skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Father of a 3.5 year old brought up using tons of "targeted talking" here: our son has a vocabulary and logical comprehension skills that are significantly beyond his peer group. As a result I'd noticed in the past that he prefers engaging with other adults in conversation over kids his age.

Yesterday was his first PTA meeting and the feedback from his teacher seemed to confirm it too. She narrated an incident when the class was being told about rocket firecracker that light Indian skies during the Diwali festival and our son was explaining to her why a rocket goes up ("it burns gunpowder"), or why it stops after a while ("the gunpowder runs out") and then why it falls back to earth ("gravity"). The rest of his class was more fascinated with the talk about firecrackers.

Her nuanced point was that our son tends to get ahead of ideas and actions by engaging in a to-and-fro conversation about the logic/explanation behind them, thus at times preventing him from enjoying or taking in the idea or action itself or talking with other kids his age.

One of her suggestions was to "explain less" and let our son figure out things on his own (easier said than done, because he's extremely inquisitive and persistent).

The larger point I'm trying to make is that high vocabulary can also act as a barrier in kids engaging with others their age. The article also hints at it, in a manner:

> Newell is proud that her daughter can spell her first and last names, recite her address and phone number, recognize and spell colors, and count to 200. She’s also frustrated that more of Alona’s peers can’t do the same.
The Guide to Making A Video To Demo Your Product
Meteor version locking is in core now (as of 0.6.0), and the rest of Meteorite (fetching packages from Atmosphere) will be folded into core as part of 1.0 :)
:( I'm an engineer and wasn't accepted. I probably didn't fit the heuristic of "top school" and "under 25".
To write an OS you need to generate native executable for the hardware that you are running on. The mainstream implementations of C# require CIL + CLR. i.e. you need a virtual machine + libraries and framework. Not exactly "bare metal" environment.

But C# is more advanced language than C, so that might be beneficial in some areas. As a minimum you would need a C# to native compiler and facilities to include assembly language code in some low level areas.

To get a better idea of what it takes to implement an OS, take a look at the Linux kernel source code. Or if that is too daunting, you could look at Minix 3 sources.
I don't know if it really qualifies as a nitpick to directly contradict the article's title.
Thanks for posting this. Great overview of what to look forward to. As someone writing an app in production based on 0.6.5, should I plan on any big "rewrites" as the framework approaches 1.0? A better question might be, what will be backwards compatible and what will I have to scrap? It sounds like packages are the one area I should be the most careful with...
Which "social benefits" are you talking about? The ability to go home and visit my family? The ability to return to my place of birth to live and work should I so desire? The net cost to the rest of the country for these things is zero. Nil. Nada. But, somehow, these are now "social benefits" that must be supported by a tithe and not, you know, human rights?

Why does the US effectively charge a membership fee for the kinds of basic privileges every other country simply offers for free? As I said in my original post, it's unbelievably arrogant.
Scanning to apply a filter (Machine-taught, or user-defined) definitely does.
Then the Congress would make another law to fix it with more regulations. And another one to fix that one with even more regulations. That's how the system works. If you don't like it, elect different people to Congress.
> When you say it's not "a serious security mechanism", it sounds as if that's defined in some absolute terms.

You have to understand that the practice of cryptography has always had a military basis; the commercial/private use is ancillary.

So, what's "a serious security mechanism?" Presume you're a military commander during active war, whose battle plans are intercepted by an opposing nation. What is the likelihood, given the opposing nation believes your plan will lead to their complete destruction, that they'll be able to break the security in time to execute a counter-operation? A serious security mechanism is anything that reduces that likelihood.
All the more reason to just clone it and try it out ;-) It's pretty awesome, actually. Clone it then just npm install -g bower && (make sure bowser is in your path) && npm install && npm start
Being a smoker is not a disease, AFAIK. But again, HIPAA Title I as far as I know provides for uninterrupted coverage regardless of health conditions, doesn't it?
When you say that some of the best hacker and hustlers that you know come from unimpressive backgrounds, does "some" mean "most" or "a few" or "hardly any"?
I was at the Boston summit in 2010 (for the snowy hackfest mainly) and distinctly remember some unpleasant and very public back and forth between (I believe) Jon William McCann and a Canonical employee who was trying to troll shell and was rightfully called out for their foolishness. I got a _distinct_ feeling of us vs them, but that was in 2010.
There's a difference: filtering spam and prioritizing mail is something that's done for the benefit of the user. However, scanning e-mails to maximize ad revenue (they can charge the advertisers more for "relevant" ads) is Google using the contents of your e-mail for their own benefit.
We do not. Are there answers to the questions I presented?
You can't observe any exact thing and say "Right there! This person is exactly 49 intelliunits smart". IQ tests may give you an idea of one point of view of a measurement of intelligent is, but it is certainly not concrete like 12 inches is. Not concrete like we know 2 hydrogens & one oxygen is water. I think our obsession that everything must be measurable & categorized fails when it comes to the human mind. We are more than the sum of our measurable parts... for now. You can look at a car engine specification and know exactly the maximum speed given optimum conditions and assuming no mechanical failures. There's no such measurement for the human brain. You cannot know what my top performance is. At the absolute best, you can have a ball-park guess. You could end up being right or being way off.
Self-Publishing vs. Working with a Traditional Publisher
This game resembles 'Runic Rumble',[1] which uses the same concept but requires the user to draw different shapes rather than connect elements in a fixed shape.

The first thing I did after seeing this thread and looking at the repository was to download the game from the iOS App Store (using an iPhone 5). I would have paid $1 to $4 for the app at that point in time.

I 'mastered' the levels up to but not including 'Belgarath the Bold' in the space of about 30-40 minutes, and seem to have unlocked all the spells except for superman, hot dog and teddy bear. That was entertaining - and repetitive. Challenges remain ahead of me in the form of Belgarath and Fionnghal, but unless some exciting new aspect to the gameplay emerges during those challenges, I don't think I would pay for an extension to the single player game. If I'd watched someone else play the game instead of playing it myself, I don't think I would now spend the $1 to $4 I would have otherwise been willing to spend.

My disinterest in paying for an extension to the single player game means I don't have any reason to consider paying for unlockable wizards, custom spells, or forums and betas.

OK - I wrote the above before trying the multiplayer game. Having now tried the multiplayer game, I found that to be much more fun, and much less predictable. Would I consider paying something now? Maybe. I'd be willing to consider one or two small in-app purchases that add to the gameplay in some non-trivial way without unbalancing the game between those who've purchased and those who haven't. I don't think I'd ever have any interest in forums and betas.

The main gripe I have with the game is not something you can easily solve: my finger gets sore after lots of frantic swiping on the glass. (It was even worse with Runic Rumble.)

Good luck!

[1]: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/runic-rumble/id581952563

Edit: Just discovered 'superman'. Hilarious!
There's some aphorism about "assholes" and children which my brain thinks fits here but that same brain won't recall what it is.

Anyhow, my initial thought was, perhaps not an asshole but a child? I could see a child playing with the phone and wiping it in quite short time. But other commenters pointed out it's not the default and there's cloud back-up it doesn't seem a major problem.
No. They want to have control, and they think they are large enough to get away with it.

They're probably right.
C# generates native code just like many other languages. In fact with a few minor tweaks MS has written an OS in C# called Singularity.
There is a better competitor - real money. The fluctuations in Bitcoin are way too risky for any serious investment (between $120 and $150 in just a month? No thanks!)
I really want Mir to die. Unless I'm misunderstanding the situation Wayland vs. Mir is going to be a massive headache for linux, and afaict Mir exists for no technical reason; it exists because Canonical don't want to play in anyone else's sandpit.
The functionality was really already there.

While I think this is mostly true (Nokia fans love to point out that every possible smartphone feature appeared on at least one Nokia product which may have shipped in the 1800s), there is one way in which this simply is not true, and it's a way which really did change everything.

The browser.

The difference in 2007 between browsing on the iPhone and browsing on any other phone was kind of like, well, comparing desktop Safari in 2007 to trying to browse in 2007 with Netscape 4. Maybe not quite that good. Phones often had only one font available to them, had very limited CSS support, often had no Javascript support. Windows Phone and the Nokia Communicator were the best of what had been out before then, and to say "they were for nerds" is an understatement. Only nerds would tolerate them.

Look at articles after the iPhone's introduction about data usage -- it absolutely skyrocketed, and it was all being driven by the browser. For the first time people actually had a real web browser in their pocket, and it really did make all the difference.

It wasn't just a phone by any stretch -- what made it disruptive was that browser in combination with the touch UI (by far the best way to use a browser on a pocket-sized screen). Revolutionary, or evolutionary? You can make a case either way, but the iPhone didn't upend the smartphone market just because it was pretty and had great advertisements.
No, but Rust is a contender.
Not really. There's an upper limit to the survival value of intelligence. Not to oversimplify, but that limit is reached when the person says, "What? I should add to the world's problems by having children?"

In all seriousness, the fact that the average I.Q. is located where it is, tells us that's the outcome natural selection blindly chose. And natural selection is always right.
Yes, it's already been done.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)
Oops!

http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Perspecti...
Meh, sorry, guy very likely had crazy hops before the training regimen, don't discount genetics.

If you lack natural coordination and explosiveness, at 5'5" you'll never dunk a basketball no matter how hard you train.

However, you may have the ability to code explosively in the same way that one is able to shake another out of their shoes with a crossover dribble; that, or train your mind to do so. The former will arguably be the superior "player" as they likely started coding at age 8, drawn to it without knowing why, and the latter likely came late to the game (case here).
> - The stability and security of the various online exchanges

The exchanges are not "part of" Bitcoin. Shitty exchanges will go out of business, good exchanges will survive.

The only thing that can interrupt that is government regulation. For example, the best US exchange that I know of, CampBX, doesn't have much competition, because nobody wants to spend millions of dollars to get money transmitter licenses in all 50 states.

Government regulation could also simply make bitcoin exchanges illegal.

So if you replace this point with "government regulation," I would agree.

Of course, not all governments will outlaw Bitcoin. Those that don't will have a potential economic advantage. This creates a game theoretical situation where it's in every country's interest to just allow it. (Of course, governments do not act in self-interested ways.) Regardless, it would be hard to outlaw bitcoin everywhere.

> - The relative difficulty of converting BC to/from cash

Coinbase.com is really good for converting money in your bank account to bitcoin and vice versa. That model is sufficient, in my mind.

Credit and debit cards are a good analogy for "using bitcoin for everyday transactions." Nobody has complained that you can't convert cash into money on your debit or credit card.
To clarify, part of what makes this possible is that they extended C# with some attributes to specify that regions of code should run in a sort of high-integrity mode, where they can't be suspended for GC, etc. This allows them to do things like handle interrupts safely from C#. They call it 'Constrained Execution Regions'.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228973.aspx
Human personality contains any number of traits that can be measured. To pretend that pyschometrics does not exist is the equivalent of refusing to look through Galileo's telescope.
Scientists discover 'black holes' in Earth's oceans
Slate running an article on the heritability of intelligence is just about as unbiased as a pamphlet on economics put out by Bolsheviks.
> We do have concrete ways to measure intelligence, and have had them for over a hundred years.

Concrete, yes. Accurate, absolutely not. Any number of people have exploited the systematic errors in I.Q. testing for purely racist and political objectives.

> The literature on this subject is quite extensive.

Indeed it is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man
also bing translator for windows phone and PC: http://www.bing.com/translator/phone/
Do you want to offer some reasoning for your enlightening statement?
One is to provide a feature for the end user's benefit. The other is taking the user's private communication and using it to make money for Google.

If this business model is allowed, imagine all the other kinds of profile that communications providers would be able to sell about you based on the contents of your email.
That is incorrect. A person is not eligible to sponsor a parent until they're 18 (or 21?). So while a mother running over the border to have a child does benefit from better medical care (most likely), the child's citizenship doesn't help her for a long time, if ever. (The child would need to meet all the sponsorship requirements for parents, which aren't trivial.)

At best, this helps the child's future opportunities, which may help the family. It in no way gives the parents a pass. A cursory review of sponsorship laws would reveal this. Yet for some reason, people parrot this silly saying as if it was somehow true.
This is just wrong. The analysis he links to on the profitability of mining is based on litecoin, he claims it's the same, but it's simply not.

Quick calculations on bare avalon chips with a 100k investment gives a current ROI of 4 days, this does not account for risk, does not account for setting up the chips, etc etc etc. However, it is indicative of the idea that the pursuit would be "unprofitable" is pretty insane.

The 90+ bitcoin mining accounts giving you the ability to game the system is even worse, it's like he doesn't have the faintest idea of how bitcoin mining even works. I should go hook up 1000 fake SETI@home accounts and reap the massive kudos for my epic performance this will surely provoke. What the hell?

In 3, he goes back to cheerlead for litecoin, even though in 1 he proved the mining of litecoin wasn't even profitable. Simultaneously acknowledging that any state attempts to ban bitcoin in a given jurisdiction won't actually be effective at any rate.

And 4 basically says "Because I'm a keynesian". Well, that's nice, go buy freicoins or some other cryptocurrency that supports your pet economic theory, there are likely dozens by now. Nobody else wants to be forced onto an inflationary store of value and will not accept your McBucks? You don't say, maybe there's something to be learned from that.
The Lisp machine operating system was written in Lisp. In fact, it was Lisp all the way down to the microcode, or at least, it would present the microcode in Emacs as if it were Lisp, and you could modify it there. The Lisp machine OS was similar to other OSes of the age, more capable in many ways.

A modern OS is a huge amount of work. It's so vast, your choice of language isn't going to make or break you. Moving a mountain with a tablespoon should proceed three times faster than with a teaspoon. You're still looking at an eternity if you're the only guy.

For this reason, your best bet is to narrow in. Decide what it is you want to write an OS for. Do you want to explore novel user experiences? C# is probably fine for that. You don't need to write the whole OS there, just the "shell" and the window manager. You can do that now, and not spend any time dealing with drivers. Do you want to experiment with microkernel or exokernel architecture? You'll be breaking new ground. Is C# OK for that? What you're really asking is, what are the limitations of C# that you'll run into? The GC pause is one, another is dealing with raw bytes and making it perform. If make the CLR self-hosting, you're going to find performance problems like crazy. If you make fixing that your mission, you could be a hero like the PyPy guys, and everything gets better, or you might just be throwing away a lot of work.

I happen to think a lot of interesting problems would benefit from a high-level approach. Security is a declarative process. You want to say what you want secured and not how. Only one system I know of has ever used Prolog for this (MeeGo, IIRC?) but it was probably a perfect fit. There are lots of opportunities for this kind of thing in OSes and they're never really exploited. If your whole kernel is C and you want to add a declarative security module, well, you'll be writing C. You can surely accomplish the same tasks in C as C#, but if it's a pain in the ass you'll either wind up with a weaker or more limited version in C, or you'll spend more time writing and polishing it. But the world is ripe for a few people to take the unpopular tradeoff and see how well it works out, rather than taking their predecessor's word for it.

To sum up, they're not suitable for the whole job from start to finish. However, if you tried it, you'd make some interesting stuff, and learn a lot, maybe even make things better for other people. Take a crack at it. Worst thing that could happen is you fail. :)
Jeet 3 Framework - revolutionizing the grid system with a light footprint
Ask HN: Best way to Financially Plan as a Self Employed Contractor
I have been working in startups for a while and I feel like I have learned so much since I started in technology, but in all the time I have served at startups, I have yet to save up a runway or secure a safety net.

After leaving my last startup, I secured a great consulting contract that should offer plenty of cash on hand, and honestly my cash position is better than it's been in 6 years, so, right now so I am sure I made the right choice.

I am trying to save as much money as possible to build up a runway for my next venture. I'd like to save 9 months worth of expenses or about $60k+.

What are the best tactics and strategies that other Self Employed Software Contractors use to save cash, especially on their taxes?

Some friends have advised setting up a company, and in the past I knew someone who set up an S or C corp and paid a wage, while the remaining profit was sent out as a dividend. But what do others do?

I know a 3rd option would be to use what ever funds I earn and try to leverage that, so if you have any ideas there that might be an interesting option as well.

Right now on prosper.com i'm able to get a 15% average return, and in the stock market I have been doing 20% year over year in my IRA, but these are not good tools to get ready for starting a company.

One option I have thought about would be to 'start' the company now, and then push all of the cash into it, and then later just work on what ever project that company would later produce.

Thoughts?
Butterfly Labs Bitcoin Miner on Ubuntu 12.04 with cgminer
It's highly relevant. If we say Google can scan your email just to support an arbitrary business model, how can we make an argument that the NSA should be prevented from doing it in the name of national security.

It isn't a good thing for Google to try to make loss of privacy seem like business as usual.
Grit Trumps Talent
Ask HN: Did your YC (or other incubator) startup fail? What are you doing now?
What year did it fail, how long after the program did things end and what are you doing these days?
I see fonts for web browsing in linux are still horrible.
On the other hand: from $0 to $140 in 2 years? Oh god yes!
I must admit though, these criticisms are billions of times more valid than the ones in the article. Though you do a good job responding to them.
> How did the researchers determine causation? What if there is simply a gene for strong language which is responsible both for the parents' financial success and the child's academic success, and the extra words were simply a by product?

Yes, it might well be the classic confusion of cause and effect, but your argument will have no effect on the OP, who is a psychologist.

For reasons that may or may not be obvious, as part of their training, psychologists are made blind to the possibility that they might confuse cause and effect.
I would be more concerned about CC agencies selling the data. I'd rather have the data public than only available to large corporations.
Those difficulties aren't Bitcoin's problems. Those are political problems that we have to confront or circumvent.

Bitcoin has just a few tasks and it does them very well so far.
That's probably why they call it a "pre-existing condition", not a disease.
My hunch is that there's no law that makes such a distinction.