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fred_durston Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild

> They own their farm

> barely above the poverty line.

Doesn't really add up. Any guesses on how much a farm in Vermont costs? It's not cheap. Big hunch the money for that farm came from someone else. Most likely an inheritance.

fred_durston Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild

I absolutely disagree that this type of "home schooling" should be legal. I do believe it is child abuse. These people should be treated just any parent that does not enroll their child in school. And I think they should have their kids placed in state custody and not even considered letting their children back in their care until they have had a full psychiatric evaluation.

It's true that these parents are likely sick and need mental health treatment. Maybe I should have more sympathy for them, but I think about the poor kids and about how lucky I was to have parents who cared more about their children than some crazy ideology.

fred_durston Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild

The other reply to this talking about depriving your child of an education etc, is exactly what I would say. And absolutely, yes I feel that this is definitely child abuse.

fred_durston Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild

Even if that were true, I would have learned much less as there were many things I and many children learned via reading far before the age of 11. So while they supposedly caught up on reading, they had missed out on several years of learning when the brain is most capable of doing so.

And honestly, that study is so loose. It reminds of the good ol' days of Whole Word learning and how many kids lives they screwed up with that experiment gone bad.

http://www.readinghorizons.com/research/whole-language-vs-ph...

EDIT: Apparently, I need to clarify loose. Sample size: 267

fred_durston Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild

> There's a lot of evidence that learning to read early can be detrimental in the long run. More and more of the educated parents I know are no longer focusing on teaching their preschoolers to read.

That's horrifying. Can't wait for the rest of us to have to clean up their experiment.

fred_durston Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild

> At the time, my father—who earned his undergraduate degree at Cornell and his master’s at Johns Hopkins

Nothing cooler than rich kids taking all their advantages they were given and use them to live like paupers with zero concern for the the world around them.

> I can report that Fin and Rye both learned to read and write with essentially zero instruction, albeit when they were about eight years old, a year or so later than is expected.

I'm pretty sure that's closer to 4 or 5 for most kids who grow up in families from the Cornell / John Hopkins pedigree.

> I want them to remain free of social pressures to look, act, or think any way but that which feels most natural to them.

Awesome how the author takes his past issues of "social pressures" and maps them onto his kids. Wonder if he ever realized that "social pressures" are one of the most natural things a child learns.

This thing is full of gems. I shouldn't be so sarcastic about child abuse, but I just can't help it. I've met far too many of these clowns in my life.

fred_durston Missed Approach: FAA Says Flytenow Go-around (YC S14)

The concern I'm trying to relay here is that at this point no regulator wants to be seen as asleep at the wheel while the next Uber / Airbnb grows to become an 800 pound gorilla. It's all over the news. It's everywhere. So now we are starting to see regulators jump on startups early and hard(see the local SF regulators). In the past regulators would typically get in hot water for saying yes to things they maybe should not have. Now they can get in trouble for both yes and undecided. So now it is turning into, "Is this a startup? Then no". With a hard fast "no" the startup will wilt and die and the regulator will never end up in hot water because everyone will just forget about it. And we have Uber & Airbnb to thank for that. All I can hope is that their investors, founders and vested employees give back to the startup community generously to try and make up for the damage they've done.

fred_durston George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf (1940)

It's amazing how one can take the parity achieved via competition and relay it unilaterally to the quality achieved via competition.

fred_durston Missed Approach: FAA Says Flytenow Go-around (YC S14)

Right, but thanks to Uber et al and their complete and flaunting disregard for regulations, regulators are now getting hyper aggressive in return. In the past the slow movement of regulations had a lot to do with regulators taking the time to get input from all parties(see FCC and Net Neutrality) before jumping to a decision. But now they know that waiting a year or two to make a decision could render their decision useless so they are forced to make quick barely informed judgements. Which end up basically saying no to everyone.

fred_durston Missed Approach: FAA Says Flytenow Go-around (YC S14)

We're finally getting the over the top push back that all those maybe legal startups kept asking for.

This is what happens when you keep poking someone(the regulators) with a stick. Eventually your credibility drops to near zero and everyone coming in behind you, with possibly much more reasonable ideas, will now be associated with your crap and pays the price.

Thanks Uber & Airbnb. Thanks a lot.

fred_durston The Happiest Regions in the U.S.

There is bias based on if it is socially acceptable in an area to be unhappy. There are many places where saying you are unhappy is looked down upon or causes people to avoid you.

This study also should have controlled for antidepressant usage.

http://insights.som.yale.edu/sites/default/files/antidep_201... http://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/study-maps-mental-heal...

fred_durston Show HN: Put “GIF” in front of any YouTube URL and hit enter

I just call those two SafarIE. Safari is shaping up to be the new IE so we might as well just say them in one phrase instead of always specifying them both.

fred_durston VimR – Refined Vim Experience for OS X

ugh more OSX embrace extend extinguish. Apple doesn't even have to pay people to write more lock in anymore.

fred_durston Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

I just want to add how important your browsing choice is. Everytime you visit a site you vote for a browser. Its one of the easiest ways to help keep the web open.

fred_durston Inside the Dark, Lucrative World of Consumer Debt Collection

They are sold in parcels. There isn't like a list of debtors in default the bank maintains that you can go pick from. It's more like here's 1,287 loans defaulted on, worth a total of $4,342,230 that you can bid on.

fred_durston Inside the Dark, Lucrative World of Consumer Debt Collection

Exactly. Buying your debt off for a penny on the dollar is probably the stupidest thing you could do financially. You would be trading $10,000 in credit card debt, with a fair amount of legal protections, for $4,000 in IRS debt with very few legal protections.

fred_durston Inside the Dark, Lucrative World of Consumer Debt Collection

I feel like I would be safe saying 99%(if not all) of this paper is not small business paper. These are the debts that are sold off in large parcels by banks and credit card companies.

Small businesses typically use flat fee collection agencies and rarely charge of the debt like this. Part of the reason is because to a small business charging off $10K in debt is going make them a couple hundred bucks at most.

There is no "little guy" getting stiffed by bad debtors in this story.

fred_durston Inside the Dark, Lucrative World of Consumer Debt Collection

Father was a personal injury lawyer. Son was a debt collector. Solid family values over at the Seigels.

fred_durston AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs [pdf]

I'm very glad this video talks about the most likely first to be removed.

I'm so confused why everyone thinks the least expensive to purchase(low skill labor) will be replaced first when it requires the most expensive version of AI(robots).

Some more insight on this is research into why Wal-Marts did not cause as much employment loss as feared, but instead removed "community leaders" from the area. Because Wal-Mart did all of it's professional services back at corporate headquarters, the area it moved into lost all of those people. The first line of true AI will be very similar to a WalMart moving into town.

fred_durston San Francisco Office Rents Seen Topping Manhattan in 2015

Because success in the US is 90% networking and who you know.

fred_durston San Francisco Office Rents Seen Topping Manhattan in 2015

I think it's funny how the same NIMBY policies that all the techno-libertarians hate so much, are the same policies that made San Francisco a more desirable place to live for said techno-libertarians than San Jose and the East Bay.

Personally, I hate NIMBYs but I also hate SF.

fred_durston Thousand-robot swarm self-assembles into arbitrary shapes

> and maybe even art

hahahahahaha.... oh scientists....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ6pehGKdW4

fred_durston Why don't I metaprogram more?

I imagine if you spent most of your time worrying about language design in general, your "business apps dev" wouldn't be too successful. Some people look a little further than the meal on their own plate.

fred_durston Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

I just meant it felt kind of creepy.

fred_durston Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

"Why they're important". I feel like that is a pretty tough one to generalize.

fred_durston Could hemp nanosheets topple graphene for making the ideal supercapacitor?

Ugh, I forgot I was posting in a pot thread.

fred_durston Could hemp nanosheets topple graphene for making the ideal supercapacitor?

The reason for banning it is more about stuff like flying over a field with detection equipment looking for marijuana, it's not because hemp will get you high.

fred_durston Walksource (YC S14) helps hotels solve relocations

While getting "walked" is the short story, you could flatten this out to other overbooked rentals like automobiles. If you can set up a system that is efficient enough to allow a company to overbook without worrying about hurting customer satisfaction I imagine there is a lot of money to be made.

fred_durston Walksource (YC S14) helps hotels solve relocations

Oh no Walnut Creek, the humanity of it all! It's a whole half hour on the yellow line to downtown SF.

All jokes aside, this is probably pretty smart, although maybe give more involvement to the customer. The first thing anyone does when the hotel tells them its overbooked is take to their smartphone. If a customer can say, "can I stay here instead?" it might help nudge the process along.

fred_durston Show HN: Detect articles with corporate sponsors

Some of those PR articles are so obvious a bag-of-words classifier would probably be right 80% of the time.