skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been waiting for people to figure this out.

It's not just kids who have shorter attention spans. Though I am blessed with friends who still call me "young man", I'm no longer a kid, and I'm a veteran of many years of lecture-based courses. But that era is over. There's no longer any technical reason to deliver lectures in uninterrupted fifty-minute blocks. And it turns out that they only reason I ever liked that format is that I didn't have alternatives.

I've attended so, so many physics lectures. They break naturally into chunks: Some scene-setting ("let's talk about conservation of momentum in two dimensions"), proposing a problem ("here's an ice rink with two hockey pucks that collide"), a derivation (equation, equation, chalk dust, erasure, equation, more chalk dust, fix the sign error), a summary ("look, momentum is conserved! And we can draw the following general lesson..."), questions from the audience, and finally a bunch of homework problems.

How great it would be to have each of these chunks be recorded as separate bits of video. You could play through the scene-setting and the summary multiple times. You could play through the derivation at higher speed, slowing down or repeating the bits where the prof makes a subtle point but speeding through the parts which are obvious to you. You can skip the student questions that you already understand but play through the subtle ones more than once.

About the only disadvantage of this way of learning is that it's kind of isolating. It would be nice to combine it with lots of lab-type gatherings where all the students can join together and feel like a team.

---

[1] I had a few professors who avoided using chalkboards. They would provide handouts with the day's derivations and equations on them, then use an overhead projector with slides. (This was all before Powerpoint was widely available in academia.)

This was a mixed bag. It worked okay, but it wasn't an obvious big win over chalkboards. One advantage of the chalkboard is that it is very flexible: you can gesture at it, redo it on demand, or scrawl circles and arrows all over it. Another advantage is that it is typically huge, offering you lots of opportunity to, say, write Maxwell's equations in a box to the left and leave them up through the whole lecture for reference. Finally, chalkboard derivations go up slowly (sometimes really slowly, if the writer is not well practiced), which can be bad, but which also makes it easy for the professor to interject meaningful comments.

But I think the availability of digital video playback, cheap cameras, and nonlinear editing changes this problem a lot.
> I like trains, but as passenger transport, they're not competitive.

That's an awfully broad statement without qualifications...

They work quite well in many places in Europe. I think some components to the recipe for success are: reasonably dense population, lots of car traffic, convenience (train stations have to be fairly close to where people want to go, and connected to other public transport), reasonable distances (less than plane distances, greater than bus distances). Another thing that helps here in Italy is that they're reasonably frequent between major destinations... if I miss one train to Venice or Vicenza, there will certainly be another one in an hour, if not a half an hour.

In other words, in the US, it makes sense to build trains, say, in the bay area, but probably not so much between San Francisco and Los Angeles - there isn't that much car traffic between the two cities, and in LA, which is so spread out, you're screwed if you depend on public transportation. Also, it's far enough that a plane is a lot faster. On the other hand, Milan to Rome is roughly a four hour train ride, center to center - so by the time you factor in going to the airport, checking in, flying, baggage claim, getting back to the center of Rome, they take about the same time, and the train is less stressful.
Couldn't you just do this:

askwolfram "What are all of the questions that will ever be asked?" | askwolfram "How do I format this answer for wikipedia?" > wikipedia.html
Y Combinator probably makes up the 6% on the confidence boost associated with being selected, alone. Makes it hard to compare unselected/selected companies, I imagine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect
I think Yonkly is a really cute (as in clever) idea and could get some traction. Have I wonder if the author has looked getting investors on board.

Maybe if people had revenue sharing or just the ability to monetize their, um, "yonks" they could have enough incentive to make the service take off.
Being relentlessly resourceful is the ONLY way to get things done in large companies. The external restrictions in a large company are much harder to overcome than in a small business. They are institutionalized.
Ask YC: Where can I get a list of YC funded companies?
I think there are about 100 of them.
Congrats on making it this far. Maybe we should start a meetup or support group for hackers who quit their jobs to find their entrepreneurial selves.

I just had my one year anniversary six days ago. Oh how time flies. I left the military to venture out on my own, finish graduate school, and see what happened.

I'd love to tell the rest of the story but I have to go catch a train. If you get a chance, consider writing about the ups and downs of the process. I know in the beginning it really ate me that I wasn't making progress fast enough. Time, progress, and a sweet spot for pain helped :) but yeah... its an interesting process.
Oh, from the site: "Monetize through Ads"

I like the ability to show a thumbnail in the posts.
Living on the cheap is one thing, going into huge credit card debt will follow you forever. :( Sounds like a gleeful story of doing it "your way" but a massive cost.

I think the blog post is a bit in denial because you haven't really said anything about any future out comes you see happening next.

What is the credit card debt? How much do you think you'll make on the book after publisher fees/whatever other costs. The web 2.0 service is cool does it have any plan for profit?

Congrats on the engagement and doing your own thing, I just wonder if you'd do it all over again or if you'd try and bootstrap your own efforts more so that you could avoid the financial black eye ya got here and still make something your truly passionate about.
I don't know much Italian, but I think you can say "succeso" instead of "fortuna".
Checked it yesterday, I like it. But I want to use it today, and it's down :(
http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.dabuttonfacory.co...
Downvotes and upvotes should both be shown for this reason as it calls to attention the divide in opinion.
Keyboard integrated in clothes.
The latest number I heard is 102, but I think it's more, if you consider adding the latest round that included divvyshot.

You will find some here: http://ycombinator.com/faq.html
at the first question.
And you will find some here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator

Also consider searching TechCrunch for ycombinator, as they write about the startups that's funded by YC.
I don't think there's any public list of non-launched YC companies, but the ones which have launched are listed at http://ycombinator.com/faq.html .
I wish there were more prominent examples (like 37signals) of small software companies that subscribe to this model. The VC funding, ad driven model has many, many examples and I think we can all benefit from a more diverse landscape of perspectives. I'd definitely be interested in hearing other examples people know about.
And that is EXACTLY the point! You can't vote it down, and that's a very good thing.

I've been friended by some people on digg - and they constantly shout battles at me: bury this, digg that. The bury brigades have gone to work on this, etc, etc.

You can't do that here, someone who hates a topic simply can not affect it. All you can do is say there are X number of people who are interested in something. It doesn't matter that some people hate the topic, or are opposed to it. They have no voice.

Example: If you have a very controversial topic that 50% of people agree with, and 50% of people disagree with. You will never see it if you have downvoting. But since there is only upvoting, you will. And I think that that is very very important, and it's one of the reasons this site is so much better than digg and reddit.

I've always thought that digg should frontpage also controversial stories, not just upvoted ones, but ones that have an almost even ratio of down/up votes.

And BTW you don't loose half of the information about votes for a topic - the algorithm here is that stories fall down over time, so time itself basically acts as a constant down vote. You have upvoting to counter that, and ignoring a topic to assist that.

Bill Gates once said something like: if I only read the stories that I am interested in, I'll never learn anything new - so I make a point of reading the entire newspaper. (I hope I remembered the quote correctly, it was from before the internet.)
They can make some money indirectly. As background, we made http://tinyarro.ws.

For our service, we make money indirectly by mentioning our other services/sites as friendly as possible. We've seen stellar response from that.

It helps that our URL shrinker is new/cute/silly and something people like to show-off on Twitter "the shortest URLs on earth".

But our plan isn't to make any money off of the URL shrinking-- it's simply a toy we want to share because it's a really inexpensive project and a good way to promote our other sites.
The times when I made the most improvement in a particular skill comes from not-dull, constant practice. Hard, yes, repetitive, yes, but never dull. If your attention wanders while you are practicing, you're not getting the most out of the practice.

Lacking confidence tends to distract as much as over-confidence. The person practicing stops paying attention to what he is practicing.

I'd say, transfer of learning (taking advice from one context and figuring out how to apply it in a different context)is a form of resourcefulness. (Though I'm more of the opinion that resourcefulness applies to both internal and external obstacles).
Up voting measures enthusiasm (and refuses any veto to the disapproving majority). Up/down voting measures peer acceptance.
Color Scheme Designer 3
Where today's datacenters have gone wrong
I never thought that HN would be a place to discuss my Grand Unified Theory of Flirting!

It is based in negotiation theory, which always struck me as a good starting point.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=396485
I think a large part of it was that back in the .com craze it was:

a) Extraordinarily hard to actually charge money. The user experience sucked and people were being told that these strange new cyberpredators could drain their bank accounts on a whim if they ever even exposed their credit card digits near a monitor.

b) The main product offered was textual content, which has always been an extraordinarily hit-driven business in which the misses do not monetize in any sort of scaleable fashion.

c) There was a whole lot of stupid money, and if you've got stupid money burning a hole in your pocket, then who needs to charge customers when that is just going to depress the metrics that get you more stupid money?

d) There's also a problem that the web is relentlessly youth-focused. People who came of age in that brief no-money twilight expect everything to be free. People who have not hit that age yet have some transactional difficulties in paying money. (Though they clearly pay money for things that people assume are unmonetizable -- I know more than a few people who spend no money on "music" but several hundred a year on iPods.)

It surprises people every time I mention it, but there is an entire world of users out there who are perfectly on board with the notion of paying money for value. They have money, they have payment instruments which are easy to use online, they have problems which they currently treat with expensive and ineffective non-digital solutions. As an industry we need to focus on these folks in addition to the 21 year old unemployed WoW player who seems to attract about 85% of our efforts. [And though I mock overfocus on that market segment, you certainly see, e.g., Blizzard and Apple making a killing out of that guy.]
I am doing small consulting jobs here and there that barely pay the bills but I am mostly focused on Yonkly (the book is almost done). I am also in the process of talking to investors and if things work out then it will be 110% Yonkly.
Wow! I'm all for trains. This made me sad:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_Streetcar_Scanda...
balsamiq
freshbooks
fogbugz
coda
writeroom
textmate

plenty more but thats a start...
I don't know if I have seen it or not: is there a kind of the opposite service?; a 'de-obfuscator' that takes a meaningless url like someblog.com?p=245 or one of the long corporate url full of numbers and translates it into abetterurl.com/someblog/the_title_of_the_article ?

I know because of SEO a lot of urls are now more human readable but it wold be an interesting idea if it hasn't been done yet (too lazy to google).
Will I do it all over again? Absolutely :)

I am not sure I can discuss the book fees but it is not substantial. Probably enough for 2 or 3 months of living expenses.

Credit card debt is huge. Think of a number. Then double it :)

Yonkly is already profitable. It covers its operating cost and more.

Thanks.
Sorry, but what are the easy ways to bypass rule 501? If it was easy to bypass, wouldn't a lot of startups be offering shares?
Yes, site owners can run their own ads to monetize their networks. Technically speaking, they can paste and javascript code into their network header and sidebar, so they can add widgets, tracking code, ads or whatever they want.
One of our clients is http://photographersjournal.yonkly.com/home and they have a ton of cool photos. Check them out.
Yeah, this has happened in my experience too. Changing my own actions as a way to affect change is easier than changing someone else's actions. This is both in the social domain and actually physically affecting someone (e.g. sparring). In chess or Go or any other strategy games, this would be "initiative".

I've also found something similar to that opposite-emotion reaction with other people. I think it has a lot to do with the parts of our brain responsible for mirroring other people and empathy. For example, changing an internal state often reflects in the non-verbal cues that affects someone else subconsciously.

There are old (50+ years old) leadership manuals that points this and other things out.
the newspaper navigation was the main reason i canceled my trial subscriptions on my kindle 2. i don't want to read the newspaper front-to-back, or even by an entire section at a time. i just want a simple table of contents for the entire paper and to jump around.

the nice thing about the kindle is that they can quickly deliver improvements to the reader's operating system over the air, so i would hope something like this can be easily changed.
Don't get it. If you are interested in the low level communications, why wouldn't you simply use a socket and send your own application defined commands over port 80?

HTTP exists so that any browser can access any web server, it doesn't re-implement or otherwise allow the usage of TCP/IP.

As a corollary, I don't see why I need to know about your application's communication protocol, let alone adhere to it because it's now a standard.
Thanks Shamiq. I've sent you an email.

In reply to rms although I wouldn't ask anyone to flout copyright I agree that the stumbling block is the publisher rather than the author. Even if you can't find a copy online I've never been refused a copy when contacting the author directly.
It could be free if it was written on AppEngine, and it stayed within the "free" quota.

(For the record I know TinyURL.com was not, but i'm pointing out that a newer/similar service could be.)
But how about ordering? At the end of the day, these votes determine which submission makes it to the front page. Allowing down voting but sorting by upvotes might be one solution.
function cons(x, y) {
return function(m) {
return m(x, y);
}
}

function car(x) {
return x(function(a, d) { return a; });
}

function cdr(x) {
return x(function(a, d) { return d; });
}

or

function cons(x, y) {
return function (m) {
return m(x, y, function (n) { x = n }, function (n) { y = n });
}
}

function car(x) {
return x(function (a, d, sa, sd) { return a; });
}

function cdr(x) {
return x(function (a, d, sa, sd) { return d; });
}

function setcar(x, y) {
return x(function (a, d, sa, sd) { sa(y); });
}

function setcdr(x, y) {
return x(function (a, d, sa, sd) { sd(y); });
}

function list() {
arguments.shift = Array.prototype.shift;
if (arguments.length == 0) {
return null;
} else {
return cons(arguments.shift(), list.apply(this, arguments));
}
}

function mapcar(fun, lst) {
if (null == lst) {
return null;
} else {
return cons(fun(car(lst)), mapcar(fun, cdr(lst)));
}
}

function reduce(fun, init, lst) {
if (null == lst) {
return init;
} else {
return fun(car(lst), reduce(fun, init, cdr(lst)));
}
}

function filter(fun, lst) {
if (null == lst) {
return null;
} else {
if (fun(car(lst))) {
return cons(car(lst), filter(fun, cdr(lst)));
} else {
return filter(fun, cdr(lst));
}
}
}
"iPhone Springboard" ehh? Except it doesn't work in Safari on the iPhone.
Hello everyone out there following the button factory!

First of all, thanks everyone for the big amount of -so- useful comments! It's really interesting and motivating!

Some have noticed, the server has been down, overloaded. I put some rules to guarantee its disponibility, but it may still be problems (it's a very small server and I just made dirty hacks to prevent it to die miserably, I hope).

I pushed a little update which corrects some of the bugs suggested:

* the 'swap' button is now usable with the history

* the vertical and horizontal padding are in the right order :-P

* "hammering" the increment/decrement buttons is now possible

* the shadow orientation now allows only east or west

* the site was totally broken in IE 6/7, now it should be usable (but terribly ugly!)

* the title "Da Button Factory" is now a link

* links have been added to download the button or bookmark the page

For the color pickers: I'm currently working on it. But it's a big job, and I want to make it well, so it will take a little time.

For browsers issues: thanks for the reports, It's very important, and I'll investigate, but not immediately (I've no easy access to the Internet in the week, even less access to Windows).

I'll certainly open a blog soon, so that interested people could follow the updates via RSS.

Once again, a big thanks to everyone for the help!
That was my initial thought too. Then I realized, going forth and digging up said advice and tips would be a good way to exercise resourcefulness, heh.
Woz: "Dancing with the Stars" victory possible with geek support
thanks for the example idea, you're right the current one is a bit ugly in the global theme!

Nice to know a web designer appreciates it!
Hey! Thanks for that!

I just realized, it is easy to get creative when bad stuff happens ... out of sheer desparation. That quote makes me wonder what would happen if I figured out how to do this when bad stuff isn't happening right at the moment.
Yes, this would be a nice adding to the output formats.

I don't think I'll implement that in the near future, but I keep it in the back of my head for later, and I'll contact you when the time has come :-)

Thanks for the idea.
The reason that the web lost faith in charging for stuff is that marginal cost is so low. What is the cost to 37signals of having another customer sign up for one of their services? If I sign up for the $49/mo. Basecamp product, they are offering me 10GB of storage as well as bandwidth and application processing. None of that has a high marginal cost. Maybe $5/mo? Plus, many users won't use all that space so it's a maximum of $5, but the average marginal cost would probably be a good deal lower.

So, while many applications might have very high fixed costs (like paying people to create wonderful applications like those in 37signals portfolio), they have marginal costs that are so insignificant that people would like to charge customers less and get more customers - often ending up with them wanting to give it away for free for maximum uptake (with the whole profit thing put off until later).

Beyond that, some applications you can't charge for. 37signals has a portfolio of applications that don't get better for users as more people use it. That's unlike Facebook, Delicious, Digg, Wikipedia, etc. If those services charged a monthly fee, it would degrade the content that the sites have. Facebook isn't useful if they only retain 10% of their user-base because they're charging $10/mo. So, some websites must try alternative ways of monieization since charging users isn't an option.

Finally, the web often forgoes charging for stuff because they get big paydays for it. StumbleUpon got $75M. Reddit commanded at least a few million. Digg is looking for hundreds of millions while having no plan for profitability. Facebook is looking for tens of billions with no plan to make money! Jaiku was bought for millions. YouTube for $1.5B. I don't need to go on. People get rewarded for the behavior of creating a site with no expectation of profits. As long as that's working, they'll keep doing it.

Personally, I think 37signals has the right idea. But that won't stop people from making free sites with no profit plan which they hope to get bought since it happens enough. Yeah, I'm not going to create visions for myself of taking over the world, but others thrive on that. As long as there is some potential of getting bought for millions and a low marginal cost, people will create those free sites.
Elegance and the Surreals
Might he have been talking about Douglas Englebart's "Augmenting Human Intellect" project? (which invented the mouse as well as provided the foundation of GUIs, hypertext, and the Internet -- although any amplification of intelligence is debatable.)
"In practical terms, downvotes are so extraordinarily rare on HN that they almost don’t exist."

It's not because you don't see them directly a lot that they don't have an impact. A comment that ends at +3 with 7 upvotes and 3 downvotes would have ended at +7 (or more because of the "momentum effect") if there weren't downvotes.
On an earlier post they describe how they came up with the pricing for their products - "Just think to yourself what you'd pay".
Well, for myself, and a fair number of others, that figure is 0. So you have to think of other ways to make money.

Clearly no one would ever pay to be able to use google to search, yet we all value it enormously.
This article is what I love about HN, geeky yet giving you an informative approach about certain aspects of life.

I guess that it's the whole point of the "hacker" thinking, having the knowledge of what's happening behind the scenes.
No no, you are right, it is important, and Opera is not a niche browser in my opinion.

I'll look ASAP at browser issues, but unfortunately I've currently no easy access to several OS/browsers :-/