skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know a lot of people in my high school who are in the top 5% of our class, but have no ability to think creatively.

GPA is just a measure of how much time you spend studying, factored in with your natural intelligence.

The people with the most intellectual potential are those who maintain a decent GPA but spend little time studying, but instead do things that are productive (as the article explained).

A valedictorian who does nothing but studies doesn't have a greatly increased chance of succeeding in life.
It seems to me that he was railing more against the attitude

> "I like playing games, so obviously I'm a CS genius"

rather than their intelligence.
I worked at a major US firm who had a rotation system for managers, becuase of course someone who manages HR will have no problems managing IT. This might have worked, if the management involved didn't feel the need to enfore their position by making important IT decisions, to which they new nothing about.

Instead of rotation to deal with underperforming people, I suggest firing them. I have worked with good people, and bad people. The bad made it hard for everybody at a company, I still don't understand why they were still employed there.
Are you really saying that the grades you get in college courses are even remotely equivalent to a measure of how much random anonymous people agree with you on the internet? Granted, my GPA is much better than my karma, but I still don't see how thinking about math or CS problem sets all day is anything like filling the internet with your opinions/favorite links?
You really can't use MS employee blogs against MS. They are written with no supervision, come directly from the employee with no proof reading or anything. They truly are just blogs.
The Practice of Mathematics
I haven't read the book, so I don't know what the claims are, but it sounds silly on the face of it. I'll grant that some homework is busy work. But some homework is necessary.

You don't learn math by listening to a teacher explain it. You learn math by working through problems. That requires homework. You don't learn how to write by listening to a teacher talk about good writing. You learn how to write by writing essays out of class. You don't improve reading skills by listening to a teacher talk about a book. You learn by reading.

Maybe the claim is only concerned with younger children?
Project Ares Open Beta (IDE for writing Mojo apps for WebOS)
I would completely agree with you on the high school level, but the purpose of high school is just to give you very broad, brute knowledge.

College is a lot more applied, and brute studying and memorization will get you nowhere.
The point isn't to "have time" the point is to have the most time possible. If you shot for a 4.0 that's going to take more time than shooting for a 2.0. In my mind it was always better to take the time saved by shooting for merely passing my classes and invest it into side projects than it was to invest that time to get a 4.0.

That didn't stop me from taking over the average course load and piling on difficult CS classes concurrently after having professors sign me out of pre-reqs, but since I shot for a 2.5 I didn't just "have time" for other things. I had lots of time for other things.

You keep asserting that it's important to invest time in high grades and you can do that while still having time for other things. I agree that one could do that, but I don't agree that investing time in a high GPA is really necessary or desirable in most circumstances.
So what's your take on the liability issue?

It doesn't sound like this was a technical failing of netflix' anonymization process but rather a matter of deduction of various independently anonymous pieces of data.
I actually have exactly that in one of my products http://www.memengo.com All content is delivered over HTTPS, encryption is in Javascript on the client side. Yes, the user must trust me not to alter the JS code behind their back, but the same applies for any native app that could auto-update and is not guarded by outgoing firewalls. Which is most of them.

The reason why data is encrypted is that database theft (e.g. backup theft) is not a disclosure of data.
I was in a similar position, also with a liberal arts degree. I ended up declaring a minor that had a technical emphasis in order to make the last year of school more interesting, and motivate me to graduate.

Sure, your degree may not be helpful to your goals, but it's a degree. And that's pretty cool--even a liberal arts degree. :)
Not a terribly useful article.

2. Tell people your competition sucks - unethical.

4. Seed your site using Mechanical Turk - unethical, depending on the type of site you have.

5. Have a blog - should be 'Have a Popular Blog'

He leaves out useful techniques like twittering about your new site using popular hashtags associated with its subject. Or posting it on Facebook, creating a fan site and encouraging your friends to spread the word.
Yeah, but we would have to support IE7, IE8, IE9 and (All other browsers), so 4 browsers, rathe than 5: IE6, IE7, IE8, IE9 and (All other browsers).
I actually saw this lady at a bar once kissing another woman. But I had no idea she was a lesbian until I wrote a deanonymizer on a dataset of millions of rows and then combed through her IMDB posts to find one very suggestive comment.

Give me a break.

> The lead attorney on the new suit recently reached a multimillion-dollar settlement with Facebook over its failed Beacon program

It really annoys me when attorneys try to make millions when honest people trying to improve the world make a mistake.

So Beacon was a bad idea. Netflix should have asked for permission before releasing a user's anonymized data. But I think they learned their lessons.

Why should some random attorney who builds nothing get paid millions and obstruct these companies from continually trying to innovate?

Sigh.
SO should ban all security-related questions. There is too much misinformation and wrong answers get marked as "resolution": http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1702661
I'm in the commercial world producing kit (hardware and software) to assist with the analysis of real-time data used in quasi-governmental organisations. That means I work regularly with military and ex-military personnel, and they talk to me off the record.

You can probably track me down if you like, but I generally try not to make the connection between my on-line persona and real-life work obvious. Feel free to email me if you'd like to know more.
On behalf of the internet I hereby command you to continue to publish these.
Has dark matter finally been detected?
I believe the suit is targeted directly at Netflix because it allegedly violated stringent privacy laws related to video rental data.

Whether Netflix violated the persons privacy or not is debatable (hence it hasn't been settled yet), however they certainly don't appear to have the intent to keep peoples privacy:

> The suit is also asking the court to stop Netflix from launching its promised second contest to improve the recommendations — this time giving out user data that includes ZIP codes, ages and gender, along with movie ratings and ID numbers substituted for user names.

I'm not certain how ZIP codes work in the US, I know however that my postal code for my childhood home in the UK could place me within a 30 house range on my street. Given age you could extract this down to ~7 people, given sex it was down to 3. Being 1 of these 3 people means I have a 50/50 chance of identifying two 'anonymous' people based solely on postal code, age and gender.

Lawsuits usually come down to intent, and Neflix arguably doesn't have the intent to keep its users privacy if it's intending on releasing ZIP, Age and Gender information.
It's a systemic problem of our structure of government.

True but misleading. Regulatory capture is a feature of regulated industries full stop. It just happens faster when the players whether buyers or sellers are concentrated.
I've used Paypal for three years. In that time, I've sold something on the order of $50,000 worth of software through them. I've had exactly on occasion to contact them -- a customer did not realize the charge on their credit card was due to Bingo Card Creator, called their bank and disputed it, and then Paypal asked me to explain what was up. It was resolved to the mutual satisfaction of all parties within 48 hours.

I have no complaints about them.
Thanks! So, the XML/SOAP/WS stack tried to simplify/abstract too much or wrongly, when problems leak through, it is too impermeable to let you solve them...

The "nuisance" of JSON+HTTP is a backward step in a way, but it lets you solve those problems. Sounds like an ideal solution would be an abstraction with less nuisance, that solves the network issues that it can and gives you access for the others - which may or may not be possible; it's an ideal.

(1) By "network issues" do you mean along the lines of Peter Deutsch's "8 Fallacies of Distributed Computing"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Comput...

(2) Regarding "assumptions" and "less brittle", do you mean issues of reading the format correctly, in the face of evolution of the internal structure and/or wire format?
Related: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/12/not-just-drones-mili...

While merely embarrassing on the surface, one has to consider the strong likelihood that the intelligence-gathering operations of other countries have probably known this for years and could by now have accumulated a vast amount of data on the disposition and tactics of US forces in multiple theaters. What an enormous strategic blunder.
"The longer a person stays at a particular level in an organisation, the more most measures of their performance fall - including subjective evaluations and the frequency and size of pay rises and bonuses. It is a finding entirely consistent with the idea that people eventually become bogged down by their own incompetence."

That's a conflation of cause and effect if ever I've seen one. It's also entirely consistent with the fact that people who don't get promoted (the majority, given the pyramidal structure) are stuck and get fed up with their jobs as they aren't challenged any longer.
College is a lot more applied, and brute studying and memorization will get you nowhere.

You need to hang out with more pre-meds.

I agree with your sentiment, but disagree with your conclusion, unfortunately. Pre-meds and especially med students are just studying machines, who seem to have an average intellectual curiosity that lies at least one standard deviation below average grad students. It's likely that these are the result of self-selection and/or adaptation to the way the system is setup.
Has any non-Googler here actually used Hadoop or any of the other public MapReduce solutions?
Coolest thing about this is there's a popular Android app for rooted devices known simply as "Wireless Tether" that bridges your cellular data connection with your wifi connection, to create a simple wifi hotspot powered by your 3G connection. So you buy a nook, root it, now you have a personal little 3G router everywhere you go!
Seems to me that if you have to get a (programming) job the philosophy degree is going to be worth less than they code you are writing to a prospective employer.
Different country, different context. I dropped out of the first college after 2-3 years (was hard and useless and tended to produce soulless zombies) and started another one which was much easier just to get my degree, while working at the same time. A few comments:

- college is about meeting people and doing different stuff. It's been said a lot, but not enough.

- the very few (3 in my case) really good teachers made a difference. Falls into the "meeting people, doing stuff" thing.

- overall, I think wasting over 4 years on getting my degree was a mistake, probably the biggest one I made. When I didn't have to also go to college at the same time my freelancing really took of, and I probably did more in the next year then in the previous three. BUT - I have a career (not just a job) where it's very very unlikely anyone will ever ask me for a diploma.
Did you get a reason as to why it was closed down?
This is only for US accounts.
As someone whose written a few WebOS apps, this shows great promise - building UIs is much easier than doing it by hand. Looking forward to trying it at home where I have the emulator installed!
Free: http://openinviter.com/

Paid:
http://www.octazen.com/
http://addressbookimport.com
http://www.improsys.com/importer.htm

Most of these have the best support for PHP which may or may not work for your needs. Various free libraries have been released for other languages but 1) generally support only a few email providers and 2) may not be actively maintained. Octazen has a fee-based API which sounds great but I haven't used it.
Those three hardest classes are?
Um, sorry, but no one needs another Git GUI for Windows. How about a beautiful one for OS X, like Versions or Cornerstone?
I’ve been using PayPal for five years and have had accounts in 3 different countries, personal and business.

I have experienced my account having been frozen a few times, but in all but one case it was just a matter of uploading the required documents. The one case where this wasn’t enough was because an account had been frozen with the claim that I used it for “cash advance”, but the actual reason was something else, so I had to call them — they do have a number you can call with an actual human in the other end.

I have also sold to a lot of people via PayPal, and there is definitely a lot of fraud going on, as people have used stolen credit cards and hacked accounts more times than I’d thought to buy my product — so to some degree I do understand why PayPal are pretty strict. They are also under a lot of external regulation about anti money laundering and similar.
Surprisingly accurate for a newspaper. Project: http://cdms.berkeley.edu/ Nice to see that upgrades are planned to the detection equipment.

Besides confirming theoretical predictions and presumably improving our understanding of cosmology, are there any potential applications for this knowledge at an earthly scale?
I don't understand the black bars. Do they indicate a running script?
Will the Tune Hotel work in Australia?
Traveling solo around the US, sleeping in dorms and passing as a college student
"Central to the books’ success was a repackaging, with a darker cover, for adults embarrassed about being seen reading a children’s book."

Hehe.
My blog is about 99% not relevant to the interests of my typical customers, but it is still useful as a friendcatcher. There are a couple hundred people who care about what my business is doing, as a consequence of blogging and other social activities over the years. This gives me an automatic boost to marketing of new sites/products/etc. For example, in 2010 when I get my new site off the ground, I can with a high degree of confidence predict that it is going to pick up a few dozen links in the first week from people who know me and care about what I'm doing separately from their (lack of) desire for my new site.

Nothing says you can't also have a customer-focused blog, too. I got around to installing one on my site a few months ago but haven't found time to write for it in a compelling manner yet. That will be another topic for 2010.
I think that separation is a healthy policy; it was more just a mild curiosity.

I really enjoyed your three grey beard stories and I'd love to read more if you have them.
How Momentum Makes Or Breaks Your Start-Up
You don't learn math by listening to a teacher explain it. You learn math by working through problems. That requires homework.

You were fine until the last sentence. Teachers can and do assign practice to be done within the classroom. And practice time in the classroom has many advantages over homework. The primary one being that students are much more likely to practice problems correctly, and get help if they are going in the wrong direction. If the same student is assigned homework, the odds of correct practice strongly depend on the quality of adult assistance at home.

The important questions then become whether there is enough time spent in the classform for effective practice, and what the incremental benefit is or isn't from homework.

What does the research say? It says that once you control for parent's education and socioeconomic status, there is little correlation between time spent doing homework and academic performance. (Whether measured by future grades or standardized tests.) However within the population assigned large amounts of homework, the correlation between academic success and parent's education and socioeconomic status increases.

This is evidence that 35 hours per week spent in a classroom is enough time for teaching and practice. It is also evidence that homework on the whole doesn't help or hurt much, but does move responsibility for educational performance from the teacher to the parent. As a well-educated parent this is modestly beneficial, because moving more responsibility for my children's education to me gives my kids an edge. But at what cost?

The same research, unsurprisingly, finds very strong correlations between homework assigned and how much kids dislike school. High homework levels also result in significant increases in family conflict. The causes of both trends are so blindingly obvious as to not need discussion.

There is less research on homework versus academic performance in highschool. But the absence of evidence of effectiveness of the treatment does not imply that the treatment level should be increased.

I don't know of any research on this in a university setting. But there I support the use of homework for two reasons. The first is that there is much less classroom time. In school you spend over 35 hours/week in the classroom. At university a full load might be 15 hours a week. So practice needs to happen out of the classroom. The second reason is that university is supposed to teach skills around independent study. And the only way to practice that is to study stuff on your own.
Tell HN: Stanford CS spinoff looking for founding CEO
We are currently looking for someone to take the reigns businesswise for the SOPRI project (http://codex.stanford.edu/projects.html), which we hope to spin off into a company that will more generally deal with computers and law. This is a fun project in that our initial users are the directors and officers of public companies - meaning that some notable people will be using our software if we are successful!

We are looking for someone located in the Bay Area. If you are interested, send an email to mkassoff <at> stanford dot edu with your resume.
I wonder how much the contractor charged us taxpayers for this system?
I use it (and Hive) extensively at Facebook.
Precisely. I was trained as a mechanical engineer, and IMHO software guys really need to appreciate just how much freedom they have in terms of engineering. I'm not going to go on a rant about lazy engineering and patches and whatnot: such is the nature of our craft.

Just keep in mind that engineers in other industries do not have many of the same freedoms we do. They don't get patches, do-overs, and "oops our bad" opportunities.
This isn't really news to the satellite feed community. The military and private military contractors have been broadcasting unencrypted feeds of operations for a long time.
It's certainly very useful, as explained in the part of the article about 'scaling down', i.e. development-mode and small to medium scale deployments.

Additionally, if you find your application needs to scale up, there are well-known ways of doing that with Django, without using Twisted.
Thanks, for the well well executed troll. It was fun.

PS: I was in no way referencing taxes on music, but ending with a straw man argument was well played.

Edit: And for our audience: http://qntm.org/?forgotten
I never got kicked out, but I took 8 years to get my BS degree. About 3 years through I got a student job doing web design and was soon promoted to staff which meant school was part time, but I started my professional career at 21.

For the first 4 years I was exactly like you... depressed, no motivation, and often unable to drag myself to class. I was basically in school to fulfill my family's expectations, and to some extent I think I was subconsciously rebelling against those standards.

Now after all is said and done, I ended up with a degree and a mediocre GPA. A degree is valuable, and it's definitely worth it to learn to push yourself through something you don't really like. Closing counts for a lot.

That said, passion and identity is a million times more important than a degree. The thing to realize about your family is that they love you, but they may well never understand you. They are only telling you what they think is best, but they don't know what is best for you. Maybe you don't either, but by pursuing your passion you will be more likable and doors will open up.
Besides confirming theoretical predictions and presumably improving our understanding of cosmology, are there any potential applications for this knowledge at an earthly scale?

One idea is to use dark matter as fuel for interstellar travel:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427361.000-dark-powe...
Thanks for your thoughts.

FYI, Open Angel Forum is a new group; I am applying to present at their first meeting. (They haven't invested in a competitor -- it's that the CEO of a competitor is also an angel and is one of the guys said to be one of the investors.)

Jason (the founder of the angel group) has recruited lots of rich people (mostly successful entrepreneurs) together to hear pitches and invest in companies.

So the group hasn't already invested in the other company in question; it does so happen, though, that one of the angels is CEO of a company in a similar space (competitor).

However, I assume they all are making their investment decisions separately, and don't want to miss out on the chance to pitch to all the other great angels.
"Keep in mind that we’re delivering a product—serving our customers, by solving the 4-by-4 Sudoku puzzles they rely on to keep their businesses running."

Brillant!
"I'm canceling my wife's shopify account" ?!

I don't know your wife, but I'd certainly ask mine before closing her (hypothetical) business.
Clueless in Costco
L-system plant drawing program written in common lisp
Hypertable, Why We Chose C++ Over Java
While I agree that more testing was called for (ie. try your own promo before telling people about it), calling this a lie is way over the top. Being embarrassed in front of the TC crowd is punishment enough. Let's be serious, people: it's not like he was expecting to get rich off charging $1 instead of $0.
OS(Operating Systems), CDM(Computational Discrete Mathematics), Math Studies II
Boot some MacBook Pros via an ExpressCard solid state drive - Mac OS X Hints
All I get is a blank screen (thats trying to load bootstrap.js) after logging into http://ares.palm.com/Ares/index.html

FTA, it looks like the UI is based on bespin which uses canvas. I tried on FF 3 and Opera 10. Could that be a problem
thanks for the response. looks like octazen is the winner
2CO can do international wire transfers.

I use them as a secondary account because some of my customers refuse to use PayPal, and 2CO really sucks compared to PayPal. They haven’t frozen my account, but their UI is crap, their fees are higher, there is delay before payment appears in my account, they keep a “reserve” when they do payouts, etc.
IANAP, but wouldn't confirmation of the existence of supersymmetric WIMPs not necessarily prove that they account for a large portion of dark matter?

EDIT: Not to imply that it wouldn't be a huge deal anyway.