skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>>but I think it is unfair to expect a lot from UG students

Each year almost 7000 teenagers are filtered out in India to be sent to IIT, the best place of all in India. At least 10% of these are supposed (or 'have the potential') to drive scientific, technical innovation in India. The present conditions at IIT are not at all encouraging in Research except Computer Science and Electrical mostly. The problems are many fold. One important problem is the faculty, except that of CS, lack a vision and passion for research. While CS, Elec profs have undergrad experience at IITs, it is not at all true for other departments like Physics. [Yup, I am from EP]. The profs are ones who had a B.Sc at some regional university and MTech and Phd at IIT. And I say CS students are not the ones who can contribute to the core Scientific Research. They drive Technological Innovations. But the research in CS is very 'volatile'. There is no sharing of Ideas in other departments as in CS. Ideas quickly spread in CS and give rise to better solutions to problems. But not so in medicine or physics. India already has a great 'research' contributions in CS. I myself has lost all the passion taking Physics as my professional career after coming here, and I am pursuing CS (which I was naturally able to connect, given it's mathematical nature, the first fav subj for any IITian). And I regret for loosing Physics. And there are so many friends in Physics, BioTech who had taken the dept in spite of good chances in other departments. And it is very essential to make use of these bright students for research. The IIT is the only bet for good research. Even if research is not directly produced at IIT, at least the conditions should be encouraging to instill the passion in students, before pumping money.
DO NOT COLD E-MAIL US with a single, vague paragraph. It will go into the bowels of oblivion into tips@techcrunch.com where we get 95% crazy and 4% decent and 1% awesome information.

You should find the writer that most appropriately fits what you want to do. We all have different styles and interests. Josh does a lot of FB-related stuff, I do a lot of mobile & finance-related stuff, Leena does some more enterprise, Alexia does culture, Sarah Perez does mobile stuff.

Establish a relationship with them for future coverage. Many of our e-mails are just our first name followed by @techcrunch.com

In terms of explaining what you do, we basically ask the same questions that PG or any investor would.

1) Who are you? Tell us about your team and why they are interesting or uniquely positioned to build this.

2) What is the idea? How did you pick this problem?

3) Why is your solution better executed than everyone else in the space? Eg, tell us about your product. Why is it built this way and what does it let you do? Where do you think your competitors fall short and who are they?

4) What is the market opportunity?

5) How does the revenue model work if you have one? If you don't, what do you think it could be?

6) How do you acquire users? Most people do not have a thoughtful answer to this and it makes me very sad. Especially people who want to "launch this cool app" or whatever. The world does not work like this.

7) Do you have evidence of traction? If you provide arbitrary vanity metrics, I will go crazy (unless you have a really good explanation) for why you need to deviate from the standard engagement metrics like DAU/MAU/uniques/# of transactions/monthly or annual revenue, etc. In your case, sheer DAU or MAU may not really be that relevant since you have a very specific target market.

8) Do you have investors or advisors? How much did you raise and why did you take money from these people?
Here is a video of my 2 year old Nexus S running ICS http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCy_urYqDEM

I am going to assume that your aren't trolling and just aren't familiar with what you are talking about. I was using a 3rd gen iPad just a couple of days ago where the keyboard choked for a good second when I opened the browser and tried to type right away.

iOS has advantages when it comes to speed for sure. One of the big things is the user can't screw it up like they can on Android, I've seen many Android phones that are the equivalent of Internet Explorer with 15 toolbars. Android has true multitasking and unfortunately that means that you have to be aware of the apps that you install aren't crappilly coded and running in the background eating CPU and RAM.

I think
So it's not much different from Poland and probably other postcommunist EU members.
How we marketed our iOS app on Facebook to boost downloads
That's the thing, Romanians are also natural born 'poets', i.e. lateral thinkers. There is a lot to be said about Romania, place of real cultural confluence, turks, germans, hugarians, soviets, greek-ortodox, communist yet latin background, etc. It's not just about the codding.
Music is different because of concerts, an established revenue stream that is far older than recorded music itself.

Much of music is also intimately tied to the old art form of dancing and many other aspects of culture, such that very strong sets of expectations are placed on music in different contexts.

Actually, it's even more complicated than that. These sets of expectations are often somewhat disconnected from the mainstream population's everyday experience, have become somewhat shallow/cartoony, and are subject to media manipulation.

you don't even want to ask what they threw at the punks and the New Wavers in the early days of punk and New Wave...having a definite genre might help when scoring live bookings. This is just a guess, though; I've never tried to run a live band.

Having a live band is often fraught with dealing with expectations. It's to the point where someone can have something like an Irish Traditional or Bluegrass influenced band and run up against people constantly asking for music that you don't really want to do or really doesn't fit the aesthetic of your band.
Music Visualization Software
Yes, this is true. Our best stuff comes from trusted referrals.
The assumption that "logic" and "mathematics" can be used interchangeably is what suggests to me that the author is couching in an additional point. This is why I attack the headline all together, and not just the use of quotation. This is why I used to term "scare quotes" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes)...twice.

Did you read my post at all?

I'm attacking the article for exactly the point you're trying to educate me about. I'm saying it is wrong to do this sort of writing under some circumstances. I'm saying trash the whole headline. I'm saying "should we use these quotation marks?" should have been noted as "bad form." I'm saying I'd take the OP's long-ass headline before I come off sounding insensitive.

"Brilliant pupil's 'logical' suicide." It makes me wrench just reading it out loud. Read it. Read the "distance" the author strongarms into the headline. It's forced. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth just reading it out loud. You know that one point people often try to make that goes something like, "Couldn't you have said it a better way?" Or "Maybe we just shouldn't talk about that here and now?" Or the whole motivation behind PC-speech? I'm saying this article's headline comes off as crass because of the use of exactly that which you are now trying to describe to me.
HTML/CSS are NOT programming language, Opa cannot replace them.
How is he acting like an asshole or being rude? Torvalds is WAY ruder than this guy.

I don't know what you're projecting onto this essay to find it assholey or rude, but it's bunk.

Frankly, I'm disappointed that he failed to condemn namespaces.
If another outlet has published it before, we are not inclined to rehash them. Maybe Mashable will, but we won't unless you can provide super interesting, exclusive information (eg a funding round, new product, key hire, passing a traction benchmark, or even interesting ideas for feature stories).
I know and love graphs, including DAGs, and even sometime write C++ to operate upon them using boost::graph or my own representation.

I'm sure I can learn git, just as a casual user (we use P4 at my day job) I just haven't put in the time to learn about its branching and merging system, or had much occasion to practice it. I was hoping I would just absorb it magically, but git is using a lot of its own terminology and it's just doing something differently that I just don't feel like I know what I'm doing yet.
Hacking the iPod: Gizmodo vs. Hacker News
Btw, this is for the basic company story. We also do trend, feature, or random culture stories, for which the bar is very different. :)
The age of pragmatists
Look forward to getting feedback from the HN community. Let us know how we can improve the app.
Facebooks problem as I see it, ergo my problem with Facebook is the daily or hourly updates of family and friends is overboard. If I check Facebook 2x / month, I would like to see a summary of BIG events and skip all the minor posts, shares, and comments.
There are javascript hacks (which the "Download youtube video" browser extensions use) but these URLs contain a time sensitive element and its against the TOU to use them to display the video anywhere else. There is no official API for the flv either but if I am not mistaken they offer an rtsp/3gpp stream for at least some of the videos
Can you give an example?

They may not be intending to be sarcastic or nasty. Sometimes, it just comes off that way, or perhaps you are misinterpreting.
One could have said the same things about airlines before the emergence of Southwest and similar carriers. When dissatisfaction is so high, and you treat your customers with utter contempt, it leaves a gaping hole for someone to disrupt your business model. Eventually someone is going to figure out some sort of distributed wireless technology that routes around the FCC established monopoly the cell carriers currently have. At first it will look like a toy and they'll ignore it, but then it will get better and better until it's too late to stop the momentum.
What do you define as success? For me success is once something becomes self-sustaining (paying the employees wages etc.) and I can name quite a lot of people I work with today that would not be in the position they are now (living off their websites) if domains were $500.

Maybe my world view is skewed because I spend a lot of my time around people that build sites as hobbies that turn into businesses and not true startups like Instagram or Twitter.

I forget the persons name, but just last week a hackernews user posted about their top 400 (I think it was 400?) US website that they started in high school as a hobby, I doubt they would have started that if domains were priced at $500.
The domain was purchased in 2008. The startup that failed was launched only a year ago. So the $500k spent on this domain could not have been used for the daily deals venture because it didn't even exist yet.

However you are correct if a startup gets $X funding and spends $Y on a domain and then runs out of funding, if having $Y in cash at the end would have given them enough runway to significantly change their odds of success, spending that money on the domain might not have been the best idea.

It doesn't appear that is what happened in this case, though.
How is XML any more immune to schema changes?
> Why am I required to finance an entire degree only to be forced to take courses that I do not value? By bundling education into its most popular format, the four-year degree, we are inevitably adding low-utility courses that the consumer should be enabled to avoid.

That's a problem with the curriculum, not the overall concept of a 4-year degree. There are schools that bundle useless courses as part of the required curriculum just because a tenured prof wants to teach it in a large auditorium. But other schools encourage students to build their own curricula with the courses that offer the most value to them. Brown University, for example, has been doing this for decades. It's not perfect, but it goes a long way toward catering to the needs and desires of each student.

I have two (soon to be three) degrees in some combination of humanities and social sciences, and I've thoroughly enjoyed all but one or two of the dozens of courses I've taken so far. I've been fortunate because all the schools I've attended have been quite flexible in their course-taking requirements. I wish most students at many other universities enjoyed the same amount of choices.

On the other hand, there is something to be said in favor of requiring engineering students, for example, to take a few courses in the humanities and social sciences. If you think you don't need to know philosophy or history to be a good engineer, you may find yourself at a disadvantage when dealing with today's complicated techno-socio-political issues. I would hate to live in a world where engineers did not stop to consider their work in a philosophical and historical context.

Sure, you could study history outside of a college. High school really should teach critical thinking skills. But the reality is that most people would never even get a chance to think critically about topics in the humanities and social sciences if they weren't required to do so by their college's curriculum.

The same goes for requiring humanities students to take introductory courses in math and science. Honestly, every college student should also be required to take a course in practical computer use unless they can demonstrate that they already know the stuff.

EDIT Clarification: There are plenty of other reasons to advocate a reconsideration of the value of higher education as a whole, but a poorly designed curriculum isn't the most important reason. That one can be fixed without ditching the college altogether.
I imagine that blogs acting as curators would pop up, recommending sets of short stories to purchase together. Odds are that they wouldn't cost any more than a collection does now.
This has piqued my interest. What specific research are you referring to?
Buy that same logic we should sell people unlimited electricity plans, and see what that does to electric companies when people stop fretting about each and every milliwatt of power they are using.

The problem is that when customers stop caring about how many watts of power they are using and start purchasing products made by manufacturers that no longer are serving a market that has any notion of efficient power consumption you will get the exact same situation that is happening with mobile data.

Specifically, products that use an immense amount of power for a killer feature (such as electric cars; analog being gigabytes/day data usage for things like Netflix) will start proliferating, increasing the average power usage of each person above the floor used to calculate the cost of the unlimited plan.

In that situation, it is fairly obvious that the power company is then going to have to change their rate scheme, as otherwise they are just subsidizing electric cars: neither the users nor the electric car companies (again, Netflix) are otherwise paying for the increased societal power usage.

The temporary initial reaction will then simply be to ban electric cars from the power grid (as happened with Netflix: did not work over 3G due to the bandwidth cost) while the rates are restructured, a return-to-sanity would occur where unlimited plans are dropped, which then will allow those high-power-using products to actually be distributed to users.

The whole while, of course, people will be whining on forums about how power companies have already laid out the cable, and how the marginal cost of power is effectively zero at some points during the day, and how unfair it was for the power companies to take away the unlimited plans; and, when a representative from the power company points out that it was a mistake, he will be lambasted.
I disagree.

The point is to always be strategic about why you want press and what you hope it will achieve. For some companies, TC is very relevant for acquiring customers. For others, it serves as validation for prospective investors and employees.

If, say, you're a women's fashion app, we would probably reach a small subset of your target market and it would probably be smart to have a broader strategy that reaches powerful fashion blogs.
> Shipper: Hmmm. I don't think that list is valid...
> Google: Good. So your program will have to detect that.

Your program might receive bad input, and it's your responsibility to output an error code if so.
Just finished watching that. He's surprisingly down-to-earth. And holy smoke, from 7:20-8:15 he precisely predicts an Instagram!
"I think the worst of it was Naggum's utter conviction of his own moral superiority... at the same time he was gleefully dumping shit on others."

You act as though he named people and dumped shit on them. He didn't. And data formats are not a "moral" issue.

The people who feel offended by this guy are clearly insecure as hell.
Quite a few years ago, I setup tc to do a bit of traffic shaping on my home network. Instead of having a standard router, I have a Linux box with two network cards using iptables to do NAT. I connect my cable modem to one of the network cards and then I connect my home network to the other.

Way back, I found I had two problems - if I was doing something that did a lot of uploading (eg seeding a torrent), my download speed would tank because the tcp/ip packets were bogged down in the upload queue.

I also like to be able to ssh into my machine while away from home, and if I did that while uploads were going on, the ssh terminal was basically unusable.

Back then I discovered tc - it was able to make TCP control packets (ack's etc) and ssh related packets jump to the head of the queue, and the other upload stuff have a lower priority.

Looking back at the script I created now, I don't really understand what it is doing, but it remember it worked. I still run it today and just take it for granted.

I tested it by start a large upload while ssh'ed into the box from the internet - I turned off the tc rules and the terminal became unusably laggy, and then I turned the rules on and it worked perfectly.
עדשות צילום | zoomi
In order to implement this, the portion of the
stack that is unwound would have to be saved
somewhere and when the recover is executed, the
stack would have to be unwound back to the try
again, the saved portion of the stack would have
to be "repushed" and execution would resume.

Which is precisely what continuations do. Not exactly an unsolved problem, and pretty much the reason why you can implement this in Lisp with call/cc.

On the code end, how would the exception code know
what failed and what to twiddle to fix things?

That's a more interesting question, but it's at least partially answered by "what does a normal catch block do?" Presumably, exceptions contain some information about what they are and why they happened.
Hey thanks much! I didn't expect someone from TC itself to be commenting. Will make sure my CEO reads your comments.
You're correct, but book publishers aren't used to thinking in those terms. Traditionally, the job results in a static lump of ink on paper. Game over: you sell it, you're done. In some fields it's a little different; text book publishers expect to issue new editions, for example. But those new editions are de facto different books, re-written and re-edited and re-typeset from scratch.

Newspapers and magazines need CMSs because they may need to pull or revise stories. Novels ... not so much. Yes, it's good to fix typos. In the world of paper publishing the author gets just one shot at that: the book goes back to be re-flowed for a different page size when it goes from hardcover into A-format paperback, and there's an opportunity to fix snags.

This is, obviously, going to change. In fact, I expect the bigger publishers to wake up real soon now and realize that not only do they have to do e-pub related things like drop DRM and fix the broken territorial rights problem, they also need to do internal process-related things -- like set up a CMS, in-source their typesetting, and modify their workflow to allow updates to existing-and-out-there books, rather than viewing the books as a terminal state at the end of a production process.

(Reasons why it should change? Well, for one thing it makes possible the issue of "director's cut" versions of a book. Yes, crass commercialism. But it also makes it possible to retarget books on a different audience. It makes it possible to rebundle in-series books in an omnibus edition. It makes it easier for the publisher to directly issue extracts from the book via their website, for promo purposes. Once layout/typesetting stops being a single step and becomes an ongoing process, there's every reason for in-housing it. And that, in turn, will require revision control and archival functions that publishers are currently unfamiliar with.)
Yes but they do vary in how they catch up with the developed world levels of compensation. Warsaw developer here - the IT job market here definitely feels the effects of the UK opening their market, not to mention local hiring by companies like Google (they have offices in Cracow & the more recently opened in Warsaw.) Curiously, not a lot of people seem to leave for greener pastures in Germany.
Does anybody recommend a CSS-optimizer that takes into account these suggestions? I'd love to plug a page into one and get some suggestions.
> Why am I required to finance an entire degree only to be forced to take courses that I do not value?

One guess is that a reason employers value degrees is precisely because it indicates a willingness/ability to successfully complete tasks that you might not personally value, but which are required in your institutional role. After all, corporations are institutions that plan to require you to do things if they hire you, some of which you might not value.

A somewhat less meta answer is that employers trust standard curricula enough to not be interested in doing case-by-case evaluation of alternatives. So if one person has a "4-year accredited electrical engineering degree", and another person has passed a selection of EE courses they chose themselves, the company will probably prefer the 1st. Evaluating the 2nd candidate requires the company to decide whether that selection of courses constitutes a good EE curriculum (versus, for example, the student having avoided all the hard or math-heavy courses), and most companies don't know or want to know how to evaluate student-customized curricula on a case-by-case basis.
Yep, this is very good advice -- especially the last bit. An intro from an entrepreneur we know already, or a respectable VC, is the best way to grab our attention for a closer look.
Stop another SOPA. Get money out of politics.
He didn't say he was tired of talking. He said he was tired of REPEATING.

If one is too tired to read, one should be too tired to comment on the reading material.