skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a hacker and father of four (2 grown now) I've read this thread with interest. What books to read as a new dad?

I wouldn't read any books. Or if you must read them, do so with a pinch of salt. Use your instinct. People in books will tell you all sorts of sounds-good things that rarely have any traction in the real world. It's like business tapes and self-help books: they know a bunch of people are out there looking for advice and they're going to pump your head full of something for your twenty bucks whether it works or not.

I am going to try to make a simple observation that I hope is not too controversial. For all of those "I did X,Y, Z and it is so much better" folks, last I checked humans have been making little replacements for millions of years. These replacements have done all sorts of things like introduce philosophy, conquer sickness, sail the oceans, learn to fly, etc. And I guarantee that none of these hundreds of thousands of exceptional cases ever had a parent that read some special book. Perhaps there is a pattern to how they were raised. If so, that empirical data is long lost to history.

So how about this? Try being a human with your kids. Seems to have worked for the rest of history except the last few decades. Might be worth giving it a shot, right? There are plenty of people out there who will read the books for you. Take a look around on this thread. And they will be more than willing to provide you their special "insight" on your situation -- complete with guilt trips, moral bromides, and sing-a-long philosophies. You should get used to these folks anyway, because whatever you do they'll still be there providing you with their counsel. Whether you want it or not.
wow, i was your fan at the time
I have a two year old. He can reason.

"But I WAAANNNT TOOOO..."

'Firstly - that's whining. And you know that you are less likely to get what you want when you whine, don't you?'

'Secondly, the reason you can't go over there is because that road is too dangerous for you to be near at your age. When you're bigger, we'll teach you how to do that more safely and you will be able to.'

[and if over-repeated...]

'Now, if you carry on complaining about that then we'll have to go home/you'll have to go inside/you'll have to go and stand over there as a punishment]. You're making this no fun for me and no fun for you. You can X Y Z which is a decent alternative'

[and never give a threat you're not willing and able to follow through on.]

[Child runs to road...."STOP!" + rugby tackle if need be.]

I don't dispute your right to raise your child as you wish, but I do dispute the reasoning you've demonstrated as your justification for doing so.
The problem is that for a startup in hardware the initial investment will be much more important. If you look only at the development tools (for example : simulation tools) it is already very expensive. And if you don't want to be only a R&D startup, you will have to invest in very expensive production hardware. Maybe the easiest way to start alone is to be a hardware consultant.
Actual Performance, Perceived Performance
White-Label like it's 2005
C# and XNA - Are Universities Teaching The Wrong Things?
"... are their any haxxors on YC in australia? ..."

yep, try here ~ http://hackrtrackr.com/state.php?region=&country=AU
How to Submit Patches to Open Source Projects with Github
A Lisp through the Looking Glass
It's gone :(
read "the no cry sleep solution" by Pantley, Sears

it works, and you don't need to make your baby cry alone every night.
The Federal Reserve's rescue has failed
I'm interested in the software side of hardware :) (firmware)
Want Success? Learn to Listen
Learning Lisp is hard up front but makes things easy later. Last week we got a digital photo frame to see how well it worked with ourdoings.com and found that, though it worked, 4 new RSS feeds would be a big win. I implemented them in about 20 minutes in Scheme. Added few lines to the codebase. In other languages I would have been tempted to cut/paste.

For more on the photo frame and RSS feeds, see

http://ourdoings.com/2008-03-01
The History of Tomorrow’s Internet: Introduction | drstarcat.com
The rhythm method for development. Sounds great, will try.
Jason.NET 2.0
Maximizing Human Performance
I dabble a little in hardware hacking. I just had fun interfacing a simple temperature sensor to my little one's OLPC. Will blog that shortly. Now I'm playing around with Arduino and want to hook it up using an XPort.
The Zen of Tech: 12 Powerful Ways to Keep Your Online Life Simple and Peaceful
Debugging In My Sleep
Wal-Mart Tastemakers Write Unfiltered Blog
I'm not saying to avoid it because of regulatory burden, but because of unknown regulatory burdens.

You can plan for known regulatory burdens. For instance, in the automotive industry, just add millions of dollars worth of safety testing to your R&D budget. If the business plan still works, run with it, and calculate odds. In the defense industry, make sure you hire lots of lobbyists.

It's the unknown unknowns, not the known unknowns that will kill you.
Expansion strategy: Is Facebook's Platform a mistake?
yagibear, are u in syd?
i like both. for example, on the homepage when you click on input 'your name goes here', two new buttons appear.. that's just details, but details are what distinguish great design/interface from an average one.
Yes. I have some ideas for web facing hardware...
Happens to me on a regular basis. I wake up in the night with a solution to a bug I am chasing or some difficult interface that remained unfinished.

Sometimes it comes right out of the blue. Last week I awoke in the night with the realisation that there was an "edge case" bug in some code I was due to deliver the next day - and I certainly had not consciously been thinking about that code after I had finished with it - almost the opposite as I had been happy with the run of tests I had applied.

The brain is a wondrous organ.
Microsoft to SaaS: We have you surrounded
I use Servee (full disclosure; I developed it) From the start I decided that disqus was going to be THE way that we were going to do comments; but It's hardly a blog since RSS isn't implemented yet.
I was looked at like a freak when I mentioned this in my pre/post-natal class, but I got a lot out The Language Instinct, by Steven Pinker.

Evolutionary neurobiology is a great way to think about skill acquisition in young children.
Escape From Corporate America
I was at Seaworld recently and they talked about they only used primary rewards (ie, food) with their animals rarely. The orcas responded better to all kinds of other feedback: backrubs, ice cubes, warm water, toys.

I've never used spanking on my child.

But I have used a variety of other techniques to express displeasure, ranging from freaked out yelling (in dangerous situations), to removing them from the situation, to denying dessert.

I think that, like primary rewards in animal training or online ads in web startups, spanking represents an unimaginative approach to the problem. The lowest common denominator. The solution you use when you can't come up with anything better.

I expect more than that out of myself and my son.
Canadian University Puts IT Whiz Kids in 'Dormcubator'
I'll admit I didn't read the book. But I used a variant that worked spectacularly well.

It took a(very, very long) three nights to get my kid to sleep on his own. Each time he awoke and cried for me, I waited about 2 minutes, then I went to his room, comforted him and put him back to bed. And then left.

Lather, rinse, repeat every 10 minutes all night.

By the third night, he'd figured out that whenever he called, I'd show up. And then didn't feel like he needed to!
Digital Photography 2.0
What matters most on your cellphone?
Shift Happens – The Future of Advertising
Five Memorable Books About Programming
Building a Brand with Widgets
My day-job project is being done in Seam... it does seem quite rails-inspired, and comes with a lot of free scaffolding and tight integration with Hibernate. We are using jBPM, too, which also gives a lot of free scaffolding.
The "important people" myth debunked
Hmmn, maybe Daily Standups are a Scrum thing? I can never keep the various sects straight.

That and last-minute release planning (the Product Backlog).
My brother was a hacker in the late 90s, early 00s. He has a massive online hockey pool that he created somewhere around 98 or 99, all wrote in php.

He wants to revamp the site, which he hasn't fundamentally changed in 5 years or more, and asked me what to suggest.
'python manage.py inspectdb', the built in admin, and clean separation between code and style converted him to Django.
Thanks.

The high suicide rate is an interesting fact. Checking on http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suicider... Finland and Japan are indeed right next to each other. But on http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murde... Finland's murder rate is closer to USA (#30 vs #24) than Japan's #60.

The parallels between Germans and Japanese were indeed about being methodological. I am unsure how this idea really holds though, as the education systems are, AFAIK, very different. There's still much to find out...
I have a great firmware idea I'd like to see implemented.

We bought a digital photo frame last week. Normally it sits horizontally. Horizontal photos fill the frame, but vertical photos are squeezed to fit. It detects when you turn it on its side, so that vertical photos fill the frame and horizontal photos are squeezed to fit.

Squeezed photos are too tiny, so I added horizontal-only and vertical-only Media RSS feeds to ourdoings.com, the world's best photo-sharing site. When we change the orientation of the frame we change the RSS feed.

This works great for my wife and me, but it takes some button pressing to change RSS feeds. Too much button pressing for non-technical people, I think.

If you hacked the firmware so that it switched back and forth automatically according to the orientation sensor, that would be really cool. People could set up a frame, send it to relatives as a gift, and the relatives could just plug it in and watch it go.

http://ourdoings.com/2008-03-01
Example of Linux Process Creation
> the newest stuff like AJAX and PHP

Yup, when that is new, you have a problem. Other than that, I am so envious of those kids.
I hear you, as youre a father, you came to see things differently, im surprised how many people dont act like humans around their kids! that say about common sense being the most uncommon of senses its true.
Not a book recommendation, but I suggest playing classical music often :)
You can also exclude certain file patterns by throwing in a grep -v or two, eg. my command for counting JavaScript lines and excluding 3rd-party libraries is:

find . -name "*.js" | grep -v jquery | xargs wc -l
Haha, unless something monstrous is going on, it would be a couple years, maybe more, before little kids can understand that book!

By the way, what is this pre/post-natal class?
I try to follow my gut (and my wifes gut), that seems to be the best way; But im sure there are a lot of things our gut wouldnt be good enough just from not having enough information, thats why im trying to reach the collective intelligence on the subject.
This story gets written everytime Apple comes out with a new product.

I know Woz did great work in the past -- and reporters I guess love disagreement between founders -- but Woz's analysis is no better than a layman's when it comes to Apple's modern ventures.
"And I guarantee that none of these hundreds of thousands of exceptional cases ever had a parent that read some special book. Perhaps there is a pattern to how they were raised. If so, that empirical data is long lost to history."

While I agree that you should read "with a pinch of salt", that's true for anything you read. But the sentiment that you oughtn't read anything is a bit overstated, it seems. Why?

One would (theoretically) avoid engaging a massive project without understanding the fundamentals of project design / development. Nor ought we, say, start a home renovation project without understanding the basics of construction. While one could certainly _end up_ successfully completing one's objectives, there's a hefty 'dumb tax' to be paid without learning from the mistakes of others.

Child rearing is no different. We don't magically know how to raise children. Some of us are lucky in having had good models in our parents. But even in that instance, a broader basis of knowledge is helpful because your children aren't your parent's children.

Certainly one can go overboard. And certainly some parents latch on to cargo cult science as if it were holy writ. But one can also go too far in the other direction and not read anything.
Do you get any other privileges with such high karma, or is the color change it?
Self-hosted after realizing that I was competing with blogs as much as with photo-sharing sites.

http://ourdoings.com/index.html
We do that a lot! since pregnancy, in the afternoons, and while bathing her.
You are right in regards to adsense. Adsense can work as a business model, but only at a MUCH larger scale than most realize. When you factor in natural ad-aversion, it raises the the bar for success to a number you will be unlikely to achieve without a mainstream site.

That said, job ads are a very cool approach. They pay more and in-the-know managers are willing to pay a premium for elite developers.
My formal education and majority of background is hardware (EE undergrad and grad). I also work full time doing hardware design and firmware mostly.
The problem with a lot of hardware is the initial investment and that things take longer. If you are just hacking some simple hareware together like a microcontroller and nothing special its easy to proto, but if you get into things that need to be prototyped on PCBs the cost and time goes up, especially the time factor.
I tend to enjoy software more these days simply because I can compile things and test them right away. It can get onerous when you spend days laying out circuit boards, a week or two to spin them, then 2 weeks to get them built, while you just spent about 10k for 50 prototypes.
macrumors has a little note on this, including a quote about how sometimes reporters distort his comments causing him to get phone calls from Steve Jobs. http://www.macrumors.com/2008/03/03/woz-on-macbook-air-3g-ip...

The theage.com.au is a handful of sentences culled from a one hour talk and thirty minute Q&A to support an intriguing headline. After reading the headline and first opening you might be surprised to also know...

Mr. Wozniak carries an iPhone everywhere, but also carries several other phones for different purposes. (Including a razr for its 3G.)

He likes the design of the air and sounds like he lusts for it but wants to be able to burn DVDs anytime anywhere and have multiple batteries in case he is caught on a plane without a power source.

A more complete article is http://www.macworld.com.au/blogs/view/macbook-air-won-t-be-a...

In the realm of the unrelated... I wonder if there will be an external battery market for the air? Back in the early 90s you could get batteries that were the footprint of your computer and about 3/4" thick to stack your computer on and extend the life. Lead acid, ah... those were the days. Today I would think a nice lithium job, sort of log shaped with a padded groove on the top might be a winner. Leave it in the bottom of your bag to serve as ballast and the all important edge protector. Pull out a power cord from the bag when you need to plug in the laptop. Charge the bag overnight. (Guess at number without looking up data...) 4lbs of battery device might give you 15 hours of extra runtime.
Moserware: What Does It Take To Become A Grandmaster Developer?
I think the chance of a "decent payout after spending 4 years of your life" is smaller than you expect, for both founders and employees.

I thought/think much the same as you, which is why I'm founding my own startup after working for 3 years at 2 other ones. I had similar equity offers as you - 0.1% at one startup, none at the second (and an offer of 0.02% at a third that I turned down). I used to think that employees were insane for taking a straight salary instead of a shot at a big payout. After 5 months working full-time on my own startup with no salary, I'm not entirely sure. Obviously I think that on-balance the startup bargain is more appealing, else I'd go get a job, but I also think the scales are much more even than I'd initial thought.

If you do take a job at the startup, take it to learn, not to get rich. You won't get rich. 80-90% of startups fail outright and nobody gets anything, other than whatever venture money was paid out in salaries. If it does succeed, you won't get rich with an employee's option grant, unless the startup really hits it big (like, Google or Microsoft-sized). One of my coworkers worked at a startup that was bought for $42M - he ended up with $3000. I do know someone else that ended up with a multi-million-$ payout as employee #35, but she was a VP and the company in question was Stratus, which momentarily had a billion-$ market cap. She ended up losing much of it when Stratus stock crashed anyway.

If you do go the founder route, do it for meaning and not for money. It has to be something you'd want to do anyways, regardless of whether there's a huge payout attached. Because from 5 months in, that huge payout looks pretty remote. (I wish I'd paid more attention to webwright's advice on tractability, in another comment thread.)

On a side note, I always wondered why some startups are so stingy with equity. If you give out big-company equity awards, you get big-company effort. And if the people who are actually doing the work are putting in big-company effort levels, how do you expect to catch the big companies? The conclusion I reached is that the startup should have product-market fit before hiring people, so that success is just a matter of crossing Ts and dotting Is, but neither of the startups I've worked at were at that point. (And sure enough, one failed outright and the other is sorta walking-dead: profitable but not growing, with a pretty narrow customer base.)
NYT on Scrabulous and Hasbro
The World's Largest Supercomputing Cloud
What's the real European growth rate?
I dabble a bit. I'm a ham radio operator, so I've built and tinkered with radios before. Also, when I have some free time and money (mostly time), I'm going to get an FPGA and explore an idea I had for a massively-parallel processor design.
umm, maybe sorta true only. currently with the price/performance of fpga's fast approaching custom asic's, i think fpga's are not a bad bet to start hacking stuff on.

also, you can buy fpga h/w approx 100k gates etc. for < 1000$ (cheaper if you are student, and can get it via some univ. program). design, and simulation tools are also available for free (with periodic registrations etc.) the only (slight) pain point being that the s/w is generally windows only.
Well, we have people claiming to be under 12.
I always have to plug Managing Gigabytes whenever a discussion of computer books comes up. Great reference for anyone dealing with searching or compressing large amounts of information:

http://www.amazon.com/Managing-Gigabytes-Compressing-Multime...
If the company already has about 10-15 employees, you're not looking at much equity left, assuming that the other employees get the same you do. If 2 founders and 10 employees got equal amounts, you would be looking at 8.3% per person, and if there were 17 people total (15 + 2 founders, not including you) that puts the company at 5.9% per person.

This is just a starting point, You have to assume that the founders have the lion's share of the equity, and that the amount of equity per additional employee trends downward the later the employee joined. It could be that the company only has 5% equity left for future employees, and so they have to offer only a small percentage of the equity. In any case, try to see what they have available, and again, offer to take only a token salary if anything in return for a greater equity share.

Good luck!
They don't belong to anyone, just consider it a good habit that may or may not work for you.
Can Architects Save Libraries from the Internet?
This is exactly why you should rest a day before you push a big release to your app/site. After a marathon coding session there are bound to be bugs that will pop up in your dreams, and you'll catch them in time.
Are there anything like this for python (w/wo django)?
Hey Ivan, stop reading the comments on TechCrunch (ValleyWag too)
I was part of a very Cambridge nutty-crunch-granola class called "Hypnobirthing" run by the midwifery clinic we used.

The pre- part was a lot of learning about the techniques and how to use them.

The post- was a get together with lots of very young kids with parents talking about what worked and what didn't.
I don't think I'd want to starting out by learning to code relatively complicated things to a framework. If you learn a framework you won't be so much exposed to the real technologies - HTTP, HTML, CSS, Javascript. I think I'd start by reading the RFCs for those. Then write some web pages by hand with HTML and then try to write a program to do what you just did by hand. Also study the source of any other web apps you can find - open source software is great for learning.
FounderLOC (FLOC?) is probably a better metric than Enterprise LOC (ELOC). Can we add this qualifier to the YCNews vocabulary?
Kingdom of Israel ? That's more biblical myth than real history.
I guess my point was not to argue the reasoning power of a 2 year old directly. I think we definitely disagree on this. My point was that spanking creates a visceral aversion to a behavior that is immediate and very different from a reasoned response. There is no "last time I did this I got spanked and so I don't think I'll do it again" thought process, only an automatic nervous response that associates built in pain avoidance with an action.

I'm not here to say when or how much spanking is appropriate. This is for each parent to decide for themselves. I'm just saying that it can and does work where reason fails, and if used appropriately and with discretion, its not the soul-draining horror some alarmists make it out to be.
Why There Will Never Be A Startup (Bubble) Bust
Perhaps this quote can help you answer that question:

"I am not particularly fond of the real estate industry, and it is not as sexy as solving anything in healthcare" - jyu
FPGA allows you to do digital hardware. My point of view is that a startup will have troubles competing on digital hardware development. Digital hardware is kinda "easy" developpment that can be done much cheaper in eastern europe or asia. For a startup to have a chance to succeed, I guess it would be better to focus in a niche market which required tricky analog design that can not be outsourced or done much faster by big companies.
Agreed. If you already know Smalltalk, then Seaside is the best possible framework to get started with. You will be at home, and it probably won't feel too different than what you are already doing.
There was a good thread last week about learning Lisp:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=125766

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126186 (a child comment on that thread that summed up a lot of the ideas).
I think this should also work with comments as you can easily click the wrong direction by mistake. Anyway, I like the idea of negative voting with a cost. How about:

You need 20 karma to down vote and each vote costs one karma point.
Woz is one of the few people in the world who likely pisses Jobs off just for fun. I'm sure he can do this and they still remain friends and have a laugh about it later.