Six Apart Opens Up TypePad APIs, Relaunches Pownce As TypePad Motion - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/01/six-apart-opens-up-typepad-apis-relaunches-pownce-as-typepad-motion/ <comment><USER2> I have a lot of respect for Pownce. I had an account, even if I didn't use it as much as Twitter, and I was really disappointed when they closed down.

So I _want_ to be excited about this, but I find the "community microblogging" idea really confusing. I was clicking through their example site for FOWA, and I just don't _get it_. And this is coming from someone who just read an article explaining how it works!

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm disappointed to see that each of these TypePad Motion deployments will be closed on it's own, instead of hooking into some kind of distributed TypePad Motion network.

At any rate it's open source... looking forward to what comes out of the community's development on this.</comment>


Calacanis Combinator - <AUTHOR> http://calacaniscombinator.com/

<comment><USER2> Who else checked for a "news.calacaniscombinator.com"?

</comment><comment><USER3> I laughed so hard at this: When asked for a comment on competing with Calacanis' new incubator, Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham replied: "What's a Calacanis?"

Definitely the funniest AFD joke i've seen today. Not quite as funny as the comments from people looking for news.calacaniscombinator.com but still great.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder what the total amount spent on one off joke domains is per year, and where it would rank on the list of national GDP's.

</comment><comment><USER5> The only URL that matters 404s: <http://news.calacaniscombinator.com/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Google translate: Μην το ονομάσουμε μια μαφία, έχουμε εδώ και χρόνια

"Do not call it a mafia, we have many years"

<comment><USER7> Heh, it seems that that's been Google translated _into_ Greek as well, as it doesn't make much sense. A more accurate translation would be "let's not call it one [sic] mafia, we've had for years".

I'm assuming they meant "let's not call it a mafia, we've had one for years"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The $151k besting of Start Fund was pretty good, too.

</comment><comment><USER9> Best line is clearly Buffet's - "Why be CEO of one top-tier business if you are capable of running 10? If Kevin Rose took this advice we wouldn't have had Pownce.com would we?"

Verbal volleys.

</comment><comment><USER10> When will Calcanis Combinator launch Webspam News?

</comment><comment><USER11> Actually one of the better ones.

</comment><comment><USER12> Seems kind of obvious that Calacanis would eventually do something like this.

</comment><comment><USER13> Who's got a better copy machine Facebook or Calacanis?

</comment><comment><USER14> Hey. That's me! (The one that isn't Joel)

</comment><comment><USER15> i wonder if any startup in this CC program has to pivot?</comment>


Study Finds The US Is An Oligarchy (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/major-study-finds-that-the-us-is-an-oligarchy-2014-4?IR=T <comment><USER2> There is nothing people can do. The only change will happen when the ones on top, decide it's enough and that is unlikely. Everyone has become docile and the old ways of getting people in power to do something doesn't work anymore. Culture has even started evolving into a broadcast what I can get away with doing and that shows how one sided the system has become.

<comment><USER3> People recently elected Ocasio-Cortez, which shook up the Democrats and helped prove that money isn't a guarantee of an election win.

Clinton's loss moved the needle a bit, as well.

Change is frustratingly slow, but the best way to guarantee things will get worse is to give up on small gestures toward change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election." Aristotle, Politics 4.1294be

see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition#Ancient_Athens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition#Ancient_Athens)

</comment><comment><USER5> More detail from the authors: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey- cage/wp/2016/05/2...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey- cage/wp/2016/05/23/critics-challenge-our-portrait-of-americas-political- inequality-heres-5-ways-they-are-wrong/?utm_term=.efb37e649642)

</comment><comment><USER6> It's not just money, it's how we run our elections. A small minority pay attention to primaries, and those people's interests are different. By the time a general election comes, the candidates with broad appeal lost the primary.

</comment><comment><USER7> And more recent independent research indicates that the water is wet

</comment><comment><USER8> That government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich shall not perish from the earth.

</comment><comment><USER9> Prediction: conservatives and liberals will both read this as confirming their suspicions.

It would be interesting to note which policies are considered elitist so we can see specifics.

I'm assuming on tax policy this study would vindicate the left but curious about what other policies the "elite" like.

<comment><USER10> From the article: Realsearchers compared enacted policies to "the expressed preferences of average Americans (50th percentile of income), affluent Americans (90th percentile), and large special interests groups."

Researchers did not evaluate legislation on its merits. Indeed, they did not evaluate the legislation at all. They rely on work done by Gilens. Gilens assembled a dataset of survey results about support for legislation in which the income of the respondents is known. See Testing Theiretical Predictions section of the full reseach article: [https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/62327F513959D0A304D48...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B/core- reader)

Economic-elite is defined as individuals with income at or above the top 10%.

Assume less. Read more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is from 2014. It's completely true, of course, but old news by this point.

</comment><comment><USER12> Yeah, this is why people are mad now, and dare I say it exactly explains why Trump won.

The fact that the US is run for the elites isn't something that happened in the last year, its been that way for decades. Which is why when presented with the option of re-electing a dynastic choice for President and a (on the surface) political outsider who captured their rage, people voted for rage.

<comment><USER13> People are angry about elites and somehow they could be convinced to vote for a guy who is part of the elite, hires mainly people from the 0.1% and makes policies for the 0.1%. In addition the Christian value voters could be convinced to vote for a serial cheater and liar. That's true genius.

<comment><USER14> > somehow they could be convinced to vote for a guy who is part of the elite

You're politically left, that's why you don't see it. This is your blindspot.

Trump could be the leader of the elites, but he doesn't act, or talk like the 'elite', and most important of all, nearly all the elites genuinely loathe and hate him.

Bloomberg is part of the elite. If Bloomberg ran for election then the site which hates elite will not vote for him.

In fact, even if he did talk exactly like how Bloomberg, Laureen Powell Jobs, Zuckerberg, Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, etc talk, he is the anti- elite because all the elites hate him.

It's sad that the who explicitly prefixes his claim as 'dare I say' is being downvoted because you don't like what he said.

<comment><USER13> In what sense is Trump not elite? He was born elite, grew up elite and does things for the elite. In the context of the US being governed by and for the rich he is part of that trend. Maybe he uses different talk than the elite you mention. But they all have the same interest which is to amass as much money as they can in their own hands. None of these people cares about making life better for the average citizen. Maybe they do in an abstract sense but do nothing (like me caring for poor people around the world and doing nothing).

The elite are the people with money. They have the real power.

<comment><USER14> > In what sense is Trump not elite?

When did I say that he is not elite? That wasn't even remotely my point.

<comment><USER13> What was your point? I am curious.

<comment><USER14> Ok lets put it this way. Lets just say it is discovered that Jesus was actually a banker himself. Does that really change the fact that he purged the bankers/money changers form the temple of Jersualem?

And because he did that, do anti-bankers and money changers care about the fact that Jesus himself was a banker and a money changer? Especially since the banker community repeatedly comes to the television and talks about how Jesus is breaking the fabric of our society and throws a barrage of anti-Jesus message through media?

Look, Bernie Sanders made $1 million second year in a row, but do Democratic Socialists care about it? He is far richer than most of his followers would ever be, but if Jeff Bezos writes Editorials talking about how horrible Bernie Sanders is, then it just gives Bernie more credibility, irrespective of his newfound wealth.

<comment><USER13> The anti bankers should care if Jesus was a banker, did not purge the bankers from the temple but the only thing he did was not to talk like a banker.

I think we are talking about the same thing. Watch what people do, not what they say and not where they come from. Trump got elected by the little guy because he talked for the little guy but in reality he is another rich guy who acts for his people.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Coronavirus deaths of Wikidata notable people - <AUTHOR> https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Lists/corona_virus_deaths#Detailed_list <comment><USER2> A morbidly interesting fact, the total number of coronavirus deaths as of 2020-04-13 is 118,304 which makes the list total of 411, ~0.35% of the total deaths. [1] This compares to the 950,903 living "notable" people on Wikipedia out of the world population of 7.594 (~.013%) [2]

[1] [https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9814707](https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9814707)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Living_people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Living_people)

<comment><USER3> Two small caveats: there are more people in Wikidata than on the English Wikipedia, and Covid deaths are certainly underreported for the world's poor. Comparing the number of living people from the US or NYC with respective entries might be interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Another caveat: some people on that list became notable because of them dying of covid-19.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very sad to hear about Tim Brooke-Taylor this morning. I remember The Goodies fondly, and came across 'I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue' a few years ago and have listened to series after series since. He'll be missed.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is there a list like this for total deaths, year over year for notable people? I imagine, just looking at notable deaths would avoid some of the extrapolation and estimation issues of looking at normal deaths while still providing a large enough sample to be somewhat representative of the population. Would like to see if the number of deaths this year is out of the ordinary, or if this is like any other year (keeping in mind life expectancy has been decreasing for the past few years.)

<comment><USER3> This list isn't intended to suggest a lot of people die from Covid-19, just as you can't deduce the true lethality of the disease by looking at it's statistical significance among a non-representative group while massive countermeasures are employed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe I'm ignorant of how this works, but some of those people are a) not notable, or b) only notable because they died from covid-19.

What is this list?

<comment><USER7> I think to be in the list you need to have a Wikipedia page before your death, but some of them may not be in the English edition as I've checked

<comment><USER8> Yeah, many of them seem to have no Wikipedia page in any language. Seems weird.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does not contain any references that show that the individual in question in fact died from COVID.

<comment><USER3> Click on a person's name, scroll down to the Cause of Death property.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So why does not nobody post a list of last year's notable flu deaths then? Of more from two years ago, as the flu hits every two years. So far the numbers don't persuade anybody that this should a world crisis.

[http://euromomo.eu/](http://euromomo.eu/)

<comment><USER7> In my country (Spain), fatality rates for March have tripled for what is usual. They don't know where to store so many corpses, in fact they're using ice skating places as morgues. So it's obviously more than a flu and the systems are collapsed.

<comment><USER11> Don't bother. People making statements like this have already made up there mind. You are not going to change his.</comment></comment></comment>


Android Sales Figures After Placing 3rd in the Android Developer Challenge 2  - <AUTHOR> http://eddiekim.posterous.com/android-sales-figures-after-winning-the-andro

<comment><USER2> Wow, that's a huge improvement for Android Market sales figures in general. Just 3 months ago a top 5 app was getting $64/day <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=796685> and now #14 in travel is getting as much as $156.

<comment><USER3> It's an improvement, although maybe not in the marketplace itself but in getting tons of free press coverage from winning the Google challenge.

Remember that "we will win a competition" does not make a good business strategy.

<comment><USER4> I suppose that could be the case, or maybe it's the fact that Verizon has sold nearly a million droids in the past month: <http://gigaom.com/2009/11/30/droid-q4-sales/>

Personally, I think it might be the latter.

Android Market sales were stagnant because very few people had Android phones. The floodgates are however opening and in this coming year I expect sales will grow tremendously when the dozens of new Android phones are launched.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the release of the Droid phone has had a significant hand in the sales increase. I've read accounts from other Android developers who didn't make it into the ADC final round who still saw significant sales jumps around the same time due to the Droid phone release.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it just me or does Google not promote these apps at all from within the Android Market itself? I'm looking for some menu option or banner that says "Check out these great apps", and am not seeing one.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not just you. This is probably my #1 complaint about the Android market that I have. Unlike iTunes, where you can search and browse the entire app store on your computer, with Android you can only browse for apps on your phone. There isn't even a Google website where you can browse for apps, as far as I know.

<comment><USER5> Yep, I actually wrote a post about that a few weeks ago [http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/15/android-market-app- stor...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/15/android-market-app-store/)

About 2/3 way through the post I talk about a model they could use where they push apps to you OTA, which could be cool. Hoping they're paying attention. I also think it's weird that they aren't promoting ADC winners at all from within the Market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Android Market sales will increase when they offer paid apps in more countries. I'm from Canada, and if I ever decide to get an Android device, I can't purchase apps from the market. What's up with that?

</comment><comment><USER7> The standard in ADC2 is still a mix between the semi-professional and pro apps.

Eg, Speed Forge, which won one of the games awards, is a racing game that doesn't have a pause option. Visit the menu and you just lost the race. Totemo, on the other hand, also won an award, and is incredibly slick.

Hoccer is cool and innovative (throwing and catching data physically), Car Finder is, AFAICT, the inbuilt maps activity with a bookmark function.

I'd love to see the figures for the Totemos and Hoccers of the Android world rather than the Speed Forge and Car Finders.</comment>


Genetically modified food opponents know less than they think - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190114114221.htm <comment><USER2> There was another post a few minutes ago from another account calling the opponents of GMO foods 'extremists'.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18920595](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18920595)</comment>


Sleep and Mortality: A Population-Based 22-Year Follow-Up Study (2007) - <AUTHOR> https://fermatslibrary.com/s/sleep-and-mortality-a-population-based-22-year-follow-up-study <comment><USER3> The people that want to make criticisms about how this association is not causal can start reading halfway through the first column of page 1252. The authors are careful to phrase their finding as an association, not a causal relationship.

They discuss the confounds you might think of (sleep a lot because of undetected major illness? depression? etc) and their efforts at controlling for them.

They then acknowledge that there are still enough unknowns that they can't make a causal link, and that there should be more in depth and controlled experiments to investigate this phenomenon.

<comment><USER4> I agree. I think publication of studies/experiments that don't find anything particularly interesting should be encouraged not condemned.

It's much more of a problem that there's a bias to publishing to a headline. I'm, slightly irrationally, more inclined to believe this than a lot of papers.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. What can we really say is causal? Not that much in the grand scheme of things.

<comment><USER6> I suppose one could argue that in an absolute philosophical sense there is no causation that we can have knowledge of, only differing amounts of correlation. It would be an extreme position to take but - like solipsism - <USER2> difficult one to argue against.

(Anyone with an actual background in epistemology care to help me out here?)

<comment><USER7> Hume argues this in "enquiry concerning human understanding" [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/#Cau](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/#Cau)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Slightly tangential to the study here but I've been going down the sleep apnea rabbit hole in recent months and I strongly encourage folks to investigate their sleep. A lot of people have sleep apnea and don't realize it. You don't have to snore to have it. A surprising statistic I found was 20-30% of people with ADHD have sleep apnea. A lot of people may be treating symptoms of sleep apnea like ADHD and high blood pressure with medications while ignoring the root cause. My experience with this has been that doctors are surprisingly ignorant. They'll happy prescribe you medications for anxiety, ADHD, blood pressure for years, and never think to ask you about your sleep. Do some of your own investigations or ask about it if you have any suspicions.

<comment><USER9> Do you have any suggestions on how can I not too expensively measure my sleep quality at home?

<comment><USER8> If you're lucky enough to have decent medical insurance I'd simply bring it up to your primary care doctor for a referral or sleep doctor in your area (you usually don't need a referral if you want to seek out a sleep doctor directly).

They will have you come in for a visit to talk about your symptoms and evaluate you, then usually they'll schedule you for an in-home test, which means you get a little device to take home and strap to your chest. It'll have a pulse-oximeter you connect to your finger, and an air flow meter that you run to your nose using a nasal canula.

If this isn't conclusive or something else seems to be going on they will bring you into the lab to sleep with even more devices connected to you measuring brain waves, muscle activity, etc. These usually look like a hotel room so it's not too uncomfortable.

I wanted to get a head start on my own so I set up a camera that has night vision to record myself since I happened to have one. (Lots of home security type cameras will have a night vision mode.) It wasn't particularly conclusive, I couldn't really make out that my breathing was stopping, but it did make me realize I seem to wake up and move _a lot_. Additionally I was surprised to learn I sleep with my mouth closed, since I've always gone to sleep with it open.

There are options I've seen online from various online CPAP stores to order an in-home test as described above, I don't know how reliable they are, presumably they mail you the kit and you mail it back.

<comment><USER10> > Additionally I was surprised to learn I sleep with my mouth closed, since > I've always gone to sleep with it open.

Do you grind your teeth or clench your jaw when you sleep? If you grind your teeth your dentist will be able to tell. If you clench your jaw you will wake up with muscle soreness.

When I was a trader I had a lot of stress and would slam my jaw shut with enough speed to wake myself up, and in one case, break a dental appliance.

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure if you're implying there is a connection between bruxism and sleep apnea, but after a quick search, it looks like there is[0]. I've dealt with some of the issues mentioned above -- in addition to bruxism -- and never even thought to make the connection. So, whether you meant to or not, you may have just helped my tremendously. Thanks!

\- 0: [https://sleepfoundation.org/sleep-topics/the-link-between- sl...](https://sleepfoundation.org/sleep-topics/the-link-between-sleep-apnea- and-teeth-grinding)

<comment><USER10> Very happy to hear I've helped you!

I have also dealt with both bruxism and sleep apnea so I know the symptoms. I also thought the same thing about going to sleep with my mouth open. I figured we had something in common.

Eventually I had surgery to fix my sleep apnea. Saying the surgery was a life changing experience is an understatement. Getting proper sleep for the first time after being tired my entire life was a giant step forward for me as a human being.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Results: long (>8h) and short (<7h) sleep both associated with greater risk of mortality.

<comment><USER13> Does this take it into account of the possibility that people who sleep longer than 8hrs probably has other unhealthy habits, like lack of exercise etc..

<comment><USER14> Your question can be answered by reading the other comments here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> xkcd-sucks To everyone requesting more, different studies: Okay, you're correct in the philosophy-of-science sense. No doubt that feels good.

But, current understanding of biology is that:

\- Literally no biological process is not affected by sleep

\- Disrupting sleep disrupts whichever process is being studied

\- Literally every type of organism sleeps[0]

It's a _huge waste of time_ further proving that sleep is really, really, important, and this waste of time is actively harmful to everyone. What's maybe not a waste of time is researching

\- How to actually get things into a shape where sleep is a priority on a population level

\- Therapeutic interventions targeting poor sleep

\- Otherwise preventing or mitigating poor sleep

[0] Sleep:

\- Periodic

\- Quiescent (less activity, less response to environmental stimuli)

\- Homeostatic, e.g. sleep less now -> sleep more later

<comment><USER15> I think studies like this are important to determine the importance of sleep and the right amount. For example, this study suggests that too much sleep is harmful, which isn't a universally agreed-on point.

Additionally, sleeping isn't a binary thing. People do mini cost-benefit analyses: sleep an extra hour vs do more work? Sleep vs talk to a friend? Sleep more or spend time eating a slow, healthy breakfast?

Maybe the health benefits of sitting down and eating a healthy breakfast outweigh the benefits of sleeping by a large margin, although both are helpful. More research could help people make decisions about how much they sleep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What worries me more is the link between sleep and Alzehimer's/cognitive impairment.

</comment><comment><USER17> I would prefer to see an experiment (even on non human mammals) rather than see a study that likely cannot disentangle correlation and causation.

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure an experiment with non-human mammals would give you much either. How would you control how much sleep the subject gets? Only thing I can think of is sedatives to put them to sleep, and stimulants or flashing lights/loud noises to keep them awake. And those all come with fairly significant side effects, to the point that I imagine you'd really just be measuring the effects of those medications on the subjects rather than the sleep. But this isn't my area, and this is based on like 10 minutes of thought, so maybe there are more reliable ways to control sleep with fewer side effects?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I would love to see the results of a slightly different study where participants (usually) fell asleep and woke naturally (and without external influences like apartment neighbors or flatmates) and those who's sleep cycle terminated artificially.

<comment><USER20> There's been a lot of studies on such sleep cycles (esp: without an external day/night cycle). But I can't really imagine a study that removed people from external influences on sleep (including their own children) for 20 years... Without having serious issues with separating out other factors...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is a repost from yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16267306](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16267306)

</comment><comment><USER22> "Significantly increased risk of mortality" sounds like the participants were immortal before..

</comment><comment><USER23> (2007)

<comment><USER24> Thanks! Updated.</comment></comment>


Google Treks - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/maps/about/behind-the-scenes/streetview/treks/ <comment><USER2> There are some great images here. I like how Google has been striving to document more beautiful places. The sheer amount of brainpower and processing that Google is putting into Streetview is truly staggering and unprecedented. Nobody else out there is doing it in this way.

On a more hand-made note, my company, [http://360cities.net](http://360cities.net), has been publishing user- generated 360º imagery since 2006. I have built a tour of my own city, Prague, starting in 2004, which was before Google Maps or Streetview. We now have hundreds of thousands of images, (all high-resolution, completely spherical 360º photos) from every country of the world, including some very remarkable places in Antarctica, skydiving from an airplane, underwater, "remote" places such as Havana, Iran, Tibet, Burma, Easter Island, and so on.

Our "editors' picks" are something I'm really proud of. [https://www.360cities.net/search/@tags- editorspicks](https://www.360cities.net/search/@tags-editorspicks)

here is our world map. zoomed out, you should see only "great" stuff: [http://www.360cities.net/map](http://www.360cities.net/map)

Other services that are similar to 360cities include [http://viewat.org](http://viewat.org), [http://roundus.com](http://roundus.com), [http://arounder.com](http://arounder.com), [http://photosynth.net](http://photosynth.net).

Then there are the services for iphone/android 360º app, but these images are far lower in quality overall: [http://occipital.com/360/verse](http://occipital.com/360/verse) and [http://dermandar.com/worldmap](http://dermandar.com/worldmap)

edit: made all links clickable

<comment><USER3> Upvoted, bookmarked and thanks! Always in the look for alternatives to Google.

<comment><USER4> Why was this downvoted?

<comment><USER5> To expand on what themstheones said: upvotes and downvotes are for increasing the visibility of a comment in proportion to how it contributes to a good discussion. Downvotes aren't punishment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can't believe I'm typing this, but after the new Google map changes, it runs so slow on my home and office computer that I was forced to switch to bing. It still works on my mobile, but its just unbearable on the other systems.

I hope they create a more streamlined version soon.

<comment><USER7> Definetly slower. Also, there's some features I miss from the old maps, like navigation on the map while on StreetView and the measurement ruler (from labs). But you don't need to switch to Bing as you can still change to the classic google maps.

<comment><USER6> I'm glad to hear I am not the only one with performance issues. That is a lot more upvotes than I expected, especially considering how google heavy the user base is here.

I love google's products and the fact that they all work together but everything seems to be running slower than it ever has before.

Looking at the comments below, it is pretty clear that other people are also having this issue.

It takes a lot for me to stop what I am doing, and move over to Bing so if I am doing it, other people are doing it as well.

They should put making all of their applications less CPU intensive at the top of their list, right away.

===Also, while I am complaining about Google products, the google news doesn't let me easily search by time anymore which has also forced me over to bing. Articles from 30 days ago are rarely useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Google can't wait to usher in a future where people stay in their rooms and eat Soylent while being entertained and exercised by their VR-enabled computers.

<comment><USER9> Check your bipedal privilege cis scum. No but seriously, every time you feel the urge to make a luddite point remember that there are disabled people who are getting a whole new lease on life via enabling technologies.

<comment><USER10> "Scum"? Trying to raise the level of discourse are we?

<comment><USER11> If you're wondering why you're being downvoted, google the phrase. It's a well known joke.

<comment><USER10> My sarcasm meter must've been on the fritz at the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Where do I apply and what is the hourly rate? I assume all travel expenses are also paid.

On a serious note, in the footsteps of OpenStreetMap that could be a great next community project: write the software for the infrastructure and the camera gear, open the designs of data collecting hardware (for the 3D printers) and let people upload their treks.

<comment><USER13>
      > Where do I apply

[http://www.google.com/maps/about/partners/streetview/trekker...](http://www.google.com/maps/about/partners/streetview/trekker/)

<comment><USER14> One of the richest companies in the world are asking the public to help them for free?

<comment><USER13> You've just found Google's business model !

Seriously though, this is better done by locals who knows the place than by some Google minions.

I think the business model will be selling it to famous landmarks and malls, who have to do it for brand reasons (and then trickle down on the famous scale). See the examples, Burj Khalifa (big ugly tower), Everest, Grand Canyon, Venice, highly touristic places.

Expect Eiffel tower, Liberty Island, not beautiful "treks".

<comment><USER15> > You've just found Google's business model !

This is essentially correct. Google makes money via providing access to content created by other's.

Try "Who Owns the Future" by Jaron Lanier. It's an interesting read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here's what the non-car-mounted camera machines look like, if anyone's wondering:

[http://i.imgur.com/BjHLoPh.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/BjHLoPh.jpg)

<comment><USER17> The camera machine can be seen very clearly in this video: [http://youtu.be/cn7AFhVEI5o?t=43s](http://youtu.be/cn7AFhVEI5o?t=43s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Great, now when the f __* am I going to get terrain back on Maps for Android?! Last summer, my phone provided some information about terrain difficulty for light hikes (serious ones should involve a paper map so that you 're not screwed if you lose battery/signal/whatever), bike rides and whatnot. This summer, with a newer, fancier, Nexus 4, that information is gone. The world is flat, indeed.

<comment><USER2> If you use the distance measurement button, it tells you the elevation of the segment you are measuring, I believe. I know this is not the same thing, but maybe it's helpful.

<comment><USER19> The distance measurement tool has been removed from more recent versions of Maps. It's why I haven't upgraded to the latest version, as the elevation profiles from the distance tool are really handy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is a little unrelated but I notice that all Google services are getting very slow. They eat up CPU and memory like it's nothing.

It's nice what can be done with Internet these days but I prefer the old quick Google with almost the same features but less shine.

<comment><USER21> Yup. This surely is unrelated.

<comment><USER20> Well in fact it wasn't that unrelated. I can barely watch the special Google maps sites like this one: [http://www.google.com/maps/about/behind-the- scenes/streetvie...](http://www.google.com/maps/about/behind-the- scenes/streetview/treks/burj-khalifa/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I have heard Google plans to do street-view of Burning Man, but it has never appeared. Perhaps this will be the venue if/when it finally does.

<comment><USER23> Probably not going to happen. The organizers require (or used to require) a percentage of all revenue made from professionally taken photos [0]

[0] [http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/burningman.html](http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/burningman.html)

<comment><USER24> That's crap.

Edit: damn, we need more people like jwz.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I hope they render some of these for the Oculus. Making View, a Norwegian company with similar 360 degree camera technology has released a few Oculus demo clips of people doing amazing things with their cameras. [http://makingview.no/makingview.com/?page_id=1691](http://makingview.no/makingview.com/?page_id=1691)

</comment><comment><USER26> I would do this in a heartbeat, even for a substantially reduced salary. Assuming travel expenses and meals/shelter are paid for (within reason) I'd travel all over the world for an opportunity like this. Awesome. Google's been coming under a lot of fire lately but between this and Google Loon[1] I think Google's cooking up some really innovative, practically useful and genuinely creative toys for the world to play with.

[1]: [http://www.google.com/loon/#utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc...](http://www.google.com/loon/#utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Global_semBK)

</comment><comment><USER27> For anyone else confused, as I was, by the Everest trek photos: these were taken with tripods and not with the new Trekker gear.

</comment><comment><USER28> It would be nice to try something like this with Oculus Rift and video. Would probably be a cool experience to view the trip down the Amazon Basin in a video and thanks to 360 degree camera / video capture, one would be able to move the head around and get an interactive experience out of it.

I would like to try something like this just to test what kind of "being there" feeling would be achievable with the current tech.

<comment><USER25> See my link below for an Oculus demo using 360 degree cameras. It's doesn't feel nearly as fluid or 3D as the other Oculus demos, but it's promising nonetheless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> One less reason to go outside my basement, great!

</comment><comment><USER30> It's mind boggling how bad the arabic translation is at: [http://www.google.com/maps/about/behind-the- scenes/streetvie...](http://www.google.com/maps/about/behind-the- scenes/streetview/treks/burj-khalifa/)

It's like they ran the text in google translate and never bothered to check the results.

<comment><USER31> Never mind the actual window-washers and builders who made these buildings are de-facto slaves to the Monarch of Dubai Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. Then in the next demo over they try to get all multicultural with the first nations language "ᓱᑯᑦᑎᐊᓃᒃᑲᓗᐊᕐᖓᑦ ᐃᖃᓗᐃᑦ? "

[http://www.vice.com/vice-news/the-slaves-of-dubai](http://www.vice.com/vice- news/the-slaves-of-dubai)

<comment><USER32> Arabic is a bit like English. Just like how England is not the country with majority of English speakers, In the same way 'Arabs' don't make up all the Arabic speakers.

Arabic speakers exists in nearly every country where there are Muslims. Which is what nearly 30% of the world population?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It would be amazing if we could put these in the Oculus rift someday. Are there any plans for that?

</comment><comment><USER34> For the times you want to go outside while sitting on your chair in front of your computer ?

</comment><comment><USER35> Stuff like this makes it really hard to stay angry at Google.. just beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER36> It's a shame that the page performs so `jaggy` on my computer.

</comment><comment><USER37> Great images here and thanks google did this for the world

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm going to do one on Compton, CA.

<comment><USER39> I see you got downvoted, but ruins of all kinds have always been popular, and a classic recent linkbait has been "pictures of the ruins of abandoned Detroit", seems like every popular magazine / website has tried that one as linkbait.

It seems both inevitable, interesting, and on topic.

Using census records I found the house some of my ancestors lived in about a century ago. The neighborhood has gone, uh, dramatically downhill since then, I wouldn't go there today without kevlar and a rifle, but it was interesting to view the original mostly unmodified house on streetview.

There is also a whole "urban explorer" subculture out there and legally obtained pix of ruins would be interesting.

<comment><USER38> I actually wasn't even joking. I install a shit load of alarm systems down there. Around 10 a month, in abandoned properties. Thought it would be an interesting take on Trek.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Did anyone else see the similarity between the examples and New York Times Snowfall?

</comment><comment><USER41> They should hook up with a buddy of mine eric! He's currently going to all 194 countries and having some amazing experiences. Seems like the perfect partnership!

[http://gowitheric.com/](http://gowitheric.com/)

</comment><comment><USER42> Just because it's from Google it must be special?

Don't want to sound too negative but wondering if Trek would get any attention if done by some startup.

<comment><USER26> I'm not sure you appreciate the engineering infrastructure at work here. This isn't special because Google is doing it, it's special because it's _really_ hard to do. How would you go about attempting this project as effectively as Google with the resources of a typical startup company?

<comment><USER43> Crawl the web for images, use the GPS EXIF data to find clusters, and use image processing to stitch together 3D environments from the photos.

It would not be as good as streetview though.

<comment> mh- Microsoft did this, effectively. Someone who remembers the project can provide a link to the demo/talks (TED, if I recall) hopefully.

edit: believe it was related to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynth](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynth)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> What a blatant PR attempt to put lipstick on a pig.

Do not forget who we're dealing with, Google gave the NSA unrestricted access to every system without any legal challenge. No amount of pretty photos will make up for that.

<comment><USER45> Google didn't "give" the NSA anything. The NSA forced their way in.</comment></comment>


Nook Color gets Froyo, Flash, Facebook, and Angry Birds - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/04/nook-color-gets-froyo-flash-facebook-and-angry-birds.ars <comment><USER2> I like that the price point makes it one of the most affordable Android "tablets" but the e-ink refresh rate must make motion games like Angry Birds hard to play. Has anyone given it a try?

<comment><USER3> It's not e-Ink, that's its sister device the "Nook", the "Nook Color" has a very good but otherwise standard color LCD with a high DPI.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Our first iPhone app, built entirely in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://ravn.com/getapp

<comment><USER2> Hi, I'm the CTO for RAVN. When we decided to jump into the mobile dev game no one in our company had any experience with Object C or Android dev. We knew we wanted an iPhone app for sure, and probably an Android app eventually. I had taken a brief look at Objective C previously, and coming from Ruby/Rails, it looked less than trivial (memory management?! I hadn't done that in 10 years). I had heard about frameworks that would allow us to use JavaScript to write our app, and also allow for cross-platform development, so I started researching.

I looked at PhoneGap and Titanium primarily. We ended up going with Titanium for a few reasons:

\- As you may or may not know, PhoneGap works by creating a sort of Safari "wrapper" that lets you write your app in HTML5 and JS. But the performance is crappy relative to native rendering. Titanium also _used_ to work the same way, but more recently it actually compiles code written in JavaScript to native Obj C and Java. Clearly the benefit is speed.

\- Even though Titanium only supports iOS and Android, we didn't really plan on ever developing for other platforms (e.g. Windows Phone, BlackBerry, webOS).

If you're looking into developing a mobile app, I would recommend taking a look at Titanium. To be fair, I had to write a little Obj C to hack geofencing functionality into Titanium (if you're interested in that: [http://stevenou.com/post/17623116547/how-to-hack- geofencing-...](http://stevenou.com/post/17623116547/how-to-hack-geofencing- into-titanium)).

There were lots of pros and cons to using Titanium and I'd be happy to answer any questions.

<comment><USER3> It's been 4 or 5 months since I switched from Titanium to writing native Objective C myself, so things may have changed since then (but I don't think they have). It's a misnomer to say that Titanium "compiles" Javascript to Objective C.

Titanium lets you write Javascript that executes using JavascriptCore (a Javascript processor that is part of iOS) on iOS, and I believe V8 on Android, but I could be wrong on that. Then, they have bindings in Objective C (and Java). So when you call in Javascript Titanium.window.create();, the relevant Objective C is executed by the bridge.

This is all fine and dandy until you start doing something more complicated than displaying a few windows. For example, our app needed to have some complicated TableViews with highly customized rows that needed to be re- generated on each draw. Executing the logic for that in Javascript has a huge penalty hit.

So while I would recommend Titanium over PhoneGap any day, it is not true that it is a "compiled to Objective C" sort of thing (again, at least it wasn't 4 months ago, and I was using at that time 1.80 which was the super-bleeding- edge-dev build, because I had a ton of issues with random crashes in the 1.7x series due to the Titanium Database module not being completely thread-safe at the time).

Sorry to hijack.

EDIT: Just to confirm, 1.81 is the current "stable" release, so what I was using 4 or 5 months ago is what is the standard now. So it does not compile Javascript to Obj. C.

Also, for an example of the random crashes we were seeing, see: [http://www.juliusbuss.de/web/youatnotes/blog- jb.nsf/dx/quick...](http://www.juliusbuss.de/web/youatnotes/blog- jb.nsf/dx/quick-tip-for-titanium-developers-use-1.8-sdk-instead-of-1.7.5-to- avoid-random-crashes.htm)

A lot has been fixed in the 1.8x series, but at the end of the day you're still depending on someone else's middleware to behave and not crash your app for no reason.

In case anyone decides to go down the learning Objective C route, learning with the excellent "Programming iOS 4" book took me about 1 month from the first page I read to having the whole app re-written, so it's really not too terrible. You don't have to do any of the memory management stuff anymore with iOS 5 and ARC, either.

<comment><USER4> Titanium was a nightmare. The edit-compile-debug cycle is so slow. I ran back to ObjC after two weeks. Development is faster and the resulting apps are better.

It has good points too but for me it was a net negative. You couldn't insert rows into a table view without it crashing, you had to reload the entire thing (that was in May).

I'm amazed at the results some people get with Titanium. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but I'm very familiar with web dev and found it intolerable.

<comment><USER5> One trick that really helped with the edit-compile-debug cycle, especially on iOS, was to run the app from the command line instead of using Titanium Studio. I set up a Rake task that would run the app and then listen for a timestamp change to tmp/restart.txt, at which point it would restart the app within seconds. I already had a vim command for touching that file (it's used by Passenger for a similar purpose) so all I do while developing is press a key combination and wait for the simulator to pop back up. Very fast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am the founder of <http://theicebreak.com>

We have built our app ( Icebreak for Couples - <http://itunes.apple.com/app/id476063944> ) using Titanium.

When we started building it, Titanium was very very buggy. It has since improved, but still has a lot of really basic stuff that is broken. Their forums have a lot of questions that have been unanswered for over an year.

Our reason for picking Titanium was basically to have an app that is just like a native app on both iPhone and Android without writing the code twice.

We have found out that porting a Titanium app to Android is taking a ton of effort, lot more than we originally thought. I would be curious to hear what the RAVN team has to say regarding their Android version.

Its just not as cross-platform as we thought :(. I would be extremely careful before picking it in the future.

Basically, if you build native apps:

Native App: iPhone=1X, Android=1X. If you want both Android and iPhone: 2X

Titanium App: iPhone=2X,Porting to Android: 0.7X. Total effort: 2.7X

Native Wins.

<comment><USER2> Exactly the same sentiment. That's the reason we did not launch with an Android version today. We will probably write it natively when the time comes. Titanium has proven to be a nightmare with Android.

<comment><USER7> Boy, do I feel you there. I've been working with Titanium since last March and I've yet to develop some semblance of a cross-platform application. It's a bloody mess in there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Care to expand on the "built entirely in JavaScript" part? Sounds interesting.

<comment><USER9> Presumably it's a "single-page web app", where the HTML page is essentially empty except for JavaScript.

This JavaScript then performs the rendering by dynamically constructing an HTML page with the DOM, as well as fetching data from the back end, and so on.

It's a fairly common application model these days.

They probably use PhoneGap or something similar to glue into the mobile OS environment. (Edit: They use Titanium.)

My company is developing a very similar events app, also written entirely in JS (PhoneGap, Backbone, etc.). There are so many challenges in making it a smooth user experience comparable to a native app, but we've finally gotten there.

<comment><USER6> They are using Appcelerator Titanium, which is a cross platform app SDK.

You write your code in Javascript, and Titanium actually generates native code that is then compiled into an app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What framework did you use?

</comment><comment><USER11> The landing page is fantastic. Super simple initially, more info if I want it. I wish the features section was more visual.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm pretty impressed with what you can achieve by running JS in a WebView, that said, it still is not as responsive as a native app. This is one of the better attempts I've seen though at bridging the gap between HTML5 and native, perhaps it just needs another year? keep up the good work!

<comment><USER6> It's not a HTML app, but built using titanium which is a cross platform app sdk where u write the code in JavaScript.

One day we will be able to do this using just HTML... But that day is not here yet :(.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The app looks great, congrats on that. The thing that bothers me though is that it posts stuff on my FB timeline without my approval first. This does not sound like a good practice.

</comment><comment><USER14> Though with titanium and phonegap you still cannot tap into the full capacity of the phone.

<comment><USER15> they both have plugin systems that allow you to write normal objc code to do anything that wasn't available in their apis... so if you ever needed to call opencv code from javascript, you can do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is there any way we can add our own events ?

<comment><USER17> And, either way, what is the source of the events? Are you really doing them all by hand?

<comment><USER18> I'd like to know this too, considering you have stuff coming up in Orlando which none of the SV startups care about usually.</comment></comment></comment>


Unigo: "why didn't I think of that" startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/magazine/21unigo-t.html?hp=&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> I'm impressed. A kid has the guts to go out, follow his idea, meet some well- connected folks, sell those folks, get some funding, execute on his idea, and then sell the NYTimes on it.

Reminds me of a quote I read from John Mackey, founder/CEO of Whole Foods: "I would say that entrepreneurs are only a step up from panhandlers because you've got to go out and hustle money, and you're mostly selling dreams and enthusiasm."

(From a really great/long interview here: [http://time- blog.com/curious_capitalist/2008/06/former_house...](http://time- blog.com/curious_capitalist/2008/06/former_housemates_john_mackey.html))

<comment><USER3> There are other ways to start a startup. You don't need all that to be successful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good idea for a startup.... buuut it might be better if their site worked.

I tried to register and:

Invalid postback or callback argument. Event validation is enabled using <pages enableEventValidation="true"/> in configuration or <%@ Page EnableEventValidation="true" %> in a page. For security purposes, this feature verifies that arguments to postback or callback events originate from the server control that originally rendered them. If the data is valid and expected, use the ClientScriptManager.RegisterForEventValidation method in order to register the postback or callback data for validation. System.Web.UI.ClientScriptManager.ValidateEvent(String uniqueId, String argument) +159 System.Web.UI.Control.ValidateEvent(String uniqueID, String eventArgument) +108 System.Web.UI.WebControls.DropDownList.LoadPostData(String postDataKey, NameValueCollection postCollection) +55 System.Web.UI.WebControls.DropDownList.System.Web.UI.IPostBackDataHandler.LoadPostData(String postDataKey, NameValueCollection postCollection) +11 System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessPostData(NameValueCollection postData, Boolean fBeforeLoad) +353 System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) +1194

<comment><USER5> It's probably under huge load from the NY Times article.

<comment><USER6> Nope, that's a misconfigured server, an error that only crops up when using multiple server without having sync'd some keys in the machine.config properly.

<comment><USER7> I got the same error on a few pages, but the site also (repeatedly and reproducibly) crashed my browser when I tried searching for a college.

I thought I would love the site after reading the article, but the actual execution kind of sucks...not just because of the programming errors, but because of the general site design and 'flow.'

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> NYTimes has a history of these "All is takes is guts!"-type articles.

[http://blog.aisleten.com/2008/01/18/build-a-crappy- website-m...](http://blog.aisleten.com/2008/01/18/build-a-crappy-website-make- a-million-dollars/)

It takes more than guts, and it's not easy. It just pisses me off to see article after article telling the "I woke up the next day to cash my first million dollar check!" story.

To get the real truth about running your startup, forget about all these fairytale fantasies and read Diary of a Failed Startup. That's the true story of what you face.

<http://diffle-history.blogspot.com/>

</comment><comment><USER9> It's definitely a new approach but not a new idea: <http://www.collegeconfidential.com/>

This really is a great domain (problem area, not uri) for a wiki though.

<comment><USER10> This sort of thing would be great if it was cloned or expanded to cover UK universities. There have been an increasing number of really ropey institutions and courses popping up over recent years and many students don't realise they're in such a university (get 'em in, take the fees, put them through the least rigorous process possible, print them a degree in something like "e-Music" or "Film, TV and Radio Studies") until they're quite heavily invested.

A site where people could frankly and honestly say "this course was worth doing for me because" or "I feel that I made the wrong decision coming to this uni because" would be brilliant at a time when uni education here is becoming more expensive and people are starting to have second thoughts over whether it's worthwhile. At present, the most popular such site in Britain is a simple vBulletin forum. There's a gap there if someone wants to run with it!

<comment><USER11> I made a little site along these lines a while back but other stuff came up and I never got around to finishing it. I've just put it up here - <http://www.yamooki.com> \- if you want to take a look. Never got around to adding a review feature, I'll do that and hook it up with Facebook Connect when I get a spare couple of days. That (FB Connect) should make some interesting things possible, like being able to add as friends those users who have shortlisted same course as you, male/female ratios etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Now Goldman goes to work every day on Park Avenue, in an office with an interior window through which he can keep tabs on his 25 employees"

An office on Park Avenue and 25 employees before the idea has even been proven. Madness.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've asked a ycnews user who was one of six Stanford students who were working together at the start of 2007 to create a startup where students from different colleges would record video tours of their schools, to comment. I think they had applied for Summer Session 2007 funding, but I'm not sure.

</comment><comment><USER14> There's really nothing new under the sun, but success has as much to do with timing and luck than with skill and perseverance. When I was 17 I founded soc.college.admissions for a related purpose. For those of you who don't remember USENET, think of it as the poor man's web. Mostly text only, and uncontrollable, it was eventually overrun by spammers and eclipsed by the Web. And does anyone remember sixdegrees.com in 1998? It was the first LinkedIn/Facebook site to see major publicity. The not-yet-ready public was horrified at the privacy implications, and it died.

</comment><comment><USER15> TheU.com pretty much did the same thing -- not sure what happened to them. The site was pretty decent (more so for entertainment purposes) when I was going through the admissions process.

</comment><comment><USER16> unigo.com has some serious issues on Firefox:

If RadComboBox is not initially visible on your ASPX page, you may need to use streamers (the ExternallCallBackPage property) Please, read our online documentation on this problem for details [http://www.telerik.com/help/radcombobox/v2%5FNET2/combo_exte...](http://www.telerik.com/help/radcombobox/v2%5FNET2/combo_externalcallbackpage.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> how does it make money?

<comment><USER7> Advertising.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Custom Ipsum Generator for my team - <AUTHOR> http://www.landscapeipsum.com <comment><AUTHOR> I'm an SEO for a startup and I got tired of Lorem Ipsum and due to my company's dev/design process, more times than I'd like it makes it to a live webpage and goes unnoticed for weeks or months. So I figured if it'll sometimes make it to a live webpage for Google to index, might as well have some keywords of value in it (I know, keyword stuffing is bad, blah blah). I decided to make a Landscape Ipsum generator to use and publish it on the web in case anyone else ever needs this niche Ipsum content for websites they're making/mocking up. It was only like an hour of PHP but I don't ever really code custom stuff, so yes I am a little proud of it.</comment>


The Oscillation of R33 - <AUTHOR> http://airminded.org/2015/09/30/the-oscillation-of-r33/ <comment><USER2> Fascinating read.

NB: it's about purported trolls ('wild men of the ether') of the 20's and 30's believed to be intentionally disrupting local radio reception by tuning to beating frequencies on either side of true; and how that was part of the story of an escaped airship</comment>


Why do we need database joins? - <AUTHOR> http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2010/11/29/why-do-we-need-database-joins/

<comment><USER2> Sets up a straw-man:

      Article table like:
      authorID, authorName, publisher, title

Where an article only ever has one author. Then proceeds to knock it down (summarized and slightly satirized):

>That's not even in second normal form. /makes an Author table. Viola! Future name changes are free.

>But wait! We don't change author names on published articles! * gasp * _we don't need joins!_

No, you've just demonstrated that _blind optimizations are sometimes incorrect_. Duh. They _are_ correct in this respect, however:

> _The dogma of normalization [too] often leads to over-engineering._

But all dogmatic adherence to X results in sometimes-incorrect use of X. This is true everywhere, not just for RDBMS normalization.

</comment><comment><USER3> Meh. If you don't have "database joins", meaning SQL queries that have the word JOIN in them, then you end up effectively replicating the join in your glue code somewhere (either on the insert side or on the query side). And if you put the join in the code, it is algorithmically fixed; there is no chance that the database can optimise this for you.

On the other hand, if you write your query in SQL on a moderately normalised database, you have the potential for the database itself to figure out what to denormalise, and what to parallelise, and any other sorts of optimisations it might do. It just has to know what the typical queries are.

There's a lot of power in using a declarative rather than an imperative paradigm.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ok, serious question. I have been writing SQL for 7 years now and can normalize schemas with the best of them; but I am wanting to learn the proper techniques for creating scalable data sets like what one would store in GAE BigTable or EC2 SimpleDB...

Let's say I have a book review site. In my SQL world I have tables of 'users', 'authors', 'books', and 'reviews'. When a user creates a review, it creates a new row in 'reviews' which contains the userid, bookid, and rating. Throw some JOINs together and I can pull out rows that have the user data, author data, book data, and the rating all together.

What do you do in non-normalized world? When a user creates a review, just insert a row into a 'review' table that has user_id, user_name, author_name, book_title, book_isbn, book_etc, ..., rating ??

I can see how this would be a much more scalable table and fetching a review is just one row, but it just seems like so much duplicate data...? Or maybe I am thinking about it the wrong way?

<comment><USER5> you're not, denormalization implies duplication (though not all normalizations are created equal). It also usually implies that you have to replicate DB functionalities in the client (e.g. write data in two places yourself).

But denormalization is not only a mean to "infiniscale" storage, you can use it even in smaller scale to just get better performances in certain things.

As usual, everything is a trade off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think that his arguement is a bit flawed. Just becuase you can come up with one arguement why joins dont work dosnt mean they are never the best solution. I know that for my day job they are the correct solution because I need the data to be transactional and correct. I shudder to think how much effort it would be to port them to a keyvalue store and maintain the same levels of data integrity.

<comment><USER7> I don't know what 'I need the data to be transactional' means. One way to get isolation is to put a transaction in one document. Often this is easier and more flexible that trying to take the 'car to pieces' everytime your park it. It is also more efficient in network bandwidth.

Everyone wants their data to be correct for some definition of correct. Normalized data is incorrect if the expectation is that relationships are preserved as the author created them, rather than re-created as they would be given the current database state.

For example, say a financial transaction record has an account holder and their related address.

For a naive implementation, if the address on the record should stay as it was when the transaction was created then:

      * The normalized implementation is wrong
      * The de-normalized implementation is right

If the address should be resolved at query time:

      * The normalized implementation is right
      * The de-normalized implementation is wrong

A lot relational tools (Foreign Keys, Unique Keys) become more complex for temporal schemas, which address these kinds of issues.

<comment><USER8> Although I understand your point, I think you're confusing things by saying that you will get different answers depending on the degree of of normalisation. Strictly speaking, if two databases differ only in their level of normalisation, then they will store the same information, just in different places. When you update the denormalised version, you will have to update the same values in multiple places.

If you don't want to update that value everywhere, then what you have isn't denormalisation, it is actually a different data model, which stores different information. Since you wouldn't be able to get to the "normalised" version you describe without losing information, it is probably wrong to call it "denormalised" in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I looked into using some kind of NoSQL solution at work, and one thing puzzles me. Assume a key/value database, where values are JSON documents or something similar.

Using such a database, with the key being customer account ID, and the value being a document that contains all the information about that customer's account would be convenient and useful. Information about the account would include things like name, address, email, status of the account, when their subscription to our service expires, re-billing information, all their purchases, and so on.

This would definitely be a lot more convenient than our current SQL-based solution for two of the three things we do with our customer data.

One of those things is display a customer's information for our customer support people when they are dealing with the customer on the phone, or working on a ticket in our help desk. With the NoSQL, it would be a simple get the JSON document for that customer, and display it nicely.

The second thing is providing information to the installed software on the end user's computer. Our software provides a service that can partly be done locally, and partly requires back end support. All the back end information needed to support a given customer's installed software would be in that JSON document, so again the key/value store would work great.

However, I'm at a loss as to how the third thing would be handled efficiently: reporting.

For instance, suppose I'm asked for a quick report on how well a new SKU has sold over the last week. With our SQL database, this is a trivial select from the "orders" and "line_items" table. It is almost instantaneous. With the NoSQL solution, it would appear that I would have to go look at every single customer's entry.

All in all, we've got a couple dozen regular reports, many running hourly, and a few being interactive on-demand via a web interface, that are fairly straightforward and efficient in our SQL-based solution (some might involve joining 6 or 7 tables, but it is still straightforward and efficient).

Thus, at first glance, it would seem that going to NoSQL would be a nightmare for my reports. Many times an hour, it would appear that the database would get slammed by reports that would have to be accessing every freaking record in the database. That doesn't sound like something that's going to make me happy.

How do people deal with reporting when using NoSQL?

<comment><USER7> If an SQL (any) database is fast there are a few possibilities:

       1. There is an index
       2. The database is in memory and a scan is running in process
       3. The query result was precomputed
       4. The query was not that hard

With couchdb you could create a view on sku and week, and reduce to a count.

<comment><USER9> I'll have to give couchdb a look.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thought experiment: imagine you are going to port Bugzilla to a noSQL solution. How would you do it? There are some pretty obvious relationships between bugs, authors, commenters and comments.

Imagine a bug that has 100 comments from as many commenters. A normalized soluion with no joins is going to require at least 200 round trips to look up all comment and commenter information, so the need to denormalize is pretty obvious.

So let's say you enormalize all the way and save all relevant information in he bug document. Each bug has comments embedded in it and each comment has all of the commenter's information in it. Now each bug requires one lookup, which is awesome, but what about the fact that commenter information can change? Sure it's a somewhat rare event, but users can have thousands and thousands of comments. When a user changes their email address, do you tell them, this might take a few hours, in the meantime I hope you still have access to your old address? What kind of load do those massive updates place on your system? Unlike reads which are fairly steady and regular, these high load queries will be sporadic. How do you plan for and accommodate the spikes?

<comment><USER7> One idea is that if an email address is updated the bugs are not updated straight away (inconsistency). They are updated as load on the system allows. Then you control the spikes as you see fit, to match your performance requirements.

Another ideas is you keep a list of un-applied changes and post process with those (fix the inconsistency). Banks used to do those when I was at university (balance = overnight balance + todays transactions, plus an overnight batch to get the balance up to date.)

If you original system was normalized, and did not fit in memory, then the joins cost (disk_access_time * items), which could have been 2 seconds of disk io. The notion that a db round trip is worse than a disk io is just wrong.

<comment><USER10> There's a solution for when data doesn't fit in memory on one box called sharding. Anyway, not trying to make the case that one round trip is worse, but certainly hundreds or thousands can be.

<comment><USER7> Sharding does not allow arbitrary joins to work efficiently. This is a really big issue with the relation model for data, and flocks of cheap hardware for storage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We need database joins so that we can derive new, interesting propositions from the data already in the database.

A database is a set of facts about something. Joins are the logic reasoning that lets you deduce new things.

If you never need to find out new things, then you don't need joins. So you can get away without joins when you have a simple system that is doing repetitive work. You can't avoid them when you are doing complex analysis or presenting data in a variety of different ways.

</comment><comment><USER12> This seems to overlook really hard part where joins become important which is for things that need to transactional, such as how much money I have in my bank account. I might not care if it takes 30 seconds for my change of name to propagate to 300 different papers I have written, but it is crucially important that I have only one total for my bank account and that it is never allowed to fall below zero (simplistically).

</comment><comment><USER13> I can only conclude that this is an ironic statement implying that we need database joins to keep a web server responsive...

</comment><comment><USER14> The site is down for me.

Anyway, I don't think database joins are all that important. They make sense when structuring your schema - only store a unique piece of data once and then connect other data to it. This is a very sound design choice.

But in light of modern key/value stores, I don't think one needs to perform joins on the database anymore. Sure it's theoretically a bit faster than performing the join in your app, but considering all the other implications and quickly you realise you don't need those.

Consider these two options: Pull data from a db, it's neatly tied together with all its meta-data. But the query takes almost a second and when the DB is always worried about consistency and stuff so writes are kind of slow too.

Pull data from a db. If you need some related data, you make another query based on the key stored in the first piece of data. Each query takes a fraction of a second, together they don't take as long as the full join query ... and you're only joining stuff when you actually need all of the data.

The added benefit is that in this situation the DB doesn't have to worry about almost anything and is thus much faster.

If that made any sense, I'm preparing a seminar on NoSQL so I'd love to hear some input on my understanding of things :)

<comment><USER15> Down for me too, so I'm only responding to your comment.

>[using a DB join means that] the query takes almost a second

This is, at best, an overgeneralization and at worst outright FUD. I don't know what sort of data or database engine you're working with that might make this true, but it's definitely not a requirement that it be this way. The RDBMS backing my site is trivially able to return all needed data in fractions of a second for most cases regardless of the presence of joins. If it can't, that generally just means that I forgot to index something properly.

Moving past this, going with a simple key/value store instead of an RDBMS means giving up at least three of the ACID properties in favor of nothing more than a speed gain.

\- Atomic: No transactions. If the system dies between two related commits...oops, your dataset is inconsistent.

\- Isolated: No transactions, again. You cannot make guarantees about what information an object will have -- e.g., you cannot say "Every user will always have at least one entry in Pages, because we automatically create a non-deletable Home page for every user at signup." If you rely on that, you will eventually hit a user who is halfway through the signup process and has a user entry but no Page entry.

\- Durable. If your backing store has not actually flushed your write to disk and the system crashes...oops, you're hosed. I hope you weren't storing your Accounts Receivable data in that NoDB.

<comment><USER2> > _Moving past this, going with a simple key/value store instead of an RDBMS > means giving up at least three of the ACID properties in favor of nothing > more than a speed gain._

This is, at best, an overgeneralization and at worst outright FUD.

> _The CouchDB file layout and commitment system features all Atomic > Consistent Isolated Durable (ACID) properties._

<http://couchdb.apache.org/docs/overview.html> (to pick a _single_ counterexample)

I have no idea what anti-NoSQL things you've been reading, but they've been wildly incorrect. And as to guarantees of what info an object has, schema- based NoSQL databases exist, just as schema-free RDBMS databases exist. Triggers frequently exist - you can automatically create a non-deletable (permissions exist too) home page for every user at signup.

You're entirely correct that DB joins taking a long time is similarly wildly incorrect, though I'm not certain that's what they're claiming. It sounds to me more like they're saying pulling _all related info_ on primary object X in your system takes a long time in a highly-normalized RDBMS compared to a document-based DB where it's all in the same location. Which is frequently correct.</comment></comment></comment>


Program Your Finances: Command-Line Accounting - <AUTHOR> https://www.petekeen.net/keeping-finances-with-ledger

<comment><USER2> I like command line access, but the critical weakness of nearly every accounting application (cli or gui) is manual data entry. The number crunching is the easy part. The hard part is automating data entry through transaction gathering.

<comment><USER3> For one off transactions, I have no problem using a text interface. However, a sort of companion app that converted receipts and bills into ledger parseable bills would really help with mass data entry. Does anyone know if something like this exists?

<comment><USER4> There's hledger (a ledger clone of sorts written in haskell)[0], which comes with some facilities for automatically assigning expenses to accounts via "rules files". I've made (and a couple of sed / awk scripts) one that handles upwards of 90% of my stuff from the files I download from my bank.

It also has a web UI, so you can use that to add transactions if you don't like using a text editor.

[0] [http://hledger.org/](http://hledger.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Could use a [2010] tag. The github repo has moved - [https://github.com/ledger/ledger](https://github.com/ledger/ledger) \- and the referred to version 3 is out.

<comment><USER6> Fixed both issues. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love ledger, but it's only useful in some situations. I made the mistake of using it to manage the account of a non-profit I was helping with a few years ago. It worked great, but when it came time to hand over to a new bookkeeper it was sort of a pain because almost nobody who's not a programmer is going to want to use a text editor and command-line utility software.

<comment><USER8> It might have been feasible to migrate the data to another account management software using a script to export ledger data to a widely supported format like QIF ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicken_Interchange_Format](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicken_Interchange_Format))

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Would anyone like to adopt the old Wesabe (Yodlee/Mint competitor) open-source code?

[http://readwrite.com/2011/02/25/crawl-your-bank-account- with...](http://readwrite.com/2011/02/25/crawl-your-bank-account-with-w)

[https://github.com/wesabe](https://github.com/wesabe)

</comment><comment><USER10> If using Quicken is like living in a loft condo in the middle of a city with a gym and a swimming pool in the building, it sounds like using ledger is like living in a house made of twigs and mud with no electricity or running water in the middle of a field. It's a cool and interesting house in its own way, but you would never want to take a date home to spend the night.

<comment><USER6> Ledger is just a fancy calculator. You can shape it into whatever you want. For example, I don't show my wife the raw ledger files or command line reports, but she does get quite a lot of milage out of the web-based reporting system I built for us, which does indeed have fancy graphs and charts.

<comment><USER11> Is your reporting system available? I'm totally blind so find Ledger to be a nice way for me to do accounting instead of a program with a GUI that will be less efficient. My Fiance is how ever not a computer person and something like this could be useful when we get married.

<comment><USER6> Pieces of it are. It's based on Ledger Web[1] which I run using a normal puma- behind-nginx stack on our home server. On top of that I built a whole budget system and a suite of reports that are specific to our needs.

[1]: [https://github.com/peterkeen/ledger- web](https://github.com/peterkeen/ledger-web)

<comment><USER11> Thanks, I'll take a look at Ledger Web.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you want to do personal accounting, you should also try KMyMoney: [https://kmymoney.org/screenshots.php](https://kmymoney.org/screenshots.php)

I have been using it since 2008 (for family accounting) and you can input all your data and do everything with the keyboard only. No dataloss (backup is easy, just a single file), pretty fast and the software is well maintained.

This is just my 2cts from a long term user of a personal accounting software (before I used MS Money and Quicken, but for the long term, open source is in that case way better).

</comment><comment><USER13>
        > Ledger is almost the most boring, austere accounting
        > program you could think of.

This does not strike me as a good way to get yourself doing accounting properly. I am anal about keeping dual-entry accounting, but part of the fun is the graphs, and part of what keeps me sane is auto-import from all sorts of sources.

I use MoneyDance, which is like GnuCash only much less ugly.

<comment><USER14> Auto-import with Ledger is trivial and programmable. You should have a look at the ledger convert command.

Another major benefit is that Ledger data is stored in plain text files and can be put in a git repo.

Currently I have more than 7 accounts across various regions (Ledger has great currency support) and I am able to process a full month of transactions in under 10 mins. Ledger so far has been the most painless system I have ever used.

There is also a great Emacs mode (ledger-mode).

<comment><USER13>
        > Auto-import with Ledger is trivial and programmable. You
        > should have a look at the ledger convert command.

That's good to hear

        > Another major benefit is that Ledger data is stored in
        > plain text files and can be put in a git repo.

I don't think I've encountered a situation where that would be useful.

        > Currently I have more than 7 accounts across various
        > regions

I am running 37 accounts in 4 currencies. Some of these represent checking accounts, some are CC accounts, some are stocks and shares, one or two are assets that I'm depreciating over time, there's an informal loan owed to me, a loan I have been given from a bank, and I use a couple of virtual ones as a budgeting mechanism. On top of that, I have about 60 various categories (which are - I guess - another type of virtual account) for various sources of income and expenses. Many of the above are hierarchal in nature. About 1/8th of my transactions are actually one-to-many transactions rather than one-to-one. This represents my personal accounts, and not my business accounts, which I let FreeAgent + an accountant handle the gnarly details of.

While this may sound complicated, it is in fact incredibly convenient, and it's exceptionally easy to pull out (or put in) almost any kind of data I want.

The GUI autocompletes my transactions as I create them, remembers how I like to categorize stuff, comes with a lot of built-in graphs, syncs to my iPhone (although the iPhone app is a bit naff), will automatically create transactions for me on a monthly basis if I want, and presents me with a dashboard.

I am just about old enough to remember people dismissing colours in their xterm's as being too hipster and distracting, and also about old enough to remember some people proudly saying `lynx` was all they needed from a text editor.

I cannot imagine why I - and I spend almost all day in a `screen` session already - would want to hand-edit my transactions in a text-editor and use a CLI tool.

<comment><USER15> > I don't think I've encountered a situation where _[a git repo of financial > data]_ would be useful.

The repeated SHA1 commits would form a kind of semi-proof, and of course having history information would help catch and resolve data entry errors.

> I cannot imagine why I - and I spend almost all day in a `screen` session > already - would want to hand-edit my transactions in a text-editor and use a > CLI tool.

Ease of use. Adding a transaction is a simple 'echo … >> FILE'. Scheduled transactions are just cron jobs. You can easily write your own code to handle interesting transaction types (e.g. sum-of-years'-digits depreciation). You can easily import & export data.

If you actually live on a CLI, odds are that you actually _enjoy_ working in your text editor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> See also [https://github.com/bashrc/fin](https://github.com/bashrc/fin)

</comment><comment><USER17> see also: [http://furius.ca/beancount/](http://furius.ca/beancount/)</comment>


Apple allows transphobic app into the AppStore - <AUTHOR> http://solarbird.livejournal.com/980121.html

<comment><USER2> In contrast to the typical "outrage" story, it appears that the people complaining here are actually in the affected community. Good on 'em for making a noise.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's obviously an embarassing oversight. Apple the company is extremely LG(.+)T friendly. The company that would rather turn down tax breaks than revoke benefits from its Queer employees wouldn't countenance this app. Some employee has made a mistake, Apple has been informed, the app will be pulled.

There's zero need to shame, picket, or boycott them, there's no evidence that they have a policy of allowing this kind of thing.

Nothing wrong with polite contact, of course. As mentioned, the app is in clear violation of the terms of use. I suspect that there's an App Store reviewer headed for reëducation in an open boxcar even as I write these words.

<comment><USER4> Um, that's quite the oversight. Seriously, look at it. [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/peekabootranny/id383095603?mt...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/peekabootranny/id383095603?mt=8)

It was last updated Oct 7; no idea how long before that it existed. They've had plenty of time to notice this. With that in mind, I can't think of it as anything other than an endorsement.

Also, not saying you're making this up, but do you have a citation for the tax breaks over benefits thing? I'd never heard anything about Apple's Q?LGBT[A-Z]* policy, and I'm curious.

<comment><USER3> Also, ...

Just because I don't think it's an endorsement and because I think it's an oversight by a reviewer and not Apple policy doesn't mean I think it's acceptable. I'm appalled, _especially_ because of my views on Apple's approach to diversity.

<comment><USER4> That's fair, but all the same, one really does have to wonder.

I know basically nothing about who actually looks at the apps that get submitted. Nor do I know anything about what apps typically get _rejected_. I've never worked with the App Store personally, as a developer or a consumer. But I understand developers should expect a time period of anywhere between an hour and two weeks before getting approval, during which presumably a human looks at it, right?

I just can't imagine any adult of sound mind and typical socialization (and presumably having gone through training that explained what Apple's internal policy is toward app approvals) wouldn't realize that that app is offensive. Thus, the only explanations I can come up with are either a) whoever approved it genuinely didn't notice its content (possible but highly unprofessional and careless, to a degree I normally wouldn't expect from a company with Apple's reputation) or b) Apple's famously stringent approval policy contains nothing that forbids this content.

Hell, it's possible I'm expecting more stringency from them than actually exists. Most of my knowledge of the App Store comes from the tech press. But there's no getting around the fact that _a human looked at this and approved it_. We are thus in the second scenario you mentioned: someone has seen your pants and very likely your unbuttoned fly, and the situation has not been rectified. Consequently, I feel I do have standing to hold Apple accountable for this, and as you say, more so because of their apparent position in the past in support of their LGBT employees.

<comment><USER3> I agree _without reservation_ that Apple is accountable for this. They choose their employees, they establish policies, they train them, they supervise them. I was only quibbling about the word "endorse."

More importantly, Apple extracts 30% of the sales of this garbage. It appears somewhere on an Apple web site. Even if Apple had a policy of allowing _any_ app to appear on their store I would still hold them accountable for reselling this kind of thing and having it appear under their name on the App Store.

Their guidelines are not on a public server, however Gruber quoted the guidelines last month:

<http://daringfireball.net/2010/09/app_store_guidelines>

 _We will reject Apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, "I'll know it when I see it". And we think that you will also know it when you cross it._

And:

 _Any app that is defamatory, offensive, mean-spirited, or likely to place the targeted individual or group in harms way will be rejected._

And if neither of those apply:

 _This is a living document, and new apps presenting new questions may result in new rules at any time. Perhaps your app will trigger this._

I think we're in violent agreement that this app has to go, and go swiftly.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Homegrown Computer Science for Middle Schoolers - <AUTHOR> http://tessrinearson.com/blog/?p=607

<comment><USER2> I love to see these articles. It's uniquely challenging to teach children to program at that age. I'm starting an after-school program to teach kids (~10 years old range) how to program. When researching tools available to teachers and students, I came up with a list that it strikingly similar to that which is presented in this article.

When teaching kids a few years older, your world really opens up in terms of tools you can use - I think a motivated 13 year old should be able to grasp any one of a number of different programming languages and/or different paradigms.

One of the issues with teaching younger students has to do with the immediacy of results:

Something like "Scratch" has a simplified programming model (visual drag-and- drop programming to create interactive animations), but gives immediate results that you can see on the screen right away, and it's impossible to create a syntax error.

When you teach a "friendly" programming language like Basic or Python, there's still a decent amount of background material before you actually create something visually cool. So, while a 9 year old might get bored and start to loose attention, I would expect a 13 year old to have the patience and persistence to know that the cool stuff (ie, making a simple video game) is on the horizon. He/She will continue to plow through the boilerplate.

When you go to Java or C, it requires all the more motivation, because the background information is that much more difficult to ignore. Syntax is much trickier. API's are less friendly to new coders. It takes more time and focus to create the result you're looking for, especially if it's graphical.

That was my thought process that eventually led me to choose Scratch as the way to introduce the students to programming in our computer programming club.

<comment><USER3> That's exactly why I introduced my kids (10 and 7) to Scratch.

But we got to the end of the video tutorials and ... then what? They don't know enough about what's possible to pick a challenge goal and start working towards figuring it out. And I don't want to just turn them loose on the forums; trying to find actionable information there as a newcomer would get frustrating quickly.

Any suggestions for next steps?

<comment><USER4> They might like the book "Super Scratch Programming Adventure!" It walks through building several games in a comic-book format. I thought it was good.

<comment><USER3> Thanks, that does look good! I'm glad there's a new book out, the other books on Scratch look too dry, too outdated, or both. Ordered a copy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While we're on the topic of K-12 CS Education, does it strike anyone else as insane that the state with Silicon Valley does not have a proper credential process for CS?

Last time I checked, there were a few ways to be authorized to teach CS/programming related classes in a school, all with problems. The three credentials that authorize you to teach computer sciencey things don't test any CS at all:

\- Supposedly, the business credential test has a question about flowcharts

\- The industrial tech test asks about part of a computer

\- The math test might have some set theory, but good luck trying to teach computer science with a math credential. The administration at your school would prefer you teach math as there's always a need for another math teacher.

CS is a delicate and fledgeling field in K-12 and right now it's a bleak road ahead. The small number of schools that have programming classes (let alone a CS track) is shrinking and the credential problem isn't helping.

One demonstration of the state of CS education is the college board's discontinuing of its Computer Science AB test in 2009 due to a mixture of lack of turnout and lack of qualified teachers to teach it. (Of the few CS educators out there, even a smaller subset could teach AB, most stuck to A).

With all of the opportunity generated by the industry pioneers here in CA, our CS education should be at the forefront nationally. We don't even have to embrace CS for its career potential. CS is a liberal art of the 21st century and I believe CS concepts would be worth it alone for its application and transfer to other subjects, especially math.

<comment><USER6> I know; I was stunned to see the ways that different states have handled the ACM's recommendations: <http://www.acm.org/runningonempty/roemap.html> (One of my friends from Idaho gleefully pointed out that they "don't suck at everything.")

If you're passionate about helping CA stay the course ahead, you really should check out some of the resources for talking to administrators at <http://www.csedweek.org/> or even get in touch with the CSEdWeek organizers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was homeschooled back in middle school. My father had me work through the manual for the parallax basic stamp & it's robotic platform the boe-bot.

It was great. If I was homeschooling a kid, I would do exactly the same thing, except with an arduino... no awful BASIC.

</comment><comment><USER8> I only wish I could have learned programming at an earlier age.. I didn't write my first line of code until my first day of college in my Intro to CS course and I have to say, prior knowledge of programming would have come in handy! I applaud anyone willing to introduce programming to kids at a younger age!

<comment><USER9> I didn't write my first line of code till I was 23. I agree with you whole heartedly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is great. As a newbie to coding, I really learned a lot from Codecademy and I can't wait until my little girl is old enough to start learning. She's already watching me and figuring out the concept of i/o (she's 5) and seems to be generally interested in CS. It just goes to show that sometimes exposure is all that's required to generate interest.

</comment><comment><USER11> You should also check out <http://codehs.com>

We're making it really easy for kids to get started and continue learning because we provide every students with help and feedback from live tutors.

<comment><USER6> Cool, I'll take a look. Perhaps this is a naive question, but what differentiates Code HS from something like Codecademy?</comment></comment>