skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"When I use a word, it means exactly what I mean it to mean, no more and no less." -- Humpty Dumpty

"Intelligence is what intelligence tests measure." -- Edward Boring

I'm actually surprised by how few comments have been made regarding the actual nature of intelligence in this thread. yummyfajitas' parent comment is one of those few, and he equates intelligence as we understand it with g, the hypothesized general intelligence posited by psychometricians.

y.f. makes the same two arguments that psychometricians make for the validity of g as a representation of human intelligence,[1] which are supposed to demonstrate g's "internal validity" and "external validity". The former refers to the positive correlations between various (supposed) intelligence tests (described in the jargon as the "positive manifold"), and the latter to the positive correlations between g and supposed success in life. Broadly, the internal validity argument proves the "general" in "general intelligence", whereas the external validity argument proves the "intelligence".

The first wrinkle in these arguments is the claim that all human intelligence tests positively correlate with each other to give a universal intelligence factor. This is false; there exist demographics where g is _not_ the predominant factor explaining inter-demographic test score differences.[2]

Here is another problem. Psychometricians tend to decide whether some test metric measures intelligence by how well it correlates with existing "intelligence tests" that're g-associated. y.f. does this in his comment: "It is relatively independent of cultural knowledge: i.e., french is nearly independent of g (1), while physics, plumbing and loading irregularly sized boxes into a truck are highly correlated to g". (I.e., French tests can't be real tests of intelligence, since they don't correlate with g, but physics, plumbing, and bin packing must be, because they do.) But this renders the internal validity argument circular: its two prongs now become: (1) g must exist because intelligence tests correlate positively, and (2) and intelligence tests are those tests that correlate positively with g. The circle closes.

The external validity argument supposedly rescues the g concept from this trap, by demonstrating that g correlates vaguely with real-life behaviours. Unfortunately, the correlations are nowhere near perfect, that g correlates with success doesn't suffice to show causality, and pointing out the correlations does not eliminate the underlying circularity in g's definition. All in all, the evidence is inadequate to reject the null hypothesis that there is no causal link between g and life success.

[1] Well, I say "human intelligence", but if I recall correctly, at least one psychometrician even tried to argue that g might well be a cross-species phenomenon!

[2] Dolan, C.V. Roorda, W., and Wicherts, J. M. (2004). "Two failures of Spearman's hypothesis: The GATB in Holland and the JAT in South Africa", Intelligence, vol. 32, p. 155-173.
That is what the first version of the Facebook API did. You could log in to someone's website and it would get access to all your data temporarily. And it was not on the social network's domain.

Facebook connect is something else that I haven't quite worked out. If it is like Google Friend Connect than it would be a bunch of widgets that let your easily plug in social features into any website.
So you think the right plan is to punish the end-users and hope the vendor notices? Do you read Bugtraq? It's a mess.

This strategy works better. Several thousand people have already read Dave's article. We don't have to worry at all about the "wrong people" getting details and messing with other users. This seems like a win-win.
Anyone have news on how the registration process is going to work?
The Paper Version of the Web
The red is a bit harsh. There's too much of it. Can't really think what to do about that. Less red though, definitely.
Inventor of the Internet takes aim at BitTorrent
Depends on who you're talking about. An XSS vulnerability in a web app will get you shelved at a Fortune 500 company. When new apps get deployed on customer DMZs, third party audits happen. When they find vulnerabilities, you spin dot releases. On a typical 4/2 dev/qa dev team, in the hopelessly optimistic case where you can turn a QA'd dot release in 2 weeks, you just lost $37,500.
I doubt --- kind of a lot, actually --- that any actual developer there even saw our report.

[Edit] On second thought, this is a dumb thing to say, and I retract it. I have no idea if anyone's seen it, which is itself a problem. If I was going to assign a cause to this, it's that the cost of fixing this particular bug may exceed the perceived risk of the vulnerability.
Not really: the practice of installing CEOs without a lot of industry experience is quite common (see Terry Semel). It might be obvious to you, but not to everyone.
goddamn, this is great. Why have I never heard of this before
Isn't 40TB just a paltry 40 hard drives (maybe 50 with redundancies)? A dedicated data center seems a bit overblown for that?
Movie Exec: So, I didn't have time to read the script, what's the plot of this "Speed" movie you're looking to make.

Producer: If the bus stops, it blows up.

Movie Exec: That's it? The "Hey Verne Guy" movies had better plots than that! What the he...

Producer: We've got Keanu all set to star if we get sign off.

Movie Exec: OH! Why didn't you say so. I bet we can get 50mil for production.

Producer: Make it 60 and you're on.
Per Wikipedia:

After the book was written, but before it hit bookstores, Gates recognized that the Internet was gaining the critical mass needed to drive it to dominance, and on December 7, 1995 — just weeks after the release of the book — he redirected Microsoft to become an Internet-focused company. Then he and coauthor Rinearson spent several months revising the book, making it 20,000 words longer and focused on the Internet. The revised edition was published in October 1996 as a trade paperback.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead
I'm glad to see people calling out the google "sharing our data - in an iframe" strategy as bogus.
Whoisi: Follow your friends on the Internet.
Actually, it's more like 50 hard drives without redundancy (keeping in mind TiB vs TB) and at least double that if we're talking quality redundancy (assuming this is a for-profit company hosting people's sound clips then they better have duplicates of everything).

I don't know enough about their model and what services they provide though. I'm thinking 40TB a year storage, but ~100TB transfer per month or more - which isn't a little.

But my biggest point is future expansion. 40TB in year one... how many in year 2?
It only appears for me next to the post when I click "link" and view a comment individually. I assume this is to prevent knee-jerk flagging. Not sure what the karma limit is.
I think the post itself is pretty clear on this score: it's not a major vulnerability. It doesn't prevent us from using the product. It does change the way we use the product.

I'm not sure Dave's too worried about what YC board people think about him, but if that makes you feel better, you can go ahead and keep thinking that.

Here's what I want to accomplish by posting this story on YC (and not Reddit, or anywhere else):

The 37Signals attitude towards feature requests is refreshing and powerful. But if you apply it mindlessly, like they themselves did in this case, you can cause problems for yourself. Not every request is really optional. Maybe this one was --- I'm on the fence leaning towards "they should probably fix this soon" --- but others truly won't be, because they will reveal customer information, lose data, or crash the system.

I think there's a lesson in here somewhere. Maybe it'll just have to wait for an actual incident at 37Signals.
From the BBC article on the topic:

"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!
Dunno, throwing a hissy and saying "FUCK THA [CUSTOMERS WHO DISAGREE WITH OUR POLICIES]" like they did makes them seem like babies who couldn't be trusted with a toy ball, let alone a social networking service.
i want to add aside from the red color. when i get into the site first time, i don't know what to do. i don't know what it's all about. noobindex? no. sorry. i don't get it. i thought it was for noob hackers. was surprised it was for gamers.

definitely a need for improvement. 0.02
Hello, Hal
If you arent doing that much traffic, amazon is a nice option. Otherwise CDN's will offer you a better price. Check out bit gravity, they are smaller then limelight and akamai but may be able to give you better attention. They also have some nice features the other CDN's arent offering.
I like the layout of the site. The text is too close to the left/right sides. Adding the same spacing that's at the top to the other sides would help improve readability.

The functionality is pretty basic though. =(

I'm not sure what is gathered here that couldn't be done within an existing system like Ning, which already has a large user base. That would give you an installed userbase to help pull from without having to get people to register for yet-another-social-network.
Instinctiv Shuffle: A great new iPhone app you can't use
New social web project built on rails using Heroku
is it real?
Ah, yes, BitGravity was the one I forgot. Diggnation uses them, I believe.
Also, reader discussion has more books, here:

http://lifehacker.com/397142/what-books-have-changed-your-li...
"ROFL get a life"

Let me see if I understand what you are saying: You assume the author does not have a life, and your response is to laugh so hard you fall off your chair?

That is not a very nice sentiment, and if I am correct in understanding your point of view, it is especially unkind to attempt to publicly shame him for what you perceive to be an unacceptable lifestyle.

I sincerely hope that the choices you make about relating to people in "real life" are much more pleasant than the choice you made here.
I don't think he gives a damn about his 20% of the company as far as cash is concerned. It's more of a legacy thing. He created Microsoft - it's his legacy, it's what he'll be remembered by, and he really cares for it.... it's a part of him.
How do you know they're stored in plain text in the db? I have that same functionality in my start-up, but we encrypt the passwords in the db. We just don't one-way-hash them.
Government Whore
ICANN ruling opens door for new TLDs (coming in 2009)
Doodle forerunners for Flickr, Twitter, etc
Ubuntu releases Hardy Heron for MIDs
I'm curious if most web designers that people here interact with do HTML and CSS.

At my last job I worked (on a small team) with a programmer who happened to have a knack for design, so after we discussed how the UI would look/function, he would do the detailed design and CSS/HTML implementation, giving me the classes/elements to use in my code.

At my current job (larger team), there is a FT designer just does mockups in Photoshop, and its up to me to implement the CSS/HTML and make sure it works in all browsers. As a developer I find that a pretty big waste of my time.

I say this, since if I am ever in a position to hire a web designers, I'd make working with the tools of the trade (HTML, CSS) a must-have requirement. It'd be OK if they don't know major browser quirks and need some help, but they should be able to do the majority of the design themselves.
Ghosn: Nissan to Introduce Electric Car in 2010, Mass-Production in 2012
We listen to everyone and 9 out of 10 things we add to our products start out as customer requests. We encourage feedback everywhere we can and interact with our customers as often as we can -- often by posting comments on their own blogs.

But, we also get thousands of requests a year so we can't do everything everyone wants. Many of these requests conflict with one another, and many of them just aren't a good fit for our products (adding Gantt charts to Basecamp, for example). The good ones, however, often make it into the products eventually. Sometimes exactly as requested, sometimes in a different form, but customer requests are almost always the seeds of improvement.

It is our job to be editors and museum curators. We have to decide what makes it and what doesn't for the benefit of the overall product and the overall customer base. No combination of yes or no is going to satisfy everyone, so we have to work on behalf of the majority.

Every company with millions of users has to say no more than they say yes, we're just honest and up front about it about it. We don't want to set false expectations or promise things we won't be able to deliver.

While this policy may rub some people the wrong way, we think it's the right policy. And seeing that 94%+ of our customers would recommend Basecamp to a friend or colleague, I think we're on the right track.
http://basecamphq.com/survey
Don't mistake my intentions, I'm not out to prove anything. the idea that our reality is defined by the properties of mass is more philosophy than science.
I'm a materialist reductionist, and really my take on this is that it is a human centered subject-object orientation.
1. fine, the number of quarks that fit between here and there. if we discover something smaller it will be that. If this wasn't true, it seems to me that space would be infinitely divisible, but it's not. Why would the Planck length be derivable from so many other physical constants such as the speed of light?

2. no, i think it's everyone else who has begged the question by referring to space-time first because it is observable. fallacy of scale is involved here.

It seems to me that what I'm saying is what the article was trying to do as well, derive the fact of 4 dimensional space-time from the physical properties of matter.
Exactly. It seems that about 75% of the commenters here and on CodingHorror are making this leap from "System can send password to user" to "System is storing password in clear text." Maybe Jeff's next post should be focused on how many "hackers" are unable to perform simple logical analysis.

I believe the flaw here is that it sends your existing password rather than sending you an email link to create a new one. Not really worth a post (and all the ensuing discussion).
Very nicely worded. Now, can address the OP's concern about security flaws not being fixed? Is security flaw == to Gantt chart request?
Walden and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
There is an about page...
I find it ironic and quite unlikely that these memos show up in PDF format. I'm pretty sure Gates uses Office. I don't really know how to judge whether these are legitimate memos or not. I also can't imagine Microsoft sitting there while confidential memos are released in their backyard. That doesn't sound like M$.

Either way the memo is interesting and Gates is surprisingly insightful. It's easy for us looking back with 20/20 hindsight and say "Of course!" ... but in 2003 it wasn't so obvious.
Yeah, I agree here and was disappointed with this decision. Out of the window goes the simplicity everyone aims for on the web.
Hacker Entrepreneur in Residence
I run a small, but successful Web1.0 company, but am looking for a new bright spark as Hacker Entrepreneur in Residence.

What’s that? All the fun of a startup without all the risk. YC folks who don't want VC might be interested.

inevitable.cc or http://tinyurl.com/5hr434
what exactly is a thought experiment then?
When I was building Rails apps at RHG, we had a team of CSS folks who converted the Photoshop docs into HTML + CSS for us. That helped a great deal; I basically had to take the HTML and add data + behaviors.

That does make things much more efficient, although I'd prefer to either skip the Photoshop step or combine the Photoshop and HTML/CSS steps into the same person(s).
Thank you! For a minute there, I thought I was losing what's left of my mind.
One thing I should point out, is that although the 1st edition does have a fair bit of talk about the Internet, (even predicting things like VoIP), Gates uses the phrase "information highway" because he thought the Internet would be supplanted by something better:

"...we stand at the brink of another revolution. This one will involve unprecedentedly inexpensive communication; all the computers will join together to communicate with us and for us. Interconnected globally, they will form a network, which is being called the information highway. A direct precursor is the present Internet..."
This is bad management?

If you're doing the job of a subordinate and not your own job, then yes.

Remember, there were 4 levels of manager in the room. What did they do? Did anyone trust them?

The internet practically passed by the largest software company in the world while 6 levels of micromanagement were showing each other how smart they were. Yes, I'd call that bad management.
You seem to misunderstand the definition of g, as g is not defined in terms of intelligence tests.

Take as your statistic the result of many tests: physics, box loading, french, basketball, etc, and then do a PCA or similar test. One of the principal components will be g, provided you have enough data. This is what defines g.

Intelligence tests are simply tests designed to be more highly correlated with g. If we discarded intelligence tests, we could recreate them (or equivalent tests) based on statistical analysis of the other test data. They are certainly not arbitrary measures.

The external argument doesn't rescue g; g is quite safe. The external argument merely claims that 'g' and 'intelligence' are the same thing, or very close. g exists regardless of what you want to call it.

As for the paper you cite, I skimmed it. Unless I misunderstood it horribly, it merely claims that particular IQ tests don't effectively measure g across different groups. That doesn't mean g doesn't exist as a hidden variable, merely that a particular test is poorly correlated with it for some population.
I've always assumed that's just a HR thing. Finding graphics designers is comparatively easy. Finding ones that know the technologies well enough to be productive in them is much harder. Likewise finding web developers is easy, but ones with a design sense much harder.

Unless you're a "rock star" employer (Spolsky, 37signals, etc...) who can choose from an enormous pool of candidates, you're going to have an easier time staffing teams of unitasking employees than you are finding generalists. It's not that either side "can't" learn the techniques of the other, it's that in practice they don't, so the ones that do are hard to find.

You go to release with the team you have, not the team you want, basically.
The curators at the museums don't lock the doors and arm the alarms, Jason.
That sounds suspiciously similar to this story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=184257
A customer of mine was unhappy with Amazon's service and couldn't get help. So he emailed Jeff Bezos. The next day, 4 reps called back.

It's worth a try.
BT starts threatening music downloaders with internet cut-off | The Register
Eloquent Javascript [E-book]
MySpace Data Availability launches later today » VentureBeat
Wrong. Fail. You have THREE seconds to capture someone's attention before they yank the back button and go back to surfing funny cats.

The human brain is very lazy, it is constantly trying to put every situation in a box. An easy-to-understand box. An "I get it" box, so it can move on.

We talk about this over and over here, but "what's the fire burning in someone's pants that makes them want to use your site right this second?"

Now figure out how to polish that into a small snippet of text that instantly draws folks into why the site exists. Maybe: "Bored to tears waiting for someone good to kick your ass at Countertrike 2? Good, you're just come home."

Plaster that on the homepage. Then walk the person through exactly what they need to do. Step 1, step 2, step 3. Pretend we are all idiots.

And then it's game on.
Albanian Custom Fades: Woman as Family Man
The MBA myth
1984

Walden, Civil Disobedience, Letters to a Stoic

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
No, no, no, no. What you are describing is just obfuscation. It's the same thing web browsers do with the password list on the local machine, and it DOES NOT provide protection against theft. It just makes that theft slightly harder. If the key isn't in the database, it's in the code somewhere, probably in one or several utility script on the same box containing the database. Yeah, that's really going to slow an attacker down.

Guys, this stuff was known and very well understood 30 years ago. Please, please, please stop trying to do security architecture if you don't understand it. This is the reason web security is as bad as it is. If you aren't 100% sure you understand the thread model perfectly, just follow the advice you read from trusted sources on the web. I'm not aware of anyone sane that is recommending storing unhashed/recoverable passwords.
I discovered the goddamn \G trick about six months ago. I couldn't believe I hadn't picked it up anywhere else. It's the most useful thing you can learn when dealing with the MySQL shell! (Especially when your eyes buzz out trying to line up a huge table!)
I imagine Inc. has a word limit on articles so they can fit them in the magazine. If so, there's not a lot Joel can do to keep his columns for Inc. as informative as the essays he publishes on his site without any length restriction.
Good News.

http://i.pity.the.fool

will be a valid URL,

Bad News. Private registry TLDs will be instantly devalued as homes for spams and scams. Oh sure, there will be some notable exceptions, but look at what happened with the .biz and .info namespaces.

Also if you are a domainer, ICANN just shot your business model in the gut (not that that's a bad thing, asset bubbles in artificially scarce goods is an antisocial business model).
Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing.
hmm imo just too much red. beauty in simplicity, yes. beauty in big red expanses...hmm. a little blinding.
Make your own IM bot in Ruby, and interface it with your Rails app
First Mover vs Fast Follower - Who wins?
Sad and disappointing.

But: if they can successfully outsource their dissertation for £100, maybe the system is broken, too?
Oh, I’m Just a Bill (Gates) | Tech Jaws
It potentially makes it simpler, in that pretty much any string could be a url.
Seriously.

The material should be interesting enough to make students want to do it. And if you are outsourcing your thesis, why are you even working towards a PhD?
Why every city council needs at least one geek
Research would be great. Would you be so good as to recommend a peer-reviewed study of the efficacy of Bill Gates' management technique?

Meanwhile, anecdotes may be anecdotal but they're still more enjoyable than flamage.
I've posted this at least three times on Hacker News, but I'm just shocked people haven't read it:

http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html

This guy is a statistics professor, and has a lot to say about exactly what "g" is. He even runs experiments! I know the article is a bit long but I promise it's worth reading.