skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everybody thinks they're highly skilled and above average. A study on hubris in academia recently showed that 95% of all university professors think they are leading their field. (They are not.) Some of my coworkers constantly babble on how super-intelligent and gifted their children are. (I've seen their offspring, they are retarded and borderline autistic.)

Listening to self-declared or celebrated "geniuses" on how a decent thought process is supposed to work, that's a really bad idea unless you're a psychologist conducting studies on pseudocompetence and illusory superiority. Many of our contemporary heroes are really just only good at one thing: self marketing.

Along those lines, I'll be the first to admit: I'm below average, in almost every single aspect of physical and mental prowess. But even with my limited capabilities I can understand how individually different people's problem solving strategies are. Just watching them may be inspiring, but it's not gonna help you be any smarter.
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Have you actually read anything on genius, or are you just stating what "feels" right to you? Because there are many studies on this exact thing -- the "skill" genius you're describing -- that show you are exactly wrong.

It really helps to actually study something before writing a sure-sounding opinion to the internet at large.
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So it's not about not being able to find a job if I read this correctly. You just haven't found one that will make you do exactly what you want to do.
Personally, I find the idea that you can still be doing something actually impressive[1] at that age inspirational and gives me hope as I age.

[1] By anyone's standards. Not "impressive for a 100 year old."
Conj Labs expands its operation
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The basic principles about NUI is the removal of abstraction layers. If you want to click an icon you don't need to use a mouse or a pen or a trackpad, there is no exotic hand to eye coordination. You simply touch what you want to activate.

For instance my son who is 1 year have no problem interacting with the Talking Tom application on my iPhone.

If he garble something it garbles back in a higher pitch. If he touches the screen the cat reacts. He don't know what he is doing but by removing the abstraction and introducing close to real time feedback the iPad, iPhone and Android creates an instant feedback loop.

One can only imagine how this could be used to teach, train and remove the obstacles of interaction.

It is however not necessarily the best tool for serious creation so I guess that computers will fork into two main areas. Work devices with layers of abstraction but very powerful and the leisure devices with no abstraction but relatively less powerful.

To most people latter will be able to replace their laptops, netbooks etc.
Why do you think the US went there? Surely you didn't think it had something to do with terrorists?
I was thinking about it last night.
How come this is getting more popular? What makes one choose a name ending in ly?
I don't yhink I'm a genius but I actually recently realized that I have a different thought process than most people. Interestingly enough I recently wrote my first blog post about it. You can check it out here: http://Kulpreet.com
I'm working on changing the way people approach personal development, from the usual current approach of digesting a huge chunk of information via book/tapes/DVDs/etc to helping people make little tiny changes that add up over time to big changes.
Normally I'd thoroughly welcome any news of large Linux-based systems replacing slower MS-based ones, but in this case...

... these days I can't help thinking "is faster really a good idea?"
This is mainly my personal view and experience although I've done some research on the subject. Regarding "skill" genius: of course you can get extremely good at anything by practice, but getting into that very last percentile seems to demand some kind of innate talent.

Chess is a good example. The Polgar sisters was groomed from from childhood by their father to become grandmasters. Studies shows that chessplayers rewire their brains to use the part normally used to recognize faces to remember positions... so you can train your chess memory.

But even though the Polgar sisters are Grandmasters they're nowhere near the raw talent of Kasparov and lately Magnus Carlsen who've defeated Karpov and become Grand Master at the age of 13 and I think now is ranked #2 in the world.

I would argue that you stand a much better chance of training your brain for creative genius (in for instance science or IT) than beating Magnus :) The same probably applies for piano etc

Bonus url: Magnus Carlsen speaks of his talent... he doesn't seem to agree with me :) http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=6187
http://github.com/jdodds/voussoir a node.js app for generating Arch linux livecds.

It'll sit behind a pylons app in the near future, most likely.

Making a website-as-service for making linux livecds is something I've wanted to do for a while, and the few projects out there that do it do it poorly, imo.

I had the start of something like this using Ubuntu a while ago, but frankly there's not much more room on the Ubuntu isos, and it's kinda a pain to make sure you're generating them correctly.

Arch is such a simple distro that it's easy to automate. The node.js app is pretty much just a wrapper over mkarchiso, but if that didn't exist it wouldn't be too hard to write.

Other than that, preparing for an interview at a sweet-looking company in Cleveland tomorrow, and finishing up some stuff at my current place of employment.
I'm not so sure. Silicon Valley draws worldwide talent. It's not just the pool of available Americans that drives the tech startup culture there.
For what it's worth, I get the error:
ln: failed to create hard link `/tmp/exploit/target' => `/bin/ping': Invalid cross-device link

Are there any other way to do this without ln?
I have no binaries on non-root-writable filesystems. tmp is on tmpfs, / and /home are on their own filesystems so I'd need to be root to create the files on a partition that this could work from.
What's so wrong with Comic Sans?
Angel investing is kind of a fad right now. Everyone's doing it. My gut instinct is that it's at least a mini bubble

I disagree. I believe it's a long term trend that isn't going to change any time soon. Around 3-4% of the population in the SF Bay area are millionaires. The majority of those have probably created their wealth in Tech, so I think it's completely reasonable that the number of angel investors in the area could increase to the thousands. Right now, the Angel List only has around 450 angels listed, but that number seems to be growing quickly.

Not only that, but when Facebook, Yelp, Twitter, LinkedIN decide to start IPO'ing, there's going to be a huge motivation for investors to try and find the next Facebook/Yelp/Google/etc...

I'm sure the funding pipeline will slow down in a couple of years, but I also think that we're seeing a fundamental change in how Silicon Valley works.
I've messed with TreeBuilder before but it looks like I should give this XPath business a look the next time I need to parse some HTML.

I was a bit confused when I hit the "quote-likes" section until I realized it was an aside however. A different colored box might be good for those.
it is taboo to drop out of universities, which remain poor incubators

This is definitely true. I'm currently at a top UK university, and there is very little incentive to start a startup. Whilst a friend a Stanford has access to an entrepreneur group with a budget of half a million dollars just for having a good idea, we have business plan writing competitions.

The very idea of dropping out of universities is met with horror, by other students, staff and relatives. They would rather you just go through uni and get a job at a nice bank or accounting firm somewhere. Starting a startup as a student isn't the norm, there seems to be too much friction.

There also appears to be much less of a can-do atmosphere and much more aversion to risk in the UK for current university students. This isn't to say there isn't a good startup scene here - but it's mostly hardware/biotech; most of the other stuff seems started by mid-30s ex Goldman Sachs bankers.

Edit - I've just found this article - http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2010... from Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC which is a good read as well
As my first erlang program, I tried to solve this problem. The code is very ugly, and rather long for my taste, but it solves the thing in 917 steps. I also took the case where if no output has been gotten in a particular timestep, then do not consider any jars.
I noticed the news post a day before my latest update, so I was prepared too. One should always follow package source's and general news of the distribution one uses.
"an echo chamber in the sense that certain posters have a lot better chance of having their articles noticed"

It's also an echo chamber in terms of ideas. Why is it that when a woman does a reverse job application she gets 4 upvotes, but when a guy copies her two years later he's 'a genius' and gets 450+ upvotes?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=648128
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Absolutely. It feels like a natural choice and is easy to remember: "The service that does timelapses of websites"
Ask HN: What do guys think about the Chrome web store?
I am just curious what people here think about the upcoming release of Chrome webstore. In particular, do you think it will give someone who does not have much of a prior portfolio to be able to leverage the platform to distribute web apps to the masses, just as the iphone ecosystem has proven itself to be?
A JavaScript IDE for the iPhone
Would you give a brief description of how Backbone and Knockout fit together?
Doesn't sound like it. Sounds like you need a setuid binary on a filesystem you can link to.

You can use find to see if you have a setuid binary anywhere in your filesystem:

find / -perm -4000 2>/dev/null
I believe so, yes.

In fairness, though, it may not have been MS' fault - crappy programming is crappy, no matter the underlying OS. And Linux fanboys should wait to see if the new system has roll-out issues...
"Hitler freaks out over Comic Sans MS":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzmrxKhaKRU
I doubt it has much to do with the university drop-out rate. In Austria, it's the norm to drop out of university but my gut feeling is that the UK has more startups per capita.

That said, I got my degree in the UK (York, in the top 10 at least at that time) and there was no entrepreneurial angle at all. There was one guy in the careers office who encouraged you to enter business plan competitions and ran one or two seminars (which were vague and focused on coming up with an idea, not practicalities) but you only found out about that if you looked for it. I only ever contemplated opting out of the standard "get a job" career path because I stumbled across PG's essays via his "plan for spam". Up to that point the "get a job" indoctrination was working perfectly. As far as I can tell from friends, it's similar in Austrian universities (except they don't even tend to have careers offices).

Honestly, I think the best way Europe could help the startup situation is to somehow convey the message that the worst that can happen if you fail isn't really too bad. Also, everyone seems to be scared of the "business angle", so that could be addressed by running a module or two on practical small-business bookkeeping, accounting, tax and incorporation basics in sci/eng degree courses. Because, let's face it, those things are not actually that hard, at least not in the UK. Rest of EU needs to get rid of their idiotic capital requirements for setting up limited companies and severe penalties for bankruptcy. Lower social security/tax rates at low self-employed income levels would be appreciated, too. (those could easily be financed by killing all those stupid grants schemes that are so complex no small company could afford the lawyers required to figure them out)
I liked this troll of my troll
Yes. The Linux version is developed at http://www.milleniumit.com/media_room/gui-press_releases.php
Currently working on synchronising information across a wide area network when the updates are streaming in to all machines from various sources. Application is soft real-time and semi-safety-critical.

Also working on an alternative to the (extended/unscented/whatever) Kalman Filter the better to detect and track fast moving objects in cluttered environments.

Also working on

+ a web site for my local math association

+ write-up of a 1800 dimensional optimisation problem

+ write-up of a variant data structure

+ write-up of P vs NP

+ write-up of a real-world example of a fold catastrophe

+ finishing the analysis of the routines people sent me ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1404347 )

I've also got a dozen other projects mothballed, ready to be re-started when the time is right.

But this week I'm mostly organising the MathsJam weekend. We've got 60 paid-up delegates and now 20 submitted talks. We can accommodate 120 people (and possibly stretch to 150) and need 30 to 40 talks. Money comes in, contracts to sign, people to cajole, all in the name of a weekend of fun.

Hope it works ...
No. You have one of the workarounds the author suggests, which is only allowing users to write to nosuid mounts.
That pattern has been in use for quite some time by .net programmers.
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I dont prefer the one line. I find the argument that the multiple line version becomes bad code when you add type info to it ludicrous.
The ars guide to trolling: Apple edition
Edit: insert irony about shocking mis-post blunder due to an interface quirk of my Android phone here.

I suspect that it's more realistic to compare Android development to PC development, say 5 or 10 years ago than now. When I was developing games 10-12 years ago there was a staggering array of different displays, processor speeds, internet connection speeds, colour depths etc etc, whereas now on pretty much any PC you'll have true colour, decent display, decent connection etc. I suspect that game developers still have to wrestle with capability differences more than the rest of us, but for "normal" applications any PC is good enough these days. Windows and the related drivers are also much more stable and consistent now. I don't think Android is there yet, but I suppose it will be within a couple of years.

Disclaimer: I've never written an Android app.
This week's Economist on the coming currency / trade war:

http://www.economist.com/node/17251850?story_id=17251850&...

http://www.economist.com/node/17252006?story_id=17252006&...
If b is true then I've apparently lead a sheltered life. Every programmer I've worked with, even the ones I could call 'not so good' where able to do socket programming.
The article mentions the Victorian times - you don't need to go that far back - Richard Branson, Alan Sugar, Clive Sinclair come to mind, although that was the 1980s. But why haven't there been any huge new successes in the last decade or so ?

I can think of a few (over-generalized) reasons:

- over-emphasis on banking and finance. The City is where the big money was made, and is disproportionately important to the UK economy (even now) so that's where the polymaths -our homegrown Zuckerbergs and Brins and Gates - went to make their fortune.

- class system. Business and government leadership comes from a very narrow circle of ex-public school and/or Oxbridge graduates who share a common disdain for science and technology. Time and again scientists and engineers have left for the US and elsewhere because they couldn't get funding at home - businessmen and politicians simply didn't "get" the potential of research.

- over-centralization. If you think Hacker News is bad with its Silicon Valley-centric worldview, come to the UK. If it's not happening in London, it's not happening. London however is a horribly expensive place to live, pushing up salaries, office costs, etc - not the ideal place for a startup. Start your business in the "provinces" however and nobody will notice you.

- bureaucracy. Both UK and EU legislation have increased the amount of paperwork needed to get started - for example employment legislation. Not sure how this compares to the US (which varies state to state) but it hasn't helped.
World record? Not quite. Let's see full details on the numbers. NASDAQ publishes their latency numbers weekly, including average, 99th percentile, and 99.9th percentile: http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/trader.aspx?id=inet. Their average latency on order entry is 98 microseconds and their average latency on market data is 92 microseconds. Perhaps by "world record" they mean "european record".
I'm sure they will notice much more benefits than just improved trading times.

For example: improved infraestructure management, overall performance increase, fast patches for security bugs, and a long etcetera.

Of course, as JoachimSchipper says, if the applications on top of the OS ar crap, a different OS won't solve the problem, but to have a good underlying OS is a good start.
Opening up the mobile wallet
Hello - Virgin? Body Shop?

(Tech startups, maybe. Even there our household names – PartyGaming say – are often illegal in America.)
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I'm working on a new app and wanting to use technology as revolutionary as the idea so going to give this a shot
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Instant-press - Wordpress-Clone written with Web2py
Pros:

- Early adopters will immediately know you're a cool startup.

- Easier to find an available domain.

Cons:

- In a few years, the exact opposite will happen, "<verb>ly is so 2010".

- Libya might might delete your domain name[1].

[1] http://thenextweb.com/me/2010/10/06/libya-deletes-ly-domain-...
If I remember correctly, the LSE brought in Microsoft themselves to fix the problems. And Microsoft couldn't.
Maybe another reason is too many British people think in terms of the government solving the problem, or starting projects funded by quangos: "what we need is a startup scene, therefore we need government funding!"

Getting startups in touch with funding sources and getting the word out that you can fund your ventures without living off baked beans for 18 months might help encourage more people to take the leap of faith.
I do something similar with adblock filters. I don't use Facebook, so I have no privacy issue with connect, but it does improve load/render times by multiple seconds.
Hard link creation can in recent Linux kernels be restricted, by SECURITY_YAMA_HARDLINKS config option which seems active by default at least on Ubuntu 10.10. So that platform is not vulnerable.
Maybe a bit OT, but I long for the days when advisories were cool and funny, Gobbles-style. Nowadays it's so... sterile and corporate. Still cool on a technological level (sometimes), but the Wild West spirit made the vuln-dev scene much more appealing as a spectator sport.
CMU firm advances in moon rover contest
Kaczynski's thesis rests on the idea that technological progress is intrinsically evil or intrinsically results in evil.

I think the evidence shows that technology is always ethically neutral. When early humans begun welding rocks as tools (one of the first technological developments), this could be used to both club someone to death more efficiently OR to build a house and have a sturdier shelter.

To get to the level of development we are at today, it appears humans have consistently chosen constructive uses of technology over destructive ones. I can't see the evidence that the Industrial Revolution fundamentally changed things in this respect.
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> Yes. The Linux version is developed at http://www.milleniumit.com/media_room/gui-press_releases.php

Can you elaborate on this? Are they developing a fork of the Linux kernel? A new Linux distro? Or could it be that they are developing the trading "platform", using a commodity Linux distro?
If your service is compelling and your cost per customer is low enough, then I'd go with #1. If you can't convert the users to paying customers then you probably need to revisit your business model.

Assuming your service is useful--and the visitor decides they need/want it--you need to factor in their switching cost. If they have some time invested in configuring and using their account, they will be less likely to move to a competitor. If your service is prone to throwaway accounts, this clearly isn't a factor.

Recently signed up for a 30 day trial with Pingdom and converted to a paying account ($49/month or so). Not sure what their incremental cost per customer would be (middle of the road I'd say) but they provide a useful service and once I got all my servers set up and had a significant history established, I didn't want to bother evaluating/switching to a competitor.
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Agreed, Accenture code can make any OS slow.
You could also have a look at the MVP(Model-View-Presenter)-Pattern. I like it more to say Presentation instead of Presenter.

Martin Fowler, for example, has some articles on it.
Of course one should be 'worried' about privacy with his/her data on facebook, but i don't think one should care less with the information google has about a huge amount of people.

Just as a reminder: they know what you look for on the web (google itself), they know what you talk to your friends (gtalk), they know what you get via email (gmail), they know what videos you watch to (on youtube) and they now even have a browser which is being adopted by a lot of people pretty fast.

Maybe one does not use all those services but many people do, and depending on how you look at it, probably google has a lot of more 'private' information about one's life than facebook.

That, of course, doesn't mean 'FB disconnect' is a bad idea. It's just that i get 'scared' when someone who know a lot about you (google in this case) build something trying to look as they 'protect your privacy'... (i also keep in mind that google is not prone to providing data about users, but they have the ability to)
I have a theory of conservation of "ly"s. They seem to be disappearing quick ;) from adverbs in spoken English, so I figure they have to pop up somewhere else.
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Why Fragmentation isn't a problem for Android or Linux
That's true. With the recent government cutbacks and slashing of quangos that might (hopefully) change. More than money though would be a better startup community - or communities - all over the UK, which is up to us, I suppose.

One assumes however that students and recent graduates are living off baked beans anyway (I suppose that's our equivalent of ramen profitable - Heinz profitable?)