skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If you explain well enough the concepts of
> place-value and multiplication, most children
> can independently invent an algorithm for long
> multiplication.

You're going to stare at your screen in disbelief, my experience suggests otherwise. A small number of gifted children have, in my experience, been able to work out their own methods, and they've become more efficient over time, and eventually converged to something isomorphic to long multiplication.

But this is not the norm.

Evidence suggests - and my experience agrees - that correctly teaching process creates the ground-work for moving to understanding. Correct methods, practised over time and in different context, result in an internalisation that leads to an ability to generalise and apply in wider contexts.

This is my point about research and evidence-based teaching systems. The existing fads are borne of insufficiently researched and poorly developed methods, badly applied. They are often driven by dogma, and then delivered by teachers who don't properly understand what they're doing.

There has to be a better way, and unfortunately, nearly everyone has an opinion, and none of them are supported by anything like enough evidence. And so we continue to damage our children.

In parting, much of what you say I agree with, but not all. This isn't really the place to have a lengthy debate, but our positions aren't as far apart as my comment might have you think at first sight.
> there is a massive gap in the market for a fast, easy payment system that doesn't treat serious customers like dirt.

You're thinking of AlertPay.
"Nothing is stopping the church from hosting their own website"

Except, possibly, finding an ISP whose TOS are more tolerant of customer content. I'm sure they exist, I just wouldn't know where to find them.
I... I didn't know there were fart apps...

Gets on his iPhone, downloads a fart app.
Congratulations! Vest in peace.

Now, it's been a while since I've had to think about any of this, but I'll try to answer your questions:

ISOs (Incentive Stock Options) are options that do not carry a tax burden. Meaning, if you exercise your options (purchase them at the strike price) you do not have to pay taxes on any profits you make on them.

Common stock is called common to differentiate it from preferred stock which is typically given to investors, founders or to purchase board members. The primary difference being is if your company goes under, those guys get taken care of first.

Vesting periods usually work like this:

You have a cliff -- which is, essentially, a time gate that says "if you leave before date x, you get no shares. after date x, you are able to purchase all of the shares you earned prior to date x (in your case probably 12/60ths of total allotment) and earn the right to purchase an additional 1/60th of your options every month thereafter."

What happens if you are acquired? There are several possibilities depending on the type of acquisition.

1) You might be given a new grant

2) You might be given cash in exchange for vested shares and a new grant based on the pool of the parent company

Going public I'm less familiar with, but I'm under the impression that you can unload any stock you own onto the market barring any contractual agreements (CEOs and significant shareholders, if I recall correctly, are disallowed from divesting over a certain amount per month so as not to affect valuation).
I think a lot of VCs lurk here. I know one who says he checks HN first thing every morning.
Many very successful sites/businesses are able to monetize just fine off of advertisements. I'm pretty positive people wouldn't pay to use Quora when it launched -- or at least Quora wouldn't have had nearly the same rate of growth had they charged their users initially.
School snipers is kinda ridiculous, but if you define "worry" as "fret due to a lack of control over the situation," then you can expect these kinds of results.

You're asking the vast majority of reasonably conscientious parents at large. What they "worry about" is the list of risks which they have not found a practical way to mitigate.

They're not being asked about how they think other people's kids might be killed, which would make comparing the two lists a valid exercise.

So these are heartening results. If parents are "worrying" about their kids dying by gunshot instead of actually locking up their handguns, you have a major problem.
Adobe posted a packager refresher for iPhone.

"Now that we are once again committed to the iOS platform, we will work on tools and frameworks to make developing iOS applications much easier. I’m currently using early versions of these projects for Android development, and they are extremely easy to use and help to create a very efficient developer workflow."

http://blogs.adobe.com/cantrell/archives/2010/09/packager-fo...
If all your options are ISOs, yes.
> I don't think it's possible to remotely steal the encryption key as JavaScript doesn't have access to browser's bookmarks.

I think a trusted site might be able to read the bookmark URL from the history object, but that seems to be sandboxed in general and might not contain javascript: links in the first place. If you were more clever with JavaScript than I am you might be able to do something like (1) pop open the current page in a new window to hide what you're about to do from the user, (2) invoke history.back() in the "parent" window, and (3) read the URL from window.location
You can't build a new Silicon Valley just anywhere
This rock keeps tigers away. I'll sell it to you for $20.
Ask HN: Please review my browser add-on's landing page 
I'm experimenting with developing a premium (non-free) version of a popular free Firefox extension that I've written. I'd appreciate any feedback on the methods I'm using to inform users of the free version about the paid version, as well as any general opinions on the feasibility of getting users to pay for browser add-ons, software that is typically 100% free.

Add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2871/

Landing page: http://www.chrisfinke.com/firstrun/url-fixer.php (shown after the user finishes installing the add-on)
Google: 'Android not optimised for tablets'
>Apple should develop better filtering, ranking and recommendation algorithms for displaying available applications to interested users.

Yes.

>Amateur Developers: Apple Says Stay Away

No. Their goal is polished applications. You can develop and experiment without putting it in the app store; they're just asking that you complete it and make it worthwhile. A fart app isn't even new-to-programming amateur level, it's "follow any one of dozens of tutorials to make your own without needing to learn a single thing" level.

Amateurs can make polished, sale-worthy applications - I've seen quite a few first-app-developers make fantastic programs. Apple is asking them to do so, rather than attempting to submit the result of a tutorial with a different background color.
How did you decide which one?
To add to the vesting discussion, there's typically a cliff. What this means is that you have access to none of your options until that time, a 1 year cliff is pretty common. If you see in your packet something about a 1 year cliff this means that on you're 1 year anniversary you have access to 20% of your available options. Typically you'll then vest the additional amount each month following until you've fully vested after 5 years.

In addition to exercising your options during a liquidity event it's common that a company requires you to either exercise or expire your options when you leave the company. There's typically a time period allowing you to decide to exercise these or not, often it's 30 days after you leave that you have available to decide to purchase your options or not.
Is the bus the source of the latency problem? I always thought it was because DRAM is slow (capacitors and all...)
Benefits of Essay Writing
There are many benefits to essay writing. It provides the writer with the means to express their thoughts on paper and increase their writing abilities. When these abilities are perfected, writing essays which will receive a high grade will be easier.
“W” is for Facebook (in Google’s Instant Search)
This list is about how we fear the rare events that terrify us (terrorist event) over the more common events we just accept as risks of life (car accidents). Nothing to do with parenting.
It's excellent that you managed to work and get an engineering degree.. but I'm not convinced this is something that can work on a large scale. Where did you live?

Not just where, but also when. I hear the worked-through-college story a lot, but only from people who graduated some time ago (in OP's case, 13 years ago). Tuition has been rising much faster than wages.
Ask HN: Could you sent a tweet to help me test my site?
The site parses tweets and give points depending on several factors. The tweet should follow a similar text like:

@crunchmysite.com I think news.ycombinator.com is great.

Change the URL and comment for whatever link and comment you want.

More info at: http://crunchmysite.com

Thanks for your help!
"Atomic Fart" sounded good. It has thirty fart sounds and a "drum set" mode where you can play five different fart sounds without scrolling through the list.
Is Drupal truly an Open Source Industry Leader? (and other questions)
I have worked with Drupal for a few years now and faced lots of opposition once my clients learn about what's behind it. I have heard many descriptions about it [As an MVC, CMS, or PHP platform], along with many developers that ask specifics about its magical database layer. I have also hear that Drupal is running on many sites around the net, (including mine) yet most people never admit whether they are running it or not (Except for the White House). My goal here is to ask the HN community for their impressions on Drupal [Version 6.X specifically]:

How much exposure do you have to Drupal development?

Is Drupal development moving forward in a positive direction?

Have there been any major incidents of Drupal being compromised or failing that you know of?

How secure and robust is MySQL as a database, and (if possible) have you seen Drupal working well with any other Database Products?

++++
Can Drupal truly be considered to be a development Framework or an MVC?

Source Links (for the question above):
http://archivemati.ca/wp-content/images/Drupal_as_MVC_Framework.png

http://archivemati.ca/2006/01/21/drupal-as-a-mvc-framework/
++++

And is there a better solution to Drupal? (for a CMS, Framework, Dev Environment) etc... (Open source or otherwise, and please add "why").

P.S. No, I don't work for Acquia or any of their affiliates... Thanks in advance!
There are social factors that magnify worrying about children. For example, in the UK over 0.5% of children are in state care.

Thus parents also worry about what other adults think of them.
Unless Google gets a handle on consistency in the user experience then this wont last long. I love my EVO and left iPhone for it but the 3rd party app market is crap and I feel like I have a phone with multiple personalities.
I've actually been pretty impressed by the quality of the answers on Quora. I was fairly skeptical at first, but its almost become just as good as wikipedia, but for local knowledge instead of global. Opening it up will pose risks, but right now I'm sold on the implementation.
Do you use Firefox (or Chrome)? If so, go through the list of add-ons you have installed and contact the developers. (JS is the primary language for add-on development.)

Many add-on devs are freelancers (read: available to work), and if you're using their add-ons, they've already passed at least one test.
There's a certain irony that readwriteweb (wrongly) call out Apple for being dismissive of "amateur" developers, then suggest a search/filtering mechanism that would inevitably result in new or alternative apps being largely ignored as users limit searches to apps with high rankings or mega sales.
An interesting life if ever I saw one...
I wonder if this will eventually become a clause in insurance contracts: "If you broadcast publicly the fact that you aren't home, any subsequent robbery will not be covered." Hard to believe, but possible.
I just had this discussion with my 3rd grader's teacher and have talked about it with all her previous teachers after reading that book. Her point is that the homework is just practice and only takes a few minutes which makes me dislike it just on the principle of wasting "just a few minutes" of my family's time for no benefit. I try to give teachers the benefit of the doubt on this and not argue too much but in the past I've sent a note to school saying she just won't be doing the homework and it's not her fault, it's my decision.
App stores are middlemen, and no amount of curated experience will make that broadly acceptable to purchasers.

Many mobile Apps will eventually be found the same way Windows Apps are today - In other words, through trusted third parties.

The equivalent of download.com, or sourceforge, may be appropriate for some mobile apps.

But the elephant in the room is Amazon.
The professors I had were always excited to help students who wanted to run ahead of or branch out from the lecture schedule. Catch them in their office when it's not just before or just after class.
Speed it up by not going through your server to get the query suggestions. You can drop the jsonp parameter and just eval the results. Or change the jsonp parameter and include it as a script tag.
Erm... I have ADHD and I don't do it.
> The fundamental problem with math education in the United States (yeah, I know the article is about UK, but it's Friday and I'm in a ranting mood) is that math is taught as a set of rules that must be followed...

Well that's actually how most of the stuff in school is taught. Whenever a kid goes "why am I learning this I'm never going to use this" that's a sign they don't know what they're learning.
We had an employee once who essentially narrated himself. For instance, if he was installing the latest build of our software to test the installer, he might say something like this:

I'm putting the floppy in the drive. I see it on the
desktop. I'm double clicking it. I see the new
installer. Now I'm opening RegEdit. I'm finding the
keys for $OurProduct, and deleting them to test a fresh
install. Now I'm double clicking the installer. I see
a dialog box. I'm typing in my product key, and hitting
the install button...

If you had to do anything with him, he'd include you in the narration:

OK, now I'm watching Bob make a new release for me to test.
His compile finished, and he's copying to a floppy. He's
giving me the floppy. I'm going to go test it...

This got real annoying real fast.
Huh, I was never taught the chunck/grid system (39yr old US public school) but that is almost exactly how I taught myself in later years, (mid 20ies) to do multiplication in my head.
Android usage to surpass BlackBerry, iOS by year end
I'm not being snarky - but outside of Google and Facebook - who is doing really well with a pure ad model?

Every time I see this now I think of Digg and Reddit, both which seem to be having issues supporting themselves with pure ads. I actually think those two businesses and Quora could likely support a small(ish) staff and make enough revenues to make a decent profit, but I'm not sure that would get them into the decent exit category.
In practice, they are, unless they can pick up and leave, taking their assets with them. (Any Greeks thinking about doing this, I suggest you do it soon.) It may not be fair, but the last paragraph of the article lays out the choices pretty well. They're all bad, and the people of Greece will feel the pain either way.
Apparently I didn't find his answers were crisp and clear. You could see lot of generalism and diplomacy. I use Quora, and I kind of get it. But I was trying to see how he pitches Quora - as investors or many people say - in 1-2 sentences. I didn't see he pointing out what they really stand for - like the one thing. I didn't see he explaining Quora's differentiating or unique selling points.

I was trying to learn how he explains why they exist. But apparently, I didn't see that spark.
PS: I have a BS from small and inexpensive college and at 28 I got promoted to the same job as the 27 year old with a BS and MS from MIT I sit next to. Now we both went to college, but if you compare the sticker price of his education he got a much worse deal then I did. Granted, 10 years from now he will probably make more than I will because he works ridiculously harder than I do.

You assume that because you have the same job and sit next to each other that you make the same amount of money. In my experience that is a very unsafe assumption. Unless you know what he makes, you don't know that. (In most US companies, talking about what you make to co-workers is a fireable offense for a reason.)
What about the history of mobile apps would cause you to come to those conclusions? I just don't see that at all.
roel_v, just like he said =) (except, CPAN is for Perl =)). Probably, API is incorrectly referenced here. But idea is - if something really shared, community using this something shared will be able to find a way to avoid conflicts.
And they say there's no innovation in fart apps...
Not as easily as with Paypal as transactions take a day or two.
All of this is standard. You probably aren't getting screwed.

You've been given options, not actual stock. This should not concern you. The difference between options and stock is largely a tax matter. In both cases, you've received an instrument with a very low current price that will be lucrative to you if the price appreciates (in, for instance, a takeover).

When you leave the company, you'll be required to shell out some cash to keep your exposure to the company's upside; you didn't give numbers, but if you stay until you're mostly vested, expect it to cost a couple thousand dollars. You'll have to decide whether the company's prospects merit the investment.

If the company is sold before you leave, you won't have to exercise your options in advance (you'll still need to exercise them, but this will be a no-brainer since the stock value will have appreciated). The difference between leaving and staying with respect to your options is risk.

As with every company, your options vest, meaning they become available to you in waves on a vesting schedule. This should not concern you; even the founders in your company have a vesting schedule.

What happens when the company is purchased? It depends. If you're lucky, there is a company-wide change-of-control clause that gets you instant access to the upside of the sale. You're probably not that lucky. The most likely outcome is that you'll have a mostly locked-in upside, but that you'll have to work through the remainder of your vesting schedule to get it. There are lots of sticky details (such as what happens if you're terminated before you vest after a change of control), but it's a waste of time to worry about them now.

You didn't ask, but do know: as employee 50+N in a 100+K-person startup, you are extremely unlikely to get any concessions in the terms and conditions of your equity grant. The company's board reviewed and agreed on this plan; it is a big deal to change it for anyone.

The real question is the company valuation and its financing terms. You should have been informed as to what % of the common stock your grant works out to, so you can work out what an $Xmm acquisition means to you. You should also probably be able to find out what the liquidation terms are on the company's financing (how much of that X the company's investors take off the top before the common stock is valued). These are the numbers that differ most wildly from job to job, and the ones most likely to impact your personal upside.

Remember that as a line employee in a 100 person startup, your stock grant is not going to be a life-changing event unless the company is CNN-level spectacularly successful. If the company does quite well, it'll probably amount to the equivalent of a 5-figure bonus per year, paid in a lump sum when the company is bought.
There is an interesting comment:

"Looks like the new policy would allow to have VM included in the app itself. Why not focus instead on the VM instead of this as3 to native code conversion (sure the innovation in one can already help the other but still it’s the VM which since in need of a bit more love)." [1]

Now that Apple allows interpreters (as long as they run code packaged embedded in the app), I wonder if this approach would be easier for Adobe to maintain than the AS3-to-assembly compilation they do now. Arbitrary SWFs could be paired as data with a standard interpreter app.

EDIT: I suppose this would make the packager a lot more like AIR for Android( http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air2/android/).

[1]: http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2010/09/great-news-for-...
What tends to happen with me is I'll hit a snag that I can't seem to figure out or debug myself. So I fire up gmail and write a note to one of the contractors who does odds and ends stuff for me.

I describe the problem in decent detail and ask when he/she is available to fix it. Send.

Then a few minutes later, the solution appears in my head, I go solve the problem myself, and send an apology note to my developer.
I wonder why they don't just do this by default?

Because for the majority of their customers, not getting money for several months would cause them to look for another solution.
This doesn't describe how they got the addresses of people to rob. Presumably, they robbed their Facebook friends. Regardless, there are easier ways to find out when people aren't home. Most people are at work during the day. Maybe you should randomize your work schedule to feel more secure.
Has someone created an app/service to solve this problem (of finding designer co-founders) yet?

I feel like I've seen a few out there already, but none of them jump to mind enough for me to refer you to.
Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume
Hack CFLs to make them beautiful: unfold them
First, let me say that you should all read that link he posted.

Second, worry about my ability to distinguish real dangers from fake makes me avoid many sources of news. To get a sense of what dangers are actually real, I pay attention to the lives of people I know and read my local police log occasionally. I also try to learn as little about people who get into the news for doing stupid/petty things as possible - no need to give them encouragement.
I know as a kid, and now probably too, that I would of preferred to of stayed in school for an extra hour or two and do home work so that when I go home I didn't have any homework. For god sakes, the typical school schedule almost has a built in slot for it already. 9-5 is the typical adult work day, 9-3 is the typical school day. If we could synchronize the two and make it 9-5 for both of them, it would probably work better for both groups of people's schedules!

Adults today don't like doing their equivalent homework either. Most adults dislike bringing extra work home with them, taking phone calls outside of work hours and talk on and on about work/life balance and so on.

Also for kids who don't have environments conductive to studying at home would do better too. If they don't have a computer at home, they don't have stable, quiet environment to study in, or they're parents are clueless, they would all benefit staying at school to do their 'home work'. Often schools cannot let the kids stay for an extra amount of time, since computer labs would close down, staff often lock the school and do not have the time to supervise the kids.
Httppocketbook: the concise guide to http