skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Stanford are doing more than most to kill the traditional university (see Coursera and Udacity). It's only natural that Stanford-the-institution should be trying to change the model so it can survive. It isn't clear to me that giving students learning opportunities likes running a real company with real investors is a bad use of a university.
Gingko
The magic of open sores: what's your Github?

This should be easy to settle and show up the other guy. ;)
The people who designed Java are not the same who "extended" it later on.
Big nanotech: building a new world with atomic precision (Eric Drexler)
For how many students is this picture of Stanford recognizable? (I have never been nearer Stanford than the SF airport, so the question isn't entirely rhetorical.)
>> Couldn't they just hire someone and say "Fix this.

The article says that "if you take the latest and greatest 13" MacBook Air, and install Windows 8 on it", the battery life goes from 14:25 to 7:40.

It's unlikely a single fix. Probably everything from drivers to GUIs would have to be made more efficient to close the gap.
Reasons why I would not pay for this (I'm a developer):

- I already keep notes in markdown using nValt. It's fast. And it's free.

- I sync these notes, which are just .markdown files in a directory on my machine, with Dropbox. Now I can edit these notes on my iDevices.

- Your service costs me money to do what I do for free.

- If I need more bells and whistles, I use Evernote. Evernote is also free for me.

- Emailing myself notes with tags in the subject in is also free.

Why should I spent $5/mo to use a digital journaling service, and then more time to make this service work with the rest of my workflow, when I already have things in place that take care of my note taking problem?

I would need a great incentive to switch how I take notes. I'm thinking a bunch of other developers thought the same thing.

Finally, at least you shipped something. Nice retrospective. Keep at it.

Edit: It's interesting seeing this post and "Ask HN: How do you store and organize your startup ideas?"[1] on the front page at the same time :)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6585375
"As Tanzania's Albino Killings Continue, Unanswered Questions Raise Fears"
The Melancholy of Subculture Society
I think it might have to do with http vs https.
It might be a guess, but it's one that we know is almost certainly correct. Windows has an enormous amount of legacy code, and behaviors that were perfectly fine even just a few years ago now can devastate battery life.

Windows is an eminently pluggable system, fully able to take advantage of low power states in hardware, ACPI, etc. Fundamentally there is no reason for it to be a power pig. But it is, because the choices made in it were made for a different world of computing.
This is really a problem with most large organizations not only the government in the US.

The real problem is applying industrial linear thinking to a post-industrial exponential scenario.

I.e. most large organizations confuse conceptualizing and building the factory with working at the factory.
The Anti-Reactionary FAQ (or, Against Moldbug)
This could be waaay better than Launchpad. And much nicer looking, too.
You're conflating intelligence and knowledge. Intelligence is a matter of capacity and capability; knowledge is one of the things intelligent people have a great capacity for attaining and retaining. The main thing, in fact.

Knowledge, unlike intelligence, is in practice infinite. And now you can understand the inverse Dunning-Kruger effect: intelligent people have the capacity to recognize how little knowledge they have, and can ever have, about any given topic.
Ask HN: What commission to give a sales person for selling SaaS?
To boost start my SaaS sales, I am considering using sales people on a purely commission basis, since I have no budget to pay them yet unless there's a sale.

Is that a good idea?

What's the going commission rate for a sales person at a starting SaaS?

For what period on should I pay them a share of the monthly subscription revenue?
Particle Systems using Stream-Out in DirectX 11 and SlimDX
If that's what you want, look up Elgg.
What I hope someone creates, is something like Elgg but where the concept of public and private keys is used somehow, so that whoever controls the server where it's hosted doesn't have access to the users' content. Or even better, some form of peer-to-peer social network so that the central server could be dropped entirely, and users would just rely on clients on their trusted machines.
I meant that in reference to the fact that the OP has a "list" of ideas. I might (or might not) have a "list" of ideas and if the list, in addition to easy or more difficult web startup ideas, so much as hinted at asteroid mining (whatever the idea is) or something like the HyperLoop (again no matter what the idea is) - then the overall list is now more resources than I would ever come into contact with through any path.

But if instead, I only have a list of cofounders who are on board with specific plans, then I would only have manageable ideas. That is to say, perhaps it is possible to cofound a private space company. But actually doing so is a helluvalot different from putting it in a bulletted list. And I probably wouldn't do so under any circumstances, even if I did have an idea in that space.
True.

Reminds me of all the roadies (road cyclists) who would come into our bike shop and demand the lightest components to put on their bikes, then rave about how they cut 10 GRAMS off of their bike weight. Totally ignoring the fact they're pushing almost 220lbs themselves.
What doesn't Tovalds call out as being utterly crap?
I routinely wipe all partitions and start fresh when setting up a new laptop. What you describe seems to indicate I would have to boot into Windows initially in order to delete those keys. Is there any other way around that? Can anyone else comment as well?
+1 for Istanbul
In the UK, it's illegal to block people from getting the job for anything which doesn't fall under the General Operating Requirements (GOR) of the job. This means that you can refuse to hire someone in a wheelchair for a bricklaying job (for the sake of pedantry, lets assume they cannot physically do the job) but you cannot just because someone has a certain religion.

It's a shockingly sensible piece of legislation.

Some interesting consequences that I know have been tested in court:

You can't be 'over-qualified' for a job, that's a form of age discrimination. An over-qualified person shouldn't be less able to do the job.

You can fire someone for wearing a niqab if it stops them from doing their job (e.g. teaching English to young students to whom English is a second language).

So, if you can show that not having the qualification doesn't disadvantage you then I would expect that'd be a legal issue.
apt-get doesn't run unsigned, unvetted shell scripts downloaded over unprotected channels.
>Windows and Linux are general purpose OSes. The same kernel runs on high throughput servers and low power tablets. The apps are written with little focus on battery life.

What are you saying? That Microsoft can't build a consumer OS with great power-management because the kernel also needs to work on high throughput servers?

Come on.

>But both Windows and Linux are more than capable to get this all sorted.

Bingo. So the questions stands, given that the consumer market is a huge priority for Microsoft and that iPads and iPhones and Android devices represent some of the biggest competition for Microsoft, why haven't they done this already?
Right. It's impossible to genuinely read any page on my site in <40 seconds, so I can treat an increase in >40seconders as an increase in reading time.
Trello. I organize them in lists and revisit weekly. I'm an idea guy that needs to focus on execution, so I revisit the list weekly.

* Needs Validating (basic market research, customer exploration)

* Hot list (validated. would like to spend more time on it)

* Dead pool (didn't pass validation, or interests/resources/priorities shifted)

My deadpool list will be turned into an interesting book one day. Most likely one of those funny single page story books that are bought for bathroom reading.
I'd take one of the well-working exchanges from the states nd scale it up to the federal level. Use somthing that works. Dont try to fix the complex, broken one.
> It's a good place to bike, as there are essentially no hills.

If you don't value your life, sure. Miami traffic is crazy. If you don't get hit by the Fast & Furious wannabe, you'll get hit by an old lady who didn't stop at the light.
Entrepreneurship events this week and startup news to note
Sensationalist hogwash. Stanford continues to be strong as a research university, and not just in engineering. Consider that two of this year's Nobel laureates were Stanford professors: one in medicine, one in chemistry. Think about the very strong history program, or the fine arts, or the (surprising) presence of the conservative Hoover Institution. In the years I spent as a student, I saw plenty of entrepreneurial excitement, but I also experienced excellence in areas far removed from the worlds of business, venture capital, and software.

Stanford is a diverse place. Just because a small number of students are dropping out to start companies doesn't mean that the end of the university is nigh.
We're currently sitting a a version of pfSense 2.1 that can run on EC2. (Ob disclosure, I own over half of ESF, the company behind pfSense.)

Amazon said they didn't want anything powered by FreeBSD in AWS. There are currently negotiations about running on a larger instance that supports the HVM, and avoids the 'Windows tax', but there are significant usage fees for that tier (today that´s the cluster compute and M3 instances) as well.

We could release a variant of the AMI as a "public" AMI. It wouldn't be in AWS then, but it would be available. If your account is new enough, it would allow a completely free VPN service on Amazon's "free tier".

It would also allow people to setup their own VPN service (OpenVPN and IPSEC are both fully supported.) Hosting on top of EC2 isn't perfect (there are possible key recovery attacks from others hosted on the same infrastructure), but, correctly configured, Law Enforcement would need more than a pen register order to obtain anything beyond the enclosing IP packet data. Since, in theory, you would be your own provider, the FBI (or an equivalent in other EC2 zones) would have a higher burden to install even a pen register.

My question is: should we bother? Anyone with sufficient clue could setup a linux instance to do the same thing.
I buy a domain and then sit on it forever. So, namecheap.
Why An Arts Non-Profit Is Developing Web Dashboards
Google Spreadsheet with difficulty scores and other parameters.
> Basically, it's just a naming convention which tells you something about the purpose of this particular class. In languages like Java, C#, etc. you also use naming conventions to communicate something useful. In CSS, I do the same thing. There is UpperCaseCamelCase, lowerCaseCamelCase, _withLeadingUnderscore, and x-prefixed. All of these things mean something specific.

What does those four styles mean then, respectively? I'm curious.
Instantly recognizable. It's in the middle of the Oval looking towards the Main Quad.
Meta: Is that the whole article? Three short paragraphs in which the author admits that he hasn't actually read Brooks' book then goes on to restate the premise? Maybe I should get into writing for Slate...

Edit: Slate blog, I suppose.
Yep, those are all installed as part of my emacs set up.
See especially people who used to have performance problems realising that the server was running a screensaver.

Terminal Server running serverside, not clientside, screensaver is poor for performance (https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en-GB#!search/windows$20...)

Q: My server has poor performance. (https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en-GB#!search/windows$20...)

I genuinely don't understand the Google groups interface. So I might not have linked to the correct messages. Some scrolling might be needed.
> The lines are also pretty crammed, they could need some more padding.

As in line height? Already tried that: http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing#line-height

> [1] http://www.beelinereader.com/

I emailed them when they came out for a JS version which I could use. I guess they are still working on it because I haven't heard anything lately.
To the founders of CryptoSeal. When you first set up, did you consider not being a US headquartered company? If so, what were the overriding factors that made you stay US-based?

I ask because in a recent blog post from Silent Circle (a secure comms company), they explicitly state "we are not a U.S firm" [1]. I'm beginning to think any company that wants to offer security products like this has to place their Global HQ outside the US's legal jurisdiction. I doubt it solves all the problems but it probably helps to some extent.

[1] http://silentcircle.wordpress.com/2013/10/16/one-heck-of-a-y...
Did you read the OP? The point of the article was that one can be great at that sort of thing and yet quite terrible as a production programmer. You are not measuring the skill you want with math problems, you are measuring a proxy.

Furthermore, I've known plenty of smart math people that just never seemed to be able to program (well). I think they are different skill sets, certainly with plenty of overlap, but plenty of differences as well, and those differences matter. I laughed out loud at the "variables, variables everywhere!" answer in the OP - I've had to deal with so much code written that way. Some people, very smart people, just don't 'get' design in that way. I worked with a guy that used to run around the office, asking brain teasers, sharing tidbits of knowledge, but he couldn't execute a basic project - couldn't plan what to do, couldn't do things in a rational order, couldn't experiment and gather data, couldn't incrementally design, develop, refactor, nor do a big-bang waterfall kind of design, and so on. He was not sorely missed when let go. Smart as a whip, and useless (for programming).

I've worked at several companies with staff mathematicians. Sooner or later they got their hands on a compiler. Oh my. No, let me do that. You tell me what is wrong with my Kalman filter, but I'll take care of the implementation, thank you.

Its easy to kvetch at somebody else's answer without offering an alternative (I do agree whiteboard progamming is disastrous). So, instead of asking math, why not ask them to write a simple routine, but then start asking real world problems about the code they would face - how would you make this API interface robust? What kind of documentation would you write. How would you handle errors? Is this code exception safe? Thread safe? How would you make it either/both of those. Suppose your problem size was n=100MM, how might you need to change this (say they have a data structure that loaded everything into memory)? Ask them some problems they will see in production - what is the network delay, or whatever your problem case is. You still get to see how they approach problems, but in the context of the actual decisions they will be making while programming for you.

Anyway, that is what I try to do. I am revising my thoughts even on that, because I find people flopping on the 'code the simple problem (and, it is simple)' yet doing great on all the engineering questions, and doing fine if we hire them.
Everybody knew that went the patent standoff went nuclear things like this would happen. Patents were meant to leverage innovation, not to use it to litigate yourself into monopolistic control of a vertical market.
Iceland, Switzerland, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and a few other places do look really interesting (and Switzerland and Hong Kong have pretty good infrastructure). Investigating a few more as well.

One consideration, though, is that we're all US citizens, and so even if we set up a Hong Kong company with Hong Kong servers, we'd be at risk to US court orders or any civil/criminal action. So for US citizens, the only real solution is technical controls, or legal/legislative reforms in the US.
I was simply confirming your hypothesis.
I don't even see how the article brings up a good point. A very small percentage of Stanford undergrads are dropping out and starting up, so what? Maybe it's part of their pursuit to work at whatever inspires them.
Interesting theory, but do you also account for the tiered nature of IT jobs? (Tiered w.r.t domain/difficulty/etc)
Google is complicit because of the pay-per-click model. They make money whether or not it the clicks are hired by middlemen or not.
To get a handle on how bad domestic spying is in practical terms, consider that the US outspends the rest of the planet in military spending. Surveillance spending is likely to be roughly proportional. A small nation with low military spending per-capita could fall below the threshold of operating an effective surveillance state, just as they could fall below the threshold of operating a blue-water navy.
Did you even read the article?

The author was not saying she was above simple coding tests but that she was an inexperienced programmer who was GOOD at the maths puzzles and got the job then struggled and the interviewer's assessment of her software development ability would have been better with some software related questions.
Thanks for posting the "behind the scenes" story.

You say you built a landing page with mailchimp signups for your new product. Did you get many signups? And I suppose these were just signups, no money involved, right? Did a good chunck turn into paying customers?

I would love to know more.

Thank You!
>Performance optimizations are all about trade-offs, and what might be a good trade-off for Microsoft's own hardware could be a bad trade-off for 95% of the other hardware on the market.

Why not have an "Extended-Battery profile" that you can turn on and off, that will have Windows be more aggressive with respect to power conservation? It'll be toggled on automatically on Surface-type devices, and turned off for desktops and servers (though servers may also benefit).

So give me a break. Where there's a will there's a way.

>The only way for Microsoft to achieve the kind of vertical integration that Apple has would be if it was willing to destroy its existing OEM partnerships.

Hyperbole much?
I really need to consolidate my ideas.

At the moment I use Trello, Evernote, Google Docs, and sometimes I guess Skype for when I've come up with an idea during a conversation.

Different ideas go into different places depending on the convenience of each one and the length at which I want to describe it. For example, Google Docs works well for a big-ass description for an idea I come up with when I'm at a PC or Mac, because it's better than Evernote on the web, and sometimes Evernote native isn't available.

But Evernote on mobile is good for this too, and Trello is good if I just need to go "QUICK GET THIS ONE LINER DOWN SOMEWHERE".

That doesn't mean I need an app to solve this problem, though, in case anybody gets any ideas.
Google's Nexus 4 is a useful example here. It's in pretty much the same position as the Surface, and it also suffers from low battery life.
Pro Athletes make a Bernie Lean Music Video. Booyah Picky Bars Crew
The correct syntax is:

powercfg /ENERGY
No, it doesn't, the foreground color is #57534a and background is #ffffff which gives a ratio of 7.7:1

WCAG 2.0 requires a contrast of 7:1 to reach AAA levels. [1]

you can test it yourself with a bunch of tools but I couldn't find link to results on any of them [2][3][4].

[1] http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/#qr-visual-audio-contr...

[2] http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

[3] http://snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html

[4] http://contrastchecker.com/
The Differences Between ManageWP and WordPress Multisite
I think IT just gets a lot of press and coverage of people who got rich.

Computers are nice because you don't need a huge factory to start something. However, let's take an archaic example: sewing. I think you can also get rich sewing, for example by designing a popular fashion line or creating a popular brand.

I am not even sure it is easier to get rich with computers than with sewing, or if more people are getting rich with programming than with sewing.

It seems possible that by the time women have been successfully coerced into tech careers, some completely different technology will be in the limelight. I don't know what - perhaps bioengineering? Then there will be a big lament why so few women are in bioengineering.
What was the initial reactions of people when they tried your product? Did they say they loved it and would want to use it everyday?
There and back again: my journey from iPhone to Galaxy S4 and back
To the contrary, Microsoft, Nokia and partners are actively looking at bringing WP8 tablets to the market. Thus completely sidestepping the Windows RT issue.
There are solutions to funding drug research that don't require artificial scarcity. Eg prizes, or simply more government R&D.

The status quo is rediculously inefficient: "...patent-protected brand drugs sell for more than three times the price of generic drugs that sell in a free market. This means that the country could save approximately $140 billion a year on its $220 billion annual bill for prescription drugs if the government did not provide patent protection and drugs were instead sold in a competitive market.

According to the pharmaceutical industry, it spent $41.1 billion on research in the United States in 2004.4 This means that the country spends more than three dollars in higher drug prices for every dollar of drug research supported through the patent system. The rest of the additional spending went to marketing, high CEO pay, and drug company profits."

(Quoted from: http://deanbaker.net/images/stories/documents/cns.html#5)