skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
good one. gist of keynote- dont be afraid to fail, there is lots to learn from it, follow what you genuinely love and use, and do what works for you best

there is something so enchanting reading about github, 37signals, etc.. they are filled with passion, do not talk about money (as an objective) and most of all inspire others to follow their heart and pursue their love
this isn't some sort of Star Trek giggle factor

Is that the technical term?
Pizzashare
Here's the problem: he wants to work at a startup. A startup, if successful, that's at ramen profitability - meaning, there isn't any cash for you even if they wanted to pay.

If you've got a VC-backed startup with cash, they're recruiting interns through the traditional processes anyway, where this guy is going to have trouble standing out.
Show him this:

http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html
Was Magnolia profitable? Did it run ads?
Is this a good case for cloud computing services?
I'm still in the process of upgrading my ambition, but I've so far been happy to just get to the point where I can release something. If it makes > $10/mo on its own, consistently, I smile (which brings me back to needing to upgrade ambitions)
I seriously didn't expect this from magnolia.

How hard/expensive is it to get an automated daily backup of the DB and sync it up to something like Amazon S3 ? I run a similar pet project ( pardon the shameless plug :) http://tagz.in ), albeit with only a dozen people actively using it. I maintain a 30 day rolling backup of daily db dumps, paying next to nothing for the backups. I've had a number of people asking me how can they trust me if I decide to stop the whole thing, and a part of the plan was to allow people to download their bookmarks in Netscape bookmarks format for atleast 30 days from the day I announce just in case I decide to take it down / run out of money. Not like this is ever gonna happen (To be honest i probably can run it for the next 6 months, even if I lose my job this very day.),
But I feel contingencies like these need to be thought about, well in advance when we're dealing with user's data (bookmarks in this case).

PS: I use Postgresql and have a script on my laptop which syncs my local db with the latest db snapshot every week, which isn't really a good idea, but works for me, given the tiny scale that I'm working on.
Matches my experience, although, as some commentors also stated, I tend to think of it as "three weeks".
If I knew, I wouldn't have posted it. Maybe bad reaction to her because of the facebook interview... (did you see that)

Oh well, I've learned not to question why i'm downmodded, haha.
he didn't do anything wrong. congratulate him, and offer him links to some things you think he may enjoy to learn more.

if you fear he will make mistakes, the best way to combat that is with knowledge, not by taking the school's side against him and calling his great success immoral.
Mathematics is not defined by how python does arithmetic.
I guess I should have phrased that as "I hate those in a position of authority that happen to be ignorant idiots on this planet" to exclude the unforeseen interpretation that "I hate all those in a position of authority because they are all ignorant idiots".
Hostile is a good way to be. It means forcing people into explaining themselves and the things they do. At the same time, it's a state of mind that lets yourself admit you're wrong, which I was this time.
I think that piece makes some assumptions about the attention span of 13 year olds that are not present in the samples available to me :)
Ah! Very sorry. That makes sense.
Up/down up/down, if you disagree say so.

Do you take offense at my suggestion this kid did nothing wrong ? Why is that ? Enlighten me, for all I have read above the sysadmin is the person in the wrong, if a 13 year old can walk all over your system you ought to be looking for a job (and one that does not include system administration).
On writing good

Haha. But seriously, I found this very interesting :)
Is it similar to Elements of Style in its focus? (That book, of course, had the most perfect phrasing: "Omit needless words.")
I knew a 13 year old, diagnosed with ADHD for not sitting quietly in class, who could concentrate on a chess game for 4+ hours straight. And then play another one after a short break.

I could do the same. I also read SICP when I was 13.
Just because you CAN screw around with someone else's property doesn't mean you SHOULD. Although it can be exciting (especially at that age) to do something forbidden, he can suffer the consequences if caught. He might inadvertently harm the system and could wind up in serious legal trouble. It's like walking up to someone's front door, twisting the knob and discovering that they forgot to lock it when they left. That doesn't give him the right to enter the house, even if all he wanted to do was "look around". Turn the situation around: would he want someone hacking into his home computer because he didn't have it properly secured? Would they have the right to do it to him?
Google: Internet innovation shouldn't need permission
When I was in high school, I guessed the administrator password of our computer lab (it was the administrator's daughter's first name) and basically maintained the computer lab for the rest of the semester. I never did any harm in the process. The administrator, upon finding out what I had done, recognized that I knew what I was doing, and supported my work. I fixed permissions that repaired apps that had been mysteriously broken for years, reset other students' passwords at their request, and lots of other helpful things..

Then one day my teacher switched places with the only other person who had the admin password, and she didn't know about what I had been doing. When she found out that I had administrator access, she was infuriated. She called me a "hacker" and reported me to the principal. The principal planned to give me a 0 in the class and possibly expel me from school. The only people who were allowed to be in the "hearing" which decided my fate was the pissed off teacher and the principal. The administrator, who vouched for me, was told that no one asked for his opinion and that it wasn't relevant. I almost failed to graduate because of this, and it was only through being persistent and involving every teacher I knew that I managed to not fail (the principal reduced my grade to 75/100 instead of failing me).

I would tell your son that most adults who have authority (including principals, teachers, judges and police officers) do not understand technology and computers very well, and therefore it's important to not only operate within the scope of the law and rules of his school, but to also not even appear to operate outside those rules. Computers are cheap, and in 2009 there's not much more interesting in his school's network than what he can set up on a $200 netbook.
You defended a child against an adult. Of course some people will irrationally downmod you. Don't worry about it.
There is an impression among VC's that every startup wants their money. We've had calls like this too. We tell them we are building sweat equity and they offer to call next quarter to check on our progress.

I suspect the author of the blog post could do more to change the situation into one that is mutually beneficial.

Why not just reply to the initial email with a link to a page that has answers to the common VC questions? Let them fill out their spreadsheets from that.

Unfortunately for Wufoo, they are losing the opportunity to have a productive conversation by allowing it to repeat itself over and over. If they "know" how the conversation is going to go, it's their responsibility to move it in a different direction.
Well, lots of porn / porn-ish stuff has ecpms well below $1. I'd bet that includes /b/, the image board, the rapidshare links, the torrent board, etc. Further, I can't imagine many ad companies are jumping up and down to serve ads on boards associated with that kind of stuff -- viz fark having to separate the main page and the boobs page.

Even worse, most advertisers don't like forums. Add the two together and well... bummer. Hard to make a living like that.
I have a son like that. He's great at the stuff that he is interested in, anything else and he's bored instantly.

ADHD to me is just a convenient label for kids that are different than that norm, so we trot out the medicine cabinet to make them conform instead of helping them to cope with the world around them we make it easier for the 'rest' to cope with them.
I've never used Photoshop Elements before. Perhaps you're right.

I don't hate Photoshop's UI. (Where was I critical of it?) I dislike the Gimp's user interface very much.
He didn't do any major damage

What do you mean he didn't do anything wrong? If all he did was find a way into their systems and report his findings of insecurity or something, certainly there would be nothing wrong with that (as long as he's following his terms of use for the school computers, also -- he's held to the rules of the school as a student). But it appears as if he's done something, maybe he didn't report what he discovered, that is indeed wrong.

And I agree, the sysadmin must be pretty incompetent, but that is still no reason to be doing that. It's like saying "the lock on this safe is weak and easily broken, so I will go ahead and break it to access the contents inside." It's still a safe, you're still not supposed to break it. If you do, you should immediately recommend to the owner that they get a stronger lock.

He's a typical (in a sense) 13 year old. This hardly warrants punishment. But he should indeed put his talents to better use, and that's what the author of this thread is asking. What would we recommend?
Academic Earth's online video lectures let you go to Harvard for free.
Whatever you do, do not punish him for this. While what he did was not right (though your use of "hacking" here is very broad), instead of telling him how wrong it was, simply try to push him in a more positive direction. My suggestion would be to ask him to work on some sort of project for or with you, perhaps even get him involved in something small and open source. Starting a website may even push him in the right direction.

An alternative would be to talk to the school and see if they could give him some sort of credit for helping administer the network, or work on a special project for the school.

To give you an anecdote: in high school (and this was only a few years ago), me and my friends consistently were cracking passwords and breaking into various parts of our school's network. We never did anything harmful, nor did we ever cheat, but we did it for the fun and the challenge. One day, we happened to find a file containing all the passwords to every user on the network -- teachers, guidance counselors, and principal included -- and we turned it into the principal. Instead of telling us we were wrong for "hacking the network" and questioning us, he thanked us profusely and got the file deleted from the network. No punishment.

In middle school, however, I got in minor trouble for "hacking" by using proxies to skirt around the school's filtering system. The "techs" in the computer lab quite literally pulled me out of class and angrily questioned me, telling me how I was wrong and what I did was bad. What happened? I continued doing it, and just made sure not to be caught.

My point is that telling him he is wrong will not stop him, and he will likely continue what he is doing because it stimulates him and he finds it exciting. By nurturing that excitement and funneling it into something constructive, such as an alternative project, he will learn what the better avenues are and likely forget about "hacking"/cracking almost (if not) completely.
I thought of the same article.

Also, I greatly enjoyed reading iWoz and it is be very accessible for a teenager. Woz' passion is very contagious and it may help him discover how fun constructive hacking is.
So does this mean that if I accidentally forget to lock my front door that it is legal for you to walk around inside my house?
I'd try the "with great power comes great responsibility" angle. They did the best their muddled minds could do to secure their system. It was trivially easy to break into it using your l33t haxor skillz, but might does not make right. Have a little compassion.

Also, remember, embarrassing them in this way might cause them to use the great power they have over you to make your life miserable as well. It goes both ways. The luddites in charge of public schools are usually docile, slow moving creatures, but they can become suddenly fierce if poked in the eye with a sharp stick.
I can haz WiFi? It actually sounds like a good idea to me. Is there a reason this is a joke instead of a legitimate business idea?
Just let him know what the potential consequences are, and your recommendation (which I'm assuming is to "not" continue).

See if there is any way you can spin this toward the "good", by possibly having a meeting with the schools principal and systems admin. This is obviously a crap shoot, but could possibly be beneficial to your son's education.
If the kid was properly instructed beforehand on what was acceptable and what was not then you have a point, but the story does not relate that, hence my question.

I'm assuming that this kid is just as curious as any other kid at that age, and the systems should be set up accordingly.

This is trying to close the gate after the horse has bolted, ok, so he looked, big deal. Now catch up on the educational bit about privacy and minding your own business, case closed.

No need to make an issue out of it. The overreaction in these cases does more damage than the event itself.
iTunes is not popular because of fear. It's popular because it's easy. I buy albums on iTunes when I want to get music quickly. The ease of access is worth the price.

iTunes is not the ultimate solution; it may be the ultimate sales interface. There are still better methods of distribution.
There's another possibility: everyone is bilingual in "Universal" (English) and "local language X". As long as you have a few thousand people, speak whatever you like.

English really isn't the greatest choice for international language - it is fairly idiomatic - but it wasn't really a "choice" anyway. Still, it appears to be heading for international language status. I read that conferences in Asia, where native speakers of English are less than 1% of participants, often just use English to deal with the fact that there are hundreds of languages represented at the conference.

At the same time, many (admittedly well educated) countries are proving that you can use your native language and English. Based on my most recent trip, I'd say it's easier to get clear directions in English from a bus driver in Stockholm than in San Francisco.

So ironically, the widespread use of English could actually be a boon for obscure languages. You can preserve one for cultural identity, and use English for business. That said, this model is probably not going to help the last 500 speakers in a remote village without running water.
Don't get caught.
My goals would guide whether I spent a retainer or not on a publicist. If I needed a reactive, damage-control publicist, then a retainer would make sense to have them at the ready. But if I were planning a product roll-out and wanted media placements it might make more sense to hire someone for a finite campaign.

As far as expectations, for the proactive job I would negotiate goals with the publicist for number and stature of media outlets I wanted coverage from. e.g.(blog coverage, trades, or national TV and newspaper coverage). I would expect them to spend their time understanding the product and then pitching the story to reporters, and then to field press calls and handle logistics (press releases, arranging interviews, etc.)

Expectations for a reactive publicist are not as clear cut. I'd want them to control damage, but I can't think of a concrete metric for that.

In either case, I'd make sure they had news or reporting experience before hiring them. If they don't understand how the media works from the inside, they won't be as effective as someone who does.
That argument has been beaten to death so many times it really loses it's shine.

So, no that does not make it legal.

BUT We're talking about a kid that is according to the OP 13 years old, at that age you are not considered to be able to make these judgement calls.

Forbidden fruit and all that...
A Simple jQuery Plugin for Parsing Google Maps Address Objects
A jQuery plugin that makes it easy to extract meaningful address data from the Google Maps API.
Let them please return to stealth mode. Indefinitely.
Tell him to stop before he gets caught. Even though he didn't do any damage, a school's administration will not take kindly to the potential threat that he is.

here's one example, a quick google search - 69 felonies for stealing tests and changing grades http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38012/118/

Also, even though he got in, I wouldn't attempt to notify them of their breach, because again the school will probably go ballistic on him, I think there was a news story about this, but what happened escapes me.
Spot on. And I sympathize with what you went through at school, times sure have changed. The overreaction to this sort of thing is something that never ceases to amaze me, anybody that is half decent with a computer gets looked at as some kind of force of evil.

I see this as a response to some kind of inner fear that there are kids out there that are more competent with this stuff than the adults. Invariably it's the clueless that start these witch-hunts.
It's as simple as emailing and asking. It's good to be specific about what you're good at and what you'd like to work on. It helps if you're in the area and can commute as well. We had a few people email us and have picked one Computer Science student at Michigan (who lives in NYC) to work with us this summer in New York.
Ask HN: Python and web services
Has anyone else been working with web services (mainly SOAP) and Python? It appears the two common libraries, SOAPPy and ZSI are both out of date and not well documented. Is there a better library that I can use to access web services with Python?
When I was looking for internships I would just look for startup lists on cities I was interested in. I saw their open positions and sent a mail with my resume and a well crafted cover letter based on what I was interested on. Most companies were very accessible and would at least reply back.
Hardish. Expensive when you're talking about terabytes.

Regardless of that, though, ma.gnolia had backups; it's just they were untested and were dutifully backing up the corruptions that were being introduced on the software level.

It's that bit I'd like to know more about. Were they faithfully following the Rails Way and expecting the model to handle validations, instead of setting up the database to do double validation? How did these errors creep in, and how did they grow to be so catastrophic?
Sometimes it's fun to be on the "bleeding edge", such as when KDE4 first went from experimental to unstable. Plus, it benefits Debian as they've more users testing potentially breaking packages and filing bug-reports.
When I was in high school, a friend told me he had been diagnosed with ADD. His parents had him tested because his grades were suffering.

My friend and I have similar personalities, and my grades were similarly hit-and-miss. I went home and asked my mother if I had ADD. Her response: "Probably."

I'm grateful that I had parents who accepted my quirks as a part of my personality and not as problems to be fixed.
Laptop orchestra founder also Smule co-founder iPhone
Tell your cousin he gets about 3 more years of goofing around like that where he should use the "stupid kid" or "I dunno" defense and get off scott-free or with a slap on the wrist. Once he's an adult though, the kiddy stuff has to stop.

If he's messing with financial systems or other serious stuff, give him a thwock on the skull and remind him that it would be unfair and immoral to screw with the systems more than the CEOs and bankers already have. =)
Heyzap growing fast (YC 09)
"Words such as “bioluminescence”, “organic”, “humble beauty”, and “atmosphere” came up frequently in our brainstorming sessions. We know that in isolation these might sound a bit corny, but this is all part of the overall goals of Windows 7."

You heard it here first - being corny is one of the goals for Windows 7.
I was expecting a sensationalist, poorly-written article about Facebook's overcontrolling nature. I was pleasantly surprised: all the points were thoughtful.

The one that wasn't mentioned is the one that matters most in this case, however: the larger you are, the less you can do without being noticed.
LimeWire strives for relevancy by tapping Web 2.0 | The Download Blog - Download.com
I saw the GitHub guys talk at RailsConf '08.

It struck me that they were all uber confident - they seemed that they knew what they were going to do and, as needed, they adjusted their course. I was walking out of this talk and mentioned this as smalltalk to guy next to me and he said he had known one of the GitHub guys for years - and in the several years that he has known him - he has always been calm confident and relaxed.

They were very inspiring.
Where? Don't see it on your profile.
Great speech. I'd be interested to hear other people's opinions on the consequences of his conclusion, the "do what you want" bit. I know he meant it in a broader sense, but I see a lot of people (especially high school students and younger) wrongly interpreting that as "don't go into CS; just go straight to a startup," especially with the specific mention of that plan of action.

I know that's a popular piece of advice given around here (though HN has an interesting mix of "stuffy" academia and "Wild West" hacker culture), and I felt the same way when I was younger. I thought I knew all the CS I needed to know to develop the stuff I'd want to develop. But I want to say that I am so overwhelmingly happy I have done CS at the college level. I knew so little back then (and still). It scares me that I almost neglected the path of inquiry that is /the/ single most interesting intellectual topic in my life.

So, young hackers out there, keep an open mind and a long-term view when you are following his advice to "do whatever you want." That's exactly what he meant by that, I think.
Interesting-- I don't recall agreeing to submit usage statistics to either app developers or third parties--- was that in the app store EULA?