skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's possible to get past the pay wall on this brand new article

Johnson, W., Turkheimer, E., Gottesman, I., and Bouchard, T. (2009). Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 4. 217-220.

here:

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/cd/18_4_inpress...

The article, by some of the leading researchers on behavioral genetics, corrects common misconceptions about what "heritability" means. Contrary to much opinion of persons who have not studied genetics, heritability has nothing to do with what Sandra Scarr or William Angoff called "malleability," how much a trait can be influenced by environmental factors:

"Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches (Pak, 2004; Schwekendiek, 2008)."

Using twin studies to look for discordant traits between monozygotic twins provides some surprising controls on assumptions of genetic determinism in human behavior:

"In a related vein, intelligence and education are often associated with healthier lifestyle choices (Deary, Whalley, Batty, & Starr, 2006; Gottfredson, 2004). Controlling for genetic and shared-environmental influences, however, Johnson, Hicks, McGue, & Iacono (in press) found that both higher IQ and greater education were associated with more alcohol and nicotine use in both sexes at age 24. This suggests that the generally lower substance use among brighter and better-educated young adults results from selection on genetic and family influences contributing to an environment emphasizing both educational attainment and reduced substance use, rather than from direct application of intelligence and/or education in substance-use choices."
What other US cities have you considered? Boston? NYC? Seattle? Austin?

Climate would lock you out of most of those places minus Austin.
I second recommending the Monroe Institute audio guides. I nabbed them off BitTorrent years ago, and I play a few of them on an iPod shuffle while falling asleep. It's worth seeing past the New Age (rhymes with "sewage") stigma--the point isn't some non-sense about metaphysical "energy", rather the point is to get you used to putting your body into a quasi-hypnotic suggestive state where visualization can be much more active in your perception.
Just to supply evidence to the contrary, I make full use of the five-star scale in iTunes, with each additional star translating to some privilege the song gets as a strict subset of the songs with lesser ratings (e.g. 4+ = always on iPod.) I frequently wish for half-ratings across the board, which would make the full, discrete scale 1-10 :) I imagine I may indeed be in the extreme minority, though.
It looks pretty interesting, however only the actual device photos looked real. The rest of the content (video/images) looked like very polished prototype mockups.

How that translates into real product remains to be seen.
At Walmart it's a "greeter".
Well, technically, both have some level of management which is bundled with the services. Ex: I don't have to literally put out fires if one breaks out in the server room.

App Engine's management service by contrast is very tightly bundled to the hosting services... so tightly in fact that the cost of the management service they provide is exactly proportional to the cost of the resources I consume. It's a great deal. But we are getting off into the weeds here.

App Engine simplifies server admin for me. I have never had to personally 'bounce' anything for any reason. I don't worry about running out of disk space. I don't have to worry about sweeping out the sessions (on disk or db). I don't have to setup database replication. I don't have to configure rolling archive tables to improve the speed of access to the most commonly accessed data on a large table.

Being a solo operation, App Engine is ideal.
IIRC, NSTask is just an objc way of calling fork() and exec() to run the task.
I would love to have one, but Microsoft 'concept' videos have a tendency to outstrip their shipping products.

Here's hoping it works though, I would buy one for sure.
Maladies of Interpreters
I've used Google docs once, a few months ago. And that one time, everyone was stepping on everyone else's edit. The end result was making it read only for everyone except one or two people to edit.

Personally, I'm not ignoring it. I'm intentionally choosing not to use it.
Doesn't appear to work on Chrome for Mac (4.0.211.2), could someone else confirm?
Can We Please Have Jerry Back?
FDA: Silly, will happen, will be worked around.

Years: Immortality isn't one step. Extra years are all you need for immortality, as long as you last long enough for the next treatment that gives you extra years. What happens when your brain fails? Hope there's a cure by then. Said failure wont be magic, it will be biological/physical/chemical/electrical and one day repair/replacable at some level.

Straws: Not true. He's not grasping at straws because he's old, he's pursuing a several decades long interest in technology, health and longevity. Also, wanting a longer life isn't 'sad' nor does it make him a 'sad' person.
Ask HN: Review my classroom web tool, Eduset
"...one, giant, database-in-the-sky, an irresistible target for the malevolent."

I'm not sure, but is this such a bad thing if this giant database is open? I mean, the most incentivized and most malevolent of people can already buy my information - and they will continue to figure out how to buy more of it as it becomes available.

The important thing to me personally, is that if a company has data about me, they will let me see what it is, and then allow me to correct and (in some cases) redact this information.

I guess what I am saying - put that database in the sky so we can all see it. Then once the info gets tracked back to my identity, have it subject to some kind of regulation so that I can reasonably control what is available. The database should not have any trouble finding my contact information to tell me that it knows something about me.
New Erlang R13B02 released
Secret Newton Killer? Einstein?
FreePRchecker.com - PR Checker - Check PR (PageRank), Backlinks and more...
Seems like a simple rule. Non-founder CEOs suck.
It would be easier to read this if they gave equations or names for sequences, insdead of using elipses --- 5, 13, 21, 29... is harder for me to understand than 5+8n; and the similarity between 5+8n and 3+8n is instantly obvious. Maybe that is me and not every reader.

I would also love to hear more about the algorithm; why are such astoundingly large numbers necessary?
Another way to say this is "People would rather take care of children than pets." I don't think that's sad at all.
> This avoids archeology on historical versions.

It's not really your main point, but the idea of revision control archeology is a really a great analogy.
Check out Doc Searls's Project VRM (vendor relationship management).

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm/Main_Page
Yes i thought it would definitely include local high school games and even possibly local hobby leagues. There are a lot of those. Funny when I grew up in Richmond, VA there was a local Rugby league. The athletes there were amazing . I was just lucky I lived nearby and I am not sure if anyone else in the neighborhood even knew about it . If they did they would have been exposed to a different sport from a different culture with great action.
Sounds like he was tech support, not retail.
You could solve that by using Google's extension, actually. If the page requires standards compliance, put in the annotation for standards compliance. Otherwise, let ie6 render as default. The employee using the webapp, ideally, wouldn't even notice.
Ah. I would put it on my personal website... but I don't think anyone would actually care enough to read it or investigate it. With 6 billion people on Earth, why would anyone care which movies jrockway watches?
I've never tried pair programming so I don't have an opinion on it, but I do know of an interesting pair programming story about Richard Stallman. It's related by Sam Williams in chapter six of his book Free As In Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade For Free Software:

[Guy Steele] recalls a notable episode in the late 1970s when the two programmers banded together to write the editor's "pretty print" feature. Originally conceived by Steele, pretty print was another keystroke-triggered feature that reformatted Emacs' source code so that it was both more readable and took up less space, further bolstering the program's WYSIWIG qualities. The feature was strategic enough to attract Stallman's active interest, and it wasn't long before Steele wrote that he and Stallman were planning an improved version.

"We sat down one morning," recalls Steele. "I was at the keyboard, and he was at my elbow," says Steele. "He was perfectly willing to let me type, but he was also telling me what to type.

The programming session lasted 10 hours. Throughout that entire time, Steele says, neither he nor Stallman took a break or made any small talk. By the end of the session, they had managed to hack the pretty print source code to just under 100 lines. "My fingers were on the keyboard the whole time," Steele recalls, "but it felt like both of our ideas were flowing onto the screen. He told me what to type, and I typed it."

The length of the session revealed itself when Steele finally left the AI Lab. Standing outside the building at 545 Tech Square, he was surprised to find himself surrounded by nighttime darkness. As a programmer, Steele was used to marathon coding sessions. Still, something about this session was different. Working with Stallman had forced Steele to block out all external stimuli and focus his entire mental energies on the task at hand. Looking back, Steele says he found the Stallman mind-meld both exhilarating and scary at the same time. "My first thought afterward was: it was a great experience, very intense, and that I never wanted to do it again in my life."

http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch06.html

Of course, that doesn't say anything about what Stallman or Steele could have produced that day working separately, but it is interesting to me that Stallman pair-programmed at least sometimes.
That's not true - there's been great non-founder CEOs promoted from within and great outsider CEOs in history. Actually, you really want one of those in a crisis that your current team hasn't been able to dig itself out of.

First to come to mind is Lou Gerstner, who turned around IBM. I read his autobiography about the experience - crazy stuff. He was up against so much built up gunk and bureaucracy, that only an outsider could've broken.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_V._Gerstner,_Jr.#IBM

http://www.amazon.com/Elephants-Dance-Inside-Historic-Turnar...
Botox High In Demand In London Botox Clinics Despite Recession
We have been hearing so much about recession and its effects; we ourselves have taken several steps to cut down our personal expenses. There are very few things that have not been affected by recession and one of those few things is seems to be Botox treatment. The number of people that are seeking Botox treatment has not reduced. Interestingly, stores report that there is a considerable fall in the sales level of many food items that are part of basic needs. This is a clear indicator how looking good helps you to feel good too.
No one encouraged me to be an engineer either (doctor? yes. lawyer? yes. engineer? no.). I'd wager that many people here were actively discouraged in some way from going down the path of technology or entrepreneurship.

Most nontechnical parents who see their son or daughter spending countless hours on a computer just think that he or she is wasting his or her time.

(That last sentence would be a good place for those mythical gender-neutral English pronouns.)
"Chaperone" reminded me about something a cute young college-aged friend of mine said about working at a chain restaurant in Cincinnati. Apparently, that retail space needed chaperones -- the wait staff were constantly hooking up.
It's not the same thing. Not even close. For most of the modern era, the best jobs have been closed off to women. Men have wielded the power, at least in the workplace. While we'd all like to believe that the effects of that power disparity are now gone, it would be naive to think so, especially once we remember that the top executives at most large employers began their careers in a time when they could not imagine competing with women in the workplace.

You don't need to spend much time in a typical office to realize that women face challenges men do not when it comes to being taken seriously in technical fields. Don't believe me? Find your closest after-work bar and eavesdrop on the conversations around you. If you have a wife or daughter (assuming you're a man), would you want them to be the subjects of some of the conversations you're likely to hear?

Yes, there are fields in which men face special challenges (or at least the assumption that they're gay if they choose to go into those fields). However, the highest paying careers are in fields dominated by men.

I believe that computer programming is a skill that will dominate the professions more as the business world catches up with its potential. Nearly all business functions can be improved with the addition of automation and data analysis that programmers can provide. If some ability to program is not a future requirement for success in the business world, the ability to talk well with programmers and have a grasp of what it is they do will be. I also believe that programming is one of the best paths of upward mobility for people of a low socioeconomic background. If either of these beliefs are correct, the fact that women face greater challenges than men in entering this field is an injustice and should be corrected.
I love that on HN you can get as a response to a vague & half-arsed comment a reference and link to an academic paper.

Cheers.
I'd never heard of HopToad before, that looks interesting.
"Casey is the sole engineer for Ravelry and to run it takes only a few people."

Looking over the setup, that's quite a lot for one person to do during nights and weekends in 4 months. Pretty cool.
Actually, the counterexample is Carol Bartz herself, with what she did with Autodesk.
I'm shocked that such a big-data company has missed the mark on ratings by this much

Well, given how badly they messed up with comments...

http://xkcd.com/202/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_E._Schmidt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._P._Morgan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Gerstner

I really don't think you can call the rule that simple. (Maybe they might suck as product evangelists, but as CEO's they all did a pretty good job).
Definitely a good start. Lots of teachers don't want do deal with mastering a learning management system like Moodle or Blackboard. What I don't see is a compelling reason to pay $5/mo for something I could accomplish with a class blog or facebook page. Are there plans to allow interaction between students? Grade management? Online quizzes? These would be great value-adds to justify different pricing tiers.
Haven't tried the actual product, but the site design and execution looks professional and trustworthy.
Seeing the distribution

This is key! Almost always, only good or great products will have a bunch of ratings and a distribution like:

****************
********
****
**
**

Someone is always going to dislike just about anything. But the above distribution seems to indicate something that a lot of people genuinely like.

I also look at the most useful positive and negative reviews.
This is all a shame. Yahoo has lost its soul aka focus on product and trying to be innovative. They talk about VCs having walking dead companies and Yahoo reminds me of that on a much grander scale. I grew up as a kid using Yahoo (like 96/97) and it has some sentimental value.

It also upsets me because they had awesome talent there in terms of product/engineering. They all left one by one. Here's just a small list of names I could think of off the top of my head:

Caterina Fake
Joshua Schachter
Stewart Butterfield
Jeremy Zawodny
Cal Henderson
Bradley Horowitz
Ian Rogers
Jeff Bonforte
Susan Mernit
Salim Ismail
Jeff Weiner

Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. There are countless others who have left, and probably it's even sadder that some awesome talent is still fighting the good fight there. Sadly, there's no real product focus worth a damn that they can make good use of their talents with. They could have also acquired other top tier talent if there wasn't such an exodus during the initial bid by Microsoft. I wonder what a group of 10-15 of smart product focused hackers+product guys from yc/hn would do to fix Yahoo! up. hmm, feel free to email me thoughts, could make for an interesting potential blog post/theoretical situation.
Oh, whatever you use, just use it. It didn't get my location, but placed me in nyc, so I assumed you weren't doing an ip lookup.
The goal was certainly to target teachers who aren't willing or able to put in the time and effort to learn a full-fledged LMS.

I agree that $5/month is a slightly hard sell right now, although there are certain parts of Eduset (such as assignments) that cannot be easily accomplished with a blog. In order to fix this, we are actually in the process of implementing every one of the features you described. Soon, students will be able to post content to their classes (if the teacher allows it), making classes more collaborative. Students will also be able to turn in homework and take quizzes on Eduset, and teachers will be able to grade that work.

As for pricing tiers, does anyone have thoughts on which of these two options would be better?

1) The current model, where all features are provided free for one class, while $5/month is charged to create an unlimited number of classes.

2) The model the commenter above describes, where certain features are made pay-only.
1. Slideshow view or whatever you call it where you can press "next" or the right side of the image to go to the next screenshot. I hate clicking to "minimize the screenshot" then clicking again to zoom to the next screenshot

2. Maybe zoom in on that email message since it may give the impression you have to use a gmail account.

3. Page of features and screenshots

4. DEMO ACCOUNT WITHOUT SIGNING UP. No one likes signing up for anything unless they have to. Just have a static version or give them a demo account with full access and every hour or so, have the database be restored to normal
Would someone explain the reference?
If it matters, I happen to agree with you, as what you said holds true for Java-vs-C as well as for C#-vs-C.

For Java-vs-C#, I hold my ground :-)

I tend to hack up Perl-like tools in C# these days, using a small regexp-centric framework that also handles command line parsing. It's not much more code, and I feel better about it in my current community.
+1 from me. I use it on my site, it's pretty awesome.
3 Pillars of a Delightful Experience: Playfulness, Usability, & Context:
Isn't $5 so low as to undermine the value you're offering? I paid $5 for a cheeseburger today at lunch.

I'd look to offer something in the $30 range as your first paid tier.
Wasn't Surface a duplicate of the Perspective Pixel work? I certainly remember seeing YouTube videos before Surface was announced.
Yes, the demo account is crucial; a lazy effort would be a screencast (flash-based?). I certainly want to give this a whirl, even though it would not directly help me, but rather, friends of mine who are professors or teaching assistants. But I'm not about to register, activate an account, and then populate it with bogus info and bogus students burning an hour of my time ... the entry barrier is too high :/
Free for one class seems interesting but how would you distinguish between their classes? What happens if a teacher just put all their students on the one. I think you don't mind getting it to some people for free.
How exactly did you get that from the above statement? It wasn't saying "nothing is wrong" it was saying "if something is wrong, the problem is here, no there."
Why the monthly plan? I know subscription is the holy grail because people set it and forget it. But are you implying teachers should cancel it during the three summer months if they aren't teaching?

And do teachers really pay for two months and then go oh... sorry kids but I realize this isn't going to work and cancel it? I assume once your on one LMS your stuck for at least the duration of the semester. Maybe a 30 day free trial is better, even sixty. If Eduset is really amazing, which it could be, then it'll become such a critical tool that they can't just switch off midway of a semester.

I'd also want to see it in action. If it is a LMS, what better way to demo your LMS than to create a Eduset page on how to use Eduset. Have quizzes, videos, homework assignments... etc.
I'll definitely put #1-3 on my ToDo list, thanks. As for #4, my current strategy is to provide one option and one option only to the user on the home page: signing up. I believe I got the idea for this strategy from 37signals. Does anyone have any insights as to whether this works in the real world?
> there was simply no way whatsoever to convince this child not to cry/scream

Colicky-ness lasts for months. Everything was tried.
Looks clean and simple. I definitely see the Facebook/Twitter design influences. I have a sister who who teaches High School Biology who might use such a thing.

But, I worry that she wont be interested in the price. As byoung already mentioned, there are a lot of other (free) services out there that facilitate basic communication already. My sister is someone who lives on Facebook and would probably look to use that first if she could. Extra features that byoung mentioned could be the key.

Some local college grads here just launched http://www.instructure.com
I haven't played with their product but it looks similar. Its never a bad idea to check out any potential competitors to see how they are addressing the market.
When I worked there two years ago, there was clearly a lot more non-brand name talent that you never hear about. With the people Yahoo had (some of which it still has), they should have been able to do great things, and they did do great things from a technical perspective. It's been a tragic failure of leadership.
While I applaud your initiative, I cannot believe that teachers would feel comfortable using something made by a single person who just graduated/will graduate? high school this year. You can keep your name, but I'd recommend taking out your relative youth.

Also, I'm always a big fan of competitive analysis charts, especially if you're competing on price. Here's ours: http://www.dawdle.com/selling/index.php/fees/ I will say that I'm with Brad and $4.99 a month feels like you're selling yourself short, but that is $60/year. Perhaps make a couple more tiers right off the bat to try to nudge people higher?

Lastly, I wouldn't say "if your students can use Facebook, they can use this" with a screenshot of Gmail. That shows a lack of attention to detail.
Another possible model is X number of students free, and per-student pricing after that.
That logic usually works, but I've found that teachers are a stingy group when it comes to paying for classroom services. I think that the risk of making the product seem too cheap is outweighed by the risk of teachers being reluctant to spend a significant amount on their classes. Wikispaces, another product partially targeted at teachers, has a $5/month option as well.
It worked here. Same version.

Er showed me as Hayward whereas I'm in San Francisco. About 30 miles off. But otherwise it works.