skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He seems harsh, I would properly let the first student hand in his homework.

As for notes, that would end the moment math teachers used slides you could download after class. I wish more people would do that (in my experience only the math teachers do this, all my CS teachers don't).

Asking questions during the lecture is pretty good, but I wonder how you would prevent the students from feeling embarrassed because they could not answer?
Singapore . . . is the example
you were looking for I think.
Let's get excited about the efficiencies when the product is delivered on schedule, on budget, and with good quality. Governments the world over announce wondrous things like this all the time, but none of them have a lock on going over budget, over schedule, and with distinctly less quality than was promised.

(I'm not saying all government projects are failures; if you thought I said that, read more carefully please.)
This should be a poll, not two comment threads.
It's just a huge sales pitch page... If I didn't know who you were I'd flag this submission. Has anyone subscribed to this? Is it worth the 30 bucks a month?
This seems like a clear privacy violation to me.

It may not in this case, but when you consider that data like this has its way of getting out to other people and used in ways not originally intended. Imagine your employer being able to pay for access to a database that has your complete location history as captured by such devices.
You have a good point. But the main articles point is that much of what is called crowdsourcing isn't. It is the work of one individual out of a crowd to which a few others may or may not make smaller contributions.

This is not to say that there are not true crowdsourced projects (despite what the article says, I think wikipedia is a shining example) but that many things identified as crowdsourced are not, or at least not in the way that the nontechnical public thinks of it.
> It's almost universal for VCs' legal fees to come out of the money they invest

It's surprising is how large the fees are. It's almost like VCs have never done a comparable deal before.

Misleading LPs about management fees is small potatoes. If you believe the "disproportionate return" argument that VCs make, excessive legal fees have a disproportionate effect on returns.
I really appreciate the detailed blog post description of the linear algebra class at Dartmouth a decade ago. There are ideas here worth applying to my nonprofit's supplementary math classes

http://www.ecae.net/category/saturday-school/

immediately. I also like asking lots of questions in class, and routinely do that whenever I teach anything. (This probably comes from being a language major as an undergraduate--language classes have to be interactive.) The one advantage supplementary classes after school hours have over school classes is not having to issue grades, and thus not evoking disputes about grading policies.
There's a third, much more important, assumption: you're assuming that the marketers want to know the conversion numbers. We, being internet nerds, want to measure everything. But brand advertisers may not want/need to.
Yeah, I did think about Singapore, but I don't know much about how it's set up politically, so I decided to stick with the case already on topic. :)
Does Google's PageRank algorithm scale? Updated. [pdf]
Interesting. This problem is tractable with better software, and it seems to be well within the capability of a single developer to solve. (Make a dedicated beta client which automates all the stupidity for the end-user, including sniffing GUIDs, downloading your distribution, and reporting errors to you, and a web service for the beta clients to connect to to grab apps, report errors, and cough ensure that your customers succeed in paying for your application.)

Unfortunately, while it is software that saves people pain (a plus) and helps make people money (a big plus), it is also sold to developers (ouch), most of whom are hobbyists (double ouch), would have to cost an awful lot in comparison to what they charge for software (triple ouch), and requires Apple to remain clueless or else your investment gets vaporized with a patch.
The media loves a good fight. Otherwise they are bored to death just copying press releases.

So you have a good angle to play. At this point, I would shoot to get a free ride on the buzz they are going to get short term, and see them die from overweight within 2 years while you zoom past them.
Good question. I'd like to know too.
Agreed. I'll be posting next week on our launch day about our real competition. And they are gorillas--mean ones!
CAPTCHA Problems, A Suggestion and Alternatives
Jobs is gone?? He's returned from his recent illness hasn't he?
> Something about it kinda smells though: it doesn't match my experiences with PHP at all.

Did you look at what the programs do before announcing that "it kinda smells"?

Did you look at the "really interesting link" enough to realize the benchmarks game website is written in PHP?

Did you look at that particular web page enough to see "PHP is rarely the bottleneck (HTML slides)" ?
For exactly the same reason as "dumping": It results in lower consumer prices in the short term, with less competition (and higher prices) in the long term.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_%28pricing_policy%29
Yes. It is unfair. They raised the money based on Jim's experience as a CEO of a publicly traded company. Still, it's not really how the startup game has been played in quite a while.
And I believe the article writer talked about ripping some of the songs? With that mentality it is a dream come true- no?
I found mibbit painful to use. It was just easier to fire up x-chat. A winner here needs to be as easy as possible.
Linux kernel swear counts per version
If you don't complete the task, you don't get paid, plain and simple. You get paid for deliverables, not for work.

For invoicing, I just bill at the end of each job--exceptions occur when the client isn't someone that I would necessarily trust off the bat to do this.
I think that it is exactly because there is so much variance in the outcome of soccer matches that the sport is so much more popular than any other sport (here in Europe at least).
check out http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
Just on the notes: as a student, I found that reading the text ahead of class to be amazingly effective. Just skimming for 15 minutes.

You already know the obvious stuff; you have a framework to slot the lecture content into; and are primed to be interested in the parts that you didn't get.
It should be noted that much of what is open source is that way because it was already open source when Apple started using it. And much of that remains open source for legal reasons, not because Apple cares about open source.
Ask HN: Registration forms: ask more up front, or as a 2nd step?
Thanks in advance for reading this.

I'm conflicted and want to hear what you guys think. We're a startup that just went into private beta. Until now, we've been manually approving new users and want to switch to a more automated process. We want to make sure that the people approved for our free product are qualified leads for the paid version which is coming soon. Since we spend so much time and energy getting folks to the website, I want to make sure we're doing the best we can to get them to actually sign up and use the product, but like I said, we want them to be qualified.

So, right now we have a 2-step registration process. You just fill in your name and email, then click submit. You're then redirected to a second form asking for more information. The more they fill in, the better we can qualify them. The problem: people don't fill it out.

The second approach would be to ask everything up front. I'm just afraid this will make even more people go away without even filling in anything.

So, what do you think? Make them fill out everything up front, or do a small ask then an additional one?

Thanks!
I'd love to try this out too. markaferguson on gmail.
Thanks for those guidelines. This makes perfect sense. Do you have any data as to how seeding/prepopulating results in uptake? I've looked at compete.com and compared sites similar to teachstreet, but there really isn't a way to control for the other variables.
That's a good reason for Apple to run their own app store; it's not a good reason to prevent any other way of getting apps.
Yes, I saw all of those before making my comment.

None of them were a substantive response to the results of the graph.

When being presented with data, you should answer with more data, not conjecture.
I'm not making a technical claim. I know what an operating system is. I'm making a claim about general mac users.

I don't know a single person (even amongst the techies) who has uninstalled iTunes from their mac. I know few people who don't use it every single day. If you use an iPhone, or an iPod, you use iTunes. There is no supported alternative. There isn't even a widely used alternative for just playing music on the mac.

On another level, Snow Leopard, the operating system Apple is shipping, is not just about Mac OS X proper. iTunes ships with Snow Leopard, along with probably a hundred other applications. They come installed. They are part of the product. And to the vast majority of the computer using population, there is no distinction between those two things.
Actually I made a mistake, 28% would be 1:2.5 dog in betting lingo, and that's a HUGE when there are 31 other competitors.
Believe me, this is what really scares me. I feel like a lot of the startup game has turned into a popularity contest, and I've never won a popularity contest in my life. If you look at my twitter stats or blog traffic, you can see that I just write about geeky things that no one cares about. Promoting myself just doesn't come naturally.

My hope is that by listening to our users and focusing 100% on them, we can build a better product and that will be enough. In the end though, I'm the CEO and I've promised my team to get the word out so our efforts aren't in vain. I've set myself to tackling the PR problem with all the intensity I bring to our product. I hope it's enough.
This is cool. I wish there was a way to do this without needing to have an account though.
I've had a lot of discussions with parents of gifted children about this, as I am now the state president of an association dealing with gifted education. And I have attended a conference of the national organization that hosts the link you kindly shared. I have two comments:

a) There is some indication in some studies that high IQ is correlated with (that is, is a "risk factor" for) depressive illness. It is not at all clear what the causal mechanism may be, as correlation is not necessarily a sign of causation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus...

There is still ongoing research in various world cultures to confirm and explicate this finding of some studies.

b) Some parents who talk about "existential depression" are just engaging in euphemism. Their children have regular, everyday depression, just like some kids who are not gifted. There is no carefully controlled study at all

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

suggesting much uniqueness in the expression of depressed mood in high-IQ persons as contrasted with average-IQ persons.

Everyone who feels depressed deserves and needs compassion. (A fairly robust study finding is that persons who experience depression tend to experience less compassion from persons near to them than do persons who do not experience depression.) And gifted learners most definitely need educational provisions different from typical school programs. High-IQ adults may or may not feel they have a supportive social circle, depending crucially on their paths to higher education and the careers they pursue. Gifted people in general have special needs, and depressed people in general have special needs, and there may be a special intersection of needs in gifted people who are depressed, but it is not clear yet what role, if any, giftedness has in mood disorders.
The whole point of the homework policy was to make sure that class started on time. That was critical given that the most important part of the class was the first 10 minutes. Accepting homework from students who walked in late would have ruined that.

The apparent harshness of the policy was softened by the fact that only 3/4 of your homework sets counted. Therefore not being allowed to turn in a homework set or three wasn't a big deal.

As for preventing students from feeling embarrassed, my strategy was to try really hard to make sure that they succeeded on the questions. I would guess I averaged perhaps one missed question per week.
You are using terms in a loose and nontraditional way.

The argument isn't logical so much as it is valid. It isn't sound, based on the untrue premises, but it preserves the truth of the premises.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundness

Occam's razor provides a reasonable metric for burden of proof. Any position that requires Saturday to have a special property that affects light switches is obviously more complicated than the null hypothesis that light switches are agnostic with respect to the day of the week. The valid arguments in favor of a special Saturday are not terribly satisfiable (in a technical sense), and are thus unfavored.
This may sound silly, but I think it's the language barrier.

Also, Matz has been very loyal to the core group of Ruby maintainers even after Ruby has gone beyond fad status. Matz has been reluctant to put Ruby on a distributed SCM as well.

I expect all of these issues to be resolved within the next few years...
Modifying HTTP requests with Netscaler, F5 BigIP and Zeus ZXTM
How the Pirate Party could win seats at the next Australian Election
To provide some context, Marc is the guy behind the Create Your Own Programming Language e-book/screencast discussed recently on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=813133
In terms of being embarrassed, if you tell your students that you are expecting them to read ahead and only ask questions on subjects you've already explained, everyone should know the answer.

Of course, some students won't really understand exactly what the teacher is asking, might have problems talking in front of people, etc. What I would suggest, then, is to make sure that if someone doesn't know a problem, you immediately move on to another student (i.e. don't badger one student if they don't know the answer).

If you find that a student frequently passes on answering questions, that would be a great indication that they might not be understanding the issues, and that would be a good time to schedule a meeting with them to get it sorted out (via email or something, to avoid singling that student out in front of his/her peers).
I don't want to be argumentative - its only a light hearted comment - but i did of course read the article. I just interpreted something differently to yourself.

I read it again, and the analogy is still there. Car is to dynamic typing as bicycle is to ... anyway ... you can play down its significance or ambiguity, but i'd need convincing that its not there at all.
Architecture for Humanity: Do-gooders Need Not Apply
Tweethook: Twitter data, pushed to you
Small ask, get them using your software/service, then start a dialogue with one of your pre-sales... "Hey, great to hear that you signed up for the trial, how's it going, what are you using it for, who is your CFO by the way?"

It kind of depends on your service though, and who will be using it. Tech types are more wary of long forms and prefer to be contacted by a tech person; opposite for biz types who have a problem to solve and a boss leaning on them.
Who's going to buy the copies though?
He seems harsh, I would properly let the first student hand in his homework.

No, what's harsh is showing up late, which is a distraction to everyone else.

how you would prevent the students from feeling embarrassed because they could not answer?

If they don't want to feel embarrassed, they should be prepared. And even if they are embarrassed, who cares? This is college, not some encounter group. Think this is tough, just wait til you see what comes after college.
Don't know how many fans of Mad Men are here, but a recent episode had Don Draper going to see Conrad Hilton, and Hilton ends up pushing Draper to to do some freebie ad work right there.

Draper clearly wants to do business with Hilton, but tells him, "I think you wouldn't be in the Presidential Suite if you worked for free."
It might work "awesomely" one some platforms, but the Nautilus integration is pretty buggy - it was a nightmare to try to get it working on my Ubunutu 09.04. I ended up having to just use the command line utility a user wrote.
I find it impossible to to follow along in class, so I just read the text. But it would be amazingly effective and instructors usually expect you to read the chapter ahead anyways, which might be why it's so much more difficult to understand if you haven't read it.
Population: Europe's problems will grow as it shrinks
I think Mibbit has a few more users than Campfire ;) So in quite a lot of ways, I believe it has superseded Campfire.

That said, still plenty more to be done...

Nice to have more entrants to the 'webchat' space in any event :D

PS. Latex support is cool! http://www.mibbit.com/tex.png
Thanks, oweng.
The target user is a sysadmin or IT manager, and I think that they probably would be wary of a long initial form.
I've been at a company that successfully pulled this strategy off. We effectively made the press think we were the leader in our space. This was incredibly helpful in raising capital, but it horribly failed at getting us closer to profitability.
The features for Zune Pass seem to already be covered by apps like Pandora and Rhapsody.

But some of these features would be nice to have.
It was just a light-hearted comment, that no one else had made, not a summary of all my thoughts. How can you know that is the only thing i got from this article?

Relevance, well its subjective, but i agree its not the main thrust of the article which had some reasonable points. He can choose its own style, its not wikipedia afterall!!
It might please you then to know that in dutch 'ATB' stands for 'automatische trein beveiliging', loosely translated to 'automatic train protection'.
He is focused on browser market share, when ironically that is precisely what's forced Google into this position. If IE6 wasn't a ridiculous percentage of the market, its brokenness wouldn't matter enough for another company to fix it.

Google doesn't care whose browser is used, they care about a sane foundation on which to deploy web apps. Steve shouldn't sound so hurt, it's not as if the entire industry hasn't been "asking nicely" for years to have IE catch up. They can't cry now that someone has taken them by force.

Steve also goes into all the wonderful things happening in IE8 and beyond. And they're irrelevant, for the same reason: IE6 is still the breaking point. Any "innovation" in IE that doesn't come in the form of a free update to IE6 that works on XP, doesn't matter.
He does seem a little harsh. I've never encountered a professor that harsh.
No, the right solution is for the government to permanently stay out of it, and let it stabilise of its own accord. That way, over the course of time, people learn to moderate their behaviour, and you don't create moral hazard traps all over the place that take the heat out of the fire.

People are stupid and will not learn crap. We've seen it over and over and we'd see it again and again.
I'd like an invite too if I don't get one from Google, and my gmail username is daviddjf. However, as I pointed out earlier, the expansion isn't actually happening until tomorrow: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=850654
Political freedom as in the freedom to vote for a third party who will never make it to power ?
The revenue of the site would soar, which means that the people running the site could ... change the economy of an emerging nation.

I find that whenever I say things like this, people either look at me funny or laugh. I wish more people shared this kind of naive optimism.
What is the relationship between copyright infringement and Open Source???
If there's another set of docs, I'm happy to do a layman comparison like I did with the YC/TS docs.

EDIT: I hope Yokum comes in and explains Adeo's thought processes here and if WSGR will use these docs for new company formation.
We agree, and we think http://shoptalkapp.com will be the one to do it. ;)
> No, what's harsh is showing up late, which is a distraction to everyone else.

It's not really a distraction. If I or someone else comes in late usually no one even looks, even if it's a tiny room. Then I can turn in whatever homework after class. If I am doing the homework during class and not paying attention? Harsh, I guess I'll fail then.
Thereby giving the Chinese a great incentive to copy them, after all they're being ripped off.

That's pretty much analogous to people copying music because they've been ripped off for so long.
Craigslistrefugees.com:
Because you don't have to pay a buck!
Official press release is available here: http://www.pitchengine.com/free-release.php?id=27243
Odd. I had no trouble on Ubuntu 9.04.
If you have time to list a few (Either here or email tech@mibbit.com) I'd be interested in what you found painful.
I wish my linear algebra teacher was like this. I could barely understand the words he was saying, and linear algebra ultimately led to me dropping my Math major and moving to computer science.
Yea and they always pick the ones with no solutions in the back.
Review My Startup: TweetHook - Twitter Search ping service
I have spent the last several months bootstrapping my own company and developing TweetHook.com to be a Twitter Search ping service to push search results to webhook/callback URLs.

There are several levels of paid plans. There is no free plan mostly to avoid spammers/abuse, but also because I am running on a tight budget and don't have tons of cash to burn. I realize I may turn away potential users with this "paid only" barrier, but the users, developers, and businesses that would want this service should be willing to pay for it. I already have a few very happy clients from my beta testing phase that are sticking around as paid customers.

Please let me know what you think!
Perhaps it's a distraction to the person responsible for making sure the hour is well spent.
The problem with wireless sync is you still have to plug in the device to charge it -- especially after using wifi to transfer gigabytes of data to the device. I can see how it would have some value for quick top off syncs but I imagine from Apple's perspective wireless syncing is going to cause more of a negative outcome to their users (battery drain, multiple syncing procedures for software updates, etc) People are buying iPods, and other Apple devices, because of the elegant simplicity. That may impose limitations to some folks but of course there's plenty of good non-Apple alternatives.
I'm all for asking as little as possible to get people in the door, as soon as functionality requires it ask the missing bits. Like that you lower the barrier to entry, and you give people a clear reason why you need the extra info.
Clickable link: https://tweethook.com/

Press release: http://pitch.pe/27243
You can actually hack in the simulator quite easily.

It's just distribution to non-app store clients that is a pain in the ass (as well as going through the approval process)
Sloppy thinking. A given Wikipedia article may be the work of an individual, but Wikipedia is the work of many. Really, his only point is that he doesn't like the word "crowdsourcing" because he doesn't like crowds. If it were called "herosourcing" instead, he'd have written the same article about how great Wikipedia etc. are.
Threadify - Thread Your Twitter Conversations
Gmail Ran out of space
Here is the "Review My Startup" thread for this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=850819
How dpo they get the data?
Do they have access to the firehose?