skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That was an example of a common distribution. Some of the debts are things like a $500 credit card balance.

Of course, I was thinking mostly young married couples, so it may not hold outside that demographic.
No 2 U 2

The crappy tech site you supposedly sold for 5-figures is actually valued at $12,501 today making you either a con-man or a BS-artist. Methinks the latter.
It's always fun when the internet feels like a small place for a minute. :)
You've clearly not comprehended the subject article - I'd suggest reading it again.
First and foremost I want to commend you for caring enough as a parent to be thinking about this, but I think you're asking the wrong question. While not a parent myself I believe I can speak from my experience of once being a child.

It is my humble opinion that children should be slowly, slowly introduced to technology. The first example that comes to mind is my own introduction to a pocket calculator in the late 1980's. I was given one before I had been exposed to the intermediate concepts of mathematics and looking back it hurt much more than it helped as it immediately became a crutch. I became more interested in getting the problem done than learning from the experience.

A slow and methodical approach to learning is what works best for me, and may not be optimal for everyone. Laying the right foundation is pretty much the only way to excel, and given the perverse incentives that abound in (America's) public schools you need to pretty much accept that it's up to you to make this happen for your child. As someone who didn't have it I cannot stress enough how important it is to have a parent that is intensely interested in helping you build from simple concepts to the advanced, learn how to learn, and how to think critically about everything you encounter. Having someone there to help you cope with the anxiety of being a novice (at life and learning) is worth more than I can express. Making sure your child understands the core of a concept before he or she has access to tools that shortcut and accelerate its use is paramount.

Also, don't be disappointed if they want to write, sculpt, draw, or paint all day. We need artists too.

Good luck.
Beware of the dreaded Second System Effect?
Sounds like they may be headed that way with Lion, too - what's seen so far doesn't have the little lights under dock icons that indicate whether the application is actually "open" or not.
>I disagree with the business model being powerful. Think about it in terms of lifetime customer value. How many occasions is a person really going to have to use this service? Maybe once? Twice? Even if it's $50 per message, the lifetime customer value is low.

Perhaps I am used to startups having some sort freemium service that becomes difficult to monetize, while this is unique in the sense that users often would like to pay more for the same service. I would call this powerful. I understand the bottom line is how much the average user pays for the service, and on that note I'd say that the types of people that would like this service would definitely use it multiple times.

>Furthermore, doesn't buying 20 messages at 10% so you're sure it will go through defeat the purpose of sending a message that you don't really want to send?

No. If you do this, you know (or are 95%+ sure) that they have read your message. What you avoid is the knowledge that they know you know. This is what people go to great lengths to avoid for basic human traits such as pride and embarrassment.

>I also don't see how you come to the conclusion that the recipient can't respond.

If they respond, it implies they read the message. Before they respond, it's their own secret, since the sender supposedly doesn't know if the message went through. So they can choose to act as if they didn't get the message.
A learning disability is NOT just "a disability which affects learning"

It's a specific thing. You're stretching the definition.

It's like someone says, "I don't have cancer, I have aids," and you reply, "Well, aids is a kind of cancer, since it gets into your body and then spreads like a cancer eventually killing you."
I read through almost all the comments and no one mentioned spoken/written non-computer languages.

I would say introduce him to at least one foreign language like spanish, french, german, portuguese, japanese, or chinese. I learned spanish as I learned english, by age 3 I was fluent in both. I had the advantage of having a spanish teacher for a mother, but it gave me the building blocks for understanding the rules and concepts of other languages (on 4 so far, working on 5th). These rules, grammatical, syntactical, etc. can help with picking up things like computer programming later. I mean they are called languages for a reason.

I think that giving your son excellent communication skills will give him a huge leg up on all his peers. Make sure to include reading in both english and another language too if possible.
Follow Election Day on Your iPad
Top 5 Reasons to choose CouchDB from Bocoup’s Hack Night
Google Offers Money Rewards For Finding Vulnerabilities In Its Web Stuff
http://www.ideacounsel.{com,org,net}
Facebook Status Updates Tell the Story of Romance Gone Awry
A place to view and share things.
A site where you can share photos or videos of awesome or funny things. Really good stuff on it.
I started http://crushtease.com about a month ago, but the programmer I partnered with got sidetracked with a different idea, so it hasn't gotten traction yet. (Likely because the way we explain the idea on the homepage isn't easy enough to understand)
From Publisher to Platform: benefits from social media
I would definitely like to see the source for this. Over time, it's become a lot more clear to me that Flash's defaults (and the normal tutorial code you read) are tuned for high resolution advertising contexts, mostly, so the need for taking steps to get good real-time / interactive performance out of Flash isn't always totally obvious to people.
Get him legos, things he can build with his hands, internalize the process of building, designing, visualizing. Do lots of projects with him. Show him how stuff works. Give him musical instruments to play with and give him lessons.

Honestly programming isn't that hard. If he finds it interesting he can start teaching himself at any age, so I wouldn't focus on that. All that said, IANAD. congrats on being a dad!
I did the same thing, and my son was around the same age.

Now we just cultivate whatever interests he has, and try our best to answer any questions he has. He's interested in marine life, but is a bit too young to help out at the Seattle Aquarium. We've enrolled him in a few robotics classes and a programming class that used Game Maker [1]. He loved the Game Maker class, I'd bet that it was a gentler introduction than what I tried with Scratch.

FWIW, he's into video games too (we have a 360, NDS, Wii, PC), but we limit his time and prioritize digital entertainment last.

[1] http://www.yoyogames.com/make
You skipped the Zero-th step:

Step 0: pay your minimum on all debts.

That prevents your principle amounts from increasing
Thanks for the advice. One of the great things about entrepreneurship is that even failed projects have numerous benefits. It's good to be reminded of this from time to time.
Tell HN: 'Review Startup' thread killed for using another service
This thread was killed, id=1860858, from what I can see, for using Twilio as their backend. What is wrong with that? Why should he duplicate the effort if he can essentially contract it out? Sure, it isn't particularly sexy, but it is an effective launch strategy.
Time. That's it, nothing more - just spend time with him. Reading, playing and doing lots fun things.

I have two kids and had massively complicated plans on how to 'program' them (and I mean that with nothing but respect for what you're trying to do) but you can over-think this. By all means encourage, support and mentor them but try not to project your ideal image of what they should be too soon.

All the little dude needs is your attention and time - things will work out great. Good luck!
Fedora has some subpixel antialiasing http://imgur.com/gVPXP .
I get more psychological assurance by paying less overall, thus I feel better paying off the higher interest loan.
Gabriel, I really like your article because all too often to we get short-sighted and get caught in the "get rich quick" mentality. I think it is critical to balance this long term approach with a firm belief that your current project will make it BIG.

Without this belief that what you are working on will be the next sliced bread, it can be easy to get discouraged or, as you mentioned, move on to the next project.
Feedback on Y Combinator winter 11' applicant wanted
Hey folks,

So there is one day left till interviewees are chosen, and I wanted to post our blog www.ikonblvd.com (which has a demo) to get your opinions on our product.

To give you a high-level idea of what we are doing: IkonBlvd is going to be the next LinkedIn/Facebook for people with skills and talents through a dynamic community-driven network, and a structured online-competition like American Idol.

IkonBlvd will set-up a competition for singers through two applications. Both applications will have one main focus: to create as fair and unbias a competition as possible. The “webcam-app” will be able to normalize sound and video, have five embedded-preselected-songs that will change per round in order to find singers with range, and upload captures directly into our Amazon S3 database to avoid users from uploading modified videos. There will also be a community driven voting-algorithm that will give different weight to users vote based on analytics from social-network APIs.

We are currently hiring software/electrical engineers. Please email career@ikonblvd.com
You can also follow us on www.twitter.com/ikonblvd

So there you have it! We would really appreciate your feedback, and wish everyone the best of luck during this cycle.

-Ray
Growing up in a house of readers undoubtedly gave me a massive head start on all of my peers, but I also had my own laptop [1], TV, N64 (it was the 90's), and gameboy and did far above my grade level on reading tests.

If you feel good about not letting your kid mess with that stuff, more power to you, but don't confuse correlation with causation.

[1] Actually I had my first computer, running MS-DOS, well before I could read. That was kind of an exercise in futility though. I did get a laptop later on (elementary school) and I learned and practiced writing HTML on it.
This is an interesting link, thanks. Although I think the ruling was a against a "blanket ban" on inmate voting and doesn't say that all inmates can vote. Need to have a better look, though.

I got curious, so rather than going lunch, did some Wikipedia reading here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_United_Sta.... Turns out the right to vote cannot be denied based on :

* Religion (in Constitution is found in Article VI, section 3.
* "Race, color, or previous condition of servitude" (15th Amendment, 1870)
* "On account of sex" (19th Amendment, 1920)
* "By reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax" (24th Amendment, 1964)

Conversely, this means that the right can be denied based on other factors, just not one of the above.

It also says: "As of July 2007, fourteen states, eleven of them in the South, ban anyone with a felony conviction from voting for life." This is outrageous, and should be considered a cruel and unusual punishment! When someone servers their term, they should be given their citizenship rights back.
Street View: Germany, What Have You Done?
We spent a lot of time on this. CSS gradients, sibling selectors, CSS transforms, gestures, canvas, and all those other fun things you don't get to use very often on production web projects. If you have an iPad please check it out and leave feedback.
A lot of people want options. Lots of options. Lots of free options.

For example, you see this behavior when people fail to commit to attending an dinner, movie or other event, just in case something better comes up.

Sometimes commitment (closing off options) works better. People trust the committed and they will step up to help them.
London Stock Exchange halts Linux after ‘suspicious' network event
8Pen Spiral Keyboard Coming To iOS
You're making a pretty baseless assumption. Many 'Rate My Startup' submissions use api's and other services for their backends. Plus, there was another 'Rate My Startup' submission killed as well. There are a myriad of other reasons as to why this happened.
On digging up a bit I found the following -
[a] http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/
[b] http://www.cocan.org/getting_started_with_ocaml_on_red_hat_a...
That's technically just a regular expression (perl syntax). The vi equivalent would be

:%s/_/*/g

Which is, replace all occurrences on all lines of '_' with ' *'

EDIT: Talk about formatting fail...
Infinite monkey theorem applies too I think...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
Unfortunately, phone+shell will not be significantly cheaper than phone+tablet.

Taking out the CPU from the shell and replacing it with a connector sounds like a good idea, but what if the connector costs more than the CPU? The CPU is just one small portion of a single chip in a phone, and high density high speed connectors that can also carry significant power are really quite expensive. You do save some money by not needing as much flash & RAM, but the cost savings are far less than you'd expect.

What you're really doing is making your phone more expensive: adding that expensive connector and the need to drive an external screen. Making everybody's phone $20 more expensive is only worthwhile if a significant fraction of the your buyers will also buy the "shell".
here are some tricks I found regarding spaces:

-To type a space, go from center to any sector, then back to center

-To type a word without a space, don't end the word on the center.
XPeerient matching enterprise IT buyers and providers
I like filesdirect - the free, customizable upload and download pages are a nice touch. (http://www.filesdirect.com)
The older I get, the more I think humans really have little common sense. It's clearly not necessary for the modern world we live in, because it is used so seldom.

You've constructed reasons not to vote, but you've left out the most important one in your reasoning: if everyone thought like you, we'd be giving absolute control to a small group of people. How do you think that would work out?

Every day I watch people make bad decisions for seemingly very good reasons. They are still bad decisions, though, and the key flaw is they either massively elevated an unimportant factor in the decision, or just didn't even consider the important factors.

What's strange, though, when this is pointed out to most people, they ignore the advice, sure in themselves that their process was correct. After the fact, they still have justifications about their decision, even if the prior stated flaws in their process turned out to be correct.

It just amazes me.
I actually find the way that Git handles branches/commits and the ability to check out an individual ref to be very well thought out and extremely useful.

Re "eating work", most of the commands that could potentially "eat work" are explicit about blowing things away, and is more a problem of not knowing what your tool is going to do. And Git will never "eat" anything that's actually been committed or stashed without you explicitly telling Git to drop that data.

`git help <command>` should be used liberally if you're not certain of what it's going to do. The documentation is extremely thorough.
No, but it was nearby. I forget the name of the building but it was right across from the mall, near Hoshmand's I think. It was taller, brick, and had a big atrium.
Not to discourage computer use, but I'd like to second the importance of the playful aspect.

Our innate playfulness seems to be beneficial to creative processes. At the very least, it makes learning more fun, engaging.

My dad used to hide notecards around the house, with a little clue ("turn around 90 degrees and walk 2 * 3 - 1 steps"). At the location specified, there'd be another little candy and a clue. Worked wonders for me, and it gave me a lifelong desire to learn and grow.

Anyhow, just a +1 for keeping it playful. It helps a ton. And it just might make your child more creative.
I think this is kind of important for any development role (not just at a startup). It's definitely good/important to be "the guy everyone goes to" in any organization.
That nugget of useful information is also explained (in a lot more detail) in one of the first chapters of the "Introduction to Algorithms" book.

When I was working through the book (and I still am to some extent), it was basically beat into my brain that some algorithms with worse performance could perform better than faster algorithms for a small enough n.
Turns out king county (seattle's county) has three in-person voting facilities for people who need accessible accommodations[1]. News to me.

[1] http://kingcounty.gov/elections/voting/accessible.aspx
I actually couldn't get the asterisk to appear without adding text below it, and I didn't have anything else to add. So I just added an explanation.

Don't worry! I didn't feel like I needed to explain. But the formatting on HN is odd, and the rule on how to use asterisks is obscure and bizarre.
No, the way to overcome suboptimal decisions is to make better decisions, even if they aren't fully optimal.
Dilbert-Combinator
windows 7 and chrome with the same results. there is noticeable jerkiness as well as the ball flickering
You're right. Criminals will not find $3000 attractive enough to turn over lucrative vulnerabilities to Google instead of exploiting them.
This might sound totally narcissistic but here's how I learned programming:
Taught to play Chess at an early age;
Taught another language (Russian, even though I never finished) at an early age (note that I didn't really like learning Russian, but it helped regardless);
Given Legos and Lincoln Logs. Basically, any toy that uses building blocks encourages the kind of thinking used in programming;
Read to often (but not about programming);
Taught BASIC (the concept of "goto" goes a long way in realizing what is possible.);
Got into creating game mods (as previous user recommended)

My parents actually sort of discouraged me from liking programming. If I would have, say, been really interested in chemistry and experimented with chemicals, they would have been less worried than when I would work on the computer for long periods of time.

It's also worthy to note that your son may not be interested in becoming a programmer, so don't try to consciously influence him. Surround him with the tools he needs. He'll find a way from there.
Great points.

I think the thing that especially appeals to me about the OS X and W7 environments is that they're not an eye sore (warm colors & effects, not kludgy looking), and they have quick access to system-wide search that works (Spotlight and Windows Search, respectively). These are my rather minimalist needs.

I have a hard time coming up with an analogy, but when I open windows on one of the live CDs, I feel like there's a gnome (no pun intended) in the background grabbing and stapling up shoddy UI mockups on the inside of my LCD.

It all comes down to tastes, as you say, though. I used to be a MOTIF and IceWM guy, so mine have definitely changed. I can't imagine "most people" would like the state of the Linux UI, though.

Having used KDE (since it was an ugly Windows 95 clone, anyone remember those initial efforts?) and GNOME from their births, not much has really seemed to change. Meanwhile, the UI paradigms have shifted significantly, in the rest of the computing world.
On my Motorola Droid running Froyo, the flash side is much smoother. On the JS side I couldnt really control it because the browser was also intercepting every keystroke and trying to put them in the url/search bar.
"Poorly chosen defaults" is also a synonym for "doesn't work like SVN/HG/BZR".
Dr. Marilyn Daniels at Penn State University has found that hearing students in pre-kindergarten classes who receive instruction in both English and ASL score significantly higher on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test than hearing students in classes with no sign instruction.

Thanks for providing these articles. I don't doubt that children can learn to sign before they can learn to speak (not a big leap considering that babies can understand language before they can move their vocal muscles well enough to produce it), or that they'd be happier being able to communicate earlier.

What I do doubt is that this has any long-term effects on their development, above and beyond the effect of learning more than one language. In any of the longitudinal studies, do they control by having a second group of infants learn two spoken languages?
Saving the web, one page at a time
Designing Objectively
Ask HN: WordPress designers in NYC area?
A webmaster I know is looking for a WordPress designer/studio in the NYC area and asked me for recommendations.

Which WP designers in NYC would you recommend?

Thanks
I wasn't aware HN actually had formatting, I was just trying to use plaintext for emphasis... Or does it?
Finance? I'm extremely skeptical, but my time on HN has taught me to be curious instead. Expand?
You can "Disable comments" for a Buzz post. Folks can still @mention you in their own posts. Which makes it very much like Twitter.
strange, I find many economists dogmatic and heartless.
What's funny is that article was just a redirect to "Tablet PC" until about a month after the iPad was announced.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tablet_computer...
Try Google: http://weblog.raganwald.com/2005/07/why-you-need-degree-to-w...
Somebody moved your cheese. :-) Over the weekend pg also changed the display at the top to show average karma value along with total karma. You can now also see others' averages by clicking their names.
Doesn't it defeat the testing purpose if you perform a check to take a different code path when the testing tool runs?
It's from one of the great ones by raganwald: http://blo.gr/352
Facebook's feed technology.
Will facebook, ever implement friendfeeds realtime code; as it relates to feeds? Its been over a year since the inquisition...
This was submitted just a day ago.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1857228
I can almost guarantee it's simply a split test using a cookie, as that's the standard way to experiment (using Google Website Optimizer and others). It's a common bracketing experiment.

Edit: To be clear, if it's flash cookies it could persist after browser installs but still be different per browser.
I'd say Safari = black turtleneck.... firefox = hoodie....

actually the chrome figure makes sorta sense. chrome is super early adopters, so likely wealthier purchasers of high-end electronics... dunno completely pulling this outta my A$$ :-)
You may be conflating two types of acceptance. [...]

Aha! Yes, I'm sure that's what happened.

So the short-listing stage is competitive, but the final accept/reject is based solely on the individual merits?
We added conference coverage to Lanyrd.com, now collecting video/audio/slides/..
It's unclear to me the pain you are solving that has value and will pull money from my and thousands of others wallets. Clarify is this the problem???? ... for people who are too proud to directly say things to their family and close friends, or things that would embarrass or humiliate someone if you just told them. Who is the competition that has a revenue stream?
I don't see why this should look funny 11 years in hindsight. the important part is knowing rather than assuming. and you seem to assume quite a lot.