skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: why are we fighting our kids' "screen time"
We hear from the media, schools, and parents that we should limit our kids' "screen time."

I know that while building a rapidly growing business at Aha.io I want more "screen time" not less.

Are we fighting the wrong battle with our kids? It's clear that they are going to be dealing with more "screens" and data going forward anyway.
There's an old saying that actions speak louder than words; I've come to believe it's phrased too weakly. Especially when it comes to determining what a person believes, words verge on useless. It's easy to assert that you believe procrastination is bad, but if your actions don't show any change, I don't consider that as you really believing it.

I do not believe that repeated assertions are a bad thing. A huge amount of self-discipline amounts to just this sort of hack, where your forebrain tries to figure out a way to basically trick the hindbrain into doing what you want. I also think that in order to optimally use these techniques, its important to understand what you're doing, and to clearly see and understand the discrepancy between actions and words. So I do not intend pointing out the mismatch between words an actions as a criticism, but as an observation.
It would be great to see a few of these services take the Netflix model and cut out the record labels.
NodeBB, Using Node.js to Become the Discussion Platform of the Future
The path of the Padawan: Getting started with Ruby/RoR
Does it come with a baby to experiment on?
AWS does not get rid of the need for a sysadmin; just the need for someone who can physically access the box.

An EC2 instance still requires someone to set it up, install packages, button up security issues, deploy configurations & applications, etc.
Why is Microsoft scared of Chromebooks?
> He was actually a terrorist leader - his group killed thousands of innocents in bombings and other attacks.

Mandela was extremely conflicted by the ANC's (and, more specifically, MK's) use of violence against the apartheid government. He saw it as a regrettable tool to be used to achieve better ends. It's clear from his later writings (his Time essay about Gandhi, for example) that he, at least, regretted needing to take these actions.

You're also going to need to present citations for "thousands of innocents". While it is true that civilians were killed in MK bombings, "thousands" is a gross exaggeration. It's also interesting to compare these actions to those being taken on the other side, with the program run under Basson as a very good example. The TRC findings make it clear that both sides were involved in some really unpleasant and unacceptable activities, and Mandela did indeed know about many of MK's uglier secrets, but to cast him as a terrorist only interested in killing civilians is unfair and historically inaccurate.

On the other hand, I suspect you're just a troll, so I'm not going to convince you with evidence.
That could actually be low. This paper estimates 90,000-380,000 deaths/year in the US from combustion, with 23,000-98,000 attributed to power plants (coal):

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/study-air-pollution-cause...

PDF paper: http://lae.mit.edu/wordpress2/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/US-...

(Agreeing, needless to say)
I suppose what has happened to my HN account (artificially high latency, aka "slowbanning", and personal penalties in comment placement, aka "rankbanning") proves this. If you actually challenge VC-istan (as opposed to Graham-esque incremental improvements) on its moral fundamentals, you've gone too far.

Are you sure it's not just your presentation that does that?

Also keep in mind that morality of systems is complex. Just because bad outcomes can be traced back to $FOO, does not mean that not-$FOO would result in less bad outcomes and so does not mean that $FOO is wrong or immoral.

Some VC-istan companies having asshole managers who react poorly to conceited employees, does not necessarily mean that all of VC-istan shares bad management philosophies. It doesn't even mean that that one company has bad management policies, it could be that anything else (or anything else they've tried) results in more asshole managers or other worse problems.

The problem isn't really that people individually dislike creativity. It's that social groups become increasingly anti-intellectual and focused on self-preservation (which requires excluding the "different") as they get bigger.

How can a group best maximize the well-being of its members?

Suppose interesting new ideas from a group member are nomally distributed, with a mean that varies by the member's skill/intelligence (approximated by status), a standard deviation that varies by the member's creativity, and are adopted by other group members based on some combination of status and approximate value.

Whether you personally get better ideas (and can help the group more) by rolling the dice yourself vs collecting the best ideas from others (and vs spending your time implementing ideas from a single cheap/fast source), depends on how many others there are and how relatively skilled/intelligent you are. As the number of creative people increases, the value of your being creative decreases. As the group size increases, the percentage of the group that needs to be creative decreases (the absolute number of creative members should still increase).

Mistrusting new ideas is not necessarily anti-intellectual. Mistrusting complex ideas because they're complex would be anti-intellectual. Wanting to see a larger sample size so you have a better approximation of someone's cool new idea isn't.
Twitter to be available on mobile phones without Internet
Great article! One question - The math doesn't work, does it?

A 1.2% conversion ratio end-to-end for SaaS startups that don’t ask for a credit card in advance suggests that if we can get 1000 visitors, then we should expect 100 trial users, converting to 1 paid user. At least that’s the theory.

I follow that the 1.2% is from the total visitors. 10% * 15% * 80% = 1.2%. So they should have expected 12 paid users per 1000 visitors.

One question on the conclusion... Indeed Show HN seems to be a much better (more efficient) option for a good product. But how do you scale it? There are only so many communities you can find. Advertising can be much more easily scaled. If you want 100 more view, pays 100 more times the money. Or perhaps 50 times the money if you can get a volume discount.
We're a young start up trying to innovate in the financial business. We're trying to have investors accountable.

I'm sorry if it seems like spam - I just wanted to share the fruit of our labor at our start up this last year and a half.
It's not just about quality, the throughput also can vary. Doing something new every time, means you will most likely not do it as fast as a person already skilled in the same topic.
Maybe it was Santa Claus and he used Iceland because it reminds him of the Arctic. During this time of year, assuming it's Santa Claus should be the default assumption. Remember that He is "making a list" and "checking it twice". So assuming it's Santa Claus is the best bet.
That depends how you look at it. One important thing I and you gained from our education was the learned ability to apply ourselves to tasks set by another, that had little relevance to our lives and dreams, for abstract reward.

I use that skill every day - I am an employee, and I create what my employer tells me to, the benefit to me being a salary. If I disagree with my employer about the value of making that thing, I still do it. If I am bored by a project, I still do it. I am lucky that I generally enjoy and care about my work, but some days like everyone, I am working for this abstract, monthly reward.

Exams were like that - you liked some subjects, and read them willingly. Others, you never saw yourself using, but you worked at them to get grades, because grades bought you a salary.

You also probably learned to fear the future. I know I do. More than studying at French because I needed that grade, I studied at French because not getting that grade might mean not going to college, might mean not getting a middle class job. And then... what? I didn't know. I didn't know any non-middle class people.

It is very hard for me, maybe for you too, to imagine a world where life was not geared (8 hours a day) towards working for an abstract salary, paid in abstract money, that will become food, and rent on a small flat in digital bytes without ever becoming cash that you can hold (after all, the bank doesn't actually hold the amount of money it lends).

I hear about a man quitting a good job (one with lots of abstract reward), to spend a couple of years doing the things he wants (Concrete things. Travelling, creating according to his own will, actually seeing his family). I feel he is irresponsible, even though his savings mean his family will never go on foodstamps. I feel a pang of anger driven by... envy?

The left of philosophy (Marx -> Baudrillard) wrote about how we had fetishized symbols over real things. There is some truth in that, but seeing it has... value, only where it informs our actions. In Silicon Valley, young employees trade their 20s for money, one 12 hour day at a time. The reward is abstract, future, retirement, and always tomorrow. Where were they trained to do that?
GIT Conventions
Combining well known internet acronyms seem to pass the check:
lmaoroflty!
"2050 likely represents the peak of world energy demand"

I guess I'm a Sci-Fi dreamer about energy use. There are some REALLY cool things you can do if you have an infinite supply of free energy. Some of the cooler ones: Magnetic force fields with superconducting coil generators. If you had enough energy, you could create a magnetic force strong enough to stop bullets. Heck, with enough energy you could build magnetic tractor beams and capture passing meteors. (Remember, infinite and free energy). Railguns to launch us to space. Water desalination on a scale big enough to purify the world's water supply.
Your Start button used to be rectangular; now it's a circle. Big whoop

Between versions of windows there are fairly substantial changes in how the start menu is organized and how a user can customize it. I'm using Windows 7 and I'm still not sure how the items in the primary menu are selected to be there. It usually seems to have what I'm looking for so I don't worry too much. But it's not as usable as I remember from older versions of windows.

That said, I do think the article sells windows short unfairly. It's true that (pre Windows-8, anyway) key gui features of windows have remained consistent between versions. I haven't ranted about Windows in a long time (other Microsoft products, that's a different story).

Incidentally, I believe the particular feature you refer to, the start menu as a general principle, is one of the best design choices microsoft ever made. It's not the most efficient way to organize a UI, but a hierarchical system is a great way to design for incremental discovery.
The UI changes with each version of windows before 8 are small, but significant. Look at the taskbar for example. First came item-grouping in XP, then came the merging of the Quicklaunch and the Taskbar in Vista, then they dropped the text-labels in 7. Obviously that's all configurable, but those are all substantial changes in the way we interact with the taskbar.

And the user's perception of "windows" doesn't end with the OS. The drastic UI changes in MS Office with every version can't be discounted. There was the move from mdi to one-window-per-document (with utterly broken "close" functionality in Excel) then the buttons were replaced by the Ribbon and that crazy Office Button in 2007 merged the File menu and the Control Box. Then they backed off on that and now there's the weird full-screen File menu in 2012. And with every version they release a completely new suite of icons for each Office app, often with new colour-scheme... which kind of counters dropping text-labels off the taskbar in Windows 7.
Added in the homepage ;)
I share your skepticism of a "competent, intentional conspiracy", but I wonder if there might be an analogous, emergent phenomenon. I also find it plausible that this (hypothetical) emergent system has been opportunistically capitalised upon, despite not being intentionally created. Does that seem unlikely to you?
I'm adamantly against software patents, however, when it comes to chemistry patents, I know it's not a rubber stamp process. It can take a couple years to get a patent, and lots of patents are rejected. A lot of the process involves the examiner stripping out claims that are invalid (the parties seeking the patents generally want them to be broader than they really should be).
This is a well-known hoax: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/648998/is-c-a-waste-of-ti...

Personally, I still found it enjoyable to read. It raises some real problems with C++.
One way money becomes less valuable is because demand for goods and services increases. So there can be Bitcoin inflation without an increase in the BTC supply.
You wouldn't need synonyms if you record the intervals instead of the notes.
Seattle throws legal marijuana a one-year birthday bash
Until I read the reply below, I was thinking "I guess you could grow weed in your desk but it seems a little risky depending on where you work..."
Because decompiling is a lot easier when your "executable" is a high level language built on top of a well known and heavily targeted VM.
>> What do you do when the travel is over?

Find another job. There's no real shortage if you're in tech.

>> Where did all the money for your trip come from?

Money put aside in my previous few years of work.

>> Where are your savings?

In the bank, looking a little smaller than they were before my six months off.

>> Maybe these aren't important questions to the world traveler. Maybe experiencing the world is much more important than career and financial agility and job security. That's fine.

Pretty much, for me.

I like what I do, and I do it well, but I'm not really committed to any one employer, not in the long term, I'm committed to getting the most out of my life. For me that seems to mean hitting the road in a foreign country (or several) for a few weeks or months at a time every few years.

>> It's kind of like entrepreneurship. Everyone says it's a good idea. But when you get right down to it, most businesses are failures. Are you willing to take that risk on for the possibility of creative freedom?

I'm a freelancer/contractor at the moment rather than an entrepreneur, but the answer so far as I can tell is - why the hell not? You can always get a proper job afterwards if it doesn't work out.
The modern prison system in America is provably racist, devastating to black communities, and legal.
To expand on this... "So no native code is used." was probably somewhat misleading.

More specifically, no native code is explicitly used. IL may be compiled down to e.g. x86-64, but you won't have a C DLL being PInvoked from your C# (or other .NET language), nor a C++/CLI DLL compiled against x86-64 specifically.

Among other advantages, this usually implies:

- Less interop overhead (unmanaged <-> managed transitions are expensive)
- Easier dependency management (just include the assembly instead of assembly + native DLLs via installer or whatever)
- Portable (more likely to run on e.g. the Mono Runtime on a Linux box with an ARM processor without requiring a build specific to ARM and possibly to Linux)
Can you elaborate? Before we were hunter & gatherers, we were monkeys, before that there were dinosaurs, before that there were one-cell organisms.

If there were human civilizations a million years ago or before that, there would be significant evidence of cities, just as there is evidence of dinosaurs, no?
Will YC VC use these in the upcoming batch?
Who needs tilt control? WoW is just an example. Any game that has a complex control scheme and requires quick reactions is simply not suitable to mobile devices. I'm not sure you actually play any of the games I am talking about.
Some major annoyances (to me):

- allergy

- bugs

- evenings full of CO2 ---> fainting or dying
Asm.js powered physics in Construct 2
Nice file name. 'joke_19980216_01.txt'
Opus update 20131205: 1.1 Release
Behind London Tech Scene, a Government Push
Any time your password uses a pattern, it by definition has low entropy. I don't know of anyone that has calculated the entropy of code, but I'm guessing it's even lower than that of an English sentence (~1.1 bits per character is a common estimate) since the rules are more strict. If we estimate 1 bit per character (and honestly I think that might be high), then you'd need your password to have around 100 characters to be strong. I have a blog post where I try to explain entropy in easy to understand terms that might help understand this:

http://tgad.wordpress.com/2013/09/18/what-is-entropy/

But the main problem with your reasoning is the idea that passwords with large character pools are more secure (i.e. have more entropy). This is a common belief, but isn't necessarily true. If the characters in your passphrase are completely randomly selected from the pool, then yes, a passphrase of length n will have more entropy if the character pool is larger. But you aren't randomly selecting the characters, you're pulling them from a grammar which is a very small subset of all possible combinations. Therefore, the security of your password relies on the secrecy of the mechanism, which is not a good idea, since if your method becomes popular (and as they say, there's nothing new under the sun), then password crackers will just start generating passwords like yours.
Benefits of spaghetti code
Yes, the YCVC investments this batch are going to be on safes instead of notes.
> I had no idea this movement existed, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

I'm a South African. I am constantly disappointed by the amount of time and emotional energy some South Africans (and expats) put into historical revisionism and apartheid denial. There are many reasons for it, but it's worth reminding yourself that in 1992 more than 30% of South African voters voted to continue apartheid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_apartheid_referen...). History is ugly, recent history especially so.
Identifying Gender by Handwriting: You’re Probably Not as Good as You Think
There are better sources than that on precocity in young children. I'll have to find some references for you. (They may not be found in time for the edit window of this comment, so feel free to write me off-forum if you would like those.)

In general, early reading is less remarkable (in English) than people think it is, because with the right materials[1] English can be seen by a young learner as a rather consistent writing system that is not insuperably hard to decode.

That said, my four homeschooled children, the first two of whom are strongly bilingual in Chinese and English, having lived in Taiwan in early childhood, were early but not strikingly precocious readers, and all my children were learning a lot of other things besides reading in their early childhood, of which chess was perhaps more conspicuously precocious than reading. Earliness is less important than long-term solid development of skill, and it sounds like the parents of some of the HN participants here who have personally observed examples of very precocious reading were well aware of that.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Child-Read-Minutes-ebook/dp...

http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Read-Linguistic-Leonard-Bloomfiel...

http://eps.schoolspecialty.com/products/details.cfm?serieson...
Those aren't latency mitigation factors, but ok...

So, essentially, your argument is that control schemes should be dumbed down so that they play on mobile? Yeah, that will go over well.
Todoist
It proves nothing - Comic Sans is a hot-button, a singularity. If they had used Ariel instead of Courier, would Twitter have exploded? No? It had nothing to do with the effectiveness of the font, it was just a nerd thing.
As I would tell my father as we passed a pig farm, "yeah, but it's not the smell of my money."
It always funny when people include the Apache license like that, given that one of the two significant changes made between GPLv2 and GPLv3 was copying the apache license text into the GPL regarding patents. Sure, they did add a clause about patent agreement, but that is only relevant if you got patent agreements.

The second change from GPLv2 to GPLv3 is the DRM clause, or the "you can't use a technical method to bypass the legal requirements". Again, only really relevant if the company uses DRM, but would be willing to use GPLv2. That is a very short list.
The real reason is his business is probably plateauing and he didn't want to say that publicly. That would make much more economic sense as a reason to move off of AWS.
> 2) The process should take a lot of man hours.

The intellectual property laws generally reject this "sweat of the brow" doctrine.[1] The idea is, that someone should be able to get a patent for something that results from a flash of insight rather than years of expensive R&D.

I think rejection of this doctrine is a grave mistake as applied to patents. Essentially, it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of innovation in the 21st century. A new invention does not happen because someone has a clever idea one day while mulling over a problem during lunch. That may have been true in the early 20th century and earlier, but it's not true today. Today, invention is driven by research labs staffed by expensive PhDs using even more expensive capital equipment. The purpose of patents in the 21st century is to protect and be able to transact in the results of this capital-intensive R&D.

E.g. Adonit has a new iPad stylus that's 1.9 mm versus the 6 mm typical for iPad styluses (https://adonit.net/jot/script). The capacitive touch matrix on the iPad normally cannot pick up on such a narrow point, so they use some active sensing technology that relies on measuring the electronic field emitted by the capacitive matrix and feeding that back to special software over Bluetooth. For this they have a patent. This was not a flash of insight. This was the result of measuring EM field strength with expensive equipment, buying lots of iPads to test product variability, doing lots of experiments and iterating the design. The purpose of a patent here is to keep companies from free-riding on all that R&D, not to reward anyone for a flash of insight.

By rejecting sweat of the brow doctrine in the context of patents, patent law has become divorced from its underlying economic justification: the prevention of free-riding. The magnitude of the disincentive created by free-riding depends very much on the capital investment that went into the invention.

[1] Sweat of the brow doctrine is more typically used in the context of copyright, but is applicable to a degree for patents as well. The doctrine has opposite effects in the two contexts. In copyright, it has been used to reject copyright-ability for things like phone books that might take work to compile, but aren't "original works." However in patents, it has been used to justify granting patents for "inventions" that weren't a lot of work to invent.
Very cool, an inspiration. How long would you say it took you? (hours of work)

I ask as a young developer looking to gauge where he stands. Anyone have resources they could suggest for gauging fast/slow development for oneself?
Parts of this sound like Valve's crazy Potato Fools Day. http://valvearg.com/wiki/Valve_PotatoFoolsDay_ARG_Wiki?title... It involved slow-scan TV images encoded in sound files, and Mayan calendar decoding etc.
The difference between the two is that Gzip uses CRC32 while Deflate uses Adler32, which is slightly more performant. The problem, though, is that many browsers and servers (incorrectly) send or expect deflate without the headers, so "deflate" interoperability is a trainwreck.