skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a long time (silent) reader of Hacker News posts and comments, this comment easily ranks as one of the most offensive, and perhaps the most disturbing.

The notion that race fundamentally has anything to do with intelligence should offend any sane, rational, science-minded person who is even just scarcely familiar with the history of the pseudo-science of eugenics and the countless studies debunking it many claims.

However, more offensive than that, I find the fact that this comment is still here and in fact, up-modded, as offensive to the very core…

What the comment says implicitly is that “Blacks are dumber than Whites - DUH.” If he had simply typed this, perhaps the comment would have been removed or at the very least down-modded to oblivion so that my reading it would have been my own damned fault.

But what is astonishing (and inexplicable, considering the great number of comments I have read on this forum, lauding and praising the seemingly high intellect of the people who frequent this forum) is that because the poster had the guile to conceal his ignorant comment with more words, not only was this comment given credibility, but many had the sheer audacity to up-mod this nonsense. This is sobering…

But what really woke me up, was realizing that the utterly ignorant comment was in response to PG – who is by all accounts the de-facto host/role-model here. I figured I would scroll down a short distance and see the straight-forward, no nonsense rebuttal I have seen him give to comments much less deserving of a dressing down – no such luck.

I shuddered. To think that this is the same man who writes all those essays wherein the common thread is a brutal application of logic – why the silence here, when given what amounts to a perfect lead-in?

Why not quickly question if it is even possible to test for intelligence? Why not describe what such a test might look like if it is indeed possible? Why not suggest that a time delineated test full of arithmetic might be the worst candidate for such a test (as it implies that computers would then be said to have such intelligence in spades)? Why not question the deep-sinking stereotypical association with speed-in-calculation ability with intellect?
Why not?

Let me not speculate as to why not. Let me just say to all who know better, but said and will continue to say nothing – SHAME.
Finalists still get 25K or something, right?
Hey language snobs: don't pinch pennies
Have just uploaded and MPEG to the blog at

http://www.videogamekits.com/CD/Blog/
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I'm upgrading Intrepix Ibex 8.10
Gojira!
Thank god for that.
Google Walks Away From Digg Deal
I was expecting something about neon-green monkeys, or man-sized rats at the very least. Bummer.
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What's the matter raganwald, jonesing for a blog post now that you've hung up your blogging shoes? :-)
Downtime? It was only an 'Availability Event', thank you very much. But yes, I like that they provide details.
Once is not a large sample size. I'm sure there are plenty of cases where it would be relatively clear that with high probability they wouldn't be behind by Demo Day. For example, startups that already have been working for a while, already have a significant demo or even beta, but still need help on positioning and tweaking their product. Just set the bar higher for these startups.

Also, as someone else pointed out, travel is an option. It could be more than just the dinners, e.g. perhaps three days (two nights) a week.

Finally, I didn't mean to suggest that the opportunity missed is solely an investment opportunity. I meant more generally the opportunity to develop great startups to their full potential, which might otherwise not do so. In my case, I don't need the money at all.
A sad day for HN when sailer starts posting here. Sad indeed.
Of course anyone can get away for three months. I, however, simply don't want to leave my family for that long. I completely understand that some, perhaps many/most people, wouldn't give it a second thought. But that is just not how I choose to live my life at this point in time. I think it is a very personal question.

Also, I don't see why it is so black or white. A couple nights a week is more on the line for me, and that still seems like a significant amount of face-to-face time. When you add to that online community tools (which I presume exist), I would guess a dedicated person could go along way into complete integration into the group.
Another angle: http://valleywag.com/5029423/google-nixing-digg-deal
I think some important areas to cover in such a post might be:

What do you do?
What have you done?
What do you want to do?
They originate from a higher latitude than they like to think. That's why they look so different from sephardic Jews. (But this is also a controversial topic.)
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I listened to the lecture and mean no disrespect to the man's spirit.

But that vapid aphorism sets my teeth on edge. I couldn't help thinking: Gee, all those people who hit a brick wall because of racism, of sexism, of poverty, because they didn't have all the advantages of a well-off handsome personable white guy - well, they just must not have wanted it badly enough. They're those OTHER PEOPLE who are kept out.

It's a damn nasty metaphor when you think about it.
Size Size Size Size Size. People want to be able to put all their music on their iPods. Using lossless formats they're not able to with the low-end players.
i find suspicious that they backed away when doing due diligence.

just recently, techcrunch reported about google trying to introduce digg-like features in its user interface. seems to me that either google wanted to either buy or have a close look at digg's algorithm.

(this is just speculation by the way)
Greenspun on shorting:

It is 1986. You buy yourself an IBM PC. You are using MS/DOS and say "This sucks. It isn't even as good as operating systems from 1960." You're a computer expert so you know that the technology is pathetic. You do some business research and find that out that the company making this MS/DOS product didn't even have the in-house expertise to build it itself. They bought it from another company!" You call your broker and find out that this "Microsoft" company is publicly traded and selling for a very lofty price/earnings ratio. You smell blood and say "I want to short 100 shares of Microsoft."

I sure hope he didn't do it, but he seems to have such bad karma, who knows.

http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/money
Agree with mark-t. These comparisons are worthless.
>> This is a more radical version of the panspermia theory of Crick and Ponampurama ... I think in a hundred years if people do biology they will think it quite silly that people once thought that spores could not be blown from one star system to another by cosmic radiation pressure.

Fungi adapt to feed off radiation? Terence McKenna would be amused.
Then you could always go for scheme, it's smaller. But it doesn't really matter. You can start with a tutorial, and just work with the core vocabulary, then gradually expand. I've been doing CL almost full-time for a year, and still, every once in a while, I find out that one function I'd defined is exactly the same as a built-in that I didn't know about.

One namespace for the built-in functions is not a problem in practice, it just means that you don't have a de facto categorization of the commands like in Python. This sometimes makes life painful when looking for commands, but no big deal.

I sure wish the hyperspec was better hyperlinked though. The See Also section is abysmal. find is not connected to member: What the hell.

I also find that C-c-d-a in slime is helpful for looking for the right command.
> We’re hearing they’ll just push through with a new round of financing.

I may be a bit clueless about the whole web-entrepreneurship thing, but I'm amazed that after three and a half year and zillions of users, Digg is still not making money. How would such a thing be worth 200 million dollars, anyway?
There's alotta rails books coming out, see amazon. This list is not up to date, either:

http://antoniocangiano.com/rails-books/

I recommend, in addition to the 2 lists, Ediger's "Advanced Rails", Rappin's "Professional Rails", and Ezra Z/Pragmatic's "Deploying Rails" . Haven't seen AWDWR vers. 3 beta, but Pragmatic's betas are usually worth reading after the first revision or 2

the last thread re:rails books

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=162210
Collection of interesting twitter apps
The message:

* BASIC (LSL, Java, C#, VB, PHP, Perl, etc) programmers win when it comes down to getting projects finished (versus Lisp, SmallTalk, Python, Ruby, Scala, Haskell, etc).

* using inferior tools has a cost associated with it, so does not using those tools.

Conclusion: find a balance and get things done.
From what I gathered (my dad died from it a couple years back) generally with pancreatic cancer, you're pretty much screwed anyway, special diet or otherwise. And yeah, Steve's physique does look eerily familiar; based on the usual fast development of pancreatic cancer and comparing what he looks like to my dad's degeneration, I'd guess we're not talking about years, but months or even weeks.
Not necessarily. Code in a language based on C can potentially be faster than it by having a deeper understanding of the code, and doing sophisticated optimizations C could not confidently apply. In Haskell, for instance, it often transforms multiple transforming passes over a list into one pass over the list with the three transformation operations composed (that is, map x (map y (map z l))) to map (x . y . z) l). I'm sure there are much, much better examples...

This isn't 100% true, because in theory you could have written out the ideally optimized version of machine language for what you're trying to do, or (perhaps) a direct transliteration thereof in C. In practice, this isn't realistically possible, except in tiny pieces.

See also: Proebsting's Law (http://research.microsoft.com/~toddpro/papers/law.htm)
It's a pleasant surprise to see this coming from Python, though - Python is my scripting language of choice, and I use it to prototype algorithms sometimes (though OCaml is winning out there), but I usually expect it to be an order of magnitude slower than most compiled languages. (Of course, that's almost always good enough.)
I suppose Gladwell likes Moneyball because it's everything his books are not: a Big Idea that is actually corroborated by all the evidence.

I remember reading Blink and thinking, "hey, this anecdote just contradicted a point he made earlier".

Gladwell is a great storyteller, but he wants so badly to find larger patterns at work that he overlooks the possibility that there aren't any.
"I may be a bit clueless"

more likely there's a VC or two about to invest in digg that is clueless...
It's interesting speculation, but I think it's just as likely that once Google peered behind the curtain they realized that there is really nothing special or unique about any part of Digg.

"The algorithm" has been reproduced in various formats on many many other sites (including this one). And it's not like Digg's algorithm "works" in the sense of promoting only the best stories, banishing spam, and just generally being intelligent.
Amazon S3, July 2008, and Bell Systems, January 1990
Plane flies, folds, tows - takes to the water
My personal opinion is that given that they have roughly the same traffic levels with 60+ people that they had with 10 people, and are somewhat close to breakeven, is that it's time for layoffs, not another round of financing.
Man, I really wish Jay Adelson gets his big pay day soon. [And Sean Parker too].
Another angle: http://thenextweb.org/2008/07/26/google-does-not-digg-it-wal...
Slinkset vs. Sub-Digg
With "zillions" of users they will find a way to make money eventually.

It is a pattern used by many others (both online and offline) and it is easier to create leverage once you have a large established userbase (especially if you are able to determine their demographics), though often it may seem a lot like gambling.

Many of the other big social sites have also yet to make money/profit.
New? No, absolutely.

If it were so, any cancer would be a 'new lifeform'.

BTW: why do you want it to be 'new'? What's the real motivation behind? Please answer!
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What’s Google News worth? $100 million
Why Won't Google Video Just Die?
I understand and agree with your point but for Google it might not have been wrong. Not that they can make money from it directly but as part of the bigger plan to organize the worlds information.
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Probably because the costs of building it are sunk, and it fills nitches in the online video space that complements YouTube and keeps out competitors.
I'd bet Google's Ph.D collection could could come up with an algorithm that performs as well as Digg's (that is, not very) on their own... The UI is of course no problem either.

The whole deal seems pointless. Some would claim it's for the userbase, but Digg/Reddit by now have self-selected themselves down to a notoriously bad userbase. Would you pay $200m for those guys?
Correct. But I imagine the bias will be towards apps that the users will be interested in. You want a tight race.
"I don't see family as much of an excuse."

For me, it's not an excuse, it is a reason. And I can't think of a better one.

On the raw happiness scale, my family has a better ROI than anything else I've done. Including founding three startups.
>With "zillions" of users they will find a way to make money eventually

Either that or the next thing comes along and they move on. See Slashdot before and after Digg.
I wonder if personality has something to do with it. My guess is that language snobs are INTP, whereas Blub programmers are more INTJ. From the descriptions at http://www.personalitypage.com/portraits.html:

"INTPs value knowledge above all else. ... They hate to work on routine things - they would much prefer to build complex theoretical solutions, and leave the implementation of the system to others."

By contrast, "[an INTJ's] primary interest is not understanding a concept, but rather applying that concept in a useful way. Unlike the INTP, they do not follow an idea as far as they possibly can, seeking only to understand it fully. INTJs are driven to come to conclusions about ideas. Their need for closure and organization usually requires that they take some action."

Since INTPs are less motivated to action and "hate to work on routine things," they are driven to higher-level languages, because those languages help them focus on concepts instead of implementation details. But this means that the people using these languages get little done -- precisely because they are more interested in concepts than in implementation.
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978, actually.

It's not as bad as it sounds, when you consider that that includes not only (the names of) functions and macros, (of which there are many groups of similar/related ones, e.g. car, cdr, cadr, cdar etc. or char<, char>, char= etc.,) but also system constants and variables, and types and classes.
Apple Lied About Steve Jobs' Health; Steve Jobs Calls NYT Columnist a "Slime Bucket"
The converse is true too, when Twitter is up and running just fine. I'm going to think of that every time I tweet - I succeeded at gossiping and failed at working.
A Dot-Com Banker Who's Stuck in the Past
I agree. To join YC in summer '07, I moved with my wife and a set of two-year-old twins to Cambridge from Vancouver for four months.

We had great memories of Cambridge and thought it was worth it.
They did it to Borland in the 90's.

Indeed, and with huge consequences. Borland withered up and died (or the statistical equivalent), and MS got Heijlsberg who went on to make some of the few things they have that don't suck.
oh, no, not piano lessons, but they definitely want to know how things work and will take things apart to find out.
a turtle?
With good shelving the loss in square footage is vary minor. Let's say you add a shelf that's 6'x1' and 8' tall. Giving you ~6'x7' = 49' of linear shelf space. Your boxes take up 3 linear feet but I go though 2boxes of cereal a week so that's ~1month = $10 3/7th of a square foot a living space. Or ~230$/month per square foot.
About your second point, unfortunately _most_ people, regardless of race, believe what they are told. Unfortunate as it may be, his remark was valid.
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Oh damn. I tried to write an comment about how I agree in principle but this is not the place for the discussion, but re-reading your comment I realized I was wrong. It's a pertinent argument and has my upvote.
Google video is great. Tons of documentaries.
As a long time (silent) reader of Hacker News posts and comments, this comment easily ranks as one of the most offensive, and perhaps the most disturbing.

Perhaps you should be a little less silent.

If this comment is any indication, your contributions could significantly improve the quality of our community. Don't leave it to the rest of us.
Git vs Subversion
Though pancreatic cancer is usually rapidly fatal, he had an unusual form that's treatable.
"One disadvantage of living off the revenues of your company is that you have to keep running it."

that's an odd "disadvantage", Paul. It implies that running my company is something I don't want to do. Don't know about you, but I LOVE running my company.
Interesting simulation !
After skimming through the Credits I think this Physicist calculated the data needed for it.

- Mark Boslough, Sandia Nat. Lab.
- Similar animation this time focusing on the meteriorite http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=e4HCTcQ-IWA
- Some papers:
o http://est.sandia.gov/publications/computational.html
"Most creative people are not working in a university doing research anymore."
Offensiveness is irrelevant. The question of whether there is an IQ gap between races is a factual issue & I think it has been settled. As far as I know there are many possible causes & the GP didn't specifically mention genes so you shouldn't automatically think eugenics.
Why are we assuming that size of index => better search experience?
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A bit for knol's tiny bits
an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor is not the kind of pancreatic cancer that kills you in six months. The fast killers are exocrine: the cells that produce enzymes that digest protein. As you can imagine, since soft tissues contain a lot of proteins, having too much of those enzymes is not so good.

This could have been any of a number of functional or nonfunctional neuroendocrine tumors, but the prognosis really would be quite a bit better.

As I said in another comment, you can still have some pretty unpleasant digestive issues, simply because it's a rather delicate digestive organ. There's a common saying in surgery: eat when you can, sleep when you can, and don't touch the pancreas. He could have a ductal obstruction, the pancreas could have necrosed. All his beta cells may have failed, causing him to become a rather old new-onset Type I diabetic (no, it's not the normal presentation of DM I, but PETs aren't common.) He could have had a completely unrelated pneumonia. I've heard some say he's still very actively managing his diet. If a doctor or nutritionist or dietitian isn't cut in on that diet, then it's probably riskier. Last I checked, this guy isn't risk averse.

He could have had any number of viral illnesses that would have taken a toll on anyone, it could have been a nasty case of mononucleosis, and, given his potentially partially compromised digestive system, the toll would be especially heavy on him.

On the nasty end, maybe on a recent foreign trip he got cholera or tuberculosis. Who knows. The differential is to wide to narrow it down, but the pancreatic cancer thing is getting old. A PET =! pancreatic cancer.

Based on the report, I'd go with a pneumonia, or some other infectious process that would have a substantial exogenous metabolic component, or a nasty GI bug, which would affect absorption of nutrients. Neither of which is lethal if treated, and the treatments are IV antibiotics, usually a fairly certain cure.
Blogging’s Glass Ceiling
Isn't that also true of YouTube, that there's nothing special or unique about any part of it? (apart from the userbase and being known)
>Sitting at the centre of the exclusion zone, the damaged >reactor unit is encased in a steel and cement sarcophagus. >It's a deathly tomb that plays host to about 200 tonnes of >melted radioactive fuel, and is swarming with radioactive >dust

No kidding. Currently they are planning to drill holes into the mantle and to insert steel rods to stabilize the structure. (I think a british company is doing this.)
Would be pretty bad if the cooling water would reach the ground water which is directly connected to the river.)

>let me be the first to say: Holy Shit there's no telling >what this could lead to in our understanding of how >radiation affects living cells (cancer)

In order for cells to be called cancer we need to have at least 5 or 6 different alterations of cell rna. This makes our physiology quite resilient against cancer compared to more simple lifeforms where maybe 2 alterations are enough for cancer there. Referring to the article though I am quite astounded how something can cope with the constant cell destruction/alteration.

Btw. I have seen pictures of the wildlife, its incredible how beautiful nature can be if humans keep their fingers away. (even if this region is radiated at immense levels.)

People living in this area are still having serious effects on their metabolism. Lack of finanical support from the goverment forces the people to rely on food which they harvest in the surroundings. This often causes a lot of trouble to kids and adults.

Coming back to the article again.... behind this research:

- Dee Carter, U. of Sidney
http://www.mmb.usyd.edu.au/research/academic_profiles/dcarte...

Q: Has anyone a good pointer where to find more info on
"pigment electronic structure" ?

Q: Somebody has a link to a paper or study about this?

Sorry for digressing so much...
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You think people screaming "SHAME" is an improvement in quality?
indicate the number of comments on a post in the rss feed
It just target different audience. There is no need for it to be "like Youtube" or just disappear. It serves completely different purpose as documentaries (mentioned here), conference talks and etc.

Personally, I find it at least as useful as Youtube if not more.
I do not condone age discrimination. I merely meant to say that those terms imply a younger company, which implies a smaller and a better work environment, in my opinion.
My idea for a GPS enabled game
The article says youtube vids are capped at 10min, but

http://youtube.com/watch?v=EsEYpJMYIIw

30min vid
I’m Sorry, I Don’t Know, I Can’t …
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