skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everyone wants to be a genius. And if they can't be, they want the comfort that it's because they're not trying hard enough.

I've met some people who were just anomalies, whose brains worked in "genius mode" naturally, without much of what we would consider "effort." Srinivasa Ramanujan would fall into this category (not saying I met him :). Pretending I could think like them is like pretending I could have synesthesia if I really wanted to.

And yes, this article is about doing genius-quality work and not genius-quality thought, but give a single monkey a typewriter and let him have at it...and he'll eventually produce the works of Shakespeare too. Genius lies in the ability to produce relatively "genius-quality" work in less time and fewer resources than it would take the average man. The author seems to want to normalize time and effort across the board for everyone.
Privacy began to quickly wilt away with the widespread use of credit cards and cell phones. Both of these allow for us to be tracked via spending and calls (now with apps and gps in phones).

But, we've always had phone books, directory assistance, and the US census. 72% of the national population in both 2000 and 2010 filled out the first form, not including the second form, and not including the door to door.

In many ways, the privacy issues that companies like Google and Facebook are dealing with were instigated decades, or even centuries earlier. Each step has met resistance, always has become the norm in a few years. I expect this recent privacy wave will be similar. We could've opted out intrusive things many, many years ago but, as a society, we have not done so.
I'm looking for NYU's feeds
I was talking to my friend about the Muslim immigrant birthrate in Europe versus the natives and how it's a threat to Western culture, but he made the counterpoint that he thought Islam would schism like Christianity has, and therefore there's nothing to worry about.
What will happen if it becomes a standard for input and you have users grow up with it who never learned QWERTY? It's premise--that you're typing with a QWERTY layout in mind--then becomes broken.

Someone can then invent QwertyType: an actual keyboard on the screen. This will be faster for these users because they won't have to guess where the software thinks they think the keys are.
Update: booked my flights and transportation to/from LAX. See you guys there. Look out for me!
RTW tickets are cost effective. You can usually pay some extra money to massage the dates, and it'll probably still be cheaper than buying tons of tickets (at least when I bought one... not sure how the prices have changes since)
I have two favorites: Ratpoison (tiling) and Evilwm (non-tiling).
Costwise this kind of depends on where you're going... overland bus travel in Asia is much cheaper than, say, taking a train domestically in Germany.

But I totally agree on the schedule part. Every time I've booked in advance something has come up that has made me have to change plans, and I've regretted it. Buy one-way tickets and no more than a month in advance.
One can't make genius quality work, but society can do it.

An army of researchers can visit any single idea in a field, and then one of then makes a great discovery, one that is the source of a great revolution, that is a genius is born, so we (society) can make genius quality work.
For stats:

Statistical Methods by Snedecor and Cochran

Statistical Data Analysis by Glen Cowan

As a gentle introduction to statistics and probability, Statistics by Freedman, Pisani, and Purves.
"The new Truecrypt 7.0 release is almost 7 times faster compared to 6.0 on my i7-620M with AES-NI. It is some hundred mb/s faster now than dmcrypt (which runs my system-encryption on Debian Squeeze), but that is expected since truecrypt makes use of multiple cores AND aes-ni and dmcrypt only supports 1 thread per mounted device, so unless you create a RAID consisting of multiple dmcrypt-devices, you can only use 1 core."
more:

http://www.robo47.net/blog/200-Truecrypt-7.0-Linux-AES-NI-Be...
HN reality check: You are a community of people who debug Javascript and scheme to get acquired by large companies.
Chrome with thirty tabs

I found it very helpful to actively and violently close down tabs. 4-5 is just about the ideal maximum. I keep a separate lightweight browser, Opera, open to API documentation, and firefox for other stuff. For wifi, I removed the internal one and use an external one. Whenever I need to focus, I close firefox without saving sessions and unplug the wifi.

When I go out to cafes for reading, I leave the wifi at home.
Have you been travelling alone or with a friend / girlfriend / wife?

I want to do this as well, but the biggest question for me seems to be who to go with or going alone (and then just trying to meet people everywhere)?
Eric Schmidt describes China as operating like a well-run company..
Head over to Asia, you can get your Visa really easily, then extend your visa over there by just crossing the border and returning again.

The cost of living is low and the atmosphere is great.
I wish I made that comment.
Don't be concerned with immigration issues for a while and leave your business registration and taxation status in the UK.

Sort out all the paperwork if or when you decide to settle down...in the meantime stay nimble, have fun and travel.
> We used to do that, when I was a comp sci grad student in the 1970s. I think we got way too caught up in the commercialism.

Students choosing to study computer science today are motivated by different reasons than their counterparts from the 70s. Many choose to study computer science at the undergraduate level specifically for these commercial aspects that were not present 30-40 years ago.
Joseph Stiglitz: the euro may not survive
It's hosted on Google App Engine, which blocks Iran: https://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_thre...
Khan Academy is a good resource if you haven't a good teacher and you have a lot of time for learning.

With a good teacher you can learn more with less time. If you are in a small group you can ask the teacher and you will learn that he can give you not only the answer you are looking for but a new perspective about that subject.

So Khan Academy is a good resource in certain occasions, but never as a good teacher should be.
I had "Mathematical statistics" by Freund and Walpole and still refers to it. Also Drake's Applied Probability theory is a classic.
In an effort to defuse any potential flames that may arise from a hot-button issue like gay marriage let me replace your example with "social issues".

You argue that financial regulation is important (and it is) but the problem with your statement is that the economy is all-important. I'm not going to argue that it isn't, rather I am merely goung to point out that people have very different ideas about what government is for.

For some there are many social issues that Are important to society as a whole. One could argue that freedom of religion is an unproductive distraction.

One can argue that we shouldn't legislate morality, which many clearly try to do, but we do that in many ways. Theft, murder, etc are all morality when it comes down to it.

If you approach democracy by saying "these people are irrational because issue X doesn't matter to the economy" you're not making any useful observation. In fact, it's a bit like arguing that the problem with democracy is that you don't get the outcome you want.
To me, this is like a automotive executive saying "the engine doesn't matter, they're all the same anyway". The engine probably doesn't directly matter to most customers and they are mostly the same. However, it's lunacy to say that the heart of your product isn't important. If the engine has problems, your customers have problems. If the OS has problems, your customers have problems too.

Yeah, developer tools and APIs are very important, but they're only as good as the platform they target.
Pioneer anomaly: Known forces taken into account, an unexplained force remains
Is not who wrote the law, but in which conditions laws should be applicable. United Nations and poor countries, you can write the law but poor countries will continue to be poor because they don't have the power to impose their reality. If you don't have power you are invisible.

Google has power, so he question who wrote the laws and he knows that power is a way to rewrite the law.
Phil- This is truly great. Thanks so much. Really appreciate it. Going to file this week...
Selection bias much? He's complaining about an over abundance of consumer facing web businesses at an event sponsored by a blog that focuses almost exclusively on consumer facing web businesses.

There is lots of real computer science going on in the world, and there's a bunch of money being thrown at it. It's just that you won't hear about any of it by reading TechCrunch all day.
I think this is where hacker-built businesses have a unique opportunity. They're well versed with the development grind. Though the media company grind is very different, mainly through the necessary inclusion of many more people involved, hackers know how to overcome a bug and solve problems. Since the problem is on their end (the grind) as opposed to external forces (a bubble) these businesses have more of a fighting chance then the dot com companies that dried up quickly and painfully.
This can be cast as a shortest path problem. Implementations on huge graphs (several million nodes), i.e. larger than the one defined by a dictionary, are very efficient and usually take advantage of both the source and destination rather than just performing breadth first search from the source. I can think of Andrew Goldberg's work, see e.g.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/goldberg/
On which sites will I hear of this "real computer science"? I'd be interested in reading them along with my daily dose of HN and TC
The last line here is not hyperbole. It changes you, plain and simple, to read this mans experiences and their translation into a form of therapy.
Jobs also had Pixar, which had an undeniable impact in it's field.

Here's a question to test if you really believe the argument you seem to be making:

You have the idea of your lifetime. It's a billion dollar idea. You are looking for a co-founder, and find two amazing prospects.

They are equal in every way (education, drive, interests, etc) except one: Jim spent the past five years working at a startup that he just sold for $20m. Tim spent the past five years working in an office job.

You can only pick one of them. Do you prefer Tim or Jim?
> I'm not sure how this logic works. If you have low-hanging fruit, you don't need genius-quality work.

One of the things that got me thinking about this originally was reading that there were massive improvements in safety and efficiency in surgery when they started adopting processes and checklists from engineering.

Whoever adopted, tested, and perfected that made a genius quality contribution to medicine, but it was (relatively) low hanging fruit. I think it's more possible to make that sort of high impact, important contribution now than ever before.

> But then again, I'm skeptical of anyone that claims that genius is easy.

I wrote - "But honestly, I don’t think it’s very hard to do genius-quality work, if you decide to try. Most people don’t try. But if you did try, I think you could do some."

So I wouldn't say it's easy, but I don't think it's so hard either.

My feeling is that almost anyone could produce some really important works if they decided to try. How many people are trying, really? Everyone I know that's trying to do really important stuff is generally doing really important stuff.

> Plus, I do believe that there's more to it than hard work. Anyone can work hard, and I know plenty of hard workers who definitely don't do genius quality work.

But are they specifically trying to make large, permanent impacts on important fields? Repeatedly, persistently trying? Putting in hard work in boring, safe areas is unlikely to produce genius quality work. But looking at really hard problems or not-yet-done things and trying to do them? I think if you keep trying, you're likely to produce something of significant value.

Or maybe I'm mistaken, I don't know. But I generally see people who plant a flag and say, "I will try to do things that are massively important" - those people I see eventually making breakthroughs and contributions. I think a lot of people just don't plant that flag.
I should add that I'm coming at this from a SaaS perspective where it's vital to release early and often. It would be unusual not to put out something new on a weekly basis. If we make a mistake we can lose a lot of money but no horses will die.
By adding in a typo like 'now what you are thinking about', the author of the article can also be pretty sure what we're thinking about .. sloppy journalism.
Doesn't work for me. Chrome on Ubuntu.

Yes. Very easy.
Read that for marketing ideas, but if you want real issues, read this: http://www.reddit.com/r/feminism

Here is why: http://twitter.com/vsedach/status/26207494600

Feminists might not fun, but their companionship frees me from the social burden of having to be a gentleman
Part of understanding may also be understanding what you can 'get away with'. That sounds bad, but may well be a fact of life in some places, especially if you're not really invested in staying there for the long haul.
Automagically Generated Summaries of MIT OCW Algorithms Lectures
Good probability book? What's wrong with Feller? ;-)

Linear algebra: well, there are lots of good theory books but I'm a big fan of the computational approach, and Golub and Van Loan is my pick there hands down!
As promised here yesterday on the MIT Video lectures - Introduction to Algorithms discussion thread -> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1751181
China has a very different culture than Singapore. I do not think that just because they are in close proximity and are both Asian that it means the people are moving in the exact same direction. To me China seems much more blue collar heavy industry than Singapore, and Singapore seems much more western looking in a lot of ways than China.
Oh I'm not joking, and don't call me "Shirley"!
Could you put into words the chilling issues about ethics and morality found in The Watchmen? I've read it some year ago, but I really can't remember anything striking, though I'd like to.
Lance Armstrong's posterous
The majority of available operating systems provide similar system interfaces. The same is not true for user experience, developer tools and APIs. His point is that these peripheral features will determine the success of operating systems.

Consumers are more concerned with the shape of a car than the engine that's inside.
Ok, I just thought that it's pretty cool they're landing people like that; nothing much to see there.
1) Come find me! I'd love to meet people just as much as you do, so feel free to come find me. My name's Sahil - I assume we'll all have name tags, not sure.
I can't disagree with this more.

The basis for the USA (ie the Constitution) has changed little in 200 years but the government has radically changed.

Look at the Supreme Court decision in the 20s that decided that constitutional limitations on the federal government also applied to the states and local government. Around that time an idea took hold among many that the constitution was a "living document", meaning that it's meaning changed with the times and it was OK to decide what the founders intended but never said.

Basically the constitution means whatever you want it to mean.

So the issue isn't that the US was an early iteration of democracy, it's that the judicial branch is out of control and the legislature has bought into the idea that's its ideas extend to things the constitution says nothing about (eg the federal Department of Education).
Interesting article, posted here recently I think

http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.3333
Levi's Gives Struggling Town Cinderella Treatment
This post is amusing because it writes off Windows, but then claims that the UX and the developer tools are the two areas where there's a lot of work to be done on modern UNIX systems.

For those who haven't used them professionally, Microsoft's developer tools are absolutely fantastic. And not just the editors, debuggers, and code assistance -- the profiling, system monitoring, and large project workflow tools are years ahead of anything that you can get off-Windows. Even if you're willing to pay Real Money to IBM, the only other serious tools vendor left, or pre-merger Sun, which had the best non-Windows profiling support in-system. Coming back to XCode, the GNU stack, and Eclipse after years on the MSFT platform was like taking a flying leap back into 1998.

UX is pretty consistent on both the Apple and Windows platforms. Once you learn a couple of apps, you've basically learned them all. I can't say that for the Linux desktop, where apps still seem to be roughly as consistent as architectural patterns across 3rd party Java frameworks. It's hard to imagine something "better" without moving to a new device factor so that you don't alienate your user base.
Team building 101: Find common enemy.

But beware, the team easily turns inward and loses the interest to create value. Simply beating the enemy isn't necessarily enough.
As a counterpoint, I think the appeal of (mindless\thoughtful) web applications are keeping people interested in Linux, open source software, new languages, and motivating them to continue learning on their own.

The vast majority of non-top tier CS programs just manufacture Eclipse\Visual Studio users for large companies without motivating students to keep discovering new skills. Focusing on a couple successful outliers isn't a representative sample.
Clustering Business Analysts and Industry Analysts
This link is actually quite useful. Down-voting must be some sort of a knee-jerk reaction mistaking this for a spam.
Schroedinger's Bar
On top of that, the border between OS and libraries is fuzzy; OS providers will move it to get a competitive advantage. 3D graphics (historically, even 2D graphics), virtualisation, garbage collected runtimes, the list is endless.
"Actually", his sentence begins with the word "Initially".

> Initially built on top of DOS, Microsoft painstakingly added version after version, always striving for backward compatibility while, at the same time, adding new features.

It was "initially" built on DOS. And over time, Microsoft painstaking strove for backward compatibility, not giving it up even for a major architecture change. NT offered a DOS VM (VDM) / Windows VM (WoW)[1], and Windows 7 offers an XP VM [2].

[1] http://kb.iu.edu/data/acxn.html
[2] http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx
The Birdfeed Easter Egg That Never Was
What you say is true, but that is not what the article argues is the most important thing about it.

There are books where you can learn physics and math, and while they aren't free but neither is the computer you need to look at his videos...
"The profiling, system monitoring, and large project workflow tools are years ahead of anything that you can get off-Windows."

It's patently false that the profiling and system monitoring tools you can get on Windows are years ahead of anything you can get on a different platform. In fact, it's the opposite [1, 2]. And I wont even get into the fact that we're still catching up to 30 year old Lisp machines in the areas of editor integration, debuggers, and code assistance.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTrace

[2] http://valgrind.org/
I don't see any reason why I would use an IDE as a glorified editor. Either I use an IDE as what it is - a heavy weight environment - or I use a text editor configured down to me needs.

It's true that Eclipse can be quite memory hungry, but if you let it eat some memory, it's features can be fast. Still, the standard configuration of Eclipse is a joke. If you are trying to edit files, Eclipse will hang all the time.

In recent days I play a lot with Vim. Even though I configured it to my needs, it still lags behind an IDE when it comes down to IDE specific features - e.g. search in a project: it's neither as comfortable nor as fast as an IDE in this area. (I'd like to be proven wrong on this feature, because that's the main thing that's bothering me) - But Vim is good in what it is: a text editor. And that's what I'm doing most of the time: editing text files.
That's why I think UX and UI should be tightly coupled.
And based on the price Cuban was willing to pay and the relative traffic stats of our two enterprises, I’d say TechCrunch in the current market is worth about $7.5 million.

And in one fell swoop he completely and utterly fails to take into account the difference in brand exposure.

TC are a household name for almost everyone in tech.

(I'm sorry but I really think cringely.com is prime material to be banned from HN, literally every post that I get sucked into clicking through to read has me rolling my eyes in the first paragraph, the guy doesn't have a clue!)
In non-fiction I found "The Alchemist" by Paulo Coelho to be excellent and thought provoking.
Customers do care about the engine, just not explicitly. They may want a car that goes fast, gets good gas milage, and is reliable. They won't ask about the engine, but it has an effect on those things.

By that same token, customers want a mobile phone that is fast, gets good battery life, and is reliable. Again, they won't ask about the OS, but it has an effect on those things. Thus, customers care about the OS; they just don't know it. Plus, I shouldn't have to tell you that similar interface != the same thing.
Life changing money is important.

Life changing work is more important.
Austin-based Drake Industries Launches New Website and Expands Services
Seriously? 700px? I realize there's a class of users that doesn't browse full-screen, and that a site with a broad an audience as Twitter is bound to encounter every variety of screen resolutions, but there comes a point where if a user elects to operate their system in a non-standard configuration they can't expect the designer to accommodate those requirements when there's already two solutions available to accommodate this choice: scrollbars and the zoom-out feature available in every browser.

While developing alternative display modes for non-standard resolutions is certainly possible, it unquestionably increases the time and expense of design, development and testing for what is arguably a negligible gains in terms of the percentage of users you're serving.
Ruby, C, and Java are pass-by-value, Perl is pass-by-reference
It should be "wheretheladies.are" to be grammatically correct.
You aren't at somewhere...
Same for chromium 7.
Exactly! I was disappointed to see this last part in their mission statement:

"With current systems, focus on the keyboard is always needed. It is almost impossible to slide the finger on letters without paying attention on the screen. Focusing elsewhere, even for a split second makes it extremely difficult to resume the word in-progress."

This is the exact assumption they are battling with tap typing. I wish they would realize that their same system could infer tap points given a swipe path.

Let the users type how they want, whether tap or swipe, and let their algorithms figure out the rest.
His sentence does seem misleading to me: it reads like he thinks Windows at the core OS level (the scheduling/memory-management/drivers/etc. stuff he mentions in the intro) is still incrementally built on top of the old DOS-lineage code, as opposed to recognizing that it underwent a complete rewrite. If he's just arguing that the API evolution has been constrained by the need for backwards compatibility, that's true, but doesn't make much sense to his point in this context.