skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The closest thing that I have to an estimate for my IQ is scoring 2340 on the GRE exam in 1991. Based on conversions that I've seen, that puts me at about the top 0.01% in IQ. Now I was really "on" that day, happen to believe that there are problems with the measurement of intelligence by an IQ test (a subject which I may devote a future blog post to), but without false modesty I wouldn't be surprised to find that I'm as high as being in the top 0.1% in general intelligence (however that could be measured)."

I see you got snarky replies for writing this. But I'm glad you did. I look forward to seeing you post somewhere, with discussion of the post here on HN, about the issues with IQ tests.

Anyone else who likes to discuss the issue of what to think about IQ tests is someone whose thoughts I'd like to read on a new thread

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1093619

about an article several friends told me about today.
Weird. I thought this board was about entrepreneurship?
Likewise, on both points. It hasn't got the polish of Firefox, and the extension ecosystem is a little rough, and I miss the intelligent URL completion from the Awesomebar, but Chrome wins in speed and stability, and those were enough to move me away from Firefox for all but a few sites.

Speed is important.
I think you and scotty79 are both right, actually.

On the one hand, I agree with the sentiment that the US Government (at the very least on a Federal level) has deteriorated to a point that it actively prevents itself from being repaired -- it doesn't want fixing. The addition of a two-party system, big media, and citizenry at large careless or clueless about how to protect and expand their liberties, and there's not really anything anybody can do about that.

I don't think, though, that simply accepting bad law as irreparable damage and trying to mitigate its area of influence is a viable long-term course of action. Letting government get progressively worse little by little can result in either a) prolonged suffering for many, until conditions get so bad that the government is disassembled (by civil unrest, economic collapse, population decline, or war), or b) another North Korea, a state frozen in time in total control with little chance of popular revolution, subsisting by the "grace" of other nations that haven't collapsed into political black holes.

One way or another, I expect that the current state of the State will only get worse before getting better. How much worse depending on how long Americans put off the task of figuring out how to start fresh on a new government. One with better antivirus capabilities.
Invitations are not permanent. If I invite you to my house and then ask you to leave, you still need to leave even though I had previously invited you. It's private property.
Remember when Firefox was the lightweight web browser? Of course it was called Phoenix back then, and later Firebird. It was refreshing.
What's wrong with nude artwork?

If it were a picture of Venus Demilo, would it then be acceptable?
FSF files new objection to amended Google Book Search settlement
Fair enough, but since there's a geographic element to startup accelerators, can't their addition merely be porting the concept to another geography?

If I visit SF and go to a great a great Hawaiian-Italian fusion restaurant (I random example), I don't think the proprietor would blame me of plagiarism if I started a Hawaiian-Italian joint in Boston.

Further, I see important differences between YC and competing accelerators. YC doesn't provide office space; TechStars and DreamIt do. I'm not sure which approach is better, but I do think it's a non-trivial difference.
Who is offended by nude art? The world's museums are packed with nude art.

Porn is a different matter.
"... I do understand the fear. It’s indisputable that Apple seeks large amounts of control over its products. So it’s a reasonable question to ask whether Apple sees the web itself, which they have no control over, as a problem. I don’t think that’s the case at all, though. The web, as a whole, is arguably the single most entrenched computer technology ever created. So where Apple seeks control with regard to the web is in the technology to render it ..."

The weakness or limitation of the Internet is it's Hubs. Compromise or take down a hub and the network fails. Crackers go for DNS. A smart business will try to monopolise publication of information, news and media. Publishing of information on the Web is a Hub. Hence the tussle between traditional newspapers and electronic publishers like Apple and news distributors like Google.
I think that's part of the post that Roman edited. It wasn't like that before.
Consistency and Availability.

If he chooses you he knows that he can 1) reach you more readily, and 2) you will always be on top of his project. Using a big company means tasks get passed around and between teams, so even the best project manager will often be slower in knowing where things are at and then communicating any client-instigated changes.
They should cut military spending and focus more on nuclear type weapons, sure they will no longer have the same power in tactical ground warfare but it would be basically saying, sure you may be able to out maneuver us now but we can defiantly blow you off the face of the earth if you try.
Source:
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/site/Home

Flash's ActionScript engine, for instance, was donated to opensource and subsequently used to make Firefox faster.

(Adobe Flash Player includes licensed codecs from Fraunhoffer, On2 VPx series, H.264, more... Adobe can distribute them, but cannot license them for redistribution by others.)
Any sort of automated compiler is certainly going to miss out on a lot of the things that make language X better than PHP though would it not? And you're still talking about a rewrite of all their PHP code which I'm sure is no small feat.

You're also ignoring dependencies and such in the form of PHP modules that would have to be redeveloped for the new language. Ensuring your front end developers are just as capable in language X(and handle the retraining/learning curve). Why go through all that trouble when PHP will work just as well for you?
Do they also block the world's art museums?
How to Rebuild a Brand: Your Own
I'm not imagining it, I tell that joke, and to the right audience it's quite funny. Of course, most people don't think it's funny at all, so maybe it's a special brand of dweeb that appreciates it, and maybe that's a dubious honor 8)
I watched a video (Jeff Hammerbacher maybe? It was a long time ago back when he was still CTO) where the person mentioned that they had already tried to rewrite their frontend once in, I think, Python, but it was such a massive undertaking and would've frozen their product for so long that the project was killed.
that might have worked in the days of lincoln...
That is a very good point. Although obviously it doesn't have as much to do with Flash as the fact that we've all been designing for mouse/keyboard interaction for years now. You can, after all, do hovering menus using Javascript/CSS.

But yes a bunch of existing Flash content relying on mouse clicks or keyboard inputs will have to be rethought out for touchscreens based controls anyway.
The search results have significantly improved over the years in some areas.
The problem being that the keeper of the records and the random police officer know one another, and those records "unfortunately" get lost. Unless somebody's got a grudge against the random officer, of course. But you're still dependent on the guy with the power.
Once in college, I was meeting with my advisor, who was also the department head. He had all my school records, including my test scores. He said something about me qualifying to join Mensa if I wanted, and I said something about not liking Mensa since everyone I'd met who had been in the organization seemed arrogant.

It was only later that I realized he must have been in Mensa himself and was recruiting me.

Proving I wasn't nearly as smart as my test scores indicated.
Well done, I really enjoyed playing that game. I had to literally pull myself away from the computer because it's getting really late and I ought to go to bed, but I'll certainly play it again when I get the chance. Just one thing though: it's a bit hard for me to play the game because of the controls - I'm not using a US keyboard layout so the Z key for me is where the Y key is on a normal US keyboard. Perhaps you could make it so that the V key is used for changing the hats?
We are hiring. If you are in LA/SoCal or willing to relocate apply at http://bit.ly/evitedev or email jobs@evite.com.
How much of this shape is an artifact of how google is presenting the data? The right most categories are chunked in ever increasing increments.
Ask PG: Your Phone Number?
Just had someone call my number looking for Paul Graham - the number he meant to dial was 805-791-7299, which is pretty close to mine.

Have we discovered something super secret?

BTW: I know the chances of this being accurate are slim-to-none, one can only imagine the number of PGs out there...
Would you mind if I followed up with you later on that? I'd like to organize my thoughts on how it could be better for me.

I was thinking I could email you at the address in your profile, but when I think about it, it might be more productive to post a Ask HN here once I have a better explanation of what I mean. Then the whole community could participate, which seems like it would be constructive.
I would have preferred if he just worked on his presentation.
There isn't a geographic element to seed funding, though. That's the mistake they all make. People think they're starting the YC of city x, and then they discover that everyone is competing for the same national (and to some extent even international) founder pool.

You're right that office space is a distinction. It's not an innovation though. The incubators of the late 90s all did that. It was a novel move for YC to consciously discard it. So it's hard to say whether including office space was a deliberate change or a transcription error. Honestly, I'd guess the latter. The naive impulse when starting some kind of incubator is always to envision it as a space, rather than a set of relationships between people.
When cloaking with the blue hat, you uncloak as soon as you move. So if you cloak while moving you uncloak immediately.
This is what wealth is all about - Choice.

Bill and Melinda now have the choice to help millions of people around the world, and they do so.

More importantly, their contribution of wealth - even in the form of vaccines worth 50c - means millions of parents now have the choice to spare their children from illness and death.

This is what Bill will be remembered for - right now he's the Microsoft founder doing good with his billions, but in 100 years' time, he will be the technology guy who drove vaccines into Africa and saved thousands upon thousands of lives.
Isn't the 560 billion for "income security" a social services thing? Isn't it giving money to people who don't have jobs, or make very little money? So that's quite a lot of money in the welfare/social services category.

And personally I'd count social security and medicare in the same sort of category. It's the government spending a ton of money inefficiently providing services that should be provided by the free market, and saying this helps people.

It's good to help people, but it's not the right role for Government, which isn't very good at it.

On the other hand, the military spending may be a lot of money, but at least it's in one of the areas the free market has the hardest time with -- it's spending money in an area where the Government actually has some expertise and some business doing anything.
Is this museum a wholly private institution?

It seems so, but the link at the bottom of their page to SCFD (which seems like a state governmental body) confuses me. Does the museum get tax payer dollars?
Can't you switch roles?
I'm not saying they were dumb for thinking OOP was a great leap forward at the time, I'm just wondering how correct they were in retrospect. OOP is ubiquitous enough that it's hard to find a baseline for comparison.
MacRuby 0.5 Released: A Significant, Stable Release
I actually had one. I'm about the same age as Watterson, and had a stuffed tiger that was identical to the one in the strip. I have a sneaking suspicion that he did to, since he captures the odd proportions of the original so perfectly. In any case, it adds a whole 'nother level when I read the strip, allowing me to relate to it eerily well. That tiger was threadbare after years of being my constant companion (my mom had to sew the tail back on several times).
Software on the Cheap
iPad: Frowl
re: that last level jump - bunny hat that bitch
Yeah, I tried to address that in the end of the post. You'll notice links to two other site's data where the chunking is present but not nearly enough to make a horseshoe.

Without Google's chunking it would look different. but it actually makes it easier to see what's happening. Everyone will see a 1-log like function here (without chunking), what matters is the rate of decay, and that is well-captured in the chunking.
For the sake of privacy, you shouldn't be posting this.
Agreed - Just providing a direct link - The absence of the URLs really bothered me. It hides an extremely important piece of info (until you mouseover). More than that, the green URL breaks up each result. Without it the results blur together.
If an organization is able to purchase all the advertising space in a jurisdiction, they can effectively decide how people will vote.

Consider the Prop 8 smear campaign in California by the Mormon Church.
That's what I used to do actually. It was indeed a very effective way to speak English but I pretty much lost interest in video games now.
> Who is offended by nude art?

Uptight Bible-thumpers that are only afraid of the fact that seeing a nude woman makes them feel uncomfortable so the only logical reaction is, "Hulk Smash!"

{edit} I should add, "and the bureaucrats that are afraid of litigation/boycotts/bad publicity from the Bible-thumpers"

{edit2} I could include Quran-thumpers too, but they don't have huge representation in the US. Maybe moreso in Europe though?
maybe it made the original developer smile, which was probably originally worth it. I know little things can totally impact my emotional state and thus productivity.
i suppose a lot of sites don't think too much about it, but putting a user/account id in a url gives away quite a bit of information. putting aside the recommendations for not putting an internal id in a url just because it may change and break existing links, there are some privacy concerns as well.

in a cms-type application, it may let a recently-subscribed customer (or competitor) know how many other customers are stored in the system, even if they can't view the other records. it may also be used to determine a signup date if that is at all useful.

in file-hosting type scenarios like dropbox, it allows for brute force scanning like this. instead of using /u/1, /u/2, use the user's username, or a randomly-generated key/guid associated that maps to the user's account.
805 is the area code for Bakersfield. He must've been looking for another Paul Graham. PG's is probably 1(911)-791-7299.
PostgreSQL 9.0 - Hot Standby, Streaming Replication
Google Removes Ad blocking Extensions from Extension Gallery Front Page
Excellent feedback, I didn't know that VA wasn't DOD.

Is the chart only about the executive branch? Does it include congressional spending & the federal judiciary?
In heavy traffic most people would benefit from switching lanes, because most people are in the lane with the most cars.
But how many special purpose robots can you send up for the purposes that a human will do?
Emotional Attachment To Music
By itself it's a fun toy.

As part of a larger system abstracting configuration and administration tasks it might actually be useful. I could imagine mapping a RESTful system around a filesystem path and embedding it in this 'os' to leverage shell concepts to web resources. Environments like CouchDB, Riak or Node.js that are partially javascript under the hood to begin with could see even deeper associations.

Hell you could probably add an abstraction layer underneath the 'vm' and multiplex it to arbitrarily many actual systems, think administering a large set of memcachedb instances with a single command line. And of course you have javascript as a first-level primitive for scripting tasks that you'd use perl for on a real UNIX.

Something to think about anyway.
I'm no cryptographer, so maybe this is a silly question... Any reason why I shouldn't just reimplement it in the high level language of my choice and release it open source?
The first thing I thought was "this looks like a spam results page".
The organizational impact due to poor software quality
This is the expenses side. It'd be nice to see an infographic on the revenue side. (Taxes, etc.)
That's not close to my number. There are a lot of Paul Grahams.
It's interesting if it's true, but it could also be a glitch. I could see taking it off the front page, but manually changing the download count would be a bit much.
Oh I agree open standards and open source has saved their bacon and will again in the future. To bad they seem intent to go the embrace and extend route.
Social security provides money, which is about as efficient as it gets. Are you positing that private pension benefits are somehow spent more efficiently?

As far as whether it helps people, it unquestionably does. Maybe it hurts other people (those who pay taxes), but that income transfer would not likely happen under private plans. So it is not an apples-to-apples comparison.
http://i.imgur.com/xyH3n.png
Sure, go for it, and I think an Ask HN would be appropriate as long as it's kept constructive and doesn't devolve into a bitchfest of complaining. I have faith in the HN community. :-)

Also, to be clear, I'm speaking in an unofficial capacity here, as myself. I'm quite curious what people's frustrations are, but I can't promise anything.
I'd guess that most scientists know six digits of π: 3.14159.</pedantry>
Agree totally.

I'd be so screwed if everything I've done came out.

Today, I'm a pretty law abiding citizen (if I break it, it is in ways that hurts no-one).

I was a rather confused and angry teenager growing up though, and did a lot of things I shouldn't have.

I really take offense to the notion that that should have fucked me over for the rest of my life.

There is such a thing as wanting to start with a clean slate.

Make exception for pedos, etc, if you want, but don't use them as a justification to screw everyone out of privacy.

For fucks, sake.
Of course they aren't permanent. However, in this case, the people who had those bumper stickers weren't doing anything warranting eviction.

How would you feel if someone denied you an "invitation" to a privately owned supermarket because you were black and you "might" say something about all the white people shopping there?
Former CIA agents using lie-detecting/interrogation techniques on Wall Street
Why? What influence do authors have on where their books get sold? Naively, my guess would be "none". As a reader, I am certainly unconcerned with the opinion of authors on where I should buy my books...

The publishers will be pissed, but Amazon remains a key market, so they will get over it.
Your parents probably did the right thing. I fretted over my scoring through most of school. It's only now, many years later that I realize how irrelevant those scores are to what I need to do.

The only thing I really wish is that my parents, and the various school administrations had ignored the tests too, because they usually resulted in all kinds of "special programs" that did very little to help me deal with school and adolescence and had negligible impact if any on me when I got older.
Great collection of social network stats for 2010
You're missing the point. Go ahead and cut income security entirely. You'll slash some incredibly popular (and useful) programs, and you'll save less than one social security.

Again, we can't keep slashing at the smallest parts of the budget and hoping to shrink the deficit. It's nothing more than political theater, designed to appease a vocal minority who don't have a sufficient understanding of the problem.
Where do you think Apple is doing an "embrace, extend, extinguish"? Can you point to an open standard that they have added proprietary extensions to?

Apple definitely mixes open and proprietary components in their own systems, but I don't see how that hurts any of the open parts, since the closed parts serve different purposes.
And why would you think Google wouldn't do that? Advertisement money is their lifeblood. Not that I agree with this, but it wouldn't be illegal or against their TOS to do such a thing.
Good to hear. I could definitely tell that the Ruby job scene has grown there since I last looked for a job 2 years ago. In my last job search, there were very few jobs in NYC for rubyists - now there are quite a few. Most of the jobs I applied for last month were in NYC and today is my first day working at my new job there.

Any other devs in NYC? Any great user groups or events that I shouldn't miss? I'm working remotely at the moment, but will be moving there this month and am hoping to get to know some interesting folks there!
I'm going to start a business to sell services to the US government. Even if I only capture 1% of the market that's $36 billion per year!
In the iPad, Apple Is Betting on Its Own Microchip
I believe that the budget proposal on which this chart is based is only for the executive branch.
A mathematician is working in his study and he smells smoke. Turning around he sees smoke creeping round the door - fire! Quickly he pulls out a fresh piece of paper and starts scribbling.

As the crackling of the fire grows louder and the room is heating up, he relaxes back in his chair, pushes the paper aside and calmly returns to what he was doing, having proved that a solution is possible.
Yes, a private group to share ideas and motivation could be useful and I'd be willing to be involved. Could be very low-tech too - just IM/email and some FrieNDAs.

I'd like to share two techniques I've found somewhat helpful (though not quite the ultimate answer, unfortunately).

1. While side projects often have no deadlines and thus less motivation, employees don't really have the same problems. I've delegated more components from side projects to my employees and the result is things getting done much faster. Now the progress block is things that are back in my hands - writing content, taking a working product and launching it for people to try.

2. A while back, an entrepreneur-type I know over the net and I did an experiment. We would both work all day and struggle with motivation to complete site-projects during the evening so we decided we'd each complete a small site project in one week. Each morning, we'd check in to show our progress. Failure to show progress meant the other person was to apply guilt trips were appropriate. Monday night as planning, Tuesday was fleshing out content, Wednesday was a skeletal site, Thursday was putting things together, Friday was polishing and making it live. Each night, the pressure of thinking you'd have nothing to show the following morning was enough to force productivity. On nights when I'd normally laze around or procrastinate at the desk, I'd cram 1-2 hours of work around or after midnight. It was enough to get a basic site rolling by the Friday that I would never have otherwise done. It worked for me but unfortunately the other guy didn't get going quite as well. Still, I'd do it again.
You're hardly the first person with this idea. There are many corporations already working in this sector--they're called government contractors.
Call me when HTML5 can do this

http://www.petrileskinen.fi/Actionscript/TubeView/TubeView.h...

http://www.unitzeroone.com/labs/alchemyPushingPixels/

http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform[]=Flash