skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am occasionally critical of every profession I've ever been a member of, including software developers (get me started on how well we understand the typical user someday), salarymen (get me started on... anything), translator (get me started on professional ethics), research assistant (get me started on code quality in an academic setting), and while I don't have a specific complaint about "seasonal order entry operator" if you give me a minute I can probably come up with one. I'm not even a very negative person -- I actually like teaching quite a lot. If it isn't obvious, pick a different set of two comments from me to generalize from and you'd assume that I'm a rabid fanatic about it.

Do you really want to play the "you're only allowed to have opinions on pedagogy if you're a real teacher" game?
Some of this stuff, like peer exchange and magnet links, are not new and are in most torrent clients for years. Pirate Bay has started promoting magnet links and rumour is that they'll stop doing torrents all together.

It's the search part that's hard to do, and I wonder how tribler do it? Anyone analysed their code? I wonder how you'd do a true decentralised p2p search system.... (i.e. do to p2p search what google did to web search, come up with a new algorithmic invention)
Funding streams for smaller niche start-ups?
Hi HN. I find myself in a curious and frustrating situation. I figured that asking HN might produce some answers that would be helpful to me and others in my position.

Specifically, I like to know if anyone know of funding sources for what I feel is a guaranteed (I have made money for about a decade for doing something similar) start-up, but the revenues, although decent, will be comparativly mild. The details of the startup are less relevant than the problem that it presents, which is:

1) The product is very niche. You basically have to be in the industry to understand why it is needed.

2) There is practically no competition. This is due to the industry being historically "non-technical" and that, although it is has been around a while, it has only recently (last 4-5 years) experienced major growth. This has the effect of making advertising a little tricky.

3) There are perhaps 50,000 or less people in this industry. Of those, about 1/4 or less would be potential customers of my product. So if I had an amazing 50% penetration rate of my target audience, I would cap out at about 5,000 or less customers. More likely 500 to 1000 customers.

4) The typical customer will have money to spend, but due to the entire industry having a built-in cap of its own, I would expect only about $200,000 - $500,000 revenues a year with 0% chance of someone wanting to buy it out for $10 million, for example.

So, in short an extremely niche startup with little to no competition, but a built in revenue ceiling.

The reasons for funding is:

1) Although I have a MVP, it needs conversion to an multiuser web app vs. a standalone single user web application. I estimate this would take 3 - 6 months (too long for me to live on my meager savings)

2) Needs graphic design work throughout. This will be essential, as this is a b2b app and needs to make customers feel comfortable trying it out.

3) Again, because it is a b2b, I would not like to offer this to customers without knowing for sure that even in a worst case senerio, I would be able to make sure they all safely have their data back.

So HN, this doesn't seem to be a good candidate for kickstarter, venture funding outfits usually look for something a little more top end potential, and loan from friends, family, or bank is out of the question.

Any ideas?
KickStarter is one of the very few businesses that's truly innovating / disrupting anything right now.

Then Stripe.

Then CloudFlare (I really like their story and pivot).
It's a mistake, but your landing page looks like a typical affiliate style long-copy sales letter, so I'm guessing they just thought you were an affiliate of the product rather than the original source.
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Ultimately it's a place where anyone can post a project and try to raise some money to make it happen. I don't think it's limited to only people who couldn't raise it otherwise.

Why can't Apple launch the iPad 3 on there? There's no reason they can't, except why would they give Kickstarter a cut of their profits when they've proven they can sell them directly with no middleman.
To make matters even more complicated, the good bug fixers aren't necessarily "just" maintenance developers with some savant-like bug fixing talent.

Many of them are perfectly capable of building completely new features on top of an existing architecture, and they will get frustrated if they get stuck with just the maintenance jobs.

Also, many, if not most, programmers don't handle the "clean sheet of paper" very well, no matter how much everyone else claims to love a greenfield project. Actual good clean-sheet coders are rare.
"Spells trouble to freedom of the net" is more like it. Copyright holders will push repressive legislation sooner or later, and will use projects like this as an example.
I have a background in IT and am not a teacher, but I am deeply interested in learning more about educational technology. I think it's important to understand the history of "education reform" and what has succeeded and what has failed in the past.

It seems to me that there is no "magic bullet" for applying technology to education. There's no app, no device, no specific technology that will really revolutionize our educational system.

There are at least two essential things that I've noticed in my brief time thinking about this subject.

1. The focus should be on "better education" not "more technology".

2. Engaging early adopters is critical to get anything done in a relatively short amount of time.

80% of teachers are too busy teaching with their existing, "tried and true" methods and aren't interested in whatever new technology is being presented this school year.

I really like the ideas that seem to be coming from Khan Academy where they are testing the best ways of learning, not just running with assumptions.
Someone pls come to India. There is a serious need for good payment processor out here. Anybody who comes up with even half-decent solution wins 75% of mkt-share by default without any sales/mktg/BDM efforts.
There are always lots of entry-level devs who can apply their fresh CS degrees to those refinements.
These researchers view of technologies' I would consider to be quite robust -- "we don’t rely on shaky foundations such as DNS, web servers or search portals" -- kind of blows my mind
This is actually available on all platforms. I installed it on my iPhone last night
You're right - they're not. I'm not trying to argue that they are, though. I just assumed that a company that's dependent on projects succeeding to make their living would have something more than "keep hitting refresh" in place to track big projects like these.
What are you using to power your site?
Don't worry about all these egotistical computer science bigots on HN telling you that you are inferior because you can't wax poetic about the work of the scientists in our field.

Understanding performance and result trade-offs of various sorting algorithms is sometimes useful. But usually not.

Understanding how the nagle algorithm works in TCP is sometimes useful. But usually not.

Understanding how the A* algorithm works is sometimes useful. But usually not.

Understanding how zlib works is sometimes useful. But usually not.

That is the beauty of our field. We can build larger and more complex systems because others have laid the foundation. Actively seek out and learn relevant existing algorithms and libraries when you need them.

All of this stuff may or may not be useful to know. However, it is largely irrelevant when it comes to getting shit done in most bits of software. Sometimes, ignorance is blissfully productive.

What makes you happy? Screw the rest.
This strikes me as hopelessly naive on a number of fronts.

Good professors spend years refining their lectures and they change things year to year, but many of those changes are evolutionary, rather than revolutionary.

Reducing all education to a simple transaction where money is traded for knowledge is overly simplistic and invites poor conculusions. Even if it were that simple, there is an inherent and significant asymmetry of information that stands in the way of an efficient market.

Further, for some professors, at least, money isn't the only reward they get from teaching. They may like interacting with students, they may feel their own understanding of the subject is improved by teaching it to others, and the dynamic of the classroom provides valuable insight that helps them improve how they teach the next batch of students.

The professor may feel, and have evidence to back it up, that students who don't come to lectures, on average, learn the material less well than those who do. There could be a lot of reasons for this, but at least some of them likely relate to the classroom experience, the enthusiasm of the professor, his or her ability to read the room and dwell a little longer on a point that half the students may be baffled by. Their lectures could have a lot of deliberate redundancy about key concepts that isn't captured in notes.

You can argue that the student should be free to choose whether or not to avail themselves of these advantages, but your comment and so many other comments in threads like these, suggest that many students don't even realize what they might be missing.

I'm utterly convinced that our education system, from kindergarden through graduate school and beyond is ripe for significant changes, but I'm mindful of what can be lost in major disruptions, particularly if people are ignorant of the value of the things they are sweeping aside.
>Also, many, if not most, programmers don't handle the "clean sheet of paper" very well, no matter how much everyone else claims to love a greenfield project. Actual good clean-sheet coders are rare.

I think I get it right on my 2nd or 3rd clean sheet.
The Double Fine Kickstarter pitch video does a pretty good job of explaining why it can't fund an Adventure game, primarily because publishers generally won't fund anything that isn't a guaranteed success. The Double Fine kickstarter projects shows a shift in power from the publisher to the developers/players.
I'm not so sure. A big budget and high expectations can sandbag even the best creative team.
The article is very interesting but seems to inflate the fact that if you have a cat you're most likely going to contract T. gondii.

If indoor cats don't carry T. gondii and outdoor cats only carry the parasite for three weeks of their life, isn't the risk of getting this parasite very low since there is only a three week window? Perhaps I'm misinterpreting this. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
How the Brain Unscrambles Jumbled Letters
This is in a similar vein to most of the answers...

Choose an interesting project from SourceForge - create something similar.

This is more efficient because you're now learning a new language and domain-specific concepts at the same time.
I'd rather rephrase the question to ask generally what it would take to break the spirit of the site. A lot of projects already use it as a shop-like site.

And as far as big companies are concerned, Kickstarter and Amazon take a combined 7.9% cut, which is quite significant.

I'm also not entirely sure whether companies with DRM-encumbered games will manage to attract donours in a similar fashion to Double Fine who seem to be using the Steam platform, which is widely used and loved.

Blizzard could probably pull it off with their games (MMOs not included) because of Battle.net, but it would turn into a major shitstorm, if they funded something like Call of Duty, which is a magnet to controversy and uproar. Then there would be the ensuing hell of charge-backs and refunds.

With Kickstarter, you generally invest in an idea more so than a product. What but a product do you invest in by giving Blizzard money? With Double Fine, you revive the adventure genre, have a chance of disrupting the videogame industry and bring back some of the biggest videogame developer legends and give them free reins over their product without having to go hat in hand and pander to producers. With Blizzard, it would just be business as usual.

I don't know whether Kickstarter will ever lose its indie feel, but if it does, or some project starters do, they will be subjected to a level of scrutiny orders of magnitude higher than what we are used to.

I think Kickstarter projects depend more on goodwill than most of us imagine.
Second Life does something like this using the Linden Dollar. Also the rate changes based on factors, kinda like how the Euro value will change over time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Second_Life might be a good read to see how a real company is doing this. Also in the TOS(http://secondlife.com/corporate/tos.php?lang=en-US#tos5) basically says the own all the money. So depending on the legal wording maybe the lack of insurance isn't that big of a deal but it might cause trust issues. I'm not a lawyer so i'm not really sure, just think the Linden Dollar might be a good example to research before creating your own type of money.
> DFS and BFS can be expressed by a single algorithm that differs only in the behavior of the "queue."

Correct me if I am wrong, but the naive non-recursive DFS and BFS differ only in the implementation of queue.

https://gist.github.com/1791284
The need to track up to a million dollars was small, sure.

But if you're revenue is based on these projects, wouldn't you want some sort of real-time counter of $$ being pledged? Maybe I'm just being a statistics nut...
This is from 2008 and from a quick skim seems ok, but delves unnecessarily into some distinctions between vars and symbols and stuff that's totally not helpful for someone new to Lisp.

I also don't think "str" is a special form, is it? https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/f5f827ac9fbb87e770d2...
> "Tribler" is a peer-to-peer file-sharing client that is completely decentralized. "The only way to take it down is to take the Internet down," the software’s creator says.

Which is a pretty f--king stupid thing to say at a time when we are trying to avoid draconian, Big-Media-backed legal shenanigans like SOPA/PIPA and ACTA.

Are they trying to demonstrate that the only way to enforce copyright law really is to monitor everyone's communications 24/7, assume that anyone who uses encryption to an unrecognised/unauthorised host an infringer, and ruthlessly cut off Internet access to any such person? Because anyone who thinks such a scenario is unrealistic hasn't been paying attention.

People who make and advertise file sharing tools for the obvious purpose of conducting illegal activity are the enemy of those of us who want to have such tools for legitimate purposes and of those of us who want to have the content we honestly pay for in unrestricted formats that don't get in the way of us enjoying them.

<skeptic>Also, with my technical hat on, how exactly does this work? I'm betting you aren't really as isolated and decentralised as you think you are, because, well, you can't be off the network and yet still be on the network. The article says it's a BitTorrent client, so surely someone is seeding something somewhere.</skeptic>
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If you're teaching the process, teach the process. Don't set up a project with a clear objective, force students to rigidly follow exactly the steps you yourself took to get to that objective, and assume the process transfers to the students through osmosis.

This is a sore point with me; I'm in a minor conflict with one of my 7th grader's over an assignment he aced in which he's being dinged for (bogus) process faults.

What's worse is, my 7th grader has generally excellent teachers. I don't buy that this is a "good teacher / bad teacher" issue. I think it's a methodological flaw common to all standard secondary schooling programs.
Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)
Hello HN!

It's that time again! Every once in a while, I like to offer my time to help other passionate people be a little more successful with their goals. If there's anything I can help you with, just ask here. No strings whatsoever. I've done this before a few times now, and it's worked out well for everyone. Check out some of the previous "No strings" sessions I've done to get an idea of how I can help. (http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=mikegreenberg)

A few requests: Be specific about what you're trying to fix/solve/accomplish. The more details you provide, the better I can help you out. I will try to help all requests made before the end of today and will attempt to complete by the end of Sunday. Be patient and check back. Please keep requests to tasks I can do in ~15 minutes. I'll spend more time willingly, but smaller requests lets me help more people! Thanks. :)

Cheers!! Mike

PS: I'm organizing my first workshop in South Florida at the end of the month (topic: Arduino for Newbies). If you know anyone who might be interested in participating, PLEASE pass this along! I'm investing a lot of time to make sure it rocks! Details at http://hackthisarduino.com
Mark Zuckerburg is not the same as an investment banker
Hi HN, Casey from the Elevation Dock project.

People use the term disruption pretty loosely, I think crowd-funding is really doing it. Goodbye middlemen, sayonara to the massive traditional barriers to entry. Hello bootstrapped projects like this that would otherwise never see the light of day.
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Oh, don't get me wrong, I am too. But I don't know how stretched Kickstarter's team are- while I'd love to see a stats counter like that on my own project, I rarely have the time to put one together.
First Look at New Film “Reboot” - Cyberpunk Thriller To Debut On 2-12-12
> What utter rubbish. So getting married isn't something compliment worthy? A compliment based on physical attractiveness is always sexist?

Nice strawmen.

In this context, the personal life of the person being introduced and their physical attractiveness has nothing to do with why they are here. At best it's completely off-topic.

Consider if it was a male presented being introduced with: "...he was an alcoholic when I met him, but now he's been 3 years sober". Completely irrelevant personal details that undermine the credibility of the person for at least some of the audience (not to mention making the person feel awkward).
My dad and sister are lawyers, and I seriously considered it at one point (took an LSAT course), so I have some familiarity with it. My impression of the field is that it's similar to programming - very detail and abstraction oriented. To think correctly at higher levels of abstraction over any domain, you have to know the details and fundamentals of it, be it law or programming.

As far as the differences, I'd like to say that there is less room for error in programming, since you're working with a perfectly literal machine. However, you can create incorrect abstractions that fail to run and immediately throw errors, but you can also create incorrect abstractions that do run, but return either obviously or subtly incorrect results. Not so different from the legal system.

So I suppose the big difference is the relative accessibility of the two. As soon as you buy a $200 netbook and start programming basic, c, or whatever, you're immediately subjected to the instant feedback loop. With law, you can take a few courses in undergrad, or go to law school. But attempting to learn law on your own, without guidance, is probably easier to go off on tangents, than attempting to learn programming on your own.

In either case, transitioning the skills from one domain to another will require some study of the core body of knowledge, hence the state of legal discussion on programmer sites (and state of tech discussion in Congress, for that matter).
Ask HN: Please recommend skills to pick up
Low level coder here (another way to saying I am out of date with relevant skills!). I have an idea that I want to develop this year. Please recommend the most relevant skills that I should get familiar with. The idea involves
- Live conferencing and Archival of videos
- Clean looking web interface

Sounds like boiling the ocean. But some pointers on general direction would be very helpful. Thank you
Pretty amazing!
In case someone runs into this comment and is interested in checking out the book, the book is called AIMA(Artificial Intelligence: A modern approach), and here is the relevant code.

http://aima-python.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/search.py

It's a long file though.
This post is content free.
Firefox nightlies have all of these features as well. Good to see Chrome following suit.
I'd love to see a case study or profile of the creation of this. Over the last 10 years and in multiple communities, I've seen the underlying Flash animation to this appear and do well every single time. It must be one of the most seen Flash animations ever, yet it continues to do well every time despite being very simply produced.
I like that the Project Euler problems get hard fast, it's a great opportunity to fail over and over again, which (at least for me) forces you to think more deeply about the problems, when something is too easy you can fall into the trap of a "good enough" solution, which is often appropriate in the day job, but not necessarily so when you are trying to practice. I love the code golf option on 4clojure for that also, because for so many of the problems I just can't see how people get the smallest solutions - not that I would want to write code like that for a shipping product.
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Why does every website need an app?
I don't have a solid grasp on what exactly Java Chronicle is and does and what the use cases might be. (https://github.com/peter-lawrey/Java-Chronicle)

Can anybody elaborate?
Let me know when they hit the all too critical mass.
To me it just looks like a typical, badly-designed product page trying to get you to buy the product. How exactly does one distinguish between an "affiliate" sales pitch and an "original source" sales pitch?
For the record, I downvoted you not because I disagree, though I do, but for your tone which was insulting without anything to back it up. Your comment simply didn't add to the discussion.