UK School Replaces All Textbooks with iPads - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-20930195

<comment><USER2> As a student, I tried to use a tablet with ebooks exclusively for a few of my university classes, and it was fairly dreadful. Not because having a tablet is distracting, but because it's not the best way to organize reference information. When I was trying to do homework, I wanted - the questions from page 251, the table of equations from 190, and to be able to flip through and find similar examples. Obviously e-books fail miserably if you need quick access to multiple pages.

As a test-taking tool, an iPad is not terribly effective either. The maths teacher shows that she can quickly aggregate the solutions, but there's no good way for the students to express their thought process. I'm pretty sure by their age, if I had simply written the answer on the paper I wouldn't have been given full marks. It's important to teach students good mathematical form from an early age, and this definitely undermines that. Consider maths is one of the easiest classes to write tests for, I wonder how science, english etc. are getting on - likely a lot of terribly simple multiple choice.

Lastly, everyone seems so smug. The school's administration thinks they've taken this gigantic problem of how to do learning electronically and they've just knocked it out of the park. I know it's a sort of fluff piece, but it'd be better to see a longer video about problems they solved, lessons they learned, etc. As it stands, it looks like a lot of off-the-shelf software cobbled together by a local Apple rep, which is hardly ground-breaking. They've just thrown a lot of money at it. The administrator featured doesn't seem to be overly technical, and the teacher seems more interested in the fact that now she doesn't have to go home and mark things in her spare time ( but, of course, she's 'dedicated', as she says herself ).

<comment><USER3> Most of those problems have very simple solutions in software features.

> When I was trying to do homework, I wanted - the questions from page 251, > the table of equations from 190, and to be able to flip through and find > similar examples. Obviously e-books fail miserably if you need quick access > to multiple pages.

The solution to this could be implemented in under a week, for sure. Add a little UI for temporary bookmarks. Let the reader save a set of relevant pages (questions, table of equations, examples) and then swipe between them. Simple.

<comment><USER2> Except for the loading times. If you've ever used a graphics-heavy textbook, especially on a high-res device like the iPad 3, rendering pages takes forever. It's not just a UI problem, it's an issue of effectively caching the bookmarked pages, and for a large book that might be a big problem.

<comment><USER4> I read some scanned PDF files (over 150MB) and they work fine in GoodReader on my iPad 2. I'm sure that graphics heavy vector PDF files would work even faster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe it's generational (I'm 33) and maybe it's personal preference, but I much prefer a physical book over reading on a tablet. I remember reading an article somewhere saying that our brains do a better job of organizing material if it's a physical book because part of the organization process is remembering where in the book the remembered material was. I get no sense of "place" when reading an e-book. I even print out important material because that makes it easier for me to read.

<comment><USER6> I find tablets fine for reading one single book, in particular when you're reading that book from cover to cover. So if I want to buy a fiction book (e.g. The Hobbit) on my Kindle it works just fine.

But when it comes to non-fiction/reference books the technology is just not ready. You don't read cover to cover, you bounce around, you mark sections, you take notes, you check your answers in the back, and yet the software I have seen does all of this stuff badly.

Plus whenever people roll out one of these snazzy "look how hip and modern we are" school programs I never read about how much they spent on teacher training or development of researches (apps, lesson plans, etc).

So I always wonder if they literally just turned up with a pack of iPads one day and said to the teachers "make this work!" Without any real thought given to how exactly the teachers are meant to use them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> My kids' high school (<http://knoxcountystemac.knoxschools.org/>) has done this as well. I'm still not sure how I feel about it.

On the one hand, the kids aren't hauling 30 pounds of books to and from school everyday, school lockers are pretty much superfluous, and the iPad is a great tool. On the other hand, it's very hard for me as their parent to tell (at a glance) whether or not the kids are actually doing school work or just screwing around and it's very easy for the kids to get distracted if they aren't having a good concentration day.

Like everything else, it's a bit of a mixed bag.

<comment><USER8> Can you not restrict them so they can't install games etc?

[EDIT] The iPads, not the kids!

<comment><USER6> With enterprise tools for iPad you have complete and total control over how the device is used.

You can restrict installing apps, uninstalling apps, using the camera, loading the App Store, talking with Siri, altering settings, etc. See this list for some of the things you can do:

<http://help.apple.com/configurator/mac/1.2/#cadbf9e41d>

Yet more:

<http://help.apple.com/configurator/mac/1.2/#cad5370d089>

<comment><USER7> Yeah, except they need to be able to do a lot of those things. They need to install apps, but there are certain apps they definitely do not need. Also, I (the parent) don't have full access to the device to do whatever, as it belongs to the school system and they handle the administration of it.

It doesn't really matter with regards to my children. We believe in addressing behavior directly (talking to them, rewarding/punishing behavior, etc). We just told them not to use their iPads for games without asking first (same rules as apply to their laptops), protect your privacy, blah blah blah.

Again, my major beef is that it takes more effort to verify that they are staying out of trouble. It's not impossible, but it's nerve wracking that I can't glance and see that they are doing homework, I have to actually maneuver around and look over their shoulder.

Trust but verify is our motto.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Meanwhile, here's another 'iPads in the classroom' story from last week, focussing on how fast the kids destroy them:

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2255546/School- spent...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2255546/School- spent-500-000-giving-pupils-iPads-admits-HALF-broken.html)

<comment><USER10> ...it's a terribly misleading story (which doesn't come as a surprise to me, it's the Daily Mail after all), because it conveniently omits breakage rates of one-to-one laptop deployments.

It may not come as a surprise to many people to learn that laptops break almost as often as tablets when deployed one-on-one in schools. A quick Google led me to one study from 2004 in Maine, where over an 18 month period 50% of laptops required repair, and 35% of students experienced laptops breaking down or being accidentally damaged[1].

The main difference is that a higher percentage of tablets require total replacement, which is somewhat understandable as tablets (be they Android or iOS) are far less user serviceable.

[1]: <http://maine.gov/mlti/articles/research/PCHSLaptopsFinal.pdf>

<comment><USER11> I don't understand. There are schools (the majority of them!) that do neither tablet nor laptop "1-to-1 deployments", for maybe this very reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Using backlit tablets for extended periods gives me really bad eye strain. I tried reading on my (high-res) iPad when I first got it, and after an hour my eyes were hurting too bad to continue.

AFAIK this is caused by eyes drying due to reduced blink rate. All backlit tablets will have this problem.

Therefore, I still buy old-school books and print out material when I need to read it in-depth.

Does no-one else think this is a concern when giving young children tablets as a replacement for non-backlit books?

RS

<comment><USER13> No one cares about this until about 3 months in at which point they are going to have to put up with it.

This is why known a kobo and a computer and nothing else. You just can't read on a backlit device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> £65k saved off photocopying is _huge_. I've seen copier bills so I know what they can be like, but that's crazy savings from introducing it. Wonder if they're just emailing everything out now, which makes significantly more sense.

I'm in favour of iPads in school. I've ran through a few of the educational programs on the iPad (including iTunes and Udemy as well as textbooks), it's a great resource and helps to consolidate everything I need in one place. When I was at Uni I was one of the few people who used a laptop to take notes in lectures as I found it easier to split my focus.

I can't watch the video but I'm guessing that they've got all the iPads through the enterprise system that most big companies are (or should be anyway) using, which gives them a bit more granularity on what's going on, pushing updates and some additional restrictions. I'm sure teachers are smart enough to realise that kids with fully unlocked iPads are going to spend their time mucking about.

<comment><USER15> An iPad is currently £330. We'll be generous and assume Apple gave the school a 50% discount (which is huge and probably unlikely as I'd imagine even Apple aren't charging 100% markup). So £165 per iPad * 840 students (according to the video) = £138,600.

They've spent more than double what they saved on photocopying, not to mention that 840 iPads take a lot more maintenance than five or six photocopiers.

<comment><USER14> Well the cost of the iPads is a fixed cost, and they'll run them as long as possible. The savings won't ever cover the costs, but we're also missing figures for how it changed IT spending (did they need new machines? Have they avoided them?). It's an expensive proposition that's for sure, but so were computer suites 15 years ago and they had those when I was a wee lad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Of course, of all tablets, it had to be an iPad!

<comment><USER17> TBH, it's hard to get the same level of user-experience from an Android tablet. There are very few apps on Android which offer the same level of experience as those found on the iPad.

Also, in a school setting, how do you expect students and teachers to deal with different versions of operating systems and device specifications?

<comment><USER18> I doubt the degree of magic involved in the user experience factors into institutional technology purchasing. And fragmentation is hardly an issue when the school is buying all the hardware. Frankly, your comment reads like a pair of talking points taken off the shelf and jammed in where they don't fit.

<comment><USER17> > I doubt the degree of magic involved in the user experience factors into > institutional technology purchasing.

User experience is not magic. It's something that involves a lot of time and effort on behalf of the apps developers. It does contribute to the choices made by individuals and this filters up to the institution level. How do you think the iPad penetrated the enterprise?

> And fragmentation is hardly an issue when the school is buying all the > hardware.

True. However, what happens when the school wishes to use an app that's not supported by the device they purchased? As an Android user I've found plenty of apps that fail on my device while working perfectly on others. Sure there are problems with compatibility with apps on different versions of iOS, but they are relatively minor compared to the problems that I've come across on Android.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This could be great, but I doubt maths-heavy subjects can be studied effectively with an iPad.

This is kind of sad, because maths-heavy textbooks could be vastly improved if they were properly implemented for tablets.

Man, if I had the time, I'd love to work on a comprehensive solution for this: e.g. an app for studying maths-heavy material by letting you leverage the power of the device while making user interaction at least as good as ordinary paper - and maybe better. Say, you have a maths or physics textbook to study, and you're about to work on exercises. The solutions to these could then be immediately accessible (no need to enter page numbers), along with an editable list of relevant theorems/quantitative relations or wordy definitions. Wolfram Alpha integration would probably work well for many kinds of problems (e.g. calculus, or more basic algebra), to provide checks to solutions, or even to find solutions that the author didn't provide. I bet this sort of stuff can accelerate learning, and it's just the tip of the iceberg.

If this could be done, then you can imagine a physics student graduating with 4 years' worth of textbooks, in-class notes and each and every exercise he/she worked on _all properly accessible on one iPad and preserved for the future_. (Currently, lots and lots of instructive exercises and worked examples just get chucked out once the course is done.)

Maths-heavy subjects obviously introduce many formatting issues, and there's always the added layer of difficulty due to the constant need for exercises and solutions. As far as I can see though, many of these problems have already been solved in other contexts (e.g. LaTeX) - so maybe they 'just' need to be cleverly wired together and coated with an innovative UI.

Just a thought.

</comment><comment><USER20> So good that kids get to learn of the Orwellian world of 1984 as early as possible. They get to learn that computers are _sealed shut_ before they even get to use their imagination about what's should be doable.

Good good good. Can't have it based on something open, something which can bring things back to the public. That would be counter-productive.

Wasn't the UK supposed to be a frontier country on open data and open data- systems in the public sector or am I mixing things up?

<comment><USER21> You're polemically trying to start a political argument when this school is trying to solve academic challenges.

The fact is that the iPad is (or at least was) the best tablet available for them to use, so they used it rather than get trapped in the morass of trying to create hardware or use hardware that wasn't as far along.

In reality, they're validating a model that would make it easier for open source alternatives to flourish down the road.

<comment><USER22> "academic challenges"

Which challenges the school chooses to address is a political issue in and of itself. If the goal of the school is to educate students so that they can become outstanding citizens, then it is probably not a good idea to train them that Apple's approach -- with its restrictions and censorship -- is how things should be, which is precisely what they are doing by giving everyone iPads.

Words of wisdom: "The medium is the message."

"they're validating a model that would make it easier for open source alternatives to flourish down the road"

There is nothing about the iPad that helps open source. It is a computer that is built from the ground up to fight against any sort of hacking, tinkering, or user programming. In what world does open source mesh well with "pay us to be able to distribute your programs" or "you are only allowed to program the computer in the languages that we choose?"

<comment><USER21> _with its restrictions and censorship_

So the students can't post an email or blog expressing their open thoughts because it's an iPad? Is so, I'd agree with you.

You more likely mean because Apple doesn't allow one to publish randomly to their app store? If so, then you're twisting the notions of censorship.

Exactly how are regular text books open for modification in schools? Writing in my textbooks was strictly forbidden. Apple's restriction on their app store has nothing meaningful to do with students expressing themselves.

 _There is nothing about the iPad that helps open source._

The whole tablet market would still not likely have been proven without the iPad. Go back before the iPad was introduced and find the market estimates for tablets. The fact that you could even imagine replacing this school's hardware with something like it that's open source is thanks to the iPad. The iPad VALIDATED the market and many of the concepts built on top of it. Without it, open source or even Android alternatives would still not be here.

On top of all of this, who wants the students hacking on their tablets anyway? That tablet is for distributing information and coordinating with the teacher. The last thing you want is for it to be easy for a prankster to create applications that would facilitate cheating or mayhem. You also don't want a system that is all hacked up with 3rd party app store items riddled with trojans that keeps the students from opening their legitimate apps and learning.

<comment><USER22> "You more likely mean because Apple doesn't allow one to publish randomly to their app store? If so, then you're twisting the notions of censorship."

It is not just that Apple has standards for their own app store. Fedora has standards for its repositories, but I would not accuse them of any kind of censorship.

The problem is that Apple has created a computer whose software can _only_ be installed from the App Store, unless you pay Apple a special fee and agree to all manner of unfriendly licenses (on top of those you already agreed to to use your computer in the first place). We are past the point of talking about theoretical risks associated with such a system; Apple already refused to allow political cartoons to run on iPads. If you do not call that censorship, what do you call it?

"Apple's restriction on their app store has nothing meaningful to do with students expressing themselves."

Unless those students happen to be expressing themselves by writing software.

"The whole tablet market would still not likely have been proven without the iPad"

I have my doubts. Apple only marketed their tablet well; they did not invent the technology that made it possible.

"who wants the students hacking on their tablets anyway?"

I do, because like many people, I learned to program by hacking every computer available to me in my spare time. I would not be where I am today if I had not had the opportunity to do so. By surrounding students with computers they cannot hack at will, this school is telling their students that they are not allowed to learn to program in such an unsanctioned way; the students must wait until some teacher comes along to teach them some standardized programming curriculum, and too bad if they had been trying to learn something else. Right now, the students are lucky in that they most likely have a computer to hack at their home; that may not be the case in the future, especially if these sorts of restricted computers continue to gain popularity.

"The last thing you want is for it to be easy for a prankster to create applications that would facilitate cheating or mayhem"

Mayhem? If the school's IT staff cannot deal with the "mayhem" caused by a single computer, they are incompetent.

As for cheating, sure, that's a risk of giving students programmable computers. The answer is not to try to restrict student activities on those computers, any more than the answer to cheating by leaving notes in a bathroom stall is to watch students go to the bathroom. It is not hard to build a computer that can be rapidly reimaged before an exam. It is not hard to deny student's internet access during an exam. It is not hard for a teacher to check for ad-hoc networks during an exam.

Why deny students the ability to learn outside the standard curriculum? Why insist that they must come from families that can afford to buy more computers for them, when you could have the school give them computers to program? We had programmable desktops when I was in high school, and the benefits were clear: there was a club for hackers who just liked to hack (and even a system where they would help maintain the school's network). Back then, we had desktops; it would have been great to have something we could carry around with us.

"You also don't want a system that is all hacked up with 3rd party app store items riddled with trojans that keeps the students from opening their legitimate apps and learning."

Funny how we didn't have this problem at my high school. The reason is pretty simple: misbehaving computers could be reimaged quickly. Students who repeatedly and deliberately installed malware were suspended, no different from students who drew graffiti or broken into other students' lockers.

Your argument amounts to this: students cannot learn unless they are following the prescribed curriculum, so any student who tries to hack the computer that was issued for the prescribed curriculum must be either a cheater, a vandal, or that they will just harm their education by doing things they were not told to do. That is a narrow view of learning and it is the reason so many intelligent kids hate going to school.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The extraordinary overhead of printing, purchasing and distributing education texts alone would seem to make this a no brainer.

The cost of supplying 840 pupils with iPads and covers, even at consumer rates, would only be around £350K. From the stated numbers, this would be recouped in saved photocopying bills alone in around five years. Clearly there will be significant software and operations costs, but I would speculate that the less obvious time and material savings (e.g. updating a hand-out from a previous class to reflect new teaching best practices) would more than offset these costs. Centralising resources is a natural side effect of digital distribution, and encourages resource sharing at all levels of the organisation.

It's easy to think up other small but significant wins enabled by this approach. We've probably all had the experience of watching a stand-in teacher struggle to fill the lesson time because the regular guy has become suddenly indisposed. With good systems in place it's easy to imagine this being a non- problem.

<comment><USER24> An iPad will never last five years: if they don't become laughably obsolete, they will be broken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This project has been going on for some time - very interesting. Recently I've been hearing about (planned / just started) similar projects in the UK and the US with K12 and higher education.

TMK its iPads as frontends, Meru Wireless Networks to connect the about 2000 iPads, MS Server 2008 with AD and MS Exchange at the backend.

for more info see: [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education- news/t...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/the- school-where-every-teacher-has-an-ipad-and-every-student-has-an- ipod-7578167.html) <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13FO_A0Sokw> (plus an Apple UK profile on ESSA) <http://www.apple.com/uk/education/profiles/essa/>

</comment><comment><USER26> Someone close to me works at a very good public high school in Massachusetts. The district is in the middle of the enormous task of planning/budgeting/funding a new school building. At one point they showed some preliminary plans to various interested parties, and the teachers were immediately prompted to ask where the bookshelves were, or where freestanding ones could even be placed. The answer from the superintendent was that this school was to have no physical books whatsoever, so they're not bothering with shelves.

<comment><USER27> ARgh, where do they find these people, and why are they entrusted with important positions affecting the education of our kids?!

Seriously, what _are_ the qualifications required for school administrators? These stories give the impression that they're crazily gullible and shallow people, whose decisions are guided more by the latest school-administrator fads than by actual experience with education...

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The school did a presentation at an Apple event I went to, the pupils were there too. Apple was pushing 1 to 1 deployment, everyone sets up their own accounts. There's loads of licencing and control issues though ("apps are only $1, just buy a new licence for every new pupil"). Fine for university level, but still a lot of compromises for schools.

<comment><USER10> > _There's loads of licencing and control issues though ("apps are only $1, > just buy a new licence for every new pupil")_

There is a volume licensing program for the App Store, where schools retain ownership and can buy in bulk at a discount (where developers opt in to allow such discounts). But in fairness, distribution still isn't perfect out of the box (it's done via one-time codes on the App Store. It is possible to automate this, but not as standard).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Missing from headline: "(Obnoxiously Cheerful Music Will Start Immediately)".

</comment><comment><USER30> _Personally_ I found tablets AND laptops lagging a plain old paper notebook when it came to reviewing notes before the test.

Distraction is another thing (sit on the back and watch to get an idea) but I presume that iPads can eventually be modified to access only coursework.</comment>


ScienceTone – The latest scientific discoveries' aggregation network - <AUTHOR> https://sciencetone.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi! I just launched a project, which I have made. You can find it here [https://sciencetone.com/](https://sciencetone.com/)

A brief explanation of what this project is about.

In this website people can share the latest studies, which they find interesting. There's a voting system, so the most interesting submissions go to the top. On each submission people can comment and ask questions. Comments must be objective and based on other studies. Same with the replies to the comments and questions. So each submission can turn into an objective discussion on the subject.

Why it is useful?

I'm a sports science graduate, so I constantly follow the latest publications, related to wellness and training methodologies. Also I'm interested in computer science too. So I follow a lot of people on social media, who are experts in those two fields. They often share interesting findings. I hope that platform like this would allow those people to share studies & conclusions, what they find interesting, with some additional and more diverse audiences. Also those shared studies might generate more ideas and questions by attracting other people, who are interested in the same subject, and expand its value by participating in the discussion section, below the submission.

I still have a lot of features in my mind, which could improve the website. For now I published the core features to see if anyone is interested in the idea itself. I think a platform like that might be useful and make people a little bit more aware about the latest discoveries. I think right now a lot of exciting things are happening in the majority of science fields.

<comment><USER2> [random advice from the internet]

If your interest is sports science, narrowing the site down to that topic might be a better place to start because building one community at a time allows focusing on getting the details right. StackExchange is a good example. It started with StackOverflow and only later used what it had learned about _heavily_ moderated communities to build other sites.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for a feedback. An interesting suggestion. If the site gets some users and separate branches become unmanageable, I will consider doing something like that.

<comment><USER2> Counter intuitively, the narrower a site is the easier it is to get users. StackOverflow just focused on programmers and a lot of its early users came from the C# and .NET communities because those are the people who Spolsky and Atwood knew best.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are LUTs copyright-able in the US? - <AUTHOR> Dear HN,
Elecrophoretic (e-paper) displays often use a .fw "waveform" file, generated by a tool, for driving the displays. This waveform file is a lookup table (LUT) of timings, voltages, and temperatures for driving a panel of specific electrical characteristics.
Since it seems this LUT is not created as a form of art (being auto-generated) and it is also a raw representation of driving properties, my gut tells me this isn't copyrightable because facts can't be copyrighted.
Are there any lawyers here who could weigh in? Can these waveform files be freely shared, and do they belong to the public domain?
Thanks. <comment><USER2> My understanding is that there's a great deal of R&D behind optimal waveforms for e-paper. It takes careful tuning to avoid visual artifacts like ghosts and afterimages. And much of the progress in visual quality and longevity over the last several years is from better waveforms. So it's not very fact-like in the sense that anyone could derive the same waveform from theory.</comment>


ReText - Markdown editor for Ubuntu - <AUTHOR> http://sourceforge.net/projects/retext/

<comment><USER2> Note, that retext also supports restructured text (which is imo the superior markup language).

<comment><USER3> Yip. rst is well supported on GitHub e.g. you can use README.rst in your projects rather than README.md which i didn't know until recently.

Makes including readme text in python packages for display on PyPI super convenient, in setup.py:

        """A silly setup.py example"""

        from setuptools import setup
        from os.path import dirname, join

        THIS_DIR = dirname(__name__)
        README = open(join(THIS_DIR, "README.rst")).read()

        setup(
            name ...,
            description=__doc__,  # """A silly setu...
            long_description=README
        )

<comment><USER2> Cool, i didn't know that! I always thought how much i would like to use rst instead of md, nice :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you want to try an alternative, you could give uberwriter a shot, which I made for an appshowdown not too long ago.

[http://uberwriter.wolfvollprecht.de](http://uberwriter.wolfvollprecht.de)

There is a paid version in the software center, however it's GPL-3 licensed and free from my ppa.

<comment><USER5> I use Uberwriter and love it! It is definitely worth a look if you're looking for a product like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "for Ubuntu"? really?

<comment><USER7> Sad, but true.

ReText README file clearly states "ReText is written in Python language and works on Linux and other POSIX-compatible platforms." I expect this to work wherever Python and Qt run, maybe even Cygwin.

<comment><USER8> Title is misleading. Since when ubuntu is the only linux distro?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> People still host things on sourceforge? Most user hostile UI ever.

<comment><USER10> Amazing bandwidth though.

<comment><USER11> They also do package/binary hosting as well. There are whispers in the grapevine that github may do this soon too, which would be _fantastic_.

<comment><USER12> You can upload binaries to releases on GitHub: [https://github.com/Atarity/Lightpack/releases/tag/5.10.4](https://github.com/Atarity/Lightpack/releases/tag/5.10.4)

<comment><USER13> The reason sourceforge is preferred by some people for binary hosting is that you get download stats. People want to know their impact. I think GitHub would really drive sourceforge out of business if they started offering this.

<comment><USER14> Sourceforge is already driving Sourceforge out of business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The README says:

         we recommend using version (Python) 3.2 or higher

It _requires_ Python >= 3.2. It didn't run on my Ubuntu machine which has default 2.7

And it doesn't support tables or code syntax highlighting. [Of course, I know they aren't part of the original Markdown].

<comment><USER16> Ubuntu 12.04 ships with Python 3.2.3, IIRC the 'python3' executable is installed by default (even though the default installation may lack some third party modules).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It might also be worth mentioning haroopad - [http://pad.haroopress.com/](http://pad.haroopress.com/)

<comment><USER18> Wow, I didn't know about this, but its awesome. Thanks for the link!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've been using this for a while (at least a year or so) and it's by far my favorite markdown editor. I love the side by side panes (code + preview) and the ease of use. It stays out of my way while I write.

I write Markdown for my blog and depending on what I'm doing, I like to write while I'm doing it, (to verify each step of a tutorial) which means I had to find a MD editor for 3 platforms (Windows, OSX, Linux). This one is by far the easiest, most reliable offering out of the three. The side by side preview is great.

I've used Uberwriter too, which would be great for a different kind of writing. Since I'm usually going through some steps of a tutorial I use a lot of images and code markup and it doesn't really handle this well. If I were writing a novel or article however Uberwriter works pretty great for that.

</comment><comment><USER20> Why not invest in cross platform for such a simple app?

[http://pad.haroopress.com/](http://pad.haroopress.com/) \- Not sure if open source [https://github.com/bianchimro/markgiu](https://github.com/bianchimro/markgiu) \- last updated 7month ago [https://github.com/danielking/docular](https://github.com/danielking/docular) \- last updated 9 months ago

These are node-webkit editors, as an easy-to-contribute example.

</comment><comment><USER21> If you're looking for a dedicated Markdown editor on Linux, maybe you'll find something on my curated list, e.g. [https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown- resources/blob/master/m...](https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown- resources/blob/master/markdown-apps.yml#L151)

Also see discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6969897](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6969897)

</comment><comment><USER22> Looks very nice, it resembles mdCharm, which I really like. I will try it out now, thank you.

</comment><comment><USER23> For a similar, great markdown editor for OS X, check out: [http://mouapp.com/](http://mouapp.com/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Do you know if something like ReText existe for Android ?

</comment><comment><USER25> Wat else ? It's free! But this is no big deal for Ubuntu users. ;)</comment>


How to build your startup... or not - <AUTHOR> http://www.pehub.com/58561/how-to-build-your-startup-or-not/

<comment><USER2> Dupe</comment>


How big is the entire universe? - <AUTHOR> http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2012/07/18/how-big-is-the-entire-universe/ <comment><USER2> The short answer is nobody has a plausible upper bound on the size of the entire Universe, and there's no firm consensus on whether it's literally infinite. If it is finite, there is no "wall" or "center", since it's not a big sphere -- a finite Universe just means that if you go straight long enough, you end up in the same spot. It's analogous to how if you stood on the ground of featureless planet, the land you could inhabit is finite, but it has no borders and no point where you could stick a flag in the ground and say "this is the center of the planet's land".

Most of the time when people give hard numbers for the size of the Universe, they either mean A) the portion of the Universe we can see, B) the portion of the Universe we could ever see in principle, or C) the portion of the Universe which could, in principle, be causally influenced by early particle interactions that could have causally influenced us. If you suspect someone might be talking out of their ass about cosmology, ask them how big the Universe is -- if they give you a clean multiple of 14.6 billion light years, they're an idiot.

Technically inclined readers will find this more enlightening than the article above: <http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0310808.pdf>

<comment><USER3> > [...] there's no firm consensus on whether it's literally infinite. If it is > finite, there is no "wall" or "center", since it's not a big sphere -- a > finite Universe just means that if you go straight long enough, you end up > in the same spot.

My understanding is that for your interpretation here of "finite" to be true, there must be some curvature. If you only consider the geometry of the universe, then what we see with our instruments does allow us to put a bound on the size of the curvature.

If you want to say something along the lines of "outside of the observable universe is probably cheese whiz" then that's your perogative, and no-one can refute that. But (from the article) the geometry of the universe that we have measured is consistent with an infinite universe, and gives a minimum bound on its size which is many multiples of the observable universe.

<comment><USER4> It's mathematically simple for a space to loop without being curved locally, although I am under the impression that there are physics reasons to infer we don't exist in such a space.

The pac-man universe acts euclidean until you have universe-sized effects. For example, a circle will satisfy circumference = diameter * pi until its diameter is greater than the span of the universe. Basically the universe could 'hide' the fact that it is a torus from pac-man by simply being really large.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, that blew me away. I would happily have gone for 13billion light years across.

This one little blog (that was a few hours work covering decades of hard work by hundreds of people) has reminded me of the vast importance of education, scientific inquiry and just plain old reading.

One recent suggestion here in the UK is to make maths study compulsory till age 18. If I can go till age 40 and not know how we know how big the universe is, and I am supposedly in the top 5% of educated people, then yes yes yes.

Is there any politican I can vote for who will double the science budget ?

<comment><USER6> Shouldn't it be 13 * 2 = 26 across? 13 light years that way, and 13 light years the opposite way? Is there some "relativity trick" I'm missing? Is some space aliean on the edge of the universe going to see 13 light years in all directions?

<comment><USER2> This is a misconception. If you just want a satisfying mental image of the Universe: It's really big, it doesn't have any point defined as its center, and it doesn't have any wall-like borders. Aliens living 14.6 billion LY away from us see a Universe that looks just like what we see in all directions.

If it is limited in size at all, it's because it wraps around on itself ("if you go straight long enough you end up where you were"). Nobody has firm evidence that it actually does wrap around on itself, and there's reason to believe that if it does, it's on a scale that's much larger than we could ever hope to observe. We will likely never have any sign inconsistent with it being literally infinite regardless of whether or not it is.

If you want a better answer than that, you'll need a very firm grasp of special relativity and a basic understanding of general relativity and the metric expansion of spacetime. In which case, read this: <http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0310808.pdf>

<comment><USER7> Was it instantly huge after the big bang or did it expand much faster than the speed of light?

<comment><USER8> Both! If the universe is flat, then it was _always_ infinitely big. And, according to the inflationary universe theory, it expanded faster than the speed of light too.

In this case, you have to think of "expanding" as being like _stretching_. I.e., things within the infinitely big universe rapidly got farther apart from each other.

<comment><USER7> How could it have always been infinitely big if there was a big bang where everything was once?

<comment><USER8> Everything we can see (which is called our "Hubble sphere") started off as a tiny little (and very massive) speck of stuff at the beginning of time. There were infinitely many tiny little specks, and they all became different Hubble spheres. But all the Hubble spheres all overlap each other, forming one continuous space. The same thing was true about the little massive specks at the Big Bang.

As I said above, at the time of the Big Bang, the universe was like a very dense sheet of rubber, and then it started rapidly stretching, getting less and less dense over time, until it is now the density that we see around us.

Infinities can definitely give you a headache, though. For instance, there are just as many odd integers as there are integers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Max Tegmark had an interesting article in Scientific American a while back discussing the implications of an infinite universe:

<http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/PDF/multiverse_sciam.pdf>

Perhaps the most disturbing of which would be the fact that, by definition, at some distance, there would have to be a duplicate of yourself.

<comment><USER10> _Perhaps the most disturbing of which would be the fact that, by definition, at some distance, there would have to be a duplicate of yourself._

Wouldn't it also mean that there are an infinite number of duplicates out there? Including one typing this very comment, but who typos and leaves the "s" off "duplicates"?

I'm very much not a mathematician nor physicist, can this really be true if the universe is infinite in size? Asking as a layman, at what point when dealing with infinite possibilities and probabilities does something become certain? That's what really terrifies me.

<comment><USER8> If the universe is flat, and therefore infinite, yes it means that most probably there are an infinite number of identical duplicates of you. It does not mean, however, that there are any duplicates of you that make a particular typo. I should think that there _are_ an infinite number of such duplicates for any given typo, _BUT_ it may also be the case that such worlds are impossible. E.g., physics is deterministic enough and chaotic enough that there is no slight nudge to the initial conditions of a world that will result in such a minor eventual difference to occur.

I.e., just because there are an infinite number of parallel worlds, doesn't mean that every _imaginable_ thing occurs in them. What occurs in a parallel world, must be _possible_.

<comment><USER11> I think you make a very important point. Even if the universe was infinitely large, there might be a point where past that the conditions can't exist that would allow something like our planet to function. For infinity to grant you duplicates of yourself the possibility must exist within that "zone of infinity". Gravity for example might be stronger or weaker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This might be a bit of a nit, but it happens enough: the quote that begins that article is misattributed. It's from Daniel J. Boorstin. <http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking#Misattributed>

</comment><comment><USER13> Very cool, but I'm still a little confused. The earth's surface more or less just extends out in two dimensions, but doesn't space extend out in three? How does all of this work when you have take into account the z-axis as well as x and y? How would a three-dimensional object "close" in around itself?

<comment><USER14> To imagine a 2d surface closing in on itself, you imagine it in 3d. To imagine a 3d object closing in on itself, you unfortunately have to try to imagine it in 4d.

<comment><USER15> I read Flatland a long time ago as a student and found it enlightening when thinking about 4d.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The article used one of my drawings without my permission.

<http://davidjarvis.ca/dave/gallery/>

<comment><USER17> Email the author, it looks like he thinks the image was made by someone else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Another factoid that causes the mind to reel is that a flat universe, which is of infinite size, also has _zero total energy_. This means that it is conceivable that someday we might figure out how to manufacture entire new universes.

Who says that there's no such thing as a free lunch!

<comment><USER18> > zero total energy ... means that it is conceivable that someday we might > figure out how to manufacture entire new universes.

How does that follow?

<comment><USER8> It doesn't follow that we _will_ be able to do it, nor even that it is possible, but before the understanding that flat universes contain zero energy, the claim that you might manufacture a universe would seem to completely absurd. Where would you get all that energy? Especially if energy is conserved?

As it turns out, it doesn't matter if energy is conserved, because a flat universe doesn't have any net energy, and consequently they can come into existence without violating known conservation laws.

In any case, you don't have to take my word for it. Look up Alan Guth, the MIT cosmologist who invented the inflationary universe theory. This is his claim.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There was a talk about this issue at the Midwest Science of Origins Conference on 31 March 2012 by Marco Peloso of the University of Minnesota. Peloso reviewed the evidence available for the condition of the Universe just after the Big Bang. He also mentioned that current observations are consistent with a "flat" geometry of the entire universe, but pointed out other lines of evidence, not mentioned in the blog post submitted here, consistent with a finite (although very, very large) size for the universe.

Finite size is consistent with current observations and theories, and an issue that the submitted article doesn't have a lot of space to address. Per a Wikipedia article,

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe#Size.2C_age.2C_content...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe#Size.2C_age.2C_contents.2C_structure.2C_and_laws)

consistent with what I heard in the lecture earlier this year, "The universe appears to have no net electric charge, and therefore gravity appears to be the dominant interaction on cosmological length scales. The universe also appears to have neither net momentum nor angular momentum. The absence of net charge and momentum would follow from accepted physical laws (Gauss's law and the non-divergence of the stress-energy-momentum pseudotensor, respectively), if the universe were finite." Wikipedia cites the Landau and Lifshitz physics textbook from the Soviet Union, Landau, Lev, Lifshitz, E.M. (1975). The Classical Theory of Fields (Course of Theoretical Physics, Vol. 2) (revised 4th English ed.). New York: Pergamon Press. pp. 358–397. ISBN 978-0-08-018176-9, for this statement.

Some multiverse theories such as those mentioned in another comment posted before this one can be overlaid on a simpler theory of a single finite "observable" (in principle) universe with the properties we know from human observation. Testing theories like those, or like the "level I multiverse" theory mentioned in the other comment, still needs more work.

The current Udacity course in physics

<http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/ph100/CourseRev/1>

started off its first unit with the students reproducing the effort of Eratosthenes of Cyrene to measure the circumference of the earth more than 2,200 years ago. On reasonable assumptions known to the ancient Greeks, it was possible to get a surprisingly accurate estimate of the earth's circumference, with a major source of error being simply measuring distances between one city and another a few days' journey away.

</comment><comment><USER20> But if the big bang happened 13 billion years ago there shouldn't be any matter or energy outside of a 13 billion light year radius, right?

<comment><USER21> No, unfortunately it doesn't work like that. It's not like the big bang took place "within space" -- like a grenade in the center of a stadium, but the bang is the rapid expansion of space(-time) itself. So, the universe could have even been infinite and very dense, and then BOOM!, it's still infinite but less dense.

The observable universe is even bigger than you'd expect: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#Size>

<comment><USER22> Yes! Mind blown (again). :)

While it's really enjoyable to talk/think about these topics from a purely scientific point of view, there's another side to all this, which is the sheer beauty of such a thing.

There's a great show on Discovery called How the Universe Works. Season 1 had an episode called Galaxies that sorta touches on some of this. The graphics for the show, first off, are awesome. When they show the super zoomed out view of all the galaxy clusters and how everything is connected, immediately I thought, "wow, those look like neurons".

And that's where the beauty of nature comes in. You can start to see how systems arrange and the patterns used from the micro to the macro. The distances on either level are incomprehensible (strings, atoms, molecules, galaxies, universe), but the patterns are visible.

And this is why I love science. While I'm not a physicist, I always appreciated Feynman because you could see he had that same love for the extremely complex and the simple observations - and he had a great way of describing it. I think the same goes for Sagan, although, in a totally different field. But Sagan too just had that love for the beauty of nature, on top of his accomplishments of the Mariner missions and other planetary science.

I have a 6mo son right now and I hope to instill that love of the beauty of nature through science. We're each an insignificant speck on an insignificant blue speck in an unfathomable universe. But, our connections to each other and our appreciation for the beauty of it all are a privilege. And posts like this, shows like How the Universe Works will be my way of conveying to him his place in it all. I hope he'll appreciate it someday like I do.

I hope, some day all people will.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The visible curve of the Earth is due to atmospheric distortion? What? Surely not. Surely the curve you see is the horizon of your view?

<comment><USER24> I believe the author is stretching it. In the iceberg photo case, that's just barrel distortion from the camera lens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> For the layperson (like me), the below is an intriguing and related TED talk from Brian Greene. A big conclusion is that we now believe the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate based upon the edge of the observable universe. But Greene posits that 1000s of years in the future, this accelerating edge will be too far away for us to observe and the universe will look to future mankind to be more static and small. I'm not physicist so I can't criticize this claim but I found it intriguing.

[http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_greene_why_is_our_universe_fi...](http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_greene_why_is_our_universe_fine_tuned_for_life.html)

</comment><comment><USER26> The first half of this is from the excellent book:

Relativity: The Special and General Theory by Albert Einstein

It's written for the interested layman, the article is from part 3 of the book where Einstein explains this.

</comment><comment><USER27> "The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest." -- Kilgore Trout

</comment><comment><USER28> Fields Medal winner Terence Tao gives a public lecture on this material:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ne0GArfeMs>

</comment><comment><USER29> Interesting. I had no idea that the curvature of the universe was an indication of its size. Does this imply that a flat universe is also infinite?

<comment><USER30> This article and the science behind it at this point is making some very interesting assumptions, such as that the Universe is closed (like the Earth is in their analogy).

But I believe at this point, the real answer is that _we don't yet know._ We're looking at a universe that looks flat and basically saying "well, it could be flat and finite, or it could be closed and curved, or it could be flat and infinite... but last time we thought our plane of existence was flat we ended up way off, so we better not make that assumption again."

Point being: take this conclusion about the size of the Universe with a grain of salt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Relevant -- <http://scaleofuniverse.com/>

<comment><USER16> Also relevant -- <http://www.davidjarvis.ca/dave/gallery/star-sizes/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Why presume that the universe is a _surface_ , instead of a giant volume? After all, the normal way of looking at it is that we're _in_ space, not _on_ it...

This is an especially appalling oversight in an article intended for the intelligent layman.

<comment><USER33> It's an analogy, because while it's easy to visualize how a two-dimensional surface can be curved, it's hard to visualize how a three-dimensional surface can be curved, because we think of it as a "volume".

<comment><USER32> There is no such thing as a "three-dimensional surface" in plain English. I don't know why that is even coming up.

<comment><USER34> Unfortunately, "plain English" is not sufficient to describe all physical phenomena, particularly with scales we aren't exposed to in day-to-day life.

<comment><USER32> If that's truly the case, which I doubt, people should seriously just stop trying to write physics articles for the layman.

By the way, scale has nothing to do with any of the objections I'm raising. It's not a problem of scale.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Products Fail - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/may2007/id20070518_332210.htm <comment><USER2> Oh snap, without even reading the article I can predict what is going to be said: The product was useless.

<comment><USER2> Hum. This article turned out to be targeted at big company types, not entrepreneurs. Innovation at big companies almost never works anyway. The authors of "In Search of Excellence" did excellent research on just that, and found that inventions which had big impacts almost always came from companies with less than a few dozen people.

<comment><AUTHOR> _'... Hum. This article turned out to be targeted at big company types, not entrepreneurs ...'_

I think the below extract could / should be applied to any startup. The point being made here is to create cheap in-expensive (money and time) rapid prototypes. In the process discovering new insights.

_'... Sketches, he argues, are quick, inexpensive, disposable, plentiful, offer minimal detail, and suggest and explore rather than confirm ... The value of sketching is less in the artifacts themselves than in the cognitive process of working through dozens of ideas, of considering as many options as possible, and allowing each option to raise new questions ...'_

This particular technique is extremely useful when the next step, _"translate design to code as quickly as possible into a working prototype"_. Speed from idea to code allows crappy ideas to be exposed faster and is a technique (rapid development of ideas into code) was used by Joshua Schachter for various projects leading up to delicious.

I think the article and the book are slanted towards big business because they have less constraints (more money, resources) and hence have problems tackling the design process. It might also be written for companies that do not create product and either make money by the hour or contract, not product ~ <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FiveWorlds.html></comment></comment></comment>


The Mad Scientists' Club - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mad_Scientists%27_Club <comment><USER2> I absolutely loved these books as a kid. I read them over and over again.

Those, along with _The Great Brain_ , _The Three Investigators_ , the _Encyclopedia Brown_ stories, etc., were all really influential books for me.

I wonder if kids coming up today have anything equivalent?</comment>


Ask HN: I need advice getting a junior Rails dev job - <AUTHOR>

HI All,<p>Ive been working with HTML/CSS/Wordpress/Drupal for a few years and have taught myself Rails. I've built 5 demo apps and am now doing the interview process with various companies. I'm new at this and wondering if people actually hire Jr Rails devs with the impression that they will grow and learn, or if Im setting myself up for disappointment. We hear in the media how desperate people are for developers, but I'm still looking for work. Granted, I'm getting technical interviews, but I;m usually not progressing from there. Any advice? <comment><USER2> My advice for technical interviews as a non-CS major (I am making that assumption) would be:

Don't be afraid to admit what you don't know, but stress that you are a quick learner and that you will constantly be improving.

If they give you a technical question and you are unable to answer, research it later and email them your answer. It shows that you don't give up, and it shows you weren't lying about constantly learning.

If you get a question like implementing a native function without using any native functionality, they are testing your ability to write efficient code. Read up on runtime complexity and even if you can't code it, be able to explain what is inefficient and what you might do to make it better.

Even as a junior dev with little experience if you do those in a technical interview you show potential and you are worth training.

Source: English major working as a software engineer after fumbling through many technical interviews.

</comment><comment><USER3> You don't have to apply for a _junior_ rails dev job. Apply for a developer job at any place that does or doesn't use rails.

Based on the info here, your prior submissions, your history of delivering value through web stacks, and the fact that you're motivated enough to teach yourself new tech and post about it to HN, you're already a step above fresh CS grads, i.e. the only people who should settle for "junior" jobs.

Don't sell yourself short, and don't give up!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am in the same boat. I have been working as a Web Developer for 2 years doing full-stack but PHP as the backend. Switched over to Ruby 3 months ago and the positions I did find I never heard back after applying.

I am now doing a Rails internship for free for a few weeks and then I am bumped to minimum wage while keeping my current Web dev job.

</comment><comment><USER5> I am looking for someone to create a tutorial for Ruby on Rails that will be free for everyone to use for RubyRails.Com as part of my open source project OpenDomain. This will get exposure for the author plus I am willing to pay for original content for each video produced. Contact me HN AT RubyRails.Com

<comment><AUTHOR> Sent!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Try going to some meetups. You might meet people that will offer you a job or hire you to do some contract work.</comment>


Show HN: Self-hosted, open-source infrastructure monitoring and alerting - <AUTHOR> http://cabotapp.com <comment><USER2> Cool project, but I can't help but wonder why people are so quick to rewrite Nagios instead of spending less time and learning about Nagios.

The DSL isn't that confusing, and there are many many options there. I've been able to set up a very comprehensive monitoring service using it, and while I too once cursed its complexity, it was worth it in the long run. Certainly didn't take as long as it would take to write a clone.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the thing for us was that we couldn't understand how to make Nagios see the world in terms of services (which are sometimes a set of machines running on physically or virtualised infrastructure, but sometimes individual servers on shared hosts). I'm sure it can be done, I just couldn't wrap my head around it.

Also it was surprisingly easy and fun to write. Probably has taken longer than learning Nagios but I don't think I would have spent Christmas hacking away at that task...

<comment><USER3> I've spent 3 years making Nagios 'work'. I've had to add all the things Nagios didn't have, like inventory management, graphing, combining graphs, trend detection, service discovery, etc. I also had to make it scale. This also involved writing plugins in C to conserve memory since plugs are run through forking processes. The 'community' plugins are mostly really terrible. Scaling it also running things outside of the Nagios scheduler with another script and feeding the results back to Nagios. This allowed me to collect data for 120k parameters in 5 minutes from a single monitoring server. Anyway, this is just a long way of saying writing your own thing is probably not that bad an idea compared to having to learn Nagios and then trying to hack it into the shape of an enterprise monitoring system.

<comment><USER2> Sorry, inventory management? Graphing? Service discovery? Those don't strike me as fitting into the monitoring role. It seems to me like you spent 3 years bloating Nagios into a multi-role service that it was never originally designed to fulfill, as opposed to setting up 3-4 different services which specialize in what you're looking for (which took us significantly less than 3 years).

Monitoring is looking at the services and making sure they're running within tolerances. Graphing is not useful for monitoring, its useful for postmortems and planning. Inventory management is not useful for monitoring, it's useful for building out servers. Service discovery has nothing to do with monitoring, though it's certainly be useful for automatically populating your monitoring configuration.

However, trend detection, I agree; nagios needs more of that. I should definitely get alerts when my disk space usage suddenly starts growing 4x its normal amount, or when my CPU usage spikes to 3x its normal usage.

<comment><USER4> > Graphing is not useful for monitoring, its useful for postmortems and > planning.

I'm sorry, I have to completely disagree with this point. Graphing is a fantastic way of visualising information to show trends, such as disk space growth, or memory usage, which can and have, in our company's case, led to diagnosis of problems that hadn't yet manifested in a complete crash. I realise you add in a comment saying that Nagios should be doing these things internally, which it also should, but what about situations you haven't planned for? Or intermittent events that don't look like anything individually, but when graphed over 6 months turn out to reveal the subtle failure of an aircon unit in a server room?

<comment><USER2> My apologies if I wasn't clear.

My intention was to say, with regards to graphing:

Graphing should be part of your overall tooling for monitoring boxes, but it should not be part of process monitoring. It should be a separate component (which should in turn be monitored by Nagios), for use in post-mortems and future planning.

It should not be built into Nagios, since the graph itself is completely irrelevent to whether Nagios should alert about a problem.

I also think that graphing is different from heueristic rate monitoring; graphs are for humans to spot trends/correlations. Alerting on rate changes is a binary alert/don't alert.

I.E. Cacti/Graphite should be creating graphs about services for human consumption, Nagios should be watching for problems with services.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can Cabot handle "multihomed" services?

I have services running remotely, that are accessible through a variety of communication methods (VPNs, SSH tunnels, 3G modems, and occasionally just straight up IP!) and it's been awhile, but when I set up nagios, it seemed there was no way to tell it: "Alert if this host is not reachable in any of these 50 ways" \- it monitors all 50, and alerts me whenever each one of them changes state (which is quite often).

What I want to say is: Here are all the ways I can reach server "pinky", I want a warning if there are less than 3 ways for more than an hour, and an alert if non of the way works for more than 3 minutes.

Can cabot do that?

(for that matter, can any other monitor do that?)

<comment><AUTHOR> This sort of service-oriented monitoring is very close to the pain point that caused us to create Cabot.

In our case, it was more that there were multiple things we could monitor for that _potentially_ indicated a problem with a service but it was hard, using Nagios or whatever, to tie those individual indicators back to a single service going haywire at 3am, especially if all 50 of them blow up at once.

We don't have the precise problem that you describe though - for us the ability to monitor the number of data series in a graphite collection (so that if a server disappears we can notify, and then if another drops off we can alert) is sufficient. Cabot can use this and the ability to tolerate a number of failures to give behaviour very close to what you talk about. However I don't know if Cabot would support the kinds of checks that you're carrying out out-of-the-box, you'd probably have to extend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great! Have been looking for something like this lately! First impression is good. But what i can't seem to find is a http notification. I would like a http alert if something is down for a x number of consecutive pings. This way i can do some API calls or implement my own alerting.

<comment><USER7> Is that what you need? [http://cabotapp.com/use/http- checks.html](http://cabotapp.com/use/http-checks.html) or open an issue on: [https://github.com/arachnys/cabot](https://github.com/arachnys/cabot)

<comment><USER6> That's monitoring. Alerting seems only possible via Email, Hipchat, SMS and Telephone.

<comment><AUTHOR> Primary author here. Please add an issue at [https://github.com/arachnys/cabot/issues/new](https://github.com/arachnys/cabot/issues/new) and we'll look into adding. (Essentially that's all Hipchat is).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I deployed it at work last Friday and i'm in love with it already. :) Good job guys!

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad to hear it, thanks for the positive feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Salmon is a monitoring/alerting system built on Django.

[https://github.com/lincolnloop/salmon](https://github.com/lincolnloop/salmon)

</comment><comment><USER10> Can this be deployed on a OSX? If so can you provide instructions on how to deploy this on a local OSX server? Thank you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't see why not, but all the upstart stuff is platform-specific.

I'd suggest you spin up a clean Ubuntu instance in Virtualbox and just run the fab deploy script against that locally... It won't be fast, it won't be pretty, but I'm pretty sure it will work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Cool!</comment>


Ask HN: What parts of software engineering can be quantified? - <AUTHOR> I've seen obvious instances of quantification of software engineering – obvious in hindsight, anyhow. Capacity planning and network performance get strong mathematical treatments in textbooks such as "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach".
But I've also seen less-than-obvious quantifications and mathematical models. The second chapter of "Hello Startup!" represents a model of Agile vs Waterfall method in terms of total cost-under-curve for learning, complete with graphs.
I've also seen the process of debugging code be represented in Bayes Theorem, but that was only one problem in a textbook.
And of course anything by Knuth or Sedgewick tends to carry this flavour with their takes on data structures. But that's moving a bit far from software creation in the mobile-app and web-app sense.
What are examples of practical mathematical modelling and quantification in software-engineering? <comment><USER2> It depends on the degree of quantification and your precise definition of software engineering, but IMHO almost all of software engineering research is minimally as quantitative as the social sciences i.e. psychological or sociological studies and analyses. In other areas, as you also mention, SE is almost purely quantitative in nature.

see: [https://jserd.springeropen.com/](https://jserd.springeropen.com/), [https://research.google.com/pubs/SoftwareEngineering.html](https://research.google.com/pubs/SoftwareEngineering.html), and [https://arxiv.org/list/cs.SE/recent](https://arxiv.org/list/cs.SE/recent) for some recent SE research topics.

Software Engineering encompasses, broadly speaking, the following topics:

Software Design => Implementation => Testing & QA => Automation => Project Management

Implementation, Testing/QA, and Automation are largely very quantitative, you can create models and algorithms and analyze them and measure most things even easier than in the physical sciences. On the other hand, due to the nature of Software Design and Project Management you are largely left to tools of the social sciences i.e. surveys, difficult to control experiments, observations, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> What parts of thought can be quantified? Bad questions get bad answers.</comment>


Facebook sinks as Nasdaq scrambles to square trades - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/21/net-us-facebook-struggle-idUSBRE84J0D620120521

<comment><USER2> _"As the stock fell, there was a long list of questions -- ranging from whether the underwriters priced the shares too high..."_

I understand there needs to be a fine line between leaving money on the table and having a pop at the open. But who is the IPO process supposed to _really_ benefit? If it's Facebook, then thumbs up for pricing it just right. If it's the underwriters and insiders, then thumbs up for pricing it just right.

<comment><USER3> So true, quite frankly I'm so dumbfounded that IPOs are seen as a "gift" to Wall Street so they can make some quick cash for contributing absolutely nothing of value.

IPO is nothing more than a transaction between two conterparties that is supposed to be mutually beneficial. The ideal IPO should go sideways. i.e. no money left on table and investors aren't ripped off. It should continue to move sideways until additional material facts emerge that cause it to be revalued by investors.

I wish the WSJ, Bloomberg, and all the talking heads would celebrate a sideways moving IPO as a success because that's what it is. Since they only write from the other side of the table (investors) they can't consider anything but walking away with free money like bandits as a "success", when success should be getting equity at a fair price for the long term. Success should come 1+ quarters from the IPO date.

<comment><USER2> It should be _more_ than ~1 quarter from the IPO date, because otherwise you're playing the second game of Analyst Expectations. A bunch of outsiders get to predict what will happen and then all tsk tsk when the outcome doesn't happen as they say.

Thankfully some companies like Apple seem to sandbag what they're going to predict instead of being super-optimistic and then get slapped around when they miss by a $0.01/share.

<comment><USER3> Totally agree, but as a slight counterpoint you need to remember that (1) they recently missed earnings expectations due to weaker than expected mobile advertising revenues, and (2) things move really fast in this industry. Given how critical mobile revenues are going to be to Facebook's future, I'd say these near-term material facts are relevant beyond a simple game of analyst expectations.

<comment><USER2> Things move fast in _all_ industries these days, that's no excuse to hypermonitor Facebook's earnings. If you were a JP Morgan shareholder, you'd agree that surprises happen everywhere.

<comment><USER3> True.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _"I basically told people they weren't going to get any, and luckily, it proved to be a bust," the adviser said._

Seems like this type of attitude is part of the problem as well. If everyone is assuming they will make a quick dollar, then certainly the underwriters will price things high. If people are investing for long term value then you can't exactly call FB a "bust" quite yet.

<comment><USER5> That's why investing in stocks is more like playing a game of poker. As the saying goes, you don't play your hand (company performance), you play the other players' hands (investor sentiment). So the raw performance of a company is not as important a metric for deciding to buy or sell as the opinion of other investors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is it too late to short the stock?

<comment><USER7> Not at all: [http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/18/us-facebook- shorts...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/18/us-facebook-shorts- idUSBRE84H0NH20120518)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article seems to have been deleted. I wonder why.</comment>


Dear NSA: If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging - <AUTHOR> https://www.danieldent.com/blog/dear-nsa-stop-digging/

<comment><USER2> When I was young, the NSA was known for how they helped! Totally forgotten in most of the current debate I'm glad someone is talking about it.</comment>


Sellers crumble after eBay cuts feedback - <AUTHOR> http://launchlab.co.uk/article/Entrepreneurial-Columnists/Big-bad-eBay/744

<comment><USER2> Real article here: [http://launchlab.co.uk/article/Entrepreneurial- Columnists/Bi...](http://launchlab.co.uk/article/Entrepreneurial- Columnists/Big-bad-eBay/745)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks</comment>


The Value of Downvoting or How Hacker News Gets It Wrong (2009) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/the-value-of-downvoting-or-how-hacker-news-gets-it-wrong/ <comment><USER2> The system of upvotes and downvotes is not productive. For one thing, it establishes a mindset of "internet points" which encourages grubbing for upvotes, especially on HN where you must either grind out 500 points worth of relatively meaningless comments, or wait until you have the time to post 500 points worth of useful messages, which takes much longer, before you can use downvotes. If your opinions don't match the overarching consensus of the community, it may take forever because people downvote those with which they strongly disagree.

The goal of user feedback on submissions and comments should be to gain information about the comments in a more nuanced system than the linear "good/bad" scale, so that the site can make use of this information to help users achieve their browsing goals. The other problem with up/down votes is that they're used to decide ordering, i.e. visibility, and everyone wants their comments to be read (that was the motivation for posting them). Thus there's a natural incentive to try to grab the screenspace with the most eyeballs. People are incentivized, then, to post at the top of threads or reply to the most upvoted comment, to upvote parent comments of their own, and to downvote other "siblings" in the tree. These are noise votes that provide no insight into any inherent property of the content, but simply fall out of the misaligned incentives. I'd like to see a system which lets HN answer the following questions: Is a comment well-written but trollbait? Is a comment a simple request for explanation, or a brilliant informative summary of a topic? Is a comment accidentally on the wrong post, or is it someone mistaken about matters of fact? Is a comment political or technical? Is it a first-person account from someone involved in the article? Is it anecdata? Is it an empty "me too"? There are many roles comments can be playing and if you're reading HN with a particular goal in mind, sorting user content into these buckets would be very useful.

Slashdot had a better system than HN has, decades ago. The reason HN's is so poor is because the incentives are misaligned and pg does not actually care about the quality of discourse here, but merely the quantity and subject of discussion (because HN exists to farm cultural capital for venture capitalists). I do not believe much thought has been put into optimizing HN for the people who read and comment on it.

Edit: I can't believe this article got flagged and is no longer visible on the HN frontpage. This system is so dysfunctional.

<comment><USER3> > "The system of upvotes and downvotes is not productive."

> "Slashdot had a better system than HN has, decades ago."

Upvotes/downvotes are not productive, yet you want to replace it with a system that places extra emphasis on that type of metadata?

> "People are incentivized, then, to post at the top of threads or reply to > the most upvoted comment, to upvote parent comments of their own, and to > downvote other "siblings" in the tree."

I'd suggest a better fix is to allow for collapsing comment threads. It's easy to tell when a thread has passed the point of no return when it comes to substance. You might miss the odd one or two interesting comments, but it'd definitely add to the overall HN experience.

<comment><USER2> Metadata is useful! The problem is that 1D "good/bad" being used to order comments is not a reasonable approach. In a more nuanced system there's less incentive (other than wrecking) to inaccurately mark comments as being "informative" or "technical" or "political", because instead of changing global comment visibility you're only changing it for the subset of users who are using that attribute to guide their reading. There are honest differences of opinion as to whether a comment fits in certain categories, but these are more specific and less contentious than "good/bad" and so I'd expect a much better SNR on them.

Collapsing threads is nice but the importance of defaults to the user experience is hard to overstate. At each step of an interaction chain more users will fall off and not end up at the goal. Lots of people will never use comment collapsing if they have to manually do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Of note: hacker news actually does have downvoting, you have to reach a karma threshold that keeps getting moved. Last I heard it was 500.

<comment><USER4> 501\. I reached it this week. Too low (1000 would be more reasonable), anyway I don't plan to use it.

<comment><USER5> You still need quite a lot of time to reach it, I've reached it in maybe 7 months or something, it's another level compared to reddit.

<comment><USER4> I took years. Only users that added a lot of value to HN should be allowed to 'shape' it. The community needs that people to feel like to continue to add value. In the end everybody wins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm ok with downvote for stories but it seems the system works pretty good without it: good posts get somehow noticed in "new" and appear in the "top", the inappropriate ones are ignored or flagged.

As for comments I would remove the feature entirely: I have never felt the need to downvote a comment even when I strongly disagreed with it and when I think something is stupid I just ignore it: there is no need to tell everyone else it's stupid. Also it really annoys me when I see someone's opinion grayed out and crashed by users that sometimes don't even bother to comment on why they downvoted.

</comment><comment><USER7> How about three buttons:

>I agree

>I disagree

>This is spam

The total votes in the first two are used in the ranking, but then you also get "recommended friends" based on who else has agreed with what you've agreed with, and "advocated devils" based on who disagrees with what you agree with. These two groups are then used to alert the user to comments made by these people, which may indicate a discussion worth joining.

<comment><USER8> The first part of that is more or less the slashdot system, which I think worked pretty well. However the recommended friends / advocated devils seems like it would encourage groupthink / witchhunts / voting rings, etc.

Personally I think the best way to modify the current system would be to have up/down votes only affect the comment's position on the page and nothing else, no persistent or visible score for users or comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> With regards to submissions we can always flag that which isn't suited for the site. With the upcoming elections sure to contentious there will be many stories masquerading themselves but in essence they are nothing more than political attack pieces.

We have already seen a few posted. They start out with an interesting headline about a technology everyone is interested in and then suddenly go straight to politics with attacks against one candidate or another without calling out the other side.

As for down vote costing, all for it with a caveat. If a post is universally down voted then the cost is refunded.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the interesting/compelling point is that there actually IS downvoting on hackernews.

<comment><USER10> What is the interesting point about that? That the author didn't notice it while looking at the site, and had to be told afterwards? That some of the arguments don't work/still work? I'm not sure what you want to say (if you want to say something, and not just see what others say)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it's a significant hidden feature which affects the shape of the community and also how the rewards of making it to the first page are allocated. There's essentially a class of hn users with more power.

<comment><USER10> Submissions can't be downvoted, so entries appearing on the frontpage is not affected. (Ignoring flagging, which admittedly can have a similar effect. I don't remember what the threshold for flagging is, also 500?)

EDIT: ... and of course this submission becomes an example for flags as downvotes...

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently you are correct. My bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if it might be a good idea to disable the vote buttons until they've been in the viewable area for a minute or so, to allow for more time to think. Has that been tried anywhere?

<comment><USER10> Only thing I can think of that is somewhat related is the fact that in deeper comments on HN it takes a while for the direct reply-link to show up, so you have to go via the permalink to respond immediately.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just noticed this for the first time. There are so many little subtle things about hacker news.

<comment><USER3> If you click on the time of post, you always get the Reply link, no need to wait.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I had a comment down voted because I pointed out that the tile of the post didn't match the title of the article at the url. The title on HN was changed to make the link more inflammatory (negative) towards the subject of the article. HN needs meta moderation.

</comment><comment><USER10> From 2009

</comment><comment><USER13> This is old (2009) and wrong (there _is_ downvoting). Flagging.

<comment><AUTHOR> How do you feel this merits a flag?

<comment><USER3> Ironically, they're probably flagging because they can't downvote stories.

As for the article, I disagree with it. The 'New' section moves so fast that there's no need for a story downvote, if it reaches the home page it's because there's enough people interested in it. The mods are also good at managing incoming spam (which you can see from the Dead stories in the New section). Furthermore, whilst it may have been true to say comment downvotes were rare in 2009, they're certainly not now.

<comment><USER13> _Ironically, they 're probably flagging because they can't downvote stories._

In some sense, yes. That is what flagging is for.

<comment><USER3> That's not what flagging is for. Flagging is to alert the mods that content needs to be removed, that is very different from downvoting because you dislike something.

<comment><USER13> It should be removed. It is irrelevant. That's why I flagged it. The concept applies to more than just spam. It also applies to, for example, political pieces or celebrity gossip.

In this case it was a simply incorrect and outdated article. I would expect that the author would be embarrassed to see it come up here (probably forgot about it).

I don't particularly dislike the article, it just shouldn't have been posted.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


On Applying to Y Combinator - <AUTHOR> http://blog.directededge.com/2009/09/30/on-applying-to-y-combinator/ <comment><USER2> I went back and looked at their applications for w2009 and s2009. They almost made it to interviews in w2009. Several things combined to push them over the threshold next time:

1\. I recognized wheels's username as someone who made thoughtful comments on HN.

2\. Their description of what they were doing was much more specific.

3\. We added the video in s2009, and we could tell from their video that they were good.

<comment><USER3> Are there any publicly viewable videos from companies that made it into yc? I want to see what constitutes a good video.

<comment><USER2> Not that I know of, but you could ask Scott and maybe they'd post theirs. (Actually it's still up, so all he'd have to do is make the page public.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think they make a great point on _not starting a startup for the sake of Y Combinator._

To be honest I almost fell into that pitfall. But from my perspective it's also hard to not focus on the application so much. Because I'm a college student, I haven't had a job, I don't have much money, and I'll be forced to balance school with the project if I don't get into something like Y Combinator.

So putting effort into the application now can mean more time to focus on the product later if I'm accepted. So while Y Combinator can be an accelerator, I think it can also be a great initiator too in that it can give someone like me the first opportunity in my life to work _full time_ on a passionate project without _any_ other priorities.

<comment><USER5> In my opinion, if you aren't ready to balance school/work and your startup until your startup is self-sufficient, you aren't serious enough about your startup.

<comment><USER4> It's not that I'm not ready. It's the fact that I even have to balance it.

Also the startup is much more interesting. School is just an unnecessary impedance to the startup and if I am serious about it I wouldn't even care about school (which I don't). The problem is my parent's aren't going to pay for me to relocate to silicon valley or fund a risky project. They'd rather fund college.

So my options are to find a way to fund myself so I have a legitimate reason to focus full time on the startup, or balance school and startup. The problem is I have a hard time enforcing a balance and the startup gets more of the attention.

So ideally I want to be in a position where I need no balance and focus solely on the startup.

<comment><USER6> You should know that a startup does not mean you do all the time only the things you like. Besides writing code (which is the best part :) ) sometimes you need to do customer support, boring paper-work, leave the best party to restart your servers, even clean your office by yourself. And may other things I can not remember right know...

<comment><USER4> This isn't the first project I've done. I did a project while I was learning the language and honestly I just wanted to go to sleep every night at 3am. It wasn't the fun that even got me through coding the damn thing. Fun isn't necessarily the reason I push myself through the work. So I more than know there are tough challenges and unpleasent experiences to come. It's really the satisfaction everytime I overcome a challenge and the results that lure me to the end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _The single most important thing that you can do to increase your chances of getting into Y-Combinator is to do what you should be doing anyway: going full-speed ahead on your startup_

Exactly. We're impressed by teams that get things done, and unimpressed by teams haven't even started to build something. I've often found myself thinking, "If you think this is so great an idea, why haven't you spent some weekends building a version 0 prototype?"

</comment><comment><USER8> It seems from the post that the primary reason you got into YC the second time around was because Paul recognized your username. Obviously there were other reasons involved, which PG has stated above. However, the overall feel is that getting into YC has a lot to do with PG's initial impression of who you are and how active you are on hacker news than the actual idea itself, considering that you said the idea remained unchanged, it was just the pitch that was different.

Basically, I feel like I have to contribute something worthy on this site now in order to be considered for YC. While I feel that being an active community member is important, I don't think it should be given the weight that it seems to carry for YC applications.

<comment><USER9> Do not do this. I tried this route and still got rejected. All it resulted in was me wasting time trying to find articles to submit and/or comment on. Better to just work on your idea and assume you'll get rejected either way.

Absolutely do not waste time in order to support your YC application. Work on your startup instead.

<comment><USER10> I think in a microcosm, 'username' is just shorthand for how active and aware you are in the startup community as a whole. It's the same as everything else, if other people in the industry remember you, whether from a mixer you attended, or an article you published or what have you, you are much more likely to have an 'in' with them. Is it a means to an end? No, but it _is_ a useful and helpful artifact of being interested and active in the field you want to go into.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Excellent post. As someone who is going to apply to YC this coming winter, this article contains some extremely valuable information.

What I get from it mostly though, is that getting accepted is less about the application, and more about getting out there and getting things done.

Essentially, I can see a number of common points between both wheels' post and pg's comment:

1\. It's a great idea to have something started. Once you have something started, pitching your idea and refining your pitch will surely help you out when explaining what problem you're trying to solve.

2\. Contributing to HN often will help build your reputation. Nothing can help grow your reputation online like writing does. I've been told time and time again that I am an excellent writer, and that people respect me for it. If you can write well, contribute to HN.

3\. Sharing your product with other people on HN is a great way to get feedback. The more feedback you receive, the greater ability you have to improve your product and eventually succeed.

4\. The new(er) feature that allows you to post a video of you and your co- founders may actually be invaluable to getting accepted into the program. I would agree with this in that it's hard to judge a person's qualities from their writing alone. A video will give you a deeper look at their personality, and maybe a glimpse of whether or not they could handle a program such as YC.

With point four in mind, I was wondering if anyone has any advice on a little problem I am having. The problem is derived from the fact that my single co- founder is currently in NYC for the next few months. What would be the best way to create a video for our application, if we are both in different countries?

Thanks, <USER11>
<comment><USER12> Yikes. I think your best bet would be to individually shoot some video and splice it together -- even though the app specifically discourages that sort of thing, it would probably be better than no video at all. That is, assuming the two of you can't somehow get together for a day or two.

<comment><USER13> _individually shoot some video and splice it together_

I did this because my co-founder was on tour in the Cayman Islands when we decided to apply for funding. I do not like being on camera, so we were not going to submit a video at all. Pg emailed us and suggested we complete the video. We got an interview, but were not accepted, for reasons which have proven to be painfully prescient.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Paul later told me that the big difference was that he recognized me from > Hacker News and that I said smart things there. So if that was the critical > difference, the question is, "Why was I saying smart things?"

Another question might be, "How would you have faired had you been a mere lurker on HN?"

<comment><USER9> Beware the temptation to post on HN in order to look smart for your YC application. Better to spend time working on your company and save your HN comments for when you actually have something to say.

<comment><USER15> Beware the temptation to do anything just to look smart for your YC application, (or life). As beneficial as I think YC is, it's not magic pixie dust, and you're in just as bad of shape if you get in on false pretenses.

The reason why some people succeed, even when everyone tells them they're wrong, is they do something they _believe_ in. Everything else is secondary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I feel like anyone working in a startup needs to type out the phrase "You don't know shit" and tape it to their monitor.

Then get back to work.

<comment><USER17> That's not very inspiring

<comment><USER16> What I meant is that you need to have the belief that you're never at your goal. You are constantly critiquing yourself and producing good work.

"You don't know shit" is a constant reminder that you need to try harder--that you haven't figured everything out. You need to live in a state of paranoia that others are just about to release something greater.

<comment><USER2> Maybe the best variant to tape to the monitor would be "You don't know users well enough."

<comment><USER18> That certainly would be a reminder to get something out the door and solicit user feedback. However, I believe it helps to stay positive, so I would also tape up something motivational like "Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don't quit." –Conrad Hilton

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great article-- When will we see a Myers-Briggs assessment on the application?

Our video will probably have the following flow:

* 5 seconds to introduce our co-founders

* 10 seconds on what we're going to create

* 10 seconds on how our product solves a major problem

* 10 seconds on why we're the right team for the job

* 10 seconds to demo our prototype

* 10 seconds on why we would be a good candidate for YC

* 5 seconds of witty banter mixed throughout just because

Thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER20> It's ironic but probably inevitable that the central advice of this article (basically: "work like crazy on your startup, stop obsesssing on the app") has been greeted with cries to see their first app, second app, video accompanying the app...

</comment><comment><USER21> Hey wheels, would you mind posting up your first YC application? I ask because I'd love to get something to contrast against dhouston's (Dropbox) amazing application. I think it would be really interesting if you had as good of an application and got rejected. This could be a good dose of reality for people looking to apply (myself included).

<comment><USER12> I'd love to see their video too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Europe and I miss you, Scott. :-)

<comment><USER23> I think Germany is better off with one less Texan.

:-D

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why YC couldn't let startups apply yearlong instead of only twice per year?

<comment><USER25> Well, the entire YC program is structured around the two three-month events of the year. YC isn't just a "congrats, you got accepted to one of the most prestigious seed groups ever—here's a bunch of cash at an insulting valuation" but it's also about the mentoring and demo days, which I would argue are worth more than the "live-on" money.

Regular seed funding groups can work that way, sure. But they're for different purposes.

<comment><USER26> Insulting, really? so you have 3 guys, and a business plan. you get $20K for say, 6% of the company. Are you really saying a $300K valuation on a company that is 'just an idea' is insulting? Personally, I'd call that high.

But yeah, you are right. it's not about the money. It would probably make economic sense for me to give 6% of my company to pg, even without getting any cash, just for the marketing effects.

<comment><USER25> I'm sorry, you're right. $20k is not a lot of money, but I did overlook the fact that most of the ideas are just that—ideas, versus an actual built business which seems to be in the minority. (Hey, at least it's better than Shark Tank.)

I stand corrected, though it wasn't the main point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I will read the bits again, and again.</comment>