skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like the interface. I agree that "The easiest way to share your entire content" is an awkward sentence. Also, I would suggest making the "Blog + Photostream + Videostream" bit more prominent on the homepage because it's probably the fastest way to explain what the site is, yet it's not the first thing I see on the welcome page by a long shot. Nitpicking here, but I also don't really like how the "red" in Sprred is red in the logo. The site is very clean but the logo could be better.

Seems like a cool service.
In general though, I'd say a lot of natural maturation occurs between the ages of 18 and 22, or even older for your masters degrees and the like.

Anecdotally, I once worked with a girl who on paper was sharp as a whip -- 2 masters degrees from prestigious colleges, top of her class, etc., but in person, was quite socially awkward and had absolutely zero real world experience, as she had only ever been a professional student. She was responsible and mature enough to do the job, and she definitely had plenty of book-type scenarios upon which to apply her vast education, but in the little things, that typically aren't taught out of books, she floundered. Now I think she holds a great title in finance at a decent bank, which probably suits her education better, and hopefully affords her less social interaction than when I knew her.

Another thing that bothers me about college (I didn't attend, though I constantly consider enrolling now) -- is that it means that degree seekers end up in the job market so late in life. I had a portfolio of applications I'd written, technical expertise, and a good working reputation by the time most college grads are just entering the job market.

Obviously, I'm potentially discriminated against by companies who heavily value college degrees, but at least for early job markets, it seems that (outside of silicon valley anyway) the college grads who had to compete with others like myself were at a disadvantage.
I am under the impression that phoronix usually does poor "journalism". I still need to understand why file systems get tested using compression and compilation benchmarks.
I expect all the phones will become linux but you won't know.

The underlying core OS will be a linux derivative, but the layers on top will vary so much that switching from one brand to another will be the same difference as switching between Symbian and Motorola-OS is now.
I fear that by life difficult for power users, Apple (and any vendor who follows their path) will reduce the number of power users that evolve every year--and we need power users as seeds for growing developers.

A creative developer doesn't start off with developer-grade skills, he starts off as a child(newbie), learns to walk(normal user), learns to run (leg power user), then figures out how to attach rockets to his legs without killing himself.
Cool Breezes, the Messenger of Change, and Fantastic Network Challenges
Does it matter what type of English you use on your site?
Here, I agree with you :) Some criticize just to do so. Hell we wont be changing our pivot, it just the 'message' that needs the work.
That won't work for virtual hosted web sites, which is most web sites, because the unrecognized host name in the Host header which will hit the default host on the target web server instead of the correct virtual host, unless that web server is configured to recognize the foo.ipq.co host name.
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There are several differences, and yeah, I am all too familiar with jobs and girlfriends like this.

First difference, is delayed gratification is something I choose for myself; it's not driven onto me.

Second is that when I choose delayed gratification, I choose it based on rational, observed reasons to expect the result, not a promise from someone who hasn't demonstrated trustworthiness. Trust is based on past performance. Blind trust is faith, which I leave to religions.

Third is that choosing delayed gratification is a sign of maturity when the end benefit is a bonus, not when it's someone taking the rock off your back. When the "better times ahead" means simply not having crap shoveled over you each day, it's not maturity to delay jumping out of the septic tank.
Selling really does start at "no"
This article pretends that both lists are mutually exclusive. Maybe combined they equal most parents' top 10 list of worries, and the ones that happen rarely are simply the ones that are most effectively prevented. I rarely die, but I don't consider the time I spend preventing it to be wasted.
For reference, the four items mentioned in the second paragraph:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(division)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carroll_diagram

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_bond

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_method
Good stuff! Straight to my .emacs :)
Thanks! I agree with most of what you want to say. I think you got the point with our service.
> Talking to yourself is a symptom of stress.

Not always. I talk to myself all the time whether I'm happy, sad, stressed, relaxed, whatever. I just seem to solve problems better when I explain them to myself out loud -- see "rubber ducking": http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RubberDucking
You forgot the bit where if you work for a company you need to get approval from 18levels of management and corporate lawyers on 3 continents who have never heard of free software - and you are on the receiving end of the political flak.

Or if you work for a US company and are writing FOSS on your own time - you still risk getting fired because one of the managers or lawyers (who have never heard of FOSS) think it breaks your employment contract and it's a cheap way of reducing head count.
I can dig it. It's useful when tossing up a web server on a cloud host that assigns an ugly external host name and I'd rather address it by a cleaner host name.
Great point. I'd also like to know how people actually use the devices. How many people download apps regularly, how many minutes they spend using the web browser daily. I bet you'd see some really differences between the platforms.
Virtual access billing, a Dutch IPSP run by a bunch of friends of mine. They use segregated merchant accounts so the risk of them going belly up is minimal.
That's a good analysis. It looks like the stress of day-to-day life is most manageable at or above $75,000, but overall quality-of-life perception continues to grow forever.

That's a reasonable conclusion. Intuitively, I would be more stressed by an unusually large gas bill, say, if I earned $30,000/year than I would be if I made $75,000/year. And at the same time, I would always be happier (feel cooler, more productive, more generous) if I had a bigger house, faster boat, or could give more to charity.
What effects do startups have on your resume?
the net effect

So homework does help some kids. But it's unfair to do anything that helps some kids but not others, so it should be got rid of.

The ideal is perhaps for parents to be able to choose whether to send their kids to a school that has their kids best interests at heart, rather than 'fighting inequality' by deliberately teaching them less well.
How much research is done on "Drill (and kill)" methods versus the more "modern" alternatives? Probably none. The dogma is that "drill and kill" is really bad, so no one actually does research on whether it works. It seems to me (not in the math education research field, but not that far away) that the "research" being done is often bedevilled and ham-strung by these preconceived dogma.

(Primarily I'm agreeing with you)

I raise a cautious note about one of your points though:

> A student who wants to learn will do so, no matter
> how bad the teacher or the teacher's methods

I used to believe this, and I want to believe it, but I've now seen several instances of otherwise bright children with bad teachers making no progress. Then a brief intervention by a gifted tutor has led to the child catching up and surpassing the other in their class.

You might claim that this is a gifted tutor by-passing the cultural issues by providing enough interest to make the child engaged despite the peer pressure. Perhaps.

But I now do believe that a poor to middling teacher in math will actively prevent many otherwise perfectly capable students from achieving their potential. That's why I'm heavily involved in math enrichment programs.
"Or if you are a 21 year old white male hacker, you might find this useful too."
can somebody shed a light on the meaning/joke? behind this sentence? what's there about being a 21 year old white male hacker?
The Organisation Kid
The Science of Eavesdropping
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, rather than as a common-sense way of systematizing simple common concepts.

http://randomgraphs.blogspot.com/2009/06/feynman-on-educatio... is a good cautionary tale on what this tendency leads to.

Part of this is that teachers tend to have a poor quantitative background themselves,

This is not a new problem. In the 50s a survey of elementary school teachers found that most thought that 3/5 was larger than 2/3. Based on anecdotal experience and the impressions of people I've talked to, I would expect the same result if the same question was ask of today's teachers.

Speaking of anecdotes, the first time I won an argument with a teacher was in grade 6. I hadn't done my homework, so I sat reading the textbook while the class went through homework. I understood the textbook's explanation, and realized that the teacher had been teaching us the wrong thing for the last 2 weeks, and that explained why the class had consistently found that the answers in the official answer key were "wrong". It took me 20 minutes of arguing to convince the teacher, and everyone had to relearn that 2 weeks of material. (We had been practicing doing arithmetic in bases other than 10, and he had been teaching us to just calculate the answer in base 10 then convert into the right base. What we needed to do was convert the number into base 10, calculate, then convert back into the right base.)
I really don't see the value. Adding to a knowledge base with learned contributors is all well and good, but it seems impossible to scale past a certain point. He seems to shrug off the question as unimportant in the interview, along with shrugging off the idea of monetization.

It's possible that he's just being cagey about some secret sauce, but why bother? I'd think he'd want to create as much buzz as possible if he's figured out a clever way to scale a contributor-driven knowledge base.
Does this mean I have to buy into my own stock?

Yes, but most people don't exercise their options until a liquidity event (company gets sold, goes public, etc). When this happens, you hope the shares are worth more than your option price. If so, you can exercise your options and make profit between your option price and the current price. This is the zero risk way to do it.

Also it looks like it will take five years to vest, so what happens if the company is acquired/goes public between now and then?

You should have some sort of vesting schedule in your packet. I'm guessing that within 5 years all your options will be vested, but between now until then, your options vest as you work. This is because your startup doesn't want to just give out boatloads of options to people who are going to leave. They want you to stick around and earn them and the vesting schedule is how they accomplish that.
How much time do you spend preventing sniper attacks? (#2)
On Stickiness - It doesn't look good for RIM (this was back in March):

Some 40% of Blackberry users, according to CrowdScience, prefer the iPhone as their next smartphone purchase. Even more, some 32% of Blackberry users said that they would drop their Crackberry for the latest Android offering, the Nexus One.

http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2010/03/15/blackberry-users-iph...
> Their strategy for this seems to be to make people jump over a low paperwork barrier, then wait long enough that the payments have all cleared before they pay out.

I wonder why they don't just do this by default? Personally I would not be offended at all if they just had a status on the payments called "waiting for payment to clear."
Whenever you fight in court, you have to take account of two aspects of how a court might rule: (1) the technical legal and (2) the "motivational."

The former is what I summarized above but the latter is what motivates a court to want to go one way or the other, as long as it can find a legal "hook" to go that way. As to this, it does matter that Mr. Hurd is head of a multi-billion dollar corporation and that he got a huge severance as part of leaving his employment. Given those facts, judges will be more motivated than otherwise to find a reason why he should be restricted in some fashion as part of his two-year confidentiality agreement. Thus, if the HP lawyers can come up with even a modicum of evidence to show "threatened" compromises of trade secrets, the court might go their way simply out of a sense of justice inspired by the background factors that are not technically relevant to the letter of the law.

So, yes, that factor can be relevant in the way just described.

By the way, this is why contingent lawyers never go into court with an "unattractive" plaintiff (meaning a "creep" and not physically unattractive) - even if you are technically right on the law, no judge or jury wants to out of their way to reward that which they regard as repulsive. This is always crucial to remember in assessing any case.
I'm not quite cynical enough to believe every compliment offered has a financial motivation.

But if I started receiving calls from random strangers telling me I'm awesome I'd probably be inclined to doubt the callers were motivated by sincere belief in my awesomeness. Actually I'd probably be saddened to think the only compliments I was getting were from people paid to do it, or concerned that someone, somewhere, was probably secretly laughing at me.

Zack, if you fancy pivoting I'd be more likely to pay to listen to the funniest responses you get :-p
Yeah - no real reason to be on Google for more than a few seconds at a time. Plus, facebook encourages you to keep your browser window open (persistent chat, live feed updates etc).
Here's a better way - if Google is going to figure out a whizbang superman App Ranking system first and better (which sounds to me like its Not An Easy Thing), let them do it and then copy it. Because right now from my anecdotal experience it sounds like the Google App Marketplace is the one with the Too Many Fart app problem going unsolved - not Apple.

I think the author is way underestimating the problem though.
I was unaware of this new jargon until today. I welcome one of them in particular, the "number bond", because it draws specific attention to something valuable that I was never able to transmit to my teenagers. They have always believed that understanding the concepts is the sole goal of education, but I have always maintained that building a large base of instantaneous recall, through practice, also has enormous value. "Number bond" explicitly addresses that.
if they file clean code, solve problems, are positive in their nature and make the people around them great they can marry their their iPad.

some of the best people startup people, at least in my experience, are "unique."

Embrace the odd, create the future.
This is great, thanks for the insight jbail. I want to clarify using an example (not using real numbers):

I am granted 100k options at exercise price of $0.10, so the total amount it would cost me would be $10k to purchase them. The company is sold with shares being valued at $10 each.

I spend $10,000 purchasing the shares, which then I would see a return of $990,000?
I talk to myself, even when not working. So yes. He's just special.

Sometimes if you're eager to say something to real people, you may talk to yourself (ADHD people do it). If you're standing right there and he's talking to himself, then he either doesn't know you're there, or it's just helping him think.
I think Shoemaker is just trying to corner the market...

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/08/apple-fart-apps/
Invest some of that ad money into actual editors, Techcrunch. My old state is spelled with a "p"!

In response to the content, I used to live in Nashua. It's a fairly sleepy little town without much crime in general, though some areas are becoming a little rough around the edges. A lot of people left their doors unlocked. I'd say broadcasting your current whereabouts to the world instead of merely your friends is a 21st century way of leaving your doors unlocked: it only works when everyone plays nicely.
I was taught with the older techniques, but I like the new chunking and gridding system better. I think it is a lot closer to how you would break the problem down if you couldn't use pen and paper and had to do everything in your head.
I have to disagree in a very large way with two of the points this article makes.

The first is that Apple is dissuading amateur developers by rejecting 'fart apps', in the metaphorical sense of instituting a qualitative standard. The App Store is flooded with mass-produced low-quality low-demand junk apps so that a coding sweatshop in east Asia can make a few bucks per app, times however many thousands they churn out. THEY are who will be rejected, rather than someone with a good, novel, new, or beneficial idea.

Second is the thought that Google will solve the App Store's search and filtering issues. Has the author of this article used the Android Market? For being backed by the pinnacle of search providers, the Android Market's search and filtering capabilities are abysmal, and are actually outdone by small-time independent groups like AppBrain.

Apple DOES have enough fart apps. Android does too. A human element needs to be involved in the screening process in a qualitative sense. Why are there hundreds, if not thousands, of single-use "sexy photo jigsaw puzzle" apps? What about "list of quotes" apps? The App Store is littered with garbage, and for the greater good, maybe there will be a few casualties, but that's the price of strengthening an emerging marketplace.
I started reading HN not too long ago and was just wondering. no reason really
I think this is my first time encountering the "Grid Method," maybe I've seen it before but I was definitely taught the "old way" in school.

It's genius. I remember the thing I hated the most about long multiplication or division was having to go back and "do it all over again" if I got the answer wrong. The nice thing about the Grid, though, is if you screw up the answer in one of the cells, all the remaining cells might still be good. Then you only have to re-do the addition. Much more user-friendly.

I don't have kids, but it makes me sad that any parent could see their kid come home with that respond with anger. Hell, once you've let your kid show you their way, maybe you can teach him the old way too. The far more important lesson, I think, is that there's more than one way to do it.
So homework does help some kids.

Homework helps some kids and hurts some other kids. And causes stress all around. The kids that it helps are exactly the ones whose families are most able to send them to private schools. The kids that it hurts are the ones whose families are least able to send them to private schools.

The ideal is perhaps for parents to be able to choose whether to send their kids to a school that has their kids best interests at heart, rather than 'fighting inequality' by deliberately teaching them less well.

You're using loaded language that shortcuts thinking.

If we TRULY have the kid's best interests at heart then it seems to me we should not assign homework in public schools (avoid hurting the kids who get no other choices), and allow private schools to assign as much as they want (so kids who would be helped can be allowed that experience). This maximizes the chance of having kids encounter the homework strategy that will be most effective for them.

That seems better to me than the current situation where half the kids encounter a homework policy that actively harms them. And have no alternatives.
Interesting. It seems that gridding and chunking would better generalize when students start taking algebra and multiplying x+1 and 3x-5 instead of 11 and 25.
any decision that isn't based on hard facts has an element of persuasion in it.
"Things that kill children" is not identical with "things parents should worry about". For example, immediate mortality is probably not parents' major concern with drugs (#5 on the list).
#include <IANAL.h>

You basically have the "option" to purchase the stock for a set price (your strike price) for some period of time.

Yes, to exercise your options you would have to purchase the stock at the strike price, and then sell it at the current (higher) price. With few exceptions, you can't do any of this until/unless the company IPO's and is publicly traded.

Because you have not been granted anything of direct value (that would be a stock grant, not an options agreement), you have no tax liability, because, well you don't have anything :)

5 Years is a bit rough, a typical vesting schedule is 4 years, typically with a 1 year cliff (nothing vests until you reach 1 year of employment, then 25% (or in your case probably 20%) of the shares are vested, meaning you could exercise them. After this, a proportionate amount of additional shares vests each month until the 4 or 5 year mark).

If something happens to the company before the 5 year period, some combination of losing any/all shares (vested or not), getting new/additional shares, getting an entirely new allocation of shares, or having the strike price adjusted is likely to happen.

You don't actually own anything until you exercise (buy) the shares. And I HIGHLY recommend you don't purchase any of the vested shares until the company is public, and only then when you intend to exercise them immediately (which is generally a cashless transaction).

The hard facts are that until there is an IPO, common stock (what you have options to) is very likely to get whacked around a fair bit, and you stand to lose far more than you gain.
Sometimes people with dislexia or other reading problems will read aloud. Sometimes, the only way they can process the content is by hearing it.
At least a few of the people dead set against these methods are college professors seeing new students come in with no math skill whatsoever. See: http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-good-are-uw-studen...

The 'classic' methods are algorithims. They work. They aren't any more complicated than the various other methods, but at least they work in all situations. The other methods, while they may be useful for fermi problems, don't always have a clear way to progress when the problems become harder. And the kicker is, they're no simpler when you account for all the 'non-easy' numbers. See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr1qee-bTZI

Whatever the reason, there's a dramatic decline in the understanding of basic math by students at reasonably good universities over the last 20ish years. I've done the math, and I think I was on the tail end of a conservative swing. There's been one new math swing in that time, and I think we're heading back again.

(This as the parent of small kids who's done way too much reading about the various curricula that are available, and how even the best ones used in classrooms pretty much suck. Jump and Singapore are the two that I know of that are pretty good, but they're not not USAian, so they don't get used in the schools. It is kinda funny going over problems in Jump and seeing the canadian cultural content.)