skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anecdotal evidence:

I've owned every video game console made in the last 15 years or so (While I was growing up). I had a TV in my own room and my own computer with broadband as soon as it was available in our city. I skipped classes to play video games in high school. I played video games into the wee hours of the night for all of high school and college. I've seen all the latest movies and TV shows and enjoy critiquing them with friends.

On the flip side, I have some 20 or so boxes of books I've completely read... I average maybe 2 books a week and have done so since I was old enough to find what I wanted at the library. I read faster than anyone I know. I read books from all genres for fun, and always have. I managed to do well in college which got me into grad school with a stipend.

The point: anecdotal evidence is not very useful. Also, the article and your comment seem to take a very naive view of human development. There is a lot more to this than just "video games made my son stupid".
It wasn't there for linkbait purposes, it was there because the startup my friend was considering which initiated this post is crazy about python, another startup in progress is all python-based, and python is always coming up in the discussion. If I wanted to linkbait I would have used a more popular language like Java.
Agreed, in terms of Audio quality, the Apple headphones are their worst product.
If you want to modify the probability based on karma points, I would suggest giving larger probability to those users with fewer points, as those with more points (ostensibly) would already get more attention given to their submissions anyway.

Dave won't get anywhere with either this scheme or the one I proposed, at least not immediately. But that's the idea: it will be a little bit harder for Dave to gain traction, but it will demonstrate that he's not a spammer, which should be a reasonable price to pay for ensuring the site isn't overrun with garbage (any more than some claim it already is).
Curious to know if you think it isn't broken because you are used to it or if it isn't broken because when you first came across it you thought everything was perfect?
Worse things have happened. You could easily cap the "considered" karma at like 500. Or some value that is a function of the total karma in the system.

EDIT: or cap the "considered" karma at the median for all users.
This seems appropriate. I didn't really start "reading" a lot until I was in my mid-twenties and wanted to know more about global issues and international affairs, and I could find books on those topics pretty easily in the best-sellers list.

My dad would have me read classics like The Lord of the Rings. I appreciate them now, but they had little relevance to me as a boy.

The internet was probably the best thing for me because it allowed me to quickly find more information on topics I actually cared about.

So I'd say the way to get anyone to read, not just boys, is to facilitate the link between their interests and books. So when someone shows an interest or aptitude in a certain hobby, show them a bunch of books in that area.

It's not quite so obvious to people that there is a ton of information out there on the things they love.

Also I think it's funny to read comments on hackernews saying that kids shouldn't have access to video games when a lot of us grew up on computer games, BBSs, MUDs, etc. and are now hackers/coders.
Businessweek top 25 entrepreneurs under 25
Setting up a new switch in the office, and to show the pretty light-show on startup, rebooted the switch. Turns out that the newer Procurve 1810Gs don't automatically save the config (you have to tell them to after making changes), and they don't have loop protection on by default...

So reboot -> no loop protection and that 3-cable LACP trunk I'd just put them on was suddenly a bit of a loop[1]...

Moral of the story : Don't assume that (what seems like) a minor version update in a product doesn't change the behaviour substantially (the 1800G switches save the config when you make changes, the 1810Gs have it as an explicit step).

[1] A gigabit loop on a completely flat network, so there was essentially a gigabit of broadcast traffic pounding at the ~100 machines on the network...
My younger son (20) almost literally eats advanced math books for breakfast.

I'm not sure I understand what it means to almost-literally eat advanced maths books for breakfast.

I understand what it means to do it figuratively, and I understand what it means to do it literally, but I'm afraid that almost-literally has me puzzled.

edit: Wow, modded down to -4 for linguistic pedantry? That's unusual.
It's been my experience that latency is a bigger issue with VoIP on a satellite connection than bandwidth limitations.
This does not seem to be appropriate to this forum.
Correlating Federal Spending and College Tuition
The tone of the Gillmor Gang was always more aggressive and Arrington wasn't being particularly aggressive and was trying to make a point about how things work. I get the feeling he wasn't comfortable with the Gillmor Gang on his network and was looking for a way out.

Leo Laporte takes quite a few shots at other people and can take it. It is often hard to listen to some of his "netcasts" because he does tend to be snarky about those flyover people.

// disclosure: I do contribute the $2/mo to TWIT
That's a nice theory, in the abstract.

In the concrete... replying to email costs money... a lot of money. First of all, just wading through the out of office, change of address, and bounces probably costs 10-20 cents each. But answering a real customer email with a real person probably costs $5-$20 depending on the kind of company you are.

Now, there are many businesses (like Zappos) for whom it is worth it, and there are businesses (like Facebook) for whom it is not. If you have a million customers and you make about $2 off of each one, well, replying to their email is going to blow any hope you ever had of profiting from them. Customers who like to have penpal relationships with companies are costly customers. Some places might think that losing those customers is no big deal, especially if they have other, well-established ways of getting in touch. For example, the phone company. They're usually a monopoly or a duopoly. They might send out millions of emails to fulfill some legal requirement to notify you that from now on the APR on late fees has gone up. They literally do not need to talk to you about this. They really don't. Anyone that would reply to such a message is suddenly going to become an unprofitable customer. They're monopolies or near-monopolies so they don't care.

Don't get me wrong... ALL my email replies work... anything that Fog Creek every sends out and anything that I ever send out to the 60,000 people on my mailing list... I get every single bounce and delete them all by hand.

But that's me. The "one size fits all" belief that EVERY company needs to read ALL their email sounds good in theory but it's obvious that plenty of businesses are making a business decision not to send from real email addresses and they're not always doing it out of stupidity.
Great ideas, thanks!
In terms of Audio quality, the Apple mouse is even worse.
Learning about Entrepreneurship from Star Wars
How my parents raised me to read:

1. Got me a library card and took me to the library often.

2. No Nintendo during the week. (And in fact, they did not buy me the system at all, my grandparents gave it to me as a gift several years after all my friends had one)

edit: Also, I spent time with cousins who also read a lot. Having peers who read and can recommend books is great encouragement.
That is not shady. It is business. They are throwing out a highball offer and will quite possibly negotiate to smaller deal.
I encourage you to use your hacker mentality and solve the problem. Although unlikely the survival of the human race may very well depend on you being prepared.
Thanks for the insights, will have a look at affiliate programs to see what types of safeguards are built in. Thanks!
No reason as to actually WHY StackExchange will fail is given, but rather it's a whining about the StackExchange sites approval mechanism. I may agree with the author and may dislike this mechanism too, but the article has nothing to do with the title and is very emotional.
PS, Does this make anyone else want to read such titles at "Sir Fartsalot Hunts the Booger" and "The Psycho Butts of Uranus"? I never read books like those, but I can easily see books like this getting young boys into the habit of reading.
Because it is much more than that ... combines Read It Later, with Readability (Firefox add-on), and ability to download ePub to my N-900 (so it works virtually everywhere, not only on iP*). Also, there is no cost of using it ... if it goes away (or requires payment), I don't loose anything than one day worth of reading.
Did you consciously train speed reading? I read a lot too when I was a kid, but I still spend hours on a book, and a lot more for non-fiction.

Do you have nay indicators on your retention? Do you feel it's sufficient or not, or do you have a feeling on how you compare to others?
I usually have the airline send me SMS notifications.

I think TripIt Pro does notifications too.
We've done all these things. It's a great list and I would only add one more item, to be used sparingly, and that is to give 'em a small dose of familial culture motivation. Saying things like, "Pearces learn to read, and read a lot. You will. It's the only way to be smart."

The purpose is just to cover all the motivational bases. Usually they'll want to read for fun or due to their inquisitive nature, but sometimes, my kids would give me lip about how they never wanted to learn to read or how they can just listen to audio. At those times, I just gently plant the cultural seed and let it go to work in their head, motivating them with a sense of duty.
I disagree. I think it's nothing but a good idea compared to its current state, for the following reasons:

- IPC in userspace is insecure, and currently easily subverted by rootkits.

- When a system is under heavy load, the dbus daemon becomes a choke point for scheduling. "Spammy" processes can prevent messages from reaching higher priority processes.

- It is a lifesaver for embedded devices with poor multitasking capabilities. Think about ucLinux.

- It's not for everyone. It's like PF_RING for packet capturing.

- It makes sense not only for performance, but also reliability.

- Even though DBus can be improved in several other aspects, I think it's nice that someone sat down and wrote this instead of bikeshedding on some website.

2c
While I agree that video games are compelling to the 11-14 year old boy scouts that I've spent a lot of time with over the last few years, I know of a few who are prolific readers as well as being competent gamers (we have video game nights every once in a while, too :)).

I think the author is well meaning, but probably not entirely on base. The author must certainly also know of the golden mean (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_mean_%28philosophy%29). As Aristotle professed, moderation in all things (including video games and reading).
My take home word from Conway's email: binary. Angelgate rolls on. http://goo.gl/fb/PpyhK
Why is weapon in scare quotes in the title?
Research summary: When and how to use caffeine to be more productive
There has been some really sensational news during the past few days: Angelgate, Facebook downtime, Zuckerberg $100mm donation, uncomfortable micro analysis of patio. Maybe it's the time of year? Or a coincidence. In terms of the normal ebb and flow this is surely a period of flow. I think that just due to regression to the mean next week should be more quiet and readers will have more time for the new page. Hopefully another "Erlang day" won't be necessary.
I have no idea why parents don't buy their children Kindles instead of a Nintendo DS.
Yeah wow, same here. I wasn't allowed to watch TV in the family house until age 14 (minus the random Nature/Nova special.) I am also lacking pop culture knowledge from the late 1980's and early 1990's. That was a (self-created) "big deal" in early education, but now I think it's a benefit.

Ontop of the no tv, we were also raised with only creative toys. Instead of GI Joes we got kickass (really they kicked ass) wooden blocks. LEGO instead of nintendo. Shit LEGO was my life.

I can't thank my parents enough for that decision as the effects are clear: I am thankful for the skills I have with my hands and mind.

But dammit, there were many times I wished I could join into the discussion about what happened on 90210 last night without faking it.
No, TCP ACK has nothing to do with this. All that matters is when the NIC has completed DMA'ing the packet. At that point, userspace can be unblocked.

Non-blocking sockets only make sense when there's an intermediate buffer.
Exactly the same formula worked for us: 3 boys; all stellar performers.

I added: ban game boxes from the house. No great loss - the boys never missed them, thought they were stupid compared to what they had (books, board games, family).
Hugh, he attacks the books with such vigor that they are sometimes almost destroyed in the process. Perhaps I was exaggerating a bit, but not by much!
I've been using spoon.net on and off for cross-browser testing for about 2 years. It's a decent product, but remarkably unstable. It's very common by the middle of the day that you I be able to launch an app from within Spoon, and if I look in the task manager, there is around 8 spoon.net processes locked up and using 100 odd megs of ram each. YMMV, but I've had this on many separate installs. To be honest, this situation has gotten bad enough that most of the time I just run separate machines with different IE versions and access them via RDP. When it works, however, it is very impressive.
This is where I actually think Digg is better than HN and Reddit. Their content and community may not be nearly as good, but at least they ATTEMPT to improve their UI and general functionality. Soon I have been on HN for a year, and I do not think I have noticed a single change to the site.

I know that interface is not everything and that once you get used to this simple one, you really get to like it, but I would just expect that a tech site, where 1/4 of the articles are about design, would try to push itself a bit more.
Steven Colbert testifies in D.C. - 5min Video
Addressing myths about Facebook
How about the option that the atheists turn to religion? That would be a far more likely option in the given situation.

If it comes to rape being the only option, it'd probably better for humanity to die out.

However, I do agree that this question doesn't seem to be appropriate here.
The article complains about Scala lacking Open Classes:

Open classes let you add features at runtime. [snip] It's
the kind of thing that would be driving programmers nuts by
the end of a 20-year maintenance cycle. But it's a godsend
when the developers of the original library weren't prescient
enough (or didn't have the time) to develop everything you
need.

This is what implicit conversions are for:

http://www.scala-lang.org/node/130
There is a very strong parallel between lawyers and programmers though, programmers use formal languages to communicate with machines and lawyers use a variation on human languages to remove all ambiguity from it.
I've got no complaints, and I've never heard of any security problems. But if the security of the materials is really important to you, you can always encrypt before copying to your Dropbox folder.
Countries most likely to default
Hmm, looks fine using the newest Chrome beta.
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Repost: Predator and Prey
Just an aside: Shouldn't your son be studying mathematics at a university at this age?
Low-Divorce Jobs
Similar situation in European countries, where human rights laws override employment contracts.
Please change the title of this post. The article has nothing to do with why (or whether) Stack Exchange will fail. It could be more aptly titled "What I dislike about Stack Exchange".
$10 million for Project 10^100 winners
I have said this in the past (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1665746) - as long as posting doesn't "cost" anything, there will be mindless as well as countless posts, making it harder to really spot intelligent stuff. It's natural for explosive stuff to make it to the top.

Now, how we pay for the posts is probably have karma as part of it somewhere. Or may be not. But, it's a discussion worth having.
I wouldn't say they're mostly ignoring the web. Once they finally made it a priority, they went from irrelevant to a serious competitor in the single most important business on the web in a remarkably short time (search, that is). If they apply the same focus to other areas, watch out.
I also had Legos, you're right :) - I loved LEGOs, both me and my brother used them, but it seems we had different inclinations from a young age, I loved building things while he used them as a stage and made them act :) (now he's into the publicity business)
I've seen the WP7 stuff and I've got to say it is a pretty slick interface. The ability to publish SL apps will likely be very popular with .NET devs as well. That doesn't mean I'm totally sold on the device, but it certainly has as much potential as any out there.
I have pretty bad retention, I usually can remember the general plot but not much else - heck, I very often re-read the books (I re-read the Wheel of Time series about 8 times, every few years when a new book came out).
'Possibly also "boys who are shunned at school", since they won't be able to take part in a huge fraction of the conversations going on in the playground.'

If the environment is that toxic and hostile to spending time wisely, perhaps your children should not spend so much time in it.
Give up hell, I haven't even gotten started yet!

It might seem to the outside observer that I start a lot of things and don't finish them, but really I'm iterating around where things hurt and where the response is, just like you note. I have been very fortunate to make enough consulting that I can take several months a year to work on my pet projects. And after all, isn't wealth really the ability to use your time as you see fit? So in that sense I am truly a wealthy man.

I have some "boring" work I am doing that is bringing some residual income as well. I've found that time is truly your friend with startups -- the longer you are out there the more success you get, no matter what you are doing. So in some ways this start/stop work has been counterproductive, but you play the cards you have, not the ones you wish you had.

I am truly excited about the long-term capabilities of functional programming and the F# language in particular. It's allowing me to build blocks of little "solutions" that can then be assembled in ways to make larger products in a way that OOP simply didn't accomplish. Very cool.
IBM warns of challenge to U.S. supercomputing leadership
I use these frequently for browser testing. They are a godsend.
I think it's a great idea. Even if you have to borrow points from HN. See my other comment in this thread.
Premier Soccer Store Canada
I'm working on a site to fix something like that. I don't want to reveal the name yet, but stay tuned :)
I absolutely love DropBox and use it to sync my laptops, home and work computers. One great use for it, I think, is Tomboy Notes, which I use to take notes in meetings on my netbook, track progress on projects at work, keep a list of stuff I need to do, etc. I don't really use it for source code, which is usually version controlled anyway.

> What do you all think would happen if DropBox went out of business. Would they make sure we all had copies of our data?

That's the beauty of DropBox; you already have copies of your data, on all computers that you sync to. It's really convenient, especially on laptops that aren't always connected to the internet, etc.
My thoughts exactly. I actually like the fact that users can edit questions and answers. This, plus the voting mechanism ensures the best information is present in most cases.
> TL;DR: Microsoft isn't turning around because they're still mostly ignoring the Internet.

I would suggest that Microsoft's floundering around in the mobile space is a bigger deal than ignoring the internet. e.g. it's not like Apple gets the web either.
Things are not measured by how difficult or simple it was to create. It is measured by the result it produces.

He also validated for them that users want YouTube Instance without the company doing any work or taking any risks. For this reason alone, he deserves more than a job offer.
The website was updated when 1.1 was announced yesterday. You must be seeing a cached page.
I'm not sure I buy the argument that you have to eliminate other media habits in order to become a reader.

When I was younger I watched loads of TV, beat Zelda and Super Mario Bros, honed my Gameboy Tetris skills to near Woz-level, watched skateboard videos over and over again to analyze the moves, futzed around with Amigas and Macs and PCs for hours, ran up my dad's phone bill with long-distance BBS charges, etc. I also read 2-5 entire books per week, got a perfect score on the verbal section of the SAT and the reading comprehension portion of the ACT and subsequently got a full ride academic scholarship to college.

I'm also not convinced that reading a bunch of junk books is actually a great use of one's time. I have a lot of nerd friends who never read anything other than HOWTOs and they are much better at their mathematical software jobs than I am. I can read a 300 page crime novel in about 90 minutes, but what's the point?
I've been using it for over a year with Spreedly without any problems at all. What sort of issues were you having?
Startup: Education - Mark Zuckerberg
I essentially use my dropbox folder as my "everything" folder for my mac. it's obviously mirrored across my iphone and pc as well. theres nothing like committing code, pushing it to git, and seeing the little dropbox icon updating at the same time. i rarely use time machine any more. start with 2 gigs, refer lots of friends (i think up to 5 gigs?). that's plenty of space to back up the essentials (school stuff, code, misc important docs)
Seems like buying ARM could set off antitrust allegations. Oracle already strong-armed itself into the chip business with the purchase of Sun, going for ARM, which aside from Power is the only credible x86 competitor gets on to pretty shaky ground.

At that point you would just have AMD/Intel on x86 vs. Oracle. Not a monopoly, but I wouldn't expect that to be a good situation.
I would suggest to them that if they believed in God and his wisdom then the reason I and them were left alive was because God decided that the earth needed to be cleaned and re-populated, like with Noah. And as a believer it is their duty to re-populate the planet they have been blessed with. God has seen fit to select me to survive and father his children through them, so no matter what happens letting me smash the crap out of them is the best thing to do
I do - because many parents weren't raised to read themselves.
Yeah!

I doubt I read as much as you did - I spent much of my unsupervised time taking things apart that I shouldn't and building really silly shit in my dad's shop. The effect is in the same vein as your reading abilities: I feel confident in my abilities to repair or build almost anything, even with no previous domain experience.
PR move to hedge againt the negative publicity of "The Social Network"?
Obligatory link to the 2010 list of the top 10 risks: http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Top_10_2010-Main

Interesting how many items are still there from 2004 to 2007 to 2010.
It is absolutely fabulous. I keep my Linux box, Mac and Win PC in sync. I also use it to keep a single copy of my dot files and share them between my mac and linux box (I use symlinks in home dir to point to Dropbox files). So far, pretty reliable.