skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because you can leave Google. You may not want to, and they do a great job of having features nobody else has, but if they piss you off enough, there's plenty of email providers.

Facebook, on the other hand, holds your social network hostage. We'll always resent any site that takes advantage of that.
This all leaves out that the idea of ConnectU was no more Facebook than cricket is baseball. They are different things. Very different.
I picked it because it has the title "A meta-analytic review of longitudinal research". Meta-analyses are often a good way to summarize existing results in a field and get a quick overview of the actual data that's been produced. They tend to be less biased than cherry-picking an individual study, though it's impossible to eliminate all bias altogether.

The 5000-feet summary of the paper's results was that there is widespread consensus that there is a correlation between intelligence and education/occupation/income levels, but there are divergent results as to the magnitude of that correlation, ranging from .15 to .40 (a correlation of 0 indicates that the two variables are completely uncorrelated, 1.0 indicates they are completely dependent).

"It's controversial because it could be used to justify a number of racial or eugenic policies, and because it's sort of silly, in the melting pot of America, and with our knowledge of intelligence, to make any claims on social classes having stratified into different classes of human within the space of a few generations."

This is not how facts work. Something is true or false regardless of whether we like it, and regardless of the implications of its truth or falsehood. This is usually called the is-ought problem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is-ought_problem

A statement about how the world is - say, intelligence is correlated with income - is very different from a statement about how the world ought to be - say, that smart people ought to make more money than dumb people. It's very possible to believe the former and reject the latter. But your rejection of the latter has no bearing on the truth of the former: just because you don't like the conclusions that other people draw from a statement like "income and intelligence are highly correlated" doesn't make it untrue.
Preparing your Citizenship Coursework
The preparation of the citizenship coursework allows students to explore different ideas and cultures. This type of coursework is not an easy one to do. But if you select the right topic and approach it in the proper manner, you will be able to write a good citizenship coursework.
Your share is 2.1 kids, not just one.
Actually, I think I/O is really clear in Haskell. Haskell is a pure functional language, and in that world side-effects are not possible (since a function should always return the same value, given the same input). For this reason functional languages like Haskell introduce monads, which allow you to model imperative languages (with state and order). I/O is performed in one such monad (the IO monad), and programming in the IO monad just looks like imperative programming. The tricky part is that you cannot get pure values out of the IO monad (since it is impure), which may entice programmers to let the IO monad 'leak' intro programs to much, rather than lifting pure functions into the monad.

Yes, monads can be hard to get in the beginning, but they never felt like tricking the compiler to me.
> I think this depends on what you define as "better".

I think by most standards that most people would agree on, democracies come out well.

For example, consider life expectancy -- this is IMO a good measure because nearly everyone wants to be alive, and someone who is alive is (usually) better off than someone who is dead. If you look at countries with the highest life expectancy ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Expectancy_by_Country ) democracies seem to be over-represented at the top. This is particularly the case if you discount territories that aren't counties (such as Hong Kong).

Of if you go by UN Human Development Index, you get a similar story.

> Certainly there are also example of successful societies that have lasted for very long periods of time that are not democracies, such as tribal communities. They don't exhibit significant economic growth, but they also are far less likely to make war

I'm not sure this is the case. Are you familiar with the high rate of homicide among the Yanomamo?

> My point being that it is very common for a culture to reinforce in its members a perception that the cultures way of doing things is "right" and that it produces a better outcome-- and it does it in such a way that people presume that this to be a fact, rather than a bias.

You're right that this is a cognitive bias we should guard against.
Have you considered jumping on the app-store/mobile market bandwagon? It's working wonderfully for me, but it may take you a "full time" effort to find your sweet spot and start making a real living.
I think it just becomes story-telling.
A really basic rule of thumb is the following formula: 6 months of living expenses, startup expenses, and 6 months of business operating expenses. Do a simple spreadsheet to test if the numbers work. If you have that amount, go for it.
its literally a catch 22 situation, its a matter of what perspective (regarding the time factor) one is looking at.

Over population will cause pressure on the sustainability of resources on the planet, not to mention inefficient use of resources and resulting pollution.

Under population in a society will put other pressures on the sustainability of a society - more of the economic type and on a longer time frame. The pressures would be more about having a critical enough market size that can support enough jobs and hence a decent enough quality of life.
He said correlation, not determinism. It's quite possible for wealthy parents to have smart children on average and yet for any given child of smart parents to be spectacularly dumb. (I know a couple myself, FWIW.)

Something with two legs is far more likely to be human than insect, for example, even if you do have the odd human with only one leg.
Why would this be true of men and not women?

I'm reminded of Philip Greenspun's _Women in Science_, in which he says that smart women don't go into science because "Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States." I think his analysis of problems in the structure of science as a profession is accurate but that his sex-based commentary is wrong: for one thing, women now outnumber men in liberal arts PhDs, where the job market isn't just worse for most science PhDs -- it's _way_ worse.
Women in Science
As I said in this thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1751387 :

I'm reminded of Philip Greenspun's _Women in Science_, in which he says that smart women don't go into science because "Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States." I think his analysis of problems in the structure of science as a profession is accurate but that his sex-based commentary is wrong: for one thing, women now outnumber men in liberal arts PhDs, where the job market isn't just worse for most science PhDs -- it's _way_ worse.

Still, this essay is worth reading and consistently interesting.
To play devil's advocate here do you have any evidence that Google's model generates higher return, click thru or revenue?

To me it seems like Facebook is the best long term business model. Slowly, as you and your friends update every bit of your life, where you are, what you are doing, who you are with, etc. they can have a massive amount of data to target you with. Google basically made Gmail just so they could mine more data from your email to better target adverts. Facebook may have found the golden needle in the haystack if they evolve the business correctly which it looks like they will. Look where they are taking things with places, etc. Google can target you and the people who email you but there isn't a permanent link between you and the recipient(s) whereas with FB it is a chunky sold gold chain linking you together in every way they can think of from things you "like", wall posts, comments replying to you, comments you make, invites you get, invites you accept, places you go, who you go with, when you go, how much you spend, monitor you behaviour via status updates. They will know you go out every friday night with the same three friends to one of two bars or clubs, you then go and add photos to FB when you are there and label everyone in the pictures, the location either specifically or via geotag, etc.

Google may have a lot of your data but FB is the holy grail and every business needs to think about how they can get in on the action. Google tried with the piece of crap Buzz was and the crappy Orkut that they bought but let it die when FB exploded. Soon FB will be as well known as Coca Cola and used by everyone. FB is the first service my mum, dad, grandma, aunt, uncle, etc. use. It isn't just a "under 30s" thing, literally everyone can and seem to be using it. Facebook is going to only get bigger and they have such a high userbase now it is hard to see how anyone else will replace them. They saw what happened to MySpace, they are smart and have learnt from others mistakes.

Just my 2c though :)
I didn't say it was genetically determined, I said it was heritable.

Regression to the mean occurs if the two bright people were bright by chance. This is not necessarily the case.
Researchers produce induced pluripotent human stem cells using skin cells
I think the selection would be based on how much parents enjoy having children.
Those who enjoy having children would have 2+ kids and their genes would multiple. Others would slowly disappear.
The change wouldn't be quick though. It would take at least few centuries to make somewhat noticeable gene pool correction.
A Code for Chaos
That's the sort of managerial problems that can only be solved from the top down. Shake-ups, reshufflings, and some good old fashioned ass-kicking can begin turning the ship around.

A lot of Apple enthusiasts like to say "Apple's excellence isn't just Steve Jobs," but I think in the case of Microsoft, one can reasonably say "Microsoft's brokenness is just Steve Ballmer." I think he's almost completely blind to pretty much everything that's happening in his company, and the tech world at large. I'm not really sure what value the board think he adds. I guess something to do with sales and marketing, given his background, but it's not like Microsoft's image is doing all that well either.

One other MS subdivision I forgot to mention that are doing well is Bing. They're doing some great work. I'm not sure who they report to, and what their level of autonomy is.
Hunter S. Thompson's brutally honest Canadian job request
I know where I'm going, I don't know where I'll end up.

I think the better Tao of goals is not by having non-goals, which becomes a goal itself, but by having flowing goals that change, grow, diminish, and lead to more and more branches. There are two commonly used metaphors of the Tao: seeming opposition and imitating water. I think the latter isn't given enough attention.
Krugman, and his ilk, are incapable of being honest. If they were, they would have to admit that over and over again the policies they advocate result in disaster.
The funny and scary point this post made was that maybe (just maybe) Facebook is bringing back the inefficient TV ads that Madison Avenue loves in the form of Facebook banner ads.

Facebook ads might make more money than Google ads precisely because their effectiveness cannot be measured (just like TV and billboard ads). Sure, engineers will cite poor CTRs but "brand managers" will be eager to dismiss that as oh-so-2001. They are not buying clicks, they are creating "brand awareness on the largest website on the internet".
In addition to altitude, another important distinction is velocity. You need to be moving at around 7.5 km/sec (17,000mph) to stay in LEO. Ballons aren't going to help much there. And any orbital spacecraft is going to need some serious shielding if you want it to come back in one piece. Some of the pictures of this Soyuz landing give an idea of the engineering needed: http://cryptome.org/info/soyuz-tma18/soyuz-tma18.htm

The pictures and video are pretty, but calling it a spacecraft is exaggeration. You can't see the curvature of the earth at that altitude. It only appears that way because of the wide angle lens.

I hate to rain on this parade, because high altitude balloons are really cool. They're just not spacecraft and I can't stand exaggerated titles.
mr. Khan and wikipedia are the two best things to come out of the web as far as I'm concerned. Project gutenberg third but at considerable distance.

Between Khan Academy and wikipedia education is pretty much limited by the amount of time you have to invest.

There was a character in a book that tried to learn by memorizing an encyclopedia, which as 'learning by rote' is not the most useful thing. But in wikipedia everything is interlinked, and you can dig down in to a subject as deep as you want, the references will give you the background. It's quite amazing how much you can learn about something just from there.

The Khan Academy is another part of education embodied in bits, a really good instructor that knows how to make subjects both interesting and understandable.
It's true that Google has this advantage, but facebook has another one: "Hey, your friends x and y like these widgets".
Apple, Future’s Unstoppable Juggernaut
Most people work part time anyway by procrastinating like mad :) It's not a bad a idea to put some structure to it. Protip: read The 4-hour Work Week.
I believe that most people blend C# and .NET together. C# is a standardized language. .NET is a closed platform. Anyone can implement C# the language. You can write a compiler that outputs Java byte code if you really want.

But a language isn't that useful without a standard set of libraries (or platform).

And I believe that is where you run into issues. Novell has made a clean room implementation with Mono. And many people believe (myself included) that Microsoft would be doing itself more harm than good to go after Novell's clean room implementation of some of the core System libraries. But there is no guarantee that someday they won't do it. Other than the fact that there is no money in it.
Comparison of disk encryption software
Oh, don't worry, he still managed to stab his own company in the eye like he does in every interview:

"Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it," he said. Google implants, he added, probably crosses that line."

I cannot fathom why Google thinks it helps them to say things like this.
I agree, its a depressing pattern but there is a a ring of truth to it - when a species/civilization gets to a certain point of sophistication and intelligence, the motive to keep expanding (or even reproducing, apparently) stops, and they don't go on to colonize anywhere else

May be the solution would be to colonize another planet fast enough, before we become sophisticated enough to march towards that 0 population eventuality.
You need to compare the job market to alternatives available to the person.

The next best alternative to a PhD in physics is job as a quant at a hedge fund, a programmer, an engineer, or something of that nature.

The next best alternative to a PhD in english lit is proofreader, copy editor or barista.
I'd report that to Google as a bug.

http://www.google.com/support/toolbar/bin/request.py?contact...

The official toolbar should not exceed request limits that were designed to prevent PageRank scraping by third-party software.
How did this happen? Even-handed, optimistic reporting on women in tech from a woman in tech? Not a dramatic lamentation that there aren't more women in tech, nor a dismissal of women as not skilled/geeky enough, nor a conspiracy theory about the boys' club? It's encouraging to say the least. I could wish all discourse on the topic was of this quality.

> A good idea is a good idea and at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter a damn where it came from.

A nice, concise expression of the hacker principal of abandoning ego and identity when considering merits. I'm all filled with hope and what-have-you; I've got to go find something depressing to read to push my expectations back down. Apparently, Unix wasn't the only good thing her parents taught her.
That kind of makes me sad, physics can be so engaging with a good teacher even though physics turned out to be my hardest non engineering course because of the teacher's assigned workload and tests it was by far my favorite class to attend.
“…beard removal (virtual shaving), beard synthesis, and beard transfer.”
Reads like a bad version of Douglas Rushkoff's Exit Strategy.

http://www.amazon.com/Exit-Strategy-Douglas-Rushkoff/dp/1887...
The whole concept of privacy being black and white - a line where you're fine on one side and creepy on the other is just a fantasy. Google needs to understand that it's a continuum. Every little creepy thing you do makes you a bit more creepy. They day they started remembering my search terms made them more creepy. They day they started analyzing my email made them even a bit more creepy. The day they started photographing me in the street made them more creepy again. There is no line. Even if there was nobody would agree on where it was. Google is going to destroy itself if they don't learn this.

Fortunately for Google Eric Schmidt seems to be the only one publicly stating this delusion so there is hope it is mainly in his head, but I'm not sure.
Clickable link: http://www.techofnow.com/
Ask HN: Suggestion on career path to pursue
I have a MS in computer science and currently working as a software developer for the last 4 years. I dont want to continue working as a developer but would rather want to pursue a career where i can put my tech skills. The options that I have come up with are
1. back to school for a MBA
2. back to school for MS for a degree like computation finance or engineering management degrees.

Any suggestions on what course to pursue and pro-cons on selecting either of the courses. Or any other option on how can i switch career without going back to school..how would i got about doing that??

Thanks
Ask PG:  Do you expect "The Social Network" to impact # of YC applications?
I have a feeling this movie will motivate a lot of people towards entrepreneurship.

Maybe there will be a bump in YC applications?
I hate to say it but that bit of Greenspun's argument alone is a horrible argument. Then why are smart men chosing science? It seems you would have to add that women tend to choose higher paying jobs when given a choice more often than men or something to that effect. It seems to be more like naysaying against science professions anyway. :) It's not very politically correct but it seems plausible that, on the whole, women are just less likely to find a deeply technical field more appealing than something less technical. Or there really are social norms driving women away from technical professions. Or something like that. I think those less popular arguments are more of an honest assesment devoid of ulterior motives. To me that makes more sense than trying to argue that women don't go into technical fields because adjusting for IQ and working hours, it doesn't pay very much. I mean, the more I think about that, that sounds totally ridiculous. How many women are really actively caclulating their IQ and quantitative skills into some vague formula when making job decisions, particularly very early in their academic careers? It sounds nice but as a serious explanation of real phenomena, it seems to fall down.
Indeed.

But I maintain my statement, which has nothing to do with Apple and Google (something I made clear on my first message in this thread). Microsoft has very rarely, if ever, launched a product that created or redefined a category. They are always late movers, but, frequently, end up with the first successful product.
I wouldn't read much into it. We got so many more good applications than we had room for this time that we might as well have been flipping coins.
I believe this is a failure of imagination. Facebook Credits will be their Gmail, the second act which shows that they are something special. Blippy, Groupon, and others are all in the general area of "social purchasing" but FB will simply dominate this when they enter the game. In a down economy, if you can get a discount by simply sharing or liking, you will. And advertisers can micro target not just demographics, but influencers within those demographics, people who are disproportionately effective in passing on memes -- and buy messages -- to
their friends.

(Parenthetically, this also means people will visit Facebook for product search, buoying the overall commercial intent of the site. And an endorsement by a friend of something carries even more weight than a good Amazon reviews.)
If you plan on duplication read this:

http://www.eoss.org/pubs/faqloon.htm

and please pay special attention to the 'notice for airmen'.

I'd hate to be on board a plane colliding with this, and even if the chances are small the outcome could be bad enough that I think that a toll free phone call is not too much to ask.

Great experiment otherwise!
The U.S. can maintain its dominant economic position indefinitely if we reform immigration to hoard the brightest minds and stick to the entrepreneurial model. If we agree to never hinder startup business creation cross-party, the China large-company model of government will not be able to adapt\innovate as quickly in the future once it's done catching up to what others have already done.
I used to love wmii, but I use xmonad now for the better multi-head support. I wish xmonad did tags like wmii though.
The rate of return is a lot worse with Facebook, because you can only target by demographics...not intent

Facebook will harvest much more intent than they do today. There will be many cases where "Ask your friends/experts" is much better than "Ask PageRank". We are seeing this with knowledge exchange sites like Quora and we will eventually see this with Facebook Questions. And this will seep into all of Facebook's Apps.

Google is having a hell of a time trying to monetize YouTube. They just aren't as good with display advertising. YouTube would be a massive revenue generation engine if Facebook owned it. Look for a Facebook Video that becomes huge.

Facebook will also turn into a massive lead generation engine based on Connect and Pages. Run the numbers for social distribution. You can do customer cluster acquisition through social distribution. With SEM you can only acquire a user at a time.

When you acquire a customer through a social network, they are more likely to lead to referrals than a user acquired through search engine marketing.

Comparing MySpace to Facebook does not follow. MySpace has massive leadership and execution issues. Facebook is probably the best executing pre-IPO company out there.
Ask HN: Do you volunteer for any community activity? Where? How?
Hello HN. I was just wondering whether you volunteer for any community activities? Say at a school or a hospital or say maintaining community buildings or help with cleaning or anything really.

Just asking to get some ideas because I want to spend some outside of my room, away from the computer, while working on something of value to the community. Earlier I did help some NGOs with their websites but this time I want to go do something not related to computers :)

Share your experiences here!
The Khan Academy is great. But, and I'm not really making any accusations at all, I hope amidst all this praise for what an admirable job he is doing and all the opportunities this affords for underpriviledged people that he stays on top of the quality and accuracy of the material. I just remember there being a few questions about some of his stuff on linear algebra. I also hope he will continue to add more advanced material to the various subjects, but I think that is his plan.