skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Our parents form the basis for all other attachments we are able to form with people. Our parents form the basis of how humans are able to interact with others.

I certainly disagree with "So if you want to improve the way children behave in school—for instance, by making them more diligent and less disruptive in the classroom", I think most people can see a correlation between poor quality parenting and badly behaved children. Inside or outside the home. This certainly proves it's point when the average family of University (or College) child age is shown demographically. (Assuming that you exclude financial issues).

Parents have far too great an influence over their children to not matter. This research certainly hinges on undermining the whole of attachment theory, and Freud's work on personality types. If parents did not support certain behaviours then they wouldn't develop. I think that this research on it's own represents a narrow minded view of later development, not something which explains how parents shape their children.

Parents do matter because they create who we are today.

Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_Theory
I used to think that a metadata based file system was a really bad idea until two things happened. I read Jef Raskin's "The Humane Interface" and I watched people use web apps and 'database' apps like iTunes.

In THI, Raskin covers the idea that the best filename for any given file is the file itself. If I save a copy of this comment on my computer, I might call it "HN - Desktop Metaphor/Hierarchical Filesystems". That's a lousy name. Three months down the road when I'm trying to remember where I quoted 'the best filename for any given file is the file itself', it's much more convenient to type in that phrase instead of trying to remember where I put the file.

There are two arguments against this approach, both with good counter-arguments.

First, if you love your hierarchy, nobody is taking it away from you. When you save a file, instead of being asked for a filename, you might be prompted for search tags. Type in a hierarchical file name there (eg. /comments/hackernews/hierarchical filesystems").

Second, what about files with no good textual metadata? A movie file, an image, etc. I can't just type in 'movie' and look through them until I find the one I want. In this case, the system could detect that there's no indexable metadata attached to a file when you go to close it and request that you add a tag. This is no larger burden than adding a filename now.

Of course, ideally you'd never have to 'Save' a file, just delete files you didn't want to save, so instead of 'Save' in the menu bar, you might have an 'Tag' item instead.

The other reason I think metadata based systems are feasible is by watching people use software like iTunes or web apps. As long as the applications that manipulate your data present a reasonable interface for navigating said data, it doesn't matter where the file is actually stored. Watch an end user play some music with iTunes and see if they ever even care where their files are. (Preferably someone without a CompSci degree, we tend to have wacky ideas about needing to know everything about the machine.)
I'm surprised by the number of comments here that say "Amazon would never do that". Look at our society, we have a black president openly advocating separate but equal treatment of gay people which to me is mind blowing. We have states voting to make it illegal for gay couples to adopt children, because they are so much better off without a stable family, right? We have once progressive states like CA taking steps back. The simple fact is the majority of people don't see gays as equals. It would not be unheard of for a large company to bow to pressure on subjects like this. I didn't sign any petitions but when I heard the news my first thought wasn't of Amazon.com's benevolence. I learned my lesson from the last internet fiasco and waited this one out. I just think it's premature to suggest we live in a enlightened time where people are free from sexual orientation prejudices.
I don't need to argue

You don't need to argue, but if you want to find the truth of the matter, then it might help to argue. Through arguing, but not through asserting, we can sometimes learn that we have mistaken ideas and change our minds.
The article does not state that parents do not matter at all, just that, when all the evidence available from studies conducted is considered, they matter less than what is normally assumed.
a way for you to keep tabs on friends in a passive way without engagement

That does sound like an apt way to sum up what Facebook promises. I'm not sure

a) that's worth much money to me, even if the money is extracted from me by responding to advertisements once in a while,

and

b) whether another company couldn't provide that functionality less expensively and less annoyingly and thus have a way to beat Facebook in the marketplace.
The title here asks if parents matter at all.
You and I go to vastly different parties if that's a cool trick.
They are worth whatever ads they can sell, I dont think they would be this successful if they charge a subscription fee.

Anyway 20m a month for running the site its a lot of money, maybe they have a permanent party somewhere.
What does that leave you with?

Skype. It's proprietary, but I don't know of a free alternative.

Zephyr.
Six years on, they really haven't monetized the site. Its advertising system is seriously ineffective and they've dropped the ball in corporate-consumer interaction to Twitter. Beacon was a disaster.

People like Marc Andreesen claim that they could be profitable in a second. If this is true, why would the company be trying to raise more VC and dilute everyone's holdings?

http://www.techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/twitter...

There is definitely value that's being squandered as time goes on. Putting the lipstick on the pig and dumping it before time runs out might not be such a bad idea as they seem to think.

Yahoo was willing to pay at least 1.5-1.6 billion two years ago. If they are really burning through $20 million/month, they've not gained very much by waiting.
Not very detailed, it only touches on a few library's. The data access issue shouldn't be a huge issue if using the Django model anyway.

Worse case scenario - you move to self hosting using the open source version (don't have the link handy), or you refactor your well designed data access layer to support a new platform.
You know, SMTP supports instant messages: SEND FROM: in place of MAIL FROM:. Apparently an analogous facility (I forget if it was actually connected to SMTP) was one of the major reasons for the uptake of Emacs on Multics.
Yes, but the discussion should focus on the actual article, no? Otherwise, why not just make it a Ask HN?
Some studies of the most closely related primates suggest that peers may be more important for them than parents are, as well as for humans.

How many people posting here are parents? I have four children. Since I have had my second child, I have cherished the saying I learned from another parent: "Parents of one child believe in nurture, and parents of two or more children believe in nature."
Ask HN: Did Apple ban the Lala iPhone app?
Several blogs posted on the new Lala music streaming iPhone app a couple weeks ago such as this one:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/28/an-exclusive-first-look-at-lalas-iphone-app/

However, the app is no longer listed or available in the app directory. Furthermore, there is no promotion of the app on Lala.com.

Did apple pull this app from the directory or is it still "in review"? I'd bet Apple has a close eye on this app as it is clearly a service that is competitive with iTunes. I would not put it past Apple to use their terms of use (ie, "duplicate functionality") in their favor.

Anyone have any info on this?
A brief googling shows that impulsiveness is believed to have a genetic component.
I dont understand why Yahoo and Facebook dont sell ads as much as Google

Its that or a fee for the service which its very unlikely to work out since their competition its free.
I like Microsoft-is-big-and-dumb stories:

"As an interesting side note, Providence was heavily involved in the $15 billion round, and submitted a term sheet in the $10 billion range or higher at that time. The big rumor is that Facebook convinced Microsoft that the competition was Google, not a private equity firm, and it helped close the deal at a much higher rate."
What to do when your gurus are light years ahead of you?
then again, maybe having 100 bank accounts would automatically trigger an audit

Don't you have to mention your Social Security number every time you open a bank account? Yes, I think having 100 different bank accounts would get attention from some government agency, perhaps the Department of Treasury office that tracks money-laundering.
Well, the article said look how influential peers are. But whether peers are influential is controlled by the parents. Some parenting techniques allow peer influence, and others simply don't. When they say peers are influential, they mean peers are influential in the context of certain common parenting techniques, but not others. Which kind of defeats their claim that parenting doesn't matter so much.

Certain types of (non-violent) parenting suppress the influence of peers completely, but no types of (non-violent) peers could suppress the influence of that sort of parenting at all.
While I agree that animation is one very effective way to enhance user interaction [1], I don't believe that simply upping the pixel count or adding 3d visuals will make interfaces that much better.

Compared to the late 90s, our current OSes focus an insane amount of their resources on eye candy. The newest UI fads (3d window switching, etc.) would make a windows 95 or Mac OS 9 user's head spin. Have they made the interaction metaphor better? Somewhat, but at nowhere near the pace of almost any other computer-related field.

I think that the main thrust of the article is that there is a limit to the advantages to be gained from simple graphics acceleration, and we are quickly approaching it. We need a new paradigm, otherwise we'll just continue languishing in a world where menu chains (edit->tools->filters...) and "ribbons" (i.e. MS Office) are the norm.

[1]http://watchingapple.com/2008/04/animation-from-cartoons-to-...
Google makes a pretty good profit (and 22B in Revenue last year) -- so it should be worth something

As for facebook - I think there's value. Lets compare it to an Australian TV Station. We've got 3 commercial stations - who have a max viewer base of 21 million viewers. Facebook has 7 or 8 times that many users, which are much much more targeted/segmented (which should be valuable for advertisers) and is still growing. I'd also hazard a guess that there are a number of young/disposable income types who spend a lot more time on facebook than they do watching TV. They've created value for their users - and probably for their advertisers, but I don't think the advertisers see that yet.
Say we can get 10 cents per user per month?

800,000,000 * .1 = 80,000,000

For most smaller scale websites, they are valued at 12-18 months of revenue, meaning Facebook's resale value at about 1,440,000,000.

2 billion isn't that far off the mark given the user base really.
He might actually mean "antisocial"; neurotypical children are a lot like dangerous animals to an autistic child who can't perceive their emotions, participate in their flock behavior, or predict their reactions, and who experiences a lot of pain from strong stimuli like bright lights or loud noises. Consequently they sometimes strike out at the neurotypicals, just as you might strike out at a pack of wolves.
Finally, vindication that Geocities is indeed more important than Facebook.
I find that very interesting actually, because that would be a very low price to pay: about the price of a lunch for one year of service, while Facebook hosts tons of pictures and videos and manage your events, etc.

They definitely offer a valuable service to millions of people but it seems that social networks are not allowed to charge their users. It's definitely taboo and would be criticized to no end. I can see my news stream filled with "Soandso joined the group 'Paying for Facebook? WTF?'".

I'm sure that, for many people, Facebook feels trivial to do even though they put in place a very reliable and fast infrastructure that handles a ridiculous amount of data.
The way he describes math and language is exactly the way I have described it to friends. My spelling is atrocious because I don't see the word a-t-r-o-c-i-o-u-s I see a gun black metal ball morphing into the head of a mace (slightly covered in slime) and moving towards me in a parabolic trajectory, which would make absolutely no sense to anyone else, but each of those attributes (gun black, ball, spikes, slime, parabolic movement) are like tags, or keys to a database that relate that word to other words. Movement = adjective, parabolic = quick decision, gun black = considered cold if said to others, slime = bad, spikes ~ ugly/pity, ball = others may disagree/personal opinion.

The hardest part for me is remembering people's names. I have to make unique picture for every single first name AND link it to a last name with another key, not as an active effort, but I know when it has happened. Learning to type was hard, until I started associating sequences of letters to their own "shapes" (more like micro movies).

When I'm thinking/working/talking/typing a minimum of 6 videos will play in my head (really fast) per thought. It goes waaaaayyyy up if I have an internal disagreement about something. Say somebody asked me whether I liked Starbucks or Tim Hortons more. Since I love both Starbucks and Tim Hortons my brain kind of does a tree of videos that face off against each other. First node would be

01"Better?" -> "impossible"

02"Branch: Define better?" -> "Speed, Cost, Service, Quality"

03"Speed Better?" -> "tilt Tim Hortons, except rush hour"

I could actually extend that example to about 60 or 70 lines, and for each line AT LEAST 2 videos would play in my minds eye. All 60 lines would take less than a second to calculate. I've developed the habit to look away (at the ground, say) from the person talking to me when this happens so that the conversation flows naturally.

Unlike the guy in the article, I have never really had a problem with reading body language.
Can anyone tell me how people like Clay Shirky are using Twitter?

I read Twitter by occasionally surfing to the website and scrolling through the backlog of Tweets from the fairly small list of people that I follow. Which is to say: I'm probably some sort of neanderthal. In this mode, hashtags are kind of useless.

But apparently the cutting-edge users of Twitter spend their days plugged into a client which lets them do nifty tricks like following hashtags in real time. I tried that last month, using TweetGrid. It was hypnotic, and kind of fun, but way too much volume. And it featured spam and trolls. Finally, I understood why some people complain about Twitter spam! It would appear that anyone can create a random Twitter account under a fake name and start spewing arbitrarily-hashtagged crap!

So I lost interest. But apparently many people have not. Do other folks just inhale all the hashtagged stuff, spam and trolls and Amazon-hating hysteria-inducing agents provocateurs and all? Or do serious Twitter users just follow so many people that they actually find the hashtags useful, just to sort through the Tweets from people they are following? Is there some nifty client software, which everyone but me knows about, that does something different from either of these strategies?
Sure, but if you're using the idea of this start-up to introduce capitalism to an Amazon tribe, maybe that's the level of abstraction you need, at first. For people who have never considered a self-sustainable living space, this level of abstraction is a good place to start before moving on to specific examples. It's like reading a dictionary entry before an encyclopedia one.
Unfortunately for Facebook, it ends up costing as much just in servers and upkeep to support 800 million users.
You still have costs - how many ads will your users click on? How much are advertisers willing to pay for each click? How much does it cost to retain a single user?

I can bet you that a Facebook user eats up a lot more than 10 cents a month in storage, bandwidth, CPU usage, etc.

The problem with Facebook is that they've targeted a notoriously cheap demographic - one that is both culturally and financially opposed to paying for stuff. The only successful ads I've seen on my Facebook network is for things like college movers and maybe media promotions... You can't tap into the goldmine of actually valuable ads like, say, car sales or law services.
Pretty slick. WiFi and Cup Holder and I'd never leave the operator's chair...
Doesn't XO / Sugar have some of these features - I never quite got my head around it -- playing a little bit in VMWare didn't quite cut it. Anyone have any experience with the OLPC kit?
why is adobe so high?
Take it! Have these guys actually started to believe their own crack?

For the record, I don't see any way that Facebook is worth even $1B. Feel free to mock me in 10 years.
Very clean value prop, easy and fast signup. Asserts is a good concept and well-done.

I can't tell if the test contact worked -- I did not receive an email or an IM. Don't know what contact to allow for gchat.
"Instead, they'll just file a tax return for you and charge you a fee for the trouble."

Why can't I just check an 'opt-in' box somewhere and have this as the default? It just seems inane that every year I have to go through this ritual of copying numbers from one form to another form when the gov't already gets its own copies. I mean, why can't this be automated where you get an intial version from the gov't and if you want to file an amendment to correct or include other items then you can but if you just accept the default you can do that too? Too efficient maybe?
Boldly Going Nowhere
My guess is people linking to "Get Adobe Reader."
>Due to an error in the production of the release candidates (2.6.2c1), the release candidates already used the version number of the final release in some places. As a consequence, upgrading the Windows installation from 2.6.2c1 to 2.6.2 (final) will fail. Users of 2.6.2c1 need to uninstall it manually before installing this release.

Oops.
oh yeah forgot about that
Reports: Mac OS 10.5.7 release imminent
Werid that his article popped up today. I was just watching some videos of David Tammet yesterday.

Here's the documentary about him that came out a few years ago: http://www.videosift.com/video/The-Boy-With-the-Incredible-B...

In it, he meets Kim Peek, counts cards, splits the hand twice and gets triple-blackjack, sets his PI record, learns Icelandic in a week, and many other things. Interesting show, not just about him, but other savant's too.
Thanks for the feedback. Regarding IM, I think you need to add us to your buddylist for gmail (sitecanary@gmail.com) -- we'll make that clearer! Email should work always -- check your spam filter.

Cheers!
Well, you listed several prominent sociologists and stuff they claimed. That doesn't in any way, shape, or form prove that their claims are true or even based on falsifiable hypotheses and experimentation like the sciences we trust, i.e., physics and medicine.

This is probably because sociology is one of those disciplines, and I use the term loosely, that really isn't yet close to being able to have its referents captured, chopped up, classified, quantified, analyzed and put into little boxes.

In fact, if I didn't know better, I'd say the observations you point to could have been made by your run-of-the-mill keen observer of humanity, like a Tom Wolfe or Shakespeare.
While your point is valid, doesn't digg only have something like 40 employee's? We're not exactly talking a Microsoft sized company structure here.
Genes Show Limited Value in Predicting Diseases
Ever see the movie 'August'? The best line - We're running on fumes
I rather prefer the Cadaeic Cadenza
http://www.cadaeic.net/cadenza.htm
Somewhat interesting statistics, but a pretty substance-free article that adds little to the original source, and the unsupported political soundbite at the end is not appreciated.
Yahoo was willing to pay at least 1.5-1.6 billion two years ago. If they are really burning through $20 million/month, they've not gained very much by waiting.

Compared to almost any other investment over the past two years, a gain of 25-30% is a lot.
Yards are vacant space consuming resources and producing nothing.

We can all acknowledge that importing water from Fiji is silly though, right?
Can anyone find historical data on this number? It seems like it's the "employment-population ratio" in the report. The closest thing I can find is the "civilian labor force participation rate", here:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/CIVPART.txt

Apparently it's currently at 65.5%, which is 1.8% off of the record high from the dot-com boom. That doesn't sound so bad. Of course, I don't understand the difference between the two either.
and macromedia.com is leftover from Flash installs...
People like Marc Andreesen claim that they could be profitable in a second. If this is true, why would the company be trying to raise more VC and dilute everyone's holdings?

Because they're concentrating on continued growth of their user base. But there's probably a valuation threshold that's well above $2 billion where they'd rather to go into revenue mode rather than take the money.
whitehouse.gov on the move up

most edus on the way down - a post ncaa tournament thing?
Ads Come to Twitter (Updated)
I wouldn't call the Aussie dollar worthless.
Wal-Martazon.
Google owns 3 of the top 6 - google, blogspot, and youtube
Perl is far from dead. All web pages on Amazon.com are perl... del.icio.us, BBC, Slashdot... but more important is it's non-web use in engineering, finance, and bioinformatics... love Catalyst!
Can you fill in a survey for my final year project? Leanheat.co.uk
Hello,

I'm looking for people who have 5-10 minutes to go through the site I have developed as my final year University project and fill in a survey about it.

http://www.leanheat.co.uk/survey.aspx

Thanks in advance.

Richard
Then what would be a good architecture for such a service?
We have a word for this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology
You are smoking the crack, sir. Games do not have 3D UIs, they have 2D HUDs on 3D worlds, if they have 3D at all. 3D modeling software doesn't even have 3D UIs. Outside of a tiny number of specialized applications, 3D UIs are another Microsoft Bob. 3D has been tried, and it didn't fail for lack of computing power.

There is absolutely no reason to navigate a 3D landscape to create your document, even a 3D document, or get to your email. The 3D interface that actually improves productivity has yet to be invented.

What? Eye candy? Seriously? There's too much eye candy already. There are eleventy billion better things to do with multiple cores. If there aren't better things to do on your desktop, then you should be using a cheaper computer or running Folding@Home, or something. Anything. 3D is for art, not for UIs.
The 50 Most Brilliant Atheists of All Time
If you're planning on going to graduate school, just remember that a 3.5 GPA from a state school is far better than a 2.5 GPA from Stanford.
I haven't seen solid enough evidence to convince me that this wasn't the result of an action by an Amazon employee for whom it was 'intuitively obvious that GLBT literature would be openly, unapologetically classed as "adult" and kept hidden away from the general public'. It would seem pretty easy for them to classify this as a 'glitch'. Without complete transparency you can only really judge an organisation by it's actions.
Nice, simple & clean.

On the bottom of the assert page, why do you have an add Asserts button & a continue to checkups link? They should be combined into a continue button?