skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Technology and politics can move in opposite directions. Technology is far, far better. The political situation is much worse. Overall, life is far better.

Unfortunately, we don't have an example of what adolescence would look like if we had the same growth of technology but without the decline in the political system. I suspect though, if we could glimpse into this alternate world it would blow us away.
"But what's the alternative here? 'Happy 13th birthday, son, now go get a job!'?"

What's wrong with making 13 year-olds support themselves? Why do parents owe their children support? Why should a single mom have to bust her butt to support her 13 year-old son who is bigger and stronger than she is so that he can have plenty of time to hang out with his friends, play video games, do sports, take drugs, etc.?

In my mind adolescence is like venture capital. It only makes sense to fund a person (and thereby to excuse self-funding) if the person being funded works hard during the funding period so as to generate a payoff.

Consider the numbers for a 13-year-old.

$7k education/year

$10k lost wages/year (assume the kid could get a job @$5/hr)

$7k parental support/year

= $24k /year

Seems to me there are better ways of spending $24k than to force a kid who doesn't want to to stay in school and jobless for a year.
Kirse, I didn't say the product was inferior because it had a flash website. I'm actually a big flash fan. My comment was more to do with their presentation of info. The 3D models they produce are amazing and should be prominently featured, not at the bottom of the list. I'm not in 3D printing actually, just blog about it.
Your title change makes the article sound more interesting than what it really is: yet another it's-all-about-me Arrington spat piece.
Stories like this suggest that the probability of finding someone in India to do the coding of a complex web app will soon be under $1000.
This idea that there's something special about four years of the much longer process is a bit silly.

The idea is that a, colleges move to you places you'd never be (I have friends at NYU and Dublin who absolutely are getting more out of the locale than they are anything else), and b, because college is specifically made so that people can learn, you'll attract a purer blend of people, all of whom are interested in learning.

For the most part, that latter point is absolute bullshit. College has become so psychologically mandatory in the United States that people go to college whether or not they're truly interested in learning. And while I love the idea of liberal arts learning, and while hopefully if I stay I'll learn things I'd never thought to learn otherwise, the fact of the matter is that as colleges defocus themselves, there's less of an emphasis on really bright people who are going to blaze through early college to get to a meaningful level. In my classes, I'm learning to program in Processing and Scratch, for instance: one is a kid's language, for crying out loud, and for the other, I can't see the point of using Processing rather than Java. In my other classes, I'm learning to use Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, both programs that I have a good deal of familiarity with. It's an absolute waste, and my professors absolutely realize this, but they have no choice because other kids don't know a thing about programming, and the course that I'm in makes these classes absolutely mandatory.

As for the kids being enlightened and focused: don't get me started. At the time of this writing, one kid is in trouble because he brought tons of kids to his house and they threw up and now he's refusing to apologize to his parents because, as he puts it, "I'm in college. This should be expected behavior." Same kid told a real knee-slapper about stealing four thousand dollars while working at a Target. I mean, it makes for an amusing story, but it's despicable. And I'm in a pretty top-notch school, for what it's worth.

No, people who are really fascinated in learning nowadays tend to try and be practical about what they know: I'd bet that the brightest people of college age are doing things like trying to create start-ups, or at the very least trying to earn a living with the skills they've got.
Yeah. Because school is ABSOLUTELY a good way to promote individuality and unique thinking. Because most teachers DON'T push for students to adapt to a single way of thinking because it makes them easy to manage. Because students DON'T judge students for individuality, creating a lopsided social ladder that lasts easily into college. </unnecessary tag>
Or maybe Ivan Illich?

http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/intro.h...
> The real purpose of education is to turn people into intellectuals

Reminds me of something Seth Godin (?) once said - that the whole purpose of school is to institutionalize mediocrity
Because he's bigoted and intolerant when it comes to many other issues.
Most kids get into sex and drugs because they're bored. I don't know a person that got into either for any reason but "There's nothing to do." I hear that from every single party-going person on my dorm floor when they go out. "I need to get drunk, because there's no other reason to be in college and there's nothing to do."
> A small fraction of adolescents want more responsibility

It's a question of the meaning of "want." I think a small fraction of adolescents can articulate that they "want" meaningful responsibility and structure, or make any efforts to get it.
So profit causes corruption?
Yeah, this is a little bit worse, for starters:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
Then why is there no contempt-- absolutely none-- among reasonable people for the likes of Paul Graham++, Mitch Kapor, Steve Jobs, or Sergey Brin?

Hackers aren't, by and large, an envious crowd. We tend to admire those who are far better than we are, and we like working with them because it enables us to learn an incredible amount fast. There's no point in envying the guy who is five times better when it's possible to study up, practice writing good code, and eventually be as good as he is. (Of course, he'll also improve during this time and still be ahead, but this is not an issue, or even relevant; great hackers benefit the entire ecosystem.)

Mark Zuckerberg is different from Graham, Jobs, et al. He's not socially awkward. He's arrogant and annoying and makes terrible design decisions, despite the rather obvious fact that Facebook's rise, at the expense of superior competitors, is entirely the result of fortunate position (Harvard). Most of us wish he would just go away. There's no "hate" for him; we just don't like seeing a person of such mediocre talent and poor decision-making mettle being lifted to the status of our generation's emblem of success. I'd rather let him have his millions and get him out of the way.

++ Edit: did not realize I was replying to Paul Graham when I wrote this. I feel very awkward to have used you as an example in this post, and also to have used your name in third person instead of second.
I don't know. I'm almost certain we'd lose something in that alternate world as well. In particular, we'd lose a tolerance for the diversity of the world. College is tremendous for that: it's the one thing it's tremendous for. You realize what radically different sorts of people there are in the world. Without that, if you're born and raised in a suburb then there's a good chance you never realize what you're missing out on.
I don't think it's fair to assume specific phases of life whatsoever: people don't automatically grow up. Some people seem to skip the adolescence phase and go right to adulthood, for better or for worse.

However, it IS fair to say that society reacts to people of certain ages as if the sheer fact of getting older meant instant change in mood and personality. And that's harmful.
Wouldn't it make more sense to cut out the middleman and help out families in trouble, rather than bail out entire companies that have been declining for years?

Incidentally, this is yet another article that really is just politics/economics. Sigh.
Put Things Off : Free, laid-back productivity advice
It's not Gaussian at all, actually. The sizes of businesses tend to follow a power law distribution, in fact. I was just using "+5 sigma" as a technically sloppy synonym for "extremely improbable".
Don't knock on intellectuals. There's something to be gained from the path they take. The fact that most people miss the path entirely doesn't change that. It's like saying that most programmers never make anything of worth: yes, it's true, but it doesn't make the entire career irrelevant.

That quote, however, is spot-on. Anything that doesn't focus on the best and brightest hurts the best and brightest in a way. And the fact that they survive despite this is a sign of those people ignoring the system rather than of the system's working. I wrote a lengthy post about this long long ago: can't find the link, apparently subjects delete themselves here?, but my point was that by making a system that was hostile to people like that, while ensuring it possible to live without the system, American school systems encourage people driven by ambition to become successes. It's why we have such a powerful entrepreneurial drive in the country.

I wish I could find the link, though, because I said it better back then.

EDIT: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=258239
I think that lots of adolescents honestly do not want to do anything. They prefer having no responsibilities whatsoever.

I thought it was otherwise: that people who didn't want to work or improve or learn were people that didn't have a good method of doing so, that they were restricted by the system. Long story short, I found out that's radically not the truth. Some people are a little bit icky inside.
But that's how a debate or a discussion goes. You give a very general overview of your ideas, and you get more detailed after questions arise. That way discussions are more focused and lead themselves to perusal more readily.
> You realize what radically different sorts of people there are in the world

I would argue the exact opposite. The majority of college educated people I know have never had a friend of less than middle class origins. The statistics show we have a society of increasing class stratification; people never marry down anymore, for example.

College and credentialism is also reinforcing an elitist attitude to manual labor. I've even seen several posts on this board that implicitly assume someone who works with their hands must be inferior to a "knowledge worker." We're getting MORE social division, not less.

And let's not kid ourselves about the real level of diversity in colleges. Hispanics are WAY underrepresented, and probably always will be. You're not going to come to any sort of understanding of chicano culture by going to college.
But what does "having a valuable place in society" have to do with not contributing economic value? I don't quite understand you.
> Most kids get into sex and drugs because they're bored.

And here I was thinking that sex and drugs are loads of fun, regardless of whether you're bored or not.
Wattzon gives you tools to track your energy consumption.
How to save 100Mb of RAM per mongrel (Ruby on Rails)
You won't get middle American teenagers to sit down and study like Chinese students will; but that's fine. Our hackers will end up just as knowledgeable as theirs, and maybe more creative.

I couldn't agree more.

Our national drive to rebel against things and disobey orders is one of the best, if one of the most frustrating, things we've got going for us. We should encourage people to do things their own way, to try thinking out of the box. Even if it doesn't work, any time you try to do things differently you'll learn something, even if that thing is "what not to do next time."
PLEAC is the best

http://pleac.sourceforge.net/
Both are true. When you're bored you get into dumber kinds of fun.
It does if profit becomes a primary rather than a secondary motive. If you teach students "Learn to make things that people want," that would be fine. If you teach "Make money" and leave it at that, things would corrupt.

Similarly, anything that's left open to profit will corrupt. Look at the difference between Fox News and PBS. In some cases, not having to worry about money lets you be uncompromising in your delivery. I think schools would work the same way.
100 Tools and Resources to Value, Negotiate, and Sell Your eProperties
This DH1 feels a bit too tight. Do you have anything in a DH4?
Ah totally cool suggestion, thanks. And easily doable with anonymous sessions. Will note it down.
My understanding is that last year (2007), while everyone was salivating over the iphone and contemplating the its ramifications on the high-end phone market, Nokia sold the rest of the world budget phones and posted record profits. So I don't think they're really banking on the smartphone market -- at least as we've defined "smartphone" in the US. Especially when their high-end phones are selling for double or triple the price of the too-beat offering (iphone).
You nailed it.

I've smoked marijuana before. I've been drunk. I haven't had sex, because I'm into the idea of abstinence, but I'd done everything but. And absolutely those things are enjoyable.

The difference is that I don't rely on stuff like that. I write, I program, I design things, I read, I try to write music and shoot films. I don't feel the need to drink once a week, or to go out and randomly hook up. And that's because I have so many things I can do at any given moment.

If you don't have that stuff, you're forced to rely on sex and drugs. And those things are both easily abused.
shhh, New Zealand is a secret!
Nuthin dumb about it done right.
Businesses generally perhaps, but not startups. I wouldn't advise the average startup to modify their strategy based on what administration is in power.
I agree with Newt Gingrich's assessment of the problem. However, I don't like this solution, particularly within the context of http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/21/magazines/fortune/talent_col... (warning, very long article) and http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=203...

Gingrich is right in that the institution is a failure. However, his proposed solutions merely reinforces those institution. A big part of the problem comes from the shift in meaning of the words "teachers", "students", "homework", "responsibility", etc. As the author from the Wharton article says:

"Consider this one example from my recent experience. I attended a conference of school counselors, where the latest ideas in the realm of student counseling were being presented. I went to a session on the development of self-discipline and responsibility, wondering what these concepts mean to people embedded in traditional schooling. To me, self-discipline means the ability to pursue one's goals without outside coercion; responsibility means taking appropriate action on one's own initiative, without being goaded by others. To the people presenting the session, both concepts had to do solely with the child's ability to do his or her assigned class work. They explained that a guidance counselor's proper function was to get students to understand that responsible behavior meant doing their homework in a timely and effective manner, as prescribed, and self-discipline meant the determination to get that homework done. George Orwell was winking in the back of the room."

I just thought of an alternative solution, one that does not necessarily require a lot of political clout. The solution is something parents can implement directly without having to lobby for legislation. Simply, the parents has their kids pass their GED by the time they are 13. They may be required by different laws to also pass the different standardization tests, but depending on the circumstances, studying for the material in the GED should be enough. This can probably be done over the age normally reserved for middle school.

A 13-year-old with a high school diploma (via GED) has a lot more social clout within the adult world than a middle-school kid. He may not be legally able to vote, or drive, or smoke, or drink, and he'd get in trouble with underage-sex laws. However, he would not be considered a high-school dropout.

The options open up from there. The parents probably should choose an apprenticeship, whether that be something as humble as a janitor, or something more aspiring such as a researcher, a programmer, an entreprenuer, a soldier, a fireman, etc. A more traditional college track would still available.
YouTube - Great Song & Great Dating Site
I pirate gigabytes in a week, but even I think it's a bit disingenous to talk about freedom for consumers. The real problem here is that markets work poorly in certain well known cases - public goods, externalities, monopoly, imperfect information etc. This is one of those cases.
The majority of college educated people I know have never had a friend of less than middle class origins.

It depends on the college that you go to. Some colleges don't let anybody of less-than-middle class in.

people never marry down anymore, for example.

You'll have to clarify this a bit more. People marrying down wasn't ever common, to my knowledge. And, this is my biased and bigoted opinion, but people in similar classes often have the same values, and this is why cross-classing never works so well. For instance, I tend to be attracted to people who are very logical and very expressive. I find myself attracted to the gap right in between programmers and actresses, because that's where people share similar values to myself. That might be shown as a sign of bias on my part, and it is, but it's a bias that can't be fixed, because elsewhere people and I are less compatible. I'd assume the same to be true across social boarders: people who go to certain places in society all have similar traits. Forgive me if I sound ignorant: I'm not at all knowledgeable in this field.

I've even seen several posts on this board that implicitly assume someone who works with their hands must be inferior to a "knowledge worker."

I don't look down on people who work with their hands. At the same time, though, I think that the power to create original things is the best power we've got. To be fair, few people ever do this, regardless of position. If you look at hackers as a whole, we're no better.

Hispanics are WAY underrepresented, and probably always will be. You're not going to come to any sort of understanding of chicano culture by going to college.

True. But I was talking more about people based on location. People of similar classes and skin color will be radically different based on where they come from. And some people never realize that until they get to college. It's not a huge change, not as huge as it could be, but it's a change and I'd argue that it's good for most college students.
Ah, but what if someone uses this device to prototype a system that reduces the amount of trees used for other purposes?
I was very excited for loopt, but it's actually pretty useless. There is no backgrounding of processes on the iPhone, meaning there is no push status updates.

That means a collection of what your friends are doing and where they are is usually weeks out of date. I have 30 friends in Loopt, all early adopter geeks with iphones. None have updated their status recently.

Add to this that it doesn't feed status in from twitter and facebook. You can push your loopt status to twitter though, making it a slightly cynical integration.

Part of the problem is the iphone and the walled garden. I'd love to see an unlocked iphone run loopt to constantly push my location.
OK, election is now over. Can we get back to hacker news?
Stalking the Wily Hacker
Of course it is. Neither is a pleasure derived from your achieving anything whatsoever. It's an automatic pleasure. I'd compare it to the pleasure that you get from eating food, or from drinking soda. It's pleasurable entirely thanks to automatic changes in your body.

Therefore, it's "dumb" in that it requires no effort whatsoever on your part. And if you come to rely on that stuff for entertainment, then you're not gaining anything as you go. As opposed to its being used sparingly, in which case you're off doing more productive things.
What would you do if you knew you couldn't fail?
What would you do if you knew you couldn't fail?
Early teenagers, in general, aren't ready for sex and drugs. Sex, even protected, can lead to pregnancy and disease... and let's not forget about the emotional problems casual sex can cause. Psychoactive drugs, although they can be beneficial for a lot of people, are dangerous, especially for a person whose brain is still developing. I don't know what would have happened if I tried pot or LSD at age 13, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have been a good thing.

That said, if the purpose of "adolescent" institutions such as high school and college is to prevent people from indulging in these things until they're ready, then they're a massive fail.
I think it's useful advice for people who are just starting up now, though. If you want to be an entrepreneur but don't know what field to start in, playing along the lines of what the new administration is looking for means that you're opening in a field that everybody will be watching.
I liked Arrington's comment in the thread to somebody who criticized him:

I don’t claim to be a journalist, and I’m never neutral.

I hate TechCrunch and the people who devoutly follow it, but at least Arrington knows what he is. A lot of people write trashy blogs and assume they're really journalists, and it pisses me off. Another lowered notch for journalism.
So-called "adolescence" has three stages: middle and high school, college, and the "failure to launch" years between 22 and 28-35, when traditionally adult accomplishments and responsibilities (homeownership, responsibly having kids, career and financial independence) are essentially out of reach for all but the very wealthy.

The first two stages are an unnecessary waste for most people, since they end up going through a lot more schooling than is useful for them, and could be abolished. For the third stage, I really don't see an easy fix, because we're talking about an extremely deep social problem. Closing the high schools and the mediocre colleges is only going to dump people into the "failure to launch" period early and prolong it, possibly to an even later age than now.
General Motors should file for bankruptcy. Monday
nevertheless the anti-nuclear fringe will go haywire over this regardless of its benefits. You are forgetting that these guys operate like a religion, not a rational group. If not, they would have gone pro-nuclear a long time ago.
Web Browser Bolded Monospace font hack.
If like me you prefer to display code samples in web pages in a bold font (bloody dark-on-light pages) this trick may be of interest to you:

1. Pick a font that is similar to your preferred coding font (I use DejaVu Sans Mono so Bitsteam Vera Sans Mono is effectively identical).

2. Install only the bold versions of the second font.

3. Set your browser's fixed width font to the bold only font.

There may be some other way to achieve this, but obviously I haven't found it, however this is pretty simple.
It may help if they tried removing things instead of adding more bloat on top.
One insignificant person makes another insignificant person angry, news at 11 or whenever.
They could use a Wifi hotspot database or allow users to manually specify their location.
I don't think so. A better and completely orthogonal compass is to try to see one's position on the pretty much inevitable path of technological development. Woz was much better off thinking "What can I do now that DRAMs have been invented?" than "What can I do now that Carter has been elected?"
MP3 headphones interfere with implantable defibrillators, pacemakers
Is Newt happy to lower the age of consent to 12?