skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It sounds to me like you want/need to write some sort of "for dummies" thing, as many salespeople think along the lines of "a good salesman can sell anything" so that they tend not to know/learn about what they're selling.

Maybe 2 books to give an idea what sort of things an absolute newbie might not know:

http://www.amazon.com/Building-Site-Dummies-David-Crowder/dp...

http://www.amazon.com/Internet-Dummies-John-R-Levine/dp/0764...

Leave the books with titles like "for dummies" or "for idiots" at home, because you don't want the students to think that you're talking down to them. You shouldn't be, but if they think you are, then you've got a higher hurdle to deal with than what you want to be dealing with.

A long time ago, I had a job where part of what I had to do was train car mechanics and electronic technicians how to diagnose and repair electriccal problems. Since the division of GM that I worked for made the computers, radio, ac controls and instrument panels (aka dashboard [the speedometer and blinkenlights]) for cars, those were things I had to teach too. Educational levels ranged from high school dropouts to master's degrees.

Teaching is a different skill from knowing, but at least with technical subjects, knowing the subject is necessary for the teaching of it.

One way to tell whether a field has consistent standards is the overlap between the leading practitioners and the people who teach the subject in universities. At one end of the scale you have fields like math and physics, where nearly all the teachers are among the best practitioners. In the middle are medicine, law, history, architecture, and computer science, where many are. At the bottom are business, literature, and the visual arts, where there's almost no overlap between the teachers and the leading practitioners. It's this end that gives rise to phrases like "those who can't do, teach."

http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html
One of the basic premises of my firm (Shirlaws) is that all businesses are the same once you remove what they actually do.

In other words, the business advice, perspective and experience YC bring will apply just as well.

Note - this is based on my understanding, which is that YC help with the business not sitting down and helping you code.
wow! wattvision is _exactly_ the idea I had for a personal project.
John and I organized Hacker House. It was a little nerve racking as the rent was $4.5k split between us. Thankfully, the place filled up quickly. There's 4.5 rooms and 9 people sleeping here tonight. It's a little cheaper than a regular place (we're paying $500-$900 per person).

Socially: I love it. There's almost always someone coding in the main area, 24hrs / day. Also, there's always someone to go to University Ave with and grab something to eat.

We're actually moving the place up to SF in May. If anyone's interested, send me an email: sam / at / odio / dot / com.
Google: Internet disconnection a "disproportionate" penalty
This is why all of the recent fury against bonuses is so mis-guided. People literally don't understand what they're angry about.

The irony is that bonuses are how people everywhere should get paid. Can you imagine how much better our schools would be if there was a mechanism to pay good teachers more than bad teachers?
The one thing I'm not sure about foodoro is... I understand paying one shipping price if I'm buying from a food catalog. However, buying six things from six vendors gets expensive pretty quickly. (Ten dollars of shipping for three fairly lightweight items?)
No, you're wrong there. I feel guilt at all sorts of unreasonable things, but that's not the point - if paying "too little" is "cheating the system" then there is not only a minimum price, but also a socially set unwritten price where the people around will label me a cheat - and hiding the price from me then making me pick an acceptable price when i'm particularly weak at judging social situations is annoying.
A Real Semantic Search Engine is Coming: Q&A With Swingly CEO Andy Hickl
Probably a good business opportunity for a tough bailbondsman/repoman type: find these people and rent to them. (Obviously, you can offer cheaper rent than a hotel, which has a staff, typically.)
I love the internet, but jurors should /not/ be doing this.
Yup, I'm at CanSecWest now. This doesn't say much except that he just brought a ready, armed exploit and just took the prize. Nils' breaking of the browser trifecta was quite impressive though.
Commercial Mortgage Rates - Get the Best Commercial Mortgage Deal
There is an Auto-pair characters checkbox under Text Editing in the preferences.
You could definitely be correct. But the article isn't that old, unless they got bought in the last thirty or so days. Quoting the article this time shows an interesting choice of words:

"But corporate parent eBay, having had to write down $1.4bn already following its $2.6bn purchase of Skype back in the bubble-2.0 days of 2005, might see an opportunity here. A billion or two from the NSA for a backdoor into Skype might make the acquisition seem like a sensible idea."

By "parent", if they get into trouble with an agency like the NSA and Ebay is U.S based (for the sake of argument), even though Skype was acquired, couldn't they 'break free' so-to-speak, and head back to Europe with their main operations? Correct me if I'm wrong, but Europe appears to still be their main base of operations while Ebay is like a corporate funding "parent"... that's how I view it from the article, but I could no doubt be mistaken.
he should carefully check the electrical design of every motherboard he puts his "finger" into :>

and what if the USB port is UNDER THE DESK? hihihi
that was the idea my ex-startup did: i-conserve.com (it's been since sold to getgreenbox.com)
I disagree. There were no specifics mentioned about how many branches banks were allowed to have during the previous attempt. For the sake of argument, if that number had been say 5, my reply was a perfectly logical rebuttal to that evidence. The outcome could have been vastly different if that limit had been 50.

My calling that into question doesn't mean "I know I'm right and I'm ignoring your evidence". Nor does the fact that a similar but not identical process been tried in the past infer that all such attempts with different constraints would fail in the future.

It's not a null argument, that's absurd. That's like saying we tried pay per click once on our site years ago, it didn't work, and holding that up as evidence that pay per click won't work for any site ever. My rebuttal was a valid response to the history cited.
I live in the UK.

The thing about tipping is that he cost of tipping is a small addition to the bill of an unknown socially set common percentage depending on place and culture which I don't enjoy guessing.

But the cost of not tipping or tipping too little is incalculable and potentially completely disproportionate to the situation, and potentially long term.

Hence, however much you explain the ideal of tipping being a kind of feedback, ensuring prompt service, etc. I will never not tip well, so it will never work like you idealise.

There is no way to differentiate a poor tip due to bing a cheapskate, one due to misreading the socially accepted norms, an unjustified poor service complaint or a valid poor service complaint. The whole tipping system works against the customer. Just tell me you're adding a set % to the bill and if the service is no good I'll vote with my feet and not come back...

Remember the scene in Monty Python's life of brian?
"how much for this?" "20" "ok" "no you have to haggle - offer me ten" "how about 10?" "ten for this? Are you mad it cost me twelve!" etc.
Tim O'Reilly at Web 2.0 Expo NY
Doesn't Skype make money(as in profit not just revenue)?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=395970
They took pictures of Earth, mostly. I'm assuming the writer may be foreign, and merely didn't use the correct preposition.
Microsoft IE8 Now Available For Download
Browser-Based Game Postmortem: Lessons Learned
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090301/O...
I have an undying dislike for standardization, because it's what influenced my application decisions and I'm not very happy where I am. So there's definitely some bias.

That said, I (and a few students in my college who were in the same situation as me) had a very, very low grade point average considering I wanted to apply to snooty upper class schools. (A 3.1 unweighted means you have a hard-as-hell time getting into any of the really elite places.) Beyond that, many colleges wanted SAT 2s, and I bluntly refused to take any more standardized tests senior year. I was sick and fed up with taking tests just to place into schools. I still think it's a terrible system that wastes students' time for the sake of assigning a number. And so I, and many other extremely bright and talented kids, ended up merely going to a good public school, hoping that it would be what we wanted out of college. As it turns out, a lot of us are dissatisfied. And it annoys me that a lot of kids that aren't as comparatively bright as that tiny group got into much more prestigious schools, because while we were doing our own things (one kid went to Colombia senior year to do work with their science labs, another was a multiintrumentalist in a variety of different-genre bands, so on and so forth), other kids were spending every minute of the day studying and looking for ways to peak out their GPA. The kids who were cramped and rebellious and spent their time going their own way as decisively as possible almost all wound up at public schools (the musician went to Rutgers, the scientist went to Penn State, I and a few artist/musicians went to TCNJ), and while the schools we're at aren't bad, they're certainly mediocre compared to what the best schools have to offer. We wound up there because we hated the useless, monotonous system and so our scores were lower and while I think if I could do it again, I'd make sure to do better in school - it would have been worth the tedium - I hate that that's the choice, either play to a really shitty system or get subpar results. So in my mind I imagine a system that focuses exclusively on finding those exceptions to the rules.
Shifty-looking sorts
But why is that so good for telecoms signalling, precise cutting, spaceship propulsion, measurement, teleportation experiments, holding parts of highly accurate subatomic clocks, tripwire systems, optical media drives, igniting fusion reactions, pointers and targetting systems, interferometry, eye surgery, 3d scanners..

They are like many fundamental building block componenta in one.
I would probably just point them to some beginner Wikipedia articles e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_sites.
I disagree strongly with making "security" step 4. By the time you finally get around to making the app functional you may have fallen into several fundamental traps that require massive work to get out of the hole.

The vast, vast bulk of security holes are due to simple things that are easier to get right even in the prototype stage than to retrofit later. Concatenating strings into an SQL statement is harder than using a proper library for escaping. Properly escaping HTML isn't that hard if you know what you are doing and plan for it in advance, but is hell to go back and fix later. Buffer overflows are easy to avoid today by using secure libraries or languages in the first place but can be very difficult to fix in an audit phase. Even things like implementing a basic role/capability system are a lot, lot easier to implement from the beginning than to try to retrofit, and they are not hard. If you have some experience and know what you are doing frequently the right way has been made easier than the wrong way anyhow.

If you are still at an experience level where you still have to think about how to properly encode an SQL query value... well, charge forward I suppose, but I promise you, you will pay. There's no way around that.

Concerns with a similar pattern: Handling string encoding. You will come out ahead if you start out aware of how encoding works and how to handle it, rather than trying to retrofit it later. Internationalization: If you know what you are doing, it is not significantly harder to do at least basic internationalization first (a string table instead of typing a raw string, with a bit of work you can make it an emacs macro so it costs one whole extra keystroke per string), and retrofitting it is extremely hard. If you encounter one particularly hard string, label it in a comment and bail if you're in a hurry, but you're still ahead for having thought about it and having everything else set up properly.

If you feel you should object to my point by saying "But those things are too hard!", you're missing my point. For someone with decent experience, they shouldn't be. I don't have to think too hard about any of these things even in my prototypes. (Except encoding, which is hard to think about because it's a hard problem, even for a prototype, unless you are blessed to be working in an environment that has a sane encoding story.)
Browser Ball
Probably not the weight so much as the need to have items shipped quickly to maintain freshness. Even so, when you pay almost as much in shipping as the food item the value add drops off rather quickly for me.
It would be really hard ... because it involves studying your intentions rather than your moves.

In chess this is doable (the intent is clearer after the fact, and the possible moves are more limited), but think about CStrike for example ... how is your algorithm going to realize that you're protecting a gate because you don't want your opponents to sneak behind your teammates? Even simple questions become hard ... say you're attacking X1 just as a distraction, while your teammates are attacking X2 ... a team uses slight variations of some tactic, it's mostly never the same (different men in charge, different hotspots, switching between X1 and X2, etc ...). Gathering useful statistics about it requires lots of played games and lots of resources, and I don't think it's doable on your average gamer's hardware.

I know, stupid example :) but you get the point.
Try spawning windows and overlapping them with each other- very addictive.
If I ever rigged up a biometric scanner, it would scan my entire body, including checking for heart-rate and EEG readings. In order to get in, I'd have to be present in full, alive, and not stressed out by an act of duress (calibrated to my normal level of stress during the pre scan, obviously.)
I don't think the encryption issue is the big problem. I am sure skype's codec has been hacked already. The p2p issue could be addressed by just placing giant routers in isp's like the US did at the telcos. The bigger problem would be transcribing a million streams at once. Also, transcribing arabic words. Thats probably what they are mostly interested in.

There are good acoustic models for english but I doubt there are for arabic. Even if there were, the processing power requirement would be insane. I doubt amazon EC could handle a million streams at once even if they used smaller grammars focusing on suspicious words.
Right, my comments are about "right now", because they reference the article which deals with the situation right now -- specifically firing AIG's management because they are "sucking down" big bonuses.

I contend that the article focuses on one of the symptoms "right now" (bonuses to poor management still running a company); whereas the cause is government intervention. Without that intervention, the "right now" symptoms would not exist, i.e. AIG would not exist.

You bring up the long debacle that led to this situation. However, you fail to mention that our government and the Federal Reserve have been tightly tangled with AIG for a long time. Regarding "multi-decade process", there's plenty of government blame to go around. http://www.lewrockwell.com/rozeff/rozeff253.html

If you're contenting that AIG was insolvent and still issuing insurance, they should have been prosecuted under state fraud laws, not bailed out with billions of dollars.
Well, your own unproven theories are no basis upon which to ruin other people's lives.

Your ideas, by the way, could equally well be applied - and are, by some fanatics - to violent video games, and yet I bet you oppose efforts to even curtail their availability, let alone imprison their fans.

I would really like to emphasise that I think that someone who's interested in collecting 10G of pictures of kids being raped is obviously pretty sick. If I found that someone I knew had such an interest, I'd probably never speak to them again. If I had kids, I'd keep them the hell away from such a pervert. But illegal? For having copied some files, but having had nothing to do with the crime involved in their original creation? Those pictures are depictions and records of a crime, but they do not embody it.

The whole concept is ludicrous and I can't believe I am so alone in pointing that out. If you have a picture of a murder, and I copy it, we haven't somehow created another murder out of the ether. If I possess a picture of someone doing illegal drugs, I don't magically become partially responsible for the drug use. I think a reasonable person would agree up to here with everything I said. So why does all rationality fly straight out the window when it comes to a crime that happens to involve a child? The arguments weren't valid before, but change the subject to an emotionally charged topic and suddenly they make perfect sense?

I just don't buy it. You can't cut and paste pictures of crime, and in doing so create more crime. You can't create more crime by viewing a recording of crime. I am utterly baffled why anyone would argue otherwise.
From my experience, Google's customer support for it's paid Google Apps could use a ton of improvement,to the point where I think it is a significant weakness exploitable by companies with similar paid services and better support. They are really difficult to contact and their support navigation always frustratingly leads you to one of their help pages instead of a number or email address to use. And if the problem is not a service outage/emergency, you must go through email which takes days to get the typical generic and unhelpful response.

I love all of Google's services, but I am/was incredibly frustrated that we actually paid to use their services and then they left us out in the cold when it came to a shortcoming of their infrastructure. We started with a domain for Google Apps and purchased 6 accounts on the domain. A year or so into using their service, we realized we needed to switch our primary domain from ourhabit.com to habitindustries.com. Both the domains are owned by us, and habitindustries.com was at the time setup as an alias on our ourhabit.com domain. Turns out, Google Apps does not support the switch. And not only do they not support it, there is no migration help to move emails or remove the risk of losing email while you transfer over to the new primary domain. And the real kicker? They made us pay for all 6 accounts again on the new primary domain even though we would no longer would be using the old account. If you aren't going to support a basic feature (which is called for again and again and again on their forums), don't make us shell out another $50 per user to mitigate it. Thank god we only had 6 users at the time.

Sorry for the rant, but seeing the claim of 24/7 customer support really set me off :)
its not even an issue of features. 99.99% of internet users have heard of google. my guess is 0.001% have heard of simulscribe. this doesn't mean simulscribe can't compete or doesn't have a kick-ass product, but users still have to be able to find them.

i suspect the best way for simulscribe to compete with google is to be folded into an entity that is well known, and has the marketing budget to remain in the minds of potential users
> Traditionally, government demanded insurers have low-risk holdings to back up a sizable percent of their outstanding obligations. The regulations that handled this have been dismantled over the years.

As I pointed out in another thread, AIG's assets have not had losses and the relevant regulations have not been dismantled over the years. (In fact, AIG had to register as a bank because of new regulations.)

What happened to AIG is that the mark-to-market for those assets, which are behaving exactly as predicted, went away. (AIG's portfolios are not taking a foreclosure hit because they cherry-picked.) That took AIG's credit rating down and then the covenants kicked in, requiring AIG to pay money that it didn't have.
Three words: Pair as needed.
I have an old GrandCentral account, and a large group of their original users were homeless people that got free accounts as a part of a grant (don't remember who paid).
For those who have said that Twitter is far from mainstream, let me tell you, you're wrong.

Almost every major radio station here in southern California, ie KISS FM and POWER 106, encourage their users to follow them on Twitter. The other day, I was watching the Martha Stewart show, don't ask why, and she mentioned her Twitter account, asked how many had an account, and encouraged all who did and didn't to follow her. This morning I'm watching the Today show, and one of the anchors mentions Twitter and how it's blowing up. This, on top of the fact that many big time celebrities are using the service, has definitely convinced me that Twitter is here to stay, at the very least, as a wildly successful media tool.
Demo day is for investors. No one ever launches on demo day. More people that are launched before demo day the better it is.
what you say is true; the major gain for TCMalloc is in multi-(native)-threaded apps.

I think this is pretty key, because otherwise TCMalloc is somewhat of an overhead. Depending on your platform, a standard malloc with will pull ahead (depends on how favourable locking is, but it is the case for OS X anyway).

A multi-threaded instance sounds interesting, but - I'm guessing it would be a challenge to get a representative sample.
This article seems kind of strange to me since I watch Hulu on my TV. I guess most people won't by the extra cable.
Charles Teague's blog (Technologist-in-Residence at General Catalyst)
Why biology students should learn how to program
Great article explaining the inner workings of Solid State Disks
It is not how fast your server is. It is how fast different geographically network can access your server('s network).

Beside that, it is a very nice service for webmasters.
To answer your question more bluntly: they are energy waves, and [or thus] they move quickly.

All of these things could be done materially (signalling with sound waves in air, record players instead of optical media, pointing with a physical pointer, etc.) but coherent light can be moved around much more quickly, due firstly to the speed of light, but also due to the wave properties of reflection, refraction and diffraction. And, despite this ease of targeting, you can "load" as much, or as little, energy into the stream as you wish, because photons have negligible mass. Finally, the "coherent" part means that you actually get to keep these advantages over a distance, instead of having them stolen by the power law.
MyPhillyNetwork » Chat Catcher - An Interview With It’s Creator
AIG and Inequality : The Frontal Cortex
there are more important things happening on march 19th:

http://stackin.hauntedshit.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/20...

:)
I'm very disappointed to see that this is just snapshots and only runs in Windows. I would probably pay $10 / mo. for a Mac OS X suite that ran ie6, ie7, and ie8 without requiring me to use VM Ware or Parallels. The best solution I've found so far is crossbrowsertesting.com, but it's a little slow and tedious.
Artificial stupidity? Isn't there already enough of the real McCoy?