skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, I've read this a couple of times now, and I honestly can't see this as being anything other than someone being intentionally contrarian.

As far as I can tell, this guy was not at the presentation, and is basing his opinions on snippets that he's read elsewhere on the net. Additionally, as far as I can tell, this guy hasn't produced anything of merit to the programming community.

I'm not a rails apologist, and have never actually done anything in Ruby, but to me this guy comes off as a gas bag who thinks he knows better than everyone else; all based on hearsay.
Or is it: no?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152477
gobsmacked.
too male centric. how about JL Jr./PG Jr.
Now I wasn't at the conference either, but you have to admit that this whole thing smells like pure hype. As they say, "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is".
They weren't autistic, and there didn't seem to be any strange behaviors socially, and they were quite inquisitive and swift on the uptake.

I once heard IQ defined as "ability to navigate bureaucracy, getting the answers others think correct in a manner testwriters imagined, and color in the lines" (paraphrased). This may have something to do with the phenomenon here.

The odds that someone would 'get a degree, earn lots of money, stay out of jail, vote often, delay having kids, etc.' seem to have more to do with successfully conforming to certain values of society's upper-middle class.

I think I'm capable of inventive thought, but I don't particularly want to get another degree, or earn much money, or delay having kids, or vote often, and the sort of things that one has to do to stay out of jail, are, honestly, quite often absurd, and I often rail against them.

And if you start to observe, closely, just how these things are tested, you'll start to get the impression that maybe bright people will find their ways through the cracks more than anticipated. There's an enormous weight given to quick answers -- time directly influences scoring. Linear answers are expected, and alternative interpretations are docked. There's often insufficient information in the questions, or it's based on a model of the world that's wrong. Domain knowledge like mathematics or vocabulary is brought into it. Analogies are made to hone in on one relationship from the many that could exist. Scorers of essays give insufficent weight to substance and too much to form -- despite their lipservice, they are indeed swayed by big words.

Even tests like GRE physics are bad. They claim to be testing rapid physical intuition, but in practice what divides good from poor scores is prior experience with 100 simple systems and the ability to get the factors of 2 and pi right with three minutes per question.
I fully agree, and I don't see why you think I'm implying that there will be "magic" levels of technology, or that something can be "infinitely intelligent".

All I'm saying is that there's still a lot of room for improvement, and AI will be a hugely beneficial tool toward that end.
Hmm, I guess PG and RTM have been hitched through all their partnerships in business/startup/hacking ventures.

Maybe the best way to get around same sex marriage issues in U.S. is to allow all same sex couples to form small business partnerships? We know all founders are in fact like couples married to each other.
I wanted a thin surface (relatively) with legs and no drawers or gimmicks. I ended up buying a dining room table from West Elm which fit the bill perfectly. Later I added two small raised shelves (which my speakers and various doodads sit on) to the desk which I built by using Ikea kitchen cabinet legs and some random Ikea file cabinet drawer fronts.

It's simple and it works great.
That's not the point.
It's the massive amount of neurons and (finely tuned) synapses that allows human intelligence, and the vast amount of possible mental "states".

Functional organization is of course of prime importance, but AFAIK, it's the sheer cortical surfaces that allow us to be smarter than apes (who are able to use symbolic (sign) language, teach it to their offspring, use tools, and recognize themselves in the mirror, all feats that were once thought to be proper to the human species).

We might have reached a local maximum , though(related to the neurotransmission speed?). Neanderthals had a bigger brain, but were seemingly dumber and less culturally advanced than contemporaneous Homo Sapiens.
"and is basing his opinions on snippets that he's read elsewhere on the net"

It's worse than that. Much, much worse. He's basing his opinions on "common sense".
Congratulations. Looking forward to the extra insight this produces in your essays.
Professional women usually reserves the right to keep their maiden name unchanged. At least I've been seen a lot of women in NYC's financial/media circle who never change their name even after marriage.

I never understand the purpose of name change of women after marriage. The ownership doesn't change lately in first world in 21st century.
Hack (and widget) to Comply with Google AdSense Privacy Policy
And scribd dies on about the 7th slide (at least for me--- who thought up this remarkable piece of trash?) but what I saw was at least interesting.
Trippin' with TripIt
Why You Should Fear Entrepreneurship and Why You Shouldn’t Care
Google updates Web address iconography
The big advantage of web startups is that they can be done with no capital, which makes them attractive for people who have no capital. If you finance a business purchase, you have to a.) qualify for the loan and b.) earn over and above the cost of capital to turn a profit. That can be a risky bet, particularly if you have no operating experience.

Private businesses can be very attractive if you do have the capital, though. They often give much better returns than publicly-traded companies, because the seller gets something in return (liquidity) that public shareholders already have. If I had a spare $10M or so to throw around, this is definitely one place I'd look to park it.
Think about what you want the application to do, brainstorm, free associate and go from there. You've got a mobile application + social networking twist.. off the top of my head I think... sociable.. socimobile, mob social, text social, social text.. socialcom.. socialmeet.. meetsocial.. but I think some of those are taken..

There's also a tradition of adding.. ista.. and ist on to words.. mobista.. mobilist.. mobilista.. (just looked online, I see squatters have already got two of those). Also.. mobilizer.. socializer.. but don't do the flickr thing if you don't have to..

Making plays on words other people have suggested.. I'd look at shoutspace, textspace.. shouttext.. textyell.. hollaspace.. mobiile.. txtmobl..textpush.. socialpush.. sociplace.. freesocial.. soctxt.. txtpush.. textero.. socialpath (play on sociopath?) no idea if any of those are taken or used yet.

Do NOT name it anything having to do with Twitter.. or put an i in front of it.. that is totally done already.

One of my ongoing projects is called Workpost. It's a place to post and find work and, soon, will be a place to list and review workers. We have other stuff planned for future versions of the site + application but it all originates from the name and the brand.

It's cool if you can think of a nonsense word and then turn that into a brand but with all the web 2.0 names out there, I think it's more useful now if you can start with a name that already means something.

Well, hope that was helpful.
So what's a 'real' playas? Someone whose last name is Polgar? Someone who is better than you? Someone who plays tournament? And what are these 'appearances'? I'd probably agree with you if I knew what you meant--- then again maybe not...
That's what I feel annoyed about. Because a lot of media studies put friedship between two males under the hidden context of homosexuality. In a lot of old French movies like those by Jean-Pierre Melville's. The male characters always forge some steady friendship that they can sacrifice they own life for the other. But I think those critics are looking at everything wrong.

I had once a male friend from England said he met his male soul mate in Italy, I was confused since he is straight, but later I understand what he said is he met one person that just understand what he thinks and likes in music/arts and theoretical physics

And old Chinese term for this case is "zhi ji" means "someone just understands me".
I've made a few startups and I try to be real careful when picking logos/images/etc. How does changing a 'major brand' icon like effect things?
The site now says "The next release will be open source under an MIT-style license", and will be available at http://wmd.googlecode.com - now I'm interested.
Well, it _is_ pure hype until such time as they ship. That being said, it doesn't sound too good to be true, it sounds like they are trying to drag Ruby up to the state-of-the-art for dynamic language performance circa 1990 or so.

=My equally uninformed windbaggish douchebaggery guess is that there will be some serious compromises to be made if you want 10x-50+x performance. For example, what if you need a pragma to turn eval and method_missing off for a section of code to obtain the highest performance?

In that case, it won't run every Ruby program at hyper speed, but I bet a lot of people will ask themselves if they need those two difficult-to-optimize features for 100% of their code, or whether they can turn them off here or there or even forgo them entirely.

I guess what I am trying to say is that it probably isn't as good as it sounds in some respects but it may still have plenty of room to be a game-changer.
Maybe it's just his tone that rubbed the wrong way. The entire article reminded me of some superbowl commercial where everyone's posteriors were dispensing advice.

He basically has a thousand words about MagLev being bullshit, but he has no credentials or proof to back it up.

I guess I just trust Avi Bryant's opinion over some random blogger's.
Then perhaps it needs a rewrite that doesn't insult everyone's mom. "Your mom is unlikely to grok twitter..."
To summarize: intelligence, motivation, and creativity are important.
As mentioned elsewhere: Naïvité. It's a terrific loan-word, it has a diaeresis and an accent :-)

http://tinyurl.com/2hep8v
Having the power knocked out for several days IS that bad. Without power the servers are offline and no long running whatever services they were meant to be providing. This means lost money for whoever those services belonged to (and lost money for those people's clients, potential lawsuits, etc). Preventing this sort of downtime is precisely why many businesses will host in a professional datacenter instead of "in house".
I think your quote comes from Cosma Shalizi. Thomas Sowell addressed that complaint years before by noting that most of the countries where you find that modern complexity are pretty nice places to live, whereas other places are hellholes. The correlation between IQ and income holds true for places outside of the US, too, so one might be tempted to think that a bureaucratic, find-objective-answers, fill-out-these-forms-in-triplicate society is better than most of the brutal alternatives.

"...seem to have more to do with successfully conforming to certain values of society's upper-middle class. I don't particularly want to get another degree, or earn much money, or delay having kids, or vote often, and the sort of things that one has to do to stay out of jail, are, honestly, quite often absurd, and I often rail against them."

My point is that, all else being equal, you could get a great job if you chose to, and that if you do illegal things, you apparently do them in such a way that you won't get caught. IQ seems to correlate with the ability to delay gratification, which itself seems to be a better predictor of success than IQ (sadly, it hasn't been tested in a rigorous, long-term way -- so it can't match the hundred or so years worth of data people have compiled on IQs).

One of the reasons that these tests emphasize time is that 'quickness' is a component of IQ. Francis Galton, the first guy to really study the subject, liked to think of things in that way -- and given that physical reaction time correlates so well with IQ, he had a point.

I agree that the essay part of standardized tests is messed up. Lots of the recent changes to tests seem to arise from political correctness. Test-makers found out that you can't design a test that has predictive value without getting politically incorrect results, like lots of men on the extremes, or lots of high-IQ Jews and Asians and low-IQ Mexicans and blacks. So they periodically adjust the scoring mechanism or the test to get bell curves closer to the same median and standard deviation (more focus on the median than the SD, since most of the people who complain about such things don't know what 'standard deviation' means). So keep that in mind when complaining about the essay, or the rebalanced scores, or the analogies (which were dropped from the SAT -- analogies happen to be more IQ-weighted than other categories of questions).
i am just laughing!

even if that speculation was true? you trully expect actually Google will allow this to happen?!

except that everyone will be running their own server by then! the Internet is only becoming more open. The rest is rindicilus fantasy.

the only thing i see happening by then is the cloud becoming a more user/consumer friendly concept/product, and ISPs grasping that concept and providing it.

therefore the only thing ISPs that are going to do is give cloud services to people.
I think a minimal necessity for a DR plan is to have at least three geographically seperated hosting locations with some sort of automatic replication or fail-over. Again, this costs a lot of money. I don't know whether the ec2/cloud-computing is comparable as of today.
Relax. Let's just treat this as Hacker News's "Sex and the city" moment. All Mr. BIG will like to keep low profile in wedding. Not on page six, valleywag and techcrunch.

All he needs is a registration in court office following a simple diner gathering with all his/her best friends and enjoy what life provides.
The big difference between the two is that rFacebook is a giant hack of a library and even the guy that made it realizes this (and thus, doesn't even maintain it) and Facebooker is a set of Ruby objects that makes it so you don't even have to think about the API (not really).

rFacebooker is very php-ish (which means some people really like it, the friends for sale guys, for example).

The Facebooker library also has fixes to make RESTful routes work, and there's related library that makes asynchronous requests stupid easy (FacebookerMQ).
Why Global is the New Local
Hi Paul,

Thanks for sharing your experience. Do you (or anyone here) could imagine putting this to work on a creative company. Lets say, put separate computers in the same room just to browse or email checking, and leave the main computers for work.

I think that in creative environments where the deadlines are very short - ie. ad agencies, design, production.. etc - having a computer connected full time is better for efficiency and since the deadlines are so short people tend to complete their task by means of inherent preassure of the work.

The problem arises and gets more complicated in the cases of programmers, book writers, scriptwriters, composers....professionals who have time to "spare" in procrastinations such as the ones we find on the internet.

I will try to implement Paul´s technique and see if I can star my script.

thanks to you all
Indeed. Many data-centers have a multi-tiered approach to fire-suppression. This usually includes a chemical suppressant as first line (often a de-oxygenate that suppresses fires by removing oxygen from the room and does not damage servers) as well as a preaction dry-pipe system as a backup (in this case the fire has gone too far to save the severs and the goal is to protect the rest of the building).
My current job doesn't provide enough problems to solve... Nor are most of them novel.
I will never forget one of the questions from the IQ tests that I took in fifth grade.

The tester asked me, "Who discovered America?"

Ah, I thought, a trick question. "The Indians!" I said.

Pause.

"Who is generally credited with discovering America?"
> have more than a few developers and a few tens of thousand lines of code, the benefits of strict typing become rapidly apparent.

The argument is that comprehensive test suites can substitute for strict typing. I don't buy it as practical, but that's the argument, and I can at least see the reasoning.

The other point is that you can avoid tens of thousands of lines of code and lots of developers in dynamic languages. You're way more likely to keep the thing in a form where two or three guys have it all in their heads and can keep it small and well factored. Strict typing is critical when you're making changes to code you don't understand really well. But you're more likely to understand all the code really well when it's small and you're on a small team.
For the most part, life in latin america seems a lot happier than in more bureaucratically encumbered states. So I don't really buy that argument.

My main point is that truly excellent thought doesn't depend on the same skills that would allow scoring highly in an IQ test. In many cases such skills would inhibit it. In an IQ test it helps to rapidly adapt to the assumed constraints of the problem and come quickly to the closest, most linear answer. If you have a mind compelled to bring questions back to reality, to challenge assumptions or think of things from many different angles, you'll do, on the whole, more poorly than if you had not. But these behaviors are sometimes precisely what you'd want!
Twitter-like dating service just launched. Can't promise it'll get you laid
Built on a LAMP stack. Anyone think there'll be scaling problems? http://www.TalkAboutADate.com
I always read the print version. The NYT layout is horrible.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/jobs/01pre.html?_r=2&o...
What Good is Breakfast?
In the 1980s, there were a bunch of online service providers like AOL and CompuServe that only allowed their customers to contact one another and only access services that those companies were hosting. All these companies (well, the ones that haven't gone out of business) have given up on the "walled garden" model of online access and let their customers use the real Internet.

Why will consumers in 2012 settle for any more restricted Internet access than consumers did in 2002?
Insert obligatory pun about the service going down here
I suspect that a lot of the C++ bashing you see comes from A) Experience with Microsoft Tools; B) Experience with 90s era C++ code bases, often produced by teams "trained up" in it.

Modern C++ done "the boost way" is a great language. I have rewritten perl prototypes in modern C++ with hardly any code expansion, but with huge performance and deployability gains.
Help me understand. Is this basically twitter + filtering based on profiles?
So, I don't know a ton about this, but I know that you can send text messages as emails. Usually it's phone_number@specialdomain.com. Like, for T-Mobile USA, I think it's t-zones.com for the domain.

You can ask people what provider they have or just SPAM all the possible suffixes and the wrong ones will simply bounce.
great, that just spoils everything...
Screenie - Fancy Screenshot Tool
The easiest way is to use MySQL's own query cache. Increasing its size yields wonderful results.

On linux, edit my.cnf and add the following:

[mysqld]
...
query_cache_type=1
query_cache_limit=1M
query_cache_size=128M # or more - depends on you total available RAM
key_buffer=128M # or more

Note that you'll need to restart mysql to make these changes count
No one is "required" to use Windows however Microsoft is still a convicted monopolist. Ebay are certainly using their market leader position to lock out competitors in the payment system arena. Anyway, I didn't make the claim that they're a monopoly (the parent poster did that) and personally I'm on the fence whether they should or should not be considered one. You need to more careful when accusing me of making such allegations :-P
How Hard Could it Be?: Adventures in Office Space
i'm going to waste way too much time on this
Innovation: How the Creative Stay Creative
Innovation: Making Inspiration Routine
IMO, emacs wins just for it's sheer flexibility.

Yeah, it sucks at first, but if you're a professional text wrangler, you owe it to yourself to try to master one of the big two (emacs or vim)...

I kept trying out emacs, getting scared off, trying it out again, scaring away again... But I always came back because other text editors annoyed me with their lack of ability to do exactly precisely what I wanted.

With emacs, whatever I want to do... It's just another line of lisp in .emacs. Or sometimes another package in .emacs.d and another line in .emacs...
Well said - good ideas. I like mobsocial best :)
Just wondering: I did not see any login page at all. Maybe only US visitors? (I'm from Europe)
Ask YC: How can I track adsense clicks?
I want to track the ad clicks I get and store some information (namely the url of the page the ad was clicked on, as well as some other info) in a database.

Is there any way to do this (assuming I'm using AdSense or ad code which is generated in an iframe?
socialcell,
socell (almost sounds like social),
(mobilesocial),
moso,
mobiso
Oh yeah, good point!
I have no idea when or how I would ever need to use this beyond all the Firefox shortcuts I already have...but I have to say it's pretty damn cool. Slick UI, too.
Latest in "time sink" technology!

Love it.

Another timeout below:

guest@goosh.org:/web> =
Error: Operation timed out (1212424763266).
So on for each customer who is active at any given time, yes. We do some lazy loading magic but not much.
Facebook Fails An Online Rorschach Test
My apologies, the copyright laws of the UK are quite different than those of the US. I don't know whether or not facts can be copyrighted there.
No capital assumes you are doing everything 100% by yourself which is unlikely. Even if you assume you have 3 partners each 'donating' their time for a piece of the action, the 4 of you could probably secure a commercial loan and start a traditional business with a greater chance of success.

Also, because I sell my time, I never consider it free.
I want a tall desk so I can stand while I work.
"You can see an example module at http://goosh.org/ext/spon.js"
Microblogging: Uh, what?
Looks cool. When will there be some windows binaries?
awesome news - congrats folks - so where is the happy couple
taking their honeymoon? did anybody else know they where a couple?
Now I'm not much of a programmer, so the answer may be obvious to some of you, but why wasn't SciTE on the list? It's lightweight and does everything I need it to. Maybe the others are just so much better than the rest.

http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html
Why is this on here? Just because something shows up on TechCrunch doesn't mean it belongs on HN