skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really disagree with you. You say you could never compose music like Mozart, but how do you know? What if you worked at it every day for the rest of your life? Are you really certain you could never reach his level? (And bear in mind he is an extreme case.)

You should read this piece by Derek Sivers called "After 15 years of practice...": http://sivers.org/15-years.

Quick excerpt (but really, read the whole piece):

"At 29, I had done it. After 15 years of practice, and about 1000 live shows, I was finally a very good singer, at least by my own standards. (You can judge for yourself at sivers.org/music. Old stuff at the bottom. New stuff at the top.)

Someone who heard me for the first time then said, “Singing is a gift you're either born with or you're not. You're lucky. You were born with it!”"
Although mildly annoying, the appearances of these banner ads make me more interested in whether or not Wikipedia is A/B testing these, whether they're using some kind of intelligent segmentation, whether they even HAVE someone knowledgeable of that on staff, and what the results thereof are.
This is not strictly an opinion; this is backed by experiment and logic.

It might be arguable that there are two main areas of talent; and success in a field is a function of passion in a field and the underlying aptitude in those two modes of talent.

Those areas being linear and parallel thinking. A really strong linear thinker may be able to be equally successful as a mathematician, programmer, or mechanical engineer; and a strong parallel thinker might a great poet, painter or social worker.
I canceled my paypal account. I am a resident and did not want to get in trouble with immigration authorities so unfortunately could not tell paypal off as to why I canceled my account. I only chose the option 'Issue with Terms of Use.' Hopefully they will get the message.
Ha, it had something to do with drawing a 3d rectangle and erasing the inner lines, adding some ovals on the front face of it. Then drawing a straight line at the top of the oval as the top of the light cover and then drawing a skewed omega-like shape (Ω think hat brim) from the middle of the oval to line and on to the other side (like [this hat brim](http://www.faqs.org/photo-dict/photofiles/list/674/1084baseb...)

I think about that from time to time as it really changed my life. This past summer I helped my son create a video game from scratch (using scratch :), he was 8 at the time. All artwork, sounds, logic came from his head with my guidance. He kinda fears playing a new sport, but when we get the fundamentals down, that fear goes away. It's fun watching him grow, I learn a lot and it really supports my theory of "talent doesnt exist"
Has Google been humbled?
Also, no international support. A real paypal alternative must be broadly international.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Banner_testi...
Żubrówka and Wyborowa are very popular (first choice list), Potocki is more of an export product, and as I see the price it's about 3x more than Absolut or Finlandia and 4x Wyborowa, so it explains a lot. Near the Potocki price tag, Belvedere seems to be more known, but here I speak for myself, I'm from Warsaw and Belvedere is from Żyrardów (about 40km) while Potocki is from another region, maybe that's why I know this brand better, don't know, I drink a lot but to be honest I'm not a vodka expert.

About drinking Finlandia, Absolut etc. in PL, I think one thing is the price placement - it's a bit more expensive than popular local vodkas yet not too expensive as premium brands, second thing is the 'imported' factor, as in your beer example - people like import stuff even if sometimes local is desired abroad.

Oh, I love to drink an ale sometimes :) Most of Polish beer is crap so in this subject I don't have to be ashamed of drinking imports :)
Vukk,

The issue there is more about tracking. You'd have to track every single block and return zero for any that hadn't been used/altered since drive creation. I'm guessing it would prove pretty costly in terms of latency for drive access after initial drive creation but its a good idea potentially. I'll pass it onto our technical guys as well to ask about its feasibility.

Best wishes,

Patrick
Are you improving every day? Or are you a sheep?
When all else fails, just use a merchant account.
He doesn't know, but many many people have composed a lot of music, many with as much passion as the OP has put into computers; but Mozart and a handful of others stand out as something above and beyond. What, if not talent, is what separates the great from the very-good?
Actually, I really do agree with your equation. So more effort can overcome some lack of talent, or talent can overcome lack of time, etc. And like you mentioned, the top post said most of us will never sing like Josh Groban ... so true. Same with athletics. Same with science/math/computers. Some people just don't have the same talents, some effort can overcome that, but it's not a cure-all if, say, you just simply can't sing.
Well, whadda ya know - That's a 10 minute walk from where I live. Will try to be there.
I have to say, learning to endure holding in traveler's diarrhea really well is not one of my life goals. But to each his own.
Is it at least not possible that your friends used their learning time better than you? They push themselves harder, it was more active, present, focused time?
Use caution, however, as vodka can make you drunk if you are able to swallow enough of it.
I feel that things could be broken down so that anyone could understand. Those scenes in movies where the teacher finally breaks through to the kids by relating the subject matter to something that they care about may seem like bs, but I feel that approach really works. I think that is the foundation of the argument for smaller classroom sizes -- the teach can focus in on how to target each student's learning style instead of a watered down general approach. The desire to execute isn't something that could be given or taught to someone though.

I have the same feeling about luck as I do with talent. I read the famous quote "luck is when opportunity meets preparedness" and I've lived that way since.
Steve Martin Responds to Interruption of Talk and Audience Refund
You will look around and find other people at your age who are way better than you at playing guitar... in reality, all they did was starting earlier than you or have been spending more time doing it.

I don't want to disagree with this essay... to first order. But it's important not to take the emphasis on passion too far.

Because this hypothesis doesn't explain the existence of passionate but untalented people. Such people exist. Dear god, do they exist. There are people who play a hell of a lot of guitar and are nevertheless not very good. There are people who write a lot of novels and stories but can't produce enjoyable prose, or sellable prose.

To paraphrase Edison, success is 90% perspiration. But that still leaves 10% for inspiration. You need directed passion, and the ability to properly channel and manage your passion is a talent. It might not be an inherited talent -- you can develop it -- but you need to do more than just noodle around for more hours than the other noodlers. You need to develop a specific constellation of skills in order to make progress.

At the risk of overgeneralizing, the most important talent is meta-analysis. You have to be able to self-analyze and self-correct. (If you can't hear the fact that you're unable to play on the beat or keep a steady rhythm it doesn't matter how many guitar chords you know.) You need the social skills and awareness to seek out criticism, listen to it, and act upon it. (If you don't hear your fellow musicians dropping hints, or don't act upon those hints, you won't get better.) And you have to cultivate abilities that may seem unrelated to the problem at hand... because you recognize, consciously or instinctively, that they are essential to your goal. (Professional scientists, for example, need a lot of sales, political, management, and literary skills. And, famously, our stock consumer PCs ship with lots of fonts in part because Steve Jobs audited a calligraphy class during his brief career as a college dropout.)
Actually, the whole contradiction goes away if the claim is a hoax, which it seems to be. Never mind.
Great find, thanks.
> it leaves a lot of common drinks out on the grounds that Schumann didn't like them

Given that most 'cocktails' I have ever been served in bars are basically 'alcohol disguised as fruit juice' leaving them out is not a bad thing. Essentially if a cocktail has a name like a porn film, don't drink it.

Given that he ran the Cocktail Bar at the Ritz in Paris I think "drinks prepared for a mock-American bar in Munich" is a tad snippy. We Europeans have been drinking strong drinks for a long time.

I recommend Claridges because I like them. Drink of champions.
"Labyrinths" by Borges.
This is similar to John Nunemaker's fantastic talk/blog-post called I Have No Talent.

Here's his post: http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2010/01/12/i-have-no-tale...
and slides: http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2010/04/18/i-have-no-tale...
Mozart was a guy who was on his way to possibly becoming history's best maker of music, except he died an unfortunately early death at the age of 35. He was writing tuneful, listenable, harmonious music at the age of four. This is a level of talent far beyond what Sivers was talking about.
Well of course I expect people to examine the idea critically instead of lifting it straight from a 1956 movie and applying it to next-gen interaction design problems. It's just an idea I think people should consider.
I can't help it, it just doesn't make sense to me.

The only people it would theoretically protect me against are your people (those with physical access). And if I don't trust your people then why should I trust your encryption?

The issue of data leakage between customers (who don't have physical access) seems so trivial to prevent to me that I'm honestly wondering if I'm missing something fundamental here.

What's wrong with just making a loopback file and mounting that to the customer node? I had in fact assumed that this is how most clouds do it (for sanity reasons alone, security being the bonus). Hence I'm rather baffled by the whole claim of "data leakage through reading the raw volume".

Has that ever happened on any cloud provider?
Unfortunately, I get a 404 on that link (I use hnDroid, this may or may not be relevant).

Thank you.
Apparently he's an official sponsor (and they took that ridiculous photo for him):

http://www.mauricelacroix.com/en/Brand/Ambassadors/Jimmy_Wal...

How much is he getting paid and is he donating it to Wikimedia?
Being the OP I have to say I hesitated a bit before adding the quote, which wasn't in the original version of the post. I've done a fair amount of reading on the Cuban revolution, and mostly agree with your assessment of Che. The actual quote reflected my mood at the time of writing though, so I still chose to include it. Disagreeing with someone on a majority of things, does not mean that I can't quote them on the ones where we do, does it?
It's complicated. The art includes much more than just "leaning to code"--design, algorithms, analysis, testing, interaction styles, psychology, and more. I believe the best approach is an apprenticeship. Find someone who is an expert and work with her/him on several complex projects.
I don't agree that the question changes. I would argue that the fact that Fortran enshrined the convention is a more relevant answer than the answer to why Fortran picked that range. The reason being that the answer to the latter question is most likely from another domain, such as Mathematics.

Although I do find the answer to the latter question interesting as well, just not as interesting as the answer to the first.
In terms of profiteering:
What's strange about FBs promotional way of advertising is that stores almost get into a price war to get the customers. In the end, only the customers win and stores will simply struggle to make more profit, impeding them to offer better services. Google's way of advertising is a lot more interesting because it simply announces what a service provider has to offer without it having to change it's product price.
Your suggestion would be?

See my reply above about using a loopback-file.

It's a one-liner:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/vols/customer123/vol234 seek=$SIZE bs=1 count=1

There's surely quite a few other ways to skin this cat (eventually arriving at the multi-tenancy features in proprietary SAN appliances), but this seems the most obvious one.
After thinking about this more, the site being tracked should absolutely be linked to the demo. The data would only make sense if it could be related to a browsable website.
I'm on an H1B with a startup after being on an E-3 for a few years with a much larger company.

We have other E-3 employees as well.

http://www.puppetlabs.com/company/jobs/

Ultimately you need to make a judgement call when hiring. Is the position important enough to justify the cost of the visa application and processing?

I'd argue that at an early stage for a startup, just about every position is that important. The right person matters a lot.

The bigger problem might be the time it takes to get all these applications done.

The USCIS doesn't exactly operate at startup pace... :)
What about curiosity?

Maybe you're wrapping that up in "passion", but I've seen people spend years using one program on the computer and never think to click on anything other than the buttons they're familiar with. I think curiosity plays a HUGE role in learning.
Not exactly a startup (but less than 100 employees), but the company I work for is hiring sysadmins (both internal and as consultants for remote work). We are taking H-1B candidates and I'd love to stop being the only H-1B employee in the company :)

We are also looking for DBAs: Oracle, MySQL and even SQL-Server.

You can read my blog post about my experience with the company: http://www.pythian.com/news/16887/learning-on-the-job-some-t...

And apply here: http://candidates.pythian.com/
US Only: Start Up Junkies Episode 1-8
Reminds me of Nick Charles from the movie The Thin Man: "The important thing is the rhythm. Always have rhythm in your shaking. Now a Manhattan you shake to fox-trot time, a Bronx to two-step time, a dry martini you always shake to waltz time." :-)
Ubuntu 11.04 a.k.a Natty Narwhal Alpha 1 Released
A Cobol programmer using twenty year old knowledge can still make good money and be useful. A physician using twenty year old medicine knowledge - not so much.
I started off on an ee route. We used this textbook in our first circuit class: http://www.amazon.com/Electric-Circuits-8th-James-Nilsson/dp... .

In later classes we used this book, which I see in the bookshelves of my coworkers: http://www.amazon.com/Microelectronic-Circuits-Electrical-Co...

If you want to learn more basic concepts, I'd recommend looking perhaps for a class in your area to audit, or possibly mit ocw might have something.

I will say the following though:

1) many folks in industry get to a point to where they rarely, if not never sit down on paper and do node-voltage analysis. They eventually get a conceptual "feel" for everything and work in simulation environments (matlab, spice, etc.). The best way to get here is to do the conceptual exercises on paper first, then play with a simulator afterwards.

2) designing basic analog circuits can be learned from textbooks, but doing more "active" things like building a switching power supply requires more specific books.
Let me ask, what were you doing at age 4?

IIRC 4 year olds have a lot of free time (to practice etc...)
That's interesting - I tried to do this some years ago on Windows but found no way to toggle the lights independently of the actual state.

Turns out you can, though:

http://geekhack.org/showwiki.php?title=Island:7031
Sort of an "On Air" sign for hackers.
Not So Stupid Template Languages
You will develop code you reuse, you may even pack it into libraries, however you shouldn't be thinking this is a fundamental process of the business. It's a side effect that makes some things simpler when you do similar things repeatedly.
Save as WWF, save a tree
Replace "ht..." with "html" in your mobile browser. It's a bug in that reader app.

EDIT: The bug is also in the Hacker News Reader android app.
$25,000,000,000 actually. And it's still chump change for the US federal budget, considering the effect it could have and what else the US government spends that kind of money on.

Plus, even if you count failures, each newly started business probably creates on average more than one additional job.
Years ago Mind Bowling was a commercial game that use biofeedback (not brainwaves) to control the movement of the ball.
It is exactly I was taught in university when I learned FORTRAN. But it is probably influenced from mathematical notation of indexing.
Where Should Mobile Developers Focus?
And sqrt(2)=4.
Enough already. Jimmy Wales, former(?) serious Objectivist and Ayn Rand fan. Now he's begging for charity regularly. Pathetic change.
It's great to see that someone else "gets" this. There's a lot of great research and evidence that supports your thesis, and I don't think that the majority of the population has any idea that it exists. People still seem to be enthralled with this idea that there are geniuses out there who never had to work hard or practice... as if Jimi Hendrix just picked up a guitar and played it to perfection without ever practicing for a second.

For anyone interested in the research in this area, there is a great piece from Harvard Business Review by K Anders Ericsson called The Making of an Expert. And Malcom Gladwell's Outliers is also a fun read on the topic.

I think we are currently demystifying the process of becoming "talented" at any given endeavor. The quicker we realize that we aren't "born to x" we can begin to put in the work necessary to make it look like we were "born to x."
Buddy Media: How to raise venture capital (without losing your soul)
I agree with the article, however I would like to note two things:
1. In software engineering companies (especially smaller ones) tend not to provide any training to employees assuming it is their own problem.
2. Expecting expertise more often than not implies "specialized expertise" and there is such thing as "too specialized". It is more important to look at the problem-solving skills and work ethic than mere list of skills and technologies.
Where, how and why would China get the source code to Microsoft's Windows?
Amazon should have waited for a court order or at the very LEAST a lawsuit before killing the site. My cursory analysis of the legal implications seems to indicate they would be protected by Section 230 of The Communications Decency Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicatio...) but I may have missed something. Maybe someone with more legal expertise could chime in.
Sahil Lavingia Mixergy Interview
That would be rad. I might chat to Tridge about it and see if they'd be willing to do it. :-)
Seagate reportedly turned down takeover bid from Western Digital
Just make sure you have enough years of combined education and work experience. I wasn't able to get an H1-B for that reason, even though the company told me they could obtain it no problem.
I envisage a system where a few dozen independent organisations around the World run the root. They all have the same data. If any of them modify their local copy of the data or try to poison the distributed data, their trusted status is revoked. Child DNS resolvers should be able to detect new trusted organisations and remove untrusted organisations quickly.

This could all be handled through public key encryption and automatic voting. DNSSEC or similar should be complete and enforced for all zones and lookups.

You would need to compromise over half of the trusted organisations running the root in order to break this system.
You''re free to run it as a plan9 network and mount p9 files in Linux, it's part of the Linux kernel.

There is also http://swtch.com/plan9port Plan9 in Userspace

and http://swtch.com/9vx/ which runs the Plan9 kernel in a VM

though dev is currently on an other branch http://9fans.net/archive/2010/10/14
Of course there is talent. Talent is when you're good at something without having done it before. Perseverance is required to become great, talent is optional. Being talented may trigger the passion required to persevere.
results = log(effort x time)
I don't blame him. He has a celebrity asset. Seems reasonable to cash in.
Considering the sheer breadth of knowledge Wikipedia makes available to the public for free, I think we can all afford the millisecond it takes us to scroll away from the banner ad. Better yet, I think we can all throw in some money towards the project.

As for him being an ambassador to a watch company, its a pretty common concept as most Swiss luxury watch makers support everyone from athletes to humanitarians. Even if he makes money off of it, it isn't his obligation to donate it all to Wikimedia. In fact I think its a pretty smart concept to showcase Wikipedia to the type of clientele who might actually buy such watches.
I have to disagree with this quote from the article "But not all manufacturing is created equal. "The vast majority of manufacturing is destructive to the environment. Like paint and toy manufacturing. And if you build more manufacturing plants here like Foxconn--which build Apple's iPhone in China--Americans wouldn't want to do those jobs. It's mindless, grunt work," he said." (Vivek Wadhwa being quoted)

So about the comment on destructive manufacturing, I would refer to the Subaru Zero Landfill manufacturing plants - see <a href="http://www.edmunds.com/advice/buying/articles/124147/article...; and to the comment about mindless grunt work I offer a personal anecdote.

I had a company of 20 employees, and we did manufacturing here in Tucson. One day I was expressing gratitude to the office assistant about her consistently excellent work in keeping the mundane office chores under control (filing, mailers, etc) and she replied "thanks, I am an office robot - it is what I love to do". I was flabbergasted - she loved the work! Personally I hate filing, mailers or any of the mundane things and I view it as torture, but she loved it. So I did a little survey at the next company meeting and found out that half the employees like closed ended work like filing or packing inventory and half the company liked open ended work like sales or figuring out how to make something. The closed ended group would finish their jobs on Friday afternoon and not think a single thing about work until Monday morning. The open ended crowd would send emails at odd times of the night and weekends, obviously thinking about work all the time.

So my experience is that people like Kat (my office robot) love the closed ended work because they know where the beginning, middle and end of the job are and if they have done a good job or not. The people who like open ended jobs like them because they are not the same every time - and I note that Wadhwa (and programmers, salespeople and writers etc) have open ended jobs. It should be hardly surprising that they don't understand the other point of view. I think there are a lot of people that would like 'mindless' manufacturing work, if they were given the opportunity.

PS. If anyone needs a great office person, Kat is now living in Portland OR. Send me an email and I will pass it on to her.
And as any actual Plan9 user will tell you while it isn't "Unix with all the design issues fixed", the model of a per process namespace and synthetic files all over the place makes for a very practical and problem solving system.

Many feel the GUI is a joy but you're not forced to use it, there is even a text mode install. (though only use it if you have to :)
There could even be a constitution and perhaps some sort of contractual obligation to not modify the data with agreed legal consequences...?