skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In 1882, fifth graders read these authors in their Appleton School Reader: William Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Bunyan, Daniel Webster, Samuel Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others like them.

Since you are connected to teaching home schooling can you tell me why we don't teach like the above now? I read George Orwells Politics and the English Language and really enjoyed it. I don't see why I wasn't given that essay and a copy of Elements of Style then told to write. With enough practice I expect anyone would write well.

So, is there a reason school is not taught in the old way? [edit: That is, is there any reason to believe that any of the people who influence state curriculum just want "to produce docile factory workers"?]
How do you calculate the value of Facebook and ChuWe?
I don't know how I feel about this. It's my favorite book, and I've read it many times, but I feel like it's something that either means a lot to you or means nothing. It doesn't translate very well beyond how you personally take it, and I'm afraid of flamewars breaking out over the content, which can have no winner. Or the studios missing the point to make it more mainstream. I also just have a very good internal idea of what it looks like, and I'm somewhat afraid of it being ruined by a movie which misses the mark, but that's remedied easily enough by me not seeing it.

Atlas Shrugged is a powerful book, but the arguments it makes highlight fundamental disagreements between sections of society. We'll do as we will, and others will do likewise. Bringing it to a national stage I don't think would cause many to go "Oh! I get it now!". At worst, it could cause sentiment to turn against entrepreneurs given the current political climate, casting them as arrogant and malicious towards the rest of society. Not that popular opinion should influence the entrepreneurs, though.
In the US at least Speech-Language pathology tends to be a very over crowded program so schools have little incentive to give scholarships or financial aid.
"the US having an appalling infant mortality rate" do you have any sources? or more specifically articles or papers researching the cause of this high infant mortality rate?
What's with the picture of Barney Frank?

I thought this was an April fool's joke, but IMDB has a page for it and a quick Google search does turn up articles from 2006 mentioned Jolie being attached at one point.
I was talking about the future rounds.

Why don't you be the first one to offer term-sheets?
Boxee including XULRunner isn't circumventing any "encryption". Boxee is then a browser which works on your TV. I'm guessing the content providers for Hulu don't know that you can use your TV as a monitor for your computer yet either.

Also, I never heard of JavaScript source code that is meant to be eval'd qualifying as "encryption". At best you can call it obfuscation.

document.documentElement.appendChild(document.createTextNode("omfg this is encrypted!!1!!!! DON'T TRY TO CIRCUMVENT"))
They can reasonably say they were referring to the casual meaning of the term and not accusing the GS guys of showing up at their office and making a coy speech about how "accidents" and "fires" can just happen.
I'm a big proponent of this; I guess because it's worked well for me. You can get spectacular results for much less, but you have to know what to watch out for.

For example, you should have (at least) one person in the off-site location who really 'gets' what you're doing. This person should be the CTO/Architect, if possible. Development should be agile. You need to know if it's ever going off-course as soon as possible. Communication can't be understated; have daily scrums, for example.

There's a lot more. Feel free to write me. My email is in my profile.
Tapbots: Designing Convertbot (iPhone App)
Don't worry about it, Atlas Shrugged is never going to get made. 35 years and counting kind of testifies to that effect.

Angelina Jolie was cast, but she got pregnant and left the project with all the prospect of it ever being made.
Are there any stats on if more people get accepted on Day 1 or Day 2 or Day 3, in the mornings, afternoon's or in the evenings?

For startups that were accepted, if the startups that interviewed prior and/or after were accepted?
This still seems pretty counter-intuitive to me. I would think that large businesses would be preferred over smaller ones in a down economy, because clients/customers would be worried that small shops could go under. Likewise, larger businesses would feel a greater urgency to spend more personal time with clients/customers to avoid losing them.
My fanboyish love for Tesla Motors aside, I found this quote the most interesting part of that link:

"I can say that the second model will be a sporty four door family car at roughly half the $89k price point of the Tesla Roadster and the third model will be even more affordable."

The Roadster, last I checked, retails for $109,000 and qualifies you for a $7,500 tax credit. We'll see if they can hit their target of $57,000 for the Model S.
How about rather then at installation time, but the first time someone queries for the floppy drive? Every time you boot it will always spin the drive the first time, but not after that. That seems much better then always spinning up the drive.
How to Start, and Close, an Angel Round (from Travis Kalanick)
They can, if they respond to those complaints/support requests in a timely manner.

The only way GS makes sense is if you've tried to contact a company in order to register a complaint and were not successful:

1) You got a generic e-mail back, knowing that your issue will never be looked at.

2) The company does not have any sort of contact information available on their site.

If users of GS register complaints there, GS should forward those complaints to the company in question. That makes sense to me. If GS does not do that, then that's a problem.

However, that does not mean that you can air your grievance with them publicly until all other means have failed. It's logical, no?
Well, people who interview when there's a full moon tend to get in, but of course it all depends on what pg had for breakfast that particular day.

Joking aside, it's probably best not to publish that kind of thing so that people inadvertently worry about something they can't control. The only reason to do those sorts of stats might be for pg & co. to check and make sure they don't have some sort of biases, but it doesn't seem likely.
That is a cogent and lucid argument and I completely understand your point of view and agree with it.

If your original comment had resembled your above statement, I would have up-voted you and given you kudos!
Not to mention that they were Microsoft in the days of Windows95. If anyone could get floppy manufacture's to standardize they could.
Very interesting proposal here... though I think having the consumer do an http request to get the "link" from HEAD is a bit too much to ask, for a few reasons:

* It takes bandwidth

* It's (presumably) before a pageload, and is blocking...
the latency to load the original URL to get the "link" gets added to the consumer's pageload time.

* Now you have to deal with "timeouts"

Ideally, "link" should be used by the browser, and not the web service. By the way, other such auto-discovery systems are OpenSearch (first proposed by Amazon, and is pretty widely adopted) and FavIcon.

At any rate, I think tinyurl, and bit.ly, etc, are a pretty fast and easy solution at this point. They should improve their services by including a "title" attribute to the link they give you, which says the URL and/or page title it's going to.
Expect "Sexy Top 10 Lists' to dominate Digg/Reddit for the next few weeks.
Hopefully there's little to no bias based on scheduling, but even if there was, publishing the statistics would only exacerbate the problem.

Not only would PG et al be thinking about this while the interviewed people ("This doesn't really seem interesting, but is that just because they're the 18th pitch today?"), but it would also distract the startups, when all they should be focusing on showing YC how awesome they are.

As far as I can tell, the people at YCombinator are extremely qualified to pick the best companies out of the group, and they generally do a pretty great job of it.
Agreed 100%. I love the book, but I can't see how it could possible be turned into a good movie. I almost don't want the movie to be made at all...if it's not done well it'll just convince people the book isn't worth reading.

Some things just don't translate well. I also love the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the movie was painfully bad.
It's been going for over 35 years, Jolie was cast but in 2008 got pregnant and the project is dead again. I personally hope it stays dead, the last thing we need is something else promoting government inaction, which gave us this problem in the first place.

The main reason the financial crisis happened was pure greed and the reason people got away with being so greedy was because they were allowed to. Umm... what's that thing called where companies are allowed to do absolutely whatever they want even in complete disregard of even their own long-term survival... oh yeah aggressive-free-market capitalism, just what Ayn Rand wanted.

I hope Ayn Rand's work is dead and gone so that at least my generation isn't going to suffer the complete stupidity. I'm 21 and I've already been through two large recessions thanks to the US, coming from the UK I hope to sweet god that America stops following moronic policies and starts towing the line with the rest of the world.

Quite honestly, if there's a 3rd economic recession because of the US, I'm going to start voting for the people trying to ban international trade with the US, at least then the US can kill itself without ruining everyone else's country too.
Thank God. If this had happened to me, I'd have no recourse. Keep in mind, even a public flogging didn't work for GS. This is the second post. Will this work? We'll see.
You mean right after they compared them to a mafioso protection scheme?

Amusingly, if you click on the wikipedia link above, and follow the reference to the bit on per se defamation, the example given is claiming that someone extorted money that did not.
From the article:

"You can't just try to figure out what type of drive the user has by comparing the clever technique against the boring "turn on the floppy drive light and make grinding noises" technique, at least not without displaying a warning to the user that you're about to do this—users tend to freak out when the floppy drive light turns on for no apparent reason."

What they should have done is wait for the disk to be used for some other reason, and then test it, and record the results. Just in case the drive changed, then after every reboot verify that it still makes sense.
It probably wouldn't cure the problem. The others would just move their dates even earlier.
For an alternative idea on this, this is what helped me:
http://www.rsi.deas.harvard.edu/handout.doc

That's a Word doc, you can view the Google cache for HTML:
http://74.125.93.104/search?q=cache:6ZpktcdKS0kJ:www.rsi.dea...

That's just a short overview of the ideas, but reading the book "The Mindbody Prescription" by Dr John E Sarno is what "cured" me of what I thought was RSI. I recommend that anyone who thinks they have carpel tunnel syndrome or "RSI" read that book.
Dissent Is Dead At Facebook, Employees Complain
Nice idea, I'll try it out for some new features of our site. Constraint are your friend even artificial ones.
Coming from Europe and suffering two recessions caused by US economics, all which Ayn Rand promoted I hope this crap never gets turned into a film.

The economy grows at a fair rate on average, yet Rand's aggressive-free-market capitalism basically promotes trying to grow the economy at 5000% until pop and everyone who doesn't have $500 million in the bank gets screwed over. I'm sorry, but when someone gets fired and then handed a $150 million check for losing their job, I think capitalism flat out sucks.

All the CEO's who've been fired have lost their jobs for a reason: bad business. Yet they're rewarded with more money than an average person would make in a millennium. Yet if I lost my job, I'd be given nothing.
I definitely felt a hierarchy. The R68-type[1] trains always had some seats fill faster than others.

For instance, the three seats lining the wall (see diagram), with the two seats perpendicular to the direction of travel always had the seat 3 fill faster than others (It's next to a window, has guaranteed leg space and you can put your feet on the radiator; it's pretty awesome). Seat 4 gets filled later since you have more leg space and can avoid person in seat 3 more effectively if you don't know them. Seats 0-2 have the potential to be squeezed awfully close to a stranger. Even closer if the train is operating is moving unpredictably.

[0][1][2]..[3].
...........[4].

The pairs of seats on the edges of the train are nice if you have a bike or with 1 or 3 friends since you can take up that section of the train, be separated from everyone else, or lean on the wall to nap or rest.

Also, the side of the train that was closer to the side with majority of stations tended to be more popular.

And this post just went into way more detail than it had to.

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/98/R68_Interior.j...
Gmail search made easier (and lazier)
Wouldn't it help applicants in the future, if the current round of folks that applied to multiple programs to list:

1. The last day to accept for a particular program

2. The ones that offer exploding termsheets
Well I suppose it is possible that it just fell through the cracks. And it is indeed a valuable scientific gem just wanting to be rediscovered.

Or it could be a website writing an article that just makes it look like that way in order to attract a lot of page views.

I'm afraid I have no hard evidence either way, only the soft suspicion it's the latter.
I appreciate your correction. I value the more wordy opinions on HN, short ones tend to remind me of reddit, and I strive to stay away from pithy posts.
One application of this I can see is to create a page like this to understand what sites your company's (or country's) firewall / proxy might be blocking.
Hm. I liked this.
You really should not look that far into it. They will choose good teams and ideas above anything else.
> My point is I seriously doubt Scala is much better at scaling than Ruby

I spoke with some people at Twitter the other day. They said that they were switching to Scala just to annoy alecco on Hacker News. The performance and scaling advantages are entirely negligible.
A 2009 response to Clay Shirky's 2005 essay "Ontology is Overrated"
The rationale given in the article was that a drive starting up with no obvious cue by the user would lead to confusion or concern on the user's part. Back then, before the widespread availability of the 'Net, users would probably think a "boot block" virus was attacking their system or some other scary scenario was happening.

Of course, I was a Mac-only user back then, so we had auto-detect (and auto-eject!) drives and learned to take them for granted. Part of me thinks the historical suckiness of DOS/Windows is less the fault of Microsoft and more the fault of the IT community of that era, who were tone deaf regarding end user satisfaction and empowerment.

(Even now, using Windows machines at work make me feel constrained compared to the relative freedom to do what I wanted with my classic era Macs. Sadly, since OS X, Macs have started to feel less "free" but I'm starting to digress too far afield now...)
Except that while tokenadult suggested it might not have been reproduced, he didn't actually say that it wasn't.

It's too bad failed results are reported so rarely. We need a journal of failed experiments.
An application of this we can all relate to:

"Not all stalls (bathroom) are created equal"
2. Is this generally known in advance? I'm under the impression that exploding termsheets appear on a company-to-company basis.
Unless you have your requirements down to the smallest detail, which is rare, it will probably cost you a lot more to have developers spread out in different parts of the country. You are at a phase where you want rapid prototyping to discover what your real requirements are. Outsouring at this stage is a bad idea.
Bacteria don't actually hurt the teeth directly - they just sit there and they make an acid that can etch the teeth, but if the teeth are strong they resist the acid, plus repair any areas that are eroded.

Also saliva contains immune components that can stop the bacteria. Bacteria may be the final component, but the causes of decay lie elsewhere.

It's not really an infection either, anymore than the gazillions of bacteria living on skin are.
Everyone who I know that's read Atlas Shrugged (including myself) turned into a selfish jerk for at least a month after reading it. God help us if the "Ayn Rand temporary jerk phenomenon" is unleashed through movie theaters all at once.

It's a good book but like anything else people extrapolate the points beyond recognition and additionally interpret it to re-enforce their own views, regardless of how unreasonable those views might be.
Only Ten Years Too Early
This guy is autistic.
DiggBar Launches Today
"According to the company's recent filing with the SEC, Rosetta plans to grow its business with new types of Web-based language instruction services."

Hopefully a good mobile application for Blackberry/android/iphone is a part of that. I used the desktop app for a while and felt it was a pretty good way to casually pick up a language (when paired with a dictionary and some grammar/theory books), but gave it up. I have a 40min commute each way 5 days a week, and would gladly use a mobile app if they had one.
Another test is to try to show hidden/system folders on a Windows machine.

If you can't, the PC's infected.
Scribd (and the 'Easy PDF' spam links on each page of this PDF-ication of HTML) is subtracting value here.

If the canonical version of an author's work is already online as HTML, leave it be!
I wonder what would happen if an entire colony suddenly "turned dead".
Cover the basics before you raise capital
I am not, by far, an electrical engineer/scientist, but the inverse square law applies to vacuum. All the details about Tesla using the Earth and the ionosphere as a conductor may have meant that he was trying to solve the power loss problem. Do we have any details on that angle?
> (YC asks people to decide that day whether or not to accept an offer from us, but we do this because at that point they already know all they need to, not to pre-empt other offers. There is no other seed firm that decides after us.)

How is this behavior any different? Offering last is a unique position which allows a group to already know the other options. It's not surprising that other firms also want decisions ASAP - they certainly don't want to be floating long term offers that function as backup plans for the best groups.

If YC wants seed funding to be synchronous like college admissions, then it should make its own process conducive - give time to accept an offer during which groups can interview elsewhere.
I think you're sorely mistaken if you think that the economics of the US are anywhere near what Rand would consider to be Capitalism.

Have you even read her books?
>Coming from Europe and suffering two recessions caused by US economics, all which Ayn Rand promoted I hope this crap never gets turned into a film.

US economics and government policy do not at all resemble the ideas that Ayn Rand promoted. These policies resemble those of Europe much more.

>I'm sorry, but when someone gets fired and then handed a $150 million check for losing their job, I think capitalism flat out sucks.

That is indeed stupid. Companies that enter into contracts with individuals on those terms do deserve to fail
TrailBehind Now Links Thousands of Campgrounds Just Like This One
some context.

The first part regd. time of the day was asked since PG mentioned (not sure if it was an essay or a comment on HN) that he used to get mundane stuff done during the day, and then code from 9 pm to 3 am.

This is not to say, PG ignores the early interviews and kicks it into high gear for the evening ones; just that if you look at the results, are there any insights or patterns.

Re. the 2nd one, look at #9, Cialdini cites the case of the real estate broker.....: http://www.vinvesting.com/docs/munger/human_misjudgement.htm...

I agree that YC should not publish these stats, but if they did learn anything interesting that could be shared with everyone, it would make a good read.
>I hope Ayn Rand's work is dead and gone so that at least my generation isn't going to suffer the complete stupidity.

I think a work of literature that has had such an impact should never be lost or forgotten no matter how much you disagree with the content. Mein Kampf is a great example of this.
I'm a huge fan of Apprentice UK - it's completely different than the U.S. version, much more like the tough-minded and entrepreneurial Dragons' Den.
Start-ups on our Mind
Find out if disk IO is the real bottleneck -- excellent chance that it is, especially if MySQL is also on the same host.

Set 'noatime'. Ensure there's no swapping.

Don't assume more processes improve throughput; they could be worsening things with contention at key places.

In case there are small memory-leaks anywhere in your stack that pile up, set 'MaxRequestsPerThread' to anything other than the default '0' (unlimited).

If you can't separate out static content at least make sure all outgoing headers get maximum browser-side caching on non-volatile resources. You could also add a front-end reverse-proxy-cache, on a tiny host, to get many of the same offload-cost-of-static-content benefits.
We indexed all of the campsites on recreation.gov to the map, and we also indexed 20,000 or so more reports.
If you're referring to the awfully staged CBC show, then yes thank goodness there's a new show in town. It was awful. VC for babies!
Acting as devil's advocate here, there isn't much evidence behind these 'explanations'. It's quite possible that Zuckerberg is loosing his edge, but this article paints him in a way that's damn close to slander.
Putting nginx in front of Apache will also help decouple the Apache backends
from spoon feeding slow clients and idling on keepalive connections. The
overhead of the extra data copies is irrelevant for most cases.
The startups that come out of YC are excellent, and I am not questioning that.
Which suggests an idea: mine news of failures from 10/20 years ago for ideas that might work now.
Oh, so politics is acceptable on HN now?

Well, another site down the drain :/
College grads face worst job market in years
Because the terms and dates are known before people apply.
Michael Crichton on Happiness
I posted this already on a carpal tunnel thread that didn't get many upvotes, but I think it's useful enough to repost.

I eliminated most of my keyboard induced problems with a split keyboard in a vertical layout. I use this keyboard:

http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/freestyle_mac.htm

And I made one of these out of a cardboard box and duct tape:

http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/images/solo-ascent-90_512x390.jp...

This avoids torsion in the forearms and prevents you from bending your wrists.
To me, this seems like the start of the decline of facebook. Gideon Yu's work has been stellar with Youtube and getting that $15B valuation. The reason may be the board and not Mark. That being said he doesn't have the it factor I see in a lot of successful CEOs.
The idea is to figure out the list of firms that provide exploding termsheets.
Wasn't there a business school professor who was digging up stacks of business plans sent to VCs in the bubble-era to see which ones would have been successful in the web 2.0 era?