skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For example, one could throw into the bag height, sexiness, feet length, and BMI, which are all somewhat correlated with one another and with "IQ".

The point is that if those phenomena are all correlated with one another, there is likely to be an underlying reason for that. Maybe it's not general intelligence, but there is something.

Suppose you threw a different set of things into the bag: phase of the moon at birth, whether you were bitten by a wolf, and how good you are with computers. These things almost certainly will not be correlated, because there is indeed no relationship between them. The only reason the author discovered a large principal component in all his models is because he explicitly built one in!

Now, my analogy with physics is not to the physics of today. Rather, it's to physics pre-Boltzman. Before that, we didn't really know how the atomic theory of physics was related to thermodynamics. All we really had were correlations - boiling is correlated with burning, with faster chemical reactions, expansion of solids, with the human perception of warmth, etc. We observed they all occurred together, and postulated an underlying variable T which correlated well with all of them. We then exploited the correlation between this hidden variable T and thermal expansion to design a specific test to measure it (thermometers).

Pre-Boltzman, all we had were correlations between fundamentally different physical phenomena. We had various incorrect theories about why some of them occurred together, but that's about it.

Now suppose Boltzman comes along. He says "what you call a single variable T, I can explain with the sum of many variables." Does that mean it's reasonable to conclude T is a "statistical myth"?
Nautilus X MMSEV Is More Outside-the-Box Space Thinking from NASA
Agreed, and if you're talking about an army, DJB is a wonderful example. Not only can he write iron code, but he can successfully sue the government when they try to restrict it, while representing himself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States

That, and teaching a course where the class uncovers 44 Unix security holes is quite impressive:
http://it.slashdot.org/story/04/12/15/2113202/DJB-Announces-...
I wonder if any of the (previous) Symbian Foundation members will fork the Symbian OS for their own use. Will anyone use Symbian after Nokia finishes their transition to WP7?

Symbian was a wretched developer platform, but it will be a little sad to watch the lights go out..
Date My Ride in the news
There's another reason why justin.tv was a bad idea and that is, far from being a new form of entertainment, lifecasting had already been done to death by the time it came on the scene. There were even two major Hollywood movies built around the idea. And predictably, justin.tv in its original form did fail, but in the process opened up a new opportunity based more on a 'long tail' strategy.

This is a great example of how funding and connections are more important than a good idea. It gives you the luxury of changing direction if something doesn't work. And ultimately, the proximate cause of every business failure is running out of money. The lesson here is to gain the trust of wealthy patrons who are willing to give you a $50K check just to see how you fail.
I've been working on a similar but different solution at http://impromptudo.com. I'm currently focusing on quantity and breadth, saving quality and depth for later.

Edit: checked out your project, looks very similar to http://usehipster.com, which was recently acquired (?) and it hasn't even launched. So, theres confirmation of the idea.
When the startup lawyer says that the protections for parties in startups from defection and unfair competition are derived from IP laws, I tend to believe him. You seem to retort, "but that's contract law!". But those are contracts protecting intellectual property.

Postgres, sqlite, BSD, and clang are BSD-licensed open source. But many more projects are GPL-licensed, and thus depend entirely on IP law, than those that aren't. Without IP law protections, those GPL projects compete on an unlevel playing field with companies that would otherwise be free to capitalize on all their work without contributing anything back.

Finally, of the list of YC companies here: http://yclist.com/, how many take no advantage of IP laws? How many are entirely BSD-licensed open source? How many have no trade secrets?
Thanks for the examples; I did mention the varying number of top AdWords units as a small step in this direction. I'm suggesting the best defense against SEO pollution might be to take this even further.
Mining 23andMe data with Python
It seems odd, that with our current level of technology we are considering how best to erect a warning using symbols. It seems to me that we should build monuments that utilize pictures and videos--warning by observation. One set of animation should be that of the nature of radiation. Something like you would see in an 8th grade science video. An illustration of the energy that irradiates from waste. The second set of animation should show two humans standing side by side-away depicted away from the monument. The animation proceeds with one human venturing towards the monument and as he gets closer, the human displays the sign of radiation sickness, and dies.

Obviously, it isn't practical to try to sustain a working media player for 10,000 years--but thats not the only way to show animation. Instead, lets embed a series of image cells of an animation into a permanent medium like concrete.
They are telling the truth. The source code to stuxnet is in the email archive stolen from HBGary Federal that belonged to Aaron Barr.
How was it detected? Just noticing Penney seemed to be ranking awfully high in a lot of searches, or something else? (I ask because the blackhattery mentioned in the article didn't seem very noticeable in its own right.)
Here is an absolutely excellent cross section of the startup world, consisting primarily of early-stage companies, a subset of a larger population of companies that vied against each other to gain a position on the list:

http://yclist.com/

Of the companies on this list, make an argument as to the percentage of them that would be viable in a world where copyright on source code wasn't enforceable, where there was no trade secret law and publication of company secrets was thus protected under the First Amendment, and where any element of content on any web page reachable on the Internet could be freely lifted and used by any other company.
Great idea - finally some good benchmarking that isn't for large established companies!
I think you're right, placing things above ground will only attract attention.

Skull and Crossbones has been a symbol associated with death at least since Danse Macabre in the 1400's. By the late 1600's it began being a flag used by pirates when they were raiding. By the 1880's the skull and crossbones was the ubiquitous warning of poison.

It would be best to bury multiple warning symbols as these are likely to outlast our languages. If you see a skull and cross bone symbol then you're going to at least pause for thought. Bury radiological, biohazard, etc. warnings just in case one has survived in some form of recognition, at least someone might stop and think "hey are these symbols in our archives anywhere?"

Then I would ensure writing is buried at a deeper level. Place warnings in every major language. Lexicologists(?) are anal retentive, they've managed to keep Latin and Ancient Greek around despite not a single native speaker. It's safe to assume that languages can last a long time, it's just a question of which one.
"Researchers have recently uncovered what appears to be a site of significant religious importance in the region of the ancient Mojave Desert. Human remains were found scattered around a central monument believed to have been used for sacrifices along with a series of yet undeciphered pictograms that are theorized to indicate something of great importance buried below. Scientists hope to get clearance for a neutrino scan of the area by the end of next year."
Simplegeo http://simplegeo.com/
Why Didn't Nokia Use Android? Because That Would Be Giving Up
All we need now is a free compiler, to turn it into life-code that runs on the Universal machine...

Until that time agent-based modeling is the best we have :)
Fork like there's no tomorrow.
The post he was replying to said

2. The payload it uses to damage nuclear reactors

He was pointing out that it doesn't directly damage them.
And of course this must be true at least in part because the inventor of a device or the author of a program can herself benefit from her work without ever publishing it or exposing it to the world. She makes less money, of course, but then, the reason she makes more money today by publishing is that IP law clears a path for her to do so.
There's no provable answer anyhow, because it's an inherently subjective matter.

Since circumstance can make a fool or a hero of any of us anyway, as you say, you never know.
I believe the point is that "to damage nuclear reactors" conjures a far different (and more explosive) mental image than "to damage nuclear enrichment facilities", even if the economic impact is the same.
Wine is not a reliable platform for testing browser compatibility. Even when I have gotten IE working with ies4linux or a similar thing, Wine's IE still misrenders portions of the page occasionally (of course, depending on what version of Wine you're running -- I haven't tested IE in Wine for a long time). You need to use IE on a real Windows installation to verify it will work correctly for your users, Wine is just too much of a moving target.
The infuriating thing about this is that from the moment Nokia decided to "change directions", they had an incentive to see this project ... fail.

And that moment was sometime earlier than today.
I wonder if he still thinks it was worth it.

It's sad to think of the enormous amount of human effort wasted by people who blindly copied that behavior in a cargo-cult like attempt to get rich.
I've tried a couple of the books. First used Beginning iPhone Development, from Apress, then looked at some others in a bookstore. The problem I found with all of them is that they teach you a few specific things to accomplish common tasks (clickable button, lay out data in a table, etc) but once you want to get more complicated, you're digging into Apple's documentation to figure out how to do it. Once I got to that point, I realized that Apple's documentation is actually pretty good, so I've given up on the books and started just using Apple's stuff. Once you get used to the official documentation, when you want to go back for more details you're going to the master source that has all the information, not just a book chapter with some high points. You have to be a registered iOS developer to have access, but if you want to release to the App Store you're going to have to anyway.
Also, CPUs at the time were simple enough that you could just add up instruction timings and know how fast the code would run. But now you can get dramatic performance improvements by making assumptions about how today's microcoded superscalar pipelines happen to invisibly schedule instructions out-of-order, and compilers automate the required bookkeeping.
Sadly, I got the same.
This paper doesn't support your claim. All it says about the criteria they used to select companies is the industry they were in. E.g. "Aerospace." Is he talking about SpaceX, or someone's 10-person shop making some component for light aircraft? The distinguishing feature of startups is their growth rate, not the industry they're in.

Just look at the evidence in front of you. Think of famous startups you yourself know. Just name 10 well known startups, and see how many in your list haven't taken money from investors.
Unfortunately it is too easy and in everyone's individual interest to advise others to be careful. But how big is the actual risk? I'd like to see examples of this actually being a problem. What has happened already, and what were the consequences?
I think the main thing that's happening is the common philosophy among investment consultants today that when a stock isn't making bank for a few quarters, it is time to sell it for spare parts.

It might that this is "responsible". But it is worth consider that Apple wouldn't exist if that logic had been followed.
After their "Snow Plow" experiment, I would rather double check with other sources.
I honestly can't imagine that the guy means what he writes. There's just no way someone can be so narrow-minded.
Here is an absolutely excellent cross section of the
startup world

It's irrelevant. In an absence of IP, the playing field would be totally different, and hence there would be other strategies and other startups.

That's why I brought up opportunity cost in my parent post.

The playing field would be completely different, but not necessarily inferior.

Both you and the original poster are trying to make a defence of IP based on circular logic that avoids considering opportunity cost. That's invalid.
Technically this isn't his entire genome - just SNPs.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-nucleotide_polymorphism)

One major problem with developing a "Google for the human genome" is that we don't actually understand how most of the genes (coding) and noncoding regions in our DNA actually work or interact with each other... except at a very basic level for a very limited set of genes.

There are genome browsers out there already that came out of the human genome project and work in that direction. One example: http://huref.jcvi.org/
Ease of Distribution

Whether its for internal coprorate site or the public. If you want people to use it, it has to be a web app.
Wow. Hearing about this guy for the first time. Inspiring ....
I'm having a hard time picturing this being comfortable (or more comfortable than having a laptop sitting next to you). Are you holding the tablet above your son the entire time? Don't your arms get tired?
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Basically every independent game developer.
So is your answer, "none of them"?
I'd like to find out if this uses google's two factor auth (if you opt to use your account passphrase).

A second issue: encrypted arbitrary note data

I use lastpass right now along with yubikey for two-factor auth. Pretty nice.
Show HN: How I stole my computer back from an NYC cabbie.
A girl at University of Washington just did a radio story detailing my quest for my stolen computer. It's episode 3 here:

http://thebarkandthebite.wordpress.com/episodes/
I use Matlab mostly as a souped-up excel, for prototyping, and for the parallel computing toolbox.

If I plan on maintaining something, I want static typing, so the whole SciPy/Matlab/Octave/R debate is a little moot for me there.
Ask him what he thinks the various applications of the Watson project are (if he can disclose some of them). I heard they were going to use it for medical purposes (let Watson answer people's questions and help diagnose them), but I'm sure they have a lot more in mind. It'd also be interesting to have him compare this feat to Deep Blue.

Let us know the question you end up asking him and his answer, if you can! Thanks!
The example of the German monozygotic twins Otto and Ewald, both well nourished but sportsmen who pursued different sports, show that physique is exquisitely sensitive to environmental influences even between two individuals who share a genome and a prenatal environment in the same mother's womb. Take a look at the photos.

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/control-gene-expression/

http://www.joebower.org/2010/05/we-inherit-and-we-also-becom...

AFTER EDIT: I'm asked in a reply below what my point was, and it's partly to point out that the term "heritable" means something far, far different from "determined by genes." There are whole books

http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Nurture-Environmental-Influence...

http://www.amazon.com/Genes-Behavior-Nature-Nurture-Interpla...

http://www.amazon.com/Dependent-Gene-Fallacy-Nature-Nurture/...

by professional geneticists, medical doctors, and psychologists patiently refuting the confusion in most popular literature about what "heritability" means, but the main point in this thread is that Shalizi is correct, and many psychologists are wrong, about what heritability figures mean in relation to IQ.
the window defined by his data points
I started ThisCity.com in Calgary, AB. We have a new version launching next month. If you want lessons from being in the biz and potentially to link up, email me.

Chris
Acetaminophen and the War on Drugs (2009)
Do you "get" our super-short explanatory video?
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Anything you create above ground will have to survive the equivalent of being sand-blasted for many weeks.

No sculptural details are going to survive. You can write symbols though, by mixing different colored concretes.
This "Mathematician's Lament" is (by far) the best critique of the modern mathematics education that I've seen to date:

http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
Hi guys, it would be great to get some feedback on our latest video, explaining our product. We had some trouble to make people "get" it quickly what our product is all about. Have we improved?
Yeah, I was disappointed that it's not a full genome too.

It's by no means all of his SNPs, either -- each person has around 3 million actual SNPs (variations from the reference genome), and 23andme just chooses a million sites that could be the location of a SNP to look at, most of which won't actually be points of variation for most people.

So, 23andme is only looking for common SNPs you might have. If you have a rare SNP you're interested in, or if you're a researcher trying to analyze the effects of an uncommon SNP, you're out of luck with 23andme data.
NYT Exposes J.C. Penney Link Scheme That Causes Plummeting Rankings in Google
I was just answering his question. Thank you for defining the opposing view quantitatively. I have never used a nokia phone, but certainly I would count myself a success if I had area under the curve like that.
Sony's private key is, essentially, a random number.

As for copyright protection, you should reflect on this page:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/index.html

And then this one:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/GeoHot/

To the point with Harry Potter: you can think of a continuum of infringement. If you tear a page out and copy it, you will violate the copyright. If you reuse characters or scenes and use them to create your own work, you are making derived works (JK put her stamp of approval on non-commercial fan fiction by the way). But the farther you get away from the original characters the less you can call it infringement. As the link between the two works becomes more and more abstract and less concrete, the new work is more protected. At some nebulous point it is no longer infringing.

For instance, Harry's story and appearance is superficially similar to an earlier work called The Books of Magic, a comic series by Neil Gaiman. You can read his take on it here:

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/04/fair-use-and-other-thi...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Books_of_Magic

Essentially he throws up his hands and says "borrowing is a fact of life in genre fiction. Deal with it, I did."

How does this apply to computer code? Well, the farther away you get from the original copyrighted code, the less infringing it is. There are extremely limited protections for derived works that amount to Person B having a copy of Person A's code in front of them and editing it.

What those Touretzky pages from CMU show is that there is no such thing as a continuum from computer code to an uncopyrightable abstraction. It is abstraction, mathematics, numbers all the way down. In fact, it is speech that is protected by the First Amendment and suppressing it is a constitutional issue with narrow exceptions.

So no, you can't use a book model for code. It is not the same thing at all. Executable ideas, math, algorithms, just don't exist in the fiction publishing industry.
> Android would put them on the fastest track imaginable to commoditization

The way I see it they are on that track anyway. As far as I can tell they got absolutely no hard concessions from MS about control of WP7 - I'm sure Microsoft said lots of nice things but when it comes to the crunch Nokia has to be delusional if they think Microsoft is going to let them have any real influence over WP7. If you are going to get commoditized it might as well be in a market that is a known success rather than one which might totally fail.

> In this kind of atmosphere, it could be safely surmised that no manufacturer would have any leverage with Google

Nokia is easily big enough and powerful enough that they could take Android their own way. They could forgo licensing Google's apps and put their own on, thus maintaining a foot in the ecosystem but remaining entirely independent. Android would have given them a lot more options than just becoming subservient to Google (which, even if they did do, I would maintain is better than being subservient to MS).

This deal is strange enough to me that I half suspect there is another surprise - perhaps MS and Nokia joining together to sue the living daylights out of Google with every patent in their arsenals.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff nuff said.
It would be interesting info.

But it's often a much better strategy to wait for a company to accumulate profits for a few years and then sue for damages retroactively.

This is one of the fundamentally unfair parts of the system: the innovator makes all the investment and takes all the risk, while the patent holder files some paperwork and obtains the option to sue or not on his own timing.

The deck is stacked.
Some love for Postmark?

http://developer.postmarkapp.com/
The actual awards and even the actual settlements are the tiniest drop in the largest bucket. The true cost comes from defense costs, the preparations for lawsuit, insurance against lawsuits, and the opportunity costs of spending time engineering around worthless "one-clicks" that could have been spent productively.
These schools are awash in money. Per capita student spending has gone through the roof the last three decades, and NY spends as much as any place in America.

http://empirezone.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/the-highest-p...

The unions and bureaucracy suck the system dry. That's why less-funded private schools in NYC consistently outperform public schools.

Every single rotten thing is the result of either dysfunctional culture or dysfunctional management structure/incentives.
So I see you did it. How did it go? Did it make a difference?