skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hadn't known about it previously. Looks like the core is Python, which seems neat.
Fractals and Stories
To be fair, it doesn't say the mom will look at everything, just that she could. It looks like she doesn't want him to use the phone in the same way everyone else uses their phones. Setting hours and encouraging him to leave it home and take less photos etc. says to me that she intends for him to limit his use of the device. In other words, she probably isn't policing the rest of his life the same way she is controlling his phone.
Well, we can disagree whether moving a little farther west is really the underpinning idea in US governance. I think that question was basically settled in the Whiskey Rebellion: there was never some idyllic period of liberty in American history where the government just was not on people's back.

Developers and entrepreneurs seem to too often live under this false notion that just because they can build things easily--literally our whole lives have been animated by the fact that we can just make a computer do nearly whatever we want--that somehow that is true for everyone in our society. A world with perfect liberty is a naturally unequal one--and the government can do a lot that is not telling "us what to do" that can address the worst examples of the inequity with a smaller proportionate decrease in overall liberty.

But, I digress in to the deepest and most fundamental question in western political philosophy, so let me move on to simply say what's below.

The federal government exists. It has immense powers. State and local governments exist. They have immense powers. Those things are not changing in our society any time soon (even with sequestration).

Given that fact, I think we're presented with two choices. We can either try to make government work better or we can ignore it. Either way it exists and affects our lives. I, for one, think it might be better if people like the folks on HN (libertarians, liberals, and everyone else) took part in the rule-making, the regulation, the laws, and the services that come out of our government. That we made sure that the folks who opine on the future of the internet were at least cursorily aware of its functioning, etc.
Just some people celebrating the New Year at Berlin
At a finance company with no defined "data science" role.

Attempting to see if I can create that niche (data science) in a large company, first for myself. If so, then things will go really well. If not, then I'll probably be getting back into "regular tech" mid-2013.
I just started my own charitable fund
A few days ago, a friend told me about donor advised funds. The best way to describe them, at least for me, is something like having your own personal charitable foundation, but without the overhead ( * there are significant legal and operational differences between a donor assisted fund and a charitable foundation, but I won't go into that here ).

The process went like this: I set up a fund thru the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program and mailed in a check for $25,000 ( minimum amount to open a fund. ) to start things off. This money no longer belongs to me, but I can recommend grants to public charities as well as direct how the money should be invested while it is waiting to be distributed as a grant. I put half of my fund in short term/cash investments so money will be there for grants I want to make in the short-term and the other half in a stock fund to hopefully appreciate over the course of years, so my giving a decade from now can benefit.

Rather than writing checks to different charities throughout the year, tracking each contribution, and hoping the charity sends me a letter confirming I donated, I make one donation at the end of each year directly to my fund. Going forward, I can make all my grants to public charity through my fund online. On my federal return, I only have to specify the single donation to my fund without having to worry about collecting proof of donations from all the individual charities to which I contribute.

I'm really excited about this and I am looking forward to figuring out where my fund could do the most good. I do not have a specific focus of where I want to contribute. I have a few charities I have supported over the years, but I would really like to expand and find some charities encouraging technical education to under-privileged youth. I would particularly like organizations where a small grant $100-$1000 goes a long way. Any thoughts Hacker News?
I know side effects are the exception but they exist, even at normal doses. From the PDF linked from wikipedia: "Common side effects that can happen in anyone who takes modafinil tablets include: •back pain •headache •nausea •feeling nervous •stuffy nose •diarrhea •feeling anxious •dizziness •upset stomach •trouble sleeping"
If it was in the UK it'd never happen anyway, unless the kid buys fake ID and sends the info to the network to enable adult content.

"You must not use this phone to falsely identify yourself as an 18 year old."
>> The reason it’s so hard for adults to learn new things is that there is no authority figure punishing them if they fail.

I think it's way more than that. Once you're out of school, there is no one to set goals for you. Even assuming you do have goals, there are no structured classes or textbooks to get you to those goals with your eyes closed. You are essentially both the teacher and the pupil and you must figure out your own curriculum in addition to doing the learning.
Are video games easier than they used to be?
In the USA, it's illegal for a porn site to show him porn until he's 18 anyway.
Of course Microsoft software is worth every cent (dollars many of them) that Microsoft thinks it is, the question here is, 'Is public debate of Microsoft's sales to the schools of Greece up for public debate?'.

Microsoft certainly wants to be a sole supplier on a privately discussed contract. If I were trying to maximize my profits, I'd want exactly the same.
That's only true for open source implementations (if you can call ZFS that, the only really decent implementation is still locked up inside Oracle). Netapp's WAFL (which ZFS copied) is the original implementation of a RAID system that is resilient to bit rot and the other array vendors (EMC, HDS etc) all have similar systems.
Here's my summary of their article. The whole event occurred because a developer ran an ELB purge job, thinking they were purging a non-production ELB meta-data database. It turned out that the configuration they were using, purged production ELB meta-data instead. As they say, no good deed goes unpunished. This caused strange errors that confounded the ELB technical team, delaying rapid recovery.

The rest of the Amazon article details the recovery process and the after-action items. Apparently, they had to recover at least twice, because the first recovery attempt failed. They had to figure out how to recover the ELB meta-data. Apparently this database didn't have a working manual procedure or automation for recovery.

One key after-action item deals with production access and is worthy of note. Privileged access to production was being provided to a small team of developers, working on ELB automation projects. The privileged access was "persistent" and didn't require per-access approval. On Christmas Eve, that was a problem. Amazon is promising that each privileged access now requires permission. They also claim that future recoveries will be faster, because they understand them better. As a final note, they apologized for the outage. Live and learn, I suppose.
So I have to be a Ninja to benefit from this? What about people in other martial arts disciplines. It seems quite prejudiced.

That said, despite the retarded title, I have no doubt that Resig has some good secrets to share. Mad respect for a brilliant developer with a terrible editor (book editor not vim).
I don't understand why you use short TTLs. Do you care that every visitor has to wait an extra 100ms or so to see the page they came for? I personally want all my DNS records at the ISP.

Sure, Google can get away with a 600 second TTL because there is so much traffic that only one person in a million will have to wait.
What were class listings?
A gentle introduction to classification of 3-Manifolds
Overlooks tablets, siri, google now, google glass ...

Seems like a case of self-imposed blindness. Narrow down your field of vision until you don't see anything exception startups oriented around mobile, iOS, social media and then complain that you're not seeing anything revolutionary. Tablets are arguably the biggest change in personal computing since the internet reached consumers. To complain things are boring is bizarre.
I mentioned this to Mattt on Twitter but I don't think he saw it. There's a lot you can do at the debugger and recursiveDescription can be called on any UIView or UIView subclass. So if you set a breakpoint you can do something like:

(lldb) po [self.view recursiveDescription]

from one of your view controllers to dump the hierarchy of that view. This of course will work on any object that is a subclass of UIView, such as a UITableView (subclass of UIScrollView, which is in turn a subclass of UIView), a UITableViewCell (directly inherited from UIView), etc.

There's a lot of good information provided by Apple on debugging here: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#technotes/tn2239/

It's definitely worth the time to go through it all if you spend any time debugging iOS code (and there's a Mac OS X equivalent but I can't speak for its usefulness).

I've also started writing a little piece on debugging code with lldb and Xcode, but it's a work in progress: https://gist.github.com/3943317
What? Did you read the whole article? An excerpt: "all roads lead to HTML and CSS... Once you understand that, then you can move on to Javascript, Ruby, Python, or whatever else you want."

This sounds logical and correct to me.
Not really. My parents knew that regardless of any rules or restrictions they would place on me, I'd find a way around them and watch porn anyway. So the subject was never brought up.
I dislike how people say "Learn to code" and that automatically implies that it's HTML, CSS and JS: There is a whole world out of that.
New PBS Documentary Takes Another Look at Silicon Valley’s History
I kind of feel bad that the switch from "learn to code" to "why schools work" was so jarring. I definitely need to do a better job making it a bit more skim-able. But I definitely don't feel bad about advising people to start learning to code by learning HTML and CSS if their goal is to eventually learn to build web-apps.

It certainly is coding in the most literal sense of writing code to be interpreted by a computer, although it's not a programming language. You are correct about that. Nevertheless, it's a great starting place for beginners.

You definitely can get paid for building static websites. Somehow I did.
If your posture problem is related to too poor flexibility, deadlift will not fix the problems. On the contrary, you can potentially put your back at severe risk as your form will break down.

You don't need to spend an hour a day, but not nearly all posture issues are down to muscular weakness.

For my part, I discovered my posture problems as a result of deadlifts and squats, that eventually got to sufficient weight that I was unable to compensate or work around the underlying lack of flexibility and ended up dangerously close to properly hurting my back.
I agree - I'm just saying it's the best starting point, not that it encapsulates all "coding".
Can you write a web app without knowing HTML and CSS? And how about reading the next sentence?

>Once you understand that, then you can move on to Javascript, Ruby, Python, or whatever else you want.
That's your opinion on the pricing of MS Office and its commercial value - correct or otherwise. However, I think the question is whether it makes sense to mandate its use in the education system, in several years time, given the rapidly changing commercial realities and - good value for businesses or not - the high price of using Microsoft products in such an environment by a government that is virtually bankrupt.

You may or may not be right on the value of MS Office, but I think its use in this context is easily and legitimately challenged.
Depends what network you are on. I'm on 3 and you have to opt in to the filter, it is not enabled by default on contracts.
His point for working in silicon valley which essentially boils down to "surround yourself with successful people, or people likely to be successful" also applies to the corporate world as well.

Surround yourself (and be friendly with) with people likely to succeed, chances are when they move up the ladder, they will bring you with them. In fact I would argue that it is just as important (from an employee's perspective) to surround yourself with successful people in the corporate world as it does in the startup world in terms of personal advancement.
Cherokee Web Server - Alternative to Apache.
Great point! I totally agree
I think a good first target for a static web site would be a restaurant website.

The goals are pretty simple, you can probably put one together in a few days or a week, and just by not making it awful you actually produce a website that is better than the vast majority of restaurant websites.
It is the opposite of logical because that would be doing it ass backwards. You don't need to learn HTML, your web app that you make while, you know, actually learning how to code, will generate it. Prettifying it with some CSS can be googled after you have something that actually works and has a purpose.
In my experience, the best way to learn to code is to find someone who needs a website built and offer to do it for really cheap, though not free.

I'd highly disagree on this. The minute someone offers some sort of compensation for work, the dynamic of the relationship changes -- from helper to employee (and in some cases servant) -- especially at the low-ball prices. From what I've found, the people thinking a website can be built for $100 are the type of people who will bug you as to why it's not done, demand extra features, wonder why it doesn't look like {{insert_dynamic_million_dollar_website_here}}, etc. And if you are just starting out, you probably don't have much contracting experience to have contracts ready with expectations of work/time to commit/deadlines/etc.

The best solution I found when I wanted to learn to code was that I had something I wanted to create that I couldn't -- not anything huge, just something small. Once I got it up and working, I had so many questions -- "why did it do that?", "why didn't it work?", "what if I wanted to do X?", and that fueled me to find out more information so I could answer those questions.

I also disagree that "we have to create a context where we have no choice but to learn." What people need, instead, is to bring back our child sense of curiosity. When I was reading up on the fiscal cliff, I was confused -- why were we in this mess? Why couldn't we do X, Y, Z? If you are overwhelmed with questions, many will just quit, feeling the answers are too insurmountable. The trick is to ask just enough questions so that you can understand a slightly larger view of the puzzle, which will help you answer the next set of questions.
I think, at least from the sounds of it, the nature of the rules your dad set for your Facebook use might be a tad different than the ones this woman set for her kid's iPhone use. It is not so much that she is setting rules, but rather projecting her own values and pet peeves on the child. I mean, look at this:

Don’t take a zillion pictures and videos. There is no need to document everything. Live your experiences. They will be stored in your memory for eternity.

What a crock of horseshit. Yes, I hate it as much as anyone when Miss Lisa Gorgeous posts on Facebook a photo of the ice cream she is eating just to get 'Likes', but I'm not going to demand that my kid refrain from that. It may be a bit stupid, but it is ultimately harmless. Not only that, but she is patently wrong that the child's experiences will be "stored in her memory for eternity." We are not computers. We forget stuff. And documenting the things we do is the most reliable way to relive them.
"Write programs that write programs" can someone elaborate on this?
Ask HN: How to monetize support of existing free and open-source projects?
Have been managing a few open-source projects for years and have wanted to get paid for the work that I put into it in my spare time. I am aware that it is much more difficult getting people to pay for support for free, open-source projects, especially after the maintainer has been supporting them for free previously, but I feel like I have nothing to lose since the product will only get better if I am more motivated to work on it. Any advice?
A related and more pernicious issue, in my view, is that companies have a tendency to hire before they trust.

Valve's ideology is "We hired you, we trust you." That doesn't mean that they give new hires all the keys, but the going assumption is that anyone who gets in is a competent adult who doesn't need to be restrained with typical, military-style subordination. If you're going to hire someone, then trust that person with his or her own time. If you can't, then don't hire.

Most companies grow too fast and end up hiring before they trust. This causes a loss of focus, because they need to generate busywork projects for the new hires, but it also creates a dynamic where there are Real Fooblers (for a company named Foobar) and everyone else, and the company has no problem generating a bunch of shit work for the "everyone else" category so the Real Fooblers can work on the fun stuff.

Talents of leadership and architecture can be assessed later on, but everyone worth hiring should start out with the basic right to direct her career and, when the time comes, prove herself.
This poor kid will definitely have a brilliant career in cryptography. By 14 he'll also have OpenBSD running in VirtualBox running in iOS, out of frustration. Apple might not approve, but he'll hack iTunes Connect at 15 anyway.
a) that's an ad hominim. I never attacked the author, and you are attacking me. Apology accepted in advance.

b) there is a large class of problem which only induces anxiety. For example, lamenting the "disconnection" between people in a modern, technology mediated society (which is a lament that's been going since the industrial revolution, and is no less valid now as then).

When we accept that large, impersonal forces shape the world in ways that, when we are thoughtful enough, realize are wrong or flawed, then we give up personal agency in fixing the problem. When you see a large, impersonal force causing a large, impersonal problem, the correct action is to file it away and keep your eyes open for opportunities to help people who both see the problem and have a solution.

That's just how I feel about the matter; others are welcome to have different beliefs.
Which is pretty justified, in my experience. There's a reason 13-year-olds are called "minors"; most of them are not yet mature enough to make good decisions on their own, so guidance is necessary.

Of course there are exceptions to the rule, but the mother certainly knows her child better than you or I do.
If your specific issues are due to muscular weaknesses, yes. If it's due to reduced flexibility, then no. Chances are it'll be a bit of both.

Try bending over with your back in a slight upwards arch while keeping your legs completely straight and together.

Can you get below 90 degrees? If not, your flexibility along your posterior chain is poor. Can you effortlessly reach your toes with your fingers (you can bend your back this time)? If not, same.

Strength training alone won't fix those. And in fact, that poor flexibility will make it very hard to maintain proper form when lifting weights, and you're putting yourself at greater risk of hurting yourself.

On the upside, only a couple of months of stretches is enough to see a substantial improvement.
AirDroid: The free app every Android owner should install in 2013
The FPS demo is just that: a demo. It's not made by a game company.

Sure, I realise that. I'm just saying, maybe it won't be quite as soon as you're thinking that we see high performance web apps.

When anyone talks about new startups, they inevitably mean a web-based company.

Not around here (Cambridge, UK) they don't. There are plenty of tech start-ups just down the road from me, many spun off from connections to the university and research done there. Some of them make web apps, of course, but most of them don't.

I suspect, with no offence intended, that you're probably seeing through the kind of HN-vision I mentioned in another post.

Everything is native apps. This is a terrible ideal world you live in.

I'm certainly not arguing that everything should be done with native apps. In fact, in my first post to this discussion[1], I argued rather strongly against making native apps for things where a web app works fine.

There are pros and cons to each approach, and I'm just saying that I don't think arguing that desktop apps are dead makes any more sense than arguing for building native apps on every platform so you could use a simple on-line database when a single web app would do just as well or (by my original argument) perhaps better. There is plenty of room for both approaches, and as always, we should choose whichever tool best does any given job.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4988159
A good accompanying video from one of the XCode devs is the video from WWDC 2012 319 - Effective Debugging with Xcode 4
Biggest innovation in my mind is the concept behind KickStarter. Literally revolutionizing marketing, fundraising, and the product development process.
so how is that better than raid? it sounds identical to what is described in the article - the problem was not scrubbing (afaict).
That's a cool idea! I had a lot of luck with student organizations since I was a college student. I also built a site for a book my professor was writing, a board game that a friend was launching, and a professional parent psychologist.
There's tons of small business out there that have little to no web presence but feel bad about not having something better up. They're more than willing to pay a learner $100 to give it a shot at creating something better.
What Amy Hoy taught me about starting a business
Lisp is very good at parsing language (i.e. all data, like computer programs, are read into lists and LISP is built around this functionality; this is one reason why it is very popular among AI researchers). Combine that with things like 'eval' statements and you can easily parse and execute an arbitrary computer language with LISP. Very, very cool stuff.

EDIT: Here's a good explanation of why LISP is good at this sort of thing: http://jlongster.com/2012/02/18/its-not-about-macros-its-abo...
Interviews in 2013
Cell phones may have done more for international development than charity, but that's a great example of improving things by accident rather than by design.

I moved to the Bay Area to start a startup, before which I worked on international development issues, and having seen both sides of the coin, I totally agree with the author's views.

It would be great if we could harness some of our technological expertise to engage directly with the world's problems, starting at the problems rather than our own individual itches. This is something I personally intend to do in the future, and I would love to engage with others that are interested in doing so too.

In fact, a few years ago, my co-founder and I thought about doing something for-impact rather than for-profit, and we volunteered with Khan Academy (when they didn't have funding), but quickly found that you can't do a great job on something unless it's the main thing you're working on (PG's "top idea in your mind" concept totally applies).

One great example of using technology for social change is SamaSource [http://samasource.org] — I'm a huge fan of their work and the founder's politics.