skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Math education is so bad right now that any genetic differences are drowned out almost entirely. Of all the mathematicians I've met (including IMO gold medalists, Fields medalists, etc.), there seems to be little correlation with siblings, at least beyond what you would expect from having parents who emphasize learning math.

To answer your question, if you want to contribute significantly, you will need to study hard for several years, but it is possible. One of the best mathematicians I know well didn't have any interest until he was 16, and he's now 25 or so.
Why the cloud cannot obscure the scientific method
"... but I need to find a Good-Angel. Somebody with heart... So any good advice on what YOU would do to go to the next level ..."

Users, more users, then angels?
Short answer: nurture, very early on, because children have a fantastic curiosity and ego-less stubborn determination.

Long answer: From my personal experience, a lot of what some claim to be 'nature' is actually very early-age 'nurture'. So it's not that children of academics are genetically smarter, it's that they are raised by people with whom dinner or a walk in the park ends up being as educational as a university lecture. On top of that, if you consider that knowledge is like money under compound interest, I think it's possible to explain people that seem smart beyond comprehension as just having gotten a good head start on learning.

Math is also a special case for two (related) reasons: (1) emotions, especially ego, has a lot to do with learning math, and (2) math is filled with "aha" moments, where one thing which seemed incomprehensible one moment is obvious the next. Little kids have an advantage related to both of these - they (hopefully) don't yet have an ego to build or protect when it comes to knowing things, and they take a lot more pleasure from the "aha" moments.

So to answer your question - I would say it's nurture, but the kind which is (most of the time) limited to very young ages. On the other hand, given the determination and stubbornness of a 5 year old facing a challenge, it's nothing you can't do at 40. But I worry that I don't quite have that determination at 22, and will only have less of it as I am starting to worrying about becoming financially secure, starting a family, etc.
Agreed. What does your app do?

PS: Where in Canada are you?
Superencryptalisticexpialidocious
I whole-heartedly agree with everything you wrote.

I competed in Math competitions while in high school but never made it to the IMO. My friends who went to the IMO were doubtlessly very smart, but they had something else: they had many years of training under their belts. I failed because I was an amateur, they succeeded because they trained like professional athletes.

To do Math, intelligence is required, but not sufficient. Tenacity, patience, stubborness, an obsession to figure things out, and the willingness to work very hard are also required. Prof. Terence Tao knows much more than I do on the subject and he explained things clearly:

http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-to...

When one is young, one does not mind feeling stupid. Understanding something in Mathematics takes a lot of time and effort. After a certain age, one does not want to feel that stupid anymore. That's why many great mathematicians did their best work before they were 30. It's more psychological than intellectual, I'd say.
Ambient-Oriented Programming
F8 Tickets Now On Sale (July 23rd)
yeah will second that.. do you have a prototype or a pre-pre-alpha testing site we can look at??
When one is young, one does not mind feeling stupid. Understanding something in Mathematics takes a lot of time and effort. After a certain age, one does not want to feel that stupid anymore. That's why many great mathematicians did their best work before they were 30. It's more psychological than intellectual, I'd say.

That's right on the spot, and a much better way of saying it than I did when I talked about ego.
Sorry, normally I'd agree with you but this is about laws regarding the internet (routing protocols, telecoms, etc).

I think that understanding the laws pertaining to the medium most YC businesses run on, i.e., the internet, is relevant to this forum.

To my mind, this is just as relevant to web-entrepreneurs as new federal road laws are to trucking-entrepreneurs.
that would be great.
EventMachine: Fast and Scalable Event-Driven I/O Framework
Focused vs. Unfocused Multitasking: When Multitasking Makes You Smarter and When It Interferes
Hardware Hacking
Hi there,
Can anybody suggest me a good site which regularly deals with hacking the hardware and prying open to understand more about the common electronic goods.
At the end of it, it should give a reader a fair idea about whats running under the hood and 'possible' system architecture.I don't really need an iPhone-only or Mac-only site, I am looking for something more generic, like Wi-Fi routers,mobile phones and anything which is powered and has transistor in it :)
This Week in Ruby (June 26, 2008)
How Hard Could it Be? Joel Spolsky recalls what it was like to work for Bill Gates
It's really not a major flaw. But, I mean, come on.
This book might interest you (assuming you don't have it already):

ODEs and Dynamical Systems (by Gerald Teschl)
http://www.mat.univie.ac.at/~gerald/ftp/book-ode/ode.pdf
Wow, 16 is sooo old. I'm sure plenty of great mathematicians didn't know what they wanted at 16 either.

25 is pretty young still I think. Thats only 3 years into a PhD, so really I wouldn't expect anyone (except super geniuses) to make many achievements by that age. I'd say 30 between 27 and 30 seems like a pretty solid age, as you've reached a peak with your PhD and you're still young and inquisitive and hopefully humble.
Had Edison thought out his work and spent more time in preparation, he would not sweat so much.

-- Nikola Tesla
I think the problem with his theory is that he is thinking of the desktop as a single entity. He thinks the _desktop_ should evolve to support streams better. That's a mistake.

The desktop is just a bunch of applications co-existing. Some programs have a document-centric interface because they deal with documents. Others have evolved an interface suited to the streams they deal with. MSN, IRC, RSS aggregators come to mind. I don't think there's more to it.

I agree that people are using streams more than before but I'm not sure of the implications of this fact.
Twitter: Adding employees, losing features
Very true. On the other hand, it is conceivable some choose to go to work for the DoD with the defense of America in mind. That could be a compensating differential too.
“The only rule is don't be boring and dress cute wherever you go. Life is too short to blend in.”

“The way I see it, you should live everyday like its your birthday”

“A true heiress is never mean to anyone - except a girl who steals your boyfriend”

--Paris Hilton
Very great mathematicians are born. You're either born as Ramanujan or Erdos or you're never going to be Ramanujan or Erdos. No way around it.

But, merely pretty damn good mathematicians can work really good and be a thousandth as useful as an Erdos or Ramanujan.
I would strongly suggest that you read the biography of Erwin Schrodinger. Empirically, it seems to be quite possible to pick up mathematics and science at a later stage. But it doesn't happen too often. I cannot tell if this has to do with society's influence (there are many pressures keeping people from switching fields) or something to do with natural talent.

But I do think that success in science, mathematics, or really, anywhere, is much more a product of your habits, discipline, environment, and beliefs than is ordinarily given credit. I don't think 'nature', or 'very early nurture' is unimportant -- for example, it can play a very important role in the sorts of things you get interested in and the preferences, beliefs and skills you acquire. But conditioned on having the same beliefs, habits, and discipline as masterful scientists, business people, or researchers, if you're talking about great contributions, I think the other dimensions of talent truly shrink into irrelevance.

Three terrific links: Michael Nielsen on Extreme Thinking. http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/?p=19

(Edit: Whoops! Michael, the link is broken! Here's an archived version, http://web.archive.org/web/20061018164649/http://www.qinfo.o... )

Terry Tao's Career Advice: http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/

And the classic, Richard Hamming, You and Your Research: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
Video: "Interrogation"
It's always been faster to write (or modify slightly) an SQL query to give the necessary results than to export the data to comma delimited, import it into Excel, and create a pivot table just so you can click around on it.

When all you have is Excel, everything looks like a spreadsheet (even databases).
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I cant understand wtf the point of the article is. They make it seem as if the company was in some way picked on by the mighty google. Point being, they were committing FRAUD, don't let words like 'Arbitrage' confuse you. Its plain and simple fraud, you try to get around the system with dishonesty, you get shutdown. The real scary part of this whole article though was that VC FIRMS invested in it!!! WTF?
Not sure if it's quite what you mean, but have you seen: http://www.core77.com

It's mostly about industrial design. There's often some cool stuff on there.
I'm curious what you specifically want to spend the money on? What is the magical item you must purchase in order to continue developing your software?

You were able to produce the prototype in your current situation, supporting yourself via your current means. Just keep working until you make something a lot of people care about.
http://www.jinfo.org/Fields_Mathematics.html

25 percent of fields medal winners vs. 0.227 percent of world population. >100x difference. [discussion of statistical signfigance omitted.] Nature vs. Nurture is a stupid discussion, as "nurture" is costly and transient and a ripe subject for government boondoggles. People are different. No way around it.

On the other hand, a basic command of mathematics can be widely shared, and learned at most ages.
>listing a few things like in his example won't be enough to give a candidate anything more than a vague idea of what the place will be like

In fact long hours, low pay and "your opinion can't be better than others'" say a lot. Well, at least one thing clearly: run like hell!
These two sites are very good resources:

http://webdesignfromscratch.com/

http://www.sitepoint.com/

As for books this is by far the most comprehensive list of books I have found for web design:

http://www.blogdesignblog.com/blog-design/25-must-buy-borrow...
http://www.howstuffworks.com/ is a good primer.
http://www.hackszine.com
http://www.instructables.com
http://www.hackaday.com/
I love 8aweek-- probably one of my top 3 Firefox extensions. Really helped remind me when I got sucked into sites when I should be working.

Not sure if it works for everyone, but it works well for me. RescueTime on the other hand hasn't really done anything for me (except take up 100% CPU a few times). I may be in a minority on that one.
would this strengthen the case for jruby and ironruby (at least for server/app code, perhaps not for quick scripts) ?
If you have the sidebar up, also, the popups don't come up. I never noticed those until I closed the sidebar.
Right. Open source languages become popular not by describing and fixing security holes promptly, but by having their super-users analyze patch notes for vulnerabilities, and code around them. The sure fire path to widely used, production ready releases.
Reminds me of me.dium, but I like this much better.
So apps written in C never segfault? Proprietary platforms always have great tech support? Other programming languages always have same-day fixes? I won't make any particular claims about Ruby, but I have yet to see The Perfect Language. Every language in the world is "bad, bad platform choice" given some criteria.

Moreover, from reading the advisories and comments, the only thing I can tell for certain is that you can kill a Ruby process with something like "Array.new[0x7fffffff]=0". The only way that's going to take down a Rails app is if you're putting unchecked user input directly into array indices -- but then, if you're doing that, you're probably in trouble anyway.

Or if you're running a setup like Heroku, and you let users run a Ruby console. (Maybe. I don't actually know how Heroku works.) To the nearest percent, that describes 0% of Rails apps.

Can anybody describe how this would actually be used to attack a typical website running Rails?
With the well known exceptions of Gauss and Ramunajan, great mathematicians tend to emerge in communities of talent. I would say that community and social network play a very large role in the emergence of mathematical genius.
Kosmix, a mahalo competitor
That may well be true, but I think the problem of disentangling the incredibly powerful Jewish cultural influence (or any other cultural, influence, really, as a half-asian I can tell you my heritage helped push me) from whatever biological differences there might be is an incredibly tricky one. So I think that asserting such conclusions here is either chauvinist or premature.
Seriously, can i get a feed of your Articles in Short.
You can sync the 360 with XP media too. IMO, Vista is just too much of a resource hog to ever be useful.
Try starting with the Art of Electronics

http://frank.harvard.edu/aoe/
"must control... fist... of... death..." - Alice (Dilbert)
Yeee!! Interesting stuff! Get the blog up and running soo!
Five easy pieces: the taxonomy of marketing
Thanks for acknowledging and correcting.
@ Xirium

Yeah how stuff works is good, but I would like to have a really product differentiating 'under-the-hood' peak. I want to know the h/w difference between Broadcoms Router and Linksys or something to that effect[just for an example]. But HSW will only tell how generic routers work...
For much of my life, I lived in my mind, kind of autistically. I spent a lot of time figuring how to get away from people, because they wanted me to do things, and I wanted to go back to the castle in my mind. Only recently I figured out that people actually take materialism, life achievements, jobs, dress code, peer esteem, education, and so forth seriously. I had mostly figured that people were putting on a show, kind of having fun pretending to be serious about their lives. Oh the horror! -- like a bad novel -- everyone actually cares about clothes and money.

I know what you mean though about cities sending a message. I used to ignore what groups of people think, for reasons of principle, because human nature doesn't scale. But then I got the naivete cauterized out of me, and so now I pay attention to these messages, even though I don't entirely like being tuned into them. I'm not sure if I go along with the messages, maybe I'm neutral or slightly against (for reasons of principle).

In any case, I think ambition is good, because the human condition can be improved. (If it couldn't then ambition would be harmful, because it would be a zero sum game.) It's too bad the word has a connotation of money, because it would otherwise be a decent word, and I don't believe in money.
Did he not mention the flaw, or did I miss it? If he didn't, I'd say this article is linkbait.

The bug is probably something really trivial that affects a small portion of users in an insignificant way. The secrecy about specifics on the author's part seems to be just to spare him embarrassment at this point.
Ok give me till monday and I will have a Blog running with regular updates.
I thought I recognised that, and indeed it is taken partly from http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html . The original is a bit more detailed.
"Dumping produce below market price" is the other side of the "farm subsidies" coin. See "Your Farm Subsidies Are Strangling Us", by the presidents of two African nations: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E04EFD8103DF...
Dynamic Dialogs with YUI and Ruby on Rails
It's an interesting read, but it's just a list-- It begs for someone to write an essay or book on the topic, and that's really what it deserves.
I'm guessing it's this:

http://forum.37signals.com/basecamp/forums/5/topics/3155

Suppose we're both basecamp users. It may be possible for me to steal your session by giving you a link to a shared calendar or something with malicious javascript. Or I can steal the login cookie of one of the admins by luring them to my website with a support request.

I don't think permitting XSS is a good idea in a shared environment.
Just post the vulnerability to a forum 14 days after notifying the company.
Can people who are not inherently 'gifted', start with an immense interest in math at a mid-point in their life, and still go on to make meaningful and significant contributions to the field?

Probably not.

In other words, is precocity a prerequisite to doing good work in Math?

Maybe, depending on whether you by "precocity" you mean "demonstrated precocity".

Intelligence is something you either have or don't have -- and while there's still debate about how much of intelligence is genetic (25%? 50%? 75%?) it's clear that the nurture which is most important is that which takes place before age 5, when the brain is still at its most plastic. Consequently, I would say that anyone who is not gifted when they're 5 years old is unlikely to have a significant mathematical impact.

However, not everybody with intellectual gifts demonstrates them early. Mathematics is a field known for child prodigies, not because it's particularly suited to prodigies, but rather because mathematics prodigies tend to get noticed. Some fields, like mathematics or chess, have little knowledge required before intellect can be applied; others, such as chemistry or biology, require years of prerequisite study. Moreover, just like chess prodigies, the abilities of a mathematics prodigy are obvious and unarguable, while a remarkable writer is still likely to be rejected by his first 19 publishers -- and what 9 year old writer is going to send his manuscript to 20 publishers?

In short: You have to be smart to do make a significant contribution to mathematics, and I don't believe that people can "become smart" past a very early age. However, it's possible for someone to be smart despite not having been recognized as such, depending on which fields his intellect is applied against. Finally, it's definitely possible for someone who is smart but has never done well in mathematics to make a contribution to mathematics -- if he can develop the interest which is necessary for him to apply his intellect appropriately.

Is this a useful answer? I have some other ideas about intelligence and IQ and the Putnam and flashes of insight floating around, but I'm not entirely certain how to explain them -- and given that news.yc stories don't stay on the front page for long, I thought I should post what I could promptly rather than waiting for everything else to crystallize.
People vary in mental attributes. Let's get this out of the way right now. It -has to be the case-. We should obviously remain agnostic about what these attributes are (for instance, I would be hard pressed to say that "good memory" is even genetic because it is hard to disambiguate "memory software" from "memory hardware" in the brain).

Cultures screen for genetic attributes at a young age. This is not necessarily a good thing, but it just happens to be the case. Attractive children are treated differently. "Bright" children are treated differently. "Slow/inattentive" children are treated differently.

The sum of genetic attribute and cultural reaction to that attribute produces higher-order attributes which are consumed by new cultures, etc.

There is an academic culture of Mathematics. To participate, you need to have had the right experiences (enabled by the right genetics, pre-conditions, and cultural/socio-economic starting-point). People like MIT's Daniel Kane or Reid Barton were made-and-born.

So no, you can't become part of the culture of mathematics if you're not. Sorry, they're very picky. They also have a lot of resources (people to talk to, seminars to attend, journals which are expensive) which you can't have if you're not in the club.

Another unfortunate thing is that new math research really has to be presented in terms that "old math" can understand. E.g. constructivist mathematics struggles to get widespread approval. Adoption of ZFC axioms seems arbitrary in some senses (the C part).

So what does it mean to do "good" research? You need to create a result and argue it. Creation requires resources, argument requires facility with standards and ears to listen. Without acceptance into the community, you have neither.

That's one definition, anyway.

Do you just want to develop truth for yourself? Do you want to understand math deeply?

The fact is that there are many people who are extremely gifted in terms of genetic skills, who can do good math, but who don't quite "fit the mold" (trivial example: people with tremendous visuo-spatial reasoning abilities vs. people with tremendous pure-abstraction symbolic-manipulation abilities). These people can still do good math. They just have to do it largely on their own and they may have trouble communicating it with others.

In short, it's insanely complicated and has to do with the marriage of genetics and -culture-, not nurture, per se. If you want deeper insights into this question, I recommend you look at the history of mathematics and mathematicians.

---

Anyway, if you want a good example of a non-stereotypical mathematician, I recommend you look at the autobiography of Grothendiek. Good read.
I'm pretty sure most people wouldn't want live the life of Erdos...
Google Sued For Stealing Outlook Migration Tools
Mac mini makes a great multimedia hub. Plays backed up DVDs over the network, out of the box, also.
What is a Dimension Anyway?