skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Evidence suggests - and my experience agrees - that correctly teaching process creates the ground-work for moving to understanding.

Considering you are talking about evidence, where is yours?

I agree that a lot of people make unsupported generalizations about "what works" and "what doesn't work". I'm simply doubtful you can really propose a practical alternative, not even hypothetically practical alternative.

I would assert that part of this how extremely difficult it to really determine better teaching methods scientifically, controlling for expectation, controlling for multiple socio-economic factors, controlling for each child's background, etc, etc.

The rather rough experiments that anyone can point to show at best that "X works reasonably with teacher of X ability with student of X socio-economic position".

Inherently, just about every teaching method is "insufficiently researched". Just about every way that we deal with human beings is "ready, fire, aim" because we simply don't have the resources to fully, scientifically tease out what's the best dealing with the many, many dimensions of human behavior.

I'm not against social science because it's better to try to be a systematically as possible. I am against deluding oneself into thinking social science will work like natural, that it will come up with generalized laws that one can follow without constant adjustment.
Great story! It's another good antidote to the "but you can never be too safe" reaction. As your story shows, maximum vigilance about your child's safety requires that you not instill a fear of strangers. Strangers should be viewed as a source of help, not danger. (Maybe amend that with some common-sense exceptions as they get old enough to grok the subtleties.)

Sadly, the paranoia seems to be out of control. So much so that I take the commenter below ("a couple creepy incidents") with a grain of salt. Was it really something creepy or are kids taught to overreact when a stranger so much as says hello and the story got exaggerated in the telling?

It's ridiculous what I've seen parents describe as creepy. They just cannot get the image of a child predator out of their heads.
A minority but not a niche. Between iPads, iPod Touches, and iPhones they're going to have a sizable chunk of the mobile market one way or another. The other unknowable factor is how engaged iOS device owners are in buying third party apps/content compared to Android users. If the average iOS user buys 2x the number of apps compared to the average Android user Apple's minority market share is effectively doubled for developers who want to sell their applications instead of relying on advertising support.
I'm outsourcing my current project... at least to get the prototype.

I want to learn it for long-term rewards. It all sounds a little daunting though..
More Emergent Strategies: Groupon, Greendot
How likely is it that your child will die from a random drunk crossing four lanes of traffic vs. merely taking a ride with a friend who is unsafe? Or, for that matter, drunk?

Drivers aged 16-19 have auto fatality rates four times higher than other drivers. That's not because they are magnets for middle aged drunk drivers.

1 in 4 teens killed in auto accidents were under the influence of alcohol.

Children are more likely to be molested by family members and friends of the family than by strangers. They are also more likely to die by stepping into the car of a friend than by being hit while driving alone. It's important to instill in your children the skills necessary to deal with the actual threats they are likely to encounter. Indeed, as a ridiculous example, if you told your children that they are not allowed to ride with friends but they are free to hitch-hike with random adult strangers chances are they'd actually be safer.
g.raphaeljs.com
Ha...

Lap Land Pet Sitting
"Thanks for the Beer Lap Land Pet Sitting! I hope you hate your new horrible logo as much as I hated making it."

http://www.horriblelogos.com/lap-land-pet-sitting-service/
Who Cares? Crowdsourcing Your News Intake
There's a lot of basic CS knowledge that seems like it would be better taught in college; I'm mentoring a younger employee right now and I'm glad I don't have to teach him data structures and state machines — that would be a waste of my time IMO. For software engineering, apprenticeship may be a better path (which you can start on during college via internships BTW).

I think a lot of people are framing this topic as "4 years of college vs. 4 years of something else" when the real answer is more likely to be college plus something else. Unfortunately, there's a strong economic incentive not to talk about such scenarios because they make a software engineering education sound more expensive.
Burglary Ring Targeted People Based on Facebook-posted Location
I haven't done this, but I know if I did I would ask this guy: http://informationisbeautiful.net/

No idea whether he does small contract work or whether it is affordably priced, but I like his work.
From my experience the general perception about software engineers seems to be that we are some sort of fancy accountants, number crunching all day. Although basic Math skills is very much a fundamental requirement to write software, people don't seem to realize there is a lot more to it.

Another reason I people bring up is that they would rather not sit all day in front of a computer, as they would rather have a job where they could socialize more. Although, I have never understood as to why someone would want it.
I think your opinion is too strong, OS X still ships with many GPL licensed software, bash, smbclient, nmblookup and I'm pretty sure that OS X server includes the GPL3 licensed Samba, OS X still comes with gcc, and I believe it will for the next two releases at least. CUPS, the printer daemon that Apple bought some years ago is still a GPLed software and it appears that Apple has done nothing to change that.

Things can change and Apple is a great contributor to LLVM, but Apple appear to have no trouble with the GPL, only trouble with gcc, but that is easy to understand.
Things That Never Happen
> You'd be amazed how things change when you get into your 30's and start having kids. ;)

Yes, that's pretty much my situation, only you can add another decade.
Phoronix. The tabloid of free software geek news website. Their best known speciality: sensationalist articles based on ridiculous benchmarks.
Harj, the point I was trying to make is why people sometimes refer to YC as an incubator. I think PG (above) is right that what people interpret to mean by 'incubator' is changing (for the better IMHO).

Responses to a couple of your points:

> the best term for describing us would be investors

This doesn't differentiate YC from Angels, VCs or even friends/family/fools (at some level). All it says is 'we put money in'. Clearly there are major differences between each category of investor so to say that 'investor' is the best description is a bit of a disservice to the package YC offers. I don't have any suggestions as to what would be better, but it's obvious to me that YC is more than just an investor.

> because we do so much more for startups than what investors have typically done

I think I understand where this is coming from but I'm pretty sure there are (or have been) some great investors who do a lot for their investee companies, on par with elements of YC. However, what YC has done, is to repeat the best elements at a scale not achieved before.
Well, you own the options after they vest; you exercise options in order to purchase shares. In other words, you own the right to buy shares at a specific price (that's the option), and exercising that right means actually buying those shares (generally for a price far below the current share price). You can then hold on to the shares, or turn around and sell them for an immediate profit (depending on the terms of various agreements).
Thanks to everybody who donated. We've indeed reached our goal, and I will be going to the conference. You rock!
A web and iPhone app to help you declutter (plus open API)
I was initially shocked when I zoomed in on one of the dots and immediately saw "Bad Deal" ... I thought WTF is this guy trying to lose customers?

But then I thought of how I felt as a customer! And it was good.

It's really a fantastic looking engine really nice. I'm interested in how you're going to use it... a "craigslist" for tickets? Relicense to ticketmaster et. al. ?

Something else?

Whatever - you've built something really cool, now you can figure out how to monetize it.
I've been trying to buy the Samsung Galaxy S for a week but they've been completely sold out in all of Montreal and Laval until today. This afternoon I finally found a FutureShop that had one.

And they refused to sell it to me.

The girl at the counter said that because it's such a popular phone they only sell it with 3 year contracts.

I bought the at&t version on ebay a few hours ago but still, it's ridiculously hard to get an Android phone whereas iPhones are everywhere and pushed hard.
I personally don't see homework as a bad thing, depending on the topic. There's two types of homework that I think make sense: 1.) The school work that couldn't be finished in class due to time constraints, and 2.) Practicing learned concepts in class to internalize them.

The second type of homework doesn't apply to all classes, but a good candidate for this is math (spelling/grammar/reading is another). I'm a believer in children needing a good foundation in basic concepts before advancing to higher ones. If you can't do 14 - 9 in your head, instantly, then it's pointless to try multiplication or division. Directed practice can make children perform mathematics quickly and accurately. They don't come like that out of the box.
I had two theories, but I had to cross one out. The one I dismissed was if she surveyed parents in the DC area around 2003, which there was an active sniper. But I couldn't find any evidence she was from that area.

The other idea is that she means "school shootings" instead of snipers specifically.
No, in England you'd study whatever your father studied. If he was a blacksmith, you were a blacksmith. If he was an aristocrat, you were an aristocrat.

What Adams is talking about is quite different.
In particular, that approach is quite nice for servers. If you're on a particular Debian stable release, you know that anything you install will work with the same base set of packages, and any security updates will work as drop-in replacements. You're never going to find that installing a new package suddenly triggers a set of cascading upgrades as it pulls in newer versions of libraries and other packages. If something depends on MySQL, it'll be the version of MySQL in the Debian you're using, and you won't be forced to do an unplanned MySQL upgrade in order to install the package. Then you can do planned, infrequent upgrades between the major releases, when you upgrade from one Debian version to another.

(Not that Debian's unique in that. FreeBSD's release branches and Red Hat Enterprise Linux use a similar model.)
Need a Job? Build Something Cool.
i.e.

Feross (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1678111) gets an offer:

From Chad Hurley's Twitter:
"Hey @FreeTheFeross! Loving YouTube Instant... http://feross.net/instant/ Want a job? ;)"
Has this ever really happened? This sounds more like apocryphal legends meant to scare young developers about that big, bad manager in the closet.
Curry ketchup is very popular in Germany. The street food of Berlin is currywurst, which is just a sausage with curry powder and curry ketchup. The curry ketchup in Germany is not only curry-flavored but sweeter than American Heinz ketchup. So is it a different kind of ketchup or just "currywurst sauce?" Does it not count because ketchup wasn't already established as a specific taste in Germany?
Ditch Resume Lies For More Successful Interviews
This is really cool. I didn't realize all these ticket brokers had affiliate setups and such good data feeds. I guess those hefty fees allow for it.
Hijacking this to say that the use of the colon in this title and others like it is deeply offensive. It should be:

"Study: Microbes Ate BP Oil Deep-Water Plume"

It doesn't make any sense for it to be the other way around!

Also, hurray that the worst case scenario didn't happen. I will try to remember this the next time I read sky-is-falling articles from commenters at the Oil Drum.
Are "Here You Have" & "David Leadbetter" viruses going after specific targets?
The lab that did the study is part of a team that received a $500MM award from BP. I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/02/01_ebi.shtml
Well, I have had everything from school leavers to PhDs working for me, and I can tell you that a college degree is not necessary to become a good programmer if you are adequately mentored by the right person. So my personal answer to your question is yes, that can work.

However, it doesn't matter what I think - it matters what everybody else thinks. And the world values the right kind of degree. I had the rather amusing experience recently of being screened out of a job application specifically for lacking a computer science degree. Apparently 15 years of software engineering and management not to mention a degree and research in astrophysics was not a good enough substitute :-)

So I personally would recommend to a talented youngster to get a CompSci degree regardless.
Probably not. It's extremely labor-intensive to collect and arguably not very useful because most tickets listed on the secondary market don't include the seat number.
WTF? The NYT says this just a few days ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/business/economy/07jobs.ht... and now this article says the opposite? Can't have it both ways.
A Dastardly Clever Scheme
Candidate's plan to charge for right to drive 90
Thank you to everyone who donated, and thank you again to Relevance for covering Raynes' lodging and conference admission.

Numbers, more thank-you's, and more here: http://bit.ly/aj0XPr
Ask HN: RFS 3: Things Built on Twitter. Where are the companies?
I've seen plenty of press come out around all the startups that came out of ycombinator this year. I haven’t seen much about the twitter startups. I’m interested because our startup http://keytweet.com applied under that RFS. We have, like the other startups, been working hard all summer. I'd really like to see how we stack up against the companies that did get YC funding. We are working on a major redesign...so stayed tuned.
Hey, there's actually another reason that's smart too. Apparently having positive emotions toward other people makes it more likely for you yourself to be happy. So maybe having these people call others to tell them how great they are would have even more of an effect than the initial service offered.
Like any crafts person be it a carpenter or indeed a surgeon, even once you learn the tools of your trade & fill your head with all of the theory and academic knowledge required - learning how to apply this, to actually create a great product takes practice & experience.

If you are aiming to quickly develop and bring an idea to market, I would recommend hiring or partnering with a developer with a solid background, maybe reduce the feature set you intend to develop for version 1 to the bare minimum. Try and use the best resources you can within your budget.

While non-developers do learn to code & launch applications in short periods of time, these cases tend to be the exception, I've seen people with sales & marketing backgrounds struggle for years to code products and never get them launched.

I don't want to sound negative, but taking a product through the entire lifecycle yourself, while also trying to drum up sales, with no technical background....it's going to be tough going.
Thanks! It appears that this blog even links to many other helpful information designers.
There are real costs to being worried about the wrong things. How many kids today have been raised in over-protective environments? Not allowed to travel around the neighborhood or the city alone, for example. How does that affect them when they become adults? How does that impact their ability to be self-reliant, inquisitive, adventurous, confident, self-starting?
I've seen Telus ads for Android phones. See: <http://www.telusmobility.com/en/ON/htc_desire/index.shtml?IN...;

I get the impression that carriers like Android devices better than iPhones. Analogies are fraught with danger but this looks similar to the early Mac vs PC days. I predict Apple can keep a decent minority market share as long as they execute well. Android or something like it will probably dominate the rest of the market. The network effects are strong.
Young, Single Women Earn More Than Male Peers
I'm a parent and I worry tons about drowning and car accidents. I also worry about kidnapping, though, just because it's such a horrible thing. I have never yet to lose a minute of sleep over terrorists or snipers though -- it sounds they surveyed the Fox News paranoia generation with those responses (assuming this is an American audience. Those are obviously real threats in some parts of the world).
Sort of the relationship of Android with the Linux kernel, for me this is the same as publishing a GPLed patch to OpenSSH or something like that, this is immense disrespect towards the developer community of a project, which does have its culture.

FSF has done this as well by changing the license of their software from GPL2/LGPL2 to GPL3/LGPL3 and turning the GameSWF (released under public domain) into the GPLed Gnash.
I have to say Brooks' ability of denial is quite impressive. He is so good at not seeing the elephant in the room, it is no wonder he has a prestigious job with the NYT.

He wrote an entire article about how Americans are "abandoning" manufacturing without ever mentioning offshoring. If you read his article you would think that the American decline in manufacturing has something to do with some weird pretentiousness of the American workers and nothing to do with the millions of manufacturing jobs leaving the country.
I think there is an unmet market, and the consolidation into twitter/facebook won't meet the needs of all people.

Bloglines and Google Reader both were flawed in providing the user with too much information; Facebook's feeds and twitters short memory prevent a buildup of thousands of unread things, and were better about promoting what was important.
It varies per person. For me, I finished all of my curriculum at Carnegie Mellon, but I will not be completing my degree because I've already gained all the value in my opinion. I think going to school and dropping out was very valuable to me.
The order is in... and let the wait begin.
We should turn those microbes loose on the deficit too then.
It's working for me now -- Chrome, OSX
Looks like we just re-did our job postings. http://datasphere.com/careers is where to find all the positions
The answer to this is pretty clear.

You can make billions of dollars in the business (particularly in finance), screw people over with little or no consequence, and you can't do that as easily as an engineer.

But i disagree that our best and brightest aren't trying. There are still engineers, and there are still people going out and becoming doctors, regardless of the difficulties in their fields.

The problem is that to do interesting and innovative things in tech, you have to go up against the regulatory and entrenched business interests in the US. The Obama Administration is having to contend with this, and Google has tried and failed to contend with this (look at the Nexus One experiment, and their whitespace wireless efforts).

It sucks to try and disrupt in the US.
I think the real problem, at least here in the U.S., is that most people learn next to nothing in high school so they have to spend 1-2 years in college in huge auditorium classes catching up.

If you want to fix college you first have to fix high school.
It's the color. People want to be able to see the difference at the same time they're tasting it. That's easier to do with a base that is bright yellow than dark red.
BlurryPeople is what ChatRoulette 2.0 could have been
The current issue with Apple and GPL stems from the App Store. FSF says you can't limit distribution of the code, which is reasonable since they own the license to the code. Apple says we want to limit the distribution of the app, which is reasonable since they own the channel.

Just like I tell my kids, if you can't get along with the neighbor, don't go play in their back yard. Sounds like Apple is taking that advice and people in the free community are offended.
What a great opportunity for you. Have a blast! Are you planning on writing up a trip report on your blog?
I don't know how ABCL works, but Dalvik uses it's own byte code so unless ABCL compiles to raw Java, it won't work for Android.
Software development is not the same as computer science. Despite the fact that many (most?) of us have CS degrees, I claim that it does a poor job of preparing for a careen in software development.

As the name implies, CS is a science. Studying it, you're taught a lot of theory, with an aim toward doing what others studying the sciences do: become a researcher or a professor.

A career in software development is actually an engineering job. We need to know about design and documentation, communicating with stakeholders by gathering requirements and writing specs, etc. This is a giant step away from what CS teaches us.

I'd estimate that what I learned as a CS major in college (in '89) taught me maybe 50% of what I needed to know in my first job. And conversely, half of what it did teach me went unused in my job.

So I think that to compete with the traditional path of education to a software development career, you don't have a very high bar to claim success. This may be why so many people I know in the field have completely non-technical degrees. Some of the best software developers I've worked with have been musicians.
I think it does count as different kind of ketchup - however if you plot the popularity of different ketchup flavors - I am guessing you'll get a pointed peak bell curve - whereas mustard would give you a longer tail curve. My point is that examples exist (I consider BBQ sauce as a variant of ketchup) but the distribution is much skewed in favor of 1 flavor for ketchups.
I'm now doing everything client-side using JQuery and <script> tags to get around cross-domain XHR limitations. Now Google can't block it. :)
Top Ways Women Sabotage Their Careers
I do find successful women to be much more assertive and vocal. But then again that applies to men as well.
Sorry, that was very poorly worded.

From your link, this is the point I was trying to get across:

"For purposes of the regular income tax, the exercise of an incentive stock option is a non-event. There is no tax — in fact, nothing to report on your tax return — when you exercise an ISO. This is dramatically different from the treatment of nonqualified options. Generally you report compensation income equal to the difference between the fair market value of the stock and the amount paid under the option when you exercise a nonqualified option."
During the industrial revolution you had an explosion in manufacturing. Prior to that most people were employed in agriculture. I wonder if we looked at editorials from the time we'd find pundits bemoaning the loss of agricultural jobs/industry, or that the "best and brightest" weren't interested in animal husbandry.

The relative cost of turning a lump of metal into a car has only gone down over the years. This is the case with most manufacturing. The marginal value of "building stuff" decreases. This makes answering the higher level questions more valuable.

Perfect example would be YC. They could have made another technology startup with their various talents, but instead they produce more value by consulting and acting as the middle man between skilled kids that need funding and people with piles of money that don't know how to pick winners.
I still have my free "I <3 Bloglines" T-Shirt. Guess I can just use it as a grease rag now...