skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks to the citation shown in the abstract submitted here, I was able to gain online access to the full text of the article through my alma mater university. The key issue here is that designers of IQ tests have known for a while that their empirically designed tests didn't tap all of the human abilities that might properly be called human "intelligence." The submitted paper test children with the WISC-R IQ at time 1, and the WISC-III IQ test at time 2. But now the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) has gone into its fourth version, the WISC-IV, and the current Wechsler IQ test includes tests of working memory.

http://psychcorp.pearsonassessments.com/HAIWEB/Cultures/en-u...

Intelligence researchers get this. The older versions of IQ tests didn't have a broad enough variety of item content to tap important cognitive abilities such as working memory. Working memory is very important, and is a hot area in intelligence research in the last several years (as this paper reflects). The latest versions of the currently used tests are already taking this into account, and include working memory items in the item content of the tests, and subscale scoring to identify which test-takers have the most problems with working memory.

Another comment in this thread asked,

Does anybody know of a good introductory text about these various theories of memory? I'd love to learn more about them, but following references is a bit time consuming.

See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...

for a guide to background reading on these issues. The Alan Kaufman popular book IQ Testing 101 is a very good book, easy to read and quite up-to-date, on these issues.
Lost after "Over the last twelve months, we tried and failed to achieve scale and speed with relational databases (Greenplum, InfoBright, MySQL) and NoSQL offerings (HBase)."

I know for a fact that Greenplum can easily cover this load. Did they actually try running all these things on the same size cluster with the same amount of RAM? Were they all tuned properly?
It was a heady time. Success was so inevitable that you could just function on the assumption that you were going to succeed, so you better be ready for it. It was just about to start raining money, the winners would be the ones with the largest buckets, and you better invest in that bucket! Unfortunately what actually rained down turned out to be fire from the heavens, but, well, you know how the story went after that.
I believe Windows Azure is considered PaaS.
Agreed. The author is clearly a delusional moron. You could've been a bit more polite about calling him on it, I guess, but sometimes you call a spade a spade.
Hrmm....that's actually a great idea.
Intro material, even if it's not too verbose, may omit important details anway. For example, a regex tutorial might only give a brief, vague explanation of raw strings (maybe a quick comment about not needing to escape backslashes, etc.). Eventually you'll want to read the more comprehensive reference on string literals, to make sure you haven't missed anything. (In the case of raw strings, unicode characters are still escaped and you can't end one with an odd number of backslashes.)

http://docs.python.org/reference/lexical_analysis.html#strin...
http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=6864.0

It's an infowar conducted by a Russian exchange guy who turned to the dark side.
See Peter Norvig's Design Patterns in Dynamic Languages: http://norvig.com/design-patterns/
Anybody in SF interested in starting a group?
My understanding--and I'm an engineer, not a lawyer--is that many companies segregate contractors as a response to labor laws. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp.

The important point here is that if temporary employees are working alongside full timers doing very similar work for long periods of time, the employer (Google, not the agency) runs the risk of a suit like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp#Vizcaino_v._Microsoft.

Microsoft now (and I suspect this lies in part behind Google's various segregations of different classes of employees) makes an effort to restrict contractor access to various full-timer activities (like ski trips and such, as the author complains) and to ensure that contractors don't do full-timer work.

So this isn't some sort of evil conspiracy; it's an honest attempt to comply with US labor laws.
The dark knight rises
the dark knight rises
– Anne Hathaway will be Selina Kyle, slinky
the dark knight rises
In numbers: there are about 300k male deaths per year from heart disease in the US, but about 30k from prostate cancer;
Too bad this will probably be banned for eating up a lot of CL bandwidth. See prior hack called listpic: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2007/06/08/jim-buckmeister...
Yep, great place to start. Thanks!
It's fine to push for a better language, but so far you seem to be saying we should do it just because the current language is too old. What are specific things that are wrong with the language Objective-C 2.0 (and not just Cocoa, which is an API; and not just Mac OS X or iOS, which are platforms)? Why should Objective-C not just evolve into something a bit more interesting?

And when considering any alternative, what are the most costly considerations for any developer, including Apple? The size of a code base is a significant factor. The fact that established code already works (new code may add bugs) is a significant factor. The wealth of knowledge already accumulated by programmers is a significant factor. A new language is very unlikely to win a war in those areas, so it would almost have to solve some other problem that is still costing developers a lot because they're using today's languages.
I take the first one. My legal knowledge in this area of software parents is limited.

Please let me know if I am wrong, but the second one sounds to be just semantics over what I said. It's not that coming up with an invention in software domain is easy, it rather is that an average software patent application is closer to being obvious in practice than it is for some other areas. If there is a good invention in the domain of software that is novel, non-obvious and useful, it should be patentable. If someone else working on the same problem domain can come up with the same idea in a short time, then the idea is obvious and should not be patentable.

I am not (yet) ready to believe that human processes in software domain make them more or less intelligent than in other domains. How can they then come up with "real" inventions faster or more often to not require patent protection?
Well, I wouldn't recommend relocating to Denver specifically for the position I know about. Denver has a lot to offer, and the job market out here is good, but I can't say I'd recommend this job as the reason to move out here.

If you're interested in Denver or anything else, shoot me an e-mail. I can't answer right away (I'm in the hospital at the moment) but I'd be happy to help answer ?'s.
What are 3 other common ways developers try to promote their app other than these listing sites?
I'm reading through Bilski now, and I note that Justice Stevens rebuts part of your exposition from a while back. He does not see the change in language in the 1952 patent act as expanding the scope of patentable subject matter, but that the change in language "merely codified the prevailing judicial interpretation of that category of subject matter."
When we did a stock market game in high school, we weren't allowed to use penny stocks.

I was so excited to find stocks that were doubling or tripling daily, only to realize how worthless it'd be in real life.

If anyone out there is a trader that works with penny stocks, I'd love to hear your insight. Is it possible to "game the system" by working with just a few (10-100) shares, instead of large holdings?
A little suggestiong: make the fonts bigger.

I have to zoom in to 144% (in Chrome) to make it readable.
Thanks for the feedback. Were you interviewing for a sales job?
This article is pretty old. I think a language like Haskell or Clojure would be a better nerd-clue these days.
There was the kerfuffle at the start of the month with QuickPick. Apple rejected an _update_ to an app that was already on the Store that duplicated (future) built-in functionality: http://www.tuaw.com/2011/04/08/quickpick-update-in-limbo-for...

The original version of the app is still up on the Store, but the update was rejected. Which is confusing.
I'd love to talk more about how we can improve on the typical fare of programming and algorithm questions.

I've had to write my own sorting algorithm perhaps twice in the last some-odd years. If you're writing sorting algorithms from scratch, you probably should sit back and consult your standard libraries.

So if I ask a candidate some basic coding question and he can't write a for loop, I know it's a no-hire. But past that basic bar, sifting apart the good candidates from the great ones is actually very hard. Do we continue to ask these questions because we can't do better?

(That's why I ask algorithm questions. I realize they suck, but I just don't have any better ideas. I'm an engineer, not an HR flack.)

So what's a better way to test a programmer candidate?
There was a great blog post the other week that explained the multi-tenancy stuff really well:

http://perfcap.blogspot.com/2011/03/understanding-and-using-...

Somewhere there's an HN discussion for it too.
I think he wants javascript :)
No worries. Let me know if you have questions, or just hit up the FGL guys if you sign up - they actually just put a nice big "Ask FGL" button on the forums the other day.
def least_common(c, n=None):
key = operator.itemgetter(1)
if n is None:
return sorted(c.items(), key=key)
return heapq.nsmallest(n, c.items(), key=key)

It has the same efficiency as Counter.most_common().
Levity aside, this is an interesting idea: have the red and blue walls facing one another with a neutral on the in between walls...
Thank you for this idea - I suspect it will come in handy in the future.
I'm up for something like this. Would be in for something around LA / Santa Monica / Long Beach. Could get space / use mine if needed (in Long Beach).
I always think it's unfortunate that posts like this leave out the horror that is Affero GPL[1].

The gist: web apps that use anything licensed under Affero GPL to serve pages would be subject to the copyleft provisions of the license.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License
Good question! I can think of a lot of reasons why Apple should switch to a more modern systems programming language.

We have all read pg's essays where he extols the virtues of Lisp, compared to other languages. His primary argument, as best as I can tell, is you can write programs with far less code than in other languages. Such an advantage would be a big win for the platform, and we may come to a time when Apple is forced to do it, because everybody else has, and they risk being left behind.

Objective-C is becoming a weird frankenlanguage. It already was, arguably: a thin layer of smalltalk-like OO sitting on top of C. Just recently, Apple added blocks, which are like continuations in other languages. Maybe that's a good thing, but I think it would be a better thing if we went with a language that had those types of concepts from the beginning.

It has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread that Microsoft has already had their platform-two-dot-oh epiphany, which was .Net: managed languages with automatic garbage collection, and so on. If this evolves into a big win for programmers, Apple will be forced to follow suit.

The biggest argument I can think of for Apple not to try a new systems language is that their cash cow right now is the iOS platform. Doing this now would no doubt cause serious memory and CPU pressure on small devices which can't afford it. So knowing Apple, their likely answer to that would be to come out with a new generation of devices that are no longer compatible with objc, which you have to rewrite everything for.
Thanks for providing that. The biggest question I had was "Why?"

Even still, I don't completely understand his point (is he being rational?). Hasn't mtgox been invaluable in giving value to Bitcoins? Without it, it'd be harder to liquidate to hard currency, and the market value would be considerably lower.

He doesn't seem to be affiliated with a direct competitor to mtgox either, because that would also explain it...

EDIT: Yeah, I have a feeling he's being irrational:

"The day before yesterday I was owed [owed] 100 BTC = $160 but today it $320 and it is too much for me. And it continues to grow simply because everyone is looking for people who cabal [can?] draw their own exchange rate on mtgox."

Although he has a completely valid point: the increased valuation of btc has increased his debts in real currency, he's approaching the problem in the wrong way. He technically is justified to a certain degree: mtgox has had this effect on btc. And now that it's down, I'm sure the exchange rate will fall.

In addition, it turns out that he runs btcex.com, a Russian competitor to mtgox.
I apparently passed a phone screen with them four years ago. Unfortunately, I only found out that I passed the phone screen a couple weeks ago when a Google recruiter called me up to inquire why I'd never interviewed on-site with them after this failed recruiting situation[1].

Seemingly, having a friend who's in a senior exec position at Google seems to be the only surefire way to ensure you get an onsite interview. At least then your friend can hold Recruiting's feet to the fire.

[1] true story. I've elided some minor details which make the whole thing seem even more farcical.
This is one of those situations where I'm just happy to see a chunk of money going to a school that I'm quite fond of, and that I am confident will spend the money wisely.

As a citizen, I see a transaction of private equity between a private citizen and a private research institution, ergo none of my business.
Pernikahan Pangeran William
Dengan iringan doa dan dilanjutkan ucapan sumpah pernikahan yang diucapkan oleh pangeran William dengan lancar di gereja Westminster Abbey maka Kate Middleton telah resmi menjadi putri dan juga menjadi anggota kerajaan Inggris.
I keep trying new ways to do this, but so far nothing has worked.

A reader offered to lead a small group of curators who will tag as many posts as they have time for in exchange for full access to everything on the site.

I'm hoping that will work.

I would love to tag the posts myself, but I'm obsessive about the quality of the interviews and if I take on any more work I'm worried the interviews will suffer.
The Russian dude was a competitor of Mt Gox.
Thanks. Looks like this will be the way we do it.

If you're interested in giving it a shot, email me: http://mixergy.com/contact
Really if you can write code that works, I'm not sure why you are having issues finding work. I can understand if you can't find enough to fill up your 40 hour week at the beginning but you should not have so much difficulty finding contract work.

One hack to get around the experience problem is to charge a lower hourly rate and be more compromising about payment terms. Instead of requesting 50% upfront ask for a smaller amount and remainder at project completion.

Having said that, if you sense the client will have trouble paying you tread carefully.

I'm sure there is a whole philosophy that lowering your hourly rate is precisely what you should not do. There is a time and place when you should follow that. But suffice to day that if you are just looking to get the ball rolling and earn some cash programming, there are enough price sensitive clients.

I would also follow themadvice of working on open source projects. That way within a few months at most you should be able to say you have decen experience developing your average web app.

I'm a recent graduate making a half decent income doing contract work. But I've been freelancing since high school as a dev. On the otherhand, I have no formal degree in CS. You have a better shot at getting a job at google than me.
How about a walk?
First wikileaks and now Bitcoin. I'm boycotting paypal.
* "When in a social situation, other than silence, how am I suppose to participate or excuse myself from participating in a discussion about american idol or some other topic to which I have no knowledge and may perhaps despise? Neither being quite, admitting I don't follow said topic are well received. Isn't there a positive way out of this dilemma?" *

One way in which you might participate is to explore what the other person finds so fascinating about the topic. You may think its idiotic but they clearly don't, so rather than try to convince them of your point of view, find out theirs.

Typical start "Oh did you see who got voted off idol last night!?"

Response, "I haven't been keeping up, but it sounds like you were surprised by that, did you think that was the wrong choice?"

Now you have done two things, one pointed out you have nothing to add in the discussion and two not made it seem like they are an idiot for watching it.

They may have a reason behind their surprise, find out what it is, find out what kinds of music they like and why, did this person sing songs from that genre? Did they do poorly?

As long as you realize it isn't a reflection on you that someone wants to talk about something you don't seek out, you can probably find some aspects of it that are at least entertaining.
I expect that they will do everything possible to marginalize or damage it.
The post reminds very much of the "Back to Work" podcast by Dan Benjamin and Merlin Mann:

http://5by5.tv/b2w/10
You're not geting downvoted based on you, you're getting downvoted based on your comment, which comes off a little snippy.
Pre-Return Interview with Steve Jobs: "What happened to Apple?"
Medium Hair Cuts,Short Hair Styles
When women want to renew their outlook and find new ways of personal expression, it sometimes comes down to the hairstyles. This is where medium length haircut styles take place.
Check this out: 200,000 bitcoins transferred in one transaction today.

http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MqsETo2t6W61QUCL9KRdw2P1PW...

That's roughly 4% of all bitcoins ever minted, if my math is right.
3 words for you: Ginger Snap Molasses.
I wish Objective-C were more popular on linux, I like the way I can mix message passing style OO with C code.
So, bitcoinex sold a bunch of Bitcoin futures and got burned when the exchange rate shot up? Is that basically his beef here? I've been following the story in the Bitcoin forums and the #bitcoin-otc channel for a few hours, but it's not totally clear to me.

Edit: I consider owing somebody a certain number of Bitcoins and agreeing to transfer them by a certain time to be essentially the same thing as selling futures. In the long run, the value of Bitcoins will either go up dramatically or drop to almost nothing, depending on whether or not they become widely adopted as a medium of exchange. The idea of "regulating" the market to provide "stability" makes no sense when the very concept of Bitcoin is speculative at this point.
Two points:
1) "Smart" people should be able to figure this out.
2) Great answer to "What does it feel like to be the smartest person in the room? I'm in the wrong room."
How is the party over?
Buffett, later than he probably should have, admitted that Sokol's transgressions were unacceptable, and now Sokol is gone.
Ultimately this is not going to have an impact on Berkshire's bottom line or share price. The stock was never really the "darling" of Wall Street because Berkshire never catered to analysts.
I take a bus to the library and spend some time there, interspersed with many breaks which involve walking to a nearby tea house. Taking a bus outsources the attention-drain of driving while still being conducive to the trance-like free-floating state of mind in which one can feed the thoughts to the unknown and allow the ideas to come to you.

Most of the times that I have sat down at the same desk for 2 hours, I have regretted it. It's sub-optimal unless you are literally just typing in what is already known.
There's a major disconnect here: PayPal is not digital cash, it's credit card processing. There is a major difference.
It's the responsibility of the government to use their powers of secrecy only for legitimate purposes, like diplomacy, and not abuse those powers to deceive its own citizens. The responsibility of the journalist is to expose such deception.

If the government compromises their own secrecy by abusing it, that is the government's own fault. How many bones the journos throw them is far aside from the point.
That's one overly dramatic title. Buffett has navigated far worse situations in his business career. Look at what he went through with Solomon. That situation actually had the potential to sink his entire company. Buffett may have lost a successor in this case, but it hardly spells the end of him or Berkshire.
Ask HN: How can companies charge a CC with only card number and expiry?
I talked to a friend about the recent PSN credit card information leak and he said he was not concerned as PSN would not store the CVV code required to make charges, however in my experience it is possible to charge a credit card (and debit card) with only the expiry date and number.

Github is an example of this happening, they only require the number and expiry.

How are they able to do this and can anyone do it?
Howdy Tim. If you would, please add us @nodesocket. We are a node.js hosting platform for developers. Gracias!
If the candidate is on github, ask them to show you something they're proud of and to explain their technical decisions. I've only experienced this from the perspective of a candidate, but it was almost fun to go over the code with my interviewer. Based on the type of questions he asked, I also realized he someone I wanted to work with.
It isn't Fur Elise that is playing it is Little Prelude in C Minor.
As it is in a lot of things, passing an tricky interview may not be the best metric of coding ability, but it is indicative of problem solving ability.

It is the same reason top companies tend to recruit from top schools. The chance that you pull a top notch programmer from a top school is higher than the chance that you pull one from a mediocre school. In the same way, the chance that the kid who passes your interview with flying colors is a good programmer is better than that of the one that completely tanks.
I'm not interested in whether software innovation is more/less intelligent. What matters is that it's less expensive and risky than innovation in hardware. See the bottom of page 40 in http://www.groklaw.net/pdf2/BilskiScotus08-964.pdf

Keep reading through the rest of Stevens' opinion. Nearly everything he says against patenting business methods applies equally to software.
Andy, if you would, please add us NodeSocket. We are a node.js hosting platform for developers.
That was fascinating to read. Thanks.
Working on this feature. We ran out of time to implement this for the hackathon.
you can probably sign up for and integrate with Akismet's API and that can help quite a bit.
It took years to get (mostly) rid of Carbon. Heck, Cocoa still has the NextStep prefix.

The amount of change Apple is willing to make can be hugely exaggerated, especially if they're able to control the respective technology (which they do mostly, one noticeable exception being desktop CPUs and GPUs).
The images are just pulled from a single category on craigslist. So we currently have no way of separating out the motorcycles from the motorcycle helmets, without further filtering.

Thanks!
Yeah I would be, I'm in the Silver Lake area.
So they never got back to you and you never followed up? >.>
look man, you're cutting down on our overall productivity, so don't come back next week

Yeah, I could see that being awkward.
Shed a Tear: The Age of Broadband Caps Begins Monday[original title]
We are using the 3taps API, not parsing Craigslist directly. They aggregate all this data for us.