skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to call this one out as it comes up all the time in connection with the concept of "home schooling" -

Keep in mind, too, the great social development he's missing out on.

There are multiple problems with this statement.

First, it assumes that the "social development" kids get in school is somehow "better" than the social development they get outside of school.

Second is a pervasive (and wrong) meme that "home schooling" is some kid sitting at a desk in their house listening while their parent drones on and on about some subject.

My experience home schooling my three girls was that skipping "the middle school experience" was the envy of all their peers in "regular" school. And the social experiences they got with the community of students that were being home schooled were very effective at teaching good social interaction skills.

In California at least you still need to register your child with an appropriate school of record which both reports to the state on educational status "in school" vs "not in school" and provide quarterly report cards for their students. Had it been a traditional middle school it would have been the largest one in the area. This because the Bay Area has a very diverse and effective community of "home schooling" students.

The Bay Area is perhaps asymptomatic in this regard but programs like the Stanford EPGY math system, the Riekes nature studies home school programs, places like the Institute for Excellence in Writing, Etc.

My kids were in social groups through out their home school experience (3rd - 8th for the longest one) Those friendships are at least as strong as any developed "in school."

There are a lot of things you can say about home schooling, but generally "missing out on social development" isn't one of them.

[1] https://giftedandtalented.com/ -- Formerly the Stanford EPGY program.

[2] http://riekes.org/nature-awareness/homeschool-programs/

[3] http://iew.com/
And to put my money where my mouth is, consider this example:

Advice: In B2B be on the lookout for people, organizations, or events which can force the hand of your prospect customers.

Story: There was a company that made e-commerce vulnerability detection/prevention software, but when they tried selling it, they found that IT departments stonewalled the adoption because they didn't want to admit there was a security problem in the first place. After much frustrating direct sales attempts, our protagonists took their software to a payment processor, which has promptly mandated use of software for all e-commerce portals that were their clients. Problem solved.

Now consider first the advice on its own, and then the advice and the story together. Which one actually drives the point home?
If there's a specific demographic whose needs are not met, then teaching methods for that demographic should be examined. We've gone through it for girls, gifted, the challenged, etc. Why shouldn't there be similar issues for boys?

How many anecdotes do you want? My son? My friends' sons? The dramatic lack (and cutting back) of physical activity at schools is a systemic issue that impacts many.
It's the argument esrauch was making.
local databases:

SQLite is available on Android and iOS by default, and available for WinPhone 8.

Yet, some die-hard NoSQL lovers stopped the HTML5 Web SQL Database API: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_SQL_Database

It's still available in all WebKit based browsers incl. Android and iOS. But famously Firefox/FirefoxOS and IE/WinPhone don't support it. The proposed NoSQL replacement IndexedDB has a complicated API and never got traction, one has to basically use a shim library. Working with several tables and indexes is trivial in SQL, but complicated and requires a lot of specific code in IndexedDB (NoSQL).

There would be place for SQL as well as NoSQL in HTML5.

* The argument that WebSQL was tailored to a specific SQLite version is nonsense. SQLite supports the official SQL92 standard, as do several other SQL embedded engines like the SQL engines from MS Access, MS Outlook, MS SQL Embedded and many others. Also Firefox already ships with SQLite for its "awesome bar" and bookmark feature.

* Also the argument that it's "hard" to sync a client side database with a server side database is nonsense. But the two argument basically stopped Web SQL as HTML5 API :( The developers who voted against Web SQL were (former) employees of two big server side SQL db vendors (see the related mailing lists and blog).

Nowadays with the rise of NewSQL movement of people who burnt their fingers with NoSQL, one can only hope someone gives some love to Web SQL.

To sum up, NoSQL has it's place and SQL has one too.
Your understanding does not jive with my simulation. Write the simulation. It is certainly possible that my simulation is in error, but as I said it surprised me so I looked closely for error, and I have several times heard people report independently reaching the same conclusion on writing their own simulations and never (yet?) the other.
Steve: Perusing or pursuing the trifecta? =o)
Using MongoDB with Hadoop and Spark: Part 3 – Spark Example and Key Takeaways
I don't think they'll ever make anything that isn't fundamentally a computer or an accessory in support thereof.

Of course, you're right that over time that will mean creating products in more and more different categories.
It could be something akin to holography.

To put it simply, they can have the same optical density, but re-write over it several times in other colors. The same lens can observe and read the exact point, interpreting the data in (for example) blue, green, and red.
Rhyming is part of the problem. Playwrights' work has to be remembered by the actors by heart.

Also, the ones you mentioned lived in the 16th century, when languages were not very sophisticated.
It's exactly what I'm describing, I've worked with people in the past who I'd initially greatly disliked (i.e. had bad feelings about) who then turned out to become great friends.
The same thing that happened when our last one had a mission: "Hope and Change"

What happened? We've lost hope and nothing has changed.
Many modern parents tend to coddle their kids. With the Internet and social media, we get to hear more of their complaints. The situation is exactly how it was from years, the only difference is we hear more about it now. There is always negative sentiment about everything, that does not mean it is wrong.
A lot of kids don't like milk and vegetables, but does that mean we should stop feeding them?
If a small number of children have nut-allergy, does that mean we stop making food that contains nuts for everyone else?
Schools have worked for ages. They may be failing some boys but most certainly not all boys.
I think this guy would probably take issue w/ your use of the word better. If one man's better is another man's worse, perhaps "better" exists only in your head.

Also, this quote comes to mind:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

- George Bernard Shaw
Gates Trust Sells $1B in McDonald's Stock
It's definitely one of the more salient counterpoints, but I think it's more the kind of thing that will limit the market size, rather than kill it altogether. The observation that Rolex sells $20,000 watches with the same internals as a $6,000 watch is where you'll find the counterpoint to the problem of obsolescence.

Yes, the Apple Edition watch will likely suffer from the same obsolescence issues as iPhones, but as others have pointed out, that will only matter for certain types of buyers. The market for $20,000 watches is pretty small, and it's composed of different types of buyers. The smallest of the market is the group who can fork over $20,000 annually for a fashion accessory, rather than buying something as a milestone that will become an heirloom.

However, Apple can absolutely afford to build a very small number of Edition watches when selling at this price point, because the cost of materials is so low, and they'll sell tons of them at lower price points, which gives them the scale they need to justify production. This is where the correlation to the ubiquity of Rolex movements come in. Apple is using the same strategy. They have one "movement" (a computer in this case), which they're packaging to suit a very broad set of price points.

I think Apple will succeed in this endeavor because they have the brand. Rolex is, again, a very good comparison. In really uppity horology[1] circles Rolex watches are considered pedestrian because they are mass-produced, and they don't include a lot of hand finishing like the more prestigious brands. That doesn't appear to matter to the broad market though, because Rolex enjoys two logic-defying distinctions: 1) they sell many more watches than any of their upper-crusty close-kin, and 2) their watches hold their value in a way that defies their mass-production status. Sound familiar?

Apple products are often lampooned for selling at a price-premium when compared to similarly specified commodity alternatives, and Apple devices fetch strong pricing on the secondary market. IMO, Apple & Rolex are as close as we've seen to companies who have deconstructed and are in the process of perfecting the formula required to bring to market products that uphold these attributes. If Apple can do this successfully with watches, they will have upped the ante significantly by jumping from one vertical to another; a feat for which I cannot think of another example.

1: Technically, the science of timekeeping, but often used to refer to the community of people interested in timekeeping devices (watches).
I'll have to give Gun a go when I have the chance. Thank you for providing the contrast.
By custom key cap they mean custom shape. Not custom label. For cherry that will cost you $50k to make the mold. Alps you can mill yourself out of wood.
My problem with this isn't that the advice is obvious, but rather obvious _only in hindsight_:
"The best startup ideas are the ones that seem like bad ideas but are good ideas.",
"the fast-growing market is going to be important but others dismiss it as unimportant"

these aren't obvious at all before they happen, not just for first-time startup people but everyone.
> Kids should learn to follow rules even when they don't like them.

Except when you're forced to go through 16+ years of conforming and not being able to say "no" without being labeled a problem-child. That's a long time to be in the creative and free-thinking suppression chamber, and by my estimate most minds don't ever truly recover.

> Personally, I think asian kids achieve more things...

Personally, I think asian kids are brilliant when it comes to rote-memorization and standardized testing but they totally lack in the creativity department. Just look at all of the articles, studies, etc that show that the East has a severe lack of creativity. As an example: [1]. Ill take free-thinkers over number crunchers any day.

[1] http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/13905.html
It would be really helpful when presenting at Events.

A lot of events record the presenters screen and the presenter but expect the presenter to stand in one spot so they don't need a cameraman.

So, it does not work very well to point at a screen when presenting.
> "Children pick on each other. Adults do not"

I am very suspicious of this. For the most part, children are not free to associate with whoever they want. Those decisions are generally made for them by adults. It can therefore be very difficult for a child to remove themself from the company of somebody who picks on them.

Adults on the other hand tend to have a great deal of freedom when it comes to determining who they associate with. They will naturally disassociate with people that they don't get along with, minimizing social interaction with people who pick on them.

In the few situations where adults are not as free or able to avoid other adults that they do not like (prisons, lower-paying/status work environments, anything retail, lower income neighborhoods, crowded concerts, etc), adults picking on adults seems to be much more common.
The lack of regulation is more of a concern than the human resource allocation or event the debt to GDP ratio.

The derivatives market is valued over $700 trillion dollars (forbes, 2013 est.), while the GDP of the world is S$74.31 trillion (2013). There's also options and swaps markets. While their benefit is dubious, deregulation has allowed these markets to ballon to ridiculous levels.

These markets keep investment capital away from more beneficial investments, such as tech firms, infrastructure and research and development. These are things we desperately need investment in. At the same time the property market doesn't need more investment, and is devastating if speculation is allowed to occur.
Just because more words exist, does not mean the authors make use of these words. I think the author would agree that English has more words - he cites the dictionary sizes skewing heavily in favor of English.

With that said, I am also surprised. I would like to see a similar analysis using more modern works, as well as a discussion around how texts are selected. It seems like the selection of authors and their novels will significantly impact the results.

FWIW - Both English and French stem from the same original language (Proto-Indo-European). You are correct that English is a Germanic language (this does not mean it stems from German), and the French is a Romance language - with Romance being used in the sense of "came from Rome," not "sounds sexy." If you are interested in more details here, I highly recommend "The History of English" podcast: http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/ I'm still working my way through it, but it does a great job explaining the history of the English language, how it evolved, how it relates to other languages, etc.

English contains words from many other languages. It is not just Latin words, but many more recent languages (such as French) as well.
"Mr. Tao informed the audience that the capital flight from China in December alone amounted to $20 billion, and that was just from official channels. The true amount could be four times greater."

So this bureaucrat just committed career suicide by admitting this.
No wonder, Siri was a huge success, literally changed the industry landscape in voice UX.
Your argument seems to be that everybody should just ignore the name and focus on the product. And that's bullshit. Names are important, they have meaning, and they cause reactions in people that see them. To claim otherwise is being willfully blind.
There are plenty of people who lose money flipping houses. It might sound easy, but in practice it isn't.

More likely, if you go into a career trying to cure cancer; there is a big pharmaceutical company or research institution behind it. They may be taking a big risk; but the career risk for you personally is not that big. You'll draw a salary even if you don't cure cancer.
She used her child as an anecdote for all boys.

Do you think that the current childhood education strategy is what is resulting in 1/3 higher college success rate of women?

What do you think would be necessary to get that ratio a more gender neutral 50/50?
Too add an anecdote: I always thought (as a boy) that the 2 hours of compulsory and graded physical activity per week were 2 hours too many.
Absolutely. If you look at the Phantom Menace today, the CGI looks like a bad video game. The "real" Star Wars trilogy aged fantastically; the stuff done as miniatures looks miles more convincing than the best CGI on offer in 1999.

I bet we'll get to "good enough" CGI someday given the amount of money and effort being dumped into it, but it might take a long time. The details are going to be the hardest part for sure.
The derivatives market IS NOT valued at over $700T. That represents the gross notional of all derivatives, but most of those trades have equivalent offsetting positions. Gross notionals are virtually meaningless.
I'd like to hear that argument and not just the assertion that it is arguable.
It always bugs me when I see people stuck in that mindset. I was for all of my teens and early 20's. I feel like it's true in some sense but I ended up using it as an excuse to continue down a less desirable but easier path e.g. keeping a miserable job because I needed money and finding a better one was hard. Luckily, I had good friends to help snap me out of it.
Why is native-like better? Explain.
Maybe I wasn't clear... GUN does have Eventual consistency, but not strong/global consistency.

Aka GUN is AP and Eventually consistent. You manually at the application layer can decide to lock, sacrificing Availability, and get strong consistency.

The merge algorithm works in an Eventually consistent case, but obviously is too naive for global Consistency, you'd need some form of consensus.

Or does that not address your comment?
"Hope and Change" isn't a mission statement. It's a slogan, and completely different than saying "I will invest more money in educating our children better".
Investing on the hope that they will use the money to repay what they owe you is pants-on-head retarded.

Option #1 - convert the debt to equity at the proposed valuation.

Option #2 - get paid, don't invest

Option #3 - expect to never get paid - walk away or continue for fun

Don't give those fools money. Working for 2 months without getting paid is enough of a gift.
Guided Tour to Dalyan from Fethiye, Hisaronu, Oludeniz Turkey
You're posting on HN, so I'll assume you know how to code. Forgive me if I'm wrong.

When you're learning a new language or framework, do you instantly do something 'useful and important'? More likely you do something that you could easily accomplish with your old tools, in order to learn the new ones. This is the nature of learning.

I teach CS and Science. Writing a script that calculates the first 1000 primes is not 'useful or important', but it is educationally valuable. Getting kids to balance chemical equations is no 'useful or important' but it is an important skill if they want to become chemists.

'useful and important' means different things to different people. I have never needed to speak a word of Latin in my life, so the hours I spent learning the language were pointless. The hours I spent practising solving quadratic equations however, were very useful to me, but not so much for my wife who is an English teacher.
"we should strive to have the best in each category" ... this is certainly not happening in Canada.
I wouldn't be so quick to write this off as the isolated concerns of a single parent. None of what you said addresses the authors claim that boys are statistically falling behind girls in every academic measure.

There are more substantive sources that have made similar claims, for example this book:

http://www.amazon.com/The-WAR-AGAINST-BOYS-Misguided/dp/0684...
That's funny because it's true.

I've been saying this forever, we already have OpenGL viewports, we don't have to listen to the folks at W3C. Browsers draw on the screen. Why is each browser concerned with the rendering engine? There's already a rendering engine in every computer, it's called a GPU. And there's already a way to draw on it, it's called OpenGL Viewport. Much ado about an already-solved problem.
I always friggin' do this, it's one of those typos I perpetually make :(

Care to make a PR so you get a commit credit, or should I just fix it? rust-lang/blog.rust-lang.org is the repo.
No, it's just... life.

If I did only the things I wanted to do in any given moment, I pretty well guarantee you our lawn would never be mowed, the dishes would go undone, dinner would frequently not get made, etc.

Not to be too snarky, but... that you're questioning that makes me wonder if you've ever actually had to run your own household, or work in a real-life job, or generally operate as an adult, which is practically defined as finding that balance between doing what you want and doing what is needed.
Downvoter, please tell me where I'm wrong?
The New White Flight in Silicon Valley
In some cases, yes.

If you are committed to doing everything in JS, then you have two choices:

1. Deliver a degraded experience to modern browsers and a terrible experience to older browsers.

2. Deliver a good experience to modern browsers and no experience at all to older browsers.

Depending on your business model, #1 may be the best choice. But if you're trying to compete with native apps then #2 is the only thing that makes sense.
I admit that I'm biased toward personal interests and hobbies but my first thought was an Oculus Rift that fits more like a pair of shades than a pair of ski goggles.

And of course the ever-present dream of "smart" contact lenses that can adjust how incoming light is magnified on an adaptive basis or offer AR functionality without any headgear at all.

Obviously that sort of application is years away regardless of how this particular project works out. Still, this stuff does lead to some fun brainstorms and geeky fantasies.
Mercenaries and Missionaries
I think the sexist undertone is actually toward men - most male teachers of children (pre-high school) are viewed as weird or pedophiles.
Wow! That podcast seems awesome. Thanks a lot. This will be my bed time listening for a while.
Please write a post about financial security as a pre-req to doing a startup. I advise having at least a year's worth of living expenses saved. Because you don't want to be worried at all in the beginning about how you're going to pay your bills. You're going to start worrying when that money is half gone, and it sometimes takes more than 3 months to get traction.

I think many founders pursue funding too soon (and thus give up too much equity to VCs much too soon) because they didn't have enough savings at the start. I would expect VCs to disagree with me about that because it's in their interest to do so. :)
I rode by bicycle to the South Rim, put my bike on the roof rack of some tour bus, walked down to the bottom, up the other side and got back on my bicycle again, to keep going up through Utah.

I have done a lot more riding in Wales where we have Mt Snowdon, complete with a railway to the top. Furthermore, there is a cafe there, 'blighting' the highest point in Wales (and England).

However...

The railway is cute because it was old. Aeons ago that was shocking new machinery and there must have been those that feared the wilderness being lost. This new-fangled gondola will also gain pedigree and heritage over time, to garner a worthy history of its own.

The tourist tailored top doesn't spoil the mountain for me and I am glad that there is one 'must see' mountain that is accessible to all. The truth is that the 'must see' mountain makes the others second rate when it comes to height. This means they are all relatively devoid of tourists.

So consider the gondola going to the deepest part, the prime spot and totally letting the car-bound tourists having it. They won't need to stray too far and it could work wonders for depleting the general area of tourists. Which is good for those that can be bothered to get their without the aid of a motor.
The findings of this study are unrelated to the title of this post.

First, the authors and books were not chosen randomly and the sample size is tiny, so the results are meaningless, although I do respect the effort that was put into this. The author is up-front and honest about this in the beginning, but unfortunately proceeds to draw unwarranted generalizations based on his study.

Second, even if a similar, but much larger, study were conducted on randomly selected authors and books, the results would still conflate the vocabulary size in common usage with the vocabulary size of single authors. Hence, what the article is attempting to study is not the same thing as the title of this post.
They did. https://twitter.com/lenovoUS/status/568578319681257472