lawtguy

I think this points out that the problem is we keep treating our children like adults. We've pushed to make them learn skills earlier to the point that kindergarden is now essentially first grade [0]. Additionally schools are cutting back on PE to be able to cram more education in [1].

The result I believe is that normal childhood development of self-regulation begins to look pathological and becomes diagnosed as ADHD. At the same time we've been demanding more at younger ages, ADHD diagnosis have greatly increased [2]. Additionally, roughly two-thirds of these kids won't have ADHD by the time they become an adult [3]. I think this points to the fact that we're simply expecting too much academically too early and we're compounding this by taking away the physical play that would help them develop.

We need to reset kindergarden back to where it was so that most kids have a chance to properly develop. We also need to restore the idea that children are suppose to play, that it's good for them and not a waste of time.

P.S: For that other 30%, ADHD is real and drugs may be entirely appropriate. I'd also suspect that more play and pushing learning later will help them as well.

P.P.S: We also need to find a way for the kids that do have the self-regulation to learn more advanced material. Right now schools do a terrible job of dealing with the kids on either end of the bell curve of learning skills.

P.P.P.S: Boys appear to lag girls by almost year in terms of their self-regulation [4]. I suspect that is why boys are far more diagnosed with ADHD. In any case, I believe this is hurting both boys and girls, it's just more apparent in boys.

[0]: http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/what-happened-kin... [1]: http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/education/many-schools-cut... [2]: http://psychcentral.com/news/2013/11/25/adhd-diagnosis-treat... [3]: http://www.healthline.com/health-news/mental-adhd-causes-pro... [4]: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/09/why-gir...

What your building sounds like a document management system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_management_system. Might be worth looking at some to see how they'd fit with what you're envisioning. Even if you write it yourself, it can be helpful to see how others have solved the same problems.

No, the computers they're handing out to the kids to do work on need to be locked down. There's no way that a school district would have time and resources to help every kid work through fixing the issues on their computer after they've bollixed something up. And they don't want the kids using a broken computer as an excuse for not being able to do their homework.

What they should add though is a IT admin/hacker elective that would be like shop class. They'd have a bunch of hacker computers that anyone in the class can have root access and would be allowed to try things out.

That blog post looks highly suspect to me. The AEI is reposting the work of a blogger who has taken data from two different sources: a paper on the GINI of individuals, and GINI as calculated for households and families by the CBO. There are two big problems I see:

The data on families and households includes capital gains, but the data on individuals doesn't (it includes only regular income). He hand-waves that away by saying, without proof, that capital gains are proportional to income, so that part doesn't matter. Given the differences in how we tax income vs. capital gains, I think excluding them from a GINI calculation is a big deal. Frankly I could simply interpret his chart as showing that rich are increasingly moving their gains away from income and towards capital gains to avoid taxes.

Second, for his graph of GINI for individuals, he's picked the GINI only for people that have an income. So again we're not comparing the same kinds of numbers. In that same paper, the one that includes everyone (not just income earners) shows increasing inequality in the last 30 years.

The idea is an interesting one: is the way we're structuring our families and households leading to increased income inequality? But unfortunately, the data he has is not good enough to show us one way or the other.

The white paper was pretty interesting. I'd certainly like to see Transatomic build a demonstration reactor. If you can really meet the promises of a half the cost and better safety, this could be key in getting carbon emissions under control.

A few questions (which hopefully are not stupid ones):

1) How does the auxiliary containment make the fuel safe? Does it just need to be large enough to let the fuel spread out and eventually cool down?

2) Is there any concern about maintenance of the auxiliary containment unit? Seems like the sort of thing that might have corners cut around it.

3) If the worst happens and plug unfreezes or the reactor breaks and fills up the auxiliary containment, what happens to the reactor and the surrounding area? Can this sort of thing be cleaned up and the reactor restarted or is this a bury it in concrete and leave it alone for 200 years sort of thing?

The problem with using a regular camera is you need a bright light shined at the iris in order to make sure you can see it well. Most people find this uncomfortable, which makes it hard to get people to adopt it.

Instead, most iris scanners use a near infrared camera and light instead. Near-infrared LEDs are cheap and and since you can't see the light it doesn't bother you. CMOS cameras can see near-infrared pretty well without any special processing. Typical CMOS cameras usually have a near infrared filter because without it images tend to look weird with the extra near-infrared light. So a standard sort of webcam or the camera in your phone won't work.

The ban also removes some of the reward for this behavior. Some of the people are doing it to make themselves look superior and the target inferior. With the ban, they can instantly be pulled up short ("Hey! We don't do that here at Hacker School.") thus instantly removing some of the superiority they thought they had gained.

I think this is exactly why they added this rule: some people didn't realize the negative effects of acting surprised when someone doesn't know something. The jerks are probably still going to be jerks of course, but for the others it's a chance to learn about how to better interact with the people around them.

Just to reinforce what Noddingham said: if you were a temp working for Kelly, you didn't get "fired": Juno Pacific called up your staffing manager at Kelly Services and told them that they didn't need your services anymore. Yes, that's a lot like getting fired, but if you were a temp, you were never an employee of Juno Pacific.

This is the classic "blame the parents" explanation (see refrigerator mothers: http://www.autism-watch.org/causes/rm.shtml). It frequently gets the causality backwards: the kids don't act that way because of their parents, rather the parents act that way because of the kids.

The vast majority of parents don't want a diagnosis so they can blame it on the disease and ignore their responsibility. They want a diagnosis because they desperate for something, anything to help their child.

"With 32 engineers over four years, WhatsApp built something that's as speedy and reliable as telecom text networks without any of the regulatory, pricing or spectrum advantages enjoyed by those companies"

While this is technically true, I think it's worth pointing out that WhatsApp doesn't work without those telcoms and all their regulatory, pricing and spectrum advantage. Frankly, WhatsApp did the easiest part of sending a message. That's not to say what they did was easy or trivial, but it's not as hard or expensive or labor intensive as installing and maintaining a wireless network.

WhatsApp did do something pretty useful though: they've shown everyone how overpriced SMSes are.

Lots of good explanations in this thread, but I'll add my own:

I'd call it the trap of the gifted, rather than the curse. That trap has three prongs:

1) Gifted people get concepts right away, almost effortlessly.

2) Because it's so easy for them, they never have to work at learning. It just happens for them.

3) Being so good at something earns praise from their teachers, parents, friends, etc. This often becomes central to their self-esteem.

This is fine until the day when their giftedness alone simply doesn't cut it. It could be in high school, or college, or graduate school or maybe even at some point in their professional career. But eventually it stops being easy and this is usually a very traumatic event.

Because of the three prongs of the trap, the gifted person finds themselves in a very hard situation. First, they are not used to frustration because previously they got everything right away. Second, they have no persistence because they've never had to work hard. Third, they become anxious and afraid and possibly even become depressed because they are no longer "smart" (at least by their own definition).

Being gifted isn't a curse or a trap in and of itself, but it can lead to a certain kinds of bad habits. Schools and parents tend not to do a very good job correcting these bad habits, which can lead to big problems.

From my observations, the effect of disturbing content seems to depend on the person. Some people see it, are disgusted by it and are largely unaffected. Some people (like myself), see it are disgusted by it and then are bothered by it for a long time.

I've noticed that my son is the same way, so I tend to be very careful about what he sees. He's definitely more sheltered that some of his peers, but that's based on how he reacts. It's important to know your kids and know how much they can handle.

The reason Steam does sales is because they make more money: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/10/24/less-is-more-gabe.... From the article, they expected that cutting Counter-Strike by 75% would result in 4 times the number of people buying it, thus being revenue neutral. Instead 160 people bought it for every person that regularly did, this increasing the revenue by 40x!

He's right about charging less in alpha and beta: those players are taking a bigger risk and for a multiplayer game he needs to build critical mass. But after the game is launched, Valve's results show that sales make you more money, not less.

I don't think it's as crazy as telling them to pick their computer up and drop it on the desk: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_III#Design_flaws

EMV (known as Chip and PIN in the UK) is coming to the US in 2015: http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/interviews/visa-on-emv-in-us...

It starts in the 1910's and 20's with Henry Ford: mass production of goods while paying your workers a high enough wage to buy your own products. This gets further codified in the 1930s with the New Deal: tax supported social safety nets, government support for unions and corporate regulation. The upshot of this is a new social consensus: the rich cannot get richer by taking a bigger slice of the pie, only by growing the pie.

Then World War II has two more effects: it finally kicks the U.S. economy into gear through massive government spending but maybe more important the rest of the first world (Europe and Japan) has most of it's infrastructure heavily damaged. The only other potential competitor, the Soviet Union, disengages from the capitalist economies of the 1st world and builds it own 2nd world of communist countries. This leads to spectacular growth in 1950s and 1960s for the U.S. and with the New Deal consensus it mostly goes to the working class and the middle class.

In the 1970s, the consensus starts to break down primarily due to two factors: automation and globalization. The rest of the world begins to recover and compete. And because thy haven't had the same sort of growth the U.S. did, their workers are much cheaper. Additional automation begins to create an ever-lowering ceiling on how much a low skill job is worth. Once the machinery to automate a job becomes cheaper than the worker, that worker is out of a job.

In the 1980s, the business owners (who never really like the New Deal) use their newfound leverage to create a coalition with libertarians and social conservatives to essentially dismember the government portion of the New Deal. Once this is done, the pie continues to grow, but the rich have start to grow their portion of it.

Apple did make a machine comparable to the Amiga 500, the Apple IIGS: http://oldcomputers.net/appleiigs.html. Similar in graphics and sound ability along with GUI OS and full Apple IIe emulation. It was certainly capable of playing great games: I spent many fun hours playing Dungeon Master on my IIGS.

It was pretty much a cheaper color Mac that gave Apple II users a straight-forward upgrade path and was great at games to boot. But I guess Apple didn't think any of that was important to selling computers.

I suspect that "burger diversity" is just a proxy for wealth. The wealthier a county is, the greater the availability of healthy food. Plus you can probably afford a gym membership and/or can walk/jog/bike outside without worrying about being mugged.

There can be a lot more that's going on than just they are bad programmers:

- They are solving a fundamentally hard problem: it's a problem that at first glance looks easy, but turns out to be really really hard (for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem)

- They are under-resourced and/or over-committed: they know how to fix your problem, they just don't have time to do it.

- Your not paying them enough to make it worth fixing: similar to the above, but in this case you simply don't represent enough revenue to make the doing the fix cost effective. Especially if it's a problem only you have.

- They have architecture constraints that make it hard to fix the problem: a bad/simple/incorrect design may make fixing the problem very hard

- They have legacy code which was poorly written or simply coded very fast and is now brittle and difficult to fix.

- They have internal political problems which are preventing them from fixing the problem.

I'm sure there are more that others here on HN have seen.

The worse case I saw of this was with a contractor who underestimated how hard the problem was, under-resourced the project and the resources that where on the project where not very good engineers. That project crashed and burned so hard there were lawsuits.

I support the right of a woman to have an abortion, and I'm also very uncomfortable with this product. In general, I think it's OK to cause pain or kill non-sentient beings as long as it leads to a useful end. Killing a cow so we can eat the meat is fine, but you're not allowed to torture it as you kill it [1].

An abortion is also OK on the same grounds: a fetus before 3 months of gestation is definitely not sentient, and killing it could prevent a great deal of hardship. To be clear, I think abortion is horrible, but it could be the least bad option available.

For this cockroach control toy, it's not clear that it causes the cockroach any pain, but it sure looks like torture. The potentially utility of it looks rather low as well. I can see that it could be useful for learning (and maybe some science as well) but I suspect at lot of people will buy it just for entertainment. That is what makes me very uncomfortable about this device.

[1]: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_slaughter

A billboard is bad metaphor for a website. With a billboard, you can get the information while standing in public or private space not owned or controlled by the advertiser. So a billboard is more like banner ad than a website. A website as a public store seems to be the better metaphor.

That could mean that creating a new account after your old account was banned could be a crime. That's like putting on dark sunglasses and a beard and walking back into the store after you've been kicked out. It's trespassing which is a crime. The difference is in the real world, simple trespass does not result in a life-altering felony conviction with a jail sentence.

The author may be correct that Nintendo is in trouble and will lose against Apple, Google, Samsung, Sony, Microsoft, etc. His mistake is in thinking this means that Nintendo needs to do something right now.

As a thought experiment, imagine a bad scenario for Nintendo in 5 years. They've been steadily losing market share and have eaten into their cash reserves. They've launched a new console and a new handheld that are largely seen as a flop. What are their options? Drop out of the hardware business and just be a game publisher/developer or sell themselves to another company. Basically the same options they have now. So they might as well stay the course and see if they can come up with another hit as it's not really costing them anything to do so.

The problem with that argument is it's pretty much the same one used by the prisoner's rights movement in the 60s. Their success in improving conditions for prisoners happened at the same time crime rate exploded. Since then politicians then vowed to "get tough on criminals" eventually in the 90s it "worked".

It's not really clear that being nicer to criminals was the cause of the crime boom nor that getting tough on crime stopped it, but I think the majority of people who lived through this era see it that way. And right now they are also the majority of people who vote (older people tend to vote more often). I suspect that arguments like these won't work for another 20 to 30 years.

The PIN is only transmitted to the chip embedded in the card. If the PIN matches, the smart card chip authorizes the transaction. So the PIN is never transmitted to the card processor, just the authorization message from the card. They only allow specialized tamper-proof terminals for Chip and PIN cards as that's the only place you could sniff the PIN.

There's definitely a bit hand holding with Parse that makes it attractive to a inexperienced developer. If opening a socket and sending and receiving binary data makes you nervous, then Parse is going to make you feel a whole lot more comfortable.

But the real win with Parse is that for small to medium sized apps, you don't need to manage your own servers. Apple takes care of delivery, Parse takes care of the backend. You don't need to worry about uptime or maintaince or 2 am notifications that your server is down.

A clear example of Betteridge's law of headlines: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines.

It's no for the simple reason that eventually entropy gets everything. So even with some radical life extension, eventually something will get him even if it takes the heat death of the universe.

More specifically, I also doubt he'll live much beyond the standard 80-100 years or so that a health human gets. He's looking for radical life extension or downloading his consciousness into a computer. I haven't heard of either of these things being done in animals. On the assumption that it will take 15-20 years from initially doing it on simple animals to being ready for humans, I think Kurzweil simply doesn't have enough time left.

I find the "Old Friends" hypothesis a good answer for why hygiene causes allergies: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1774411/

The basic idea is that the human immune system has co-evolved with a number of immune suppressing parasites. Hygiene has greatly reduced the number of these parasites we're exposed to and without them the human immune system is too reactive. That extra reactivity results in our immune system attacking proteins that are harmless, like pollen or peanuts.

So hygiene is definitely extending human lifespans by preventing us from getting deadly bacterial and viral diseases. But it may indirectly be causing auto-immune diseases. The good news is it's not all that hard to introduce safe parasites back into our bodies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy

I suspect that the we won't jump from fully manual cars to fully automatic cars. It will likely be similar to the auto-park function: we'll see more and more cases where automation is available at the request of the driver.

As car makers add these new functions, we'll start to get an idea of how liability will work with them. Some driver is going to get into an accident using this and then claim that the automation made a mistake. Should result in a very interesting trial.

It might end up taking a very long time to have the manual controls removed simply due to liability: as long as you can control it, it's your responsibility. Without the controls, it much easier to argue that Ford/GM/Toyata/Google/etc is really at fault for the accident.

Moderate alcohol consumption actually increases longevity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_effects_of_alcohol. So regular periodic consumption of a reasonable amount of alcohol is actually helping you.