skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's going to be really difficult to get schools to pay for anything in this environment. Definitely a worthy goal. I'd have a school administrator page or portal or something target at people who purchase 30 accounts at once.

But you need an entry point. Cold calling schools is likely ineffective. Try seeing which schools use Blackboard and then see if you can convince someone to try it out Eduset. Administrators are definitely looking to cut costs where they can. If you can provide their current LMS functionality for cheaper, there might be a play there.

Another thing to try is once you have users, suggest that they tell their friends about it. Maybe suggest it on a newsletter? Make it easy for them to share it with their peers and even their administrator.

This is probably a revenue model decision for you. The way I see it, 60 bucks a year is not much. If the teacher cares enough, then they should be willing to spend it. 60 bucks is not painful enough for them to push the school to pay for it. If it were more money, you'd lose teachers because they weren't willing to try it but you may net a whole school. A way you maybe able to solve this is offer some really expensive but cool tool at a higher pricing point. Base is 60 bucks but if you want to be able to track how students/classes/races are doing it's going to be 800 (maybe more?) bucks a class. Okay that idea was from a quick brainstorm, administrators love numbers... especially ones they can show accountability to parents with.
Common sense = conventional wisdom. They're both wrong reasonably often. Have you never taken an instant dislike to someone within seconds of meeting them? Or indeed, felt a connection with someone you haven't known long enough to have any real bond? These are mostly subconscious reactions to demeanour, tone and (much weaker) dress.

You've heard "First impressions last", right? So obviously we judge people outside of conscious, logical thought processes.

Person and Costume: Effects on the Formation of First Impressions
http://fcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/4/1/32

First Impressions: Making Up Your Mind After a 100-Ms Exposure to a Face
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118597412/abstrac...

Confirming first impressions in the employment interview: a field study of interviewer behavior
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=3296559
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A friend of mine was shooting AK-47s in a shooting range in asia and he said it jams easily. Dunno how that fits in with "you can bury it for 10 years"
They certainly do. It's extremely common, and perfectly within their guidelines. That's why they have 2 distinct fields, which are allowed to be on different domains.

One reason is to allow ad-arbitrage, which is a massive part of adwords. (I used to do a fair bit of this).

For example, you might want to show adverts that have the display URL of apple.com but actually go through an ad networks own url before they get there. Having the ad display a URL of an ad-network instead of apple.com would be very silly.

You might also just want to put everything through your own jump script so you can count clicks yourself to ensure google is honest.

From the adwords guidelines:

"Your display URL must accurately reflect the URL of the website you're advertising. It should match the domain of your landing page so that users will know which site they'll be taken to when they click on your ad."

The original ad here violates that requirement.

But certainly allowing a different destination URL to display URL is pretty important for a lot of people who legitimately use adwords to drive traffic through ad-networks or jump scrtips etc.
"This is just a rumour" is not boilerplate if it's the only reference to the source of the information. Also, "sources" is highly ambiguous: who do you mean? the guys at the bus stop or the company board members?
Because there is no objective measure for "quality" within an individual implementation within a language. The best we can hope for is some guarantee that people know what the tools and techniques available to them are, and that they know the factors that influence software quality.

That would be more valuable than being language certified.
Summarising, and adding my $0.02 ...

Since they want to abandon it, get them to agree in writing that they are walking away and leaving you everything. Make sure you write the agreement, and get all parties to sign it. If you can afford it, and if you think they deserve or will want it, offer them some money. If they accept money, get a receipt. I believe having money in exchange makes future disputes less likely. You made an offer, they accepted, they got money, you got the rights.

While you are doing this, get a few opinions from people who have never seen it before. People here on HN are usually pretty straight and pretty honest.

Target limited alpha launch (not just a couple of people dropping in) for two weeks from now. Target beta launch two weeks after that. Don't move those deadlines, just make sure you hit them. If you can bring them closer, do it.

Launch, and listen to the feedback.

A comment about the failures: Each one you mention, the failure is that you have not taken control. You are doing the work, but you are not driving things through. If you are ever going to succeed in these sorts of things you must see what needs to be done, and get it done.

Finally, you can contact me directly if you want. There are two ways. Firstly, find a real email address for me. It's not that hard, others have done it.

Alternatively, read this page:

http (colon) //www (dot) penzba.co.uk (slash) DHMW_Challenge.txt

I'd prefer not yet to have a direct link. On there you can find instructions on creating a public-key message for me which you can either post or, preferrably, put in your profile. It's probably secure enough for what you want.

If you want to do this but have trouble, reply to this comment.

On the other hand you can give up and walk away, but from what you say, you've already done most of the work. Be methodical, make a plan, then work through it.
You can always just empty your app.yaml or edit your code to return an empty page...
I'm sure 37signals will come out with exactly that shortly, to drive more traffic to their blog.
How about if they just emulate the female role models in their life?
App Engine thinks about a lot of thinks for you, besides scaling, and the roadmap suggests that it's going to continue to go into Amazon's territory, such as by hosting large static files.

I'm still holding out on built-in full text search, but recent releases like a task queue and an XMPP client are nice additions.
I bet there are a lot of people here who like your writing and dislike TechCrunch (I am one). This can't be true if people dislike you both for the same reason.

It is clear from your writing that you are after the truth, and it is clear from TechCrunch articles they are after the pageviews only. This is okay if they provided quality product, instead they provide the latest rumors with little technical understanding behind linkbait uninformative titles.
Point taken, but this story doesn't really indicate that the small arms trade is in decline, just that "knock-offs" have reached sufficient quality levels that they are considered a viable alternative to an authentic product.

What's interesting is that these companies have lower costs because they don't do any R&D like the original inventors do. With no money for research, nobody will invent a more efficient gun. Hopefully.
See, thats key to making the system worthwhile. Your ratings come back to haunt you in a qualitatively different way for each rating. Not that I can see how youtube could do this...
Not sure about rockets specifically, but I do know that the only reason the Soyuz is way cheaper than the Space Shuttle is lower Russian wages.
That chart is veering dangerously toward misleading; it should be a bar, not a line.
Did you send them an email, and ask them to be more specific?
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So your assertion is that theoretical computer science is complexity theory and algorithmic analysis?

How about any of these?

Semantics

Concurrency theory

Theories of refinement

Type theory

The Curry-Howard Correspondence (and results derived from it)

(Finite) automata

...

Shall I go on?

Those are all "theoretical CS". Programming language theorists qualify as "theoretical CS" practitioners in most cases. Simon Peyton Jones certainly qualifies.

I think you have a strange, narrow definition of theoretical CS that isn't shared by many people.
This is dangerous advice; failing fast is way better than failing slow. To get to (in your example) breakeven in year 2, you better be showing traction in year 1 after launch, or at least signs of life, which they were not. No one liked or cared about what they were building, and they wisely realized they had no idea what market they were really going after and (after several months' worth of learning) still had no evidence one even existed.

Given they're still at square one, if they identified a more promising market, they should go for that, and it takes a lot of discipline to admit that all that prior effort is sunk cost.
I'm just starting up in London. Cambridge sounds like a good option. Are living costs really much cheaper?
It was also like that here in Brisbane today. It was strange seeing everyone with masks over their mouths. Looked like the apocalypse.

Here's some more info about it, for anyone interested:

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,26114000-421,00.html
If your theory were true then looking back on history you'd expect to see an inflection point in the graph of killings per capita with the invention (and widespread production) of firearms. While these figures are difficult to come by, every indication seems to be that the opposite is true. (For example, do you live in a city with a wall around it? Why do you think not?)

The problem with weapons that take a lot of effort and/or training to use effectively is that they give the advantage to those who are most motivated to use them. And they make it difficult for people to both work productively in civilized society and take up weapons for their own defense. The historical result was a stark stratification of fighters and civilians, one of the key forces behind barbarism and feudalism.

As for gun control, the genie is more than a little out of the bottle, firearms are not a recent invention. What is more likely to discourage someone from going on a killing spree? The difficulty of illegally obtaining firearms? Or the likelihood that they will run into armed resistance during their spree? Given the predominance of mass shootings in "gun free" zones such as schools, it seems most likely that it's door number 2.
Women have different and distinct priorities in life.
Modded up, but please no PHP.
You can bury it for 10 years and afterwards, it will still jam easily.
You might want to reread the part of the post on the importance of spelling. I am not familiar with program names - is that supposed to be Codeworrier or Codewarrior, or am I wrong and it's spelled correctly.
Google docs isn't a replacement for office apps, in my opinion. The main benefit, to my mind anyway, is that it allows for super easy collaboration across the internet. It takes so few clicks to create a document and share it with a few people.
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I have an unsubstantiated theory: gmail's rich features, chat, cal etc -- that didn't originally work on IE -- got a lot more people to switch to FireFox than security concerns.
I'm finding that even with my Nokia S60 phone ("not yet supported" according to the Google PR stuff) I'm getting Gmail pushed to my device. Worth trying if you haven't already.
Seems like with technology, each of our life spans can be maximized. So if any organ fails, it can be replaced (or maybe preemptively replaced so it lasts longer). However, the biggest problem is going to be our brain cells. After 100-120 years, our brains are just about used up. Doubt its worth persisting much longer after that.

Maybe in 500 years they'll figure out a solution to that, but I wont hold my breath.
Based on what you've written here, as an outsider: Your audience is not the HN audience. What people think of you here in terms of copying is completely irrelevant. (Also, copying is fine. Everybody copies, sometimes entire business ideas.) Your customers, who I assume are school administrators and teachers don't care which came first or who copies who. If you look at school admins, they probably don't even care about features, to win them over you need a good salesmen. Also, X always pointing out how he came first and his is better then Y is just good marketing, because whenever people see Y they also see X and are more likely to compare the two. Saying X is better is hardly evil, it's just marketing. (Remember the Apple vs. PC ads? Remember the news about how Microsoft wants to build stores right next to Apple stores? You're living it.) In the end I think you will need to sell packages to schools to make real money, and in that case it's not even going to be about features but about a good salesman with connections. That's what you get for making a product aimed at the goverment. Cheers.
Find yourself saying "blah blah blah" to close out the thought?
Why use HAProxy at all?
its a hassle if you drive, Cambridge is really a cycling city.
Hi thanks for this post. My main goal is to either start or join a small startup looking to solve an interesting problem (I do conversion optimization and product development so something near the app layer and UI is where I know I can improve a great many websites - designing for optimal user flow, creating an entire site around converting a user into registering, decreasing bounce rates, that is what I do very well with the analytics that go with it)

If you know any company looking for a product director would love to talk to them.

But back to the location thing, I will take a look at the city as well, it certainly is a bit pricey but I will know more after I visit in the next few weeks to look at a few neighborhoods.

You guys have really been great answering all the questions and making me feel welcome so thanks for that and hope to meet you all when I settle in.

If you need help with your startup to get people to convert and want to bounce ideas off me, my email is in the profile and would be happy to speak to you all about it.
Will check out hackerdojo thanks for that info
Yes. I sold my car and motorcycle before moving to SF. Now I use a Zipcar occasionally, taxis a few times a month, and mostly rely on my feet, public transit and my bike.

In SF, a transit pass costs $60 a month for an adult. I probably spend $60 a month on Zipcar (at most), and maybe $30 on cabs. So that's $150 a month on transportation. When I lived in Seattle (a cheaper place than SF) with my beater car, I paid that in auto insurance and parking alone. Even though I didn't drive that much, I was easily spending $300 a month on the car.

I've done this for over a year now, and I really don't miss having a car. Services like Zipcar really make it convenient for those rare occasions when I need a vehicle. The rest of the time, it's incredibly nice not to have to think about it.
where do you work? :)
worked for delicious
Agreed. Looks like a pretty cool initial implementation too. Seems like it'd take a decent marketing push to get an initial user base (so that the site's actually valuable). Hopefully these guys are able to get some decent angel funding and are able to get a shot at it.
Bushfire-season around Sydney is also an interesting time. Ash falls all through the city and down at Bondi you can see it drifting like rain onto the now-grey beach.

During the Hailstorm[1], the Sydney sky had green glow, of all things.

Now if Sydney has a plague of Locusts/Earthquake it may be time to postpone Mardi-Gras and Sleaze Ball... just to be safe ;)

----

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Sydney_hailstorm
I'm way more impressed by the company linking robot and web.

http://www.makeaffinity.com/

Not to many web startups these days make me stop and go wha-huh!? This one did.

Hey, Trevor, I've got a million dollar idea... how do you feel about QA going to a strip club?
You are kidding yourself. Neither one of those is going to prevent mad person from going on a killing spree. Making sure mad man doesn't get a weapon in the first place will.
I think the key point of this article is buried right in the bottom quote, from Joe Sill of The Ensemble - "One of the big lessons was developing diverse models that captured distinct effects".

The rest of the piece seems to gloss over the importance of "distinct effects". If you have a collection of algorithms which are each trying to interpret the same effect or data, but in different ways, combining them could make things worse.

So this isn't just a great example that "proffered hard proof of a basic crowdsourcing concept" (in fact, I would argue it doesn't even fit within the concept of crowd-sourcing, at least as I understand it). It's a great example of really smart people who really know their models working together.
at the very least he doesn't mention 'time spent maintaining the car.' But then again, he doesn't mention 'fear of damaging paint job' for new cars.
Why would it? You are not saying anything bad other than they are not interested in it anymore.
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"> Don't tell others what to do

Why not?"

Because it's rude, condescending and self righteous.

"Everybody does it, including you in the above sentence :)"

In German we say "how you shout into the woods so it echoes."

I won't argue with all the pessimism you uttered later but it's astounding how some people manage to deny even to most gigantic successes) A billion? Boooh!
If you have a collection of algorithms which are each trying to interpret the same effect or data, but in different ways, combining them could make things worse.

Can it? I wouldn't think so if you are combining them properly... at least, I would expect the overall average to be better even if its worse in some predictions.

Obviously if you are doing something like evenly weighing the predictions you could end up with something worse but thats not really a smart combination.
Sadly there are plenty of copycats who produce enough AK-47 guns to kill us off twice.
Yes it's spelled Codewarrior. Sorry.
I found this interesting, as I've just started working again on a web app for rating learning resources - I made a previous post on HN asking about the merits of a 5-point system versus a 2-point system (thumbs up / thumbs down). It seemed the consensus was to the five-point system, as it's more informative.

However, TC seems to believe that the 5-star system is more poorly defined. Opinions? I've been wondering about whether to include guidelines for the different rankings, (3 stars means this, 4 stars means this, etc) or just to let people use their own definitions (since, in all likelihood, the guidelines would be ignored). I've always thought it strange when reviewers provide a little box saying "5 stars - Excellent, 4 stars - Good..." and so on, since most people should have got the idea by now.

I also want to segregate links by level - Getting Started/Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced - and was trying to think of precise definitions for each. Again, I've also thought that since people likely would ignore any such definitions, it might be better for them to use their own definitions. Theory being that if 100 people thought this link should be in the 'beginner' category, then others won't be surprised to find it there.

So, give definitions for each ranking, or let users work by their own interpretations for each ranking?

2 ideas to improve things:

Idea 1: Change the weighting of a vote based on the voter's voting habits. Eg, if a person only gives 1 and 5 star votes, decrease the weighting for their votes. I doubt I'm the first person to come up with this idea, does anyone know of any sites that implement such a scheme?

Idea 2: Users with 'editor' priveleges have the ability to move things around into their 'correct' place. This could make it more useful to have predefined definitons for each ranking and category.
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While on the whole the AK is somewhat prone to jamming, much of that is related to the fact that most AK-47s are made very cheaply in badly equipped workshops not exactly adhering to the strictest of engineering standards. The basic strength of the AK-47 is not so much that it is an amazing rifle, as the fact that it doesn't get any worse by constant abuse.
Don't get me wrong - it won't definitely make things worse, but it can. I felt the article over-simplistically inferred that adding other teams and algorithms would improve results almost every time, which isn't the case - it took a lot of smart combinations to win.
How do you do that? By making it illegal? Isn't murder already illegal? Don't you see a flaw in that line of reasoning?

Pearl, Mississippi 1997; Edinboro, Pennsylvania 1998; Appalachian School of Law 2002; Colorado Springs, Colorado 2007; Houston, Texas 2009. All of these places and dates correspond to killing sprees that were stopped by armed citizens. Feel free to search for the facts at your leisure.
There is an interesting "Zero-Downtime Restarts with HAProxy" Tutorial that he might have implemented:

http://www.igvita.com/2008/12/02/zero-downtime-restarts-with...
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Any headline like "x sucks", "x is bull####" or "x is dead" should be changed to "x critique" to establish some civility of discussion.

This type of "pulling a Calacanis" headline is sheer link bait and rarely meant to stir an honest discussion.
The sky was purplish red this morning and by 8AM it was yellow. I went out to buy bread and came back tasting powder in my lungs.
Yes, but is "burning bridges" a rational thing to do? Does it really give actors psychological advantage afterwards or is it simply to show yourself/partners/competitors how cool you are? It is very hard to measure...

Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_of_no_return#Related_expr...
The German government is advising NOT to use Google Wave for privacy reasons.
This happened before, when Google Adsense paid $1 for anyone who installed Firefox with Google Toolbar via an affiliate link. A clever chap ran ads linking to a download page with his affiliate link.
I don't know why I would use an application platform that doesn't let me do anything, but I found it to be very useful as a reverse proxy.
s/Codeworrior/Codewarrior/g
When the Wikipedians say that it "is the only national flag in the world to feature such a modern rifle", it sounds like the Onion video of the faux Chinese minister beaming at the high cancer rates, proud of such a modern disease afflicting the populace.
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