skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've had a bit of insight into this, through some exposure to a program that attempts to treat ADHD, Aspergers and Dyslexia. The program is based on the premise that these conditions are caused by an underdeveloped cerebellum, and provides a program of exercises that are specifically designed to develop this part of the brain.

One of the tests they do in diagnosis and progress assessment is a basic "standing still" test, performed on a platform with computer-monitored sensors, and several of the exercises involve simply standing as still as possible for a few minutes.

They find that over the 12-24 months the candidate participates in the program, as their ability to stand still increases, the extent to which they suffer from these conditions diminishes.

As I'm sure many here would attest, people with ADHD, AS and Dyslexia often have above-average IQ scores, but struggle with school performance or endeavors that require similar strengths, like conventional office jobs.
Yeah, there's lots of different interpretations for the average. The predictive one works well (expected value), another one is where the "balancing point" would be if you had physical weights at those coordinates.

If you had 1kg weights at distances 2 3 and 10 (sum of 15), you should put the fulcrum of a lever at 5 to keep the set balanced. (Torque on right: 10 - 5 = 5. Torque on left: 5 - 2 = 3, and 5 - 3 = 2, for a total of 5).

Different sized masses? You literally take the weighted average :).
Sounds like an Austin Powers movie.
So for example I rarely concentrated very hard in class, but enjoyed to for 12 hour days at chess tournaments. I knew plenty of similar people, some of whom were diagnosed with things like ADHD.

I'm not saying all children are good at concentration. I doubt most of the kids who stand still well are very good at concentration. It's just not what is being tested for and not what schools really care about.
Compared to what? Obviously we think it's the best thing to do right now, so it has advantages over every other possible job. Name a job, and I'll tell you why I'm not working there.
+1 for info about actual usage of tests like this
Apple to iPhone App Store applicants: Just hang tight
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Changing my Job
I never said anything about resetting variables, and in fact, I emphatically mentioned copying the stack by way of clarification. I'm surprised you would misinterpret me to be saying anything about resetting variables. I'll try to refrain from using "state" in the future, when speaking to someone that could be from a functional programming background, since it seems to be so easy to misinterpret as "variables". I wasn't aware anyone used the term "state" to mean "variables", but I come from a C-derived lineage, and may have missed that memo.

I'll also try to refrain from commenting in language weenie threads. It's not my forte.
I don't think its that controversial to suggest that a child who can sit still longer has better self-discipline. Self-discipline isn't exactly the same as ability to concentrate, but as a simple indicator for young children its interesting to study.
On the other hand this guy never gives up either. It won't help you if you're a nut job working on nonsense. There is a point where you do have to listen to smart people and try to gain an accurate perspective of yourself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Newman_(inventor)
Will C.E.O. Eric Schmidt be able to keep Google true to its roots?
No better or worse than usual (actually maybe a little less hostile than the last three batches--I know Winter07 had more hostility in the comments, although this one may catch up by the time all is said). TC comments are always full of also-rans and never-was entrepreneurs who are spitting vitriol, and they come out in force for the YC demo day roundup.
Its a clever pun on the German word for wonderful.
First Galileo (the EU's GPS alternative), now this. Do Europeans enjoy wasting taxpayer money on duplicating perfectly good solutions in the name of nationalism?
http://heroku.com/

Link wasn't in the post (that I could find)
What happened to Europe? Before the middle of the last century, it was the center of everything, innovation included.

How did it lose so much so fast?
Grr! Damn you Tony Wright! ;-)
I think the US was ahead economically by around 1900. Scholarship tends to lag by a generation or two.

Very interesting question though, and one I've thought about a lot, coming from Europe to the US as a kid.

It's possible that Europe may have only lost relatively. I.e. Europe may not have fallen so much as that other places have risen.

The single biggest problem with Europe may be government. There's a tradition in most northern European countries of strong central government. And the growth of technology in the 19c made it possible for a hands-on central government to be very much more hands-on. This seems to have had a disastrous effect on certain kinds of economic growth.

Remember too that Europe had two huge wars go through it during the 20th century. That can't have helped.
Ask YC: Salary vs. Hourly for the Startup
I was talking with a friend earlier today who works in IT, and we got on the topic of Salaried pay versus Hourly. It was a good conversation given the scope of his employment, constantly working extra hours (overtime as he's on salaried pay) which lead me to wonder:

How would a startup work with payment as funding and financing are always questions of concern?

Discuss.
I don't see how this is very newsworthy (in the HN context) or likely to spawn an interesting discussion.
YC could fund 17,486 startups with that money. ($306 million is almost exactly the square of the amount we invest in the average startup.)

Maybe you wouldn't want to spend it all on seed rounds. But $306 million spent well would be enough to make a startup hub to rival Silicon Valley.
His book "Higher Order Perl" is awesome. And Memoize is so neat that I go around looking for places to use it.
Yes, by using a gif. (Gif is better here as the final image has few colours and sharp contrasting colours beside each other.)

And yes it could be done with Gimp/html/css/MS Paint, whatever you know.
Library 2.0 - Service for the next generation library
What They Don’t Tell You About Being An Entrepreneur
What's more important: Form or Function?
Recent news surrounding popular blogging platforms has focused on their ability to help users "design" their blogs. And it made me wonder, how much will the availability of themes influence the choice of which platform to use? Is it one of the first things you look at, or do you look into designs only after finding all the other features you want?

Below is an assortment of theme selection pages for various platforms.

TypePad: http://www.typepad.com/go/design-assistant/

Movable Type: www.movabletype.org/design/assistant/

b2Evolution: http://skins.b2evolution.net/

WikyBlog: http://www.wikyblog.com/Special/Main/Templates
When you can influence productivity via payment: Don't pay for time but for units of work done. That motivates the employee and gives you a better performance control.

But that's not true for supporting jobs (e.g. secretary) where it's up to your cost accounting whether you pay for time flat (monthly) or by workload (hour).
Google adds a new layer of security to Google Apps
http://heroku.com/beta

I put myself on the waiting list and got an invite within the hour.

Pretty impressed with Heroku so far.
I think perhaps Mr Cringely has overestimated the difficulty of plugging in a USB blueray drive and installing toast.

If people make their livelihood with technologies such as this (wedding videographers) it is unlikely that they'd be stymied by such a leap.
I second "Modern Compiler Design" by Dick Grune. Without being bound to any language in particular, it gives you all the juicy details about how lex,yacc, LL(1) parses, recursive descent parsers etc really work really work, various backend/code ge techniques, (threading, BURS etc) and also how compilation worlks for various programming paradigms (functional, logic, imperative). This is the most "dense" beginner's book I've found. And it is very engagingly written too.
Once you've worked through this you are in good shape for more advanced books like Muchnick's.

Good Luck
Oh, yeah I didn't even read them... just assumed they were other posts.

feels dumb
One a related note, can the government aid basic research here in the U.S. (NSF, NIH, etc.) or are the agencies dispensing that money too bureacratic as well? Here are some numbers: http://dellweb.bfa.nsf.gov/Top50Inst2/default.asp
Careful about paying per unit of work. Your workers might throw quality out the window in order to get more quantity and thus more money...
Top NSF grant recipients
This list is rather suprising.
The headline is a sad mark on our schools...

Especially as they talk about young children, any faults lie with their parents--the same generations who think they were tougher when they were kids, are creating problems by never saying no to their own offspring. And, schools don't ever want to keep students back, so the curriculum is designed so that anybody who shows up to class can pass. Required daily homework and classwork that might represent 50% of one's grade, instead of a couple of tests that define 80% of one's grade, teaches kids to focus on submitting paperwork instead of actually putting in thought nor allowing them to figure out how to do the learning they might need to do.

This process works to ignore incompetency in basic abilities year after year in students, as long as they have good grades, the fact which allows educators to say that college opportunities their kids have available to them are also good, and therefore, that they did their job. Not to mention that schooling our students one month longer, and for 2 years longer, than other countries do, in the same "conditions" described, furthers work towards decreasing independent thought and leaves many kids unprepared for real life.

Sometimes I wonder if that when people think our education system does our kids justice because our students are better at sports (that are mostly only played in the US), have more options of after-school activities, and have the chance (based on parent income) to utilize many different types of expensive private educational tools, tutors, "theories", consultants, certifications, and textbooks, if they're not missing that...

...the huge factor that explains why our students end up being more entrepreneurial or have the potential to get paid a lot of money when they finally do grow up, is that the US is incredibly wealthy--and at the same time cannot keep track of money any better than its average citizen--than that we're good at educating our students remotely close to what we should be given the money the government budgets for education.

I don't think we would hinder our country's strength in either entrepreneurship or Football, Baseball, Lacrosse, and Softball programs if we were to increase our understanding of math and science in this country; nor would it hurt to have a law that would require mandatory monthly teacher to parent education on what is expected of their student and ways the parent can help the student actually succeed at learning the material rather than submitting enough homework assignments to pass. Of course, having more educated people instead of "consumers" could affect our economy "negatively" as well as positively, but there are already many ways our economy is being pulled in both directions, so I don't think that teaching arithmetic and the scientific method to everyone would be a crazy thing to do.
Commercial product but brilliant reality hack.
I've never understood "defense in depth" to be in the context of a single application. Rather, an entire network will have "defense in depth" if it has such things as a firewall with proper rules at every gateway, machines with proper virus protection that aren't running silly services, and users with proper responsibility to not run things sent to them via e-mail.

In that context, if a supposed "hacker" wants to gain access to files on machine X, they may be able to penetrate gateway A, router B and firewall C, but they still will be blocked by NIDS D or end up in honeypot E.
Brings new meaning to "just sing the alphabet baby, we'll do the rest".

Seriously with stuff like this available to the average punter, could the age of celebrity finally be over? Here's hoping.
Specify the unit's quality. Payment depends on compliance to the specification. One can agree to pay a basic monthly salary (we're talking about employees who are motivated by some income security) and make all else a variable income. One needs to find of course the balance between loyalty to the company (monthly steady income stream) and productivity (income by units). So it depends on both the startup and the workforce where to set the priorities.
Well a pun anyway, yeah I got it.
Self regulation and IQ are both important characteristics. It makes sense that self regulation has a stronger correlation with better school performance than IQ. School tests one's ability to regulate their time and focus, studying a paying attention.

I believe that children must mix "raw" play where they can imagine their surroundings. The good old empty box comes to mind... it can be a race car, a castle, a rocket ship and so on and so forth.

On the other hand I think the commentary undervalues the importance of regulated play. The learning of rules will come in handy when one enters school and the work world where there are many formal rules to follow.
If someone needs to be paid extra (hourly) in order to stay one extra hour in the evening, they're probably not an ideal startup employee.
Ideas for Startup Vesting
Top 10 Tools For Tracking Web Site Statistics
Any statistician would tell you the mean is biased and the median is less biased.
That's just Google Maps doing its standard wraparound (east touches west on a sphere). The shape is more like a U.
I'm surprised there aren't any good comments about the photo.
Glad you liked it! I'm always on the lookout for ideas that help me sleep better at night.

Thinking about it, I'll probably do a future post about some other things in that same category. For example, I like to checksum data structures before I serialize them across the network and after I rebuild them, just to make sure there aren't any bugs or network glitches. Nothing worse than trying to track down a problem that was caused by flaky networking or bad memory.
Wait, wait. What is the appropriate unit of work for programming?

Lines of Code? We've been down that road, and it doesn't work well. Especially if you improve the project by deleting unneeded code - did you just do negative work?

Features? Some features are wildly more work to implement than others.

Bug fixes? Besides not being a sufficient measure of work making new code, making a bug fix the work metric penalizes conscientious programmers who find and fix all their bugs very quickly before they check in, or if they report them then they're wasting time writing about bugs that took less time to fix than they did to write about.

I think in an ideal world programmers should get paid by work units, but I don't think there's a way to measure it that doesn't create more overhead than it is worth. In the end, people get paid by the hour not because it's be best way, but because hours are easy to measure.
I'm sure the best Vim users on HN could fill pages and pages with "favorite tips". Seems like I learn something new and/or cool about Vim every week.
Never give up. But know when to change directions. You don't want to keep banging your head against a wall.

Bad ideas can be salvaged with good work ethic and execution. But make sure that you have the right idea before you start your march forward.
Here is my two cents:

Salary, in USA, usually means an exempt worker, which is for those professions (software engineering included), where you can't directly measure their output. So, you pay somebody a fixed early salary, then the person can work 30 or 50 hour or whatever, that's something between you and the employee.

A non-exempt employee is sombody that the work can be measured directly (QA, secretaries, call center help support people, factory workers), and they are usually paid hourly, with overtime kicking after 40 hrs of work.

The only time you see a software engineer working hourly, is when they are hired in a contract basis (i.e. work for a given amount of time, 3-6 months etc.). Even this contract can't be longer that 18 months, as you will be breaching labor laws, as this person should probably be considered as full time, exempt employee.

Now,in a startup, if you hiring somebody full time (not contract work with fixed amount of time), you are probably breaching labour laws. A graphic designer working hourly is ok, a software engineer, no no.

In most startups I know, when the first employees are highered, they usually are highered salary basis, so they can work as many hours it is needed.
Awful headline.

One of multiple exercises in a 1940s test of 'self-regulation' involved standing still. Children in 2001 don't obediently stand still as well. Separately, the article notes (without referencing source) that "good executive function is a better predictor of success in school than a child's IQ".

The custom headline going from 'standing' to 'school success' is tenuous extrapolation that, if the reporter had put it directly in their article, would not have survived editing and fact-checking.

Bad headlines waste readers' time and send discussion off in tangential directions based on skewed understandings.

OTOH, I love the article -- good info on how self-management, in individual children (or even groups) might be best encouraged, and how toys/things might be just the wrong thing. (What would that mean for the OLPC?)
I think this post is great and concise.
I am not an entrepreneur yet but I keep having these battles with myself daily about ideas. There is something about it that is very satisfying, yet sometimes it wont let you sleep at night.
Good idea, but it is still rough. The actual value of the idea wouldn't matter in an auction setting, it would just be the perceived value that would matter. And that perception would usually be flawed.

IP has value. I don't know if a mere idea with no protection is IP though.

Information is meant to disseminate. It is nearly impossible to manage the spread of the information. Nothing stops someone from reselling an idea or just distributing it freely after distribution.

Usually when ideas are sold there is a specific context for the ideas. Consultants can come in and just give advice (ideas) and receive compensation, but they are solving a problem. Not just a random idea.
Shift happens. Old media better shape up and change also. The Internet provides new opportunities for old media in a new context. Through social networking and streaming on line content it provides a new way media can reach its target.
I have a related story. During a visit to a doctor when I was a kid, the doctor found me unruly, noisy, and over-active. Being a friend of my parents, he flatly and frankly told them, and in front of me, that I "cannot sit still" and suggested they enroll me into a Go classroom, which they promptly did.

After a few months I visited him again, and he said, again in everyone's presence, that I was "much better." I was actually not yet mature enough to care or comprehend what it was all about, but I am thankful for having had those lessons.

I also daresay that the benefits of taking such lessons would have comparable or perhaps superior effects to these lab-controlled exercises, at least when there is still uncertainty.

However, as per the article, the goal, I believe, is self regulation, so at least in my case, the neural changes probably were not focused in the cerebellum.
Thanks for the great read.
skip lists are not bad at all. also, i guess for unrolled-linked-list you might have to have different 'num-items' for different cache sizes.

better would be to have a library of cache-oblivious data-structures & algorithms. google for 'harald-prokop' for some interesting stuff.
awesome. one of my first events in the area. looking forward to it. oh yeah, if i joined with clickpass, im assuming the email associated is the one on my clickpass?
Think of employees as subcontractors. Their basic monthly salaries are your costs of having them on standby to work on your assignments. Then you can (more or less) calculate the value of a unit to your company / project and that's what you pay for it. Roughly speaking. So "unit" won't translate into "work unit" (like LoC and similar quantities) but into "subproject". And so we're talking about capital budgeting. A good hacker can understand and apply this creatively after some good books or courses (or the VC advisors provide the knowledge), 'cause in the end it's just some basic concepts + formulae.
Is that an exclusive or?
A startup will need to hire strong talent and retain them during critical periods to have a hope of success. The enticement needs to go beyond a simple deal of annual or hourly agreement. Bonuses based on completion of goals and other kinds of benefits are important. Shares in the company is even more important. If you don't have the enticement, you can just quit tomorrow and paid just as much somewhere else. The cost to the employee who quits is a tiny amount of risk in transitioning to a new job. The cost to the startup can be huge due to delays in hiring and ramping up new employees.
I think the emotional rollercoaster applies to anything you do where you have a large personal stake in it and yet it's new, innovative, and unproven. I remember feeling that way with several of my volunteer & employment projects, even though the outcome wouldn't make a financial difference to me either way.

It's exacerbated when you actually start working on your startup, though, because you have so much more invested. If it's just your idea, then it's only your pride at stake. When you start backing it up with your own money and large amounts of your time, it can become overwhelming unless you specifically try not to think about it.

It's gotten to the point where when my friends ask me how the startup's going, I answer "Depends when you ask. Right now, pretty well, but if you asked me this morning, I'd tell you that we're doomed."
Create Rivalry, Make Friends!
Not sure if this is available here as well but I noticed the 2006 proceedings include Paul Graham's MP3 for "Hackers and Founders" session.

http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix06/tech/mp3/graham.mp3
I think it depends on where the startup is in its development. If there is no income, and the startup is very young, there should be no employees. The founders should all take a salary, even if it's just a token salary of their living expenses, for tax purposes.

In my opinion, anyone working on building the primary product of a company (the hackers) should be a founder, or have a significant equity share in the company, especially if the company has yet to earn a profit (assumed if the primary product isn't build yet).

If the startup is at the point where they are earning a steady income, and needs to hire additional people, then it depends on the role needed. Secretaries, customer support, and other administrative work should be hourly (or even better, contracted out). Sales should be commission (to the extent permitted by law). Additional hackers should be on salary with stock options and the expectation to do a lot of work beyond the typical 40 hour work week.

I'm interested in hearing what others think about my suggestions. Please let me know what's worked/worked better for you.