skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's see: meet my self-imposed deadline, or read The Art of the Self-Imposed Deadline? Tough choice.
One of the most ubiquitous and profitable types of models would be short-term weather forecasting. These are regularly wrong by several degrees, misjudging precipitation, etc, when trying to predict just 12 hours in advance. There's absolutely no point in looking at forecasts greater than three days, they're barely a guess, throw all the "accurate" equations and you want at it.
[Disclaimer: I'm from the midwest - capricious weather.]
if Harvard were interested in spreading the good word, they could have taped the lectures and had them online by now. I'm sure you don't need to be in the same physical room to get 90% of the good man's lessons.
@neovintage I totally agree with you. I am an engineer by training and is currently in the second year of business school. I would have to say this article has too narrow a focus and stereotype MBAs. There is a lot more to MBA than finance and people who sought for big payouts. I have come to business school to understand the business side of things. As an engineer, I just did not understand why this marketing people just kept asking me to make things that I don't see a value in.

Business School is a place that allows people with motivation and the will to change the world to share ideas with each other. Of course, there are also some people who are more keen in getting a comfortable job and lead a comfortable life. But so far for me, attending business school has extended my horizon greatly (I did figure out that finance is not my cup of tea and technology is my true passion). I have learnt a lot about people skills, finance (to help me understand term sheets when I startup), business strategy and ways to grow businesses so my ideas can achieve the biggest impact on people's lives.
AKA the virtue of phronesis, as described by Aristotle - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phronesis
"It used to be that creating a webpage was a pursuit reserved for the truly tech-savvy, requiring a geek's expertise in HTML, Java, or C++ coding."

?
The Value of Online Clicks
This is totally overboard. Apple clearly didn't intend this 'loophole' and if it is not good for the developer (especially in such a dramatic way), it is not good for Apple. It will change.
Amazon Removes Customer Reviews from Product Pages? WTF... Bummer.
ITT sues Verizon and everyone who makes GPS phones except Apple
What the submitted article says the change is are two things:

a) division of each subject into several topics, with each topic being reported with its own grade,

and

b) setting standards for grading not in a norm-based ("curved") manner for each classroom, but in a criterion-based manner comparable across a whole state.
You can always read his book and email him any thoughts or questions. You'd be surprised how often you get a response.
Yes, you need 100+ karma I believe before you can.
Some at AIG Buck Efforts to Give Back Bonus Pay
I read of an interesting thought experiment once - a way to take the moral judgment out of the anthropogenic global warming debate. Imagine that there were never fossil fuels or elevated CO2 levels. Now imagine that scientists have (somehow) determined that the sun has suddenly increased its energy output in such a way that would exactly mimic on this imaginary planet, the proposed effect of elevated CO2 on our planet (this turns out to be about a 0.3% increase in output).

Would this discovery warrant massively restructuring the world economy by central decree in an attempt to counteract the sun? The spending of billions (trillions?) of dollars? These are the decisions you are making when you err on the side of caution.
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Amory Lovins talks about this in "factor four" (great book). They go through how the refrigerator is a textbook example of loads of small design decisions ending up with something really suboptimal. In a cold climate, what you do is put the radiator coils on the outside of the house. Every kitchen would have two pipe hookups where the fridge goes, leading to the coils on the outside. Then you get the fridge and plug it in just like you do with washers. (Or you could plug it into your heat pump, which you should use to heat your house anyway.)
Surely trying to recreate YC outside the valley can only help?

Well, no, actually. YC being in the Valley doesn't actually do that much for the Valley. I explained why here:

http://www.paulgraham.com/maybe.html

It's the stage after YC that makes the Valley what it is-- the angel stage. YC could be anywhere. We contributed as much to Silicon Valley when we were in Boston.
Love this idea. There are already incubators and seed funds doing this in India and China. And I suspect the trend will accelerate.
Good luck with it, dryicerx. Everyone has a first time; do try to help yourself by getting advice from those who have done it before, though. If you're in a place where there's a startup community, connect with it!

Smart, experienced people not only will help you refine your ideas and give you answers that will help you get to market quicker, they'll have connections that will help get you the resources / partners / talent your startup needs later.
"Today with a guy or two, a good idea and about $1.5 million you can get a contract manufacturer in Asia to do your gadget."

So probably not very easy with only a few thousand in investment, but I guess somewhat reasonable.
Online Age Quiz Is a Window for Drug Makers
Pipes generally don't go in your living spaces, they might heat your basement but that's not really where you want the heat.
It sounds like you are arguing that science needs to be observational to be "real." I'd argue that science needs both observations and theory and that either half alone is incomplete. Think of the models as a manifestation of the theory. It would be nice if you could solve a set of equations for the atmosphere in closed form, wouldn't it? But you can't so you run a numerical simulation.

Anyway, it's hardly surprising that so much effort has gone into theoretical climate science, since, as you observed, it's difficult running a controlled experiment with the atmosphere.
Wow, <optgroup> could be very useful. Great way to prevent the dreaded expanding wall of text.
Sorry Charlie, but you (MBA's) have lost control of your own branding. Consider dumping the title Master's of Business Administration and go with Organizational Economics or something.

I don't know how to tell you to get your street cred back, but you'd better start excluding the riff-raff somehow.
The trouble with that is that by mixing the hot drain water with cold water you spend the energy heating the cold water and lose efficiency. You want to avoid the cold toilet flush water and whatever and just get the "hot stuff".
Ask HN: A good way to learn the Twitter API?
I am looking to get my feet wet with the Twitter API and am wondering if more experience coders recommend a book such as this. (Or perhaps another) I know the best way to learn is to build but I am looking for a reference guide.
Now that it's closed - what was the final count?
+1 to all of that as well! We spent about 3 hours just recording a lot and saying different stuff until it worked. As a result, our final video was a bit hyperactive and a lot lame, but we managed to actually convey information without sounding like zombies.
Part time at the moment (and only for a short time, 2 months), going to jump into it full-time in a couple of months, once all of my current projects end.
I've talked to a few solo founders, so they're definitely there! Good luck to you all.
Looks almost exactly like the same acoustic foam that is used in the studio at the community radio station I occasionally volunteer at.

I'm guessing this has been painted over to match the wall?
Twitter to Offer Paid "Pro" Accounts
If I'm totally honest, or if I slice up the work the way most HN people would, I say "part time", because (like most of the people in the company) I'm billable more often than not.

On the other hand, after a couple years of growing that practice, we have some pretty excellent people on fulltime dev.
the reason Apple has refunds is to zealously protect their "All interactions with Apple should be mindblowingly awesome for our customers" reputation

Funny you say that, because you can't return Apple hardware without incurring a 10% restocking fee.

(source: http://store.apple.com/Catalog/US/Images/salespolicies.html#...)
Prepared how so? Like, reading openly from scripts, or just overrehearsed?
What % of participants travel from outside Silicon Valley?
After shooting ours and giving it a second look, I was filled with a newfound awe for Ze Frank, who makes speaking really fast both interesting and hilarious. I never realized just how hard it is to say stuff quickly and not be a complete weirdo.
Alternatively, developers could create games that are not played-out in a month. It would probably also be a good policy on Apple's part to say that if you purchase something in-game via the new in-app payment system then you can't get a refund for the original app (or the upgrade.) This would lead to cheap teasers that would effectively allow users to test-drive the game with an in-app upgrade to the "real" game coming once the user has played a level or two and decided they actually like the app.
Can we get a youtube of that? Or something with better load times.

Thanks for the link though.
Not sure how good your feedback is going to be here, it doesn't look like that comes out until April 2009. Kind of confusing considering it says Buy Now though...
I can try and come a little earlier too. What time do you plan to be there ?
Aren't many lobbyists resembling the "might makes right" practices? From what little I understand so far, there is quite a bit of money involved, and decisions do not always seem to be as honest and altruistic when the amounts get large enough.

And aren't the politicians replacing responding to populism and mob voice with the loudest voices nearest them? Especially those that may finance the politicians' agendas?

I am frequently bewildered by some of the decisions made and enacted/codified into law, and must conclude that I obviously do not understand all of the agendas being served in those instances.

It is beginning to seem to me that the current lobbying system is akin to the current union system in that it may no longer be as beneficial as it once was in its current form.
Depends. Some governments (hello China) may indeed do such a thing but if you have such drastic steps taken against you then your SSL certificate is probably the least of your worries.

I'm not saying that this solution would be perfect and yes, most governments don't exactly have a flawless track record of managing, well, anything.

But no matter how screwed an actual implementation would end up - it can't get much worse than what we have now.

Admittedly a government has relatively little motivation to make SSL good. But even that is still better than what we have today with the commercial CAs - those have a strong and frequently proven motivation to make SSL worse!
people in those comments are missing the point of the car, they are comparing this thing to other cars, instead they should compare it to the motorcycles that populate India's roadways.

Is it safer than a civic? Obviously not. But its leaps and bounds safer, than having a family with kids riding around on a motorcycle
That's what you get from having a huge vast thing like the Internet and giving people free reign, though.

I remember joining my first forum - I was 13, and everybody who said anything and sounded decisive was a "pro" to me. I remember telling my father that Squaresoft was making Final Fantasy games based on the work these people were doing, and getting mad when he told me that wasn't the case, because this guy said it online. I also find that every time I join a new "scene" online, there's the same reaction. When I was a big user of TheAdminZone, there were a lot of people running huge forums that knew their shit, and a lot who just got lucky and would spout pretty stupid things, and it took me a little while to realize that these was this disparity. Same thing with the writers on DeviantART, the community managers at Zoints, the popular blog scene at Tumblr, and especially with Gawker, which is the one that I feel makes the biggest rift in my online communities today.

On the Internet, everybody's a noob and an authority. If I want to diss Tim O'Reilly and say he doesn't know anything, I can, and somebody will read my diss and be influenced by it. On the other hand, there're a lot of people online who are famous for being famous: people like Julia Allison or Cory Doctorow come to mind.

Finally, there's the fact that we're all still pretty much n00bs here. The Internet's less than 20: this isn't like the world of, say, movie making, which has a century's knowledge to it. Furthermore, everybody's aware of this lack of precedent, and so everybody wants to be the person that gets known for the equivalent of Orwell's tips on writing. We're a very postmodern medium in that regard, because the discussion happens on the same plane as the publication. Everybody's as much of a celebrity as other people say they are, and there is no distinct authority.

I'd be willing to bet that 20 years into movie-making things were similar. In fact, the one similarly young industry today - the gaming industry - suffers from the same problems of amateurism and groupthink.
Market Good News Upstages Bernanke, Geithner, and Obama
I'll disagree with this. Don't run! Be at the forefront of the group of MBAs who'll show just what an MBA is worth!

Now's not the time to be abandoning the title. Now is the time for courage and a level of pride in what you've accomplished.
In the last two cycles, 66% were from outside the Bay Area.
It's possible to mock up a hardware design in software (just look at console emulators). That gives one a cheap way to demonstrate ideas that can be used to attract investors. Plus, the software version is a useful platform for testing new ideas and identifying hardware bugs.

If your hardware idea is radically different from any existing device (rather than using software to make the hardware unique), you can still use physical models to simulate actual mechanical inputs (like accelerometers). Otherwise, you can just find an existing hardware platform and hack it to run your software.
I don't think it would work to paint this stuff. Fortunately the wall is pretty close to chromatic orange, and so were the panels.
Ask HN: You're a recent grad that's working full time on your startup. How?
I'm curious as to how the recent grad crowd works full-time on their startup. I've read multiple comments over the last few weeks from people that do this, so I have to be nosy and ask the obvious question - how do you do this? Personally, after graduation I will need to get a "real" job to pay for expenses, housing, food, etc. Ideally, of course your startup makes money, but it's obvious that comes with no guarantee or time frame. Are the bulk of these fresh grad full-timers somehow independently wealthy, do they just get by with part-time jobs, or am I missing something entirely?

Let me know, thanks.
exactly! not sure why this uproar at this time but this has been there for a while. Regardless, I am hoping that Apple will fix it either on its own or due Facebook-style user revolt :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day

Guess I have better Google-fu.
Everyone's bedazzled by the numeric grades, but I'd like to take a moment and gawk at the things being graded: "Decoding Skills", "Reading Engagement", "Basic Computer Skills", "Presentation Skills", "Research Skills".

I question the system's ability to grade based on such categorizations. "Reading Engagement" aka "Faking Interest In Boring School-Assigned Books" is particularly distressing of the set I can see.

(Yes, you read some interesting books in school assignments. So did I, but the bulk were pretty dull. I was and am an avid reader and faking an interest in The Scarlet Letter would probably have been beyond me. Fortunately, nobody actually required that of me.)
Mobaganda: elegant, beautiful event planning
I graduate in May and plan to move to full-time. I'll be able to work on my startup because my parents have [thankfully] agreed to help me out while I try to bring it into the black. Since I've been working on it a lot during college, I hope to start making a profit not too long after graduation. I'm currently living with some college friends in a house and intend to live there for now, unless (A) money runs out and I need to move home, or (B) I decide it'd be better to move to the valley.

I'm in Iowa right now; it's a dead zone, but I have resources available to me here (family, time, friends) that I wouldn't have if I just upped and moved to SF right now. Not that the prospect isn't intriguing of course.
The easiest way is just to move back in with parents. Most middle-class families can afford to do this; I think the stats from my graduating class (05, top private college) were that 50% of students were moving back home.

I took a slightly different path: I moved back in with the 'rents, but I also took a job for a couple years and saved up money. Then I went full-time on my startup, funding it mostly out of savings (I was paying rent to my parents). It's funny - now that I've moved out, my expenses are only about $200/month more than they were when I was living at home, but the difference is that now I'm paying a complete stranger's mortgage instead of my parents.
Another semi-useful one is <base>. Most probably have never seen it, but it's an easy way to direct all your relative links to a separate server. One can use it for simple load balancing.
World Time Zone Map
Map of world timezone with current times of all the countries. Map with current time around the World and countries operating Daylight Savings Time.
Thanks for commenting, and let me put to you a question that bothered me about this superficial article:

If MBA programs are a place where people are taught technical details they won't need to know to fulfill the get-rich-quick fantasy that brought them there, what are those irrelevant technical details?

What's your curricula, and what makes it valuable or not valuable?
How frightfully unpleasant that these designers thought that "designing a game about your first time" meant "let's make a bland generic game that's only exciting because of its concept."

Picking out outfits? Shaving minigame? These are signs of a shitty, boring game. That makes the idea of virginity losing a "shock" element rather than the beginning to a unique, fascinating video game.

Game designers suck. They all have such limited ways of looking at things. It's why the best developers come from the indie scene right now: mainstream design has ground to a halt when a game concept like Mirror's Edge is touted as potentially breakthrough.
Here's my train of thought about why Shotput, if successful, would help Atlanta:

- There is really very little seed stage funding in Atlanta (unlike the valley)

- The people who choose to startup in Atlanta AND need seed funding usually do so because they want to live in Atlanta for the foreseeable future (or have to, for some reason). If they didn't, they would just move to the valley since getting seed funding is so much easier there.

- Therefore, after seed funding, they are likely to stay in Atlanta (The round 1 funding scene in Atlanta is better than the seed funding scene..although not optimal)

- Hence, Atlanta will be one startup ahead because of Shotput Ventures

The gist is that if first time entrepreneurs were going to leave Atlanta after seed stage, they would likely have done so at seed stage since seed stage funding is so much harder here.
In my case it's a combination of (a) graduating with money in the bank due to generous scholarships, and (b) having low expenses due to living in my parents' basement.

YCers, of course, are given a theoretical 3 months of living expenses and then usually get other investment at the end of the YC program -- so there's no mystery there (at least for those people for whom $5k == 3 months of living expenses).
Unless my clock is wrong there's still half an hour left. But we never quote the number anymore anyway, because now that we have competitors we don't want to tempt them to get into a number war.
Good on him for trying, but twitter has the momentum. Twitter is a okay to good idea, executed extremely well. They got enough people on board that new, and intresting behaviors emerged. I am not certain that just technically doing what twitter does is good enough to do what twitter does.
[I was going to say it's not closed but it says PST not PDT, so nevermind--but that's why this comment is attached here in case you're confused]

PG - it would really rock if they were confirmation emails. The button to submit being gone and replaced with tiny text doesn't inspire enough confidence in me that it worked.
No, we are all down. It's really a question of who's down more. Go over to wilmott.com and you will see the ex-physicist quants getting all defensive too. Not to mention the finance theorists. Oh, and don't forget the economist-philosophers like Laffer and Greenspan.

MBAs shouldn't be trusted to make important decisions, and neither should the rest of us apparently. Maybe check with Mom first next time.
Yeah it probably was :)
Touching Windows 7
WebNotes’ first founder worked part-time on WebNotes for about a year after graduating before raising enough investor money to go full time. After going full-time, he gave everyone else an ultimatum to jump ship as well, and now, we’re a five person team.

So, in short, I’m lucky. The startup has been able to fund me from the start.
The best way in my opinion to learn Twitter API is to get involved by reading the API wiki ( http://apiwiki.twitter.com/ ), join the google group for Twitter API.
Chuck Moore's personal web site.
After long periods of clicking, I come to tell you that all that happens when you get to zero is that the hamsters are replaced by a single hamster in a tux.
Unless they restrict applications to people from Atlanta, they'll get them from all over the country. Meanwhile, most groups from the Atlanta region won't apply only to Shotput, but also to the other seed firms.

So unless they restrict applications, there will end up being little local component, just as with every previous seed firm. Techstars intended to be the YC of Boulder. But IIRC only 4 of the 20 startups they've funded so far have been from Colorado. As far as I know, the same thing has happened to everyone after them as well.

The seed funding business isn't regional. People would like to believe it is, because it's 20x cheaper to run a YC than to do what you'd actually have to do to make startups stick to a particular city. But it isn't.
A brand new way to browse the web
Seriously, how did <label> make this list?
I see a common theme here in the first few submitted replies. What does an ambitious young person do if the parents are

a) dead and gone,

b) sick and dying,

c) impoverished,

or

d) stingy?

(I ask as a parent of would-be start-up founders, trying my best not to fit into those categories, but never knowing for sure when I might fit into category a).
PST vs. PDT ?

:-)
Sending the email to Posterous now. My upload is less than 1 Mbps so I'm freaking out.

I had a video where I was alone talking, but my brother (co-founder) arrived at the last second and we recorded a new one. These last minute updates make it all worth while :D
Damn, I thought it ended at 10 EST rather than PST! All this time I could have been making teensy little anal adjustments!