skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Building the ultimate Student Toolbox using HTML5
www.schoolnotez.com

I would appreciate feedback from students or teachers on HN, or anyone interested in EdTech.

It is a digital notebook where all the Apps a student needs to do school work is integrated:

Graphing Calculator

Diagramming

Flow charts

ER diagrams...etc

*Virtual Labs to teach science and mathematics

There are currently some sample simulations, more to come.
OpenDNS still has the site categorized in: Nudity, Pornography
Heads of State and Maze featuring Frankie Beverly – A concert you CAN’T miss
Regarding #18, how come nobody's called CPS?
Pretty strong parallels here with his article about "schlep blindness".

Specifically: " Drew Houston realizes he's forgotten his USB stick and thinks "I really need to make my files live online." Lots of people heard about the Altair. Lots forgot USB sticks. The reason those stimuli caused those founders to start companies was that their experiences had prepared them to notice the opportunities they represented."

Also the section about "wells" and attacking a problem at least some people care deeply about, instead of a shallow 'hole' is one that has just allowed me to clarify and refine some of my thoughts and ideas about where I'm at right now.

This was a massive help.

Thanks for the great article pg.
I don't know where to put this observation, but here it goes.

I got a chance to play with a Surface last weekend. The very first thing I noticed was the placement of the "home" button. I guess it might be called the Start button? No matter. It was located along the long edge of the device, as opposed to the short edge, which was really odd.

At first, I thought this was because the device is meant to be used horizontally with a keyboard attached to it, so having the button closer to the keyboard makes it more accessible. But then I realized this is unlikely to be the case, because the keyboard already has a (much more) accessible Start button! Which leaves the button on the device useless, because even when you're holding it in your hands, your thumbs are too short to reach it.

It's little details like this that killed the experience for me. It confirmed my suspicion that Microsoft does not understand user experience.
OSX Diff/Merge tool for text and images
The problem here is that "his" name is also a common verb in the English language that means "to raise something for discussion".

I'm not sure he should get to prevent any discussion forum software from using that word, or the clever dns hack moot.it to advertise said software that lets you "discuss it", because he happened to choose a common-ish verb as a screen name, years ago.
Do you expect only astronauts to speak about travelling to other planets? Be real. I've been to as many different countries and places on Earth as I can afford (on the order of maybe 15 or so). Regardless, obviously when it comes to space exploration I have little to no experience (I have been through many interviews at SpaceX but do not yet have a job there). Shouldn't we be encouraging people to speculate about profit in the planets and the stars, rather than belittling them with the idea that we are "armchair warrior"s?

As for scientific exploration: I have collected more than ten million individual measurements of atmospheric pressure across the whole globe over the last year. I intend to use this data to learn more about short-term weather patterns and to generally improve humanity's understanding of the atmosphere.

So there's some physical exploration of Earth in my past, and some scientific exploration of Earth in my present, while working my ass off to attain the goal of space exploration in my future.

Call me what you like, I guess.
The watch that shut down Oakland airport the other day
They are not really an organization. For all we know they are Hamas people calling themselves Anonymous.
TenthBit Inc., makers of Pair (YC W12) is hiring Android and iOS Engineers in SF
I would assume that air traffic control is similar to ground control for the purposes of this analogy. Does that 35% number take into account the costs of air traffic control? I'm assuming that the airport (and not the airlines) covers those costs.
Fiscal Clff Inches Closer . . .
Having exited earlier this year from the start up I co-founded, I've been thinking a lot about this lately as I weigh up what to do next. We arrived at our start-up idea 10 years ago in much the way pg says you should, which was more by accident and serendipity more than anything else. So, I can vouch for the veracity of his advice.

I came across the following quote by William S. Burroughs recently:

Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.

Replace "Happiness" with "a start-up idea", and I think you get what pg is getting at:

A Start-up idea is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek a start-up idea for itself seek victory without war.

I also came across a great post on the relationship between serendipity and success, and is it well worth the read: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/10/when_success_is_born_out_of_...

I especially enjoyed this bit:

Our mind abhors these serendipitous explanations, and searches for convenient patterns instead. Ask for the keys to career success and you'll get logical explanations, recommendations, pathways and approaches. Then ask someone how he or she became successful and suddenly it becomes a story of serendipitous encounters, unexpected changes in plans, and random consequences. It does not make sense to ignore this basic fact about success any longer.
21st Century Shop Class « Otherlab's MENTOR News
I have read those same arguments over and over.

Just because generics do not come up as often does not mean they won't make programs safer and/or faster. Almost all of the workarounds I have seen for the lack of generics can easily be applied to Java for instance.

There were several questions that came up on the Go mailing list asking how to convert certain code to make it more "idiomatic". The resulting code had several layers of indirection, interfaces composed of interfaces, and so on, that ironically it would have looked much more concise, and would have been type safe in a more "traditional OO" language like Java.
I can see why TSA would have been concerned.
Hi Brandon! I am also in high school (currently a sophomore). Personally, I would suggest two main things.

1. Just build something. You said you were using Django. Find an idea, and build it! You will learn a lot as you build it.
2. Udacity. I found the Udacity online courses to be amazing! They are very helpful (I took Web Development (CS253) taught by Steve Huffman)!
I like this idea a lot. Not just because robots could go berserk, especially more intelligent robots in the future, but perhaps most importantly because no one could be responsible of what the robot is doing.
"but everything else is expected to re-use the same library of controls and fonts?"

Because when people fire up an application, they're usually trying to get something done; not play Myst with the UI. "Clear" is a great example of what NOT to do. It pointlessly eschews established UI standards that work very well (table views, indentation, disclosure indicators), in favor of invisible gestures and a UI that fails to provide basic information. For example, there's no difference between items and groups of items in the list. Why?

The "skinning" fad died for good reason. It's a pain in the ass to have to go on an Easter-egg hunt for basic controls in one app, let alone EVERY app.

You provided your own answer with the game analogy. A lot of people rate the value of a game by how long it takes to finish. Applications are exactly the opposite.
(IANAL) If your medium is destroyed you still have a licence, but you do not have a medium in which to exercise that licence. You therefore need to buy a new medium. You are prohibited from making a copy of the medium as that would allow you to distribute it which is braking the terms of your licence.
One suggestion: It might be good idea to change your flow so that email is the last think you ask - "and now to get your savings please enter your email".
> the fact that builtin functions have special powers doesn't strike me as particularly unusual. If they didn't I presume they'd just be part of the standard library.

It strikes me that the primary expectation of a built-in function is not having to import anything, and not having to namespace-qualify it on use. It circumventing the type system IS a surprise. In Go, I believe not only generic-ness appears, but also overloading.

Go as a complete package is very cool, though! I think the reason its warts get brought up disproportionately often is a reaction to its evangelists going a bit overboard in claims of simplicity/orthogonality.
Provided that it is true
"Another problem is that the clients are really interested in our specific experience: that means they want to work with me or my partner, not with the company. This bit is hard to crack."

You certainly have a lot more business experience than I do - however I've been working recently on preparing a lots of tender responses. I work at a software consulting firm, with about 10 devs and 20 GIS analysts.

In our tender responses we include the resumes of the people who will be working on the project as an appendix right at the back. At the front we have a section with our 'relevant experience'. In the 'relevant experience section' we NEVER mention which person worked on a specific project. Its always termed as "XYZ corp developed an app to ... " or "XYZ corp worked with ABC inc to ..."

I guess it comes down to a metal shift in always describing things your company has achieved, instead of things you as an individual have done.
A perfect way to bring the hardware innovation wave into the education. Makerbot should be looking into Education sales and training for a next gen shop class.
Also do research your registrar, and transfer out at the first sign of trouble. I had an important (for me) domain at RegisterFly [1]. Took some time to reclaim it after it had been transfered to Enom. Currently moving other domains godaddy -> gandi.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registerfly
Russia Demands Internet Takeover By The UN, And Then Retracts It
> Everyone has it's own way, just because one does things differently and not your way doesn't mean it's wrong.

Did you read the article? That was exactly his point.
The problem with the touchpad is suppose I want to scroll. I have to carefully position the mouse over the scroll bar.

No, you drag two fingers up or down, with the cursor anywhere in the area you want to scroll. Recent versions of OS X don't even show scrollbars unless you put two fingers on the touchpad.
PHP is weak for long running back-end services.
So something that worked for me when I was starting out was to reverse engineer an existing Opensource project or maybe even look at their buglist. IMO reading code and figuring out the intuition behind it is almost half the battle. You may also want to pick up some engineering/algorithms/computer science books to get the underlying (and almost universally) applicable concepts.

Coursera is a good place to start.
So are "apple", "time" and "caterpillar", yet they are all federally registered trademarks whose holders have successfully prosecuted others for their use. Being a common word is not an absolute barrier to trademark protection.
What? Not having your company's stock perform as well as you wish (or what the recruiter told you, which everyone takes with a grain of salt anyways) is nowhere near examples see in that court filing. Not remotely close. Putting what looks to be serious abuse in the workplace alongside stock underperformance as "issues" is absurdly disingenuous.

I know plenty of folks who work at a wide variety of companies in the Bay Area and have heard of nothing remotely as crazy as what is being reported at Color, so yes, I do believe this sort of thing is relatively isolated.
Yup, if someone threatens to sue you for bullshit, you can sue them, in your own jurisdiction, for declaratory judgement. That way you can save yourself from getting embroiled in a multi-year bullshit case in someone else's jurisdiction, and get a quicker ruling (declaratory judgement) that the threat is indeed bullshit.
Eh…wut?

Custom UI is common in most apps - this isn't a bootstrapped app or something quick and dirty. Why would they use the default/built-in/native UI design?

Now, if you meant it's foreign because of the design style, then you may have a point. iOS apps tend to designed with elements such as textures, gradients, drop shadows, inner glow/shadow etc. While Android tends to be flat and borderless.

There were parts where it definitely felt Android/Flat (icons), other parts felt iOSish (buttons).

The custom alerts were definitely a nice touch - don't see alot of apps with custom alerts. I didn't mind them - but some may not find it as impactful as a 'real' alert (it's like a warning usually comes in red, but it's now in blue. Just doesn't carry the same weight/feeling.)
Are you talking about local clients, or do you have to take on international clients?
The thing that annoyed me most in this article was the author's insistence that the aspect ratio of the Surface was in some way weird or unusable. The iPad is 4:3 but almost every other tablet is 16:9 (or close to it). I have an Asus Transformer and I prefer the aspect ratio, it allows me to use landscape when browsing the web or watching to get a full view and then portrait when I am reading long-form text to avoid excessive scrolling. This is a case of "I'm not used to it and therefore I hate it"
in this case, though, it's not immediately obvious it's bullshit... imho
Did I say Gnome? Most Linux users know this. KDE, XFCE, LXCE are what you want if you need customisable UI.
More proof that charismatic CEOs with Narcissistic Personality Disorder are bad for business. Don't be blinded by charisma.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/01/11/why-narci...
A number of buddhist sects/schools hold no belief in any god... It is a religion, they are not irrational. It is a major religion.

> And as for educated. Perhaps there isn't a conclusive study on the subject, but it is safe to say that the more educated you are, the less likely you are to be religious, particularly fundamental. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_and_intelligence

Correlation or causation? I don't really have time to read through all the studies, but St Thomas Aquinas is a good counter example of that premise, very analytical, very religious...
So is "Apple"
Over water seems rather reasonable considering what we can do with cable laying ships.

Whatever method is used to get it up in the air, it'll need to be safely reversible. Over water bringing it down is much easier. And you'll have to bring it down for repairs. Every five minutes it will do a full loop.. Iron is fairly ductile, but those stresses will add up. And wikipedia says the kinetic energy involved is close to a small nuclear bomb. Back of the envelope math suggests the iron cylinder would be very thin. It will wear out sooner or later.

My guess is that Musk's big breakthrough is for a cheap and reversible deployment system.

I'm double checking my numbers now (and reading the original papers) but the entire contraption might weight a lot less than we are implicitly assuming. Like, light enough that a single large plane/blimp could support the entire cable/sheath system. And a small fleet of planes could safely tow the cable through the sky. Or a fleet of blimps could support the entire cable while it was stopped for maintenance. (Both would need a large number of well trained pilots, it would make the skycrane maneuver look simple.)

edit: The original paper talks about a ribbon 5cm wide and 7.6mm thick weighing 15.6 Gg. I dropped a kilo in the back of the envelope calculations. So it would need at least 100 very large aircraft to hold up. Still feasible, but more than a little crazy.
> Finally, null pointer dereference does not cause undefined behaviour, as in C, C++. Go will panic (and you can safely recover). I'm not convinced that removing null pointers will eliminate the cause of these bugs. I think the idea of "failing fast" would help diagnose bugs much faster - although I see reasons for disagreeing.

Dereferencing nulls in Java is not undefined either, so what? And the notion of 'failing fast' is exactly why null pointers should be modeled in the type system. What faster way to catch bugs than at compile time? Furthermore, how do you know you will quickly hit a NPE in you code at runtime, if it happens to be in a code path that is infrequently accessed? Ironically in the OSCON talk mentioned in another comment here, Pike mentions that dynamic typing is pushing some compile time errors into runtime, which is exactly what is happening here.
but is 'moot' trademarked?
Wait, a broadcaster on HN? We should be friends. I'm @randallb on twitter... run http://vidpresso.com/. We'd give you a discount just because you're on HN.
Samsung phones come with a custom Samsung app store already. It's just as terrible as you'd expect it to be.
Tips and tricks when learning a new technology
Well put, it's a 100% user driven service, and has been historically friendly to developers. While the later point may be shifting, they can never lose site of their content creators value, and have to actively listen and work with them in order to make their publishing as easy as possible. I think that makes sense of their recent purchase of Vine, a beautifully crafted service on the twitter platform.
As someone who's heard the name "moot", I would have (prior to reading this article, which shows otherwise) assumed that a service named "moot.it" offering discussion forums is associated with Moot/Chris Poole.

Preventing this kind of confusion is the entire point of Trademark law, and whether the company's name did this intentionally or not, I think Moot has a reasonable cause for concern and case.
The Longest Word in the English Language
Freelancer is a solid choice for individuals, but if you're company is paying for it, the New York plans are surprisingly comprehensive. Nice to see the city supporting entrepreneurs like this!
Is LinkedIn Too Stuffy?
Either side can produce the evidence, weigh each other's evidence, make their arguments before the court, and ultimately the court makes a decision.... or they decide they're both fucked in certain ways and settle. the way it works, either side can try to make their case... in principle makes sense, the only problem is it takes a lot of time.
You don't necessarily need to register a trademark in order to defend it (although you do need to defend it once it's registered unless you want to risk using it).

From Wikipedia:

> In the United States, neither federal nor state registration is required to obtain rights in a trademark. An unregistered mark may still receive common law trademark rights. Those rights, for example, may extend to its area of influence—usually delineated by geography. As such, multiple parties may simultaneously use a mark throughout the country or even state. An unregistered mark may also be protected under the federal "Lanham Act" (15 USC § 1125) prohibition against commercial misrepresentation of source or origins of goods. Unregistered marks are also protectable in the United States under Lanham Act §43(a).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unregistered_trade_mark
Firm legal standing or not, getting confused with 4chan probably isn't a good idea for any startup. IMO the largest worry for Moot.it is risking some sort of retaliation from 4chan's user base. They are excellent at shitting things up.
I was talking about pictograms replacing labels. You're talking about application icons, which are essentially branding.

I don't get why you're mixing the two matters.
Why can't downloaded Wii apps work like iPhone apps? I've never had an issue transferring those to a new device.
I think it's the entrepreneurial bias speaking here, but I've been talking with my officemates about building a social network for startups to source talent and share resources. I'd love to have HN's thoughts!
Kind of like a 43Things...

I didn't want to start off with a criticism, but last thing I want to do is create an account anywhere before I'm sold on the concept. I like to look around, but these walled-garden type apps make that difficult to do. So I rarely sign up.

You should be able to get some use out of an application (such as this) even from a logged out perspective. As an example, Last.FM lets you browse and view a lot without logging in. I can find similar artists, read bios etc...

If I could see peoples goals, and sort of explore the site first, it might be a bit more compelling...
Although the attitude is starting to show a chance of waning, the truth is that software is simply not valued over hardware.
Windows Users Plan To Switch To Apple - Business Insider
Makes me sad to read this-- my mother was a devoted 'BAI listener waaaaaaay back in the 60s and 70s so it was a part of my childhood. I knew there have been various scandals and woes over the years. Sigh...
I was wondering the same thing. Maybe she means 5B? Although most valuations of SpaceX are not that high (definitely will be soon) and I'm not sure about Solar City...
Does that pre-date the (ancient) greeks? Plato and Aristotle had a lot to say about 'freedom'. When I say 'Western' I mean them, given our whole way of thinking (philosophy) and problem solving (scientific method) was defined by them.

From my brief look, Hinduism and the Ancient greeks started talking about Freedom (and freedom of speech) at around the same time (~400BCE).
Why was BritRuby cancelled?
Samsung has its own app store. It's popularity is so high that apparently no one on HN knew it existed (despite being shipped on every Android phone Samsung makes).

I've tried it - it is annoying and doesn't work very well. Samsung can't do good software - their best decision every was to align with someone who can.
Well "investors" probably don't care much about what happens after a part of their portfolio gets a "big exit" since that's the end goal. :(
Starting a startup probably isn't financially feasible at this time, but I otherwise agree that joining a startup, or relatively small company would be best for me. There's probably a megacorp out there that would be good for me, but the ones that I'm willing to work at are the Googles of the world, and those aren't in Austin, which is where I live.
I'm no TSA apologist, and anyone who knows me knows my dislike for not only the TSA but the bizarre and fluid rules and policies that they inconsistently enforce. But everyone knows the TSA exists and their collective lack of sensibility is pretty well-understood by the traveling public (or at least well-documented in the media.)

Can you, as an artist, seriously look at something like that and think "that'll get through the TSA no problem, I think I'll wear it to the airport"?

Yes, I know that we shouldn't have to alter our lifestyles even in the slightest to kowtow the the TSA, it's a matter of personal freedom to wear clothing of your stylistic choices, but even still, my gast is flabbered.

You wear something like that through the TSA, they're going to give you a hard time about it, up to and including throwing you in jail because they're not smart enough to understand logic or reason. If you want to do that, and knowingly expect the consequences of dealing with a knee-jerk government security force, that's fine too.

But is there anyone who's been through a US airport in the last oh, 11 years or so, that truly thinks something like that will just skate through the TSA without issue?
Ask HN/PG: What causes this sudden drop-off behaviour on HN submissions?
I actually think 4chaners might react against Christopher/moot. Anon stands very specifically for complete and total freedom of speech. Saying "whatever the fuck you want" is more important to anon than protecting some imaginary trademark moot thinks he has.