skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure if this is totally over the board here, but Rapleaf has a number of... unusual hiring practices. So I want to weigh in before others decide to copy their practice without thinking.

For example, the job description for an 'Amazing Software Engineer' is a little over the top.

http://blog.rapleaf.com/jobs/#engineer

- Amazing coder who takes no prisoners. Master of all things Internet. One of the best coders in existence.
- Intensely driven and proactive person.
- Extremely hard working. This is a start-up - team members work long hours.
- Quick learner and real doer. Err on execution over strategy.
- Thrive on working with A-players. Too good to spend long hours with B-players.
- Likeable person who garners respect on and off the job.
- Thrive on chaos, risk, and uncertainty.
- Should be easy to get along with, nice, fun, smart, ethical, and low-maintenance.
- Strong desire to build a more ethical society.
- Desire to be an early employee and want to be a real owner in Rapleaf’s future.
- Want to work with extremely large datasets and build portable APIs that thousands of other companies can build applications on top of.

Note: this job is really hard. You’ll be working with some of the top search engineers in the world and they are going to expect that you kick ass. We’re doing things that no one has ever done before and solving problems that have been open for years.

---------------------------------------

I think this attitude would be totally fine, were it actually consistent with the work they're doing. But it's not. I applied for an interview there, and after making a massive deal about it, they sent me this, honestly, trivial test. They chose the time -- 4pm - 5pm on a Friday, and I got it back to them, while pointing out the errors on their test, in fifteen minutes. They then said they'd get back to me Monday.

Then there's a product. It's basically just security rooted in email addresses. I admit that it's a halfway decent heuristic, but it doesn't really solve any security problems because email isn't a secure channel. I asked them about this, and they gave me absolutely no indication they knew what I was talking about. Patient rephrasings lead them to say 'oh, I understand, yes, we can't do that, that's impossible.' But it doesn't answer the question of why they're building this product with this approach in the first place.

So take what you can learn from it, but with a grain of salt.
What is "intelligence?" Can we separate it from society's conception of it? Can we state a computational definition rather than a definition in terms of satisfaction of cultural standards? We undervalue a lot of mental attributes - consistency of thought, sensitivity to subtle differences in concepts, patience, self-reflection, the ability to "go meta" etc. which cannot be detected by the rough and rigid abstract problem solving required by low-level Math (e.g. the Math problems which would qualify prodigies).

I am highly turned off by the idea that we can't "become smart" after an early age. I feel like I "got smart" after I started playing go, I feel like I "got smart" after I learned category theory. I feel like every year I get smarter - and not smarter in the sense of "having more knowledge" but smarter in the sense of being able to solve larger classes of problems, and more complicated problems.

and c.
I think that the typical options structure for startups is a bogus relic of a time when people thought you needed a hundred people to get software written. I'm trying to change that, though my existence proof is a work in progress.
Perhaps this is true in a corporate environment, but some of the more productive periods in, say, open source development, or research, are pretty much whole life affairs. Einstein's Annus Mirabilis, for example.
You can steal cookies with XSS?
ROFL get a life you are missing so much if you think WoW is anything compared to real life.
WoW No Longer World’s Biggest MMO?
Rick Segal is a web oriented VC based in Canada. But the best advice he has for you is probably that everyone deserves 100 words -- a chance to make their pitch. So work on an extremely concise version of what your startup does, what problems does it solve, and how it will make money. If it's simple enough for others to communicate, your ideas will start gaining traction, and you'll find a lot of doors opening.
Bill Gates on the iTunes Music Store (PDF)
Security flaws are bugs. They should be prioritised along with the rest.
Also, on trying to convince the candidate not to come on board, it is instructive to contrast this with Steve Job's approach.

http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...

"
Apple was interesting; Larry was working on the Lisa, which was starting to look like a real computer, but for some reason it didn't appeal to me. At one point, though, Larry realized that I'd be a better fit in the Mac group, and introduced me to Andy Hertzfeld. Andy (the "soul" of the Mac software group) showed me some demos that were so amazing that I somehow thought that they didn't really need me--that the software was almost done! But I was impressed and intrigued, and mulled it over...

Meanwhile, I went to interview at VTI. The people there were wonderful. I'd be working with folks I knew and respected, and Doug even offered me a $15K signing bonus, a huge amount of money for a recent college graduate. I'd be working on advanced chip design tools, a new area for me, and it would be an interesting challenge. So I accepted the job. That was Thursday.

On Friday evening, I got a phone call. "Bruce, it's Steve. What do you think about Apple?" It was Steve Jobs. "Well, Steve, Apple's cool, but I accepted a job at VTI."

"You did what? Forget that, you get down here tomorrow morning, we have a lot more things to show you. Be at Apple at 9am." Steve was adamant. I thought I'd go down, go through the motions, and then tell him that I'd made up my mind and was going to VTI.

Steve switched on the Reality Distortion Field full-force. I met with seemingly everyone on the Mac team, from Andy to Rod Holt to Jerry Manock to the other software engineers, and back to Steve. Two full days of demos, drawings of the various designs, marketing presentations--I was overwhelmed.

On Monday I called Doug Fairbairn at VTI and told him I had changed my mind.

I was going to join Apple, where we would change the world with a little computer called the Macintosh. "
In some situations. See:

http://jehiah.cz/archive/xss-stealing-cookies-101
The Perfect Desktop - Linux Mint 5 Elyssa R1
Getting Involved: Gates vs. Jobs
I find 37signals pretty stubborn when it comes to listening to its users, in general.

-just my 2 cents
Sure, but why do they have to rely on cotton? I just question the assumption that all Africans should be farmers. In fact, is it likely that they will reach our standards of living if they all remain farmers? I don't think so - very few people in developed countries seem to be farmers, for all I can tell.

Of course if cotton can be produced cheaper there, it is a shame that the world doesn't make use of it. But other than that, I don't see why a nation should stubbornly insist on one kind of production.
I actually enjoyed this. They're generalist platitudes, but at least it helps to remind me of what I can bring to a relationship. Outside of academic circles, it's strikingly hard to find dates who aren't, well, intimidated by independent, able women. The way people 'turn off', on say, OkCupid, when I mention what I do, had become in equal parts amusing and frustrating.
1 Dimension items could be best measured in time maybe.
3 Dimensions items could be best measured in matter at a specific point in time since matter is constantly moving. This is just my thinking.
It's not really at a startup stage, but I'm trying to, with some friends and burning man people, see if I can build/design an extremely lightweight and cheap parabolic trough out of carbon fiber and mylar, for electric and mechanical power generation. I'm iterating through to see if wind is a blocking issue.

I also had some designs for a powered wheel with two degrees of freedom, without a caster, to remove some of the angular momentum problems that classic approaches face.
Its a lot more complicated than that. Read the article. Also a lot of people play Wow and it makes a lot of money so its worth understanding it even if you don't agree with it.
Worldwide Internet Advertising To Surpass $106 Billion In 2011 
"Worldwide spending on internet advertising will total $65.2 billion in 2008, or nearly 10% of all ad spend across all media, and grow 15-20% a year to reach $106.6 billion in 2011, or 13.6% of total ad spend."
Application processor for multimedia mobile phones
Assuming as little as 10% could be nature, the lack of genetic conditions would mean a lot for top achievements.

Also talking about a certain community doesn't necesarily mean something related to race. There could be some kind of selection for people that become jew marrying or people that quits.
BC212B Datasheet
BC212B Datasheet
Wasn't there a story recently on HN about a guy who proved a longstanding open problem as a hobby, and was a security watchman in his day job? (Or some other job, I don't know).

I am surprised so many people here seem to lean towards "nature". I am pretty sure you can pick up mathematics at any age. Sometimes I also wonder: humans manage so many really complicated tasks in their daily lives, can it really be a much farther stretch to reach into mathematics?

Of course experience and knowledge and training help in mathematics, but as in other fields, maybe sometimes an outsider can bring a fresh view into it. It might also depend on the field of maths you choose, some might be more approachable than others.

That said, I agree with the other post that genius mathematicians are probably somehow born or made very early on.
Because no one will read "Top 10 Reasons Dating Me Rocks." Instead, the author derives a sort of "aspect" of themselves, and portrays it as an aspect of an entire group. This is really the base of quite a lot of the world's rhetoric--people really talk about groups they don't identify with very rarely.
document.cookie, wow... Guess you learn something new every day. For those interested, this has a good explanation:

http://www.quirksmode.org/js/cookies.html
We bought one of these:

http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/keyboards/keyboard/devices...

Rocks pretty good for media. Can't play serious games with it, though. (My girlfriend manages to use it for Portal.)
"...there seems to be little correlation with siblings, at least beyond what you would expect from having parents who emphasize learning math."

I'd bet for a set of negative factors. For you to be 100%, you need to have full 15% of genes (maybe there are a lot involved, so it could be very improbable to have more than 10% of that 15%), 30% of early nurture and 40% of favorable social conditions (good environment, or just not being poor that lets out a big part of humanity) and the rest of luck, effort and good teachers.

The lack of any of these conditions could explain why the siblings are not so bright. The lack of genetic conditions and the early nurture could also ruin more easily the posibilities.

"Genetic" is also broad. It could be quicker thinking, focus, even a illness that forces a child to stay home reading instead of playing outdoors.
My first startup was a hardware company. I don't recommend it, unless your problem can't be solved any other way. The vast majority of hardware is a commodity, and if it isn't today, it will be in a year or two when Chinese manufacturers get it figured out.

Someone else mentioned medical devices, and I definitely think that's a great area. But most folks I meet who want to do hardware are going after the consumer market, which is a hard business to enter as a startup.
Yes. That's why XSS is such a serious security problem. And even if you can't steal cookies, you can still do nasty things like re-target the login form's action to point at your own server and hence steal people's passwords.
Yeah definitely thinking about that...
Precocity is overrated. To me, believing that genius is decided at age 0/5/10 whatever means that you are just rationalizing not working hard enough with "I am not a genius. I will not make it. Therefore no point in working hard".

The primary test really is :
a) Are you having fun (with maths in this case)?

b) Are you willing to put time and effort into it?
Note that the amount of time available may be one hurdle if you are starting at mid-age since its likely that you are pursuing it as a side hobby instead of a full time profession.

See Hamming's lecture on PG's site. Search particularly for "hard work is compounded" and "why is he so much smarter than me" or roughly along those lines.
Yeah I have it, Connect360, works very well. Won't work for Netflix though as that only runs on Windows...
Submitters, please spare a thought for those of us that read RSS. All I
get is:

Subject: WoW

[Comments][1]

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=228117

URL: http://mattmaroon.com/?p=396
comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=228117

If it's worth bothering all of us with your submission, please take the
time to add a sentance covering the content if it's not obvious.
I suppose I'd buy that being a 'hackrepreneur' women would have a polarizing effect on mens' interest, but would you really be interested in someone who had it polarized to the negative, anyway? If there is a shortage of guys who are into girls who can code, I'm grossly misunderstanding the bay area singles landscape.
In fact I can think of a ton of people in my immediate social network you should contact, heh.
Anyone else see the flaw in asking a gifted mathematician about the human brain, merely because they're a gifted mathematician? cperciva is certainly very smart, and may also happen to know a thing or two about the subject...but mathematical ability doesn't necessarily correlate with knowledge of how humans learn or cognitive development.
String is vulnerable too. You'd be hard pressed to write a useful program that didn't put user-provided data into Strings.

An attacker could study the code paths of popular ruby based open-source projects to craft special attack inputs that exploit the weaknesses in Array and/or String.
I definitely, definitely agree. A lot of mathematicians I know are kind of self-appointed "kings of the mind" and so pontificate tremendously on subjects they're not really qualified to talk about. Not saying that cpervia is, but it's definitely a trend.

That being said, mathematicians definitely have (as a class) some good mental attributes - they usually think very consistently and can see very subtle flaws in arguments (especially common ones (it gets frustrating)). They also solve really tough problems which means that their ideas about problem solving (probably pretty central to the question of "what is intelligence?") are probably good, assuming they're self-reflective.
There was such a story ( http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/966679.html ), but the guy was "an accomplished mathematician" before becoming a security guard.
I'm sure there are, for me, as for everyone, many people out there, however the issue is really just mending the psychological damage caused by impatiently sampling dating sites. Bad idea.

I also think that many men in tech or science tend to think like-minded women are, in the abstract, attractive, but when it comes down to it, it's just not the sort of thing they're looking for while dating. After a while, helping people discover this loses its novelty.
I would also like to ask, how could such conclusions, were they actually true, be put to use by society?

I haven't been able to identify any way to use such information which I wouldn't consider deeply immoral. But I have unusual views here.
The article explains it well.
My great-grandmother told me 30 years ago: a 25 minute nap in the afternoon is essential; over 45 minutes is not good. This old wisdom from a hard working farmer took how much scientific scrutiny to finally be called the "NASA nap"?
Don't listen to all your elders, but ones with true wisdom are pretty obvious.
(WoW) paying subscribers vs (Habbo) free active user accounts

Not even a contest: WoW wins. Also, according to the Habbo site:

* 2262 Habbos online now!
* 2,845,022 visits in the last 30 days

How do these numbers translate to 9.5MM active accounts?
I'd be curious who uses Mahalo? And for what? It's very pretty, but it seems like just a nicer looking version of dmoz.org (where I've been an editor off and on since its first year or so of operation, and I'm still not convinced it is all that useful) with less data.

I searched for a few Perl-related subjects that I'd been searching for earlier in the evening ("function prototypes", "core modules in 5.6 and 5.8", random crap like that) and it brings back pretty useless and unrelated results: "Herbie Fully Loaded", "X-Perl" (a WoW add-on?), and "Aaron Miles" (who I now know is a second baseman for the Cardinals). So, I guess it is actually a bit more like Everything2.com rather than dmoz. Random crap linking off to even more random crap (but it still looks a lot better). I did learn about Kate Moss and her see-through dress, along with the aforementioned baseball player, so my available trivia has increased, but I didn't find anything I was looking for.
Netherlands: ~1700 taps per day

US: 2208 taps per YEAR

Netherlands: 16,570,613 citizens

US: 301,139,947 citizens

Baffling? It gets worse.

Recently a new EU law forces phone & internet providers to save phone & internet data (12 months in the Netherlands, the minimum according to the EU law is 6 months). This means that every time you visit a website your provider stores this fact in a database. Every time you send an email message this is recorded.

It gets worse though.

Every time you make a phone call it's saved in a database (not what you say, only that you made a phone call). Now the interesting part: if you use a mobile phone your location is saved too. So the government knows where you are if you use your mobile phone. Maybe they know where you are if your phone is on even if you're not using it.

Someone might say "OK, they have this database of every citizen, but they aren't going to track everyone." The budget for this project in the Netherlands is 20 million per year. But the government doesn't pay for the servers and other things necessary to save this data directly. The phone & internet companies do, and the government pays them a small amount of money every time they access their database. Accessing the database costs 6.50 euros. They pay 13 euros to the phone company for a tap. That means that they are going to access the database 20M/6.5 (just over 3 million) times. Or maybe 1.5 million wire taps per year! This is huge, especially considering the small population of the Netherlands.

So they know (if they don't use a wire tap) 1. what you do on the internet and 2. whom you're calling 3. where you were for the last 12 months.

Who's going to make sure that the data is well protected? The phone & internet companies (hint: that's not going to work).

Why are they doing this? To catch terrorists. Of course terrorists don't use hotmail (if you use hotmail they can't see whom you are emailing). Terrosists probably don't use proxies either. And terrorists don't know that they can use Skype instead of a phone.

Be happy, it's worse here.
I would add: making things easy to read. Red on black gives me a headache.
The redundant end tag is a feature which makes it easier to write and edit by hand. E.g. imagine you have a <section> of text more than a screenfull - how do you see when the section ends? Which closing parenthesis is it? This is an important feature because document are often large, deeply nested structures.

Parentheses may seem nicer than angle brackets if you are used to Lisp (C programmers probably think curly brackets are clearly nicer), but note that you are replacing the angle brackets with parentheses and quotes, both which have to match. So it is at least twice as tricky and error-prone to write by hand, and the quotes are less visually helpful since they don't have "direction".

Of course any of these problems can be alleviated by a fancy editor, but XML was intended to be writable and editable without special software.

XML is of course just as extensible, since you use elements for complex structures, not attributes.

S-expressions work fine in Lisp, but programming code is differently structured than documents. For example, in code you typically (hopefully!) don't have several screens of code deeply nested.
Raph Koster did a presentation at GDC2007 that touched on this: http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/gdcprime2007.shtml

The slides that struck me were this one:
http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/gdcprime2007/Slide61.JPG
followed by this one:
http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/gdcprime2007/Slide62.JPG

Note that even back then Habbo had more active monthly users than WoW.

Of course Habbo and Runescape are free to play (at the basic level at least), but the costs of running them are so much smaller. Last I heard, Blizzard's WoW team numbered close to 1000 full-time staff. Jagex has a very small team that has only very recently started to expand.
Could anybody summarize: is it possible to use Ruby now or not?
The Employable Web Designer
MacRuby rather than RubyCocoa?
The CEO Playbook: Smile Through the Mild Discomfort
"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"

it is not true. imo modern math requires years of study to reach the border of known.

to topic starter: i know pretty good mathematicians who think that geniality exists and who think it does not.

i thought about it for a while and come to conclusion that it does not matter.

The right question to ask: Am i enjoy (fall in love with) math?

p.s. those mathematicians who believe in existance of geniality think that "love math or not" is a good test.
I have had similar thoughts recently. Although my desire to get better at maths is not to "make meaningful and significant contributions to the field".
My desire is to make meaningful contributions to other fields. Reviving and extending my dusty math skills may be an essential component.
So I think if you realign your question/purpose as I have, the answer is "yes". Otherwise, my instinct says "no".
thanks for the feedback everyone - some decent leads here.
They could start arbitraging into second tier networks, like FindWhat or LookSmart. But it's unlikely that this will actually work in practice. The bids in those networks are too low.

Another way of doing it (and that's how some arbitragers are structuring it even now) is to have two or more separate companies, with different billing addresses and access respective Google accounts using different IPs.
Ask YC: decent JavaScript resource and reference sites?
I'm looking for some comprehensive JavaScript resource and reference sites - I'm hoping someone here can point me in the right direction.
Does God also constantly lie to his children?
I think space-time can be defined in terms of mass. time is a change in mass, space is the number of atoms that can fit between here and there.
mass has 4 dimensions, so space time does as well.
if mass had a different number of dimensions so would space time.