skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Few notes.

The whole discussion whether intelligence is born or made, misses the fact that motivation to work hard for years is unfrequent. Most people give up quickly, and are not able to commit themselves without immediate reward.

I easily imagine a mathematican without great intelligence, yet with high motiviation and ability to stay focus for hours. I can't imagine a mathematican who is smart, yet is not able to concentrate.

Another thing is that what seems to upset most people about genetic intelligence is limitation of our free will. It goes something like this: "I realize I want to become a mathematican and environment limits me; I can't afford this thought."

The problem is that between born and made there is a lot of grey area. What if, for instance, you do not realize it?

You might grew up in a suburbia environment that encourages you to become a MBA or a lawyer. If so, non-zero chances are you'd simply don't want to become a mathematican, or a quant. (no money, no chicks). Is your free will limited, or no? In different environment you'd dream about becoming an Erdos.

You might think that you made the decision, while, actually, the socialization process made the decision, and if you want to change it, you have to overcome the defaults. A non-trivial task.

I also feel that, besides the intelectual curiosity, there is something more behind this question. It seems, at least to me, that most people asking it, actually ask whether chances are their effort will be rewarded.

There is nothing wrong with it. One wants to minimize her risks. If investment of 10 years would be known to give 0 output (here: becoming a great mathematican) in some cases (here: lack of genetic intelligence), then, under given circumstances, it doesn't make sense at all.

The point is that intellectual work is highly non-linear and if there are any constant factors, they are highly more complicated than born vs made.
Basics of everything you need:

http://www.hunlock.com/

Interactive tutorial:

http://eloquentjavascript.net/

Print version:

http://eloquentjavascript.net/print.html
Judge Ends Facebooks Feud With ConnectU
That's why I like this community-what a nice thing to offer. .
What does it mean that the brain "obeys the same physiological rules" that the body obeys? This point is incoherent.

My point is that yes, there is a genetic aspect to intelligence (duh), but that doesn't mean that there is a genetic component to how "fast" your brain is or how much "memory" you have. These could be emergent phenomena - not directly determinable.

Please tell me more specifically how my prejudices are clouding what I'm reading/saying. You didn't follow this point up.
No, but there are still a lot of opportunities out there which require hardware.

One idea struck me the other day: why not use your iPhone (or Android phone) as a home phone handset, when you're home and in Wifi range? That would require a specialized base station (perhaps running a stripped-down Asterisk) that recognized when your phone was in range, and would "ring" it on demand, let you pick up your home phone any time, etc.
browser bugs:

http://www.gtalbot.org/BrowserBugsSection/

Danny goodman's quickref/cheat:

http://www.dannyg.com/dl/JSB6RefBooklet.pdf

mozilla's JS 1.5 ref

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Core_JavaScript_1.5_Gui...

jscript / IE deviation from ES 3

http://blogs.msdn.com/jscript/archive/2007/10/29/ecmascript-...

browser testing

http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200702/browser_testing...

browser market share

http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
http://ejohn.org/blog/will-memory-leaks-matter-in-2009/
Xobni, Xoopit, Gmail Labs: Inbox Addons Are Getting Hot
The now defunct Active Matter (who built the site, in 2003) were hopefully not members of Mensa.
Start up hosting
What are good recomendations for hosting a start up? I dont want to pay fortune in the case nobody uses it or vice versa, its constantly down due to high traffic from it being a cheap hosting plan.
Freelance consulting (.NET/SharePoint however) in a German/Egypt dev shop. Lovin' it here (so far). Still, no takers?
Ask YC: Opinions on using a CMS like Joomla?
I am about to begin building the back end of my site. What has been your experience with/ is your opinion about using a CMS such as Joomla to provide a framework for doing so?
So this is supposed to be an example of good management?

Looks more like an example of why Microsoft succeeded in spite of its management. I guess when you're milking a monopolistic cash cow with crappy products, you really don't need good management.

Think about it. The CEO comes into a meeting with 6 levels of management and proceeds to treat his people like children by acting like a child himself and "teaching them a lesson".

I wonder what Mike Conte, Chris Graham, Pete Higgins, and Mike Maples were thinking during this charade.

With 6 levels of management, you'd think that the CEO would focus of the big picture, set the course, and trust his people to do their jobs.

Perhaps the best evidence that Bill Gates was too busy bullying and micromanaging was the book he wrote 3 years after this meeting, "The Road Ahead," which never even mentioned the word "internet". Imagine, the CEO of a multi-billion dollar technology company who didn't see the internet in 1994.

There are stories of him being upset with having to write that book because it made him take his eye off the ball. I always wondered what ball he was talking about. Thanks to Joel, now we know.
I think most of these concerns can be addressed with regexs. Maybe the title should be, "Why can't website form designers be more intelligent?"
I believe the parent is referring to the lowercase 'i'.
James Hong Video Interview: How "Hot or Not" Began
Open Source Software Makes it Cheaper For Start-Ups
World of web names poised to get wider
Frikkin' A. that's the last time I read th article BEFORE I look at the comments. Could have saved myself 10 minutes.
Slicehost and AWS are among the perennial answers to this question.
There are basically 3 requirements for intelligence that surpass the basic need to survive:

DNA, Diet, and Stimulus.

DNA limits what structures can develop which is the basic foundation of intelligence.

Diet provides the raw materials to crate the structures that DNA is trying to build. Poor diet causes DNA to sacrifice specific objectives to insure survival. Specific toxins like lead also limit the body's ability to create structures. At the same time short term diet inhibits performance.

Experience refines specific structural elements. Without early experience in specific areas it becomes harder to develop efficient systems for dealing with those situations. It's not impossible to learn French at 50 if you only know Spanish, but it's far easer to learn it at 5 than 50. Part of this has to due with the brain ignoring sounds that it finds unimportant.

All of the above statements are well supported by a huge body of research being annoyed by them is like getting pissed off at gravity while building rockets.
14 days after? Just disclose the vulnerability to bugtraq and be done with it. Whether the company follows up or not is up to them.
I'm gonna go against the grain on this one and call it karma whoring. Here's the formula:

1) Pick a company that has been the source of recent controversy.

2) Find a silly security flaw in one of their products that you can make sound serious with a bit of sensationalism. This should be easy to do, because most web apps have a few silly security holes.

3) Inform the company, and when they inevitably assign the silly flaw a low priority, write an inflammatory blog post and submit it to major news aggregators (e.g. news.yc)
Joel's Inc Magazine columns compared to his blog writing

Most of his articles have been inferior re-writes, to the point that I'm not sure why nobody at Inc. has caught on. Maybe they don't care, but I'd be pissed.
I think they are trying to pretend that they know everything and that they never make mistakes. It's a good image to have, which is why they try so hard to get it.

Unfortunately, the result is customers that can't think for themselves. Anyone with a brain uses someone else's services.
It may be more than that. When you are an extraordinary person, your dating pool is necessarily more limited than it is for the merely ordinary person. I think this is true regardless of gender or sexual orientation.

In Boston, we have this term "The H Bomb," which is the moment one tells a prospective partner that one has gone to, or is currently attending, Harvard. You try to put it off until the second or third date, unless the person you're dating also has Ivy League credentials. Just that word can end things before they've started.
And yet they're still making plenty of money. Security would be taken seriously if users gave a damn. But they don't.
ICANN threatens to change the rules of the domain name game
A great(ish) philosopher once said that the point of having philosophers was to save regular people from the effort of having to think about philosophical questions.

Likewise, the point of having physicists is to save regular people from having to think up nonsense pseudotheories on their own.

I just saved you some time.
I have a copy of the first edition of The Road Ahead. Here is the index entry for Internet:

Internet, 3-4, 91-100, 91
activities on, 93-97
addresses on, 94
cost of use of, 97-99, 125
e-mail on, 96-97, 124-25
expectations for, 125
foundation of, 97
growth and evolution of, 91, 95-96
and information highway, 3-4, 89, 95, 100, 230, 246
and publication, 95, 123-25
real-time content on, 99
regulation of, 161-63, 204
revenue from, 125
and security, 95, 96, 145
software on, 100
and standards, 96
and telephone system, 99
and Windows, 64
and WWW, 94, 95, 193, 201
I beg to differ. Usability tastes differ a lot.

A random mother finds VIm's UI hard. A random hacker finds VIm's UI excellent.
Jeff Barr, the Amazon Web Services evangelist, mentioned during one of his talks that Jeff Bezos, the Amazon CEO, had an intimate hand in the shaping of the Amazon Web Services APIs.
I just finished building something with a nice salted hash for storing the passwords. The client complained that it was too "confusing" for him, and asked me to change it to storing the password in plaintext :-(.
Over the year and a half I have had my profile, I had amassed hundreds of pictures, hundreds of personal messages, many links/bookmarks, and hundreds of useful personal contacts; and all have now been lost due to Facebook egregious and bull doggish attitude.

It's their site, and you didn't pay to use it. I'm not sure why you'd expect them to care what you think.

But anyway, consider it a gift. Instead of wasting your time ammassing photos, you could do something useful instead. If you don't have any friends or social network without having a social networking profile, you're doing it wrong.
Agile vs. Lean
Does mensa store sensitive user data (financial info/ssn/naked pictures), or is it like most sites that store maybe customization options, possibly a calendar, possibly grant access to a forum? Unless there's sensitive data, it doesn't seem all that incredibly stupid to me. Am I missing something?

Of course, I would prefer to generate my own password, rather than using one created for me.
Bill Gates on iTunes Store: another interesting memo
I don't agree with your choice of cutoff age--certainly it is correct that the historical figures who had made the largest contributions to the field of mathematics have done so while quite young--indeed, the prime ages for developing new mathematics seem historically to be between 17 and 23--but there is nothing to suggest predestination regarding the matter at age 5. Also, given the level of specialization involved with some open problems (and the overwhelmingly large amount of data involved in all of mathematics), it is certainly possible that someone deeply specializing in an aspect of mathematics not "popular" at the time could make a non-negligible contribution to mathematics even if they started late in life, and were less "smart" than their "prodigy" peers.

If you start mathematics late in life, you are extraordinarily unlikely to find your name on a list with names like Gauss, Newton, and Archimedes. Nor will you likely reach any sort of par with Euler, Hilbert, or Russell. Indeed, even the levels of Conway, Shannon, and Wiles are probably unattainable. But math is a huge field now, and there are parts of it that most young mathematicians find boring, or simply aren't exposed to. If you find some such part that you like, you can probably make some progress.
I wonder if Bill knew details of windows as much as about Excel.

We'll never know because people who write kernels can't write as well as Spolsky.
F8 Registration Is Now Open!
Yes:

http://apps.facebook.com/friendcsv/

Warning, this is what got Robert Scoble kicked off FB:

http://scobleizer.com/2008/01/03/ive-been-kicked-off-of-face...
I use MediaTemple and am constantly impressed by the U/I and ability to manage wordpress, php, googlea pps and more from the management console.
You have a point as far as ownership of the site goes, but I'm going to strenuously disagree with your second paragraph.

You may not be a picture person, but many of my friends are. We have hundreds of pictures of us doing silly things in silly places, at parties, at weddings, graduations, traveling, etc. This is what we look like as we move through life, and all of them are valuable keepsakes of our time together, and various stages of our lives. Amassing photos is useful and wonderful.

It's also not fair to imply the poster doesn't have friends or a network outside of facebook. He or she may have a great network, but facebook makes communicating with that network easier & more fun. I mean, that's the point, right? There's nothing wrong with that at all.
YUI Autogrid: Correctly resize the grids
"Does Tesco want .supermarket or .groceries?" said Graham Hales, of branding consultancy Interbrand.

"Or maybe it wants .value or .everylittlehelps. The choice is endless."

While this may address the lack of domain names now available thanks to squatters and collectors, it'll make the web a mess! It's already bad enough with some of the more exotic domain names in use, but with custom TLDs it'd be easier to just memorize the IP address instead!
Yes, but it has one great takeaway quote that isn't self-serving:

> Watching nonprogrammers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn't know how to surf trying to surf. Even if he has great advisers standing on the shore telling him what to do, he still falls off the board again and again. The cult of the M.B.A. likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don't understand. But often, you can't.
When I've planned out sharded infrastructures, the database usually wasn't that big of a concern. The web framework or system architecture are usually the pain point. And with Rails, you have to abuse establish_connection if you're going to have each web head read from multiple shards.

The easiest route I've gone when setting up a sharded infrastructure is to use subdomains and a 1-1 Web:DB setup. Have each subdomain go (either thru a reverse proxy or hardware load balancer) to a different (sharded) webhead. Each web head talks to two databases- the common database and its sharded DB. With this you'll probably want a "common" web head to handle home page traffic and authentication (after they are authenticated they'd get dished off to their shard).

Salesforce.com was my inspiration for this method, and it is probably reasonably common. It probably also has a name, but I do not know what it is.
Most web apps out there do make money, or have a plan to. Even if it is free to the user there is usually a revenue plan in place. Not many people will host a large scale web app from their pocket and not make any money from it.
The "Popularity" of FriendFeed is a Bug in the Social Software Ecosystem
I could not agree more.

The web has lots of practical examples and API documentation, but it's fragmented information. This book gives you a thorough, cohesive understanding of the language.
40TB?!

Look into other CDNs like Akamai or Limelight. I think the bulk price deal you're going to get with an established CDN is better than the rates you'll get with Amazon flat rates.
LHC: Better safe than sorry.
If your client is confused by a salted hash, I certainly wouldn't trust them to keep their database secured.
I always chuckle when looking at the profile of a female friend, and there's the link that says "Poke her".
You probably want this 1986 paper: http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/hpts85-nothing.pdf
Please read carefully before flaming.

For what it's worth, he did start with "No offense, but..." which doesn't really sound like flaming.
Your profile being disabled may have been unfair. However some of the examples you cite from Google make sense:

"Facebook just disabled my account. I started a group for people with the same last name as me and i started sending messages to people with the same name to join."

"I added a number of friends from my College because of the mere fact that people in the same school should know one another."

"My account was disabled a few hours ago.. because I was friending too many people."

I do not want to be friends on facebook with people I've never met in person. It sounds like Facebook is trying to prevent the same problem I had on Linkedin. Just because you worked for Big Company X or used to go to X school, it doesn't mean I want to add everyone from those places on my friend list, nor do I want constant emails or notices from Facebook of these people trying to add me. I don't want 'friend request' spam. This is the reason I killed my Linkedin account. In general I don't want tons of people I don't know, messaging me on Facebook unless I actually met them face to face in the past.
SmugMug currently hosts 600TB of pictures on Amazon S3.

http://gigaom.com/2008/06/25/structure-08-werner-vogels-amaz...

So yeah I'd probably use them.
Design Decisions: Basecamp support request form
Why don't you email Mark Z directly? That will probably help you much more than dealing with customer service.

Also keep us posted on how it goes. Good luck.
What was I thinking? I obviously read something that was wrong. Looking for my source...

[EDIT: I give up. I'm not looking anymore. I thought it may have been "Hard Drive" but it's not. So I either read something that was wrong or (more likely) I misinterpreted it.

But I stand by my claim that Joel's meeting is an excellent example of mismanagement. If Bill Gates wasn't so busy maintaining an atmosphere of bullying and "see how smart I am" and instead was a real visionary, would there even be a Yahoo or Google today?]
Chrysler to turn vehicles into wireless hotspots
Could Microsoft Get Control of Yahoo Without Buying It Whole? Investors Think So
Naps are the cure all for me in general. Need a little energy boost take a nap, have a headache take a nap, not feeling well cold coming take a nap. Most of my friends are amazed that I don't drink coffee.
Agreed. It's a short book (<200 pages) that you can finish in an a few days. Might give you a new perspective too.
google search sharding site:highscalability.com

http://tinyurl.com/5znhvu
Well, a number of messages later, and a very stern message from them (see quotation in article), I've not got anywhere. If you can push a few buttons on my behalf, then I would be highly grateful.
It's an example of management that knows their business and takes knowing it seriously. In Joel's mind, this is good.
I sat next to Mike as he was drawing these (total fluke of me to sit next to him). It was amazing watching these notes being created as the conference was unfolding. I can tell you that each page you see was done as is from start to finish - not a single mistake was made and there were no "do-overs".

Now if only my coding skills could be as efficient....
Maybe they think Inc and Joel On Software have mostly non-overlapping readerships?
space is the number of atoms that can fit between here and there

What about the space between the nucleus and electrons of an atom?

mass has 4 dimensions, so space time does as well

Does it make sense to refer to the 4 dimensions of mass without first positing space time? You seem to be begging the question here.
The only data he really lost is messages and what not, which isn't too bad (I doubt many people store life critical data in their Facebook messages). Photos he should already have on his computer. It sounded to me that he wanted his Facebook account back so he could continue to use the site, not capture posts he made so they could be saved.

Anyway, I'd treat it as a lesson learned. You have no recourse with a free service. Don't count on it as always being there. Especially for services like Facebook that are burning through crazy amounts of cash. Facebook could go away entirely tomorrow and the world wouldn't grind to a halt.
I think streety's point is that -- assuming a terrorist tried to faithfully reenact Speed and assuming the authorities wanted to keep people from being blown up -- the bus would need a go-fasterswitch, not a killswitch.
And yet a fairly large company does trust him to keep their database secured. All I can do is present the argument, and then acquiesce. That's why they call them "clients."
Yea, he seems like a reasonable guy. Just make sure to not mention any business ideas in your email.
Outsource your homeowork to India
Maybe you could submit that to Snopes. I was another believer in the "no Internet in The Road Ahead" urban legend.
Old timers remember the exact same issue with reddit.com, only they went the extra distance and had their servers stolen with passwords on them.
highscalability.com is a great site that provides conceptual level information about sharding.

But it doesn't provide anything approaching a cookbook or tutorial.
No, I understand how/why I want to do sharding and its implications. I'm looking for something much more tactical and practical.
No, you're misunderstanding the threat model. The problem with plaintext passwords isn't the danger to you, it's the danger to your users. Users reuse passwords, they just do, and you can't stop them. Storing those passwords in plaintext means that when (yes, when) your site is compromised, the attacker (an employee, for example) can get a pre-validated list of emails and passwords that they can try on other sites.

I, personally, watched an ancient Western Union account of mine (no doubt created with a repeated password that I used for other services, like mailman lists, which store them in plaintext) used for fraud. Someone found another user with the same name, put their credit card on the account and stole $1000US.

Just don't do this. Just don't. Don't excuse it. Don't pretend you understand why you can get away with it. JUST DON'T DO IT.
This is true for any industry and it's a basic common sense for anyone but a recent MBA graduate without any real-world experience. There's nothing particularly great or insightful about this quote.
You mean after all this, it has NOTHING to do with the gameplay or the following of users who migrated from the WC3 universe?
I've seen folks approach things this way -- Dr. Nic's done some of it in an exploratory manner: http://tinyurl.com/36twmo

But I don't think it is the best approach. I'd much rather push ALL of the magic down into the database layer and not have the app worry about it at all. I want ONE layer of magic and I'd prefer it to be in the DB, where it seems it "should" be.
I'm curious about that: is it simply because there were no progress bars in the first browser to implement a file upload and everyone is now just rolling with lowered user expectations?
Rapidshare, Megaupload, etc. don't allow audio streaming. Nor do I want to wait 120 seconds and solve a captcha that has to do with finding which letters have cats attached to them as opposed to dogs to get an audio file.