skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is an important point and I feel torn about it.

On one hand, I agree with the idea that forcing kids to be quiet and do their work will be unhealthy for some of them. (Certainly I know people who were unable to deal with the system and left as soon as they could.)

On the other hand, I also know plenty of people who grew up in very high-pressure situations (some from stereotypical first-generation asian families, some not) whose souls turned out just fine, thank you. I hate the pervasive notion that such families were somehow crushing their children's "true self" or whatever.

My guess is that there's no one-size-fits-all solution. Smart parents and ideally-designed school systems will adapt to kids' needs: allow the hard workers to grind boundlessly, let the meanderers meander without (while still trying to challenge them and spark their curiosities).
It might not help going forward, but I'd wager it'll help close a few cases in the meanwhile.
this makes a lot of sense, i.e. "the chances of you picking the right door out of a million on the first try are basically zero. do you want to try the other door now?"
Thanks a lot everyone for an amazingly prompt response. I did leave some important details.

The CEO is a serial entrepreneur - he has sold 2 companies to Autodesk and 1 to IBM in the past. He has enabled investors to realize exit profits in the US$180 million range with his founding team member involvement. He is also a highly rated and a well renowned speaker - this is how he gets business. Also, yes - they have been consulting so far but along the way, they have several prototypes developed (to be evolved to full products dependent on funding). I guess thats where the valuation comes in.

Someone1234: I like your idea of not putting all eggs in one basket. I think he did PMV at worthworm.com. Also, the fact that someone is willing to invest $2M - 10 multiple of the seed amount is $20M. Is this how you typically validate the PMV? And yes, one of my incentives to invest is to get myself paid. Is that a good approach?

kkowalczyk : I agree consulting companies cannot scale that much. But, this is positioned to become a product company (dependent on $2M funding) - in that case, what are your thoughts?

Jeffmould: The CEO has confirmed I will be at the top of the stack. Future funding will not dilute my equity. I like your idea of convertible debt to safeguard my investment. In fact, the CEO did mention this to me - he will take this investment as a loan to be returned to me - maybe he meant convertible debt? Is there anything more I should watchout for?

auganov: Thanks for your honest answer. I don't blame you as I left out the relevant details earlier. But how can I ask for 15% for only $100K when Mr. $2M is asking only for 10%?

lxfontes: Yes, if the $2M seed comes through, they have offered me a full time employment with some common stock but without the founder shares. Founder shares will only be given with cash investment.
> That's why my son is homeschooled.

I'm in a position where this is an option, but I'm concerned about social interaction? I think it's important for a child to spend substantial periods of time with his peers. How do you deal with this?
I'd mistakenly assumed that phrase had filtered into popular culture. Flying a desk is a euphemism for performing tasks of little importance, administrative busy work, pushing paper... while seated behind a desk.
That's no longer correct: all banks create money.

When a US bank approves you for a loan, it simply credits your account with new money. This money does not come from other accounts, i.e. this "investment" in you is made entirely with new money, created by the bank. When you repay the loan, the money disappears from the system.

There are limits to how much money can be created in this way, but those aren't relevant here.

http://www.positivemoney.org/how-money-works/how-banks-creat...
Segregation hasn't really worked so well in the past. . .
> If you open 99 doors that are full of mindless drivel, what are the odds the 100 is the one that has something interesting? This is why so many people were fooled by it.

So they thought "ha, this is foolishly wrong, I'll write in and tell them that—of course, without doing the 5 minute math check to make sure, first!"
I think there is a difference between "liking" someone and "feeling good about them" (i.e. believing they will help advance your cause).

There are a lot of people I "like" who I wouldn't let within 10 miles of any working or financial endeavour. But great to have a beer with.

I've also noticed that when your priorities shift, so do your likes.
Is line numbers considered "highlighting"? I mean, I get why you would want it but I never would have thought to ask for it.
Update: Thanks for down voting because I am the most unlucky person with crappy crappy computers.
Line numbers are really helpful when presenting code at an event, in a meeting, etc.
I hated Microsoft for years, for all the stupid garbage they pulled. Antitrust stuff, terrible software, mismanagement, etc. Even after switching to using a Mac full time, I still had to deal with awful Office documents with undocumented changes, or 'XML-based' documents with undefined data formats. Sending my resume to someone and finding out the entire thing had been reformatted into Courier New and lost all my indenting, making me look like an idiot, etc.

But lately, things have changed. Apple is the new Google, loved by the tech world. Google is the new Microsoft, using their market power to do dumb stuff that no one really cares about, and Microsoft is the new Apple, the underdog who got left behind by changing technology and ego and is making a serious, determined effort to become and stay relevant, to put out good products, and to regain their position as a market leader (earned this time, and not strong-armed).
When To Quit? Force a Moment of Truth (Steven Levitt, Econ Perspective)
The MSFT crew didn't set out to make windows, they took advantage of a market opportunity by buying DOS from one guy and selling it to another.

Billions of dollars in value is made by people who analyze markets looking for an angle.
Here is a story of something that happened to a friend of mine. This is from New Zealand.

He was taking 7th form Latin. Latin has enough students in the 3rd form but by the time you get to 7th form (The final year before university) there were only 20 or so students in the entire country taking the course. He was taking the course by correspondence because the school obviously wouldn't provide a teacher for a single student.

He scored 95% in the final exam. In NZ the end of year standardized tests are scaled to fit a curve across the entire country. He was scaled down to 43%. A failing grade.

Obviously in this case the only students that would bother taking Latin all the way up to 7th form are going to people who care enough about it to learn it well. The standard scaling method used doesn't make sense at all with this group of students.

He wrote a letter to the education minister of NZ complaining about this issue. Months later he got back a form letter explaining why test scores are scaled with no regard to the special circumstances.
in order to pick the "right" value of N, you have to know what value of N will maximize the greater good.

What? No. The comment said nothing whatsoever about 'N'. GP's comment was exactly this, and nothing more:

How would you even start to define a term like "the greater good" in a way that a law like this could event begin to make sense?
The point about religion is key. We really need to go back to basics with this stuff and reevaluate what exactly we're trying to achieve here from the ground up. We simply cannot retain first-class support for 20 years of legacy cruft and make meaningful progress. So if we could start again today, what would we want from a 'browser'? How about:

- A cross platform execution environment
- Hot code loading
- Fetch, load, run in seconds
- Source based; inspectable by user
- Complete separation from the host OS except via well-defined, permission-based APIs
- A mechanism for including 3rd party code and UI modules, fetched at runtime, and appropriately sandboxed
- A suite of strong, high-level, declarative UI APIs
- A suite of strong, low-level, UI APIs
- Good crypto support
- Pain-free concurrency
- A nice language that behaves well as a transpilation target
- Ints, floats, and all the other wonderful number types (and not just in arrays)
- Strong support for displaying structured information
- Accessibility, extraction, etc
- etc, etc, etc

I don't know about you, but none of these things scream HTML, JS, or CSS to me. HTML is an arbitrary XML schema that's fixed and subject to standardisation because it's trying to do too much: it cares about layout, content, semantics, accessibility, and programmatic stuff. All of that needs to be parsed out into separate, much simpler data structures anyway to actually be used.

And I'm sorry if I'm offending your world-view here, but JavaScript is a complete fucking mess. If you love it that's great - nothing to do with me - but as the only language on the dominant end-user runtime environment? What a sick, twisted joke. Honestly how much time has been wasted dealing with it's deficiencies? With a language that has a monopoly, every little quirk, every tiny failure in the design process that makes it do something you didn't expect translates to hundreds if not thousands of man-years shat away. I'm not exaggerating either: shit adds up at scale (and if you don't believe me, consider that the subset of British people who actually had reason to call the government(?!) last year spent a cumulative 750 years on hold).

So much of everything we do (in the western world, at least) is dependent on the technology we have for creating, moving, and consuming information, and the browser is the king of this world. So it's not just mission critical that we get it right, it's economy/happiness/progress-as-a-species critical too. A big shift here would be in the same ballpark as the switch from steam to internal combustion! And we already know it's possible, we're just too risk-averse to commit - but that's the short term view, in the long term digging this hole any deeper carries significantly more danger.

I suggest we take the plunge and commit to a wholesale overhaul to something correctly designed by the best minds around, and with an aim to deprecate the current system in 5-10 years. We're (slowly) doing it with IPv6 because we have little choice, let's not wait for that to happen here - let's get it done before we're in a corner and are forced to make a tonne of half-baked decisions in a hurry.
It's free software so that's no problem if you feel the need.
that's really interesting. apparently I need to read up
> The article doesn't discuss this, but I'm sure that played a part in why her detractors jumped on her so fast and so fiercely. They got told that this person was smarter than them, and they were inferior, and now was their chance at proving that that wasn't the case.

If only they had stopped to see if she was even wrong first, they wouldn't have proven the claim.
I agree that schools are failing all students, but I don't believe your idea of segregation will help resolve the diversity problems in tech. Perhaps it would be better to treat computer and coding skills like science, math, history, etc. and make it a mandatory subject for the entire class.
I did a comparison of Syntax Highlighter, Prettify and Highlight.js for weblogs.asp.net. I ended up preferring Highlight.js. My notes:

•	SyntaxHighlighter

generates tons of nested tables, doesn’t work well with Bootstrap (overflows into right rail)

•	Google Prettify

Worked okay, but kind of ugly. Had to use jQuery to apply “prettyprint” class to all pre elements.

•	Highlight.js

Easy to set up, lots of themes, seems pretty quick, regular updates

Sample post: http://weblogs.asp.net/jongalloway/looking-at-asp-net-mvc-5-...

Highlight.js + styles are hosted on cdnjs, which makes it easy to host on a blog.
Mixing large amounts is pretty damn hard, there's not enough volume to hide large transactions. Trading massive amounts of BTC to an altcoin would be even harder, concealing the movements of that altcoin would be pretty much impossible.

In the end the process of money laundering ends up being significantly more complicated than with "real money".

Don't go and compare Tor to BTC, just don't. They share nothing from a technical PoV.
I'm morally opposed to requiring or preferring custom cover letters tailored to the job being applied to.

I think people who demand this really are disconnected from the realities of a job seeker. It's simply a ridiculous burden in an age where you must apply for hundreds of jobs and almost all of them don't even make a single response to your application.

If I'm ever hiring, I will not require a cover letter. I also believe that candidates should be compensated for their time interviewing. As a graduate I once had a very small employer literally interview what seemed like 50% of my class for one single position. He spent over an hour talking to each of us, mostly just conversing and looking for ego stroking. This is abusive in my mind.
Or do it better to the point that someone else doing it doesn't matter? Google wasn't the first search engine after all....
I do very much agree with "you are less likely to understand the problem". That being said however, the contrary also appears true - I doubt the founders of Uber knew much about the taxi industry for example, but yes, they experienced the problem.

"... or knowledge of any secrets"

Did you read Zero to One? :)

"you may be less likely to believe in your idea when times get tough, because it is not deeply rooted in your experiences."

This is by far the point that resonates most with me from all the comments. Fair dos - point taken.
I notice that four of the seven authors with the smallest vocabulary are writing theater (Moliere, Shakespeare, Racine, Corneille). I think it's not a coincidence, because writing in rhymes must be a hard constraint in the choice of words one can use.
I'd love to see more male teachers. But I also think there's an (perhaps unconscious) sexist undertone that we need more male teachers because we can't expect boys to see women as proper authority figures.
Uh oh.

Your post sounds a little...extreme. Schools aren't evil. Bear in mind the effect your values are really having on your son. Keep in mind, too, the great social development he's missing out on.
It's definitely hard to do animations and touch interactions as good as native apps. Making responsive websites is really really easy for an experienced designer and/or html coder.
i'd thought about adding something about this but decided it's worth a full post.

i don't think you need very much of a cushion--i.e., 6 months of living expenses saved up is more than most founders have. but saving up a bit of money before starting a startup is definitely a great thing to do, and if you're an engineer willing to live cheaply, shouldn't take very long.

that said, startups are not the way to optimize for financial stability and not the right choice for everyone. if i had little money saved up and a family that depended on me, i'd choose being an engineer at a big company instead of starting a company until i felt i had some safety net in place.
Homeschool co-op for whatever amount of time you think is appropriate. They can be anywhere from one day a month to several days a week.
this reminded me of an interesting New Yorker summary of a study on 'filler words' and how our ability to speak and explain efficiently develops:
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/conscienti...
A great exercise in how never to sell something to anyone. Ever
SHIT YOU DON’T KNow ABOUT MANKIND – THE HISTORY OF MAN
Yes I definitely agree on GSS. Can't wait to try it!!
The issue is that you need to find an idea for a product, wherein 1) the product has the potential to generate tens of millions of dollars of value 2) the first, valuable, version of the product can be built in a couple man years. That is really, really hard to do. There are tens of thousands of smart, competent people searching for such ideas, working on such ideas.

If you want to make millions of dollars, if you want to make much more money than the average smart engineer, you need some secret. You need some idea or skill that happens to be the right thing at the right time. Nobody can tell you what that secret is. If Sam could tell you, it would not be a secret.

So you are right. There is something critical missing. What is missing is the actual secret, the actual idea that you have a unique insight into. But nobody can tell you what that will be.
> In a way this is partly a good thing. If everyone focused on going to space or curing cancer and were unsuccessful for quite some time we'd be in trouble.

Implicit in this claim is the idea that somehow we need someone to own things. Why is that exactly? In fact, employee-owned cooperatives demonstrate that when the doers own what they're doing, it can have some benefits for all involved.
Good point - my same process of thought https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9080740
This and the other Cherry comment capture my cynicism as well.

And the reason I'm cynical about it is that they story they offer doesn't seem to make sense to anyone who has purchased key switches for projects.

So lets break it down. $50 donation gets you 150 switches, they are looking to raise $1000. That is twenty $50 chunks, or 3,000 switches. So what they are really saying is that our vendor has a minimum order quantity (MOQ) of 3,000 switches, and if you all buy some, together we'll get switches and you'll get switches. That at least would be an honest narrative. And hey its helping the Open Steno project so its got that going for it.
A lot of YC's advice was not considered obvious when they started out (nearly ten years ago!).

If some of it seems generic and obvious now, that's because they've succeeded - more than anyone else - in discovering and sharing some actually repeatable strategies for building startups.
It's no secret that we've had problems with pro-Microsoft astroturfing on HN in the past. But the way to deal with this is not to make angry, substanceless accusations and then complain when the community responds poorly. Please stop.

I'm going to detach this subthread as off-topic now.
Many people also think they are experts in education, even if they don't have kids, but they've been to school.
Or this classic from my childhood http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Frisby_and_the_Rats_of_NIM...
What is the definition of clickbait here?

"Radical Statements about the Mobile Web" does, indeed, contain some radical statements about the mobile web, from a guy who works for Mozilla.

"Handling five billion sessions a day in real time" is... about handling five billion sessions a day in real time.

"The Unlikely AirBnB hosts of Japan" is... well, you get the idea.

Clickbait is when you give a story a title the actual content does not live up to. "You won't believe", when you absolutely will. "You'll be amazed" when you won't. The stories he's complaining about here are... just stories with titles.
I agree: Understanding something cognitively doesn't mean you've internalized it and can apply it. Even if you get ex ante insight from others, this can only partially help you because sometimes, you inevitably have to make mistakes yourself and learn only from breaking through your own sticking points.
The problem with the finance sector was actually largely the opposite: financiers were so confident the collateral would hold its value that they were happy holding loans made to people with little or no skin-in-the-game or ability to make regular payments. They assumption was that even if significant numbers of loans in a portfolio failed, the repossessed houses could be sold on, perhaps even at a profit,

Unfortunately the value of that collateral didn't hold up when a glut of repossessed houses appeared on the market and many prospective housebuyers suddenly found they couldn't borrow quite so easily any more.
Ideally if you are homeschooling, you will be involved with others homeschooling in your area. There are lots of great organizations around the US that help support homeschooling, and the kids have regular get-togethers. In my personal experience, most homeschooled kids have better social skills vs. traditionally schooled kids due to having to interact regularly with a much broader range of peers. They spend more time with kids of different ages, and adults, than kids in school do (as they're generally segregated by grade, and spend nearly all of their time socializing only with kids their own age).
Making a startup is both an art and a science. The part which is purely "art", the bigger part, you will have to learn through actual doing, but the "science" part, the small part which yields repeatable results in isolated areas of the craft, is something you can also learn from others. Sam did a good job summarizing all of that which is known to YC to be repeatable.

If all of the article rings true and obvious, you're done reading, it's only doing from now on.

If it reads unclear, you should watch and read the supporting material.

If it all rings hollow and devoid of substance, you will, too, have to start doing. Eventually you will come to similar conclusions under your own power (which is why I called it "repeatable" - it repeats quite often), and then your reading history will make it easier for you to come to terms with your own experience.
Genuine question, why?
I'd hope that AAP would have this right, but since they don't cite any studies - my instinct would be to assume that teenagers don't have a specific problem getting to sleep earlier other than social/cultural. It's generally understood for adults that you can train yourself to fit a different schedule (to become a "night person" or a "morning person"), what is it that makes this different for teenagers? Certainly when I was a teenager my failings to be alert in the morning were based on not going to bed early enough because of things I wanted to do and lack of self-discipline, not because of biological reasons.

And therefore, if school times were moved back would teenagers not just stay up later and still not sleep enough?
I used to work for a school system that experimented with gendered classrooms. While it would be a mistake to extrapolate too much from our experience, those became the most successful classrooms at the elementary school in question. The boys did particularly well.

Naturally the ACLU would rather fight to ban the practice outright than risk additional research possibly showing that this is a productive approach, at the expense of the preferred gender politics narrative.
> ONE of the biggest political issues in recent years has been that Wall Street has done better than Main Street. That is not just a populist slogan.

The economist behind a paywall is like an irony overload for me lately. This time using a populist title and introduction paragraph is all I see.
I thought this was a democracy!
> He hasn’t been allowed outside at school all week; it’s too cold

This is not the first time I read this, so it must be true, but it's the craziest idea ever. Not allowing kids to play outside (not making them go outside, regardless of the weather) is criminal.

I'm not sure this has anything to do with boys vs. girls though; I have 3 kids, two boys and a girl, and while the three of them love to play outside the one who likes it the most is the girl.

She's 6 and will very happily spend a whole afternoon jumping on a trampoline under light rain, as she did yesterday with no harm to herself or her health.
How to save time by understanding semantic versioning
Darkside Detective Demo
"So if you look at line 7, you'll see..."
Announcing Rust 1.0-alpha2
Industry brain drain.
3.9% vampirism is survivable.
More than that and we start to play risk-mania games with the point of no return.