sajithw

It is tough - it's a big behavior change to go from paper to electronic records. It's less difficult when scientists are using wikis or Evernote though.

It's been built before. Many times. Mostly for chemists though. However, it's never been done in a way that's integrated with the actual tools scientists use to design experiments and analyze data, so you end up with a bunch of data silos. If you ask a scientist whether they can search all of the work and associated context/data that has ever been done in their lab from one location, the answer is almost always no. We are trying to fix that.

It's really technically challenging - life sciences is so broad so you end up with lots of surface area in your product. The "apps" we provide for manipulating the primitives in biology (e.g. DNA) are huge products just by themselves.

Founder here. We are hiring if you want to help us fix life science! No biology background necessary, only an interest.

Congrats, ritik!

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22ask+hn%2...

  http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

  30. Startups for startups. The increasing number of 
  startups is itself an opportunity for startups. We're one; 
  TechCrunch is another. What other new things can you do?

If ARM's business model is around licensing their IP, wouldn't getting distribution (via Apple, etc.) be considered growth? They hit profitability in a year.

"EDIT: Same goes for id, Valve and other game studios - you see sometimes it's better to have the best engineers and researchers take their time, let them develop and mature the technology they're working on and build something long-lasting that affects millions of people."

Game studios take time because game releases used to be all or nothing. There were no second chances.

I can't comment on id, but the entire reason Valve built Steam was to speed up distribution and release updates incrementally (the previous patching system sucked). It went from idea to inception in about a year. It was also buggy as hell when it was first released. Now developers can easily release additional content and make game play changes after a game is initially launched.

MIT's campus is almost completely open (including the room this event is in) so I'd imagine anyone could go.

Sorry I posted this before you were ready for it to be public! I was asking a friend about a license and he sent me your site and one thing lead to another...

Edit: Realized you discussed WorkFlowy in your analysis.

I find the name distasteful. Would you be comfortable releasing an app called jesuslists? Same idea.

It's a bit misleading to describe this as "algorithms in python". You'll find that the course is almost entirely theoretical (as it should be) and that there is a small implementation component for each problem set that just happens to be in Python.

I don't think I said "No one who gets below a 700 has impressive credentials". I was just trying to generalize that higher scoring students are more likely to have other impressive things about them.

I can agree with that (and with you for the most part). I just maintain that "near perfect" isn't part of the equation.

Edit: I never was really arguing against this (just that near perfect notion). There's a big difference between near-perfect and bad.

The math portion of the SAT doesn't even cover precalculus (stops at Algebra II). Would you really expect someone who scored below 700 to have otherwise impressive credentials?

I'll agree that the more stellar applicants do tend to have high SAT scores but that's also in part because they are a) stellar and b) the SAT is a trivial test. I still disagree that SAT is a cutoff or benchmark. I highly doubt the admissions committee sees a 600 and throws the student out before reading the rest of their application to look for things that stand out. That said, there are tons of students with 800s that don't stand out at all and get weeded out.

Exceptional candidates will be exceptional regardless of their standardized testing scores.

Edit: Not trying to say that they admit all the exceptional people either. I'm absolutely positive plenty of people get screwed by the limited number of slots despite being more than qualified.

That's not entirely correct. You don't need near perfect SATs/grades, especially at a place like MIT. I know plenty of people (myself included) who do not fit that bill. And there is plenty of opportunity to discuss your projects. I mailed MIT a packet of all the interesting work I thought I had done and they even have an optional essay where you can talk about "something you built" in their application. I think they really care about those pet projects and they are the best differentiator they have.

This blog post makes it sound like he didn't fill out an application. However, I'm guessing he did and also sent in code as supplemental material (which is quite common).

College admissions is a game. I currently go to MIT and it's definitely more meritocratic than many other institutions of similar "prestige" but it's not an exception.

  High school students today optimize their grades and SATs   
  and after school activities. They speak French and  
  Chinese, play piano and paint abstract art.  They dance  
  around and play hockey and act like they help homeless 
  people.

On the other hand this stereotype arose from an era where admissions committees were trying to create a class of well-rounded students. It still occurs to some degree. However, things are trending towards creating a well-rounded class instead (lots of highly specialized students).

Meditation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_on_meditation

It's a long term investment to bring security down to the hardware level.

From a legal aspect, how is this going to last at all? IANAL but I was under the impression most meta-search engines operated in at least a semi-grey area because they don't spoon feed illegal content to you. Most just index the big trackers and (conveniently) don't discriminate between illegal and legal content. I feel like when you are dropping torrents into buckets more specific than "video" and "audio" (e.g. linking multiple torrents to a specific movie, highlighting the HD versions) any conventional argument against aiding copyright infringement is out the window.

Awesome site though.

All of our classes are identified using numbers. The 6 corresponds to the sponsoring department (EECS) and 912 happened to be available within the department, so we snagged it.

Yep, on it right now. Will post the link in a few minutes.

Edit: It's up, see my above comment.

I'm one of the guys behind this. I realize it's MIT students only right now (we have a special 1-month term in January with no classes for competitions like this) but if there's enough interest we would love to hold an open tournament in the next few months.

We're also looking at opening our scrimmage server up to the public this month if there are enough people who want the intellectual fulfillment of competing :)

Edit: Created a small mailing list. Feel free to sign up if you want to be updated when we decide to launch an open tournament (towards the end of the month, most likely).

http://mitpokerbots.com/interest

I feel like I can't do a google search for anything technical without the top results being horrible MFA sites with content scraped from mailing lists/stackoverflow and completely plastered with ads. This might not be the same as autoblogging, but it's driving me insane and Google is definitely doing a poor job.

Yeah, that's definitely an accurate workaround I was just hoping I could factor in how my college years will affect my investments (like you said projects are pretty sensitive, so a few years and a few thousand each year may change things a lot)

This looks like a cool service. However, there are only a few brokers (mine is not listed, boo).

I've also noticed every investment site (understandably) has no student options (i.e. no salary ranges below 30k, no way to say I expect to be making $x once I graduate and play around with it). It'd be cool if someone paid attention to us since some of us do invest, but I can understand the neglect at the same time.

A few days ago I saw a link to a "roadmap" for Rails (http://techiferous.com/2010/07/roadmap-for-learning-rails/). It'd be nice if someone put together something like this for a rigorous and practical computer science skill-set.

Likes:

- Simple/clean interface

- Gossip scraping and integration into the stream

- The discussions!

Dislikes:

- Medal system isn't that compelling to me

- Streaming is pretty limited. But I assume this is due to the scarcity of legal streaming sites.

- Suggest me some shows? Maybe stuff that people who watch the shows I do are raving about?

- I constantly find myself going to Wikipedia for show information (e.g. actor names/bios/pics, etc.) -- can you scrape some of this and give me a slick way to consume it?

Overall, it's a neat site. Summer TV is always a little lackluster so I think I'll be a bit more engaged in the fall when prime time picks up some steam. Of course, I'm assuming with a bigger user base there might be a way to reward users with exclusive content which would definitely compel my active usage of this site.

Discrete mathematics: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

- Get rid of standardized testing and change the culture of teaching for the purpose of passing these tests. On the subject of just regular in-class exams: they are a necessary evil in many cases but only should be used for a mid-term or final exam. Teachers need to challenge students so that they have to work together to solve complex problems.

- Increase teacher salaries and promote the hiring of teachers with advanced degrees.

- Let people fail. Stop holding hands as much. On that note, stop catering to the lower end of the curve and holding back the smarter students. Set the standards high if not impossibly high so we can raise the definition of average.

- This one is a pipe dream: more specialized science and math schools. There are about a dozen or more sprinkled through the nation. I attended one for high school and it happened to be residential (and totally state funded). Seriously life changing.

Actually, I think it's worth considering the other side of the coin. Either work for free or ask for a wage that is comparable to your skillset (i.e. well beyond minimum wage).

Working for free is a great way to build your portfolio of projects and get some "experience" to put on your resume. Go find a startup or small business and basically tell them you can build stuff for them for free for a month. After that period, if they like you then they need to hire you full-time.

However, I do agree there is a fine line between doing this for portfolio/resume building and being used for bitch work.

At the end of the day degrees are just pieces of paper. Don't fall into the trap of going into college thinking you are going to double major in X, Y and get a minor in Z. It isn't high school anymore, so take classes you are interested in or you think will add some value to your life and adapt to the structure of a degree program over time. College admissions committees reward the biggest tools (I would know) but now that you've made it, don't waste absurd amounts of time with course work/resume filler bullshit and focus on passion projects, building relationships, etc. -- more important stuff.

Also, organic startups have a much better chance of succeeding so building a rich knowledge base in a subject that interests you is your best path to success rather than picking the degree path that may be most relevant to entrepreneurship. That being said, it may be helpful to ask people what their undergraduate education experience was like (classes/books that really influenced them, projects they worked on, etc.) and pick up a few ideas regarding where to begin?