skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was being somewhat rhetorical. But only somewhat. Your statement that "We don't magically know how to raise children" I find to be very interesting. How then, do we learn how to raise children? Certainly parenting is indeed built into the species, as it is in every other species.

I would not go so far as to ban any learning at all, only to understand that there is a financial motive in people giving you advice from self-help books. New parents are nervous, worried about doing the right thing. This is exactly as it should be. In response to this worry the free market provides us with lots of "security blankets" in the form of books and advice to make us feel like we have nothing to worry about. The odd side-effect to this is that people reading different books feel the _other_ people are all full of tripe. Let the baby cry. Don't let the baby cry. Spank the kid. Don't ever spank the kid! Nurture children. Teach children self-reliance. Discipline. Self-exploration.

These are somewhat contradictory to say the least. Here's an idea: when presented with lots of self-contradictory information, look at nature. Nature is neither good nor bad, nor is it necessarily optimized for modern life. But it certainly has worked for eons. Must be something of value going on in there. In fact, I lean towards trusting genetic learning over self-promotion any day.

My opinion only. YMMV. Do not operate heavy machinery while raising your child.
I laughed at the quote myself.

But, think back to when you were 18, were you right on top of things? Or slowly trying to catch up and a few years behind? A program like this could have a few kids say 'Hey! lets check out Arc, pg says its cool!' and learn a new way of looking at programming.

I am moderately angry my alma mater didn't have this in place when I went. However, I think it would be a great dorm to visit, not to live in. My priorities were not the same during those years.

Waterloo is really turning into a startup hub, but RIM's aggressive hiring lately has turned most of my entrepreneur friends in the area into drones!
Arduino is a pretty cheap way to get started in hardware.
As anecdotal evidence, some of the worst parents (in my opinion) are those who are committed to being something other than themselves. They try so hard! Whatever the book they're reading, they imitate it almost exactly. They preach it to other parents and they look down their noses at the poor uneducated who haven't found their superior knowledge.

Until the day comes when they've had a bad week, the kid is grouchy, life is bad, etc. Then wham! You got some parent wailing on their child (either emotionally or with corporeal punishment) What does that teach children? Mommy's so inept she needs a book to tell her how to act, and in reality she can't hold it together?

I'd much rather just be myself. If you get angry -- get angry. Kids have to learn to live with angry people from time to time. If you feel grumpy, be grumpy. Geesh. We act like we're raising kids to live in some kind of world that doesn't exist. It just seems way too easy to lose track of common sense, that's all.
Ask YC: What is your favorite Version control SW?
I am working with Windows, so I used Visual Source Safe which I found quiet simple and easy to use but it is not free. I tried Rapid SVN but I find it not mature enough. Now I am using TortoiseSVN but I am not really satisfied. What do you guys use?
Adobe AIR review
Ask YC: crowdfiltering business case
NewsYC, Digg, Reddit are top of the top crowdfiltering services, and I think that they get more visits because they are designed to bring change/news more often than a regular blog.

Also, the final result it's better news for the visitor.

Do you have more information about this pattern?

I'm building an engine to run sites like this, with the same features that reddit or digg has, and would like to put it in production soon, but need research about how benefits a community to put a site like this online.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=82052
Spam is not free speech
I agree with you. I've been banging the drum of content diversity but I feel that old Digg/reddit submissions that are no doubt interesting to hackers is something that will detract from the value of the overall focus, which is mainly geeky-startup (at least that's what I see) stuff.
Ask YC: Who Are the Startup Friendly Accounting Firms?
I've heard PG say one key element of Viaweb getting acquired was that they had a top brand accounting firm which gave great credibility to their books. He felt it contributed a lot to sealing the deal with Yahoo.

Does anyone know who Viaweb used or who is considered the Wilson Sonsini of startup accounting?
"Humans do not perceive the passage of time in a linear way. This, coupled with the irregular behavior of progress bars, causes human perception of process duration to vary."

Wibbly-woobly timey-wimey
C# 3.0 has closures, expression trees, LINQ, and other features that make it much more expressive than Java in my mind.

If you think in terms of map, fold, and filter, you'll be right at home in C#/VB.NET (they're just called Select/Aggregate/Where instead to be familiar to people whose background is SQL and not functional programming). Java, on the other hand, is agonizing to me.
Ask YC:  Why not release your email statistics involving strangers to the public to reduce spam/uninteresting email to you?
The idea here is to release the topics of emails from strangers as well as whether or not you generally liked emails on those topics.

This should serve as a guide for others to determine whom to email about various things.

For example, if you want to talk to someone about topic X, you can perform a search to see people who generally liked emails on that topic from strangers.
Ask YC: What DNS provider do you use ?
I'm looking for a DNS provider that will provide me with the ability to set a low TTL value for my domain but not charge me the earth.

I don't mind paying a monthly fee as long as it's reasonable, but the provider has to be rock solid (i.e. very reliable).

Does anyone have any recommendations ?
Not free, but http://webfaction.com is a shared hosting provider I've used in the past that has a one-click setup for Django, Rails, etc. Plus they offer PostgreSQL (which not a lot of shared providers do). I don't use them anymore, but I think it's something like $10/month for the cheapest plan. It's great to learn on.

But as far as what to learn, I'd highly recommend Python and a web framework such as Django or Pylons.
I was planning on using a small flash player for the music, and a small flash uploader. The player actually works fairly well, but the uploader is causing problems.
If your Java experience is with GUI programming, you should be right at home with Google Web Toolkit. You don't need to worry about complicated web-related tasks such as handling asynchronous calls, that is all abstracted for you. You can layout your pages like you would a Swing or SWT desktop app and that should get you started.: http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/

GWT is a higher level of abstraction than most other frameworks, which some like and some do not. The top-most layer is actually not coupled to anything specific related to javascript, DOM, or HTML in general. DOM manipulation and javascript are treated much like in-line native assembly code in a traditional high-level language. You can develop an entire web application like GMail without ever seeing anything below this high level abstraction. This may make it sound weak or limited, but its actually very powerful b/c you can focus on building rich functionality rather than debugging erratic cross-browser quirks.
Startup-related activity in the areas seem to have greatly increased over the the last year or so. It was interesting to see 70 or so people at Waterloo StartupCamp I, and then probably double that number at Waterloo StartupCamp II a few months later.
UpperCamelCase.

(Unless you're a real camel nazi, and don't recognize upper as valid.)

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CamelCase
Dormcubator? More like dorkubator, am I right, folks? Am I right?
That's a useless definition.
Because the cost of three 9's of uptime is unacceptably high. Squeezing out that last 3 hours of uptime per year costs far too much.

Next question?
Sun is starting to give Python some love
Hey - if you disagree with my post feel free to post a reply making your point. A downmod is just childish.

You might not like it but ASP.NET is a popular and extremely effective environment for building interactive web applications. I personally use a variety of different tools to build web apps and .NET ranks with them.
Digital vs. analog probably isn't the issue - how well your device solves the user's problem is what people care about. Start with the problem your device should solve first.
"Learning about speaking about and selling your idea or product is usually the most important part"

What about building it?
http://everydns.net

Great track record (total of 1 hour of downtime due to DDoS for past 4 years). Nice features. Free, but don't forget to donate.
Behind the scenes at 37signals: Postscript
If anyone is interested in doing interesting hardware/firmware work, get in touch. Our startup is doing some exciting work in the digital cinema space. We're using the Analog Devices Blackfin processor, which is a pretty sweet piece of kit.
http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/

it's reasonable.
Uniqueness Typing Simplified
Second most important.

Success and quality seem to be only loosely correlated.
We're self-hosted using Mephisto. Why? I like the self-hosted solution because it feels more professional. And I have more control over theme and plugins (it looks exactly like the rest of our site). I went with Mephisto for simplicity (in interface, not installation).

Though, I'm starting to wish I had gone with something more traditional for the framework, like Wordpress. It has way more support for plugins than Mephisto.
i have recently been interested in microcontrollers, chips you can program, to control things like motors and leds, and to recive data from sliders / knobs (potentiometers)

i got some PIC programmer and some pic chips and started doing some experiments ... but it seems like for me, a mac os x user, the AVR is a better option

im looking to buy some AVR "kits" from smileymicros.com very soon, as soon as i get some money ;) (i live in mexico so i have to pay more to get fedex)

im into programming music apps to make my own music, and i see a lot of potential to make hardware to control music/sound

hey, if you try the smilemicros kits, let me know ;)
This depends on the situation.

There are times when an "employee" is really a founder, but the founders don't want to admit this. Even if there is a salary, the financial situation may be very unstable (ie., making payroll may be an issue). This is often the case for very early employees, and seems to happen most when non-technical founders are hiring their first progammer. In this case, I think the founders should really be either bringing on a technical person as a founder or paying a contractor. It's a sign of a pretty clueless bunch of managers, either way.

The other situation (which I am in right now) is when you have a fully functioning "startup". The business may not be cash flow positive, but it's been around for a while, has a stable funding base, a product, and probably some customers. In this case, a very small bit of equity is reasonable, because the employee is really working for a salary, plus a chance at a nice payout (maybe up to a mil, but no more than that).

My advice is that you evaluate the company - they need to be in category 2 for this offer to make sense.

By the way, I agree with you that the risk can be "greater" in some situations for the employee than for the founders. The founders have more control over the exit than the employees do, and they'll see trouble coming from much further out.
TNS Buys Compete For Up To $150 Million
It's a very good point--but its lost in translation. There is nothing that aggrevates a reader more, whether consciously or subconsciously, than being told "THIS IS THE CONCLUSION".
It is? Really? Are you sure?
Criticisms, however well thought out, are ineffective when you cannot convey the thought properly.
User Generated Web Video: FAIL
smuglispweeny: Macro-ro-ro Your Code Gently Down the Page...
I run EveryDNS and am looking for an ALL-STAR PHP/MySQL hacker who wants to help take it over. You must be in San Francisco.

This is a simple business that can easily grow to make $1mm a year (and with some work, $5mm/year). I will help you understand how to grow and run a business. I am focused on OpenDNS these days and EveryDNS has been neglected (though we added AAAA support on Saturday night).

In addition to the business side of things, I will also teach you about networking, routing, BGP, and every other aspect of running a world-class global operation that provides a necessary service to the Internet.

Contact me directly -- david at ulevitch dot com.
I probably will never use the poll feature again, or if so very very very rarely. This was actually a question I asked myself a couple times these past couple weeks whenever I saw a post that made me think "why am I seeing this on HN". Combined with the new feature that I wanted to try out to see how it worked it made sense to make a poll. Now I've done it and the novelty is over.
often times I find solutions to complicated problems while I sleep. But I usually don't spot bugs while I sleep (unless I've been thinking about some particular known issue the day before).
editdns.net - it's free for basic features (and donation supported for a full account). Siple interface that doesn't get in your way. And nameservers in US and EU. Have Neva had any issues since I started (about a year ago)
Cyclist Spontaneously Combusts (?!): "a flaming human torch cycling along the road"
Teaching boys and girls separately
The second annual Father Ted festival took place last week in County Clare
I find this kind of thing fascinating, but I'm surprised no one has commented on the health insurance angle here. I wonder how long it will be before "discount" health insurance is available if you agree to take this test. All kinds of fun implications once we go down that road...
That's just a coincidence - we started Hacker TV before we settled into this weekly cycle.
Amazon MP3 Downloader available for GNU/Linux (though not FAIF)
The difference between subjective time and objective time is widely known:

The engineers had concentrated on reducing objective time; the designer concentrated on reducing subjective time. Reducing subjective time works. -- http://www.asktog.com/papers/magic.html

I believe that the design decision in the MacIntosh to have a single mouse button was because it was objectively faster.
Used to happen to me a lot when I hacked in C. Not so much in PHP. I'm not sure if it's memory handling abstraction or experience. Lately this sort of thing has crept into subtle flaws in business models and ideas.
I've been using zoneedit.com

Very kludgy site, but it gets the job done for free.
Look at Arduino. The entire design and software is open source. You can buy or make.
While it's a good idea in theory, it would ultimately fail if we tried to apply it to reality. Think about it. Ignoring the fact that we are releasing personal information (no matter how trivial), attached to our email address, how often do you personally recieve spam that is useful or interesting to you?
If the answer to that question was anything other than "never", guess what? It wasn't spam.
Spam emails are mass emails that generally want you to click on their link. This will most likely direct you to their site, ask you to complete other offers, populate your screen with popups, etc etc etc.
Perhaps some people like completing 5 offers which cost them X amount of money, in order to recieve an Xbox six months later.
Perhaps some people like being asked if their breasts need to be twice as big.
Perhaps some people like their computer crashing repeatedly because of a virus they've infected their computer with by opening an email, going through a link, or downloading an attachment.
Personally, I am none of these people.
Spam is classified as such for a reason. They are emails that we don't want, and don't ask for, the internet version of junk mail--only without the tiny bit of irritation that comes with getting the latter, thinking of all the better things someone could have done with the millions spent sending out glossy paper that immediately goes in the trash.
Either way, regardless of whether or not I personally like spam emails, someone has already implemented the idea of sending people advertising emails based on what they like: mailing lists.
Don't believe your web stats
I'd spend a point to downvote that comment! (j/k)

Actually I like the idea - it would prevent (or at least raise the cost of) karma-bombing. I think the threshold should be higher than 20 though - maybe 50 or 100. It would probably be best to introduce it at a high minimum and then lower it after observing activity, like pg said he's doing with the polls.
wow, that's you? my friends freshman year were all about kegbot! bows down
I'm not referring to that kind of email, but rather, I'm referring to serious emails that are sent only to a few people. You may not like receiving all such email, especially if you get lots of email.

Some people are more likely to respond to email from strangers on various topics than others. This is useful knowledge for everyone to know.
everydns rocks!
Yeah.........but in Spain, you have a housing bubble that would make California look sane. When I went there, my relatives talked about 40 or 50 year mortgages, and even 100-year mortgages (Your son has to cosign in some cases). There was a huge swathe of nada between Seville and Madrid, and at one point in this swathe there were 90 cranes building 10-story buildings. Anecdotes don't make data, of course, but the data I've seen also says there's a bubble; not just in Spain, but in most of Western Europe. The only notable exception is Germany.
Be sure to implement an oust_trolls method.
I have a 15 mo girl.

My wife read lots of books. I read a few. With a few exceptions, the books have been a waste of time and money. So many of the books in this genre have the feel of the Learn Blub in 21 Days line of programming books. Accept from the get-go that parenting is hard, there are no silver bullets, and you are going to spend a lot of time and energy if you want to do a good job, and filter anything you read from that perspective.

Nevertheless, we did find some helpful books. The most useful books we have are a reference book given to us by our pediatrician and a book about baby sign language (The following link is to the revised edition, which is not the one we have, but it's cheaper on amazon http://www.amazon.com/Baby-Signs-Revised-Linda-Acredolo/dp/B...).

We went through a lot of "the book says" conversations early on, especially related to getting her to sleep. The thing to realize here is that it is up to you how to do it. There's a book out there that will support your position, and many of the books are contradictory. So, in the end, you'll end up having to decide what you think is right. The book many parents find useful is merely the one that reinforces their opinion, and they will use that book to appeal to authority in the passive-aggressive conversations that all new parents seem wont to have.

I had trouble finding what I felt like were unbiased opinions on sleep in particular. This book: http://www.amazon.com/Healthy-Sleep-Habits-Happy-Child/dp/03... was helpful, mostly because it more or less laid out three approaches and passed few, if any, value judgements on going to the baby vs. letting her cry herself to sleep.

In the end, I decided I couldn't stand to let her cry, so we settled on developing a very predictable routine at bedtime, and it has worked well. We have had our bumpy patches, particularly during illnesses, teething, and major milestones, but in general my child looks forward to bedtime and naps.

The sign language seems somewhat controversial among our peers, but we are in the less progressive southeastern US. The common fear is that it will retard speech. I just wanted to be able to communicate with my child, and it has made for a pleasant experience so far. She seems to be developing vocbulary at an above normal rate. I don't necessarily attribute that to signs, but it is at least one counterexample to the fear of significant speech retardation.
Random guess - one of the "Big Five"
http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/3003864?f=search
david rocks!

he let me crash at his place a while ago.
I saw a proposal for spam whitelisting which involved users publishing a hashed list of email addresses. This allows people to receive messages from friends of friends but without revealing your address book. To prevent the data being aggregated, each hash would include your email address in the form:

you@your.tld:friend@their.tld

This prevents spammers aggregating large lists and then rainbow cracking the hashes to find valid addresses. You can also bulk the list with bogus entries to reduce spam and to increase your ego.
Yes, I've used seam for several projects and found it to be an amazing framework that lends itself to rapid development and web apps that can take a Slashdotting+Digging on the same day.

Plus is has great integrations with Ajax4JSF and RichFaces which makes adding a nice Ajax front end very very easy, even if you don't know much JS, like me.
is a degree in computer science worth it?
I've been using editdns: http://www.editdns.net/

Its free, and has worked very well for me over the past year.
Just try to spend as much time with her as you can! The best is to take a deep breath and take full responsibility of your baby for a few hours, just two of you. This helps the create a very special relation between all three of you, while helping poor mum to recover a bit. We did it with our younger kid from the second month as my wife studied on each Saturday for 8 hours or more. From our experience this is a real booster. Be brave!
If I could pick any way to die, this would be it...positively legendary.
Interesting stuff. I wonder, though:

> 62. In Why Gender Matters, Dr. Sax explains that "anomalous males" -- boys who like to read, who don't enjoy competitive sports or rough-and-tumble play, and who don't have a lot of close male friends -- should be firmly disciplined, should spend as much time as possible with "normal males," and should be made to play competitive sports.

Source: http://www.aclu.org/pdfs/womensrights/20060801seldencomplain...
Estimating the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow
Ask YC: Your Startup's Bandwidth/Connection
How much do you need? At home I'm fine with a comcast 6mbit line but for large FTP/S3 transfers every once in a while, I skip over to campus for a faster line

http://www.speedtest.net/result/241619960.png
7 entrepreneurs whose perseverance will inspire you
A compiler from Higher Order Logic to hardware (with a detailed survey of the field)
The best book I ever read about programming was Writing Solid Code, by Steve Macquire.
How to Pass a Silicon Valley Software Engineering Interview [PDF slides]
Related projects for other languages:

Scheme: http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/05-saint-mleux.pdf

Haskell: http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~mfn/reduceron/
I was thinking the same. Although now it's the "big 4" because of the Arthur Andersen/Enron fiasco. Viaweb had revenues and was starting to get profit when it was acquired [http://www.paulgraham.com/vwfaq.html]. Perhaps the auditing firm made the due diligence process for Yahoo faster?