but this site is a good starting point:

http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/169/
A good read about why they kill each other: Konrad Lorenz, On Agression.
If you're going to gripe about business plans constituting inventions, how about hulu.com at 4? It's enought to make the LHC at number 5 really want to create a large black hole.
Threat Models Improve Your Security Process
US appeals court rejects business method patents
How to repair the biggest science experiment in the world
People give their bank passwords to mint.com etc!
LinkedIn, Stop Hiding People Behind Links
Neil Young Wants his 20-Foot 1959 Lincoln to get 100 MPG and Win the Automotive X-Prize
That's not crazy. It has always been very safe to use a credit card, because if some fraudster uses your credit card to pay for something, you're not liable. With cash, checks or a debit card, your money is already gone. With a credit card, the credit card company's money is on the line, not yours.
Harvard-Google Online Book Deal at Risk
no IP ownership conflict of interests

This is a bit of an exaggeration. Universities claim IP, too. Although it is true that most of them are pretty incompetent at it, and they don't much like to sue their successful graduates because it makes for very bad press.
Ok, but all jokes aside, we're still waiting for an email :(. I might have made a mistake, but I'm pretty sure I triple-checked my email address in the application, and I also have it in my profile. I know my application was submitted, since I received a question from pg himself.

Maybe something went awry with the mail script? I don't want to assume one way or another until I get an actual response...All I know is that productivity is going to suffer today! Is anyone else still waiting?

Perhaps providing responses through the HN profile could be a good fix to this problem and the spam folder issue for future cycles?
Do you know the process to get a name's ownership?
Google Maps also has this: http://maps.google.com/vote
"To some extent, though, the system works. It does so for the same reason that some startups work: because as you look at the details you find new things that you couldn't have predicted. Those new things are your research."

I think this used to be true when grants were small, and groups were scrappy and independent. However, today the funding agencies are pushing mega-projects; gigantic labs and "collaborative" research dominate the landscape, and the tendency is toward "million-monkey" results -- throw enough randomly pecking monkeys at any problem, and something good will probably emerge. This is a good career strategy if you're a PI, but it's not so hot if you're a monkey.

My advice to the OP is to get out while there's still time: switch to a different group, and start over. In your first year of grad school you're (probably) independently funded, so it's easy to do, and there isn't much of an intellectual tie to whatever work you've been doing. You also know a lot more about what to look for in a PI and a research program. Write off this year as a mistake, and move on.

In grad school, you've got to fail quickly, and choice of environment is no exception. If you're unhappy at the end of your first year in a group, you'll never be happy -- it only gets harder, and you don't want to be the student to who has a fantastic blowout with your advisor in year three or four, where there's little chance of recovery.

So, my advice is to change labs. Failing that, quit. Grad school isn't worth it, unless you can have a great experience. But whatever you do, don't get so far in that you feel that you can't quit, even though you hate your life and your work.
None of the AES finalists have been "broken", and all of them (except maybe I think Serpent?) have had cryptanalytic results published in the literature. It is indeed because AES is the standard --- everybody uses it, there are many good-quality implementations, and everybody knows how to use it.

It's all kind of a moot point. If you're typing the name of a cipher into your code, you're doing it wrong, and you'll pay down the road when you get pentested.
</sacrewcow>

The non-monetary value of the cheques is, to me, minimal. I'm well aware of the Knuth's work and the confidence required to post a logarithmic reward for bugs. But the concept of 'bug' has been artificially limited.

The primary goal of TeX is "to allow anybody to produce high-quality books using a reasonable amount of effort". It is clearly buggy, as it certainly has failed at that goal.

The problem is that engineers are to focused on algorithms to care about usability or even realize that this is a problem.

It is a problem, and it prevented TeX from achieving it's stated goal.

The same attitude in other projects would ensure their failure too.
Forum was my first love too.

I agree that individualism web appeals to a lot more people. And yes, most people still use internet for recreation purposes only. But that's changing. My understanding of individualism and collectivism is that they are not two separate entities. In fact, they feed on each other. For example, let's look at this "evolution"

1. Lots of people experiment with individual expression on live journal (or whatever was popular back then)

2. Good writers get more attention, bad writers drop out

3. Some of the better writers get so many traffic that they decide to open independent blogs

4. The best of the blogs always serve critical functionality for the community (consciously or not). Either by delivering valuable information, e.g. news, or by (virtual) bringing people together, e.g. comic strips.

When I look at this evolutionarily, it just makes sense to me. Humans are collective animals. We know that one of the main reasons that collectivism works so well is because of Divisions of Labor. Interestingly, at the core of Division of Labor is the requirement that everyone takes on a specialized and often unique role, which is very individualistic.

Thus it is important to work towards the "few but better blogs" kind of collectivism-individualism system.

I'm pretty confident that on a larger time-scale, the internet is going in that direction. At least for myself, I enjoy a well organized forum a lot more than having 400+ facebook friends.
Google Releases Third Beta of Chrome: Better Security and Performance
KillerStartups Gets A Killer Deal On Startups.com
Apple Not Accepting Opera Mini on iPhone
>at $1000 for the basic kit

Actually, 23andme dropped the price to $399.
BibliOdyssey-Books, illustrations, historical data presentation, visual Material Obscura
Thanks for your advice and everybody else's too... I still feel like I may at least give SimpleDB a try by making a new domain for each table and distributing the large tables over multiple domains (my data is amenable to splitting up). I may make two copies of some domains that are split up in different ways so I don't have to query all of the domains associated with a table.

Are JOINs used that often? My thought was that I could export the data to a mysql database for analysis if I needed to do any very demanding crunching.
Nice gem from the 'Yegge-esque'ness:

"Consider the delightful personal pleasures that crackpottery has to offer."
Exactly. The Ubuntu releases are more incremental. Really all that the new releases contain are new and updated patches, occasionally a new kernel release, better support, occasionally additional applications, etc.

It's not like Windows where each release usually brings some serious changes.
He could if people were really interested in the money. People, however, are more interested in keeping his check and autograph as a collector's item and/or bragging rights.
- Banking is often free in the US, just like in Europe. Credit card usage is more prevalent in the US. All of the things that I typically do with bank transfers in Europe (with the odd exception of monthly rent which was a check and my salary which was a bank transfer) I did in the US with a credit card.

- I've had more problems with my land-line in Germany than I ever did in the US. And I've heard enough stories about BT to believe that it's all peaches and cream on the island.

- Those little chips in the European cards aren't used in most cases (at least the German ones), and in fact the most recent ones being issued here don't have them anymore. You certainly don't need anything but the magnetic strip for ATM or credit card transactions.
Cool Abstract Ubuntu Wallpaper
Access Line Losses Hurt: Verizon CEO
Got bored last night and thought my desktop needed some ubuntu spirit. Used photoshop to blend in a nice subtle ubuntu logo and thought you guys might like it.

The original wallpaper (w/o logo) can be found at -> http://uribaani.deviantart.com/art/Revours-Wallpaper-pack-86...

I didn't create the original wallpaper.
I hate this form. I know a lot of people like it, but I hate it. It goes against all the standard for design techniques that users are used to - even as a designer and full time employee at an internet company I was confused for a half second when looking at it. That is bad.
PaulB, then? Hmm.
The 8.10 releases tend to be more "experimental". I dont think it's advised to actually run a day to day system with it :)
Do you guys think we'll start seeing this release on Slicehost/Linode soon?

Any major advantage over Hardy (from a server perspective)?
I wouldn't trust a shared instance of MySQL with blog comments, let alone business data.
I updated my slices to it a few days ago, and it seems to work ok:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/10/25/slicehost-ubuntu-intre...

BTW, more here:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/10/30/slicehost-migration
well then why not send people an autographed copy of the book? People would appreciate that even more
Poll: The Decline of Search (am I imagining things?)
Back in the days of yore, search was a necessary evil on the internet. You weren't going to find anything unless you hit up a proper indexing site and asked it favors. But I am seeing a trend in my own behavior that may well be indicative of the way web usage is heading.

I rarely search anymore, and I think the reason why is partly due to the malaise of search engine optimization, and partly because of social networking. When I am hot to research a new topic, wikipedia has me covered and usually has handy links down at the bottom of articles to articles and community sites that are vetted by other readers. I somehow feel safer clicking these links, rather than doing a search and stumbling onto some searchoptimized page made by some scriptkiddy jagoff with popups, redirects, and malware. The major players in areas that are commonly hit for internet usage are well known and publicized, so I don't need to search for E-Bay, Travelocity, and YouTube. Social reputation, blogging, and site-to-site crosslinking has become prolific to the point where it's easy (and safe) to browse topics you're interested in without having to set foot in "the dirty web".

Is it just me, or are we being somehow driven to rely less on searching? Please submit a response to the poll, and maybe drop a comment on whether or not your search amounts are dropping.

How often do you Search?
More than ten times a day
3 to 10 times a day
Once or twice a day
Maybe once a month or less
Although I like the way the original site is straightforward (usability for those new to the web), vimeo does a killer job at integrating their login form into the site design...it actually looks like it's supposed to be there, as opposed to most log-in forms that just look slapped on.
Silicon Valley Leaders Say No to Proposition 8 With New Group and Ad
Revenue Crisis: Here Come The Pro Accounts
He's just "paul" on HN
I wouldn't be happy if my employer wanted to renegotiate my contract, I think this is better advice for your company's contract with other companies.
What's the shortest line between you and graduation?
my mail is terribly unreliable, but my co-founder got our rejection letter, just now managed to forward it to me :D

wanted to see me sweat, obviously
Wasn't it stated somewhere that pg == nickb ?
I don't believe this surprised anybody, including the Opera team.
Classic example of a business sacrificing long term gains for short term gains. Sure they gain money by doing this via google or whatever. But in the long run, well, this is why there is no Apple developer ecosystem.
pg denied it
I know of one exception. He explained his system: he does the research, then he gets grants for his research. This gives him time to do new research and he writes new grants based on that. He delivers because he only proposes to do what he has already more or less done!

You have just described my thesis advisor: he was offset -2 years on the 3-year grant periods. The publication system is so slow that his whole approach was timed just right.

Grant reviewers love news of great success, soviet style. They don't question how can one produce a scientific publication just one year into the grant period, which tells a lot about their review process.