skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Way to generalize. The points mentioned in this article do not apply to the top tier colleges at all. Consider Harvard, or MIT, or Caltech. These colleges have no problem with cost. The suggestions mentioned in the article will needlessly weigh down these institutions. In return for "protecting" the lowest common denominator who have trouble even with graduating from a 4-yr institutions, we will sacrifice the competitiveness of these top thinkers of our time. Historically, never a good trade off.
"For example 'list.sort()' in Pytohn could run 3 times faster than C++ 'sort(vector<string>)'"

Again comparing apples to oranges.
Maybe think of it as uniquely good within your sphere of influence. I'm bottom of the bell curve in generic small talk when you dump me in the middle of a sales conference, but in the context of the IT department I work in, I'm usually put forward first to chat with customers.
There some coworking places in the city but with how much I pay for rent I can't justify paying additional for a desk elsewhere. I work from home half the week and then go to a neighborhood coffee shop the other days. I do not doubt the networking opportunities but personally, I just can't afford it.
You're lucky, when I take time to point out spelling errors I usually get ignored in a more or less hostile way.
I don't quite understand how the server would validate the ticket if it's been forgotten. Wouldn't that just allow any forged request to generate a seemingly valid ticket and submit a request like that. Further, excuse my ignorance, but can you explain how HMAC would help in a more user-friendly language than what Wikipedia provides?
My degree was a great education in Scheme and AI (Prolog, Bayes, search). I met a few people who I don't talk to much anymore.

My AI was one-to-one, with a couple of lecturers, because I was simply the only person that year to take it. I guess that's why I learned a lot.

I decided not to take a job placement for the 3rd year, as I needed to finish the course before I lost interest.

Do you do the degree quickly or postpone a year with a job?

I got a 2:2 which doesn't look very impressive to employers, but I don't regret taking the degree. An opportunity will come along.

That's one issue - Do you flunk year after year until your grades are at the top, or do you do the degree as quickly as possible and get a lower grade?
Bail. You're not happy, and you're putting in more effort than you should / want to. If you carry on it'll make you more and more bitter and that won't help the business. If you have another opportunity, go for it - the novelty will rejuvinate you I'll bet.
I think this is a problem with the students as well.

Kindergarteners need to be taught by people who are trained for teaching. Eleven-year-olds need to be taught by people who are trained for teaching. But by the time you get to the the university level, you're supposed to be clever enough that you can pick up a subject just by having one of the world's super-experts in the field stand up and ramble in front of you for a while. If you can't learn without hand-holding, you don't belong at university.
I do think the days of "shit"-free-mium services are over, I.e. forums that are turned static and filled with ads.
I am Marc Griffin, the inventor of Bulletball. Just wanted to say hi and glad to know people are still talking about Bulletball.... I guess the "act" was emotional enough afterall :) Go to DUSTWEB.com and there is even a video version of the game being developed! any questions and I can be reached at bulletballgame@yahoo.com

P.S. Obviously I didn't go out and commit suicide after the judges ripped me apert on national tv. But it wasn't fun to go through either.
The top five reasons why Windows Vista failed
send me a list of questions an I'll write a blog post answering them :-)

(I'm the author of http://imranontech.com/ and am creating a developer recruitment startup)
Analyst: Half of 'social media campaigns' will flop
Watch Numb3rs Episodes
It is always a happy moment for some of us when it comes to the end of a Friday. This is because we are going to relax from that excruciating week. I personally chose to relax by watching my favorite TV Shows (my favorite TV show is Heroes) or video (Music video, movies) or playing a video game. Are you like me or just almost like me? But what to do to watch TV episodes which I have missed?
Watch Grey’s Anatomy Episodes
I personally chose to relax by watching my favorite TV Shows (my favorite TV show is Heroes) or video (Music video, movies) or playing a video game. Are you like me or just almost like me? But what to do to watch TV episodes which I have missed?
In theory. What about in practice?
What about MITM attacks?

Seriously, if you want security, use SSL.
The quality and level of education in school in the US is somewhat pitiful. On the other hand, at least in grad school, I found the level to be very satisfactory and pushing my own intellectual needs and interests. I didn't do an undergrad in the states, but would do one 100 times out of 100. Would not be where I am without my education, and I like where that is.
afaik Io has major performance issues
You're so normal!
No kidding. Preventing forgery would be a nightmare.
Nice definition. Only works in a context of evolutionary stable strategies, though
STARTonomics: Frank Mashraqi, Scalability for Startups: How to Grow Up without Blowing Up
In other words, barely news.
Even if your argument had shown that faith in something was rational --- how can you conclude that this something has to be a god?
Spam... it's not free, it's loaned if you take on a $3k support contact. This is just a poorly disguised advert for an over-expensive piece of kit.

Flagged this article.
If he's close to launching, he should just launch. If it clicks with even a few people, that'll be the source of motivation.

Though he should probably get rid of the non-committed cofounder (hoping the equity is properly vested): great cofounder > solo founder > bad cofounder.
How about Adam Smith's works? They are very readable.
i'd say, no matter what you do, wait until you launch and pull in some customers. if your cofounder isn't tech savvy, i would hope that he's the business/marketer type person who's going to be doing the selling of the product. hopefully he'll be the one donating huge time chunks post-launch in order to make it sell, while you don't have much to do.

whichever you decide to do, stay or go, i'd bring it up with your cofounder. bringing up issues instead of letting them fester can help, if they're things that can get resolved.

if the differences are irreconcilable and you're unhappy, jump ship when the fall is comfortable enough for you.
For any Austin folks reading this, http://coworking.pbwiki.com/CoworkingAustin
Why not fish if you aren't happy? People who are looking to hire regularly read this site.
It sounds like you are ready to launch. I can't imagine walking away after your site is ready and before it even launches!

a) See it through the launch. Send your post to your co-founder. Try an forget about "effort" and "sacrifice". Is he adding value at all? Is he going to once you launch (i.e. sales or something?).

b) This sounds to me like a theory/reality problem. I love thinking up ideas and plans. I hate when they get all messy when I try and bring them into the real world. It sounds like you might be interested in the "new development" work and have tired of your less-than-perfect implementation. Once you launch, is there a chance you'll get more funding, another customer to help with funding or anything?

Also, you might try and separate your feelings about the work and the actual changes of the business. Just because you hate it now doesn't mean it won't be successful (not that I'm advising you to do something you hate...).
SSL solves a different problem.

Problem 1: protection from session hijack across a series of requests. Solution: tickets.

Problem 2: protection from interception and alteration of the commands within one request. Solution: SSL.

SSL (even in its most powerful form as a password-protected client-side CA-signed cert!) provides no protection against problem 1.
To offer the contrarian view, I know many who've changed careers and explored alternative paths because they had a sound conceptual understanding. Yes, you can't just be theoretical, but I'd argue that you go a lot further when you know why you are using Excel in the first place and what you want to achieve with it.
Understand the Financial Crisis - Wired How-To Wiki
The problem is that you need to find a way to work with these people in the first place.

My first two jobs were through random contacts ( a relative and someone I met while swing dancing). The next two were through dedicated recruiters on Monster.

I suspect I'll be able to use professional contacts or one of the better recruiters that I know the next time I'm looking, but up to this point, they haven't panned out.
From one of the articles linked in the wiki entry:

Basically it’s done like this:

1. The server passes a random string to the client

2. The client performs a calculation on the password and the random string

3. The client passes the username (in plain text) and the result of the calculation to the server

4. The server performs the same calculation as the client did and compares the output to the output of the client.

5. If it’s a match, the client is authentic.
Don't bail when the going gets tough. Launch and give it everything you got for the next 3-6 months. If NOTHING comes back, give up. If it starts trickling in and you see potential, continue pushing. Otherwise, give up.
It seems to be pretty much close to the speed of similar languages (python, ruby, etc). It loses a lot in the languages shootout[0], but that was back in January and its a very young language. It does seem to beat python in vector ops[1], so who knows what else it wins at.

Anyways, speed isn't the reason he is rewriting Io for the JVM - he wants the advantage of all the libraries already available, as well as being able to fix some small things he doesn't like.

[0]: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/io.php
[1]: http://iolanguage.com/about/speed/vector/x86/
I have just -- in the last two weeks -- helped launch my county's first co-working space. We're starting small, but we've managed to get $150/month per space, so it's pretty affordable.

I've discovered that I'm next to worthless when I work from home, so I'm looking forward to setting up shop there.
Visual Computing Will Change Your Life
No, elitism and free market do not have to go hand in hand.

For example look at the "I, Pencil" essay (http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html) that argues that no single person knows how to make a pencil, at least not effectively. People of all walks of live contribute to our economy in varying degrees.

The history of science and technology is still told as the history of great men. Just look at the wealth of independent re-inventions, to see that seldom does progress hinge on individuals.

I still admire entrepeneurs and great scientists as great role models.
No naked black holes
You're not dreaming. I remember that it was an article about how to allocate your portfolio according to the risk inherent in the various investment options. It appeared here on hacker news, and yes, it put the lie to a lot of Taleb's claims about risk and investing.

I am not nearly a good enough statistician to give a good critique of Talib's theories.

Neither is he. (rimshot)
The Shared Suffering Hypothesis
"... If he's close to launching, he should just launch. If it clicks with even a few people, that'll be the source of motivation. ..."

The founder also mentions there is no money for further development. So great co-founder or not, this is a catch-22 situation.
The other factors are just a marketing trick. You know higher quality is a niche on its own --- and you have to seemingly ignore sales and concentrate on high ideals alone, to generate good sales in this niche. At least that's what works for industries other than education.
Ask HN: Have you ever been a one man Geek Squad? (Of course you have)
I'm planning to go into business for myself (a "startup," surely you've heard of them) and providing the local citizens with an alternative to the Geek Squad. For those who don't know, Geek Squad is owned by Best Buy and they provide home installation and support of various electronics. Problem is, they suck. Or, at least, I know I can do it better.

Essentially, I want to be the computer guy for people who have little or no computer experience, but also provide support for people who know what they're doing but don't want to get ripped off by the Geek Squad. You know, a computer handyman with an old-timey-doctor feel. Walking in with my stethescope and big medical bag of tricks, telling the user to use Firefox instead of IE and to drink lots of fluids.

The problem I'm running into is that I know the "What" but not the "How." My starting point will probably be to see what the Geek Squad charges. Then, I'll see if there are any other local computer handymen and what they do and what they charge. Then, when I'm sure how to go about it I'll get the word out.

My question is how did you/would you go about it? If you've done it before, what was the experience like? What problems did you/do you run into? Are there any books/websites that you would reccomend for first-timers managing their own business?

Feedback is much appreciated.
Maybe people should get together and work together on stuff at a set coffee shop or someone's house?
Didn't expect this to get submitted.

I wrote this for people who may have heard of A/B testing but want to know what all the fuss is about. More detailed articles will be forthcoming.
Geeky cartoon: Isometric (warning, some coarse language)
To validate the ticket, it looks inside the ticket at the user ID, the timeout date and it checks the signature. HMAC is a lightweight symmetric-key signature. Symmetric keys are OK because the same person is generating and checking signatures. Data plus signature equals proof that "I earlier permitted this". I don't need to remember it in the interim.

A forged request can't guess the HMAC key, and a forged request with an invalid key is refused. A replay is disallowed after the timeout. The server can also keep track of "spent" tickets until they would have timed out, preventing a replay even during the timeout period.
You are prepared to bail. This is an excellent bargaining position. Put your problems plainly to your cofounder, including your intention to bail if things dont improve on his side. If you dont see the reaction you want, do what you were prepared to do and know that you tried as much as you could.
Airport X-Ray Art
That's a HMAC password protocol, it's different.

In the case of tickets, the one signing is "this server then" and the one checking is "this server now", with a period of amnesia (about the data, not about the password) in between.
In general, how do solitary founders make sure they have people around during the day?
I thought it meant mean that in the event of success, he can increase his investment.
I tend to think of it as the one-in-one-hundred trait. Given yourself and 99 other random people, what can you do that they probably can't?

That doesn't mean you're the best in your country, or in your field, or in the world, or whatever, it just means that you'll tend to be the best at a lot of small companies, and among the best at the larger ones.
Clearly the problem with the US is that we have too much education.

Ugh. Complaining about the drop rate is valid. Sure. But blaming individual actors for systemic failure is no better than blaming your loan officer for the economic meltdown.

Note that critiques of education follow two lines:

1. You don't get enough for your first job (e.g. real-life skills --- such as C++/Java).

2. You don't get enough for the rest of your life (e.g. critical thinking).

A cute dichotomy, but unsatisfying. Frankly what I don't like about all this is the static "learn" phase followed by the static "work" phase. I grew up working while in school (not the heroic part-time school, part-time student way, just the lazy "I need RAM money, time for a summer gig" method). I like the idea, and it's made me a better student and a better professional programmer.

What gets me is little incentive I see for people to alternate between school & work. Either you work 12 hrs a day (8 for work, 4 for school), or give up work (& salary) to go back. Neither are good choices if you've got a spouse and kids.

Are there employers that give you a break on responsibilities (at least in hard time) to get an advanced degree? The payoff in smarter employees seems pretty worthwhile.

It'd be better to make undergrad less of a make-or-break situation, and more of a path of work/learning that continues for the rest of your life. But eh, that's more touchy/feely than most would like.
This applies to programming too. Even though Java/JEE has such a huge number of programmers, every Java project I ever worked on was probably unique in the combination of libraries it used (ever worked on a project with struts, spring, ibatis, oracle portal and prototype? Good chance you're a ex co-worker.)

When I switched to Rails, the problem of finding people with the same problems as I had, simply disappeared. And that's the biggest argument against alternative runtimes and frameworks - even if they're a lot better, you'll lose the shared suffering, and that matters.
interesting. But I thought traditionally there are way more poor people than there are rich people, and that poor people have way more kids than rich people. In fact it's a little depressing that the poor will always be with us instead of being evolutionary losers and be a problem that will'take care of itself'.
I just recently discovered, much to my own surprise, that I am in fact not a good businessman. I've got management experience, and I've done that exceptionally in the past, but it turns out that that's not the same as being a good businessperson. I have good ideas about policies and customer service and so on, but I really stink at paperwork and organization and all that kind of stuff.

I need a partner. :-(
This is scary. I would never store my finances in a random small start-up already doing data mining.

It is already too much to have banks and credit card corporations doing it.
I'm assuming more money would be needed only for further development, but the product can launch now (or days from now). If some features are not ready for prime-time, turn them off and launch with what works well.
Steve Wozniak interview
I don't think it's about being demonstrable. Start with plausible. A lot of the items are about intent. While you can never be sure that items like '1-$2m tops before reaching 25 -$50m value' are a yes, you can often be sure that they're a no.

It might be in the strategy. The strategy might not be viable without more down the line.

Works as an exclusion list.
it's the first time something like this has been predicted though. that's something.
Taleb isn't saying that this event can't be explained ("simple debt implosion"), or that no one predicted it. He's saying that the markets as a whole didn't take into account what ended up happening.

This crisis is built upon the fact that people thought they could predict mortgage repayment rates, and they didn't expect a major decline in housing prices. Huge parts of the world economy took these bets. The unexpected happened. Hence the black swan.

In some respect, what Taleb is saying is obvious - markets aren't predictable, and it is unwise to place bets that will kill you if your predictions are wrong. Too bad more people didn't do this.
True to a point and possibly for the majority of jobs, provided that you aren't trying to bill yourself as a consultant (expert in whatever technology). I'm also assuming that the "average hacker" implies that you are eliminating everyone who claims to be one, but is not even close from the list of hackers, in order to greatly improve the average. (The average "successful" hacker.)

Now, even with the higher standard, the learning curve depends greatly on the complexity of the system and how much of a learning curve is permitted by the employer. If you are trying to work with a full J2EE system, and you haven't done it before, expect a steep 2-3 month learning curve, even if you are proficient in java. If they need someone to be productive within that first week, the average hacker won't be able to make it.

There is just too much complexity and too many libraries to memorize in less time then that. I spent a good month or two learning the EJB 2.2 frameworks, Servlets, JSPs, javascript, etc at my last job. This job had a very steep 1 month learning curve with a modern Seam, Richfaces, JSF environment. I'd add on another month or two for anyone that doesn't already understand the core of the j2EE/web application stack. This small team has had people that haven't been able to pull it off.

Now for the extreme example, my father has worked developing the base station for a satellite telephone system. He's commented on how half of the people brought in to help him got lost in the complexity and provided next to no additional productivity.

I've also dabbled in pharmaceutical automation and in the telecommunication networks. Very steep learning curves in regulations and the complexities associated in both fields.

In summary, competence often requires a lot more then just raw coding ability. Very few people can slide into a job under the radar and properly complete very hard problems where they don't have the expected domain knowledge.

*Reviewing this, it's not really a direct response to what was said in the above thread. I was reading into the response too much.
Wow, how did they miss FireBug?
Taleb is to Roubini as Klein is to Chomsky.
You're not dreaming. I remember that it was an article about how to allocate your portfolio according to the risk inherent in the various investment options. It appeared here on hacker news, and yes, it put the lie to a lot of Taleb's claims about risk and investing.

I'd love to see this article. Anyone know what it is?
Oh yes, the poor population of Sudan, huddled together on 5 meters of ground, and that is the exact 5 meters that gets hit by an asteroid. What are the odds?
My own two cents:

I wouldn't do this because your customers are cheap idiots who don't realize they're cheap idiots.

I personally don't think the small amount of money you make is worth the headaches you will face. I think you'll have better luck targeting small businesses as "outsourced IT" help than targeting home users.

Good luck to you though, regardless.
We launched our affiliate program, any developers out there looking to monetize?
If you can, try taking some time off. Travel somewhere. Do not think about your work for a week or two. That gives you really good perspective.
Poor people having more babies than rich people seemed weird to me, but in reality, throughout history, poor people (or people with little status) make babies that don't really make it to adulthood at the rate of high status people (see Gregg Clark). Overall, in Malthusian societies, there's not enough food to go around, and the poor are the last to be fed.
Nope, you're thinking of Founder's Coop in portland.

Here's the discussion on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=164892

They actually have updated their application to include a thank-you to YC: http://www.founderscoop.com/apply.php
i've actually considered doing this.

something to consider is nerds on site, which is basically an international group of contract workers doing what you're doing, but they provide a network of support for the process.

something worth considering is providing the service of at least attempting to diagnose problems via VNC, instead of making house calls like geek squad does. provides the one-on-one support by inspecting the computer, but doesn't incur the cost of making a house call. it'll probably be easy to spin it as beneficial, since one wouldn't have to cough up a house call bill for a minor issue.