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Does karma affect what you write? | tokipin: what good is karma if you dont use it thats what i always say |
Does karma affect what you write? | trickjarrett: It's definitely curbed my "me too" posts as these seem to get dinged. But if I have a content related post I will write it and post it. |
How to programmatically observe program execution? | wmf: DTrace and SystemTap can insert probes in code if you're only interested in certain parts. If you want basic-block-level or instruction-level coverage, look at Pin, DynamoRIO, or Valgrind. |
What's a fair policy for employee-generated IP? | rdrimmie: My current agreement requires that I explicitly seek company exclusion for any ip I work on at home. The key to this sort of implementation is that it is ridiculously simple. I write up a sentence or a paragraph or so, I bring it to the CTO (it is a small company so he is a desk away) and he signs it.The easy way to think of it is sort of a right of first refusal, with the company being extremely likely to refuse anything. Basically I am going to him and saying "hey can I spend my work time on this?" and he says "no we don't want any part of that" and then it's all official and documented with signatures and good stuff like that.I bristle at IP contracts, but the simple fact of the matter is that as an employee (especially of a somewhat mature funded company, bootstrappers may have a little bit more flexibility) I know that I'm going to be subject to them. Being up front about it and making it possible and simple to exclude my IP from the company's means that every few months I bring a list of fairly early-stage ideas to get signed off.The other option is just to start with a "Hey, your IP is your IP and our IP is our IP." policy and wait until you're actually screwed over to change. There's value in protecting yourself, but building a giant wall around you for a problem that may never occur can also be extremely restrictive. |
Is there room for another photo sharing service? | Kaizyn: Yes, but you need to find a way to do picture sharing better. What would differentiate your startup from flickr or photobucket? A tie in to all the networking sites where you upload your photo once and they show up in all of your networks might be a big win, I don't know.You can always find room in the market for a better mousetrap, provided you have a good idea of how the mousetrap needs to be improved. |
Does karma affect what you write? | mhartl: I rarely think about karma except ex post, and then mostly after being downmodded. It's amazing and distressing how much even one downvote hurts. |
Does karma affect what you write? | bestes: Isn't the point of karma to make HN a community? Karma is an important way of demonstrating quickly if a link or comment fits within these norms. Community does not have to mean groupthink and I think HN has avoided this, as demonstrated by so many comments arguing both (or all) sides of an issue.
So, yes, I take karma into consideration. Not because I want people to like me, but because I want to add value to HN. It's funny, but think of adding a comment on HN the way I would on usenet, back when the warning about how the post would go all over the world actually meant something. |
Does karma affect what you write? | tlrobinson: Yes and no. On one hand, I think it prevents me from saying silly comments that I might not think twice about saying on Reddit.On the other hand, Reddit also has karma, but I get far more negative votes there than here, not because they're mean/nasty comments, but because I enjoy criticizing some of the stupid that goes on there (uncreative pun threads, etc)."Hmm will this be unpopular and ding my karma. In my case it seems like HN Karma encourages group think."I don't see a lot of negative karma voting due to people disagreeing with opinions. Usually it will just hover around 0 if most people disagree. Only when a comment is clearly wrong, immature, stupid, inappropriate, etc will it reach negative values. |
Is Content Management a solved problem? | TrevorJ: Broadly defined, NO I don't think it is solved by a long shot. In the narrow Hey-look-I-made-a-multi-user-blog sense, then sure. But beyond that think there is still a lot of room for innovation. For instance, I've been looking for a CMS that would let multiple authors submit articles directly to a digg-style rank-based page, but none of the solutions work without a real mishmash of code. Also, it seems as if a lot of systems out lack good out-of-the-box rich media support. It would be nice, given that it is 2009 if you could record right from your microphone/webcam/still camera and publish to your site without needing some third party tool. |
What's a Good Professional Font You Use? | kingnothing: I use Georgia on my resume with a minimalist layout and receive compliments on it often. |
Getting Eyeballs | amichail: Coming from someone who hasn't been involved in a startup (yet!), I've never really understood this inability among founders to develop clever marketing campaigns.Why don't you try it and see whether it's that easy? |
Does karma affect what you write? | andrewljohnson: Karma effects EVERYTHING I do. |
Does karma affect what you write? | fauigerzigerk: It doesn't affect my writing but it does affect what I think of people here. The more downvotes to negative values I see, the more I think this community is becoming less able or willing to communicate.Intelligent people should be able to use words to disagree. I see how it can be useful to use upvotes for content filtering, but downvoting to negative scores actually highlights those posts and therefore defeats the content filtering purpose.Greying them out even forces me to take action (highlight the text with the mouse) in order to be able to read them. It's completely counter-productive.So what purpose do downvotes have? In my view they are either insults or they are a very primitve way of expressing opinion. Upvotes are also a very primitive way of expressing opinion, but they help me filter out interesting content as well.Since negative scores serve no purpose at all, why would I want to have those posts thrust in my face? To learn that there are a bunch of speechless people who feel good about making a score go from -8 to -9? I already knew that, thank you very much.I wish there was an account setting that makes all comment scores go away. |
Best banks for startups/corps, by their web interfaces | vlad: Banknorth used to mention on their web site that they were rated the #1 bank web site. |
Getting Eyeballs | mixmax: I actually quite like your puppet idea. |
Is there room for another photo sharing service? | callmeed: I think it really depends on if you're talking about a completely consumer/snapshot sharing service that is free. If so, I would say "no". Facebook and Flickr dominate and (to my knowledge) neither make money solely on their photo services. (Facebook's only revenue is ads and I doubt Flickr's Pro account covers the cost of the entire service).If you're talking about a premium/freemium service that is targeted at pro-sumers, then maybe. SmugMug and others (myself included) have shown that it can be done profitably. It's just that with a paid service, you reduce your market considerably (no one wants to pay to upload their halloween party pictures).But I think there are new markets to explore for paid services. Just depends on who you're trying to reach. |
How to programmatically observe program execution? | lacker: If you run your debugger via emacs, you should be able to use emacs macros to programmatically observe execution. |
Getting Eyeballs | jwesley: Please don't use the term "eyeballs". It makes you sound like an aging marketing exec.The thinking behind "getting eyeballs" is the same as "Techcrunch is our marketing plan". It's not about how many people see your product, its about the right people seeing your product at the right time.Pulling stunts might get you coverage in the tech blogs, but unless those people are your ideal users, it won't be much help. |
Does karma affect what you write? | giles_bowkett: fuck karma. fuck all of you. nothing personal. |
Does karma affect what you write? | DanielBMarkham: If karma didn't matter to most posters, the board would not work. The whole philosophy of voting is based on the idea that karma matters, both to the reader of the article and to the submitter/voter.Now whether or not the board is "working" -- whether or not a simple up or down vote means anything more than a herd mentality knee-jerk response -- is a completely different question. |
Getting Eyeballs | jamesbritt: "Make a bogus/cute little app that might not relate to your site like that 'Is Hillary Swank Hot?' app that was here a week ago."Except that gave me a poor impression of the people behind it, since the notion of it being an "app" struck me as disingenuous.It's easy to get attention, less easy to get good attention (begin debate over "there's only one thing worse than being talked about ...") |
Does karma affect what you write? | kwamenum86: Downvoting is a way to express oneself without or in addition to a written comment. More importantly, it is a way to control the culture of the site. If you end up with a negative score it means both: 1) people thought you should be downmodded, and 2) not enough people disagreed with the first set of people.I say all that to express how irrelevant it is in a larger context unless you are a Karma Whore (I will likely get downmodded now.) Express yourself. Period. Most downmodded comments contribute to conversation I think. And that is really the point of commenting, not to whore yourself out for more points. |
Setting up a small office server? | RobGR: I'm not sure what you mean by "visible on a Mac network" and why that is necessary . . . won't an IP address and maybe a domain name do ?If you were doing this with Linux, you should install a common linux distribution (to make sure it won't have security problems out of the box) and then go through and turn off anything that doesn't need to be on, and check it using nmap to see what ports are still open. If you want to educate yourself and go further then download metasploit and see if you can break into it.Install vsftpd as the ftp server, and make sure it does not allow anonymous login, and make sure the passwords are long and random. If you have ssh on it, which you probably should because you should encourage your people to use scp instead of ftp (graphical tools exist for the mac), make sure you install denyhosts or something similar to keep out the brute-forcing attacks. Try not to have commonly guessable usernames, such as "tom" or "joe" and disallow root login.But if you have a Mac, can't you install or turn on the Mac's ssh or ftp server and do the same ? That might be simpler.You might also google for "The Perfect Ubuntu Server" -- there is a series of howto's on how to set up the "perfect" server in various linux distributions. |
Does karma affect what you write? | iuguy: Karma does not affect what I write at all. I accept that sometimes I'm full of shit and move on. I'm counting on the HN community to kindly point it out to me if I miss it. |
Does karma affect what you write? | 1gor: There is a great tradition of elitism and disdain for banality among intellectuals. Think of impressionists circle in the early XXs century, most of these guys' paintings are fetching millions today, but during their lifetime they were poor bastards most of the time. Influential - yes, popular - not. At least not immediately.It is almost by definition that any fresh and promising idea meets hostility from the masses. But the thinking minority is always ecstatic about it. Good ideas and views are like a breath of fresh air.HN has been a refuge for new and controversial ideas from the start. Which is understandable, given that pg himself created quite a stir with his view on 'hackers' as artists and on lisp as an abstract essence of any programming language (making it a superweapon in right hands). So people escaped from reddit and digg and came to HN to share controversial or complicated ideas. At that time karma points were a badge of honour.But then of course in came the masses and HN has changed. Now arguments don't win on their merit. Banalities are repeated ad nauseam and the winner is the one who can capture the crowd's lowest common denominator. HN is not that much about ideas anymore. It is more about commercial promotion and quite a lot about entertainment.In this environment positive karma should make you worried. I actually quite enjoy getting negative karma nowadays. Of course there is a huge risk of being labeled a 'troll'. It has happened a couple of times. Which I think is as honorable as being labeled a dissident in communist Russia or a non-believer in fundamentalist Iran. Just make sure you are 'trolling' by challenging a consensus while having sound arguments and facts at hand. <sigh> But not many people cannot even read your arguments after they fade to gray under merciless and mindless downvoting. |
How much of the web is just a race to the bottom? | arockwell: You more or less just described 4chan.org, which does in fact get an absurd amount of traffic. |
How much of the web is just a race to the bottom? | JayNeely: I think it balances it out. People have a need to express their 'dark side' because so much of what we would normally say or do is suppressed by fear of what others would think of us or other types of social mores. Often we learn where the lines are by crossing them and either feeling shitty about it or being reprimanded for it. But if things were opposite, if we lived in a world of dark ugliness, there'd be the same longing for an escape into beauty, peace, and politeness.Have you read about T-Shirt Hell shutting down? ( http://bit.ly/YkX4 ) Is it unfortunate that they existed to begin with, or unfortunate that they're closing? Some of us may have strong opinions about it, but I'd be most of us would say that as a whole, most people would find the issue ambiguous... that the lines aren't clear.In some cases, the lines are clear. Spitting on someone is unacceptable. Maliciously harming someone is unacceptable. But in other cases, let's say humor, the lines aren't clear at all. And it's because we, as a society, don't make our opinions heard, clearly or even through signals like frown power ( http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Frown%20Power ). We need to tell people doing something offensive that it's offensive, and why. We need to tell people telling someone that things that _aren't_ offensive are offensive are wrong, and why.Otherwise, people are going to continue to repress things they'd like to do/say, and it will continue to be spewed forth in concentrated venom. |
How much of the web is just a race to the bottom? | TomOfTTB: One of my favorite books is Robert Fulghum’s "All I need to know I learned in Kindergarten". One of the chapters tells the story of Steven Brill a man who, after hearing New York Cab Drivers were all dishonest, decided to look into it. He decided to get in a bunch of cabs, pretend to be an out-of-towner and asks to be driven somewhere really close to see if the cab driver would rip him off. This was the result (from the book)...“One driver out of thirty-seven cheated him. The rest took him directly to his destination and charged him correctly. Several refused to take him when his destination was only a block or two away, even getting out of their cabs to show him how close he already was. The greatest irony is that several drivers warned him that New York City was full of crooks and to be careful.You will continue to read stories of crookedness and corruption-of policemen who lie and steal, doctors who reap where they do not sew, politicians on the take. Don’t be misled. They are news because they are exceptions. The evidence suggests that you can trust a lot more people than you think."That, to me, says it all. When the bad people stop getting attention I’ll worry. Until then I continue to believe the loud mouth trolls are just an exception to the rule.On the Internet side, I understand why you might think there are more bad people on the Internet but I’d point this out: The Internet is a place where the loudest person in the crowd can push out in front of it. There’s no referee so sometimes it’s the trolls who look like their dominating the conversation. But if you read a site like HN you’ll see there are far more well-intentioned comments than there is trolling. The trolling is just what sticks in your mind. |
Has anybody observed cheating? | astrec: Specifically in the classroom? Or just cheating in higher education in general?I get emails from students asking me to complete their CS assignments with reasonable frequency. Because I'm a prick (and actually worked for my degrees), I'll more often than not determine the school and class and fire off an email to their lecturer or professor. |
How to programmatically observe program execution? | abecedarius: There's been research on this, e.g. http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~jeffery/alamo/That's about 10 years old, though, and I don't know what's been done since. |
Does karma affect what you write? | windsurfer: Of course. I once posted something about free software, and got my karma completely destroyed. I won't mention it again. |
Has anybody observed cheating? | steveplace: I went to a very large public university. The engineering program was so-so, and they valued ABET over actual learning.Senior Design was known as the "gauntlet," not necessarily due to the actual building of something, but for the 100-page research paper that they required. They assumed that if each member of the team writes about 25 pages, then they must understand the underlying concepts.This didn't affect me as much as it did my team. As you can tell, my long-windedness knows no bounds when behind a keyboard. My team however had the collective grammatical know-how of [insert punchline here].It was my job to proofread the paper. It was straight copy and paste. Utter bullshit.And I understand that it was my ethical obligation to correct this, if not report it. But it was clearly stated at the beginning of the class: "if one fails, you all fail." I was not prepared to deal with that. So I compromised my standards and just finished the assignment.I knew that there wouldn't be repercussions; all they do is count the number of pages, make sure there isn't too much whitespace, and that there's no more than 50% of space devoted to pictures.What can be done? With this particular example there was a large discrepancy with the overall goals that should have been, the goals that were, and the metrics that they measured it. |
What do these startups need so much money for? | sirsean: Because VCs don't invest anything less than a crapload of money? |
Has anybody observed cheating? | bbuffone: The funniest cheating I have seen in a "class room" was during a philosophy class. Tests for the class were multiple choice and given out on a computer. Every student for some reason good two guesses for each question and there were five answers. This meant that you needed to work with two other people and you could get all the answers right. So during the tests you would hear. Fred - "A" nope. Stan - "B" nope, Jeff - "C" yes. Then everyone would enter C for question one and then repeat.It was quite hilarious actually. |
How much of the web is just a race to the bottom? | zepolen: > Comments?That is the issue. Giving users a public voice on your site is what kills everything in the end. |
Has anybody observed cheating? | vaksel: Well for tests, let students have a formula sheet. I don't understand why in this day and age we need to learn everything by heart, when in the real world everything is 1 search query away.Or you can just forbid all TI calculators with memory, and just have them work with a $10 special(but thats just a way to screw over the kids).Then you can have smaller classes. Its a little harder to cheat in a 20 person class, compared to a 300 person auditorium.For big projects etc, split those in a lot of parts. This way the students won't be tempted to cheat, when they remember that they have a 40 page paper due tomorrow. |
What do these startups need so much money for? | matthias: The barrier to entry has toppled by an order of magnitude and the market is slow to adapt to such changes. |
What do these startups need so much money for? | FiReaNG3L: I suspect there's a heavy amount of marketing, as most startups that receive millions of VC money tend to have enormous 'growth' - in parenthesis because im sure there's an artificial part of it - I suspect that some of them increase their traffic by paying for fake traffic, so they can say 'look at how our service is popular'. |
What do these startups need so much money for? | justin: 1) Salaries. Many engineers, salesmen, etc who have been out of college for a year or two don't want to go back to making basically nothing. Yes, you can find talented people who will work for you for little, but it's going to take a long time to do so. It's lovely to think that every company should be able to bootstrap off ramen indefinitely, but it turns out that often times you find that in order to do all the things that need to be done you need to expand beyond the founding team, and, so sorry, those new mouths want to get fed.2) Capital expenditures. It's nice to run on EC2 for awhile, but it might not be the best hardware fit for your product. Similarly, it's nice to use Cisco switches and not crappy switches when you want your network to work at high volumes.3) Marginal costs. When you have millions of people using your site all the time, bandwidth, power, free tshirts you give new signups, etc all cost more and more money.For many companies that are pre-product/market fit, raising millions of VC might not make sense. But for many rapidly growing companies where there is a lag time between user acquisition and user monetization, something needs to fill in the gap. Guess what that is. |
Has anybody observed cheating? | fgimenez: My brother had an issue where he had finished a programming assignment early. Some other people found out and asked for help. Being the good-natured (totally naive) freshman he was, he sat down and started to explain his own code to them. Sure enough, they ended up asking the age old question, "I just need to look at it for a while. Could you just send me the code?" Nothing happened until grades came out and he failed. Weeks of interrogations and protests later, he finally cleared his name.Moral of the story? Never send a copy of your code. |
What do these startups need so much money for? | paulgb: Payroll and office space. Occasionally Aeron chairs. |
What do these startups need so much money for? | staunch: For a VC backed startup that's at 15-25 employees with a successful product I can make up some numbers that aren't totally unrealistic:Advertising: $30k/moPR firm: $10k/moRent: $12k/moSalaries: $100k/moServers/bandwidth: $20k/moThat's a $2 million/year run rate and I don't think this is even particularly on the high side and doesn't include upfront investments in servers, desktops, furniture, software, etc. I'm leaving out lots of stuff, really.Taking VC means you're aiming high. Spending $2 million/year to take a shot at becoming a huge business is not that extravagant. |
What do these startups need so much money for? | inerte: 10 people making 80k per year, that's a million dollars already. Now add taxes.If you think VCs are interested in companies that won't need 10 people to run their business, ever... you're thinking to small :) And not only there are your employees, but imagine hiring accountants, lawyers, cleaning staff... the list, only with actual human beings, is already huge!Now add costs like transportation, hotels, food, all the furniture, the stuff you need just to have the office open, like electricity and water and... fumigation? Ad on Techcrunch? 20k for 2 months. NY Times front page on Sundays? 100k. And let's not even mention prime-time TV... It just costs a lot of money to have a big business running.Open a spreadsheet anyday and do some calculations. I've only skimmed some of the costs with my examples here (even though I am sure someone will comment how NY Times ads don't apply to your question). |
What do these startups need so much money for? | ltbarcly: Making a really big website does cost money. You can't host yelp on your VPS account. On the other hand, startups that have raised money when they aren't basically failing due to inability to serve up content due to too high of demand are idiots (and the people who hand them money are double idiots). |
What do these startups need so much money for? | tptacek: Big ticket items:* Carrying inventory, if you sell hardware.* A 6-10 region direct sales force.* A full time customer service operation.* The reconstituted powdered startup marketing packets they sell you when you buy your CEO.* The pro-forma engineering staff-up you do almost subconsciously to end up with a 50/50 b-team/engineering split. |
Has anybody observed cheating? | rms: Hey, your email isn't listed in your profile -- if you want people to be able to see it, you need to relist it in the about me section. |
Has anybody observed cheating? | paulgb: I think cheating is the tip of the iceberg, the root problem being that the system over-emphasizes marks. Students who genuinely care about learning the material have no incentive to cheat. Cheating is just the symptom; the cause is the prevailing attitude that high marks are the ultimate goal of school.If marks and learning were perfectly correlated it wouldn't be a problem, but trying to quantify something as abstract as knowledge is bound to have a large margin of error which students will exploit (by cheating or otherwise) if the incentives encourage it. |
Has anybody observed cheating? | iends: The most serious form of cheating I ever experienced was Junior year in high school. It was a Spanish 3 class taught by an eldarly women, who reportedly had a stroke over the summer (which I attribute the entire incident to as I can only hope no sane person would do what she did.)Anyway, she was not teaching the class. I would go in there and sit and she would mumble on in English about nothing in particular. After about three weeks of this, I got a bunch of students together and we all complained to the head of the Spanish Language department (large school, many spanish classes). He said okay, and he told the teacher he was going to observe the class.Well, the day he observed was the first day she taught the class anything. Of course, it was the material we should of known after a month of Spanish 3 so everybody had trouble following.This went on three or four times until midterm exams. For the midterm, we had a standardized spanish test. Since he hadn't taught us anything, except when being observed, students knew nothing. I studied my butt off but that didn't matter. She stood in front of the class and read all the answers from the test.I complained to the school and they had a huge investigation, and basically thought I lied about the whole thing. Why would a teacher give the entire class the answers? The real part that gets me is that nobody had the integrity to come forward and complain. They had to discretely question students.Long story short, truth came to light and she found out I was the one who reported her. She was not fired, but kept "teaching". For some insane reason, she started changing the answers on my tests and quizes so I started out scoring everybody by huge margins.In the end, everybody who had her as a teacher failed the final for the class, but the school system changed all our grades to As in some weird sort of cover up.She still teaches to this day, at a different school, however. |
Review my project, Factolex - the fact lexicon | gojomo: This is somewhat like an idea I've been considering. So I think it's a great concept... and have strong opinions on possible directions.If your primary model is a ranked listing of 'facts' by a major 'term' key, it will be hard to outperform Wikipedia (or even Mahalo). When those sites' single-topic articles/pages are well-written, they already lead with the core facts, and then proceed through the rest in a well-organized fashion. Even the Google 'snippets' in natural search hits then turn out to be pretty strong for anwering people's questions/queries. So I think to differentiate you need to break out of that linear model somehow.The multiple licenses situation is confusing and may prevent you getting proper credit for openness.You may hope voting and reputation will be mechanisms for gradual quality improvements, but they often backfire. Any benefit from people seeking to 'climb' for the right reasons can be offset by gaming.It's unavoidable you'd need to use some bulk automated processes (like scraping Wikipedia or hired contributors) to bootstrap, but that may then undermine the organic growth of 'community spirit' and norms that will be essential for the long term. The right balance will be hard to find.Good luck! |
Has anybody observed cheating? | donal: I'm currently in a Masters program for Information Systems and one of my peers had the joy of having the professor of the class ask him why his answers and another student's were so astoundingly similar. Having worked with this gentleman a lot on the homework, this particular assignment even, I knew that he wasn't the one cheating. Apparently one of our classmates had asked to see his work to "verify" and instead had copied it. Granted, allowing someone to see your answers could be considered cheating, but one assumes that the other person isn't a complete imbecile and has actually done the work. I think that level of trust is even more likely at the graduate level when your peers are all well into adulthood and should know better.We were both pretty ticked to find this out. I was mostly ticked because I had worked with the one for several hours trying to help him understand the questions and how to get to the answers (without ever giving him the answers) and so knew how hard he had worked to get that lab done. Having someone weasel his work off of him was just rather foul.We both didn't understand his motivation either. Why pay close to $800/credit just to risk losing it as well as not getting anything except a piece of paper at the end. I know that paper can get you in the door, but it is also really obvious when you don't actually know your stuff.This was on of the more technical of the classes. It dealt with web services. |
What do these startups need so much money for? | johnrob: 7 man years per million, all costs considered. |
Has anybody observed cheating? | rscott: Last semester someone in my signals class started an exam before we were told to begin. The prof took the test and that student got an F.I loved it. |
Has anybody observed cheating? | proee: In my engineering classes, almost all the tests were open book and open notes. The hardest classes only had two problems per exam and the teacher wrote those questions the day of the exam - so cheating wasn't really an option, which would explain the 30% pass rate in some of the classes... We also had to walk through six feet of snow, uphill, both ways. |
Has anybody observed cheating? | jwilliams: Do you know what - I've often wondered about cheating in the Higher Education context.Is it really cheating? When you're spending $,000's a year to learn, does it really ever benefit anyone?Maybe that's the thing - Higher Education is increasingly under pressure as a business. It's getting hard to fail/expel someone. On the other hand, universities trade on their reputation, so they need to walk a fine line.Higher Ed is free in Germany - and someone can probably correct me - but they also have no entry criteria (I might be off-base, but it's less retrictive either way). So you can sign up for Engineering there if you want to, but you soon fail if you can't meet the requirements. |
How much of the web is just a race to the bottom? | sho: IMO, the core problem is that our whole concept of humour revolves around negativity. |
Has anybody observed cheating? | gambling8nt: A roommate of mine from college graded papers for an introductory astronomy class (a class commonly taken to fulfill a distribution requirement for those majoring in the humanities); one of the students in the class (after, apparently, not going to class between the third week and the midterm), copied his entire midterm exam from the person sitting in front of him, almost word for word.It's not that the content of Physics classes makes it harder to cheat (although this might be true); students cheat when they don't love the subject (and believe that they will get away with it). This is why you see much higher rates of cheating in disciplines people often learn for money rather than curiosity (business, engineering, law, computer science, and medicine).Unfortunately, people aren't likely to love these fields any more any time soon. Nor are they likely to stop pursuing them despite their dislike for the content (as long as the resulting job is respected/pays well). Which only leaves making it clearer that they won't get away with it, or making the penalty for getting caught outweigh the advantage of doing it. The former is a topic worthy of active research. The latter is probably not helpful, since (at least at the university I went to) the penalty is already so severe that I can only assume that people cheat purely from a lack of expectation of getting caught. |
What do these startups need so much money for? | hs: plentyoffish: top 10 site on 8 servers -- admined, designed, developed (in asp, no less) -- by one guy, and profitablecan yc/angel/vc backed startup be plentyoffish killer? i doubt money will help shrug |
Has anybody observed cheating? | andr: The best case I've seen was at a certain SAT center. A group of 5 people went together with the idea to copy off each other. However, the proctor had each one draw a number from a hat to determine where he was going to sit. Since they ended up sitting in different parts of the room, the plan was thwarted.A few minutes later, the proctor realized she had messed up the seating. People were supposed to seat on every other row, but there were two rows one right after the other. She said "Why don't you move around a bit?" at which point everyone got up and the 5 people in the group sat together.All of them had a 790. |
Has anybody observed cheating? | tudorachim: The instructor for our discrete math class has a most hilarious way of catching cheaters: he sets up trap sites regarding the problems that he googlebombs to be on the front page of the results. Every student signed a document at the beginning stating that they acknowledged googling for solutions was cheating, but 20/195 people still managed to be caught cheating on the first assignment. |
What do these startups need so much money for? | tdavis: For many startups, the short answer is: they don't right now. Everyone involved is betting on them needing it later.But I understand your confusion. VCs are always knocking at our door and we still haven't answered the question, "What the hell would we do with 2 million dollars?" This is precisely why we haven't taken it.Well, we've answered it, but it involves the words "hookers" and "blow". |
What do these startups need so much money for? | known: I heard that Vista advertising budget was $2 billion. |
What's up with Rapleaf ads *everywhere*? | rockstar9: which sites do you see them on? i haven't really noticed myself |
Has anybody observed cheating? | RiderOfGiraffes: I can't be too specific about the circumstances ...A colleague of mine was teaching a class, and after a few weeks set a test. He also took a note of who sat where, and noted that three friends, A, B and C, were sitting together in the back. When he graded the test he found that on question 3, A and B had identical incorrect answers, whereas on question 7, B and C had identical incorrect answers. He joked that this showed that A and C were conspiring to make it appear that B was cheating, but the evidence was clear - cheating had occured. He decided it was an interesting lesson for him, and it was OK since that test only counted for 5% of the final grade.For the next test he created two, nearly identical tests, differing only in the actual numbers. All the calculations were identical, just the numbers were different. He gave these out alternately.As office hours approached on the day after the graded tests were returned, there was a very long queue. He invited the first student in, who immediately started complaining that on question 6, he and his friend had identical answers, but his friend got full marks and he got zero. "But the questions are different," said my colleague. "But the answers are the same - why don't we get the same grade?" complained the student. After running around that little loop for a while the light dawned, the student became very thoughtful, and left. "Next!" said my colleague. No one came in, and when he checked, the queue was gone.The students complained to the Dean, and my colleague was told in no uncertain terms that it was unacceptable to give different tests. In particular, it was unfair not to have warned them, or made it obvious. The students had no way of knowing that they were equivalent, it was impossible to prove that they were equivalent, so he was instructed to give identical tests to everyone.On the next test he handed out alternate blue and yellow test sheets. There was muttering, but no outright complaints. Within an hour, however, he was summoned to the Dean's office. "You were told to give identical tests!" shouted the Dean. "I did", said my colleague. "They were on different colored paper, but they were identical tests."The reaction from the Dean was, says my colleague, remarkably similar to that of the student discovering that the tests were different.Fortunately that was the last "in class" test. The final loomed, and one by one the students dropped the course. The final test was only taken by 12 of the initial 40 students, and all passed. Interestingly, of those that dropped out, several were later disciplined for cheating in other classes.So the evidence suggests that cheating occurs.But we knew that. |
Has anybody observed cheating? | bayareaguy: In college when I graded introductory programming assignments, there was the time a student turned in a printout of their program and execution trace for an assignment.Unfortunately they forgot to remove the email headers from the other student who sent it to them. |
Goal Setting Software | kevTheDev: Just to further clarify what I want, I like to break tasks down so that I'm constantly working on the "Next possible logical step" no matter how small.Most of the time I just write them in a list in a text editor, but then i get to the point where i need to clear out my scratchpad - thus losing track of my progress.Obviously seeing my progress in a chart/graph is not necessary to get stuff done but it might help with motivation :) |
Is there room for another photo sharing service? | Devilboy: I think there is definitely room - in niche markets like traditional advertising where photos and other artwork comes from multiple sources, and where automation can really save money for your clients. |
Goal Setting Software | Devilboy: I've been experimenting with gmail and tags but it's not much better than just using a spreadsheet at the moment. |
good books about military strategy? | smanek: I like the Defense News periodical, and have heard good things about Jane's Defence Weekly.There are a lot of Field manuals available (e.g., see http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/army/f...), but those are (in my experience) more about tactics than strategy. |
good books about military strategy? | fiaz: My favorite (copied from Wikipedia):The Unfettered Mind (Japanese: 不動智神妙録 Fudōchi Shinmyōroku) is a three-part treatise on Buddhist philosophy and martial arts written by Takuan Soho, a Japanese monk of the Rinzai sect. The title translates roughly to "The Mysterious Records of Immovable Wisdom". The treatise was written as correspondence to Yagyū Munenori, inheritor to the Yagyū Shinkage-ryū school of swordsmanship. Written for the laity, the book makes little use of Buddhist terminology, but instead focuses on describing situations followed by an interpretation. Its contents make an effort to apply Zen Buddhism to martial arts.Available in PDF form here:http://www.daikonforge.com/downloads/TheUnfetteredMind.pdf |
good books about military strategy? | vaksel: You can try downloading some of the army manuals that you can find on the net. I know there are some for the soldier level, so there is probably some for the general level too.Then you can go back and try finding books written by generals or about them. i.e. I figure something written about Patton would have tank tactics there too. |
good books about military strategy? | utnick: Check out Tom Clancy's non fiction books.Very well written and I believe exactly what you are looking for. |
Goal Setting Software | nonrecursive: It's not a web app, but I highly recommend OmniFocus for mac and iphone. The desktop app and iphone app can sync with each other, which is nice. I use it all the time, and it's great for doing brain dumps, then organizing projects and todos. |
Goal Setting Software | JeffJenkins: If you're on a Mac, you could try OmniFocus. It's a pretty decent implementation of Getting Things Done (the core of which is what you're describing). I've been using it since it was in beta and I'm really happy with it.It lets you make folders, projects, and actions. Actions can have start/end dates, repetitions, and contexts. The idea of contexts is that you should be able to see what actions are available to you at any time in any place. Actions can have sub-actions and you can specify whether the sub-actions have to be done in sequence or can be done concurrently. You can also set up a global quick-entry hotkey which will let you enter an action and have it placed in your Inbox so you can organize it later.There's also an iphone app, but I haven't found it teribly useful. OmniFocus has the ability to grab tasks from Mail.app in a special (user-defined) format and I found that works as well for adding new tasks as anything.The downside is that it's $80. I got it for $40 when it was in beta, and I think it's a much harder sell at $80. If you aren't interested in this, or aren't on a mac, just google "getting things done" or "GTD" |
good books about military strategy? | lionhearted: A quick read is Wikipedia's summary of Miyamoto Musashi's "Book of Five Rings" - it's about Japanese swordsmanship in the early 1600's in a variety of situations: Full-on combat, a duel, outnumbered, with high/low ground, etc. It's strategic more than tactical, and if you like Sun Tzu you might dig it.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Five_RingsThe story of his life, "Musashi," is one of my favorite books of all time and has good strategic and philosophical discussion mixed in with some really riveting action and social commentary. Musashi had a lot of potential at a young age, but was extremely undisciplined and constantly had it out with the law, society, and people whose motivations he couldn't understand. The book chronicles him becoming the greatest swordsman in Japanese history. An incredible read, especially for anyone who was bright at young age but questioned a hell of a lot of society's rules.Amazon (no affiliate B.S., just a great book):
http://www.amazon.com/Musashi-Eiji-Yoshikawa/dp/4770019572 |
Best Micro Payment provider? | skootch: have a look at www.onetouchpurchasing.com |
What do these startups need so much money for? | axod: Depends on your game plan I think.
If you want to look all big and important so you'll hopefully get acquired, you need to spend tons of money on things that impress potential acquirers.If however you just want to make money, profit, things like that, you don't need to spend much money for a web based startup at all. |
Goal Setting Software | arien: How about Tracks? http://getontracks.org/It's also based on the GTD philosophy, it's very easy to use and has some nice features. You can find an online version here, try the demo first to see if you like it: https://tracks.tra.in |
good books about military strategy? | benzim: I can't think of any books, but you can find good descriptions of strategy used in famous battles on wikipedia. Some interesting battles.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ilipahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Alesia |
good books about military strategy? | hedgehog: "The Art Of War" is great, I read this version when I was 13 but I would still recommend it as a good place to start before getting another translation or other books:"Sunzi Speaks: The Art of War"Tsai Chih Chunghttp://www.amazon.com/dp/0385472587Some online reading that you might find interesting:http://www.ingber.com/combat97_cmi.ps.gzhttp://www.ndu.edu/inss/Symposia/joint2008/papers/Hoffman%20...http://www.ndu.edu/inss/Symposia/joint2008/papers/Warden%20P...http://www.dodccrp.org/files/Smith_Complexity.pdf |
good books about military strategy? | icey: "Warfighting", hands down:http://www.amazon.com/Warfighting-U-Marine-Corps-Staff/dp/96...It won't teach you how to drive tanks and lob grenades, but it is one of the best military strategy books I've read.If you just want the PDF, it's freely available here:http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/service_pubs/mcdp1.pdf |
good books about military strategy? | mechanical_fish: You sound like you're looking for something like Jones' The Art of War in the Western World:http://www.amazon.com/Art-War-Western-World/dp/0252069668Or just go there and follow Amazon "related" links.Jones is of the "very broad" school of military history. It can be a little bit dry, but it certainly tries to be comprehensive: It's like Civilization in that it starts with phalanx and then moves slowly forward through the history of strategy and tactics.You might like the works of John Keegan, another famous military historian who takes a general approach. He's got a History of Warfare that's like a lighter-weight version of Jones -- I might recommend starting with that, actually. His one-volume histories of WWI and WWII are probably decent.Keegan is British, so it wouldn't surprise me if his histories were heavy on the Western front. If you want the actual history of WWII you need a history that's more about the Eastern Front, which is pretty much where the war in Europe was actually decided. Unfortunately, the history on that subject lags decades behind, because the surviving Germans didn't exactly want to dwell on it and the Soviets weren't exactly forthcoming. (Many of the key Soviet figures either got disappeared by Stalin or lived under the constant fear of being disappeared by Stalin.) I'm not sure what the best current general history of the Eastern Front is, but I do know that the big Western expert on the subject is David Glantz, who has spent the last twenty years digging through formerly-sealed Soviet records of enormous battles that were covered up for years. I'd probably start with:http://www.amazon.com/Slaughterhouse-Handbook-Eastern-David-...because I don't know any better and it comes up first on Amazon.If you want something written by a gamer try the works of James Dunnigan, founder of SPI and author of a whole pile of famous simulation board games. I read most of his Dirty Little Secrets of World War II and it was interesting. A much breezier style than the heavy-duty military historians. And he's got books that cover contemporary military stuff as well as history.Nobody should read about war at the 10,000 foot level without also reading about what it's actually like on the ground. Obviously, the great modern literary works on the subject are Slaughterhouse Five and, even more so, Catch-22. In the realm of nonfiction, Fussell's Wartime was interesting, but it led me to Eugene Sledge's With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, which is even better: a very good book by a guy from the front lines in the Pacific who is not shy about telling you exactly what went on. Comes with an endorsement by PG! (from the last time I mentioned it on HN.)Don't read it over lunch if you're squeamish.(I haven't actually read some of these, but my dad is a military boardgamer and military history buff. He's got several bookshelves packed with books like these.) |
Which school do you attend? | ie_khing: Maranatha Christian University, Bandung, West Java, Indonesia |
good books about military strategy? | pskomoroch: I used to have a lot more time for non CS reading and actually made an Amazon list on this topic back in 2005:http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/listmania/fullview/2INJSM38...1. On War (Everyman's Library (Cloth)) by Carl Von Clausewitz2. Leadership: The Warrior's Art by Barry R. McCaffrey3. Small Unit Leadership: A Commonsense Approach by Dandridge M. Malone4. The Defense of Hill 781: An Allegory of Modern Mechanized Combat by James R. McDonough5. The Art of Maneuver: Maneuver-Warfare Theory and AirLand Battle by Robert Leonhard6. Strategy: Second Revised Edition (Meridian) by B. H. Liddell Hart7. The Art of War by Niccolò Machiavelli8. Hagakure: The Book of the Samauri by Tsunetomo Yamamoto9. The Emperor's Handbook: A New Translation of The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius10. The Art of War (Shambhala classics) by Sun Tzu11. The Prince (Bantam Classics) by Niccolo Machiavelli12. Evolutionary Game Theory by Jörgen W. Weibull13. On Guerrilla Warfare by Mao Tse-tung14. The History of the Peloponnesian War: Revised Edition (Penguin Classics) by Thucydides15. The Histories (Penguin Classics) by Herodotus16. The Persian Expedition (Penguin Classics) by Xenophon17. Plutarch: Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans (Modern Library Series, Vol. 1) by Plutarch18. Plutarch's Lives, Volume 2 (Modern Library Classics) by Plutarch19. Livy: The Early History of Rome, Books I-V (Penguin Classics) (Bks. 1-5) by Titus Livy20. The History of Rome from Its Foundation, Books XXI-XXX: The War with Hannibal (Penguin Classics) (Bks. 21-30) by Titus Livius Livy |
good books about military strategy? | notaddicted: Have you read Clausewitz On War? That was one of my favorite books last year.This is more general than you are looking for and it stops a bit short of air war but it helped me to put historical events into a global context.The outline of history; being a plain history of life and mankind. Rev. and brought up to date by Raymond Postgate and G.P. Wells. With maps and plans by J.F. Horrabin.Wells, H. G. 1866-1946. (Herbert George),
Garden City, N.Y. Doubleday 1971,
Book. 1103p., D21 .W4 1971I'd say definitely search for books written about Iraq and Afghanistan, that should give you some information about current strategies. |
good books about military strategy? | byrneseyeview: http://www.amazon.com/War-Nerd-Soft-Skull-Press/dp/097966368...Certainly not dry. I can't vouch for his accuracy, but he knows a lot and could point you to some interesting battles/periods to study. |
good books about military strategy? | andr: Military strategy? I'd like to hear your startup pitch :) |
good books about military strategy? | Agathos: Martin van Creveld writes some serious analysis. Consider...Supplying War -- on logistics (as in "professionals study...")Command in War -- on communication, information, and the importance of local autonomy leading to quick actionThe Transformation of War -- has strategy's biggest buzzword right there in the title, but this was written back in 1991. On the growing role of low-intensity and asymmetric conflicts.His books tend to be short, but very dense. |
good books about military strategy? | iamwil: There was a post recently on a class that examined Starcraft strategy. That might help. |
good books about military strategy? | parzival52: The best I have read is by B.H. Liddell Hart:http://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Meridian-B-Liddell-Hart/dp/04...He also wrote respected volumes on the world wars and biographies of Rommel and Scipio Africanus, among others. |
good books about military strategy? | rodrigo: You can google the field manuals (FM) of the US Army and Marine, they range from operation of guns and marksmanship to strategy, to leadership. All great reads. |
What do these startups need so much money for? | anthonyrubin: To impress potential investors and acquirers. |
Has anybody observed cheating? | NoBSWebDesign: I dual-majored in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering at a 95% engineering school. Cheating occured very often, and I would venture to guess that a majority of the students cheated at some point during their college career, usually in the form of finding a "crib", or previous test from that professor and memorizing the answers.In my opinion, the greatest cause for cheating was severely unrealistic expectations from the professors. They often expected a far greater amount of memorization and understanding than could possibly be accomplished in the amount of time given to learn the material.When confronted, their answer was almost universally that "you will have to know it in the real world, and people's lives could depend on your work." However, this logic is severely flawed in that, in the real world, we are given more than 2 hours to complete a set of tasks. And we have the internet and textbooks at our grasp if we need a refresher on a specific equation or concept. And others will be checking our work, especially if people's lives depend on it.This discrepency between professor expectations and real-world expectations I think gave many students the view, "if the professors aren't playing fair, then why should I?"As a result, I saw much much less cheating when the professors "played fair", meaning they made the tests open-book and/or open-note. However, there was probably also much less legitimate understanding of the material come test time. So, I'm not really offering up a solution. Just my observations. |
good books about military strategy? | bjelkeman-again: My absolute favourite in this class of books is:Infantry attacks, Erwin Rommel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infantry_AttacksDon't let the word "Infantry" in the title fool you. It is an engrossing account on how to use armed forces to your advantage. He supposedly was working on "The Tank in Attack", but never made it that far. A good substitute is The Rommel Papers, which was published posthumously by his family.The Rommel Papers
http://books.google.com/books?id=JE8VFsdxNGgC |
Goal Setting Software | unalone: If you're on a Mac, get Things.http://culturedcode.com/things/Beautiful software, incredibly easy. I can't deal with get-things-done software, but if I had to use a program, this would be the one I used. |
Best approaches for Javascript game graphics? | shaunxcode: checkout Raphael js it provides cross platform svg type drawing, pretty sweet and that way you can target everyone. |
What do these startups need so much money for? | jazer: As so many others have said: yes, good people are expensive. And if you expect to grow to a non-trivial size, hosting/servers/bandwidth are going to cost you.There is also the issue of leverage. If you need $500k, you don't raise $500k, because when you run out and start looking for more money, your negotiating position is very poor. Instead you raise $2M, then start to talk to investors again when you have spent half of it.In my experience marketing is not a significant portion of expenses for a startup. |
good books about military strategy? | geirfreysson: Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "Black Swan" had some pretty good insights into the "unknown unknowns" of military combat.http://www.wajapi.com/books/80 |
Goal Setting Software | chanux: I use GTD tiddly wiki. And I wrote about it on my blog http://chanux.wordpress.com/category/computinglife/ |
Goal Setting Software | hboon: Saw this - http://www.joesgoals.com/. I have not used it before. Why not try it out and let us know? |
Review our startup - Taxi Mogul, a persistent browser game | pclark: looks cool, super slow though?How are you gonna make money? |
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