skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with your point completely: just because you're fastidious about grammar doesn't mean you can accomplish anything worthwhile. And anyway, most of the 'grammatical rules' that are widely propounded are just a form of mythology: maxims received uncritically and held up as a sign of (supposed) education.

On the other hand, written expression is like the programming interface for the world most of us live in: from the money we make to the business relationships we form to the thoughts we develop, written expression is almost always an essential means to reaching the goal. Those who can't be bothered to adhere to arbitrary grammatical conventions often find the grander and more abstract challenges of life inscrutable.

The Romans had an expression: "Qualis oratio, talis vir", as is the speech, so is the man. (Seneca, Epistulae Morales 19.114.1, attributes the expressions to the Greeks: "Hoc quod audire vulgo soles, quod apud Graecos in proverbium cessit: talis hominibus fuit oratio qualis vita.")
http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/sen/seneca.ep19.shtml

Despite the Latin slogan, I'm reluctant to reach a conclusion about the tutoring proprietor based on his use of language. Maybe he had a rhetorical reason for lapsing into grammatically half-baked jargon: he's suggesting he's too stupid or careless to be guilty of a premeditated logo theft. I don't know.

But...

Can you really write "If someONE would judge..., I wouldn't want to associate with THEM..." without cringing? I've been guilty of worse, I readily admit, but is it too fastidious and pointless to balk at such a construction?
Introducing Yip: A Unified Notification System for the Web
Well, step one is just to make people aware that you exist-I think the "get a bigger crowd" option is a great way to do that. Increasing your Twitter following would probably also help, though. Tweetspinner is a good app for this-if you get their premium service, you can follow people automatically when they mention certain keywords, automatically follow all of your competitors followers, then purge the followers that don't follow you back.

You can also submit your site to social media sites like Digg and Reddit. Getting other websites to write about you will also help point people in your direction.

Once you start attracting people, I think having a credibility rating system will become increasingly important in helping to keep the community healthy, intelligent and civil.
I think he was asking for suggestions on how to improve it, or at least what you didn't like, specifically, rather than simply "really poorly implemented".
I got my first job the hard way. I applied, and took whatever they would offer. I pretty much said I'd work for nothing.

I was in college, had no experience, and knew very little. I needed an in, and saw an ad in our Computer Science building. Emailed my resume, got a call, interview etc. I met with the owner who told me to go home and learn PHP and MySQL over the weekend. Did that, took a quick development test, and started work the following week.

I made minimum wage for about a year before we (the other newbie and myself) power played for a pay raise.

That job is what got me where I am today. We had to learn everything, be everything and do everything from support, engineering, development on through server admin and db schema design. I couldn't ask for a more rewarding first job.

From there all of my jobs have been based on my experience. My first salaried position I got because I was willing to move, could answer a battery of basic questions on programming and system admin, and I fit in. My current position I got because I learned ColdFusion at my previous job.

Everything builds from that first job. Being able to demonstrate your skills is extremely valuable. Connections can get you in the door, but real work will get you the job.

I actually got an interview through a connection once and was called the day of to cancel. That sword is double-edged.
While it sucks for the people involved, these posts just got me to go verify that all my sites have backups setup, and that the backups cannot be deleted via ftp
I experienced a strong case of PTSD and low self-esteem as the result of an extended period of quite pernicious and malicious bullying. In my case, the principal bully -- the leader of a pack who all engaged in the bullying -- was the son of a higher level school official; some of the school staff saw it occurring but took no action, I speculate out of fear of retribution.

For my part, I was also confused and frustrated by the situation. I had no desire to fight the fellow, and I didn't understand where this aggression was coming from. I also literally didn't know how to fight. No one ever taught me even the basics.

The psychological impact was strong enough that I will live with it, to some extent, for the rest of my life.

My recommendations to a parent or mentor would include:

+ Ensure the child is trained in self-defense. I will not allow any child of mine to be without such training. The purpose is not to become aggressive and controlling of others. It is to learn to remain centered and in control of oneself, and hopefully in control of the situation. At least in control of one's reaction to it.

+ Understand that, per my limited reading, bullying is an effective social strategy. Perhaps that may change as society evolves, but it has and does serve the purpose of promoting the bully and gaining them certain rewards. Not that the bullying is necessarily a conscious, pre-meditated decision with such rewards as the known and expected outcome. However, it is not a purely pathological social aberration. As such, it is something that will appear and that will need to be addressed. Saying it is "wrong" and "unfair" does not help the victim in dealing with the situation. Creating a social structure that aids the victim while mediating the bullying does. However (again), the individual cannot count on others always fostering such a social structure. The individual needs to be able to take care of themself. From that standpoint, they may then also be in a position to help foster a social environment that mediates against bullying.

+ Modern society seems to me to have created a bit of a "Lord of the Flies" situation. Many parents' daily lives are so separated from those of their children. Kids spend 8, 10 hours away from their parents in social environments that are strongly weighted towards their peer group, with limited participation by teachers, coaches and such as supervising adults. An entire subculture develops largely independent of broader society. Kids can end up very vulnerable within this. And the culture's message and influence is often to not communicate problems to adults. This reinforces the isolation of the victim.
Maybe because it's possible on competing smartphones?

I was curious about the new features in IPhone OS 3 and decided to take a look at the list. Copy and paste? MMS? Voice memos? Search? You've got to be kidding me. The competition has had that stuff for ages.

If Apple couldn't deliver that stuff on day one that's fine, but it should have been released in an update shortly afterward. It's absurd that 2 years later people are still waiting for basic functionality that's been available elsewhere the whole time.

Don't get me wrong. Although I choose not to use the iPhone, I still like it. Despite the fact that it does some very basic things badly or not at all, it does have some neat features and has driven the competition to work a little harder. The iPhone made mobile app stores commonplace. The 'find my phone' and 'remote wipe' features are very cool and I haven't seen those on another phone. I'm looking forward to how the competition responds.

What does bother me, though, is all the Apple apologists coming out of the woodwork to brush all of their faults under the rug. Apple does some good things and some not so good things. In my opinion, a lot of the features in this update are things that people should not still be waiting for. I also think we don't need to be in the habit of excusing the lack of background applications. We're so fond of innovation, yet this missing features prevents the kind of innovation happening on other platforms.
My first job was an internship with someone I met during my short stay at college. I didn't know him very well at all, but we happened to talk a little bit and after I told him I wanted to get into the computer industry he let me know they had an internship available.
We've had an awful lot of problems getting biodomes to work here on Earth. I'd want them to be pretty much perfected before we try them on Mars.
The Twitpocalypse is Near: Will Your Twitter Client Survive?
Your point is clear and practical, but a thought just occurred to me:

Imagine if you had to jailbreak your Windows machine to use applications that Microsoft hadn't approved...
I'm not pg or even pg passing as a commoner, but I read 4 to 6 science fiction books per month, 1 or 2 technical books more if I'm starting a new gig, usually not cover to cover, and 0 to 1 general interest science book. Thank whomever for the general humanities requirement in college. I can converse with a little knowledge about Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton.
Guitar, electric and acoustic. I'm very much out of practice these days - my two year old son is the priority. He already has musical taste - he comes over and mutes my strings whenever I play!

I love playing some of those old Celtic tunes I grew up listening to in Cape Breton, meant for violin but nice on guitar as well.
5 Milestones to Reach Before Raising Venture Capital
Violin, saxophone, learning the bass. Mostly jazzy style, but all-around.
The risk of war with China is not that great. China can't afford to lose their exports to the US, and the US can't afford to see what would happen if China flooded the market with their massive reserve of US dollars.
The banks are not aware of the underlying organizations. Even if they were, they probably would not care. They only see the lawyer in the suit at the loan office signing paperwork on behalf of XYZ, LLC.
I'm actually interested in this answer as well. I know of a company using a proprietary db and now that their growth has literally exploded, they're stuck with it.
Make sure to also click on the link "7 Ways I Almost Killed FreshBooks"
This is from a year ago and the startups... I'm not too impressed. Blog backup company, social networks...
StumbleUpon’s Su.pr URL Shortening Service Is Now In Private Beta (250 Invites)
Couldn't this article have just as easily been written about the G-1, or certain models of Blackberry?

Android is not a large enough market for anyone to target exclusively. The Blackberry has inconsistent hardware capabilities, which fragments the large market it has.

The advantages that each of those platforms has just don't matter in achieving the kind of success that Apple has had with the iPhone platform in the way that the author describes.
Shouldn't that read, "A Nunified?"
Apple has a monopoly on branding expertise

Could you explain this?
Google's method of scanning books without flattening them:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227026.000-google-se...
Acoustic guitar - mostly folk and alternative rock. And typically it's just for myself or my family. :)
Thank you all for the very insightful feedback thus far. We are taking all accounts very seriously. Expect to see some of the changes you may have suggested in the future of Skinnyboard.
Why don't you change this to ask everyone? That would be more interesting.
Why should we teach people how to expend effort to overcome problems they shouldn't be confronted with in the first place? If somebody assaults you, you should press charges.
My son could have been the subject of the article. In 4th grade, he was constantly harassed by a single bully on the bus and in class. Unsurprisingly, all the cliches held: the bully had been in fights with most of the boys on the bus; the school was completely unresponsive to requests for intervention; and the parents of the bully didn't care.

For the first time, I forced my son into an activity - martial arts. After a few months, it gave my son the confidence to stand his ground against his tormentor and fight back. Again, unsurprisingly, my son served his first, and the bully his fifth, suspension for violating the "zero tolerance" for throwing fists in school. It was a great life lesson about fairness. He has not had a problem since.

Most kids, esp boys, will be bullied at some time, but I shuddered at the thought of my son being the constant target every year.
What's the value in teaching children how to respond physically to low-grade physical violence?

Like the modern "zero-tolerance" bullshit, you have equated the physical nature of the violence to a level that just isn't warranted in most cases.

Children use violence more readily than adults because they haven't yet learned more sophisticated methods of intimidation and bullying. Of course you wouldn't confront a co-worker, but you'd ostracise them, spread rumours or make sure the boss knows they fucked up that last project.

The act of responding to the threat directly and in kind teaches the victim several qualities that serve them later in life, namely confidence and the ability to act while afraid to assert themselves. People get bullied all the damn time, if for no other reason than they simply don't confront the bully.

It's not valuable in adult life.

I would suggest that it is. There will come a time where your child will be bullied, physically or not, and you will not be around or able to help them. Their ability to believe in their own self-worth and the notion that regardless of the challenges in front of them; whether they are afraid or whether the outcome is certain to cause them pain; they will not subject themselves to being unfairly treated by their peers. They are who they define themselves to be; as important and valuable than any other person.

While I don't believe that physical violence is necessary to learn this, instilling the "fight back" notion into a child is. From my non-scientific observance, parents that are unwilling to let their child fight are usually the same ones that consistently duck from facing challenges head on. There is something to be said for being afraid and acting anyway that many people just fail to grasp.

To think of the number of teens and adults with all sorts of confidence issues, from depression to addiction to being unable to operate without the approval of others - even if it is against their self interest! I can't help but wonder how many of them have never been taught to respect themselves first.
> What's the value in teaching children how to respond physically to low-grade physical violence? It's not valuable in adult life.

It's very valuable in playground life, though. The value is that they prevent future low-grade violence by engaging in a bit of low-grade violence themselves.

> I want my kids handling problems smart, and "fighting back" and standing up to bullies on their own terms is playing to lose.

Nonsense. It works really well, in my experience. The playground is not like an office, so your extrapolation to adult behaviour doesn't apply. Teenagers are nearly adult physically, but still unformed mentally and ethically/morally.

> Fuck that shit. If my son tells me he's quitting band because he's getting pushed around over it, I am going fucking ballistic.

How's that going to help him? If he knows that you'll react that way, he likely won't even tell you, and the bullying will continue, in secret.

Here's what I'm going to tell my daughter:

1) No one has the right to attack you. If you are attacked, and you can fight back, do it! If the odds are not in your favour, try to flee to a safe area / allies. Don't worry about suspension / expulsion, etc. I will back you up.

Try to keep the violence proportional, unless it's a do or die situation. I.e. shoving vs. shoving, punching vs. punching, don't use improvised weapons unless they do. OTOH err on the side of survival.

2) If anyone ever threatens serious violence, like rape or death threats, tell me. These are not joking matters. It doesn't mean we'll go ape-shit and over-react, but we need to know it's happening in order to figure out whether it's a real threat.

3) If you're being bullied electronically, then tell us, but never ever react to the bully. Don't feed the troll. If the person can't actually reach out and physically hurt you, don't give them anything to work with.

If you teach your kids to never respond to violence with violence, you're setting them up to be bullied, which will affect them throughout their lives. Authority figures can't always (and often won't) save you. Sometimes you need to fight first and ask questions later.
StackOverflow DevDays: Five New Cities
I'm pretty sure they encrypt the entire flash with a random key that is stored in the first page. When remote wipe request comes in you just need to nuke the key to destroy data, which is a lot faster than actually overwriting 32Gb of flash.

iTunes backups are not encrypted by default because you have a key management issue. The primary purpose of the backup is so that you can restore it to a different device after your main device is lost or broken. Since devices where backup is taken and restored are different you can not use built-in key to encrypt the data. There are only two options where to store the key - with the backup itself (which is entirely useless) or with the user. Which is exactly what iTunes does - it allows the user to specify a password that is used to generate the key.
All you need to do is watch my parents use the internet (Google search and adsense laden sites) to realize that a HUGE portion of Google's revenue is based on tricking non-geeky folks into clicking on things that they didn't know were ads. While the right-hand ads are somewhat clear, the top ads (nearly white, right near the #1 result) are NOT and novice users when routinely click on that ad when asked to click on the first result.

Adsense advertisers are constantly rewarded for walking the fine line between blending in and just outright tricking their users.

While maybe this isn't outright EVIL, it certainly is disingenuous.
You're making the same observation the article is. Parents are by necessity separated from their parents for 8 hours a day. Ergo, it falls upon the school administration to decisively handle this problem, to an extent that is just now beginning to be recognized by academia, medicine, and school boards.
Agreed, though losing two would also be crushing. This article makes it sound like the security exploit and data loss was closely related to his suicide, but I suspect it really boils down to the loss of his mother and sister. People who lose loved ones to suicide are many times more likely to commit suicide themselves.

Reading a bit of his blog, it also seems apparent that his father is an alcoholic and drug addict. His ego was almost certainly a defense mechanism, and that kind of thing can be brittle.

I'm confident LXLabs was still doing fine...this wasn't going to ruin the business. It's certainly not good for business to have a major security exploit, but he had plenty of customers (according to the article, something like an order of magnitude more than we currently have and we're supporting a couple of salaries), and was the sole developer. Weathering the loss of a few customers for a few months while the storm blows over wouldn't have been too difficult. People forget about security problems eventually. Obviously, security issues never made Bill Gates lose any sleep, or the man would simply never sleep.
Stored Procedures are EVIL
This an old article but the guy seems to have a point.
> What's the value in teaching children how to respond physically to low-grade physical violence? It's not valuable in adult life. Corner a coworker at your office, shove them, stick a finger too close to their face while raising your voice: you're fired. Is your boss dumb enough to let it go, or worse, participate? Guess what: when employees sue, you lose, no matter what.

Remember, we're talking about a response to aggression. In an office, no one is likely to be shoving you in the first place. If someone is, then you are certainly justified in responding physically if you cannot remove yourself from the situation.

You've seen the internet video where an office-worker rages out, hurting others, and everyone just stands around because they've been conditioned to never use violence? They finally react far too late.
The issue here is that the average person doesn't see the iPhone as a computer. That's why Apple is able to screw its users over like this and not catch any flak for it.
Fiasco? You think App Store is not a success but a fiasco?
Proportional violence is a great way to get your kids in the same kind of trouble a bully is bound to get into. It also perpetuates the problem for kids who unavoidably cannot respond in kind to these situations, so that's an outcome I'm happy with.

I'm happy your kids can handle themselves in a physical confrontation. My son's big for his age, and my daughter has really taken to her martial arts classes, so I have high hopes for them too. But if I found out that my kids were responding to low-grade violence by engaging in it themselves, they'd get punished.
Two. My first, and my second. After that, I had a good enough network that I ended up with a personal introduction or referral. Networking really is everything in business. :)
It's not. It's just an interesting article.

I'm a little concerned though. I don't want this semi-hallowed place to turn into Reddit or Digg!
I play keyboards, guitar and just started learning the drums. Plus I'm typing this from my studio full of equipment. Synths, samplers, drum machines etc, mostly used for house and breaks tracks.

Also played the trombone in school until I was kicked out for improvising all the time.
Honestly? Bully. But not often.
Just a fyi, I've considered this program in past. They offer a MCS degree, not MS in CS. Hence, you cannot pursue a PhD after this MCS from UIUC. Not sure if you plan to do a PhD but just thought I should share this with you.
You still can't get it in Israel.

You can import an unlocked device from France or something, but you'll have no visual voicemail, no 3G (EDGE/GPS works with Orange/Partner with some tweaking).

The Maps app doesn't have any info beyond the general border outline. You can get street names and all that from maps.google.com/ but that works awful in Mobile Safari.
Hi Denis, are you at WWDC? It would be quite rad if someone were to start prodding the apple folks in sessions with regards to this. Inquiring minds want to know!
I've never met the tenderfoot who has the attitude the article is based on. Its quite the opposite, I guess its the tenderfoots using oracle and postgres and the old dinosaurs using mysql ( or mSQL ). Silly me. I thought the kids like the mysql and no triggers, procedures etc.

--

This is in total conflict with the attitude of today's wet-behind-the-ears tenderfoot greenhorn who seems to think:

Use stored procedures and triggers at every possible opportunity simply because you can.
Because the police aren't everywhere and we don't want them to be and there are situations in which it would be valuable to have the confidence to physically defend yourself.
Breadth-First Development
I experienced a strong case of PTSD...

Sounds like this guy was full out abusing you rather than just "bullying" you? I got occasionally pushed around in school and dished it out myself, but it was hardly bad enough to cause shell shock and extreme psychological trauma years later.
Also, would love to know why you're pretty sure.
Joel Spolsky: A Visit to Microsoft and Google