skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Would a professor who thought of himself as an "omnipotent, benevolent dictator" encourage his students to interrupt him whenever they didn't understand something? He seems to be asking his students to treat him more like a colleague than a superior, which is much the same relationship you'd have with a good PhD advisor or the leader of a graduate seminar.

And he seems to really care about the future success of his students: "But what I can probably achieve is showing most of you how to become mathematically much more effective, because the other courses in mathematics may teach you mathematics, but rarely teach you how not to waste your time."

Also, from the point of view of someone paying for an expensive product, why would I want the provider of the service to be able to dictate the details of how I use it? E.g., if I don't feel I'm getting any value from a particular homework assignment that I paid for, why should I be penalized for not doing it?

When I was a student in college, I thought of myself as an adult and didn't want to be treated like a child either by my professors or by my parents. I would have appreciated a professor like Dijkstra.
Help with Rails?
This is my first post and I hope it's appropriate for the site. My son admires HN and recommended I ask for help here. I'm an "old" CS guy (graduated back in the 80's) and have NOT kept my skills up-to-date as my career led me from development to mostly sysad stuff. So for the last few years, I've had this web site idea and spent the last year designing it while trying to learn Ruby on Rails (using Mark Hartl's tutorial). Setting up a Linux VDI and getting the environment right is driving me crazy. It's always one problem after another. I'm normally a very persistant guy but Hartl's recommended problem solving algorithm (google it) doesn't always work. I'm at the point where I'll do anything just to get this project off the ground. Any ideas or suggestions? I'd pay someone to help me but I don't know where to find such a person.
>Sure, but that's a little different than listening to everything.

The NSA never cared about listening to everything, that would be completely unmanageable, flagging conversations with key phrases has always been the course of action.

>Not to mention trivial to detect. Just watch CPU consumption and start spouting off trigger words.

It'd also be trivial to detect that you were using a CPU usage monitor and turn off those keywords, viruses do these sorts of things all the time to avoid detection.
I've always been a very focused student. Lecturers usually provide good value to their students, but in three courses during my undergrad I went to two lectures before determining that my time would be better spent reading up on the material on my own. The lecturers were just very bad and obviously made an inferior job than the textbook.

This is what is so good about being a student: You are for the first time allowed to take responsibility for your own results. Unfortunately you have to be lucky or extraordinarily talented to get similar conditions when you get out in the real world.
Is it correct to assume that both you and your non-failing friends put in considerable work outside the lectures? Or, depending on the exact subject, at least skim Wikipedia? If so, that is certainly an even better way to learn than by lectures, but unfortunately will not be possible by the fourth or fifth year in university.
IIRC researches were able to remotely read a laptop display. However, it seems like it would be much easier to build a large faraday cage than it would be to switch to typewriters.
4 stars. Fast; cheap and has a decent camera. Strongly recommended for the backdoor lover.
The N9 was the only truly great product (as in a regular consumer would have found the UX appealing). And that didn't really together until AFTER Elop told them that they were all doomed. Only then did they stop playing politics long enough to build and ship something amazing (Harmattan on the N9). Kind of like how at the end of the world, everyone seems to get along better because there is no upside to triumphing politically.
"The Perfect Store" is a book about the early days of eBay. The primary takeaway for me was how they deliberately went to swap meets, flea markets and garage sales all over America — especially the rural flyover states — and talked to people. They identified the key influencers and flew many of them to California to be given VIP treatment. Those folks returned to their communities as true believers and encouraged their flock to get on the train. 15 years later that investment paid off more than any of them could have hoped.

That said, I suspect that there are many founders who would be open to taking the show on the road. It's incredibly daunting to know what that looks like, or where to start. I feel like it's not laziness, just unknowable to people used to tech communities and test suites.

To that end, my friend Ted and I think we've figured out how to help these founders take the leap and get in front of real people. Those people might be clients, developers or community leaders.

If you're interested in what we're doing, let me know. I'm happy to answer any questions you have, here.

And if you need help with hard problems, you should definitely call Ted: http://usistwo.com/
"But (like other ways of bestowing one's favors liberally) it's safe to do it so long as you're not being paid to."

We at blogVault love the above line. We often have our customers ask us for help with things completely unrelated to what we do. However, we always refuse to be paid for it. We always tell them that we are in the business of backups. Everything else we will help out but could not accept any payments for. It ensures that we don't have to commit to deadlines etc.
What will they do when someday our phones are chips in our brains? "Please sir, I need to cut your head off for a bit". Eventually technology will make it almost impossible to do a real border search.
It's funny that he has to explicitly state that. It pretty much implies he knows they are not grown-ups. I imagine the average college student being scared shitless of interrupting the highly-esteemed professor to ask him wtf he's talking about.
The Rosetta stone paper: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/rosetta.pdf

also some preliminaries (books by Simmons, Awodey and Lawvere/Schanuel, spivak):

http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.6946

http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1eiyid/category_theory...

http://blog.begriffs.com/2012/07/order-of-lambda.html

http://debasishg.blogspot.com/2012/01/2011-year-that-was.htm...
Nice to see some action on Perl. IMHO its better than most of the existing dynamic languages.
Which other major mobile OS has the equivalent of Cyanogenmod?
Doesn't look serious.

First pass:

* Doesn't list a regulator, probably unlicensed money lender
* Company about page is empty, no registered company address or identity
* No legal jurisdiction given.
* No evidence on who the team is and what they're experience in loans are
(legal, risk, etc.)
* Empty T&C - probably means you don't even have lawyers, can't find lending
contract anywhere on site, does one even exist ?

And the list could go on.

It's like launching Amazon without having any books or the logistics to handle ordering.

There's also a decent chance the site as it exists (even if it's not currently processing loans) might violate the law (in a "Go to jail, do not pass Go" sense) depending on where it's operating from.

This is the kind of business where you have to have a lawyer, because there's so many things going on which can have serious legal repercussions.
Watergate was done copying purely physical media.
>Then these overqualified research professors should not waste their time teaching and have this conflict of interest. They should be just mentoring the next generation of research professors and doing their research, since that is where most of their money comes from anyway.

That's just not the way research works.

I've gotten far superior instruction in math for example from dedicated instructors at community colleges than I ever got at my university. 30 people sized classes vs 300 sized and it was almost half price.

One of the best courses I've ever taken was a "300 sized" chemistry class. The lecturer was a master at lecturing, his classes filled almost immediately. He also put a lot of effort into meeting with students, despite having a dozen or so TA's to manage.

>These community colleges are only devoted to teaching and generally they do just fine.

I'm an instructor at a CC and I can tell you it is a mixed bag. Our math dept is weak.
"Don't keep looking for greener pastures" is something I needed to hear.
Judging from the fact that the carrier's name is displayed prominently on the status bar, and that it's only available on one carrier, I think they meant "New Motorola".
Great article. I also like Dereck Sivers post on manual work: http://sivers.org/hi doing things that don't scale
Corrected! (Actually there used to be a 'cookies' tab, if I recall correctly, but no more.)
Why Microsoft’s reorganization closes the books on an era of computing
I'm working on http://boardgamehub.co, and my consulting practice at http://ulisesrmzroche.github.io. I'd be happy to get feedback, since everything is so new I haven't gotten much further than empathy stage.

Board Game Hub is the newest way to play boardgames. Instead of having to teach your friends or meet strangers in internet forums, the web app matches people up by the board game they want to play and, once all the logistics are in place, sets up a gaming night at a board game store for them. There is also a premium version where users can become Guild Founders and, with their fame and renown now tracked, put their reputations against other Guilds in a highly competitive social gaming network.

As a consultant, I build high quality startups on a low budget. Providing web development, marketing, and explainer video services. I'm also still working on honing the target market, because it seems like so many people want wordpress stuff.
"For reasons I'm not permitted to disclose, I need to stick this wire up your nose."
The only reason Windows Phone is not the dominant mobile OS is because of the social stigma around Windows.

For most people, Windows Phone is a MUCH better experience than Android.

The problem is that no one gives Windows Phone a chance. I don't know many people that used Windows Phone and switched back to Android/iPhone. Beside the app factor (which is much less of an issue than what people think), Windows Phone is an excellent mobile OS.
TBH, I've never been fired.
I have fired a handful of people. All of them have been fired after more than a week (in some case, much more). I believe that all of them could have been fired earlier, saving both us and them a lot of time and trouble.

I know this is a black-and-white type of argument, and in real life things are obviously more complicated.
Please unpack "radicalized islam" for me. It sounds a lot like "africanized honey bees".
How to kill your child
PG’s point about a lot of startup founders having an engineering background is hugely relevant to this, beyond his assertion that “customer service is not part of the training of engineers.“

Systems that don’t scale, or that are reliant on the grunt work of humans, are not part of the training of engineers either. For so many engineers, an unscalable, human-dependant system is a bug, not a feature.

Is it too hyperbolic to say doing things that don’t scale runs counter-intuitive to an engineering mindset? (I’m a left-brained, analytical, systems-minded designer, so I’m definitely not trying to throw stones at my peers.)
Check out http://railscasts.com http://peepcode.com http://lynda.com http://codeschool.com
You can change it, but yeah you're right. Not sure what they're thinking. They should just leave it to OK Google.
Channels by themselves are not a concurrency primitive. If you try to write and read from a channel in the same context, you'll deadlock. Goroutines (or "go blocks") provide the concurrent semantics, channels are a means of communication.

In Go you don't actually ask "what channel do I read from?". You are handed a channel (as a function argument or as a value from another channel) which you can then use to communicate. From the encapsulation point of view, pids and channels are very similar -- the code using the channel/pid doesn't have to know anything about the other end.

But the semantics of channels and message passing are very different: always synchronous vs asynchronous by default.
Some of the UI elements from Maemo/Meego live on in their low-end Asha series. You probably don't see them much in the US, but they're reasonably popular in India.
You are there to learn, not to pay money and get an A.

If you desire teachers to stoop to your level and explain things best left to self-reading in textbooks, you are probably in over your head and have no one but the overly lenient admissions department at your university to thank. University is a big business, that makes admissions easier to let in more students and make more money. Do not fool yourself into thinking otherwise.
A competent TA might have more of a rapport with a student, since they'd be closer in age and experience. It's likely that a grad student TA has recently taken the same classes and done the same kind of assignments. Also, a TA may have more time to spend with a struggling student than a professor has. (I've been a TA.)
TLDR: Startups that try to focus on big launches are generally lazy. Success comes from putting in extraordinary effort to putting your customer first. This means you get super-enthusiastic users. This works by the principle of compound growth as users tell their friends.

Somewhat ironically I am of the opinion that:

(A) this is one of pg's best and most useful essays ever

(B) it is partially more useful because it is longer and more experience driven than some of his other "classic" essays (i.e. the theory behind why blub is bad and lisp is great)

(C) it is too long and could have been edited down a bit more
A password you can swallow? Don’t hold your breath
Exorcising Google
Imagine. Steampunk typewriter with something like Arduino for Ethernet/TCP/IP/SSH support :-)
Could you describe the problems you are facing in more detail?

I guess you would not have to pay to get directions. One-on-one help might need payment.
The AND professors I've had are some of the finest. I think I had 1, maybe 2.
That's pretty much my point: I don't think mathematical monads are a good background for Haskell Monads. It's a bit like saying the ZF axioms are the mathematical background for Data.Set.
One-on-one with Microsoft CEO: Ballmer on reorganization, future
Me too : )
You can buy conversion kits for typewriters, to convert them to USB.

(http://www.usbtypewriter.com/)
like BSG
>In the case of the good student, he's competing with his fellow student, so it's in his best interest not to help them succeed.

This is entirely counterproductive. There is no good reason to have that attitude since the number of spoils (a grade of "A") are not limited.
In other words, the only new markets that will be available will be the ones that are protected by some sort of "potential barrier." Otherwise, they would already be actively exploited.
Lawyer/Soldier/Model Sues Apple for Allowing Porn to Destroy his Marriage
I actually have fantasies about going back to the late 1800s and making a hyper-simple steampunk style internet with telegraph wires and whatnot. You'd have 'servers' which set up static pages in some analog format (akin to moveable type) which could then be easily coded and decoded across the wire and printed onto a ticker of some sort. You could have a set of panels that flipped to one side of the other (black or white) to form a rudimentary display, maybe 256x128 or something.
Has Patent, Will Sue - An Alert to Corporate America
Clojure and Complexity (2011)
Maybe stackoverflow or serverfault could help if you are having specific issues with the code or the server setup?
There is a link to the source at the bottom of the page (http://www.straeto.is/rauntimakort/). I parse the JSON input, associate the records with previous ones (i.e. which bus is uniquely which) and stream output via websockets.
Seconded; after an extensive comparison over a year ago, Yii is now my framework of choice on any PHP project, and I haven't regretted that choice a single time since. It's fast, powerful, extensible and well documented.

As for English documentation, their guide [1] as well as their main tutorial [2] are in English and are written and structured better than the documentation for almost all other frameworks I looked at.

[1] http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/guide/1.1/en/quickstart.firs...

[2] http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/blog/
I stumbled across thinkful recently: http://www.thinkful.com and I think having a mentor while learning to code (especially web dev) is really helpful.

PS: I have not used thinkful before.
Michael is very responsive to questions although you should first use his debugging tips. He'll usually fix your problem with one line of code.

http://ruby.railstutorial.org/help

If you don't find your answer from either the debugging tips or a Google search, try writing your question on StackOverflow. Most of the issues you face are probably solvable by knowing what line of your error to search for.
Understanding the very generalized algebraic monad helps you to understand the nature of encapsulating effects and adding complexity to categories through layering. It's absolutely not beginner material—but it's valuable material.

I don't like your take because it refuses to take that deeper dive into the mathematical Monad, despite [alluding] to it. Knowing the relationship between `Monad` and `Category` the type classes is almost never useful in programming Haskell. Knowing the relationship between `Monad`, monads, and their categorical underpinning is a different matter.
> Mobile and personal computing devices need to have hardware entropy. It should be required.

I guess it's a good thing then that Intel added RdRand on IvyBridge. And doesn't TPM also have hardware RNG in it?
If there ever was a "red herring" in a discussion of Linux distributions, it's the init system.

The distro maintainers package the software for their system. It's therefore also their responsibility to make sure a service can be started/stopped and have its status checked.

It does not matter what kind of init system a distro has. A single Linux distribution is an Operating System independent of all others. There is no one true portable Linux way, much less for non-Linux-based Operating Systems. You have to treat them all as separate because to do otherwise would not only add complexity to a monolithic "portability" system, it would eventually get so complex you'd have to split it up anyway.

Portable software makes 3rd-party software developers' lives easier. But the init system is not managed by 3rd-party developers. It is managed by the OS maintainers. So it does not matter what method they use.

Furthermore, it's fucking Debian, the second-oldest distribution still in release. The oldest (Slackware) holds onto the old ways for as long as technically possible, and they're still going strong. So why the hell they care about being "modern" and "remaining relevant" is anyone's guess.

(disclaimer: I wrote my own init system for my own Linux distribution, and have modified most others)
PG, thanks for this essay, it is such an encouragement for us, giving us a plan for how to approach our startup (http://automicrofarm.com/) growth for the next few months.
"the newer alternatives are more standard"

This statement doesn't seem to match the actual controversy, unless it was sarcasm.
Asshole x software = Asshole at scale
That remind me of one of my friends, who went to do MBA ... so he can be more successful carpenter.
Unless you're being targeted as a potential customer or a member of the audience, your mobile performance is irrelevant. What is relevant is that the majority of the devices being used to access sites don't have the performance of mid-high end models.
Alltogether there have been around 300 Proton launches in Soviet times. http://www.baikonur-info.ru/kosmos.htm
Partial almanac is here - http://astro.uni-altai.ru/space/view-all-list.php?page=253
I like this essay a lot.

In the early days of Apple, the founders placed minimum orders for parts on 30-day credit, then built the computers in 10 days and sold them before the payment for the parts came due. There wasn't any sexy software at that point. Apple was a hardware startup.

Web startups are in general probably more attractive to VC, but I'm excited about hardware startups.
Hey jrbeal, I've had the same problems. I taught myself ROR over the past year and I had huge issues getting it off the ground. I've been through over 20 different sets of tutorials, so I'm sure I can help out.

I also had a lot of initial difficulty setting up my environments, but I've gotten a lot better at it now.

If you'd like, send me an email benigeri@stanford.edu and I can try to help you and point you to good resources. It's a little hard to suggest anything right now since I don't have any context.

So send me an email and I'll try to help you as much as I can, pro-bono.
I don't believe you actually read the context of my comment.
No, this 1-3 list is not comprehensive; it ignores the entire literature on side channels and covert channels.

Have you read any of these papers? I respectfully guess that you haven't. You're in luck. Go read Boneh's "Remote Timing Attacks Are Practical", and Osvik & Tromer's local spy process paper.
UX Basics: Designing For Your Mom
I would be extremely hesitant to take a "contract-to-hire" offer, because that expects me to take on all the risk of a job not working out. That said, I wouldn't mind a 40-80 hour paid engagement, on my own schedule, as a sort of job interview. I only wish you guys served more markets than NY and SF.
It's interesting that what pg writes in this essay is implicit in the word scale. If you think about what it means to scale, it means your level of automation grows as your number of users grows. If you don't have many users, it doesn't make sense to automate too much.
ListenToBitcoin.com contains malware, switch to BitListen.com
>Thinking someone is an excellent lecturer is not the same as being taught effectively.

This a thousand times. Most student evaluations are garbage.

>It's not his job to entertain you. It's his job to make the material available for you to study and assimilate, and to provide insight you would find difficult to gain simply by reading from a text. You falling asleep is your problem, not his.

No, but at the same time, we can and should look to optimize the ways in which we deliver material.
When asked if he would like condensed milk or honey on his bread - Winnie the Pooh said "Both, but never mind the bread".

Dropbox went to YC and to TC 50 and did "double-sided affiliation" and has a great product and and and... etc.
It sounds more like a consulting company than a startup. Then, I suppose it would end being an startup..
I was surprised to see that you were the first one to mention Virtual Machines in these comments.

I would use a VM on a "live" system, booted from removable media, to which no data is ever written. (DVD)

But it wouldn't be any Linux distro.

BSD is what I prefer. Take your pick of the available options, NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, *BSD.