skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This isn't really the place to have a lengthy debate

To the contrary, this is Hacker News!

Unfortunately, the situation that I'm referring to with children inventing their own long-multiplication algorithm was presented at a talk, so I can't point to the specific results, if they're even published yet, but my contention is based on an academic research study. The punchline of the experiment was that a full class of approximately-average grade-schoolers were taught math in a novel method, and developed their own multiplication algorithms, and went on to have above-average improvements in math test scores. The development of those algorithms were probably guided to a certain extent, but they looked to me like someone who was working the problem out from the first principles based on the concept of place value. That said, I'm definitely willing to accept the evidence you claim to have (especially since it leaves open the meaning of "correct").

I definitely agree that education should be based on science and not on dogma. Just because we think something ought to work doesn't mean that it works (it usually doesn't), and education is something you don't want to fuck up because the stakes are high and you only get one chance. But, I'm not sure we're even at the point where we can do research yet. Before you can measure results, you need to decide what results you're looking for and how you're measuring them.

I'm a mathematician, and I'll be the first to admit that being able to perform long-multiplication isn't actually that useful of a skill, and yet that's mostly what we measure on standardized tests. Understanding what multiplication means and being generally numerate is far more useful and not measured very often (the best we have is word problems). The more desirable side-effects, such as the ability to abstract concepts, to generalize processes, and to apply knowledge from one domain to another, aren't being measured at all, and those are really the only things from my math education that I use in my day-to-day life. Similar things happen across other subjects--knowing what year the War of 1812 happened in isn't useful, while understanding the social, economic, and political conditions that led to that war is useful for the average citizen in a democracy (but doesn't fit well in a scantron).

I think we as a society need to first have a big sit-down and figure out what the point of education is. We know it's important, but we've never coherently stated particularly why, and that lack of explicit direction is what lets politics, dogma, and fads more easily take control of the process. Once we've done that, we can let science guide the structure of education. Or rather, we should. There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem that without solid backgrounds in quantitative and logical thinking, most people have difficulty making data-driven decisions, and people in general won't get better at that until the education system improves.
Evidence suggests that if my oldest were to come up with a method for multiplication it would involve: scissors, a stapler, and a stick, 5 complicated steps, 2 requests for materials from one of the parents, and it would be abandoned halfway through for some method of making a crane that involves an even bigger stick and rope.

On the other hand, going through 100 lessons on reading, spelled out to the word what I was to say and do, and 9 months after starting he's reading 100 pages of books like The Way Things Work when he's supposed to be sleeping.

Sometimes rote methods work _really_ well.
I had the same reaction: it's really remarkable how well those two methods map to my own mental arithmetic algorithms. The grid multiplication technique would also prepare the student pretty well for polynomial multiplication (which is how I originally derived it).
This is exactly how I do it in my head. I was never taught to, but found myself multiplying multifigure numbers in my head often enough to come up with the gridding system. It becomes laborious after five figures or so. I was never that fond of the long forms, and didn't use them after they stopped appearing in the exams.

Incidentally, I didn't bother with a calculator until 12th grade. Since then, I've started making more mistakes, and now have to do any mental calculations several times over.
It's interesting that this is exactly how I ended up doing these calculations. It just seemed intuitive to me that this is the way it should be done over time, so I eventually just dropped the method taught in schools.

For once, I agree with the changes being made.
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It depends on the event. You would still have the options, but might not be able exercise any of them until a cliff is reached. The event might also include a trigger of some sort that accelerate the cliff/vesting schedule, but I think this is usually just a mechanism for founders & early employees.
I really doubt someone could pull that off now. With the cost of college and cost of living in general, you would barely make a dent in your college payments. Add the fact that it is impossible to get a job these days.
In the line of fire
doesn't work at all on mac 10.6 with chrome 7 (dev channel)
The Danger of the Dream Job Delusion
> But it's unfair to do anything that helps some kids but not others, so it should be got rid of.

This is a disingenuous straw man of a summary. If it were the case that it "helps some kids" but the others felt no effect, and they kiboshed the program for that reason, you'd have a point. But the problem here is that it "helps some kids", AND HURTS OTHERS. That's a big problem. The fact that it correlates with SES makes it even worse, because it means that the ones it's hurting most are the ones least capable of defending themselves, but the basic logic would be sensible even if the help/hurt spectrum were uncorrelated.
In the early oughts, I loaded third party Palm apps onto my Visor...you could even buy shrink wrapped apps at Office Depot.

More recently, I've downloaded Symbian and Java apps onto my Nokia.

Apple's App Store's model is an exception to the historical distribution.

Right now everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. But there's nothing special about mobile-apps. They're still a commodity.

Apple can probably keep the iPhone locked down and continue it's app store...but ultimately other companies benefit more from differentiation than from "me too."

But even Apple is showing the strains of deviation from their core competency.

Of course, I could be wrong and Amazon will continue to just sell books.
There are a few. I have checked them all out including the HN co-founder sheet on google docs, but I haven't really found anyone yet. Looks like designers don't like replying back to emails, or maybe I am approaching them in a wrong way.
Good point, when applying for a position at a traditional corporation coming from another traditional corporation might be a positive on the resume, if for nothing else you are accustomed to all the office politics of a big corporation.

As a side note I came from a 3 developer software company a few years ago when I got my current job with a major television broadcaster and to this day I am baffled with the amount of office politics people employ.
Have you considered that maybe you are stuck in a system that the author is describing? "Intermittent rewards, keeping you busy, being tired, emotionally involved, crises occur" is absolutely not a description of life. It describes some of my worst weeks, but I think I'd go insane if my life was like that all the time.
I think he's drawing from other histories: shrink-wrap apps, web-apps, games, etc. The evidence appears to be on his side. People like curated gardens well enough, but they don't like the entire universe to be a curated garden.
Precisely! Thank you!
I generally agree, but: verbosity is mostly due to Cocoa naming conventions, not Objective-C. PyObjC (Cocoa bridge for Python) is — aside from few classes mapped to Python types — equally verbose and even more annoying to use, because you can't mix method name with arguments.

Reference-counted memory management might be step back, but I don't agree about inconsistent object lifetimes. Cocoa has simple rules: you're responsible for releasing objects returned by methods with `init`, `new` or `copy` in name. delegates are not retained. Everything else is retained and autoreleased for you. It's pretty consistent and even clang's static analyzer can catch common mistakes.
Thank you. A liberal arts education in the atmosphere of a university, with thousands of people your age, is an incomparable experience. It is a luxury, no doubt, but if you can afford it, it is like nothing else.
Makes sense for most Internet Services, but obviously not so for science-heavy startups (medical device, etc.). Otherwise a good read.
Playing 'Poker' To Plan Agile Projects
I worked full-time as a Drupal developer for two years and still dabble with it, though I'm now using Rails as my main web ui development technology. Though I'm not as connected to the community now, I've always been impressed with the level of participation that the community has, the outstanding volume of the work being done, and the commitment (for the most part) to the "Drupal Way".

I haven't heard of any major incidents of compromise, though it is easy to let sites get out of date which would leave some holes open.

As for MySQL, I think there are plenty of examples of it working at massive scale with good security (inside the Drupal community and out). From what I've seen developers seem pretty committed to working with other databases, though I'm not sure how far beyond MySQL and Postgres you'll get.

As for the "effective as an MVC question": no. Looking at that chart, half of the items mentioned in the Controller and Model you aren't supposed to edit regularly (parts of the Drupal Core), and especially not for site-specific functionality. Sure, most things can be altered with the addition of modules, but you're eventually going to run across something that can't be easily overridden from a module, or a place where there's no hook, or you just fundamentally disagree with how something works.

The modules themselves can be just as frustrating. Sometimes you'll encounter a situation where a module gets you 95% of the way there, but again you'll need to make some alterations and you have to understand exactly how the module works in order to do this. That means delving into someone else's code, the quality of which can vary considerably.

Finally, Drupal isn't REALLY object oriented. It's not as if content types are represented as a model with a corresponding controller, which is how I would expect MVC to work. A lot of individual pieces of code are OOP, but the entire system wasn't designed with this in mind.

That's not to say that Drupal doesn't have its uses. If you are fine with the default that's provided or feel like getting 95% of the way there in some cases is good enough, then by all means fire up a Drupal site. Unfortunately, you need to be familiar with the options out there in order to easily make the decision up front.

On the plus side, it's nice having a user system with permissions, administration, easy ways to add content, pretty good methods for handling audio, images, etc all up-front without having to do any coding. This is where Drupal shines, in my opinion. It's great for enabling technical people who can't/don't code to set up complicated systems. But that's a far cry from being an effective MVC.

If you do use Drupal, definitely use Drush (http://drupal.org/project/drush).
I have worked with a number of people in the industry over the years and have seen a bias against startup founders, more than a desire to hire them. But on the flip side people want to hire engineers from startups. Basically being at a startup is desirable because they often think it bring good qualities (of course evaluating the position and individual too) but being a found brings the concern of them being discontent with the job and leaving to do their own thing again.

I think you have to look at the individual, their specific fit and how old they are.
Define "brightest minds." I don't agree with their implied definition.
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finally, a step in the right direction. These chipsets are in wide use, i have jumped through the binary-blob-download hoop many times in the past.
For people wondering about the Linux community's attitude towards Broadcom: They certainly took a long time and much "encouragement" to realize the benefit of opening their drivers.
That would be like Google hiring an engineer who used to be a spammer (reformed?) to maintain the integrity of their search index.
A big question for me is what are the implications for Apple iOS given the quick diffusion of the Android OS. Will Apple iOS and the iPhone go the way of the Macintosh? A niche player in a very big market?
I wouldn't say that you have failed.

You've done what many people haven't.

1) you launched - you'd be surprised how many people never get to this state

2) you've got a handful of active users and 25 paying customers - also not to be taken lightly.

So first, congratulate yourself for getting to this point.

Is the question you are asking 'you we continue developing this?' or 'what should our next step be?'

First off, I assume you've got the legal side of things covered? If not, look into it and make sure that your technology structure permits you to do what you are doing. As I recall MP3.com and others have been caught out on licensing doing cloud served music files.

Lets assume you're comfortable with where you stand legally.

I assume you've seen this post..
http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=1668285

I've been amazed how long it can take to get traction. After more than a year of effort with my site, I pretty much gave up further development and marketing, noticing that nobody in the space was really getting significant traffic, I just figured it wasn't going to go anywhere.

Now I see that some competitors are gaining traction two years after launching. While one who never got much traffic at all was recently purchased.

This is a LONG road. From the info you've provided, you've done very well on the first few steps. If you're still excited about the product and have a good roadmap, than I think you could be on your way to success.

Don't underestimate the need for further marketing and refinement of your product offering.

At the same time, coming from the music space myself, this isn't a high success area. Look at things like iLike, MOG, spotify, amiestreet, imeem, playlist, etc. Lots of these sites had big backing and lots of users, but aren't making much if any money.

So, how do you go from 25 paying customers to 50? To 100? to 1000???

I turned my focus away from music because as an industry, I just don't see it leading to financial success.

There are those who are doing it, but it is more challenging than other areas.

My 2cents.
They're not called the PayPal Mafia for nothing ;)
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Dangerous ideas: Getting started is overrated
You'll very likely have to execute your options when you leave the company, or give up your exposure to the company's upside.
The important questions are: only 1 appstore or many? And, appstores to the exclusion of all else? So far as I can tell few people really want only 1 appstore to the exclusion of any other way of installing apps.
I am not sure this answers the original question, but it seems like you can just look for the n highest peaks that don't have neighbors.

http://gist.github.com/574052
Yeah, the difference between "your app was rejected" and "your app is in the store but no one will find it" is pretty slim in a practical sense. It would probably do a lot to reduce complaints about censorship and walled gardens, though.
To get around this situation, mark your paypal invoices as 'Services' and they can not refund them at all (unless however the card was stolen, etc). But 'Services' don't require shipping proof.
I don't think so. My parents worried about the things in the list that gets kids killed, and not about the things in the that doesn't get kids killed. Which parents really worry about snipers and terrorists?!
Apple themselves noted the ubiquity of cases when they downplayed the antenna problem on the iPhone 4, so I'm surprised to hear that there's anywhere in the world where a majority of people don't use them. Here in the U.S. (Austin, Texas, and I think Texas in general) it's the opposite, 80% in cases or even more. I almost never see a naked iPhone and can't think of a single person I know who carries one. I carried my iPhone without a case at first and broke two, personally, before I caved in and started using a case.

I didn't think it was controversial that it's an extremely fragile phone. There's a cottage industry of people who repair broken screens, and there are repair kits available from several different sources for every model of iPhone. In my experience, if you drop it without a case onto a hard surface, you have about even odds of breaking it. I don't remember exactly, but my first one broke the second or third time I dropped it. (I wasn't careful with it at all.) I was so careful with my second iPhone (which pissed me off in itself that I had to baby a phone that way) and managed to avoid dropping it for months, but the very first time I did, it broke. My third has been in its case almost constantly since I bought it, but I did drop it without the case once, and it didn't break. So I had two breaks in four or five hard drops (mostly chest level onto concrete or blacktop,) versus zero breaks in innumerable drops for my previous phones.

Just putting a case on it solves the problem completely, but that brings me back to my original point: if the vast majority of users use it with the case (and that's certainly true here) then it doesn't make any sense to judge it by its size and aesthetics without the case. Plus, for all the users that resort to a case, Apple did not completely control the phone's aesthetics and user experience, which isn't necessarily a bad thing but is certainly noteworthy since it is contrary to conventional wisdom about Apple and the iPhone.

So why could they not be keeping their phones in a protective case to avoid scratches?

I can't speak for anyone else, but that doesn't make any sense to me at all. The case will get scratches, and you'll still have a scratched-up-looking phone. My case has a rubber ridge around the screen that was apparently munched on by some kind of insect last time I went backpacking. That's just the way things get when you use them. If people want a pristine-looking phone, they'll have to buy a new case every few months.

In general, I see almost all iPhone owners using cases, and with other cell phones, I see a clear minority using cases, mostly girls with decorative cases or (like you mentioned) IT geeks who like to clip them to their utility belts. From that I conclude that most iPhone users who keep their iPhone in a case would not do so if they had a different phone, and would prefer not to use a case with their iPhone, but feel compelled to do so for practical reasons.
Well there are different types of ADHD. It's related to the fact that ADHD people have bad working memory. So practicing how they would say stuff is a way to get it out before they forget it.
I like my BMW 5 series as I am a driver at heart. To me driving a well designed car like, with a 1000 tiny well thought out performance tweaks is an experience I enjoy every day.

Having struggled with noisy, underpowered, no fun, front wheel drive Toyota's & Hondas for years I would be hard pressed to give this up.

However if you just buy something like this for the badge, you need your head examined.
That bag looks awesome. Just ordered one. I've been looking for a new bag for quite a while.
Their filtering mechanism is generally infeasable too.

here's why (snark):
"Apps that only work offline.."
That's not so easy, and neither is the myriad of other attributes of any particular app. Right now tags and the title of the app contribute to the app search criteria (not the description).

They're suggesting that every app (including 250,000 existing) fill out a survey on the specifics of what it does so that people can search via that attribute? This is their simple solution to the problem?
The Perfect Mac Setup (25 Apps)
I thought I had another innovative far app idea the other day: Fart competition app (Friend Fart Off) or a fart analysis and rating app (with real audio analysis) . Unfortunately after a few Google/App Store searches I found a few developers have already innovated in this area. Bummer.
I can remember at least one case where force-detach didn't work either. In that case there is absolutely nothing you can do to access your data.
A Clojure "Scholarship": Let’s send Raynes to the Conj
Seems like Apple is following the same plan as before: keep hardware closed, keep OS closed. Microsoft beat them because they provided a platform on which hardware manufacturers could compete.
You cannot buy happiness at all. However, that isn't what they meant to say. They're trying to say that more money always means greater chance of happiness because of less stress.

As the original article stated, there's a point where more money means new stresses appear. The results of their study show that at $75k, the total of all stresses is at its least on average.

That number is wrong. These kind of studies always are due to their nature. It's a best-guess.

The point wasn't to figure out how much money people should be making, it was just a look into how money affects peoples' lives for the average person.
A finite set is so limiting. I'm waiting until someone maps the universe of possible farts onto a continuous, multi-dimensional parameter space that I can navigate by X & Y coordinates of where I touch combined with gyroscope, accelerometer, & compass. I guess I'll have to switch to Android.
Pure link bait; the actual article does not say anything of the sort. The article is, in fact making the point Americans as a whole no longer "make things", and are avoiding getting their hands dirty.I'm not sure if the premise is true - it would be nice to see some hard data to back it up.
Once the iPhone is available on more networks, I can see these numbers changing DRASTICALLY.

Here in Canada, the iPhone is available on all carriers and you rarely see an Android phone. The iPhone totally dominates the market. Most smart phones are iPhones and Blackberrys.
Since preloaded applications are called "crapware," would that make preloaded application stores "crap stores?"
Please do list these "any other platforms" which are so open that the users can decide what they want on them.

And please don't say "Android".

http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/09/android-open/
Mac 10.6 Chrome 6 beta, working here.
Quick note - it looks like About is profitable (50M) it seems like one of the most profitable arms of NYTimes model. Can't find specifics on HowStuffWorks yet. Pet Holdings I like, but is it profitable? Hulu the jury is out, they're just cash flow positive - but they just moved to a pay model. I actually categorize last.fm and hulu slightly differently in my head then the pure, text based web plays, but that's okay.

Demand media I was going to actually use as a counter example since they're not yet profitable (http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/08/12/where-did-demand-medi...)

Last.fm was "hoping" for profitability this year (http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-interview-cbs-thinks-la...)
Fully paid spots are rare in the humanities though, aren't they? When I was in grad school in science pretty much everybody got a free ride but my impression was that things on the other side were very different.