skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It takes advantage of people who have little other choice, and often leaves them with little to show for having done so."

Not true at all. To get a top job in most professions you need a four year degree from a 40k-a-year school. If you want to be a designer who charges 30k per website, all you need is a portfolio proving you can deliver on your promises.

Doing three websites for free or cheap over a 40 year career hardly strikes me as exploitative. Especially since the winner of this contest is going to get tens of thousands of dollars worth of free publicity.
The way I see it, high school doesn't really teach content, it teaches learning, which we've been learning (cout << recursive_meta_joke) for about eight years now. The second thing that high school gives is a one-year introduction to the various careers that can be taken on.

For example, I notice one thing with many of the people I talk to, to this regard: high school is where the transition from "YEAH MAN, I'm going to be a pro athlete when I grow up dude" to "I thought physiology was pretty cool in bio class, so I'm going to go and do premed."

But of course, this doesn't work for a lot of people. It doesn't work with me, because I've personally already have found my passion (and it has been for three years.) It also didn't work for Richard Branson.

Everyone complains about high school. And there's definitely a lot of rote memorization. But for some people, they might not gain this important "oh, this is actually pretty cool" moment.
I'm currently a teenager. This is mostly false.

I was a teenager -- I dropped out of school, moved out of my parents home, and took a full time technology job at 16, and began working my way up. This meant that by the time my peers graduated from college, I had 6 years of experience under my belt.

I wasn't special, I was simply motivated. If my home and school life had been satisfactory, I probably would have been content to sit out my future high school and college years with very little responsibility, and I imagine this is the situation that most teenagers find themselves in.

High school works decently enough for the rest of the 95%.

95% of teenagers don't accept real responsibility and behave like capable adults because there is no external motivation or encouragement to do so.

Is this beneficial to their well-being?

Dropping out is not an option. You 100% will have a much harder time with acceptance with most colleges (and asian parents.)

That depends on what you would like to do with your life. Returning to college later in life is surprisingly easy.
When you follow the anti-spec argument to its logical conclusion, you wind up in the same place as the interior design industry, which creates State Boards of Certified Interior Designers and attempts to enact laws prohibiting (to paraphrase Radley Balko) the placement of a throw pillow without licensure.

It's all about restricting demand to improve the outcomes of industry insiders at the expense of industry outsiders.
But that's not the point. People with brains that are still developing are perfectly capable of functioning in 'adult' society. Many teenagers, and perhaps society as a whole, would benefit it we allowed those willing young people to make 'adult' contributions.
Nonsense. Private property already has all kinds of restrictions. Try this: First, buy prime commercial real estate in a bustling pedestrian downtown area. Second, make sure to leave it abandoned, ugly, in a state of general decay, and plastered with ads just to make sure you make a little money off it it. (Assume no property taxes.) Third, watch the city council ordinance you into fixing up the place or leaving it altogether (under threat of fines).

The whole point of community rules on private property is that an ugly or rundown property will drive down the value of the properties around it. The same happens with domain names. The reason we have startups with ridiculous names like Meebo, Loopt, Reddit and Xobni are because all the reasonable names are taken by squatters who just plaster the domain with ads and make a tidy profit while they wait for a sucker to hand them over thousands of dollars.

I agree that people legitimately doing business on the web shouldn't face a constant, ominous threat of seizure. At the same time though, the web could use some communal standards to make the community better for everyone.
Whatever happened to the idea of an 'apprenticeship'? Not all teenagers want to pursue 'traditional' studies and would be much better off learning a specific trade or craft that they are interested in.
An anti-spec person would say, "it's so true that you need books to be designed by professionals, so that they all the technique and language of graphic design to their fullest and match the content of the book perfectly, so as to sell as many copies as possible, that you should be prohibited from soliciting the services of designers who might not meet those standards, as evidenced by their willingness to accept substandard contractual terms".
WordPress Admin Password can be Reset by Anyone (Fix Provided)
Co-founder of http://ridewithgps.com - we're launching a huge redesign on Saturday, but have had a positive response to our features so far.
A fair coin is one on which p = 0.5.
A coin that has a 51% chance is clearly not a fair coin.
This isn't even what I was talking about, but is still equally easy to turn into a fair coin.

In this case, caller calls in the air after flipper hides the side that starts up. 0.5 * 0.51 + 0.5 * 0.49 = 0.5

For any other case, flip a coin twice. Assign one person HT and the other person TH, reflipping TT and HH. Since p * (1 - p) = (1 - p) * p, the dual flip is a fair flip.

Please don't mention the possibility of sleight of hand next.
If by "magic thinking", you mean "a basic understanding of concepts like angle of incidence/reflection", then sure, magic. Or basic science. Your choice.

No. Not choice. Evidence says you're wrong. Evidence trumps theory. Them's the rules of science.

Don't go by sketchy memory. Take one of each laptop - borrow a co-worker's, if necessary - go outside, and expose each screen to direct sunlight.

This isn't sketchy memory I'm talking about here. I still own the glossy screen laptop, and I also have a new Mini 9 with a glossy screen, and both can be cranked up nice and bright. I know they're unusable outdoors. And I know that my new laptop is quite usable outdoors even in low-power (dim screen) mode. I just took them all outside for a side-by-side. I mostly see my face and shirt in the glossy lappies, while the matte screen is quite usable.

Neither type of screen is great in direct sunlight, of course, but the matte screen can actually be used even in direct sunlight. The glossy screens cannot. At least not by me...maybe my eyes are worse than most (actually that's not a maybe, I'm damned near legally blind without glasses or contacts).

Anyway, as I mentioned, sufficient brightness can somewhat overcome the problems of glossy screens outdoors. Newer laptops are brighter than older ones, so if you upgraded from a matte screen from a few years back to a newer Apple laptop with a much brighter glossy screen, you might feel like the newer screen is more usable even in sunlight.

But, I'm absolutely certain a good matte screen is better for working outdoors than a good glossy screen.

The good news for you and your glossy screen preference is that since glossy screens are cheaper to manufacture, they are far more common. You will be able to buy glossy screens to your hearts content. I, on the other hand, have to be a bit more selective, and usually spend a bit more (generally only the high end Dell models have the matte option).
This personal approach to the problem by Apple is the best thing they can do at this point. Now they need to follow up not only with words, but with actions -- make the App Store a fun place to develop for again.
> Aren't paintings and screenplays typically sold to someone else for a fixed price after they're created, assuming someone buys them?

Yes, the difference here is that if you write a novel, create a painting, make a sculpture etc, and your target client doesn't buy, you can shop around for another buyer.

I'm not really sure there's a market out there for "book cover for a Tim Ferriss book" other than Tim Ferriss himself. This is the problem with spec work of this variety - you have one winner, and a bajillion losers who will now see absolutely nothing for all the work done.

> how should they get started?

At a shop, working under someone more reputed than they are, until they have a large enough portfolio of their own to show potential clients. That's the ideal scenario anyways...

You can apply the same thing to programmers, though. Say you have an aspiring hacker with no references or previous code to show you - how should they get started?
If I believed that most high schools taught people how to learn I'd be very satisfied.

There are many options that we could explore if our political system allowed it. The one that makes the most sense to me is to provide two paths for students: one which leads to a university and one which is vocational. The university path could begin at 16 with the curriculum that would typically be taught to a college freshman.
In Objective-C you often end up with patterns like this:

if ([[obj delegate] shouldThisDoSomething]) { ... stuff ... }

When calling "delegate" on obj, it might return nil if there isn't one set (or if obj itself is nil). If it does return nil, sending "shouldThisDoSomething" results in 0 (aka nil). nil == false, So "stuff" will never happen - which is pretty much as expected in 99%* of cases. (* made up statistic)

This behavior, combined with a few rules like naming certain methods in a way that asks permission rather than forbids an action, gets you an entire system where you can almost completely forget about the issue while retaining programmer control for the few special cases where it might matter and you can test for it.

(Nil also sticks out like a sore thumb in the debugger if you're stepping through and trying to figure out why something didn't work like you thought it should.)

Aside: Nothing fails silently unless you never test it. It's just a matter of how you're exposed to the failure. IMO, sending to nil resulting in 0/nil is very good at eliminating a lot of if/else boilerplate for certain situations which means less code cluttering my screen.
My Sons. (Still building them, as a co-contributor)

What, not the answer you were looking for? :)
Not to take anything away from melito, because really, this is cool as beans, but what I _really_ want out of something like this is a place where I can set my configuration up with variables.

Better than booting a semi-configured server would be booting a fully-configured server. If I could host my app on sliceapp.com, along with changes from a base bootstrapped instance (e.g., apache settings, hostnames, etc) -- and be able to have multiple images to launch (one for db, one for apache/mod-python/django, one for load balancer) -- then this would be the best thing that ever happened, pretty much.
Yes, founder of http://www.Qaym.com, a local business review site in Arabic
I've done a similar thing as this guy, living in a number of countries for half a year or so, usually in connection with language study (doing remote contract work to pay my way). I've also observed American expats in those places, and in my home country (Poland).

I think it is laudable to live abroad, and in our field we're fortunate enough to be able to choose where to live. But with that choice I think comes a certain responsibility. You can live very well in a place like Thailand or China without engaging with the country past the minimum needed to get your needs met. Basically treating it as your private hotel resort. I've seen many people who choose this route, and I find it pretty repugnant.

If you are going to bootstrap abroad, be careful to remember that the country you choose does not just exist for your convenience. Be respectful of the place, and try to go beyond the role of a self-satisfied expat, which is very easy to fall into.
Your point is too nebulous for me to know what you're really trying to say. What do you mean by "functioning in 'adult' society"? What, specifically, do you think should be different?

My point is that teenagers are mentally not adults, and as such, they should not be in the same place as society as adults. I'm not saying they should be completely divorced from it, but I worry when people claim that the concept of a "teenager" is completely a cultural construction. Neurological research indicates it is not.
Sounds like a good lead for bragging, but not sure if this community actually encourages it.

I'll go with: first to write a mainstream article with the word "Internet" in 1992 (at least where I lived at the time).

To add some balance: first to miss the Internet revolution in 1993, sounded like old news to me :-)
hola quiero hjaker
What does 'mature' even mean in this context? Don't mistake "not finished growing/changing" with lacking the ability to make mature, thoughtful decisions if given the opportunity/responsibility.

One of the reasons teenagers act so irresponsibly is because they've grown up with the idea that teenagers are inherently irresponsible and therefore aren't completely accountable for their actions. It becomes self-fulfilling.
Compare new and old Google Search side-by-side: http://tlrobinson.net/misc/googlecompare.html
Cover artist for "The 4-Hour Workweek": Barbara Sturman

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_4-Hour_Workweek
Charging for the option? I fail to understand that, and I didn't expect it, even from Apple.
basically in u.k. universities there are barriers at £12k and about £100k. £100k+ is like I said. £10/12k+ initial cost is easier and something like three quotes, justification and head of finance sign off but that's internal - so is specific to the insitution but it's fairly common and quite straight forword.

If the project starts looking to buy a big product it will go through the process. There is probably a way in with consulting if you start small but that wouldn't really suit product start up.
Is he not allowed to do that?

The dual enrollment is allowed here (one must apply to the college that offers the dual enrollment classes). This choice is not used by as many students as could benefit from it. Many seek the "socialization" of high school. Yeesh.
Cool! Can you say a little about how you are loading each instance with the chosen packages? For example, are you using Capistrano or Fabric to script the installs? Will you be offering contextualizing functionality, based on some sort of user data (ala EC2 user-data + script execution)? Anyways, nice project.
I am not sure if this would ever really become a problem but I wonder if once less technologically savvy users begin to use Facebook more if there will be a growth of apps that post spam to a users status. Such as some ice-cream flavor app that an unaware user added and then it starts updating the users status without their permission. It's totally a violation of the Platform TOS, but if someone can get away with making such apps and make a profit form it they probably would.
Thank you. I would be interested to hear a designer's take on what the downsides to spec work are for me. But everytime I read an anti-spec rant it includes accusations directed at me that are patently false, like that I ran a spec contest because I don't value or respect the work of designers. No, I ran a spec contest because it was the only thing I could afford.

The second, and most obvious criticism of anti-spec arguments, is that the designers on the other end are choosing to engage in them. If the anti-spec crowd can't convince designers who participate in spec contests, why should we pay them any attention?

For people who feel so passionately about a topic, I wish they would at least put the time into creating a more compelling argument.
Presentation folders printing
It's a two-part problem. First is finding the right people to delegate the tasks to. Second is to define the tasks, assign them, then evaluate the result.

What kind of arrangement do you have though? Do you have employees? Are you assigning things to co-founders? outsourcing to another firm?
Yeah. It's a damage limitation exercise - sure, some kids are mature enough to run their own lives at 15, but many are not - and you can screw your life far more comprehensively by making bad choices at 15 than at 25 (or 35 or 45).

My impression is that kids that are that mature at 15 find non-school ways to improve their lives/skills/education. The rest need the extra time (and of course for some, no amount of time is enough).
Personal bookmarker and web-history search.
The return to CPU-based rendering might do wonders for PC gaming's popularity. It hadn't occurred to me until I read this, but it seems like the decline of PC gaming has mapped fairly closely to the increase in reliance on top-end graphics cards. There is probably a huge slice of people at the margins that have shunned PC gaming (actively or passively) because of the various burdens that requiring a graphics card adds.
I believe this is true. Children are adults-in-training and need to be treated as such. Yet we create these unnatural environments and wonder why teenagers act so irresponsibly. And when they finally do become "adults", they can't function as adults.

I believe the majority of teenagers will rise to the responsibility given to them, if it is genuine. You can't expect them to act responsibly on one hand but then subtly treat them as nothing more than overgrown children.
The author doesn't understand spec work at all. The reason we hire people on spec, is because an artist's portfolio usually gives you very little indication of whether they will do a good job of executing the project at hand.

If an artist has good samples of the exact type of work I will be hiring them for, spec isn't needed. It really has nothing to do with a perception of artists as cheap talent.
Note that now he's not saying that GPUs are becoming margunal, it's the fixed-function pipeline he dislikes. The "software rendering" he calls for will most likely run on a GPU.
> Large clients already get ideas on spec from those design firms

No, this is not the same. Large clients get little bits of spec work done for them which, on the whole, are not very useful in an of itself. To actually get the work done they will still need to pick a winning bidder and pay them fairly for the work.

In other words, the invested effort vs. the potential reward is pretty favorable for the design firm. For one thing, you're not competing against 50,000 other people on the interwebs, and secondly there's no danger of the client "stealing" your work - since they themselves would have little use for what amounts to an insignificant portion of the grand project.

That's a pretty key difference - in this case Ferriss has not promised a contract to the winning bidder, and what he is asking for is complete work directly. This strikes me as unfair. Where the traditional spec-work model is supposed to be a "try before you buy" thing, Ferriss is simply asking for a bunch of free, final copies to be produced for him gratis.
That is amazing!

Great idea.
I love the idea!

I've always found Slicehost and other DIY hosting solutions to be difficult to set up and work with. Which is why a solution like Heroku is so tempting (though various limitations have precluded my using it so far).

I'm excited about the potential for something like this.
Are you sure you're thinking about Objective-C? Objective-C lets you send messages to nil/0 which then return nil/0 silently - a feature used quite often in all Objective-C code I've been exposed to and written myself in the 2 years I've been doing it.
Full maturation of the brain - and I do think that indicates being able to reliably make "mature, thoughtful" decisions. I don't think you should deprive teenagers the opportunity to do so in the correct environment, but that's different from assuming they have the same mental faculties as adults.

Personally, I don't feel like I was a mature adult until about 22, and I was never considered an especially immature teen or young adult. I'm 28 now.
Apple is known for their secrecy and grand announcements. The debacle they have gotten themselves into in this case requires transparency to get out of gracefully. I hope that Phil makes some sort of (grand) summary announcement about their upcoming transparency. And that it actually materializes.
The fact that I'm getting upvotes and no solutions is somewhat telling, and very depressing :S Is this really one of those problems that we have no solution for?

Shoulda stayed in school...
Dropping out is not an option. You 100% will have a much harder time with acceptance with most colleges (and asian parents.)

I enjoyed turning on, tuning in and dropping out, fwiw. It's not for everyone, but life experience has fine-tuned my BS filter, given me infallible icebreakers and generally purged that poisonous Life-As-A-Race mindset.

By my experience getting into university after doing the dot-com years and a few years of domesticated life, colleges only care about their straight-out-of-secondary rates (given, I went to a state school, not an Ivy League, but I feel that the end effect would be similar.) Asian/1st generation immigrant parents, on the other hand, are a terrible burden to bear!

I would encourage the younger HN demographic to manage their expectations. Spending 3 decades in school doesn't give you a whole lot of common ground with a VC panel, other people in your chosen field or (really) anyone outside of a similarly-academic background. While that may be who you're working with or hiring, 8/10 times that's not who you're ultimately selling to. Freight-train academia can, however, set up a crushingly intense fear of failure that can break a young hacker's willpower in half.

Short story: never be afraid to walk away from a raw deal, especially if there's an implication that it's "mandatory." Life doesn't have to be a Dostoyevsky novel.
I think that if they went out of business you can still have control of your link mappings. They claim that you can have portability, but I guess I don't know how extensive it is. It might just be click data that is portable. At the very least, if you own the domain you can point all the incoming links back to your home page. I see it as more of a cost vs. development time issue.
Facebook Launches One-Way Mailbox API.
How to design elegance
Are you saying Ferris is "stealing" work from his submissions, or did you just mention theft to further muddy the waters?
Great story but it doesn't work for everyone. I actually took this approach and because I was big enough it worked. My own child has a different temperament to me and would not do this. The child who goes up against the bully and loses, ends up being deeper in the cycle of bullying because he feels powerless. I don't have an answer - as everyone is different - I'm just pointing out that the above only works for some people
If someone creates an app that lets me select ALL unread messages, like every last one, not just that paginated group and mark them as read, I will love you. My fb mailbox is 500+ unread now and id like to have it put down to zero so I can actually use it.
In open source.
100% agreed- awesome, awesome comment.