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Live: Head of NSA meets with House Intelligence Committee
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Arguing that these programs are effective by revealing a few foiled terrorist plots is entirely beside the point. Obviously monitoring every communication on the planet would help the government track down a few terrorist plots here and there. If they really want the debate to focus on the effectiveness of these programs then they should explain why they failed so spectacularly to prevent the Boston Marathon bombings, a plot carried out by two of the most careless and naive terrorists to date. Heck, even a direct warning from Russian officials fell on deaf ears. Perhaps the NSA was too busy listening to innocent people's phone calls to respond?The effectiveness isn't what's at issue here, though. The problem is the loss of privacy for innocent civilians, to which Obama and other government officials respond to with wishy-washy arguments about "tradeoffs" between security and privacy.
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Deputy Attorney General: "We don't get any content...under this program." The use of language across all parties here is really incredible. The Google/Apple/etc denials so carefully worded, the lawyer-speak that avoid saying anything at all for hours at a time in the US gov't...it's amazingly Orwellian.Edit: Did he just say that the fourth amendment does not apply because nobody expected privacy in the first place? I can't possibly have heard that right.
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Live: Head of NSA meets with House Intelligence Committee
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Deputy Attorney General: "We don't get any content...under this program." The use of language across all parties here is really incredible. The Google/Apple/etc denials so carefully worded, the lawyer-speak that avoid saying anything at all for hours at a time in the US gov't...it's amazingly Orwellian.Edit: Did he just say that the fourth amendment does not apply because nobody expected privacy in the first place? I can't possibly have heard that right.
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Hopefully this will shift the conversation from "listening to phone calls" and "collecting internet records (eg: emails, browsing history)" to "storing phone calls" and "storing internet records (eg: emails, browsing history)".At this point it's become abundantly clear that everything is stored and indexed in a database, and the only defense against abuse of this database is only policies.One of the worst cases to come out of this entire ordeal is the legal dance around the definition of "listen" and whether it refers to automatically capturing phone calls or an individual listening to a recording of a phone call after it's been captured.
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Live: Head of NSA meets with House Intelligence Committee
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Hopefully this will shift the conversation from "listening to phone calls" and "collecting internet records (eg: emails, browsing history)" to "storing phone calls" and "storing internet records (eg: emails, browsing history)".At this point it's become abundantly clear that everything is stored and indexed in a database, and the only defense against abuse of this database is only policies.One of the worst cases to come out of this entire ordeal is the legal dance around the definition of "listen" and whether it refers to automatically capturing phone calls or an individual listening to a recording of a phone call after it's been captured.
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"But if we do acquire any information that relates to a US person, under limited criteria only, can we keep it. If it has to do with foreign intelligence in that conversation or understanding foreign intelligence, or evidence of a crime or a threat of serious bodily injury, we can respond to that. Other than that, we have to get rid of it, we have to purge it, and we can't use it." (emphasis mine)This seems very close to an admission that they both have and analyze the data before purging it. Combined with the idea that most people commit three felonies a day and pretty quickly all of these assertions about not spying on US citizens or people in the US goes out the window.
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Live: Head of NSA meets with House Intelligence Committee
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"But if we do acquire any information that relates to a US person, under limited criteria only, can we keep it. If it has to do with foreign intelligence in that conversation or understanding foreign intelligence, or evidence of a crime or a threat of serious bodily injury, we can respond to that. Other than that, we have to get rid of it, we have to purge it, and we can't use it." (emphasis mine)This seems very close to an admission that they both have and analyze the data before purging it. Combined with the idea that most people commit three felonies a day and pretty quickly all of these assertions about not spying on US citizens or people in the US goes out the window.
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"Does the NSA listen to the content of phone calls?"General Alexander: "No we do not have that authority."I think it's pretty clear by now that they're collecting phone call content.Here's another and I'm paraphrasing:"Is there something else being collected?""Besides the 215(?) and 702(?)? I'm not sure as I don't know whether that info has been declassified."
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Microsoft to Limit Capabilities of Cheap Laptops
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This isn't "evil", it's basic market segmentation. Microsoft doesn't want to limit the capabilities of any device, but if it sets the price of XP to a level that works for ultra-cheap vendors, it surrenders a vast amount of money to companies like Dell.Like any business, Microsoft wants Dell to pay what XP is worth to Dell, and Asus to pay what XP is worth for the Eee. It can't simply charge one amount to Dell and another to Asus. So instead it uses arbitrary specifications to create a category of XP license that is unattractive to Dell and cost-effective for Asus.You can argue about the ethics of this up and down, but when you start looking for it, you see that we're awash in market segmentation. Often, the most egregious examples of it actually have consumer benefits: take airfare, where the total ripoff fares I pay for last-minute business travel effective subsidize tickets for tourists who would not otherwise be able to fly.
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To recap: Microsoft says that if a producer wants cheap window's licenses, they have to limit the specs on their umpcs (screen < 10.2 inches && hd < 80GB && ! touchscreen).This is a good thing.If a consumer wants, e.g., a umpc with a touchscreen, they will be forced to get a linux one. Getting more people to try linux (and giving the linux hardware an intrinsic edge), is probably one of the worst things microsoft can do to itself and one of the best it can do for linux.
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Microsoft to Limit Capabilities of Cheap Laptops
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To recap: Microsoft says that if a producer wants cheap window's licenses, they have to limit the specs on their umpcs (screen < 10.2 inches && hd < 80GB && ! touchscreen).This is a good thing.If a consumer wants, e.g., a umpc with a touchscreen, they will be forced to get a linux one. Getting more people to try linux (and giving the linux hardware an intrinsic edge), is probably one of the worst things microsoft can do to itself and one of the best it can do for linux.
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The lack of touchscreen interoperability will be a major limitation which will encourage open source adoption.Unfortunately, current client trends are counter to Microsoft's strategy. Firstly, people are buying laptops rather than desktops. Both are getting cheaper. Secondly, Microsoft follows the classic monopolistic tactic of racheting prices. Successive versions of Microsoft software a typical more expensive despite initial costs already being re-couped. These trends create a situation where the cost of an operating system and pre-installed applications take an increasingly large share of the retail price. This creates a third trend of laptop manufacturers who opt-out of the "Windows tax" and only supply units with tailored open source software.In two years, we'll probably have a device which is a mix of laptop, mobile telephone and Nintendo DS. It would be a clamshell design with two 11 inch screens with the bottom one being touch sensitive. You cannot rely on Microsoft to support such a device. Nor would it be viable to include Windows. So, such a device would mostly be used with open source operating systems.This design has already been tried. Unfortunately, it was quite a few years ago and it was a commercial failure. However, since then, the technology has improved, the cost has fallen and the volume of people who only want to run open source software has grown significantly. This would make a similar attempt much more likely to succeed.It is understandable that such a trend would adversely affect Microsoft. Therefore an attempt to steeply discount Windows on limited hardware has two benefits. It creates an artificial divide between premium hardware and almost disposable devices where Windows is viable on both. Secondly, it reduces the inclination for low cost manufacturers to abandon Windows.
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Microsoft to Limit Capabilities of Cheap Laptops
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The lack of touchscreen interoperability will be a major limitation which will encourage open source adoption.Unfortunately, current client trends are counter to Microsoft's strategy. Firstly, people are buying laptops rather than desktops. Both are getting cheaper. Secondly, Microsoft follows the classic monopolistic tactic of racheting prices. Successive versions of Microsoft software a typical more expensive despite initial costs already being re-couped. These trends create a situation where the cost of an operating system and pre-installed applications take an increasingly large share of the retail price. This creates a third trend of laptop manufacturers who opt-out of the "Windows tax" and only supply units with tailored open source software.In two years, we'll probably have a device which is a mix of laptop, mobile telephone and Nintendo DS. It would be a clamshell design with two 11 inch screens with the bottom one being touch sensitive. You cannot rely on Microsoft to support such a device. Nor would it be viable to include Windows. So, such a device would mostly be used with open source operating systems.This design has already been tried. Unfortunately, it was quite a few years ago and it was a commercial failure. However, since then, the technology has improved, the cost has fallen and the volume of people who only want to run open source software has grown significantly. This would make a similar attempt much more likely to succeed.It is understandable that such a trend would adversely affect Microsoft. Therefore an attempt to steeply discount Windows on limited hardware has two benefits. It creates an artificial divide between premium hardware and almost disposable devices where Windows is viable on both. Secondly, it reduces the inclination for low cost manufacturers to abandon Windows.
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Wow, just like the old Evil Microsoft. They forgot something, though: Apple is no longer a negligible force. I wonder if this move will ultimately backfire.
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Microsoft to Limit Capabilities of Cheap Laptops
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Wow, just like the old Evil Microsoft. They forgot something, though: Apple is no longer a negligible force. I wonder if this move will ultimately backfire.
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Once they secure their position, I wonder if MS will start imposing comparable constraints to the future OLPCs (which they should have never been allowed to put their grubby hands on)?
Also, I wonder who in the world their PR dude is and if he sleeps most all days... In any case, they really should be working on improving their public appearance through their policies rather than trying to impose restrictions on their potential customers. Dumb.
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Show HN: I shipped my first product
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Congrats. Good luck w/ the app and future apps. I think that writing, launching, (and making a few bucks off of) a simple app might be the best way to get started down the right path. If you can get even the slightest bit of success, I'm sure it will lead to more.It's amazing how hard it is just to ship something for yourself. I've been doing website development for 15 years and have launched 100's of sites, apps, major features, etc. for clients and companies. My history of developing my own projects has not been so stellar.To date I've launched maybe 4 projects in the past say 10 years. 2 were very simple content sites not meant to generate revenue. 2 were fun sites which I hoped might generate a few dollars in ad revenue. I never really got any of them where I wanted them and have since folded all but one (I'm still hoping to make that last 10% of improvements to the 4th).Launching is tough. You did it. Fair play to ya.
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Congratz on the launch!If you make the data useful beyond geeks (srsly, Mom and Pop aren't going to import CSV in a spreadsheet and start data mining), this could be really cool.For example, you can get the locations from 4sq or gmaps, or allow the user to check in (but locally, without sending the data anywhere). Then, measure how much time is spent on each location and in transit between them (might want to make more samples for that to work), and give me a daily/weekly/mothly overview. Eg: "30 hours spent in office, 8 in transit, 20 in coffee shops, 5 in shopping". Something like RescueTime for location.
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Show HN: I shipped my first product
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Congratz on the launch!If you make the data useful beyond geeks (srsly, Mom and Pop aren't going to import CSV in a spreadsheet and start data mining), this could be really cool.For example, you can get the locations from 4sq or gmaps, or allow the user to check in (but locally, without sending the data anywhere). Then, measure how much time is spent on each location and in transit between them (might want to make more samples for that to work), and give me a daily/weekly/mothly overview. Eg: "30 hours spent in office, 8 in transit, 20 in coffee shops, 5 in shopping". Something like RescueTime for location.
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Just found it in the App Store - congrats on launching.It took some effort though - even searching for "TrackMe" put you below another TrackMe (by kimptoc), Track Me (TM), TrackMe FindMe, Track-Me, and Track Me.Did you find it tough choosing a name? Or (general questions) are names less important in the App store, perhaps because most people find Apps through 'most popular' type lists and people searching for specifics know specifically what they're looking for?
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Show HN: I shipped my first product
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Just found it in the App Store - congrats on launching.It took some effort though - even searching for "TrackMe" put you below another TrackMe (by kimptoc), Track Me (TM), TrackMe FindMe, Track-Me, and Track Me.Did you find it tough choosing a name? Or (general questions) are names less important in the App store, perhaps because most people find Apps through 'most popular' type lists and people searching for specifics know specifically what they're looking for?
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Nice work!One small point - the export format is listed as CSV but has semicolon delimiters. I know this is common in countries with comma decimal notation, but if targeting US customers you might want to make the separator configurable.
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Show HN: I shipped my first product
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Nice work!One small point - the export format is listed as CSV but has semicolon delimiters. I know this is common in countries with comma decimal notation, but if targeting US customers you might want to make the separator configurable.
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That's a really clever idea. I'd have loved this when I was travelling this summer. Something I would be interested in, though, is some sort of battery test comparison. I know that you say it uses minimal battery, but I'm very conscious about that (and I know many others are, too).
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Show HN: My app in 4 weeks is done
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It's funny that just this past weekend I was looking for something like your product. I've imagined it more to be a webapp with mobile client though. Something like http://highrisehq.com/ but more personal. (A PRM instead of CRM, one could say.)
It should keep in sync with my address book (or rather replace it at some point) and tell me not only what I know about the people in it, but also what interactions I had with them. Ideally it would augment that information with things it can find out on its own over Facebook and the web. (A bit like Gist, although I've found the information it can find to be useless most of the time.)Does anyone know of a product, besides Met, which comes close to what I'm looking for?Congratulations on your launch!
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Related app request from Loic Le Meur: http://loiclemeur.com/english/2011/03/its-time-for-personal-...You should contact him, you might get some endorsement :)
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Show HN: My app in 4 weeks is done
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Related app request from Loic Le Meur: http://loiclemeur.com/english/2011/03/its-time-for-personal-...You should contact him, you might get some endorsement :)
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Congrats on the launch.I like the idea--I definitely see a/the "problem" you hope to solve. I'm terrible with names so if I run into someone ("James") and they introduce me to their friend, kid, wife, etc. I'll jot down their name in the "Notes" field in "James"'s contact ("James's wife is 'Jane'"). Next time I see "James" and can't remember his wife's name, I can check my notes. It's not perfect but it works-ish.The $3.99 might be a bit high for what I consider a "it works slightly better than my free hack" app. MVP and all that so sure there is more to come...
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Show HN: My app in 4 weeks is done
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Congrats on the launch.I like the idea--I definitely see a/the "problem" you hope to solve. I'm terrible with names so if I run into someone ("James") and they introduce me to their friend, kid, wife, etc. I'll jot down their name in the "Notes" field in "James"'s contact ("James's wife is 'Jane'"). Next time I see "James" and can't remember his wife's name, I can check my notes. It's not perfect but it works-ish.The $3.99 might be a bit high for what I consider a "it works slightly better than my free hack" app. MVP and all that so sure there is more to come...
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I just want to say that this is awesome. Congratulations on the launch. I do not have an iOS device, so I cannot use it. However, the whole blogging about building an app in X amount of time is a great idea and I am definitely considering doing this in the future. :)
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Show HN: My app in 4 weeks is done
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I just want to say that this is awesome. Congratulations on the launch. I do not have an iOS device, so I cannot use it. However, the whole blogging about building an app in X amount of time is a great idea and I am definitely considering doing this in the future. :)
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Congratulations for launching!I like the simplicity and the concept, and I can already imagine what kind of jokes we may see popping on the net if your app gets popular.I admit I was put off by the price though, but I may not be the core of your target, which I assume is people who do a lot of networking. I'd install an ad-supported version any day.
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Nastiest Python list comprehension ever
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>>> def mystery(n):
It's a buggy implementation of primes_below(n) through a sieve."There should be one - and preferably only one - obvious way to do it." And this ain't it.
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> Does anyone have a suggestion on how to do it?Yes, provide more details so I don't have to spend twenty minutes figuring out what it does.(Going by my three-second-look gut feeling: It's the Sieve of Eratosthenes)
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Nastiest Python list comprehension ever
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> Does anyone have a suggestion on how to do it?Yes, provide more details so I don't have to spend twenty minutes figuring out what it does.(Going by my three-second-look gut feeling: It's the Sieve of Eratosthenes)
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Can somebody from the Perl community please but this guy in the right place by supplying a one-liner Perl golf quadruple map call?
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Nastiest Python list comprehension ever
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Can somebody from the Perl community please but this guy in the right place by supplying a one-liner Perl golf quadruple map call?
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I think it's a testimony to the readability of Python that I've never even programed in the language, nor am I familiar with the finer points of the list syntax (a[::2]?!), and yet this mucked up piece of shit nonetheless gave me the first impression of a prime number sieve. I actually still don't understand how the sieve works, but it somehow just looks like one. Or is it just the case that assuming every obfuscated loop is a prime number sieve is disproportionately likely to be true?
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Nastiest Python list comprehension ever
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I think it's a testimony to the readability of Python that I've never even programed in the language, nor am I familiar with the finer points of the list syntax (a[::2]?!), and yet this mucked up piece of shit nonetheless gave me the first impression of a prime number sieve. I actually still don't understand how the sieve works, but it somehow just looks like one. Or is it just the case that assuming every obfuscated loop is a prime number sieve is disproportionately likely to be true?
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Does that even run? :)Nested comprehensions are one of the things I hate about Python actually. The functions in itertools are so much clearer. I can't really think of a good reason to use nested comprehensions... they become unreadable really fast!
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Ask HN: Death by design, poor on-boarding or do we just smell?
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This looks way too complicated. The birds eye view might be your main feature, but it's visually unattractive, and very cluttered.It looks like you have all the bones of a great app, but you need a great graphic design and a great user experience architect to take it to the next level.I tried out your app, which was a nice touch, but it's not nearly as polished as BaseCamp. Even something as simple as a task view in Bird View Projects is completely confusing. Do I turn on the alert checkbox? Add a subtask? What is the difference between the clock and the $?
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Just an idea:Figure out a single use-case you want to be The Best at (planning weddings, or whatever).Delete (or at least hide) everything except the absolute bare minimum featureset necessary to be The Best at that.Make the claim on your home page: The Best way to plan your wedding (or whatever).Have a Weebly-simple sign up process (sign up form on home page). Let people dive in and get hooked ASAP.Iterate based on feedback. Make 100 customers love you. Expand outside your niche if necessary.
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Ask HN: Death by design, poor on-boarding or do we just smell?
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Just an idea:Figure out a single use-case you want to be The Best at (planning weddings, or whatever).Delete (or at least hide) everything except the absolute bare minimum featureset necessary to be The Best at that.Make the claim on your home page: The Best way to plan your wedding (or whatever).Have a Weebly-simple sign up process (sign up form on home page). Let people dive in and get hooked ASAP.Iterate based on feedback. Make 100 customers love you. Expand outside your niche if necessary.
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I would focus on just one aspect that you do uniquely well.Take Rapportive's landing page: http://rapportive.com.
They provide much, much more than just Twitter / Facebook widgets but they purposely restrict what they show. As a potential user, I see that one feature and decide it is cool enough for me to install.Providing a single, simple, salient advantage I've found works much better than trying to market your solution as the all-in-one Swiss army knife.What is the one cool feature that you feel differentiates your product?
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Ask HN: Death by design, poor on-boarding or do we just smell?
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I would focus on just one aspect that you do uniquely well.Take Rapportive's landing page: http://rapportive.com.
They provide much, much more than just Twitter / Facebook widgets but they purposely restrict what they show. As a potential user, I see that one feature and decide it is cool enough for me to install.Providing a single, simple, salient advantage I've found works much better than trying to market your solution as the all-in-one Swiss army knife.What is the one cool feature that you feel differentiates your product?
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FYI - "Click, close your eyes and count to ten" was actually closer to fifty on the first load. I went back and clicked the button again, and it only took about seven seconds. Just thought you should be aware.
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Ask HN: Death by design, poor on-boarding or do we just smell?
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FYI - "Click, close your eyes and count to ten" was actually closer to fifty on the first load. I went back and clicked the button again, and it only took about seven seconds. Just thought you should be aware.
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Intimidating...that's how I would best describe the look of your application. I'm guessing potential customers see a long learning curve ahead and want nothing to do with it. This "intimidation factor" conflicts with your stated goal of creating an alternative "entry-level" project management system. Furthermore two years is way too long to be developing any type of CRUD app.
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Unified Dropdown Menu: One Menu to Rule All Links
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I'd rather these complex sites avoid having drop-down menus entirely for their top-nav bar. Instead, have the most common general sections linked in the top-nav, and put links to their sub-sections in a section-specific navigation area inside the newly-loaded general section, separate from the top-nav. Less common pages and sections are linked in the bottom-nav.Cluttered top-nav is a hassle to use, with the worst offenders making me feel like I'm looking for a needle in a haystack every time I use it. It's much nicer to drill down to the section you need one step at a time without modal navigation windows appearing and disappearing, especially if the defaults are well-chosen.[It's also worth noting, as mentioned by others here, that the paradigm of stacked windows, and thus pull-down menus, is incompatible with pocket OS designs, so you're going to end up with completely different navigation workflows on different platforms if you go this route.]
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I like this approach, esp how it is implemented on Lebron's site. Like wolffnc3 said above, I would be curious to see if users like the idea of triggering all of the drop-downs with one hover or if they prefer the classic way.
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Unified Dropdown Menu: One Menu to Rule All Links
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I like this approach, esp how it is implemented on Lebron's site. Like wolffnc3 said above, I would be curious to see if users like the idea of triggering all of the drop-downs with one hover or if they prefer the classic way.
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Most of the top bars use single word (or very short) menus. With this unified drop down menu, you are limited to make all the sub-menus at the same size then the top menu, which is not very user friendly.
I prefer to have longer sub-menus with comprehensible links like http://www.jawbone.com or http://www.nike.com
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Unified Dropdown Menu: One Menu to Rule All Links
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Most of the top bars use single word (or very short) menus. With this unified drop down menu, you are limited to make all the sub-menus at the same size then the top menu, which is not very user friendly.
I prefer to have longer sub-menus with comprehensible links like http://www.jawbone.com or http://www.nike.com
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Interesting idea, i'd love to hear from anyone who's tried this and see if they've gathered any data on it's effectiveness (a/b tests, heat maps etc...)
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Unified Dropdown Menu: One Menu to Rule All Links
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Interesting idea, i'd love to hear from anyone who's tried this and see if they've gathered any data on it's effectiveness (a/b tests, heat maps etc...)
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This is great on desktop, but I don't think it scales smoothly down to the available space on mobile.
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Y Combinator's Graham Doesn't See "Bubble" in Technology
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My favorite line in that, after the interviewer asked PG what the big successes for YC were and he answered AirBnB and Dropbox:Q: "But aren't you forgetting Heroku? They just sold for $220 million."A: "Oh sure, Heroku was a success... but you couldn't buy Dropbox or AirBnB right now for $220 million."
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Speaking as someone who does not live in the Valley, if this is a bubble it's a great deal smaller than the 1999-2000 one, in the intangibles at least. Buzz may be up in the Valley but it's nonexistent out where I am.I do think there may be a rush to declare bubble. You know, a lot of the promises that powered the first bubble are still true. The Internet really is going to revolutionize every business. Opportunities really are everywhere. It just was and is going to take a bit longer than initially expected, and 1999 infrastructure really couldn't support it. (Remember, in 1999, your top-of-the-line server chip is a Pentium III Xeon, built on a 250nm die, at 600MHz or so, and let's not even talk about the price of one of these. Or how your non-very-tech-savvy customers are supposed to get to your very expensive server.)
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Y Combinator's Graham Doesn't See "Bubble" in Technology
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Speaking as someone who does not live in the Valley, if this is a bubble it's a great deal smaller than the 1999-2000 one, in the intangibles at least. Buzz may be up in the Valley but it's nonexistent out where I am.I do think there may be a rush to declare bubble. You know, a lot of the promises that powered the first bubble are still true. The Internet really is going to revolutionize every business. Opportunities really are everywhere. It just was and is going to take a bit longer than initially expected, and 1999 infrastructure really couldn't support it. (Remember, in 1999, your top-of-the-line server chip is a Pentium III Xeon, built on a 250nm die, at 600MHz or so, and let's not even talk about the price of one of these. Or how your non-very-tech-savvy customers are supposed to get to your very expensive server.)
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I always think this is funny. Most people didn't see the housing crisis coming before it was terribly obvious to everyone. Crying bubble doesn't make you look like you're any good at predicting anything. The only danger of a bubble has to do with debt.Most startups are funded by savings and while that savings can be wiped out no one is hurt after that hit. Businesses fail all the time and only when massive amounts debt is involved is anyone else (outside the people directly involved) affected.A bubble would start to scare me if people started taking out massive loans to startup companies that had no hope to make money. I sometimes wonder about the quality of the companies that are able to raise money now but I'm not worried about them taking it. The investors will learn from their mistakes and hopefully we won't have as many daily deal sites for me to deal with. In the meantime I'm using Yipit to help me who also raised a decent amount of money I guess. Oh well.
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Y Combinator's Graham Doesn't See "Bubble" in Technology
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I always think this is funny. Most people didn't see the housing crisis coming before it was terribly obvious to everyone. Crying bubble doesn't make you look like you're any good at predicting anything. The only danger of a bubble has to do with debt.Most startups are funded by savings and while that savings can be wiped out no one is hurt after that hit. Businesses fail all the time and only when massive amounts debt is involved is anyone else (outside the people directly involved) affected.A bubble would start to scare me if people started taking out massive loans to startup companies that had no hope to make money. I sometimes wonder about the quality of the companies that are able to raise money now but I'm not worried about them taking it. The investors will learn from their mistakes and hopefully we won't have as many daily deal sites for me to deal with. In the meantime I'm using Yipit to help me who also raised a decent amount of money I guess. Oh well.
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PG has all these amazing quips.> "If you have big plans initially, you are probably Webvan"
> "The valuation of an early-stage startup is the % chance they will be big. i.e. a $10M valuation ~= 1% chance they will get to a $1B valuation".Also, am I the only one that picked up that AirBnB and Dropbox clearly have a valuation higher than $250M. I wonder what they consider their valuation to be right now.
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Y Combinator's Graham Doesn't See "Bubble" in Technology
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PG has all these amazing quips.> "If you have big plans initially, you are probably Webvan"
> "The valuation of an early-stage startup is the % chance they will be big. i.e. a $10M valuation ~= 1% chance they will get to a $1B valuation".Also, am I the only one that picked up that AirBnB and Dropbox clearly have a valuation higher than $250M. I wonder what they consider their valuation to be right now.
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I think the only valid answer to this is a tweet from http://twitter.com/hackernewstips:> Today, @PaulG claimed there is no tech bubble. In unrelated news, @AdKeeperInc raised $40 mil. in funding for "Delicious, for banner ads".Which is exactly what AdKeeper is, btw.
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Ask HN: is there a marketplace for code bases, startups, etc.?
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Generally such businesses get sold directly by the owner approaching interested parties (companies in the same space, competitors, etc.).If they end up on a public market it generally means that no-one in that space was interested in it, which is a huge negative flag (i.e. strong indication it's a dud) which drives the price down so much it's often not worthwhile doing the sale (i.e. handling the legal, accounting cost and processed aren't worthwhile).
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There was a recent Sell HN thread where people were posting projects they wanted to sell: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5803374 . Hopefully this will be a recurring monthly event, so you might be able to put it up then,
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Ask HN: is there a marketplace for code bases, startups, etc.?
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There was a recent Sell HN thread where people were posting projects they wanted to sell: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5803374 . Hopefully this will be a recurring monthly event, so you might be able to put it up then,
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I'm assuming there is no users and/or revenue stream. So your talking about an untested business plan, some intellectual property ie code, trademarks, patents. I don't know of anything but I'd be interested to see. Yuo might think about selling it as a service and white labeling the functionality.
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Ask HN: is there a marketplace for code bases, startups, etc.?
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I'm assuming there is no users and/or revenue stream. So your talking about an untested business plan, some intellectual property ie code, trademarks, patents. I don't know of anything but I'd be interested to see. Yuo might think about selling it as a service and white labeling the functionality.
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http://us.businessesforsale.com/us/search/Internet-Businesse...That is the major one.
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Ask HN: is there a marketplace for code bases, startups, etc.?
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http://us.businessesforsale.com/us/search/Internet-Businesse...That is the major one.
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www.flippa.com
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Show HN: My 10 Hour Winter Break Project Mixmatic
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Interesting site. I lost interest in Spotify but I can see the novelty of a site like this.But... your example URL makes it pretty easy to guess at other people's mixes... so not very private. Not that you claim it to be private. But if I was sending a mix to someone and typed in a special message for them, I would not really want random people to read it. Some sort of URL hash would at least make it harder to guess.
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Seems to be the season for mixtapes, found another one on HN recently http://muxx.it
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Show HN: My 10 Hour Winter Break Project Mixmatic
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Seems to be the season for mixtapes, found another one on HN recently http://muxx.it
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I put together a usablity review of mixmatic.co using moustach.io. I hope you find this useful.http://moustach.io/welcome/e/reviewed/ozH9eZmzRYuRB5bycNJYb-...Good luck.
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Show HN: My 10 Hour Winter Break Project Mixmatic
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I put together a usablity review of mixmatic.co using moustach.io. I hope you find this useful.http://moustach.io/welcome/e/reviewed/ozH9eZmzRYuRB5bycNJYb-...Good luck.
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I don't use (and never have, but I suspect it's like Grooveshark) Spotify so this question might be stupid. What advantage does this have over just sending an email with a URL to a Spotify playlist?
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Show HN: My 10 Hour Winter Break Project Mixmatic
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I don't use (and never have, but I suspect it's like Grooveshark) Spotify so this question might be stupid. What advantage does this have over just sending an email with a URL to a Spotify playlist?
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First question: Why get co and not a com?Second question: i like the design given the time constraints. What design tools did you use? Any tips on getting a good design quickly?
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Craigslist Censored: Adult Section Comes Down
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I hear quite often that prostitution would be a wonderfully pleasant industry if it were only legal, which does not square with the experiences of countries where it is legal or tolerated.You pretty much have to be running schoolgirls out of homeroom to get the Nagoya police to so much as glance in your direction, but Japanese prostitution is a very, very ugly place to be, and much of it is based on trafficking. I live two hundred feet from a "Korean aesthetic salon" which is open at three A.M. in the morning. One of the not-so-young ladies who works there has taken to sleeping on the bus bench across the street recently, in heat which has nearly sent me to the hospital twice. You may have heard that Japan has a storied relationship with its Korean immigrants. Those who do -- to use a nauseating euphemism -- the jobs Japanese girls won't do can expect neglect from polite society, because polite society knows that inquiring into her circumstances means they have to know what goes on in those walls, and they are very interested in keeping up the fiction that they do not know what goes on in those walls.Or take the European experience. Amsterdam, city of lights, so much more sophisticated than the American puritans, perfectly legal thriving sex trade, right? It has been taken over by Russian mafia who are undercutting the locals via use of trafficked girls from Eastern Europe. You always have the option as a merchant of sex slaves to one-up what the "morally upright prostitutes" allow, safe in the knowledge that they will cover for you because an investigation into what you are doing harms their business interests. Society, meanwhile, has no great desire to actually police what happens inside of brothels, preferring to believe its sanity-saving fictions like "she wants to be there", "it is just sex between two consenting adults", and "no slaves live on my block."http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/world/europe/24amsterdam.h...Prostitution, legal or otherwise, is not pretty. It is based, root and branch, on exploitation. To the extent you think that legalizing it will end the exploitation, you believe something which is contrary to reality.
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I bet most of the people freaking out about CL's adult services haven't considered that censorship usually leads to an increased demand. They're doing an excellent job advertising to the world that you can easily buy sex online. If they really wanted to help people they'd be advocating a safe highly regulated adult services industry that satisfies the demand while eliminating most of the ugly side effects of prohibition. They completely reject this idea so it seems obvious to me their agenda is more about moral pontificating than helping people or they truly have no understanding of how the real world works.
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Craigslist Censored: Adult Section Comes Down
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I bet most of the people freaking out about CL's adult services haven't considered that censorship usually leads to an increased demand. They're doing an excellent job advertising to the world that you can easily buy sex online. If they really wanted to help people they'd be advocating a safe highly regulated adult services industry that satisfies the demand while eliminating most of the ugly side effects of prohibition. They completely reject this idea so it seems obvious to me their agenda is more about moral pontificating than helping people or they truly have no understanding of how the real world works.
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I never thought TC would ever come up with a quote worth, uh, quoting, but pigs are in flight today!If it’s just a sex crime it isn’t a story. But if a listing on Craigslist was involved, it’s a big story.Painfully true.It's all bullshit as well, this "OMG Sex crimes" nonsense. We investigate sex crimes (i.e. rape, abuse, murder etc.) caused by the internet - literally none of them (and I am well above 60 investigations in that area now) have anything to do with personal ads such as the ones censored here.I might be out on a limb here because a) this is based on only a small amount of empirical evidence and b) I've not talked to colleagues to get their take on it, but, most of the internet derived sex crime comes from the "under the radar" sleazy dating sites or, more likely, simply someone they managed to get on MSN.These people prey on those looking for a boyfriend, not someone looking to sell sex. Prostitutes are, for the most part, not stupid - they know when to take a deal or walk away.I can't help feeling crusades such as this are actually harmful.
</rant>
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Craigslist Censored: Adult Section Comes Down
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I never thought TC would ever come up with a quote worth, uh, quoting, but pigs are in flight today!If it’s just a sex crime it isn’t a story. But if a listing on Craigslist was involved, it’s a big story.Painfully true.It's all bullshit as well, this "OMG Sex crimes" nonsense. We investigate sex crimes (i.e. rape, abuse, murder etc.) caused by the internet - literally none of them (and I am well above 60 investigations in that area now) have anything to do with personal ads such as the ones censored here.I might be out on a limb here because a) this is based on only a small amount of empirical evidence and b) I've not talked to colleagues to get their take on it, but, most of the internet derived sex crime comes from the "under the radar" sleazy dating sites or, more likely, simply someone they managed to get on MSN.These people prey on those looking for a boyfriend, not someone looking to sell sex. Prostitutes are, for the most part, not stupid - they know when to take a deal or walk away.I can't help feeling crusades such as this are actually harmful.
</rant>
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I can't understand the motivations for this.Several state attorney generals find out there is are people going to a web site, and for all intents and purposes advertising they are going to commit criminal acts. The public is outraged.A rational person whose job is to enforce the law at this point would be dancing in happy circles, because the criminals are not only advertising their crimes, they're doing it in a single, easily searchable location. This makes his job much easier than it was before.So what does this person do in order to score political points with the outraged public? Arrest all these people in sting operations? No. He gets the site shut down. Out of sight, out of mind. And the public is happy about that.For the life of me I can't understand why people do the things they do and feel justified about it. Prostitution is either so bad that it should be illegal and those laws enforced, or it shouldn't be illegal at all because all that does is create problems. There is no middle ground here.
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Craigslist Censored: Adult Section Comes Down
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I can't understand the motivations for this.Several state attorney generals find out there is are people going to a web site, and for all intents and purposes advertising they are going to commit criminal acts. The public is outraged.A rational person whose job is to enforce the law at this point would be dancing in happy circles, because the criminals are not only advertising their crimes, they're doing it in a single, easily searchable location. This makes his job much easier than it was before.So what does this person do in order to score political points with the outraged public? Arrest all these people in sting operations? No. He gets the site shut down. Out of sight, out of mind. And the public is happy about that.For the life of me I can't understand why people do the things they do and feel justified about it. Prostitution is either so bad that it should be illegal and those laws enforced, or it shouldn't be illegal at all because all that does is create problems. There is no middle ground here.
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no, its just located here now: http://newyork.craigslist.org/thp/
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Coming Home to Vim
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I took the dive into Vim about a year ago. I was at the stage where I'd become proficient with some command-line tools in Linux, but I didn't yet have an editor I could use fluently from the command line. I tried out both Vim and Emacs, and found Vim to be slightly easier to grok, plus my pinkie got kind of sore from holding down the Ctrl key in Emacs.I changed my default editor at work to be Vim, and started doing all my dev work at home through Vim. I started off just using the arrow keys to move and just using insert mode to edit text the normal way. Each day I tried to add one new command to my repertoire; I learned about how to structure vim commands (c-change i-in w-word, etc.) and move using hjkl and the higher order movement commands like w and b. Now I can maneuver my way around vim quite confidently, and although when I started off I was much slower in Vim than other editors, I now find that Vim is just as fast or faster for most tasks, particularly where I can make use of Macros.At the moment I still have to get my head around markers and a few other concepts, but I've definitely become proficient enough for it to be worth the effort and time invested so far.My tips for anyone learning to use vim for everyday development would be some common tab commands: :tabnew <path> to open a file in a new tab, :tab sball to show all currently open buffers in separate tabs, gt and gT to jump to the next/previous tabs.
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Wow, the bit about seeing vim commands as sentences composed of nouns, verbs and adjectives blew my mind. I thought about learning vim, but I didn't know about this, so vim commands seemed like some arcane language that I would have to gradually get proficient at over months.. this might make the transition a lot easier.
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Coming Home to Vim
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Wow, the bit about seeing vim commands as sentences composed of nouns, verbs and adjectives blew my mind. I thought about learning vim, but I didn't know about this, so vim commands seemed like some arcane language that I would have to gradually get proficient at over months.. this might make the transition a lot easier.
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I'm a hardcore nerd and I spend many hours with a text editor during the day. Yet I find vim beyond my nerd level. I just can't be bothered with fiddling with config files and installing little bundles and packages for every functionality.On top of that the whole "language of editing" and combining noun,verb,adjective commands, etc... doesn't really appeal to me because I'm too visual when I'm editing code. I can't stop to think about the right semantics about what I want to do, I just do it visually.
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Coming Home to Vim
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I'm a hardcore nerd and I spend many hours with a text editor during the day. Yet I find vim beyond my nerd level. I just can't be bothered with fiddling with config files and installing little bundles and packages for every functionality.On top of that the whole "language of editing" and combining noun,verb,adjective commands, etc... doesn't really appeal to me because I'm too visual when I'm editing code. I can't stop to think about the right semantics about what I want to do, I just do it visually.
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I'm a bit torn. I love the controls in vim, the way you navigate and manipulate text is a brilliant system. It makes it more efficient and more "fun".However, I really don't like the configuration system for vim. Reading the article above, I lost interest when he started talking about his .vimrc file and the plugins he used. It seems arcane to have to have these cryptic settings, whose functions aren't immediately obvious, and write them to a file. I understand that part of the VIM philosophy is that it's almost like a language, or that it's like programming your text, but configuration is just something that you (ideally) set once, and then forget about. Even if I do learn what "nnoremap <leader>ft Vatzf", if I need to set up my environment again, I'll likely forget what it is and why I needed it in the first place. And even if I configure VIM to have the things I want (for example, NERDtree for project navigation), it'll never look or feel as intuitive as having a graphical interface.So it seems when people talk about VIM, it seems that they're really talking about two things: the control scheme (keybindings) and the editor itself (the environment).Being an android developer, I use eclipse. I use the "Vrapper" plugin, which gives me vim keybindings in the eclipse editor. I love it. It gives me the vim navigation that I know and love, but the environment and tools provided by Eclipse. I think this is how it should be - the environment of the editor is best handled separately, and although you can add a ton of plugins and configure the crap out of VIM to turn it into an IDE, it'll never really be a proper IDE.This is why I'm still looking for an ideal lightweight text editor/IDE. My ideal for linux would be Geany, but with Vim keybindings. I discovered Vico yesterday, which looks interesting, but is OSX only at the moment. Might be what I'm looking for, but we'll see.
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Coming Home to Vim
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I'm a bit torn. I love the controls in vim, the way you navigate and manipulate text is a brilliant system. It makes it more efficient and more "fun".However, I really don't like the configuration system for vim. Reading the article above, I lost interest when he started talking about his .vimrc file and the plugins he used. It seems arcane to have to have these cryptic settings, whose functions aren't immediately obvious, and write them to a file. I understand that part of the VIM philosophy is that it's almost like a language, or that it's like programming your text, but configuration is just something that you (ideally) set once, and then forget about. Even if I do learn what "nnoremap <leader>ft Vatzf", if I need to set up my environment again, I'll likely forget what it is and why I needed it in the first place. And even if I configure VIM to have the things I want (for example, NERDtree for project navigation), it'll never look or feel as intuitive as having a graphical interface.So it seems when people talk about VIM, it seems that they're really talking about two things: the control scheme (keybindings) and the editor itself (the environment).Being an android developer, I use eclipse. I use the "Vrapper" plugin, which gives me vim keybindings in the eclipse editor. I love it. It gives me the vim navigation that I know and love, but the environment and tools provided by Eclipse. I think this is how it should be - the environment of the editor is best handled separately, and although you can add a ton of plugins and configure the crap out of VIM to turn it into an IDE, it'll never really be a proper IDE.This is why I'm still looking for an ideal lightweight text editor/IDE. My ideal for linux would be Geany, but with Vim keybindings. I discovered Vico yesterday, which looks interesting, but is OSX only at the moment. Might be what I'm looking for, but we'll see.
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I'm skeptical that Ack is "far, far better than grep." Different? Ok. Better? Maybe, based on what you're doing. Far, far better? Probably not. Omitting correct results because a file extension isn't white-listed sounds like a pain.http://superuser.com/questions/39384/best-grep-like-tool/342...
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Ask YC: Choosing wiki software
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MediaWiki is the king of unrestricted wiki platforms. However, if you're looking to restrict access to certain portions of the wiki, or develop some sort of responsibility and/or permission structure, or add features such as forms and even embedded apps, I recommend TWiki. There are lots of plugins available, and there is plentiful documentation.
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I'd personally go for Ikiwiki, just because it lets me ditch the browser for editing the wiki. I personally hate the embedded text controls in web pages, finding that they invariably stink. Ikiwiki stores the pages in a $SCM repository (eg, your pages are stored in Git or SVN or whatnot) so you can check them out and edit them.Being able to check out the wiki from the repository backend that Ikiwiki uses and edit it with my editor of choice (Vim) is a huge win, I think.
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Ask YC: Choosing wiki software
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I'd personally go for Ikiwiki, just because it lets me ditch the browser for editing the wiki. I personally hate the embedded text controls in web pages, finding that they invariably stink. Ikiwiki stores the pages in a $SCM repository (eg, your pages are stored in Git or SVN or whatnot) so you can check them out and edit them.Being able to check out the wiki from the repository backend that Ikiwiki uses and edit it with my editor of choice (Vim) is a huge win, I think.
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I wrote one for Rails: http://dedawiki.dedasys.com and it's open source.It's not as fancy as the mediawiki one, but it's easy to customize - observant people will notice that it shares a lot with another site of mine, http://www.squeezedbooks.com
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Ask YC: Choosing wiki software
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I wrote one for Rails: http://dedawiki.dedasys.com and it's open source.It's not as fancy as the mediawiki one, but it's easy to customize - observant people will notice that it shares a lot with another site of mine, http://www.squeezedbooks.com
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I think http://wikinvest.com uses a heavily modified MediaWiki. If you're happy with PHP, it's a solid choice.
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Ask YC: Choosing wiki software
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I think http://wikinvest.com uses a heavily modified MediaWiki. If you're happy with PHP, it's a solid choice.
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MoinMoin (python) is good.
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Ask News.YC: What would you do if you were a billionaire?
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I'll tell you what I'd do, man, two chicks at the same time, man. Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I had a million dollars I could hook that up, cause chicks dig a dude with money.All office space quoting aside, if my startup IPOs I'm buying a winery in Napa, preferably Stags Leap district, and a house in the hills of St. Helena with enough land to let my dogs run free and terrorize the neighbors.And I'll probably jump into the restaurant industry.
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Step One: Construct a giant concrete sarcophagus similar to the contraption they used to seal off Chernobyl.Step Two: Hire a reliable private investigator to ascertain the location of the target: Creed's rehearsal space.Step Three: Fill the sarcophagus with alligators, poop, and diseased ferrets.Step Four: Rent several hundred industrial-grade helicopters and lower the sarcophagus onto the target.Step Five: Construct a monument honoring the heroism of the alligators and diseased ferrets.
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Ask News.YC: What would you do if you were a billionaire?
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Step One: Construct a giant concrete sarcophagus similar to the contraption they used to seal off Chernobyl.Step Two: Hire a reliable private investigator to ascertain the location of the target: Creed's rehearsal space.Step Three: Fill the sarcophagus with alligators, poop, and diseased ferrets.Step Four: Rent several hundred industrial-grade helicopters and lower the sarcophagus onto the target.Step Five: Construct a monument honoring the heroism of the alligators and diseased ferrets.
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Fund scientific research at a laboratory I direct with my business partner Josh. I think we could knock off a few major diseases like AIDS, or maybe get bacteria effectively generating energy.To cure HIV (idea is Josh's): Start with some adult stem cells from the HIV patient to be treated, specifically the stem cells that produce T cells. Introduce the 32 base pair deletion in the CCR5 gene and grow the cells in culture. These can then be "transplanted" back into the patient. These transplanted stem cells will create HIV immune T cells. Once there are enough immune T cells, the patient will probably still have HIV, but it will not develop into AIDS. There will be no chance of rejection since they are the patient's own cells. Furthermore, since the body does produce antibodies to HIV, these modified T cells may even be able to fight off the HIV.To test this, we would get a mouse line, which are genetically very similar to each other from inbreeding so we won't have to worry about rejection of the transplants, and introduce the human CCR5 receptor into them. This, in theory, will allow the mice to be infected with HIV since HIV attaches to the CCR 5 receptor to enter and infect the cell. If this works, we can then try the technique of taking some of their stem cells, introducing the mutation, transplanting them back in, and see if their T cell count increases or if the levels of HIV decrease. It could also be used as a preventative therapy, which we can also easily test on the mice.
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Ask News.YC: What would you do if you were a billionaire?
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Fund scientific research at a laboratory I direct with my business partner Josh. I think we could knock off a few major diseases like AIDS, or maybe get bacteria effectively generating energy.To cure HIV (idea is Josh's): Start with some adult stem cells from the HIV patient to be treated, specifically the stem cells that produce T cells. Introduce the 32 base pair deletion in the CCR5 gene and grow the cells in culture. These can then be "transplanted" back into the patient. These transplanted stem cells will create HIV immune T cells. Once there are enough immune T cells, the patient will probably still have HIV, but it will not develop into AIDS. There will be no chance of rejection since they are the patient's own cells. Furthermore, since the body does produce antibodies to HIV, these modified T cells may even be able to fight off the HIV.To test this, we would get a mouse line, which are genetically very similar to each other from inbreeding so we won't have to worry about rejection of the transplants, and introduce the human CCR5 receptor into them. This, in theory, will allow the mice to be infected with HIV since HIV attaches to the CCR 5 receptor to enter and infect the cell. If this works, we can then try the technique of taking some of their stem cells, introducing the mutation, transplanting them back in, and see if their T cell count increases or if the levels of HIV decrease. It could also be used as a preventative therapy, which we can also easily test on the mice.
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Pay off all my family members debt.
Setup a trust to provide my family members with reasonable salaries. Just enough to let them do what they want, but not enough that they don't have to work.
Buy a giant piece of land and move my parent's and their families on to the same property, if they want too...
Go to university.
Setup a decent course in South Africa to teach kids about programming.
Get that silver Porsche 911 that I've always wanted.
Go to my old work, in my new Porsche, and show it to my ex-boss.
Fund something to fight crime in South Africa.
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Ask News.YC: What would you do if you were a billionaire?
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Pay off all my family members debt.
Setup a trust to provide my family members with reasonable salaries. Just enough to let them do what they want, but not enough that they don't have to work.
Buy a giant piece of land and move my parent's and their families on to the same property, if they want too...
Go to university.
Setup a decent course in South Africa to teach kids about programming.
Get that silver Porsche 911 that I've always wanted.
Go to my old work, in my new Porsche, and show it to my ex-boss.
Fund something to fight crime in South Africa.
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Day to day? Much the same thing, actually.
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Why Don’t Restaurants Charge for Reservations?
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What I've never understood is the opposite, is those restaurants which have insane lines, as in 2+ hours waiting outside to get a seat, why they don't simply raise their prices by $1 or $2.There was a restaurant that everyone in college in Vancouver went to back in 1993-1994, Antons Pasta, and you always had to wait incredibly long for - the place was packed 100% of the time at night.I would see this line (fresh from my economics class), and wonder, instead of charging $5 for the tortellini, and have a 3 hour line, why don't they charge $5.50, or heck, even $6.00, and only have a 1 hour line. It's not as though having a 1 hour line is going to result in any lost business.I'm thinking that part of this is the fact that a long line outside, means there will always be business inside, and there is always some paranoia in a restaurant of having empty seats inside, and better to have slightly missed profit opportunity, than to have some seats go empty and make a "reasonable" profit.That's the only theory I could come up with.
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Chez Panisse charges a $25 deposit for reservations, that goes towards your meal. But they have two seatings per night, so it is more difficult to fill tables for no-shows. It's still impossible to get reservations there.
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Why Don’t Restaurants Charge for Reservations?
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Chez Panisse charges a $25 deposit for reservations, that goes towards your meal. But they have two seatings per night, so it is more difficult to fill tables for no-shows. It's still impossible to get reservations there.
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I imagine at some point we will see this happen, as society stratifies even further. You can already pay to skip lines at places like Disney.
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Why Don’t Restaurants Charge for Reservations?
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I imagine at some point we will see this happen, as society stratifies even further. You can already pay to skip lines at places like Disney.
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I've encountered another approach in NYC which I haven't seen mentioned here. Some higher-end restaurants require a credit card number (over the phone, maybe online is possible too) which they tell you they will charge e.g. $25 per person for no-shows. The first time I was a bit put-off (giving out CC numbers on the phone never feels great), but now I'm more sanguine about it.Aside: in central London, booking is essential. Many decent (not even high-end) restaurants have most of their tables booked in advance. I did a double-take the first time I walked into a place with two-thirds of its tables empty and was turned away. "Fully booked" seems a lot more common there. I never knew a restaurant to charge for booking, but I did know people who paid "unofficially" to get tables, or had office assistants scramble for them.
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Why Don’t Restaurants Charge for Reservations?
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I've encountered another approach in NYC which I haven't seen mentioned here. Some higher-end restaurants require a credit card number (over the phone, maybe online is possible too) which they tell you they will charge e.g. $25 per person for no-shows. The first time I was a bit put-off (giving out CC numbers on the phone never feels great), but now I'm more sanguine about it.Aside: in central London, booking is essential. Many decent (not even high-end) restaurants have most of their tables booked in advance. I did a double-take the first time I walked into a place with two-thirds of its tables empty and was turned away. "Fully booked" seems a lot more common there. I never knew a restaurant to charge for booking, but I did know people who paid "unofficially" to get tables, or had office assistants scramble for them.
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It's interesting, I remember listening to NPR awhile back and they had a story about how high end restaurants are experimenting with a "ticket" system for reservations. Part of the problem is that even for restaurants where say you reserve well in advance for a holiday, it's surprisingly common for people to cancel at the last minute. So, some have tried to have people prepay for the meal. It might only work for rather pricey restaurants though...Here's the link:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/08/05/337834577/no-mor...
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Beautiful fixed-width fonts for OSX
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Wow, this is the ugliest font I have ever seen. I do like the color-less syntax highlighting, though.Also, Haskell looks nicer when you translate things like -> to →, \ to λ, and so on.But really, both of these things would look nicer on high-resolution displays. When can I get a 1200dpi 24" monitor? (In the mean time, you can pry hinting and subpixel anti-aliasing from my cold, dead eyes. It's a necessity on the limited hardware that's currently available.)
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I'd recommend Consolas.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConsolasOS X Install → http://www.wezm.net/2009/03/install-consolas-mac-osx/With slightly more effort it can be installed on linux.
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Beautiful fixed-width fonts for OSX
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I'd recommend Consolas.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConsolasOS X Install → http://www.wezm.net/2009/03/install-consolas-mac-osx/With slightly more effort it can be installed on linux.
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This makes me happy.I tried to make 6x13 for OS X a while back:
http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/fontstructions/show/6x13_redu...Then I discovered the full set of characters (er, codepoints?) supported and pulled the emergency brake on that idea!http://rasher.dk/rockbox/fonts/misc/6x13-full.png
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Beautiful fixed-width fonts for OSX
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This makes me happy.I tried to make 6x13 for OS X a while back:
http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/fontstructions/show/6x13_redu...Then I discovered the full set of characters (er, codepoints?) supported and pulled the emergency brake on that idea!http://rasher.dk/rockbox/fonts/misc/6x13-full.png
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My current favorite monospace font is Incosolata http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html It's an amazingly legible font and looks great and small and large font sizes.
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Beautiful fixed-width fonts for OSX
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My current favorite monospace font is Incosolata http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html It's an amazingly legible font and looks great and small and large font sizes.
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I use misc fixed in a smaller size on osx in mrxvt (in X11 of course). Anti-aliasing turned off. 256 color goodness in terminal emacs, yummy. This terminal is incredibly fast (especially with anti-aliasing off), it'll scroll through a big file in the blink of an eye. I dislike having to wait when massive input is scrolling through a terminal. I totally love this setup, only caveat is that I need to attach a mouse to be able to paste into x11.Here's a link to my .mrxvtrc file http://gist.github.com/277956
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GnuPG - 16 Years of protecting privacy
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So many people seem enamored of the idea of building software to protect users from NSA, and respond by designing new cryptosystems. These efforts invariably fail, because crypto is very hard, and professional crypto requires 10x verification (particularly at the design stage) as it does implementation.It baffles me that nobody has instead picked up the challenge of taking the PGP/GPG cryptosystem and making it more usable. That seems like an incredibly valuable project that also makes great use of the skills of the sorts of people that tend to want to work on privacy software.Paradoxically, the more you know about crypto, the less inclined you usually are to build new crypto.
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Except that the tool itself is so painful to use, and has such a shallow integration with things like email clients, that using it requires a considerable degree of self-discipline.I think I installed it once, and then when my machine required rebuilding, I just couldn't bring myself to install it again.I wish it weren't so, but a new website is not something that is going to speed the adoption of GnuPG.
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GnuPG - 16 Years of protecting privacy
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Except that the tool itself is so painful to use, and has such a shallow integration with things like email clients, that using it requires a considerable degree of self-discipline.I think I installed it once, and then when my machine required rebuilding, I just couldn't bring myself to install it again.I wish it weren't so, but a new website is not something that is going to speed the adoption of GnuPG.
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This blog post is partially about the crowd funding campaign, but the author didn't include a link to the campaign!http://goteo.org/project/gnupg-new-website-and-infrastructur...
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GnuPG - 16 Years of protecting privacy
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This blog post is partially about the crowd funding campaign, but the author didn't include a link to the campaign!http://goteo.org/project/gnupg-new-website-and-infrastructur...
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2^2^2 years protecting privacy, that is!
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GnuPG - 16 Years of protecting privacy
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2^2^2 years protecting privacy, that is!
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For a more readable format: https://www.readability.com/articles/jzsno986
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The inside story of MIT and Aaron Swartz
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I continue to be astounded by the unprofessional, predatory manner in which MIT, JSTOR and in particular the federal prosecutors in this case handled themselves.The article also reiterates that the ridiculous CFAA charges centered on the claim that Swartz had unauthorized access to MIT and JSTOR’s networks (he was signed in as a guest).- MIT officials openly mocking Mr Swartz - "LOL" -http://www.bostonglobe.com/2014/03/29/documents-how-aaron-sw...- JSTOR equates downloading files with loss of physical property while simultaneously admitting this is an inaccurate comparison -http://www.bostonglobe.com/2014/03/29/documents-how-aaron-sw...
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The Swartz/MIT debacle reminds me of a chapter in Starship Troopers. A mobile infantry recruit punches his drill instructor. The recruit is publicly lashed and discharged.Later in private, the commander reprimands the drill instructor: there were standing orders to never let a recruit hit you. They obviously have to punish recruits who strike instructors, but they do not want to. The drill instructors are supposed to be elite soldiers, and this one let a recruit get the drop on him, and that mistake cost the infantry a recruit.MIT had sufficient opportunity to stop Swartz with technical countermeasures -- but they failed to do so. They allowed the situation to escalate until official punishment became unavoidable. MIT may claim that they did not want to punish Swartz; few people will argue that they did. It was not their intent but rather their incompetence that lead to his punishment.
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The inside story of MIT and Aaron Swartz
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The Swartz/MIT debacle reminds me of a chapter in Starship Troopers. A mobile infantry recruit punches his drill instructor. The recruit is publicly lashed and discharged.Later in private, the commander reprimands the drill instructor: there were standing orders to never let a recruit hit you. They obviously have to punish recruits who strike instructors, but they do not want to. The drill instructors are supposed to be elite soldiers, and this one let a recruit get the drop on him, and that mistake cost the infantry a recruit.MIT had sufficient opportunity to stop Swartz with technical countermeasures -- but they failed to do so. They allowed the situation to escalate until official punishment became unavoidable. MIT may claim that they did not want to punish Swartz; few people will argue that they did. It was not their intent but rather their incompetence that lead to his punishment.
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Straight to the relevant email logs: http://www.bostonglobe.com/2014/03/29/documents-how-aaron-sw...Lots of interesting material there. An amusing little quote:> his hobbies include changing his mac a lot, not using dhcp, fake registration info and downloading entire online journals
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The inside story of MIT and Aaron Swartz
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Straight to the relevant email logs: http://www.bostonglobe.com/2014/03/29/documents-how-aaron-sw...Lots of interesting material there. An amusing little quote:> his hobbies include changing his mac a lot, not using dhcp, fake registration info and downloading entire online journals
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> MIT has insisted it maintained an appropriate, even compassionate, neutrality toward a determined hacker who stole 4.8 million articles and eluded numerous efforts to stop him before the college sought help from police.The tone of this article is very defensive. "stole" vs. downloaded, both MIT and JSTOR didn't want to prosecute, yada yada.
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The inside story of MIT and Aaron Swartz
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> MIT has insisted it maintained an appropriate, even compassionate, neutrality toward a determined hacker who stole 4.8 million articles and eluded numerous efforts to stop him before the college sought help from police.The tone of this article is very defensive. "stole" vs. downloaded, both MIT and JSTOR didn't want to prosecute, yada yada.
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I am sorry, and I am really not this paranoid world conspiracy theorist kind of guy, but it's very obvious that much bigger things were going on here. Aaron was not popular by A LOT OF powerful people for many reasons. He was on "a list". In times where it is a common fact that intelligence agencies have seemingly endless digital power, all you need is someone who constructs a good story. It's not about the MIT, it could have been everywhere and anyone. The reason for all this will we find in the things Aaron was (sometimes successfully) fighting against. I wish Lawrence Lessig the best of luck!
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Start-Up Founders: Take Your Spouse on a Date
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I'm curious why so many negative articles on startups keep coming from the NYT. It's like they are sinking with the Titanic and laughing at people in the lifeboats.
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It is also worth noting the burdens on the children of startup founders and early stage employees. Founders should also consider time they may lose with their kids. Feel free to bring the blackberry to the baseball game, but at least pay attention when your kids at bat.
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Start-Up Founders: Take Your Spouse on a Date
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It is also worth noting the burdens on the children of startup founders and early stage employees. Founders should also consider time they may lose with their kids. Feel free to bring the blackberry to the baseball game, but at least pay attention when your kids at bat.
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Suppose I'd have to take time off to get one of them things first. I mean, I was dating someone not too long ago. How long ago was 2006? How time flies when you're fighting a war / building a business.If there's anything I hate more than made up holidays it's... okay, I can't think of anything I hate more right now.
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Start-Up Founders: Take Your Spouse on a Date
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Suppose I'd have to take time off to get one of them things first. I mean, I was dating someone not too long ago. How long ago was 2006? How time flies when you're fighting a war / building a business.If there's anything I hate more than made up holidays it's... okay, I can't think of anything I hate more right now.
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Spouse 2.0 day! Gee, I hope I can find a babysitter and dinner reservation on this short of notice.
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Start-Up Founders: Take Your Spouse on a Date
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Spouse 2.0 day! Gee, I hope I can find a babysitter and dinner reservation on this short of notice.
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reported as inaccurate. startup founders don't have spouses.oh wait, this isn't digg..
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Google Buys Twitter? Chris O'Brien's 11 Predictions for 2011
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I would like to see someone buy Twitter, if only to have a different set of engineers and product people tackle their issues. I find twitter search to be very useful in theory, but useless in practice. Mostly I get the "older tweets for <term> are unavailable" message.If it takes an acquisition to make Twitter more useful, I'm all for it.
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There are two spheres on twitter, the first one is a broadcasting tool, its the accounts with large follower numbers broadcast their stuff, mostly its promotional stuff but it has a use too. They pay attention to the tweets where their username is mentioned and average joe whose voice was ignored now could make some big brand listen to him and resolve a problem if he has one.
the other sphere is the chitchat region, where users with medium number of followers and follow decent number of people have conversations, most of that are retweets, which is just copies of someone's message, retweets are pointless but provide good statistics for trends and stuff.
anyway, twitter is definitely useful because it is a large pool of current and latest information, but you need really good filtering tools to get what exactly you want, not unrelated noise.
in terms of monetizing twitter is in trouble. they want to stick ads in those 140 characters? its going to be hard as long as the ads look like ads, but if they manage to learn about the user and his needs for that particular moment so they could serve ads that do not look like ads but are more the services that user needs at that point, then there is a bingo.
and yeah about google, i dont think google should buy twitter, it does not fit, and google does not really need it. twitter would make a good company standalone.
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Google Buys Twitter? Chris O'Brien's 11 Predictions for 2011
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There are two spheres on twitter, the first one is a broadcasting tool, its the accounts with large follower numbers broadcast their stuff, mostly its promotional stuff but it has a use too. They pay attention to the tweets where their username is mentioned and average joe whose voice was ignored now could make some big brand listen to him and resolve a problem if he has one.
the other sphere is the chitchat region, where users with medium number of followers and follow decent number of people have conversations, most of that are retweets, which is just copies of someone's message, retweets are pointless but provide good statistics for trends and stuff.
anyway, twitter is definitely useful because it is a large pool of current and latest information, but you need really good filtering tools to get what exactly you want, not unrelated noise.
in terms of monetizing twitter is in trouble. they want to stick ads in those 140 characters? its going to be hard as long as the ads look like ads, but if they manage to learn about the user and his needs for that particular moment so they could serve ads that do not look like ads but are more the services that user needs at that point, then there is a bingo.
and yeah about google, i dont think google should buy twitter, it does not fit, and google does not really need it. twitter would make a good company standalone.
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The expression is "without further ado", broadly standing for "without any more fuss", and not "without further adieu". "Adieu", borrowed from the French word for "farewell", doesn't make any sense at all in this context.I know it's nitpicking and doesn't add a lot, but still. And I can't even post it on the website because it requires a facebook account. Blegh :(
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Google Buys Twitter? Chris O'Brien's 11 Predictions for 2011
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The expression is "without further ado", broadly standing for "without any more fuss", and not "without further adieu". "Adieu", borrowed from the French word for "farewell", doesn't make any sense at all in this context.I know it's nitpicking and doesn't add a lot, but still. And I can't even post it on the website because it requires a facebook account. Blegh :(
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It depends on how well Google Me does.If Google Me indeed takes off, as a social layer (on top of application and presentation layer), they could just make buzz more prominent.But if it doesn't, which it may, considering Google's failed investments in Buzz, Wave, Me, investment to buy twitter would seem compelling.
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Google Buys Twitter? Chris O'Brien's 11 Predictions for 2011
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It depends on how well Google Me does.If Google Me indeed takes off, as a social layer (on top of application and presentation layer), they could just make buzz more prominent.But if it doesn't, which it may, considering Google's failed investments in Buzz, Wave, Me, investment to buy twitter would seem compelling.
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I'd actually be really surprised if Groupon doesn't go public this year. Considering they just passed on Google's acquisition I don't think they're going to have a better time to go public then in the next year, before their brand gets too diluted with competitors. I think a lot of investors would also be very happy to get in on a hot new tech property like Groupon, as the economy inches back towards a recovery.And a cloud bubble? Really its pretty damn obvious for the lsat year that cloud based services are damn hot right now, but a bubble? This one is barely just a prediction he's pretty much stating what is currently happening. He can declare victory on this "prediction" on Jan 1.
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A Statistical Portrait of a Y Combinator Batch
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This is a really excellent example of using your own product to generate interesting content as a way to drive traffic back to your product.Great work Statwing. Can't wait until I have some data that needs analyzing so I can use your service.
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"Higher values for Number of Employees/Contractors (FTEs) are weakly associated with higher values for Average Age of Company's Founders (Rounded)"I had a suspicion that that might be true, but I wonder why that is? Perhaps older founders tackle problems that need more domain expertise and more people? Or perhaps they can rely on savings and have been able to bootstrap a little better than high-school/college grads?Anyway, good job on StatWing, I love playing around with numbers and graphs. Perhaps some public datasets will help people get more familiar with the app and serve as demo.
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A Statistical Portrait of a Y Combinator Batch
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"Higher values for Number of Employees/Contractors (FTEs) are weakly associated with higher values for Average Age of Company's Founders (Rounded)"I had a suspicion that that might be true, but I wonder why that is? Perhaps older founders tackle problems that need more domain expertise and more people? Or perhaps they can rely on savings and have been able to bootstrap a little better than high-school/college grads?Anyway, good job on StatWing, I love playing around with numbers and graphs. Perhaps some public datasets will help people get more familiar with the app and serve as demo.
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Thanks for posting. It would be fun to see the ages of accepted YC applicants compared with the rejected applicants. I'm not sure how easy it would be to get the data of the rejected applicants though. Maybe they would self-report their information if you posted something here on HN.
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A Statistical Portrait of a Y Combinator Batch
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Thanks for posting. It would be fun to see the ages of accepted YC applicants compared with the rejected applicants. I'm not sure how easy it would be to get the data of the rejected applicants though. Maybe they would self-report their information if you posted something here on HN.
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I wonder, is that that spike at 39 thinking "Shit, I'm about to turn 40. It's now or never!"
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A Statistical Portrait of a Y Combinator Batch
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I wonder, is that that spike at 39 thinking "Shit, I'm about to turn 40. It's now or never!"
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It would be interesting to put this against the ages of Gen Y distribution. I believe this grouping would actually look relatively old to the peak in population if we assumed only Gen Y would apply.I am basing this on my memory that 1990 was the peak year for those born in Gen Y. (I cannot find the data set to back it up, but I bet someone else knows where to get it).+ a few outside of Gen Y.
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Ask HN: What Criteria Should a Young Hacker Apply to College Choice?
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It's not the populist thing to say, but I'll say it anyway.The top colleges are a great place to be because of the friends you'll make and the level of competition at those places. You can meet amazing people anywhere, but generally speaking they are in higher concentration at more competitive universities.If you're going to be a hacker, go to a top CS school if you have the opportunity. The competition will be more hardcore, the faculty will be great (and will have written some of the textbooks!), you'll be heavily recruited by top software companies, and maybe you'll meet your cofounders there. If it costs a little more, then do it anyway -- does it matter if you're a good hacker? Even at the top schools, if you had to pay for most of them with loans, you'd be making more than enough to pay off the debt in short order after graduation.Debt IS bad though -- you want to avoid it if you can because it ties your hands when it comes to starting a company right out of college. But then again, working for a few years and earning a solid salary for a bit can be a great thing too. Make your mistakes on other people's time. =) Worked for us.
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Don't choose a college. Choosing a college means you are choosing a particular brand of credentials.http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.htmlInstead, the best thing to base your choice on is people. The next best thing is environment. Are there particular professors who you look up to who would want to mentor you? Is there a high potential for meeting the kind of people who will inspire you? Do you have good evidence that being in that environment will inculcate something valuable? (And starry-eyed reminisces of an alum are not good evidence. Lots of things can happen at an institution in a decade or so. Get current information.)(Another way to put it -- the reputation of a school is marketing. Doesn't it seem wise to corroborate that with more direct measures of value?)
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Ask HN: What Criteria Should a Young Hacker Apply to College Choice?
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Don't choose a college. Choosing a college means you are choosing a particular brand of credentials.http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.htmlInstead, the best thing to base your choice on is people. The next best thing is environment. Are there particular professors who you look up to who would want to mentor you? Is there a high potential for meeting the kind of people who will inspire you? Do you have good evidence that being in that environment will inculcate something valuable? (And starry-eyed reminisces of an alum are not good evidence. Lots of things can happen at an institution in a decade or so. Get current information.)(Another way to put it -- the reputation of a school is marketing. Doesn't it seem wise to corroborate that with more direct measures of value?)
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For most private schools (and the more prestigious public schools), the only people who pay list price are those most able to pay it. Working class and even squarely middle-class kids will generally qualify for significant amounts of need-based financial aid in the forms of grants. So, to the degree that cost is a factor, you should be considering the tuition in conjunction with the financial aid package offered.I think neither cost (as long as the cost is affordable) nor prestige should be the top criteria.I think its more important to find a good match between the student and the environment of the college. The most important aspects of the environment are the professors, the other students and the available academic programs.I'd discount big research universities, since the foremost criteria used by the institution for evaluating undergrad instructors is 1) are they cheap (ie grad students), 2) does their research attract prestige, funding, and cheap labor (ie grad students). The foremost criteria used by undegrads in evaluating their profs is "coolness" and the ease of getting a good grade. Also, access by undergrads to profs is limited. They are usually teach in big lecture environments, and their office hours are limited.Focus more on institutions, like small liberal arts colleges, that place a high value on undergrad instruction, while still expecting profs to maintain a level of engagement in scholarship and research. The classroom environment is usually more intimate and profs are more available outside of the classroom.The students are important too. Every hour spent with a prof will also be spent with other students. Better they contribute to the experience. Also, for every hour spent in a classroom setting, there should be at least as many spent studying and socializing with other students.Even if you have your criteria firm in your mind, its hard to get enough information to base an evaluation on, so it pays to look for points of leverage among friends, family, family doctor, high school teachers, etc. None of them are going to have good knowledge of more than one or two institutions, but teachers will have a sense of the experiences of former students. Older friends and relatives will know about their own institutions. Parents of friends and relatives will know something about the experience of their own children, and also of the children of their own friends and family. What's most important though is that these people will have an inside perspective not just the institutions, but on the prospective student. So, tell these people what the student is looking for, ask them for suggestions based on what they know, and then ask them why they made the suggestion they did and see if it makes sense.It's also worth paying close attention to the way the schools markets themselves. If a college manages to communicate a strong and consistent identity for itself in its marketing materials then i'd give that identity some weight unless their is strong evidence to the contrary (particularly if the same message is delivered once they've issued their acceptance). There are some perverse incentives for small schools to misrepresent themselves, but these mostly come into play before applications are received. Also I think these perverse incentives are checked by the fact that they don't have a lot of flexibility with respect to class size. Too many students and their quality of teaching suffers. Too few and their finances suffer. In addition, if its a bad match and the student drops out, it can damage their reputation, and hurt some of the metrics on which they are judged when it comes time for re-accreditation.Take advantage of the net to get more of an inside view on schools too. We used to have prospective students checking out our live journal group. I think that's died off a bit, but there are still groups on facebook and whatnot, and the school should be able to put you in touch with current students and recent grads.In the end though, its great to do a campus visit, particularly if you are choosing among just a handful of schools. Arrange it with admissions. They may get you a room for a night in a dorm, and they'll get you into classes, and give you a campus tour. Outside the formal activities, take advantage of unscheduled time to talk to other students.Regarding the academic program, a lot of students end up graduating in something they might not even have known about when they entered, and they may end up making a living doing a job that didn't even exist when they graduated. For these reasons, I think its important to get a good solid liberal education, with exposure to a variety of subjects and viewpoints no matter what major they choose, and a grounding in the humanities, so they have a perspective on the forces that have shaped society in the past, and can apply that perspective to understanding present day changes.Last thing, I think the prospect of launching a startup after graduating was raised in another thread. I generally encourage people to keep their options open after graduation by not taking on too much debt. For a student who is planning on a pursuit (like writing a book, or starting a company) where they can expect little or no income for a long stretch after graduation, I think the goal should be graduating with no debt at all. In those cases, cost could become a more important factor; 10K in loans might not be decisive if one expects to have some sort of paying job after graduation, but it could be the difference between having grocery money, or going to bed hungry if you are planning on scraping by while trying to get a startup off the ground.
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Ask HN: What Criteria Should a Young Hacker Apply to College Choice?
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For most private schools (and the more prestigious public schools), the only people who pay list price are those most able to pay it. Working class and even squarely middle-class kids will generally qualify for significant amounts of need-based financial aid in the forms of grants. So, to the degree that cost is a factor, you should be considering the tuition in conjunction with the financial aid package offered.I think neither cost (as long as the cost is affordable) nor prestige should be the top criteria.I think its more important to find a good match between the student and the environment of the college. The most important aspects of the environment are the professors, the other students and the available academic programs.I'd discount big research universities, since the foremost criteria used by the institution for evaluating undergrad instructors is 1) are they cheap (ie grad students), 2) does their research attract prestige, funding, and cheap labor (ie grad students). The foremost criteria used by undegrads in evaluating their profs is "coolness" and the ease of getting a good grade. Also, access by undergrads to profs is limited. They are usually teach in big lecture environments, and their office hours are limited.Focus more on institutions, like small liberal arts colleges, that place a high value on undergrad instruction, while still expecting profs to maintain a level of engagement in scholarship and research. The classroom environment is usually more intimate and profs are more available outside of the classroom.The students are important too. Every hour spent with a prof will also be spent with other students. Better they contribute to the experience. Also, for every hour spent in a classroom setting, there should be at least as many spent studying and socializing with other students.Even if you have your criteria firm in your mind, its hard to get enough information to base an evaluation on, so it pays to look for points of leverage among friends, family, family doctor, high school teachers, etc. None of them are going to have good knowledge of more than one or two institutions, but teachers will have a sense of the experiences of former students. Older friends and relatives will know about their own institutions. Parents of friends and relatives will know something about the experience of their own children, and also of the children of their own friends and family. What's most important though is that these people will have an inside perspective not just the institutions, but on the prospective student. So, tell these people what the student is looking for, ask them for suggestions based on what they know, and then ask them why they made the suggestion they did and see if it makes sense.It's also worth paying close attention to the way the schools markets themselves. If a college manages to communicate a strong and consistent identity for itself in its marketing materials then i'd give that identity some weight unless their is strong evidence to the contrary (particularly if the same message is delivered once they've issued their acceptance). There are some perverse incentives for small schools to misrepresent themselves, but these mostly come into play before applications are received. Also I think these perverse incentives are checked by the fact that they don't have a lot of flexibility with respect to class size. Too many students and their quality of teaching suffers. Too few and their finances suffer. In addition, if its a bad match and the student drops out, it can damage their reputation, and hurt some of the metrics on which they are judged when it comes time for re-accreditation.Take advantage of the net to get more of an inside view on schools too. We used to have prospective students checking out our live journal group. I think that's died off a bit, but there are still groups on facebook and whatnot, and the school should be able to put you in touch with current students and recent grads.In the end though, its great to do a campus visit, particularly if you are choosing among just a handful of schools. Arrange it with admissions. They may get you a room for a night in a dorm, and they'll get you into classes, and give you a campus tour. Outside the formal activities, take advantage of unscheduled time to talk to other students.Regarding the academic program, a lot of students end up graduating in something they might not even have known about when they entered, and they may end up making a living doing a job that didn't even exist when they graduated. For these reasons, I think its important to get a good solid liberal education, with exposure to a variety of subjects and viewpoints no matter what major they choose, and a grounding in the humanities, so they have a perspective on the forces that have shaped society in the past, and can apply that perspective to understanding present day changes.Last thing, I think the prospect of launching a startup after graduating was raised in another thread. I generally encourage people to keep their options open after graduation by not taking on too much debt. For a student who is planning on a pursuit (like writing a book, or starting a company) where they can expect little or no income for a long stretch after graduation, I think the goal should be graduating with no debt at all. In those cases, cost could become a more important factor; 10K in loans might not be decisive if one expects to have some sort of paying job after graduation, but it could be the difference between having grocery money, or going to bed hungry if you are planning on scraping by while trying to get a startup off the ground.
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Here's a list, but don't take the order too seriously:- Courses: Do they have courses that you're interested in taking, and is the department strong in those areas? What's the balance between theoretical and more immediately practical classes, and which do you care more about?- Professors: How are the professors regarded as instructors by their own students? During undergrad, your professor's quality of instruction matters more than their quality of research.- Rigor. Top colleges are pretty comparable, afaik.- Class size.- Affordability.- Quality of environment.No one criteria ever really "trumps" other criteria. You have to determine your personal weightings for each and decide which place offers the best balance. Also, you may find that your priorities change once you've been at college for a year or two, so unless you have a super good idea of what you want to do, you might prefer well roundedness to strength in only a few key areas.
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Ask HN: What Criteria Should a Young Hacker Apply to College Choice?
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Here's a list, but don't take the order too seriously:- Courses: Do they have courses that you're interested in taking, and is the department strong in those areas? What's the balance between theoretical and more immediately practical classes, and which do you care more about?- Professors: How are the professors regarded as instructors by their own students? During undergrad, your professor's quality of instruction matters more than their quality of research.- Rigor. Top colleges are pretty comparable, afaik.- Class size.- Affordability.- Quality of environment.No one criteria ever really "trumps" other criteria. You have to determine your personal weightings for each and decide which place offers the best balance. Also, you may find that your priorities change once you've been at college for a year or two, so unless you have a super good idea of what you want to do, you might prefer well roundedness to strength in only a few key areas.
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None of it really matters. Visit each college until it's just obvious. "I could spend 4 years here and be happy" Stay overnight with a freshman. Get a feel for how things are run. Talk to as many freshman and seniors as possible, candidly, in private. Go to some sample classes.Don't just take a tour or investigate it online. I chose my college because the people going there were all pretty hard core geeks. And undergrads could get paid to work for Masters and PHD students on their thesis. (I wanted hands on experience) This, naturally, made having a killer social life a little more challenging, unless your definition of a "killer social life" is playing net trek at 3:00am on a friday night in your dorm's computer room.
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Android: Fragmentation? More like Fragmentawesome.
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That's not to say it was playable on all of them--the Covia SmartQ5, for example, has no keyboard, trackball, or even orientation sensors, and you have to use a stylus on the screen (it also has no GPU so the game runs extremely slowly). And some devices (like the LG Eve) have directional pads that are really poor for games.In other words: Fragmentation is a bit of a problem on the Android platform.Sure, your software doesn't crash on any Android hardware. Good for you! But there's a big difference between does not crash and is useable.Fortunately, your software is also usable on "average" Android hardware. Great! But there's a big difference between usable and useful, and an even bigger difference between useful and elegantly designed.The problem is least-common-denominator design: You can't assume a hardware keyboard, and you can't assume a software keyboard, and you can't assume multitouch, and you can't assume an orientation sensor, and you apparently can't assume a minimum level of graphics performance. So you design something that runs well on some hardware, but not so well on others, in a way that's not necessarily easy for a potential software customer to understand or anticipate in advance. And you're careful not to accidentally take too much advantage of some hardware feature that isn't widely available, lest you box yourself into a niche.
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I can deal with hardware fragmentation, but I am still concerned with software fragmentation. For instance, we (Bump) have different contacts code for Android 1.x, Android 2.x (yes they were supposed to be compatible), and HTC. Bump is not stable on several devices that have changed the contacts subsystem but that we do not have time to support individually (and we can't compile to install on only a subset of known working devices). And I am sure there are problems on handsets we don't know about (there seems to be a new Android handset that we have never heard of on our servers every week). This may be a bigger problem for us since we are so tied to the contacts database and it seems to be a popular subsystem to change but an unpopular one to developers. In the end it means more time bug fixing than feature developing which is too bad.That being said we are extremely excited about the openness of the platform and the features that enables us to build. :)
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Android: Fragmentation? More like Fragmentawesome.
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I can deal with hardware fragmentation, but I am still concerned with software fragmentation. For instance, we (Bump) have different contacts code for Android 1.x, Android 2.x (yes they were supposed to be compatible), and HTC. Bump is not stable on several devices that have changed the contacts subsystem but that we do not have time to support individually (and we can't compile to install on only a subset of known working devices). And I am sure there are problems on handsets we don't know about (there seems to be a new Android handset that we have never heard of on our servers every week). This may be a bigger problem for us since we are so tied to the contacts database and it seems to be a popular subsystem to change but an unpopular one to developers. In the end it means more time bug fixing than feature developing which is too bad.That being said we are extremely excited about the openness of the platform and the features that enables us to build. :)
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The fears about Android fragmentation are, in some cases, overblown. The point that concerns me is that this guy has, or has gotten his hands, on every one of those Android devices.This is a feat that most Amateur developers cannot afford to pull off. It is, however, a feat that any iPhone developer can manage (there are only a handful of devices)My fear, with platform fragmentation, isn't for the people who do this for a living (I do, and platform fragmentation is just one of the many problems we already have systems in place to handle) My fear is for the people who want to do it as a hobby.So for us professional folks, the platform fragmentation issue is very over-blown. But if you're a one-man shop who wants to make some mobile software in his/her spare time (for which there is a thriving market on the iPhone) then this is actually a huge hurdle to get over.Sure, if you have access to all the Android devices, you might or might not have to make code changes to support specific handsets (yet). But if you can't get your hands on every Android device...and you want to develop a paid app in the evenings, get ready for a deluge of angry users for whom your application is just too slow to work. Further, these will be problems you won't be able to debug _until_ you get that email from an angry user.
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Android: Fragmentation? More like Fragmentawesome.
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The fears about Android fragmentation are, in some cases, overblown. The point that concerns me is that this guy has, or has gotten his hands, on every one of those Android devices.This is a feat that most Amateur developers cannot afford to pull off. It is, however, a feat that any iPhone developer can manage (there are only a handful of devices)My fear, with platform fragmentation, isn't for the people who do this for a living (I do, and platform fragmentation is just one of the many problems we already have systems in place to handle) My fear is for the people who want to do it as a hobby.So for us professional folks, the platform fragmentation issue is very over-blown. But if you're a one-man shop who wants to make some mobile software in his/her spare time (for which there is a thriving market on the iPhone) then this is actually a huge hurdle to get over.Sure, if you have access to all the Android devices, you might or might not have to make code changes to support specific handsets (yet). But if you can't get your hands on every Android device...and you want to develop a paid app in the evenings, get ready for a deluge of angry users for whom your application is just too slow to work. Further, these will be problems you won't be able to debug _until_ you get that email from an angry user.
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> "The cool thing is, Replica Island ran on all of them without complaint. That's not to say it was playable on all of them"But wait, isn't that the entire point of a standardized platform? The ability to guarantee some minimum of user experience quality?The splintering problem is real, and add it to the propensity for OEMs to add all kinds of (mostly poorly thought out) UI tweaks to Android, and what you have is something that really shouldn't be advertised under a single brand name.
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Android: Fragmentation? More like Fragmentawesome.
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> "The cool thing is, Replica Island ran on all of them without complaint. That's not to say it was playable on all of them"But wait, isn't that the entire point of a standardized platform? The ability to guarantee some minimum of user experience quality?The splintering problem is real, and add it to the propensity for OEMs to add all kinds of (mostly poorly thought out) UI tweaks to Android, and what you have is something that really shouldn't be advertised under a single brand name.
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Saw the author of Replica Island talk at Google IO. He's worked for nintendo among other handheld companies and really knows his stuff. He works for Google now and developed Replica Island as his 20% project. I'm glad that his software runs well on all the various android capable devices because if he can't get it portable, chances are not many can. One thing not mentioned in this particular article is the fact that he's not only open sourcing replica island but also the engine he's developed to create it, so it should make game development easier on the rest of us.
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The new sandbox: open-source and self-hosted
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I'm sad to see their free sandboxes going away, they were a good option for deploying Django for small, non-commercial projects or tests. The experience was better than Heroku (rsync deploy, reasonable database limit, ssh shell) and the docs were alright.From the free options I've seen so far, AppFog comes closest, but last time I tried them the Python/Django documentation was pretty sketchy and the build process had some issues.What are some other good free (tier) PaaS options out there?
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Since my comment on Dotcloud's blog post hasn't been approved, I'll repost here. Mind that this was addressed to Dotcloud...First of all, I want to congratulate you guys on what you’re doing for the community by open-sourcing these projects. I have hope that it will lead to faster extension of the options provided by the already-slick configuration scheme to better support new variations on deployment strategies, as well as better documentation.That being said, my days as a Dotcloud customer may be numbered. Back when I was evaluating PaaSs to use for my commercial project, I chose Dotcloud because I could be free to experiment and test using the Sandbox. While we use a Live application for our production deployment, my company still relies on the Sandbox for staging and one-off tests.I have since run into a couple pain points using Dotcloud’s services. The first of these is the fact that your Postgres service cannot be easily scaled. Dotcloud support themselves recommended that I use Heroku’s Postgres hosting as an alternative. This seems to be just one step down the slope of potentially migrating our whole stack. The second pain point is that the instance-based model is not amenable to running New Relic for monitoring. This is not a problem specific to Dotcloud, but again, Heroku is outflanking you by integrating New Relic pricing directly into their basic pricing model. This provides for much more predictable and bounded billing–super important for my company in our bootstrapping stage.While I certainly understand that the Sandbox flavor must come at a significant cost to your company, the fact that it’s phasing out is a significant reduction in value for mine. I’m sure this wasn’t an easy decision, but I hope you understand that this is a strong push toward testing out my deployment on your competitors’ services so I can evaluate the pros/cons of bailing. I hope you’ll consider this as just one customer data point.
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The new sandbox: open-source and self-hosted
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Since my comment on Dotcloud's blog post hasn't been approved, I'll repost here. Mind that this was addressed to Dotcloud...First of all, I want to congratulate you guys on what you’re doing for the community by open-sourcing these projects. I have hope that it will lead to faster extension of the options provided by the already-slick configuration scheme to better support new variations on deployment strategies, as well as better documentation.That being said, my days as a Dotcloud customer may be numbered. Back when I was evaluating PaaSs to use for my commercial project, I chose Dotcloud because I could be free to experiment and test using the Sandbox. While we use a Live application for our production deployment, my company still relies on the Sandbox for staging and one-off tests.I have since run into a couple pain points using Dotcloud’s services. The first of these is the fact that your Postgres service cannot be easily scaled. Dotcloud support themselves recommended that I use Heroku’s Postgres hosting as an alternative. This seems to be just one step down the slope of potentially migrating our whole stack. The second pain point is that the instance-based model is not amenable to running New Relic for monitoring. This is not a problem specific to Dotcloud, but again, Heroku is outflanking you by integrating New Relic pricing directly into their basic pricing model. This provides for much more predictable and bounded billing–super important for my company in our bootstrapping stage.While I certainly understand that the Sandbox flavor must come at a significant cost to your company, the fact that it’s phasing out is a significant reduction in value for mine. I’m sure this wasn’t an easy decision, but I hope you understand that this is a strong push toward testing out my deployment on your competitors’ services so I can evaluate the pros/cons of bailing. I hope you’ll consider this as just one customer data point.
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Their new strategy is to decommission the free plans and re-invest in building open source instead.It's not really clear how to self-host and how to transition from self-hosting to their platform if the need arises.
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The new sandbox: open-source and self-hosted
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Their new strategy is to decommission the free plans and re-invest in building open source instead.It's not really clear how to self-host and how to transition from self-hosting to their platform if the need arises.
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I think this is great, with one request: I would love to be able to use the same dotcloud toolchain to deploy to a local VM (or, container, I guess.)Something like `dotcloud local push`. This way I don't have to mess with chef/vagrant/etc for my staging environments: I can simply use my dotcloud configurations for both local and production deployments.It would be sad if I had to create one deployment system for testing environments, and something entirely different for production - because by the time I set things up for tests, I might as well use that same tool chain for prod!I don't mind that the free tier is going away - because for me, it has been less about the "free" and more about the "easy to throw a stack together".Exciting times!
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The new sandbox: open-source and self-hosted
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I think this is great, with one request: I would love to be able to use the same dotcloud toolchain to deploy to a local VM (or, container, I guess.)Something like `dotcloud local push`. This way I don't have to mess with chef/vagrant/etc for my staging environments: I can simply use my dotcloud configurations for both local and production deployments.It would be sad if I had to create one deployment system for testing environments, and something entirely different for production - because by the time I set things up for tests, I might as well use that same tool chain for prod!I don't mind that the free tier is going away - because for me, it has been less about the "free" and more about the "easy to throw a stack together".Exciting times!
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Does anybody else feel that less than 3 weeks is not enough advance notice before permanently destroying applications?
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Swiss City Of Bern To Switch To Free And Open Source IT Solutions
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It's quite interesting, since Switzerland has been quite "under the thumb" for a while when it comes to proprietory software, so this comes as a welcome relief.Disclaimer: I live and work in Switzerland.
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The city of Munich even has created their own Linux distro in 2006, called LiMux, which is part of the identically named LiMux project, aimed at switching all their software systems to free and open source software. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux)
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Swiss City Of Bern To Switch To Free And Open Source IT Solutions
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The city of Munich even has created their own Linux distro in 2006, called LiMux, which is part of the identically named LiMux project, aimed at switching all their software systems to free and open source software. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux)
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Swiss Neutrality
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Swiss City Of Bern To Switch To Free And Open Source IT Solutions
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Swiss Neutrality
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Cool. It would be interesting to see an estimate of the savings from software license purchases they no longer have to make, and what they plan to do with the savings.
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Swiss City Of Bern To Switch To Free And Open Source IT Solutions
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Cool. It would be interesting to see an estimate of the savings from software license purchases they no longer have to make, and what they plan to do with the savings.
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Hopefully this will contribute to improve the open source office software.
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