thetabyte

I agree. Which is why government making the risky investments that more conservative businesses won't in order to create the empowering innovations that will save our environment and improve our economy is a major positive for me.

So you're telling me risky investments in possibly revolutionary startups can fail? If we go back to writing by PG, failures like this are proof we are making risky a enough investments to actually make a big difference.

Dumb question, as I literally know nothing about stock or savings: isn't it generally a bad idea to put 100% of your long term money in any one place?

No. No no no. Yes, arithmetic math does benefit from repetition and memorization, is useful, and your comments on why getting good at arithmetic is hard are spot on.

But math is so much more than arithmetic. Math is about learning to apply a variety of available solutions and processes to solve a problem. Math is about understanding relationships. It's why I get better at math in a combination of my physics and programming courses than I ever did in algebra or calculus.

In fact, the biggest problem with mathematics education is that it is not falsifiable. Measuring reasoning, logic, critical thinking, and problem solving skills is almost as hard as teaching them. Writing a generally applicable test that measures whether a teacher taught you to actually use and solve problems with math is nigh-impossible, made worse that students (and most of all, parents) don't want to be held accountable for problem solving, because it's too fuzzy, or because you just "have to be smart". The fact that real math skills are tough to teach and tough to measure is the problem, not the reverse.

So, I'm at the University of Maryland right now. All three mirrors seem to be down, so I couldn't check if my information was on the list. The article suggests this was done with SQL injection? God, I really hope my university is better than that. Or at least hashes passwords. I'd check if they did, but again, mirrors seem to be down. Sad thing is, I wouldn't be surprised. Despite the 15th best comp sci program in the nation, and ridiculous policies like "change you password to new unique password with at least 1 number and capital letter every 180 days", OIT seems useless on security. Sigh.

"had it certified"

Bam. I have no idea quite how intensive the review process is (I'm no Windows programmer, so the requirements don't mean much to me) but any additional barrier is something that holds back the finnicky and decentralized indie crowd. Not only will it present another technical barrier that they will have no interest in surpassing, but there will likely be a cultural and psychological backlash of having to certify their version 0 project with Microsoft. Not to mention how certification requirements would impact beta releases and feedback.

What people here aren't getting with the references to XBox and iOS is that Notch's objections aren't to closed platforms. He objects to PCs as closed platforms. Minecraft was originally an indie game developed for PCs due to their open ecosystem. It was only able to reach closed markets like iOS and XBox because of its success as a side project on an open platform. Notch strongly believes that the computer should stay a bastion of openness in order to sustain a indie game community--indeed, the majority of my own games I play today are small, independent games that provide a unique experience that I would hate to lose due to higher barriers to entry.

I'm loving the product so far, thank you very much!

Additionally, why can't we play Dungeons and Dragons and watch football? I heavily enjoy both. Not to mention Fantasy Football, which is a strategy nerds dream, that they can actually play with their non-nerdy friends. Come to think of it, why don't we have HN Fantasy Football leagues?

I'm loving reading all your comments about your process. Would you mind sharing some advice on writing your first ebook? What kind of roadmap should you aim for? Who should you have edit it? Should you? How much? Should you pay someone to do it? All of this kind of information would be great!

Everyone seems to be completely missing something PG made abundantly clear. Black swan farming is not what YC tries to do. They don't only swing for the fences. PG simply illustrated why and how it makes the most business sense. He says, explicitly, multiple times, that it is not YC's primary objective, they don't reject teams based on this criteria, and they aim to help all of their teams. His essay just documented the interesting truth that venture firms are better off with the unintuitive process of focusing on big winners.

I'm sure this is one of the things you're least interested in, but there are JPEG artefacts visible in your logo, pretty badly.

Ok, many have these quotes have been previously picked apart, so I'm going to focus on one particular one. Please, do not mistake this as a commentary on patent infringement, but rather the sheer inanity of some of these jurors' statements:

"There are other ways to design a phone. What was happening was that the appearance [of Samsung's phone] was their downfall. You copied the appearance.... Nokia is still selling phones. BlackBerry is selling phones. Those phones aren't infringing. There are alternatives out there."

Nokia and BlackBerry are hemorrhaging money. They are dying. They are proof that alternatives are not out there. I am not claiming this allows patent infringement (nor am I saying whether infringement occurred) but that was a simply ridiculous statement.

Additionally, the fact that "One of the jurors, believed to be Peter Catherwood, is a project manager with AT&T" presents a huge issue to me. The carriers are incredibly staked in mobile phones, and AT&T is a greatly invested in iPhone's success--their Android selection is poor. How can no one who reviewed this jury have said "maybe we shouldn't have a manager from AT&T"?

Finally: "Hogan was jury foreman. He had experience. He owned patents himself...so he took us through his experience. After that it was easier."

I've already seen a number of people criticize the foreman's leadership, but I'll add. The plural of anecdote is not evidence, let alone the singular form. He was not an expert witness. How can we know whether false or misleading statements by the jury foreman didn't redefine prior art?

This whole trial is ridiculous.

Yes, but does the fact that "nothing bad has ever happened" mean that "nothing bad will ever happen"?

As a developer, I'm familiar with the fickleness of software. What happens when we see HFT algorithms error in unison? What have we not thought about?

I think one of the goals with providing brief, easy to read summaries can (and should) be expanding the number of people who care what is in the TOS.

To be fair, neither is exactly terminology familiar with the average user, who I think they're trying to reach out to here. Both are clever, but known mostly by avid Internet users or nerds.

This is an excellent point, and a possible opportunity for class action lawsuit?

While this is wondeful, ZDNet misses something huge picked up on Ars.

"The FCC concedes that Verizon may charge $20 per month for customers who retain grandfathered unlimited data plans." http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/07/tethering-apps-must-b...

So I won't be benefitting from this. The most ridiculous, bullshit part of all of this is that unlimited plans aren't unlimited anyway. They have "Fair Access Policy" data caps (5GB for Verizon IIRC) that are just like the modern plans with a tad higher caps. They just advertise differently. It's the same damn thing. And I don't get free tethering. Ridiculous.

Oh wow. Incredibly prescient on most points. Out of context, much of the description of it's strengths sounded like those of Google (at least, those of Google within the past few years). In the same vein, many of the problems it mentions for Yahoo ahead are visible when you go to the Yahoo homepage today--especially the increasing number of services and topic hierarchy problems.

Now, what it says about advertising is another story entirely. A few years ago I would have dismissed it, but now it seems we may be on the verge of the problems he speaks about. We could use a more up-to-date run of the numbers, including look at trends starting back from 1998. I'm not sure how to go about finding data that old though.

Afterthought: Hilarious to read "3.0 seconds...fastest download times" sentence at the opening.

The big difference was that College Humor was/is a content creator, not just a content aggregator.

After some thinking, I'll go ahead. "On Happiness" addresses some life/purpose/possibly religious issues, so "your mileage may vary". That was the only section of my graduation speech that addressed happiness, but you're welcome to read the rest.

On Happiness: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11gFKnGCqW_vfp-vG_raj768Q...

Graduation speech: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N1JYKJkEPp_ib6aB4sS_Os-z...

They teach that everywhere. Just graduated high school here, most of my peers still use it. They even taught a special method for three term polynomials. Algebra II is the worst taught class of them all. People spend years after it still learning to factor. But yeah, FOIL is incredibly stupid, I was the only one that refused to call it that, and called it distributing instead (which it was).

It was a section of a longer work, which explored human purpose, so I apologize if the abbreviation makes it lose some of its meaning. I don't actually want to share the whole text at this point (some of it is a bit personal), but, on the other hand, you still raise a good point. However, it's my opinion (of course, I've never lived any of those situations) that the same lessons apply. If you do work that good for humanity, even if it is miserable work, you should glean happiness is what you are able to achieve. The conditions are different, but I guess my focus is on avoiding saying "This is what I wasn't able to do", and replacing it with "This is what I have done". Which seems to be a tough task for most any person.

I'm glad I could help somewhat. Believe it or not, that's my high school graduation speech, that I delivered a month of two ago. A lot of that lesson was actually driven by the college acceptance process, as well as witnessing a parent do to themselves what I mentioned in the second portion.

I know that this may just sound like telling you what you've always heard ("Just be happy!") but I'm going to quote my graduation speech, because in it I tried as hard as I could to express a lesson I learned about happiness.

"As I’ve said before, we’ve learned many lessons during our time here, but if there is one I could share with you, it would be the difference between greed and happiness. It is alright to make your own happiness a priority in your life—actually, it’s quite healthy. It’s not greedy to try to make yourself happy. You just have to properly understand the difference. Greed is the acquisition of enjoyment by taking what you do not have. What most people forget, is that when you get whatever it is, you’ll only want more. Greed only begets greed. Happiness is enjoying what you have. Happiness is learning to be content with that which is good about your life. There will always be something you don’t have. There will always be something you could have done better. There will always be things you fail at. Being happy is remembering that despite this, there is still plenty to enjoy in your life. If there’s anything I can ask you to do with your short time on this Earth, it’s to be happy."

Further, from a piece of writing I did:

"I have seen many people who fail to prioritize their own happiness. I work very closely with someone who does so. They work tirelessly doing something they love, and they are quite good at it. They help countless people, and they do a fantastic job achieving everything they want. But they are miserable. In everything they do, they only see failure. They see what they have not done, and what they did not achieve, and they see the same in the actions of others. Despite their successes, which they readily recognize, they fixate upon that which they did not do. And so, no matter how much they achieve, nor how successful they are, they will always have a reason to be miserable. It’s horrifying. I cannot imagine living my life in this manner. It would be a life without purpose."

And so, try to remember, there will always be more. There will always be something you didn't do, or could have done. But focus on what you did do. How you have succeed. Accept it, and enjoy it. There is no greater standard to live up to. Love what you've done, and be happy :)

Well, we still use social auth, but now it's LinkedIn :)

I think that's something we as a community forget. It's ok to feel proud of being good with your tools. It is fun. As long as we don't turn it into a "holier than thou" situation, it's neat to have an editor that you have such mastery over that you can control blocks of text with keystrokes.

Note: I don't quite have it yet myself. I'm been using vim for about 6 months (with only 2-3 of active use) and I'm actually right on that cusp he mentions--where you are searching less and less, and only for more powerful and obscure commands, and things are just starting to all become extremely useful. It's beautiful.

There are a number of things you can do (which most other posts are covering) but there is one I want to focus on: internships.

If you are in the financial situation to do so (especially if you are still in school) find an (people won't like me saying this) unpaid internship. At 17, in high school, living in the middle of nowhere, I put up my resume (with very little web development skills) on HackerNews saying I would work for free, remotely, about 8 hours a week. I got 10 responses. I took one doing Ruby on Rails with an organization that did pair programming exclusively and I learned more than I did in years of Java classes. With this training, I was able to find a two month paid internship in Ruby on Rails this summer, and hopefully this chain will continue upward into jobs. I cannot explain the value of on-the-job learning and experience, and if an unpaid internship is what it takes to get you there, I really recommend it.

In the meantime: -Learn git inside and out if you don't know it -Pursue a web development framework -If you have programmer friends, get together and code with them. Productive people make you more productive. -Whatever you do, put yourself out there. The more you are out there, the more opportunities will come your way.

The less was less about the fact that he did change it, it was the fact that, by oversight, he changed it, and deployed it live without once discussing or even mentioning the changes, even after the fact. She was understanding of the change and we're working on a happy medium (just as you said we should), it was just a shock to find something she'd put so much effort into go live completely different than she expected. That kind of communication among founders is vital.

-Jordan (1 of 5)

Well, it's only about a day old, but the conversation between him, her, and the rest of us went well from there. We're working on v2 right now :) I don't really think this is going to tear us apart--I was actually the cause of a worse mishap a bit earlier, and that ended much better after clearer, and apologetic communication. The point stands though, it is important that you stay considerate in situations like these, so they don't become something that jeopardize your team dynamic. Jesse immediately responded in an incredibly understanding and apologetic manner, and now we're working together to fix things, as we should!

-Jordan (1 of 5)