skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Surely this is not that big a deal - The title's misleading - in particular, this announcement doesn't enable "facebook apps on any website" in a way that wasnt previously possible since the api was first released, pre-platform even.

The point here is that they've released a javascript interface to the api that sits alongside the existing ones for other languages (php, ruby etc). The news is that now you can build FB apps without having to use server-side code. Can anyone suggest a "useful use" for this, where you wouldn't want to use a server-side language..?

TC, mashable etc all seem to have missed the point here due to misunderstanding the technicalities. Now, if FB _did_ open up a platform to enable _existing_ FB apps to be embedded on web pages external to facebook (like google gadgets for your webpage) - now _that_ would be interesting. Thats what everyone is implying, but sadly it isnt so this time..
Sorry, that is complete bullshit. There are tons of papers on why genders exists, in terms of evolution theory. There are tons of studies on the effects of various genes - it is a billion dollar industry! Besides, why should I provide the details, if you started with claims of the sort "the number of genes is too small"?

Apparently mechanisms exists, humans are being created from mere genes, with lots and lots of differences. I don't think I need to provide any evidence for that - just go out on the street and look at the people. Nobody looks alike, except for the twins.

May I ask you: are you a creationist? I really don't want to waste my time...

If the hormone level doesn't convince you, let's take body height: can you imagine that body height could make a difference in temper? Again, I don't know, but if there was a study showing it, I would have no trouble believing it.

There are actually studies showing that tall men earn more on average than smaller men.

The world is a complicated place...
The Coming Wave of Gadgets That Listen and Obey
I'm not sure if this is a good idea or not. In a way it could work a lot like openid where the user only has to log into Facebook.
As far as I know it has always been the case that people developed a language. For example there are cases where children had been raised in total isolation from society, and they developed their own language (I think even single children). So it seems to me it is fairly certain that something in the brain makes it develop a language.

That does not follow. For example, maybe they developed language because it's very useful.

@image processing: There are things inside brains which can/do differ, the issue is what effect this has on adult minds. And personality in particular. For example, how does the difference survive layers of being interpreted to remain a difference in adults personalities?

@ "repression through men" -- My position is that culture is largely transmitted, unintentionally, through behavior of parents. Further, mothers appear to have more influence over children than fathers. And female friends appear to influence young females more than their male friends. And I think the same sorts of things are done to both male and female children, just differently.
I wish all schools were this good. There is no reason public schools couldn't be like this.

I mean come on, if anyone has seen what a public school looks like recently, it's sickening. But I guess the schools in other countries are in more need of the tax money than our own.
I know there are many studies to do with genes, I've read a variety of them. If you believe you know of one which answers my challenge, then feel free to cite it.

Am I a creationist? Umm, lol. No. If I was, why would i talk about evolution of both memes and genes? Since you keep bringing up personal issues, maybe we can put them to rest: I am a very (classically) liberal person, a scientifically-oriented atheist, generally a small-l libertarian. Not a science-hating, lunatic, religious conservative.

body height might control temper? how?

a correlation between height and income doesn't imply height causes income, especially not directly.
Skin colour map: skin colour & latitude
Perl Cannot Be Parsed: A Formal Proof
I see that with present technology, mothers need a few month vacation per child at the end of pregnancy and for physical recovery after. This is a fairly minor thing, and it is no reason a culture must assign people wildly different roles and personalities.

You'll probably say the mother will want time to raise her kid. But that could equally well be true of the father -- can't you imagine a culture where fathers are expected to stay home more and raise children, and mothers aren't? There's nothing impossible about that. Or it could be treated equally.
As a Googler, I want to say that I don't agree with a single statement in this article.

Things like "Google says it's working on AI" represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what AI is.
Of course not, but your challenges are a bit off: we are discussing complex systems, that nobody really has a hold of yet. And that includes you and me.

I don't know if body height affects temper, I am just giving examples that could e plausible. For example, body height could affect the blood pressure, which would surely affect temper.

What is your challenge again, that genes can affect temper? I don't even feel the need to read any papers, really. Body height doesn't convince you, take something else, say some ugly deformation of the body. Might cause depression?

Maybe those examples sound ridiculous, but so does the notion that a butterfly on the other end of the world could affect the weather on the other side of the world. Actually I think the butterfly really is an exaggeration, but nevertheless, small changes can have big effects on the outcome in a complex system. So I don't think we even have to argue.

Oh yes, and being a woman or a man obviously has a different outcome in temper. You claim that is only cultural, but that doesn't matter: in our current environment (a ka culture), your temper is affected by being a woman or a man. Point proven.
Cmon. One out of the 500,000 people making myspace pages gets some cash. Really not impressed - although I am happy for her.Is there anything different or innovative? Anything to be learned?

Hpe she is an industrious the next time around.
Sorry, I was a bit tired - the discussion is not about culture affecting the roles of men and women. Of course it does - we have different cultures on earth with different role models.

The discussion was about men and women being different, and I still maintain that is true.

Also, I don't think pregnancy is a minor thing. 9 months is 1-2% of the working life time of a women.

Besides, other effects might come to play. There is currently another thread about it on news.yc: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/magazine/20wwln-freak-t.ht...

I think effects like that are more likely to be the cause for inequality than repression.
I don't know, empires have risen and fallen since the dawn of time. You think Google will still live in year 2500?...
Being ugly doesn't cause depression. Though in some cultures ugly people are treated badly, and in some cultures many people have personalities that get depressed when others (wrongly) treat them badly.

Now, if you take a culture like that as a given, you can say that ugliness causes depression, and call it a fact. And say you've proven your point. I don't dispute the possibility of making very misleading simplifications of this sort which are true in a sense.

But if we want to explain what's going on in our world, it isn't reasonable to take culture as a fixed point. It would be much more fruitful to take our genes as a fixed point, and look at what our culture causes in the context of our genes, and how a different culture would, in that context, cause something else. Doing that, we could come up with some ways our culture should be changed.

One way to see what is the true cause, A or B, is to consider what would happen if you changed only one (at the time of its creation). So if we change genes, thousands of years ago, our culture could very well have developed to have the same results, despite the genes being quite different.

But if you change imagine our culture developing differently, then having the same genes we have today won't stop it from creating different gender stereotypes.
You don't need 9 months off -- you can work through a large portion of a pregnancy. Further, for example, you can pay someone else to be pregnant for you. That doesn't cost enough relative to a serious career to make a major difference. And that price can be split with your husband.
"And female friends appear to influence young females more than their male friends. "

Well if you believe that, then you admit that there is a difference between men and women (within your kind of logic).

Of course nurturing has an effect, but the fact remains that men and women are different and have to face different challenges in life. It is not only the 9 months of pregnancy - yes, men could stay at home after pregnancy (now that we have breast pumps for the milk). But there are still several other differences, as I explained elsewhere, not the least the problem of finding a mate to begin with. It is a completely different challenge for men and for women, simply because women can only have a few children, whereas men can have thousands of children in theory. So women have to be more selective etc. Again just one example, but in the sum things like that end up evoking behavioral differences.

If all behavioral differences were only the result of nurturing, then why are there no more random variations? Why are there not more societies where all boys behave like girls in our western world, and vice versa? If boys and girls really were equal except for the nurturing and their visible difference, then we should see such variations, because if a society with our boy/girl pattern is stable then the reverse would be equally stable.

Edit: I think you yourself mentioned tomboys, so there are people with reversed roles. Therefore, all else being equal, whole islands of societies should develop where roles are mirrored (because apparently the reverse strategy is being evaluated on a regular basis - so if it would be equally successful, it should from time to time become dominant). But they apparently don't develop.
Right on!

Things that require concentration shouldn't be interrupted. If only people who schedule meetings at typical corporate offices could understand that.

I'm convinced the cliche late night hacker has nothing to do with the time of day. They'll eat the productivity hit because they're tired in order to boost their work because they are alone and not distracted.
Being a woman in our culture certainly has some advantages.
Yes. The people who started Mercado Libre are from Argentina, and ML is in Nasdaq ("MELI"), so sure it's successful.
I think you don't want to get my point. Yes, there are ugly people who are happy.

Are you saying that nothing causes depression? Some things apparently do cause depression. I was just giving an example - maybe it is not uglyness, then it is something else. I don't care, but it is something.

And no, uglyness does not cause depression - not getting a mate because of ugliness causes depression. But that again is at least in part biological. I know you will deny that, though, because you did so in another threat some time ago. Anyway, if we deny the biology, we could culturally train ourselves to only be attracted to apes, and humanity would die out.

I never took culture as a fixed point, in fact I pointed out several alternative cultures, both existent and hypothetical.

Now I am waiting for you to describe a hypothetical culture in which things are like you want them to be, so that we can verify that it could really work that way - or perhaps biology would get in the way.

Edit: and I don't get why you deny that being ugly causes depression - on average.
It would be nice, if they just joined with the OpenID community though. I mean, out of all the sites that is a virtual address book (outside of your e-mail), Facebook could be the best OpenID provider out there. They don't even need to give the contacts and the network, but just the information (b/c the user would have to enter it anyway).

There is huge business potential for Facebook as it becomes the central hub to sign into other sites and it has huge potential for publishers who want to access the Facebook base. I'm guessing a business guy though is afraid that it would kill their competitive edge by being more open though.
Um, ok. Heh.
Facebook and Myspace clones
I keep reading about how Facebook or Myspace clones can be created or available. My question is for what? Can't anybody think beyond cloning? Is there no room for growing beyond my friends friends and sharing pix and blah blah..
I'd suggest that a large part of the reason is the issue of prestige. In America, intelligent black people will tend to choose high prestige, low-risk career paths more often than not. A lot of it is about the uncertainty of failure; In black communities, a lot is expected of the really smart kids. They're seen as not just representing themselves, but also their communities and, to an extent, their race. It sucks, but it's the truth. So a lot of them choose to be doctors, lawyers, etc, because you're viewed differently by society. If we ever get to the point that being a software engineer is viewed in the same light as the aforementioned occupations, I'm sure there would be a sizable increase.
If there are any? There are plenty of them...

I'm from Argentina, and here, as in many other latin countries, there are a real lot of local tech startups. Some important companies which started like startups here are Mercado Libre (MELI in Nasdaq), Core Technologies, and Wanako Games (a company in Chile, by Argentinians, recently sold to Vivendi for US$ 10 million).

Actually there are lots of incubators for entrepreneurs here, and there are local VCs, and there are many people working on Web 2.0 and general tech stuff. Recently, there was a local Barcamp here in Buenos Aires too.

There are many, many local startups here, and of course we are all latino here. So I'm not sure the question makes a lot of sense...
tip: if you have Netflix, I'm pretty sure it's available as a Watch Now. I've been planning to watch this for a while now, just never take the time to boot into Windows (Flix needs to hurry up with their *nix support!)
I said from the outset that our culture treats men and women differently. That includes, among many other things, what gender of friends they are encouraged to have as young children.

Why aren't there more variations in culture on Earth? First, there is a lot of shared culture across a lot of the Earth, like Abrahamic religions. Second, perhaps the logic of the situation (e.g. men being stronger) lent itself to certain simple gender roles. If so, that isn't why they still exist today in any form. Third, the general logic of memes can create common points across cultures. Fourth, Earth is a small sample size.
I remember having temporary pain from working alot and it would go away after a couple days...

The bad thing - at some point, it becames residual - no amount of rest (short of 6-12 months of keyboard abstinence) will let you recover. You have to start proactively manage - You've broken the proverbial straw on the camel's back.

That was years ago, I have a much-less painful, residual level of aching (2.5 on a scale of 1 to 10).

Nowadays, I manage my work, with occasional flare ups (4/10). My advice is to get WorkPace restbreak software to force you take breaks. Consider using an burst-proof exercise ball chair (forces you to work your abs) http://www.fitter1.com/Catalog/Items/FBCJ.aspx

Take Yoga classes, swimming (great full-body exercise, zero-impact). Alexander technique is good for gaining body awareness as well. If you slouch your head is like a bowling-ball weight that causes a domino-effect of strain on your entire backbone/spine.

The good thing, if there is a good thing about RSI symptoms, is that you may start to realize that you may not be able to be a programmer for as long as you wanted and you start to diversify and you will not take your programming job for granted. And you become a much more efficient programmer..
As I said, technological advances might tip the scales - making somebody else carry the child for you was not an option for women a few decades ago.

Anyway, isn't the whole discussion completely moot? If you don't accept anything else, then what about physical strength? Can you accept that differences in physical strength can cause differences in behavior, and certainly differences in career choices?

I must apologize, but I am tired now, and we have been talking circles for a while now. Let's let it rest (I'll read your answers, if you give any, but I don't intend to reply).
You yourself mentioned the tomboys. Therefore nature is obviously capable of still evaluating new strategies, even under the tyranny of culture. Therefore it needs explaining why none of those strategies ever reached a significant mass, if their efficiency is the same as the existing ones.
>It's easy to make up and describe a cultural factor that would explain the data. For example, the previous shift was about how adult women were treated in public -- open discrimination. The second shift will come when parents (and others) treat young children more equally in subtle ways. That's one possible cultural explanation, of many.

You still need to explain why this affects physics, but not law.

This idea seems very weak when you look at gender gaps within fields. Most people barely know the difference between physics and chemistry (let alone theoretical vs experimental, or condensed matter vs high energy), yet there are gender gaps between them. Compare also web design to programming.

How can culture cause a disparity between things that the culture doesn't even know about?

>But for biology, there does not exist a single reasonable explanation that can account for the data. In particular, in must detail by what mechanism the genes effect the personality of adult women. That is, "there is a gene for business" wouldn't suffice, without saying specifically how that gene works.

For business, aggression would be my best guess. Testosterone is known to cause aggression, and it is also known that men have more of it.
A perfect example:

We recently had a meeting with some people who were interested in investing or something, we gave them the pitch and our vision. We gave them nice financial estimates, not great ones (but at our stage, who really cares as long as there is a need and a market?)

I soon found out that they all graduated from Emory, Duke or Wharton Business Schools and they like us, but they asked questions like, "What is your HR strategy?" or "You'll soon need to hire C-level people and we can help you with that."

All we wanted to hear was: "We like you. Here's a guy who has been a successful startup entrepreneur who can help you. Here's a small bit of money. Go change the world."
We have a culture that (sort of) causes ugly people to get depressed. There is nothing innately depressing about being ugly, the whole idea of being depressed about it, and indeed of what is ugly or pretty, is in our culture.

So, our culture has code to have people detect certain traits caused by genes, and act differently in their presence. Just like it detects mountains, and has people act differently in their presence. But no one goes on and on about how mountains control human personalities and determine gender differences (or mountain-raised-near differences).
Why are you assuming tomboys have anything to do with nature?
Welcome to quebix.
Welcome my friends.It is a very special occasion indeed, and i can assure you that this is the single most important thread that you will have ever read in your entire life. Since I am not a man of many words, the least i can do is offer you a proposal for your inclusion and cooperation to change the world and revolutionize computing in ways never before thought possible.

I am now currently recruiting some of the greatest minds on Ycombinator to see who would be the best potential fit for a co-founder, someone who will not only help me build great products, but also a great company. If you want some insight into my interests, you can visit my webpage at http://www.myspace.com/164645855, if you're ready to change the course of history, then you can e-mail me at bjneff01@moreheadstate.edu.

quebix.

How the impossible is done.
According to ESL teachers, it takes seven years for an adult to learn a new language well enough that native speakers will want to talk to you. Although a child can probably acquire a language in less time than that, it is also true that the child will lose the language if he or she stops using it before adulthood. I have seen many arguments for the value of learning a second language, but they all strike me as flimsy. Please tell me why
a student who already knows English or even Spanish or Mandarin should invest thousands of hours learning a second language when there are more than enough sciences and practical arts with much clearer educational value to last anyone a lifetime of learning.
Amarillo Slim was a great one too, before he got all child-molesty.
I didn't really understand the article because I read it while doing 8 other things, but I agree.
People we've met along the way have "advised us," but we are still hacking away on finding the right prototype and the right market.

Lots of people believe in the mensch mentality. It's surprising how many others have just helped us think through decisions. It makes them feel important and on the off-chance you become successful, you won't forget them.
In yet another of the seven signs, Robert Scoble is hiring
Having someone else bear a child for you was an option, millennia ago. It's really not very complicated how to do this: they get pregnant, then give you the child when it is born.

That you overlook this demonstrate the power of culture. Doing what I described violates taboos, so it's hard to imagine.
People still do it with surrogate mothers...
Ultra-immersive, long-form video games from the past or future
> How can culture cause a disparity between things that the culture doesn't even know about?

There is all sorts of knowledge in our traditions, which no individual person understands. So, for example, suppose culture contains a trigger which causes parents to be more discouraging of one type of children's book than another, for girls. They could do this without understanding what's going on at all -- all they have to know consciously is that they like one book more than another.

Even if we don't know what kinds of books encourage people to become chemists, certainly we can imagine some books pull more in that direction than others. Because, for example, the skills they help create are more useful to doing chemistry, or lead to more trains of thought that bring up chemistry, or are more useful to understanding explanations of why chemistry is interesting and important. This is all very plausible, because we already know that books can help learn skills, help bring up trains of thought, etc, and already know that there are skills which help one become a chemist, there are trains of thought which help one see why becoming a chemist would be nice, etc And 'book' and 'chemistry' can be substituted with other things, like game, toy, activity, law, physics, etc, and still have similar effects.

---

By what mechanism does testosterone cause aggressive personalities?
Is Tomcat an application server?
Bleh, this article made me want to hurl. While Java EE developers are debating the definition of 'application server', developers using other platforms are building applications (and 'enterprise'-worthy applications at that)!
Scala Subreddit
I don't think the clones serve much of a direct practical use but I think they could be useful to people who want to research new social networking features.