bloomshed

I've been a high school social studies teacher for the past 3 years or so. I'm currently laid off and substituting, so I've been able to observe what goes on in a lot of subject areas outside of my training. I was thinking today about the potential impact of digital "textbooks" on the classroom, especially for subjects like math and reading.

A lot of students make progress in different ways and at different speeds. It would be extremely easy to tailor instruction when students are moved away from textbooks and class-wide instruction to laptop-based, small group or individual instruction.

Every student could have a laptop with (extremely) limited Internet access and simply rotate through classes staffed by teachers trained in different subjects. Students would work on web-based curriculum that meets them on their individual achievement level.

All Johnny or Suzy has to do is make progress towards showing that he/she is learning, stay on task in class, and not break anything/anyone to be moderately "successful" in school. A machine gets broken, no worries, get a new machine, all the work is web based.

Smells like the future to me.

I'm a non-coding founder trying to develop a website. I'm looking to find a technical cofounder and I need to understand how to better work and connect with coders.

I've read a fair amount about retaining programmers but most of those articles are confusing to me because they contain lots of coder specific language. I thought it would be more fun to have a discussion around the following question:

What should non-coders do (or not do) to make it easier for hackers be excited about collaborating and developing a great product?

I'm at a crossroads with my app and I'm looking for some insight from those who've come before me.

I've spent most (OK...all) of my meager family investment seed money ($3K) on a very basic demo that essentially "secures" the most sensitive IP for my concept and demonstrates the core defining feature of the app. I know that coding something probably in no way protects a concept, but I felt like I had to have something real to show investors because I'm not a programmer and this is my first project/startup/attempt-at-something-awesome.

My question is what would be the best use of my time moving forward? Should I keep pitching friends and family for cash to add more power to my demo? Should I work on developing a great presentation for angel investors?

I feel like the window of opportunity for my app is probably 10-12 months from closing. If I'm not in the market by then, I'll be toast. I've been working on the idea for the past 14 months, I know what I want to do with it. If you were me what would you do?

Forgive me HN vets, but haven't seen this topic lately. I was wondering what apps people loved to use the most, thought it would be a fun discussion.

iTunes blew my mind. I spent 3 days in college getting all my bootlegged mp3s set up. iTunes was so powerful and intuitive compared to everything else I was aware of at the time. It got me thinking about why some things are great while other things suck.

I'm an outsider to the development community. I enjoy thinking about software and media, however, and came up with an idea that I've been working on for a year now. I started my own LLC and began contracting with freelance developers. As a recent applicant to the YC winter session, I'm told to participate and post on the forum to give the YC crew an idea about how I think.

There's a big problem though: I don't know the language of the profession well enough to contribute my input to the vast majority of content I see on the forum. I feel like attempting to participate in a discussion in which I know %40 of what is really going on only sets me up to look woefully incompetent.

Any help out there for guys like me who are new to the culture of developers?