skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that what I respect is anyone who is unpretentiously humble. People who just do their thing, do it the best way they can, and do not constantly introspect about how good they are, or how they are in a better class that other people.

The difference is that if a humble person who has a lot of experience in a field talks to someone who is new to the field, once he realises that the knowledge of the person does not match his, and it would be impossible to have an interesting conversation, he just switches the topic to something else. But the non-humble person will insist on trying to teach the other person, or tell the other person how things should be done, even when his opinion is not solicited.
Define: "decent handwriting skills". For instance, if I never learned how to write a G "correctly", I could still take notes and do just fine in the rest of my life. Teaching that "skill" is a waste of time. Handwriting learned on your own would be good enough for your purposes. Communcations with other people today requires a separate set of skills - typing, writing, speaking, even debating - that aren't taught enough. Instruction in handwriting is a waste of precious time - developmentally and socially - when there are better alternatives.
How My Start-Up Failed
Why assume that handwriting wouldn't be learned if it's not taught? How many of us took typing classes?
I didn't bother reading more than the first few paragraphs. I expect the quality of writing to be a few notches above the level of speech. This article's style simply doesn't cut it, mostly because of excessive jovialness.
Japanime using pure HTML tables
This woman seems to think that sacrificing the pen for the keyboard somehow makes us a more evolved or sophisticated brand of human.

But when I picture a room full of Americans than can't even scribble their own names on an application form, I get exactly the opposite impression.
I respect people who can silence the the inner voice that fears embarrassment--people who can "dance like no one is watching." I've been working on this personally. I'm convinced it is one of life's great keys to success.
I also think some calligraphy work in school would be a great idea; not so much because it improves your handwriting, but rather because it teaches you to concentrate on what you're doing at the moment.
Funny Pictures & Wallpapers Collection: Body Painting - 2
He means "wisened". "Wizened" is how you feel after getting all the way through Steve Yegge's archive.
No problem! I hope things work out for the best in your road to going to MIT and getting a degree. :)
MySQL: find unused indexes
in the case of a fully qualified domain name, a trailing period is valid (its implied if you don't include it).

http://news.ycombinator.com.

is just as valid as

http://news.ycombinator.com
I think i missed his point. Maybe I'm retarded, but i didn't get what he was saying. Did he compare Firefox to fashion, religion, and an obsolete communication device?
When something works as an approachable example for a (potentially) difficult concept, it tends to get spread around, regardless of whether it's actually true or not.

Similarly, the Inuit don't actually have several words for snow. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow)
Python 3.0 and FP
This is a great point and, to be honest, the real reason why it makes sense to learn handwriting, reading paper books or mathematics. Focus is one of our most important assets and without ability to focus it is hard to accomplish anything.
Nostrademons, I think this is an important insight. I respect people who will go outside their domain because they feel a need to solve an important problem. It takes a lot of guts, for the reason you articulated.
Yep, it should be wisened. Funny enough, I think my stupid spell checker changed it on me on my last round of proofing. Can't trust these stupid computers, can you?
You can include the parens in a URL by adding %28 and %29 to it for the left and right parens, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkey_Kong_%28video_game%29#De...

I swear, this should be in the FAQ by now.
Generally, I try to write more formally, but then I often get complaints about being too stiff and too long.

The crazy bit about blogging is that there is at least one complaint for everything you write. Just proves that you can't make everybody happy. Still, I liked it :-)
(but read my other articles, you know, the longer ones with more detail :-)
indraneel, what's your email address? or, you can email me at the addy in my profile.
IPython 0.9 is out
ABLE - A Basic Lisp Editor
I went to a public school in NY. We had a weekly touch typing class in 5th grade (during the mid nineties). It wasn't rigorous enough to make great typists out of us, but it provided a decent foundation for keyboarding electives in middle school and high school.
Greenspan: Tough decisions await in Lehman case
User 'technologizer' has submitted 22 links in the last 31 days, every one to 'technologizer.com'.
Leadership skills come from expert knowledge, not interpersonal skills
It might be an idea to put down (possibly here, maybe a separate post) what it provides over Google News and My Yahoo - that's what I saw as the main competitors.

I'll definitely go back though and have added it to my list of daily things to check :D
This is exacly my point. A 5th grade typing class that meets weekly and electives down the line? But daily handwriting classes in kindergarten and 1st grade and often probably later? That seems very backward to me.
As someone who has tutored a number of dyslexic young people, I have seen this pattern repeat itself over and over. The teachers at most schools just don't get it. They seem to think that trying to manipulate children emotionally with "interventions" and the like will magically fix their awkward/sloppy/inverted handwriting (letter inversion, as others here may have mentioned, is a classic dyslexia symptom). It's cruel and unnecessary, and reflects a lack of competence.

Having said that, I mostly disagree with this writer, though I understand her reaction as a parent. In the course of my training, I was told that handwriting, and cursive handwriting in particular, are important to learn because when done correctly, they reinforce the brain's neural pathways associated with particular letters and sounds (1). For example, we had students stand at a whiteboard and write large cursive letters while reading/saying them at the same time (2). The acronym was V.A.K.: Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic. The idea was to associate lots of information (from the eyes, ears and muscles) in the brain with the different letters and their sounds.

Of course, most schools don't do that, so the lesson of this article seems to be this: teaching handwriting to kids is bad for them if you're doing it wrong.

(1) I'm not a neurologist, so this might be the wrong way to describe it.

(2) The students worked one-on-one in private rooms with tutors that they trusted, NEVER in open classrooms. This is an important point.

(edited for formatting)
Installing Drupal 6.4 On A Lighttpd Web Server (Debian Etch)
Of course, infix is (always/usually?) only for some operators (e.g. arithmetic ones), with everything else prefix, just usually written foo(x, y) instead of (foo x y), but prefix nonetheless.
Godin's desire to boost Firefox is laudable but...

(1) Flock made a Firefox heavy on social features, which hasn't caught fire; and..

(2) Potential social network-effect features are better constructed as services or websites than browser functionality; and...

(3) Even if the functionality needs a browser-based component, to implement that in an "only with FF users" manner would be counter to the open mission of Mozilla.
Wow. How could a "Stanford MBA" not even know the basics of marketing? If this fellow had clearly identified his market before specing out and ordering his product he would have completely avoided his first-iteration fiasco.

I also suspect a bit more research would have shown that empty cases (which the customer would fill with their own product) would sell just as well. Instead, he plowed on through to obtain more inventory (wasn't discarding expired inventory the inspiration for the product in the first place?) and meet regulations (instructions, etc.) that he probably didn't even need.

Do your marketing up-front, folks. A well-designed product that doesn't address a market isn't much better than this guy's box of greasy, plastic-covered condoms.
History of computer programming language statements
Gatto has very interesting ideas about education. I wish more people would listen to him. Here's a good article he wrote that I read a while ago that illuminated a lot of things for me: http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html
Sun's future is 'a coin toss,' analyst says
A friend of mine has one of those with a condom and a cigar on his wall. It's been there for years, he isn't that good with girls and doesn't smoke.
It's called a Master of Business Administration, not Master of Business startups for a reason.
It sounded like he did identify a market:

"just in time for the San Francisco International Gift Show...I soon began sales calls on buyers ranging from novelty shops and porno stores to gay rights groups and Planned Parenthood clinics...People began buying my key chains. Small gift shops in small towns bought dozens and dozens and regularly reordered"

His failure seems mostly economic: his financial projections didn't include all the overhead involved in importing the keychains, getting them ready for sale, and shipping them out to retailers. And much of that was because he didn't know all those things were required.

He would've been saved by researching the supply chain better, not the market.
I once saw a street vendor in Thailand prepare a pineapple in his hand with a machete in a mere 20 seconds: from 'as nature made it' to 'skinned, cubed, on a stick, in a bag' - in 20 seconds !

There really is nothing quite like competence..

tom saffell
See also: Peter Norvig's Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (http://norvig.com/21-days.html)
Why a Startup Shunned Venture Capital
I know what you're saying, but I wouldn't use the term "lame."
It seems that Gall's Law is essentially asserting that progressive evolution works, and spontaneous creation doesn't. Yet evolution also means that most participants, be they organic or electronic, fail, in the sense that they don't lead to descendants which carry on their code. Only a tiny fraction of all organisms/software have living/executing progeny today.

The article says Gall noted: "A simple system may or may not work." I'd add: "A simple system that works isn't necessarily any good."
He's dyslexic, therefore schools shouldn't teach handwriting?

Care to fill out the missing steps in the syllogism, to make the "point" you think she's got?
This is stupid. There is a correct way to write a G. That's how the alphabet looks. Yes you can stylize it but it has to generally fit the mold of the G. If you were using a different alphabet, you would have to learn how to write the letters/symbols of it.

You are arguing against teaching people the alphabet basically.
>And if you observe them taking a risk that doesn't pan out, it looks like incompetence.

Maybe... but everyone makes mistakes. There has to be a difference between making mistakes, and making the same mistakes over and over again. I definitely think part of competence is how someone handles failures.
No, I'm against wasting public resources on marginalized skills while teaching kids that learning is about boring you to death. How many of us have sloppy handwriting and after how many hours of us being "taught"? Handwriting today is much more often for personal use. My handwriting is good enough if I can read it.

Teach typing instead. The child will learn a much more useful skill and with many more applications. They'll pick up handwriting as necessary (just as they do typing now). Invert the priorities.
Definitive Guide to Bundling Dependencies in Merb
I did consider the case of being dyslexic, in which case he wouldn't just have a problem with handwriting, but also with reading and writing in general, regardless of medium. At the age of 8 or 9, you'd expect the kid to already have it diagnosed and actions taken.

But you made me re-read the article (actually the middle three paragraphs, which I skipped because the intro and final paragraphs weren't interesting). Fair enough -- she has a point. It could be about cursive, stupid teachers, bad curricula, schooling, or just handwriting in general. Not sure which, and that the title is incendiary and that she stated her profession in the intro just doesn't do it for me. I admit my comment was untamed though.
Though I had a Stanford MBA and regularly consulted on multimillion-dollar projects, I didn't know the first thing about starting a business.

Truer words have never been spoken.
You don't get a chance to observe most people over and over again - that's usually limited to friends and immediate coworkers (team members). Not coincidentally, those are the groups you should tap for startup cofounders.

The original question seemed to be about celebrity personalities and casual acquaintances - "when you Google someone..." etc.
Thanks for that, but my understanding of the passage you refer to is that it is discussing T'ao Yuan-ming's poem "Peach Blossom Spring", not the Tao Te Ching.

I've recently been reading Ellen Chen's new translation and commentaries [http://www.amazon.com/Tao-Te-Ching-Translation-Commentary/dp...]. It includes an interesting discussion of academic attitudes to the history and origins of the Tao Te Ching, and as I recall the notion of it being satire is not mentioned.
Not quite. The product which met with some success was his second iteration: "Retailers told me that what the customer really wanted was a key chain with a usable condom."

Although research of his supply chain was extremely bad, it doesn't seem as though correcting it would have saved his first misdirected attempt at a product.
There is as much reason to teach typing as there is a reason to teach a class in how to use the XBox controller. Nobody under the age of 25 has any trouble learning how to type.

I don't know if handwriting is or isn't a big deal. I don't remember having to do it after kindergarten. 3rd grade seems a bit too old, perhaps the author is really just embarrassed her kid is still failing the slow kid's class?

It would be interesting to see what would happen to society if handwriting class was abolished. Home Economics and running at recess were tossed out and now everyone is obese and in debt.
"There is only one Amazon cloud storage, but there are thousands of other online storage places so switching is easy."

1) I don't think switching would be that easy unless you're just getting started.

2) Thousands of other online storage places I guess you simply pick you poison, er, locked down platform with various restrictions.
How could a "Stanford MBA" not even know the basics of marketing?

Keep this story in mind the next time you assume that the computer science graduate in front of you knows how to install Linux. Or that the electrical engineering Ph.D. knows how to solder.
You are both right. That's why this is such a great story. It's a learning experience at every level!

My own take is that the poor guy's fundamental error was that he jumped the gun on outsourcing. He should have built the first hundred prototypes by hand on his kitchen table, with parts scrounged from one hobby store or another, then sold them himself. It sounds like he basically ended up doing that anyway, but if he'd done so in the first place he'd have invested less up front, gotten feedback faster, and gotten an intuitive sense of his market and the sort of product they'd prefer. Premature optimization!

The other, even more fundamental error was going into the novelty business in the first place.
It would've shown that his business idea was not economically viable, regardless of whether people wanted the keychains, before he had invested $10K in it. If there's no way a business will work, it's better to find that out quickly and cheaply than to invest more money in it.
And you would have made the same mistake he made! Exactly the same mistake! You seemed to think that he just chose the wrong product or the wrong technique or something. Every business should EXPECT to have to deal with similar stuff he dealt with at the start.

His problem was that his financial calculation was wrong. Marketing is ALWAYS wrong till it works, research is only right after it is proven true. The only thing you can estimate with any degree of accuracy is the financial projection to see if the business is financially viable. And in his case he didn't factor in the uncertainty and the mistakes that one always makes.

The _basics_ of marketing?
Hmm... I take all my notes in LaTeX as well. For me, I found that it was more a matter of having the correct macros than any inherent slowness in the LaTeX type setting system. My preamble grew to about 130 lines before I was really able to type effectively in class. However, the benefits of this approach are undeniable. It halped me become good at LaTeX but more than that it made my notes easy to archive, retrieve, share, and use in general. Referring back to old theorems is a lot faster when you have Ctrl-F at your disposal.

The key is that if you write a similar thing more that ~3 times, make an emacs abbrev for it or a latex macro for it.
There's an example that's fairly easy to measure. tallness.

Here's what Malcom Gladwell had to say:

I polled about half of the companies on the Fortune 500 list--the largest corporations in the United States--asking each company questions about its CEO. The heads of big companies are, as I'm sure comes as no surprise to anyone, overwhelmingly white men, which undoubtedly reflects some kind of implicit bias. But they are also virtually all tall: In my sample, I found that on average CEOs were just a shade under six feet. Given that the average American male is 5'9" that means that CEOs, as a group, have about three inches on the rest of their sex. But this statistic actually understates matters. In the U.S. population, about 14.5 percent of all men are six feet or over. Among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, that number is 58 percent. Even more strikingly, in the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are 6'2" or taller. Among my CEO sample, 30 percent were 6'2" or taller.

Whatever the reasoning, Americans seem to want to be lead by taller people.

Maybe there is some actual correlation between competence and looks. That wouldn't be terribly startling (though maybe it's due large to the fact that competent looking people are given more opportunities).

But what would be startling is for it to have such an overwhelming effect. That, I'm almost sure, is a fluke.
I respect demonstrated performance.

Is is done? Does it work? Does it bring value to others?

Anything less is just posing.
The guy who stood up to those tanks in Tiananmen Square.
It sounds like he could have made it a success if he streamlined the production process and kept the cost per keychain down.
This is harder than you would think. I took a year off from programming to help a friend market and sell actual physical stuff.

Often times a product that gets well received when you have a few samples made doesn't sell at all. Something you think kinda sucks and is just a 'filler' product in your line up turns out to be the most popular, and you run out of stock. Something sells well, you can get more made, so you order 500 more units, and then all of the sudden the product is not cool and nobody wants it anymore.
1 Fabulous Way to Great Programming: Write Code.

Geez, does anyone know the difference between correlation and causation anymore?

This is just another one of those meaningless, "If a, then b must be true" posts. "I watch Star Trek, therefore I must be a good programmer."

The only measure of good programming is the code you write and the value it produces. So stop reading B.S. blogs and go write some code.
I really like the ability to filter what news sources I want to see.

Excellent job with the site, all around.
In 1999, Google Cofounder Dreamed of a Second Startup
In the spirit of this article, I have found a number of other things which are no longer needed in the school curriculum and serve only to stress incoming student.

1. Writing (already mentioned): Seriously, hard stuff and obsoleted by keyboards.

2. Reading: reading is hard, you need to know hundreds of thousands if not millions of words and exactly what they look like. Obsoleted by screen readers.

3. Arithmetic: Boring, terminally boring, requires memorization of multiple tables or an understanding of the very basic concepts behind it and makes people hate maths. Obsoleted by computers.

4. Algebra: Not terribly difficult (unless you are a math major) and nobody really uses it. Besides, we have mathematica.

5. Calculus: See point 4.

6. Mathematics: See point 5.

7. History: Long, hard, requires memorizing information on so many dead people. What is the point. Obsoleted by books (or audiotapes as the need arises).

8. Science: Seriously, have you seen physics. Soooo hard. Obsoleted by computers.

9. Schools: After points 1-8 what does this do anymore?

10. Thinking: Oops. Still waiting for MIT.
On Scribd:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/5176674/Margin-of-Safety-by-Seth-K...
No, with proper marketing one would not make the same mistake. Instead, one would conclude that the product was a no-go and adjust their strategy to fit (in this case, putting the idea on the shelf).

Consider marketing the social component of design. In the whole "Make Something People Want" bit, marketing identifies the "something people want" part. "Make" is important, but it doesn't mean jack if you're making the wrong thing.

It sounds as though this guy might have had a good market for condom cases ( http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=condom+cases ), particularly in the 80s when the things were just coming out from behind the pharmacist's counter, but he didn't pursue that initially and his second attempt appears to have been an approximation of what people actually wanted to buy.

If he instead identified what people wanted (reliable condom cases) and delivered that instead of a novelty which sold well to Bangkok tourists, he may have had a business.
I appreciate your perspective. I am a neuroscientist, and this subject closely rubs up against my training. I see nothing in handwriting that typing doesn't also give the developing brain. If anything, typing, especially touch, seems to require more fine motor skills than handwriting. And with the possibility of computer games to help teach typing, and coincident with auditory (hear 's' versus 'sh' versus 'sp') feedback (which helps normal and atypical reading development), you could teach typing, reading, writing, and spelling in one well-designed program while providing different types of focused feedback. Handwriting not only has less real world utility, but it is also harder to learn while being a more solitary skill. The more I think about it the more I'm verging on outrage that so much emphasis is still given to handwriting over typing.
Reminds me of my second favorite line from Rodney Dangerfield's "Back to School". Thorton Melon's opinion of his business professor, "He tells it like it ain't."

(My favorite line? "Bring us a pitcher of beer every seven minutes until someone passes out. Then bring one every ten minutes.")
Digg has a karma system. They just don't show your karma. Perhaps that's what you meant.