skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, just that size and intelligence are more correlated than speed and intelligence.

My guess is that the correlation between size and intelligence is close to zero. So that would imply there's a negative correlation between speed and intelligence. That would be easy to test: just compare the results of the players' IQ tests with their 40 yard dash speeds.
1. No. You try to breed for egg laying chickens and you end up with super aggressive chickens. You select for Malaria resistance you end up with rickets. Life is not something you can linearly improve on and there is no goal to reach for.

2. Uh, what?

3. No. George Bush is a socialist.

4. Are you sure it is, what if your dad is Prescott Bush? I'd think who your parents are is an even better predictor then IQ.

5. No. But you sure should stop government subsidies.

6. All of humanity is more similar then just one tribe of chips. We are all descendant of a handful of people (5 women) who lived ~ 80000 years ago.

7. Maybe they have kids?

8. Yes. None.

9. Nothing.

10. Difference between individuals are HUGE, difference between large groups tiny.

11. China.

12. Nothing. Most people are simply more emotional then us rational geeks.
They should compare staff positions instead, as coaches and water boys probably display regular IQ patterns.
Video: Test Driving an Electric Smart Car
> This is one of the (few?) cases where government regulation is appropriate, one airline would go out of business

Huh? If it actually produces cost savings, folks who valued that cost savings more than time would flock to any airline that did it. If it doesn't, then why is govt regulation appropriate?

I doubt that minor changes in flight time matter to a lot of passengers, but since it's not my money at risk if I'm wrong, it's inappropriate for me to demand that others try.

If you think that you can run an airline better, do it. If you're right, you'll get rich and force existing airlines to either change or die. However, if you're not willing to risk your money, why should someone else be forced to risk theirs?
If you can't write intention revealing code, this often is a symptom! Most often this means that there are implicit rules written into your code base. 90% of the time or more these should be factored out!

Also, another problem with too many comments: this is more stuff to maintain. Chances are, the programmer already has enough to do!
I love ruby, and use ruby at my job. I just don't write unless. Certainly there is no cause for someone to say a statement is mistaken just because it used if+not. Nor to guess that someone won't like ruby just because he doesn't like unless.
Microsoft tries to one-up Google PageRank
Cool, I'll have to check those out. I was selfishly hoping that something like this is already out there.
"This is true because code is designed partly for computers while comments can be written entirely for humans."

There are differing degrees to which this is true. Different languages had different design motivations. Smalltalk was specifically designed to be readable by humans. By grade school aged humans, actually! In the Smalltalk community, most regard comments as a "Code Smell."
Some of them are specific to web apps, desktop apps, libraries, or system services.
I am a libertarian, and we are in agreement on most of your economic points. Having said that, I have to say that libertarians don't support the imperial thinking that has permeated Washington in the last 20-30 years.

Take the current wars. Both Osama and Saddam were on US payroll (literally so in Osama's case) for a long time. Osama was a US ally because the US needed him to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Same way, US bankrolls the failed Saudi state. The Saudi state buys off peace with Islamists. And guess who the Islamists are targeting?

Empires don't work.
I think that 'finding some use for them' is an ultimately doomed approach, if only because each student is going to have different ways in which they want to use the mathematical tools with which they are presented.

My father, who is an 'educator', seems to think that the best way to learn trigonometry is to use it to teach carpentry, but I can't think of anything that would be more dull, for several reasons. One, because I imagine that well less than half of the class would have a genuine interest in carpentry; and Two, because building things with wood requires very little trigonometric calculation, so nearly all of the examples would be highly contrived.
Bikers, pedestrians seeking better Web maps
"But we don't beat the Reaper by living longer. We beat the Reaper by living well," said Dr. Pausch.

Something to keep in mind.
If someone asked me that they need to build a website to promote X without giving any more details, I'd say try Blogger or Wordpress. It may be just what they need, why make a point about passion or drive if they want to build a simple website? If they want to do something more sophisticated, they will quickly find out the limitations and ask the right questions.
Thanks for the links - I checked these out, and while they are cool CMS products, it's not quite what I had in mind. I'm not looking for a full CMS system or framework, I just want a simple library + compiler that can plug into any existing site that is not built on top of a CMS backend.
Hammers and word processors have a much lesser legacy impact upon building and writing than software does upon making web sites and applications. If you choose wrong with the former, you can very easily change your mind and avoid having to redo anything. The same is definitely not true of the latter.

There is a continuum between a basic tool and a medium. Hammers and word processors are basic tools. The basic tool of hacking is the word processor. A piece of software, or programming language, is much further along that continuum. A better simile for software and websites might be, "I want to construct a place for people to live. What kind of building should I design?"
I don't know enough people in sports to be sure about this, but my guess is that the people who try to fix their mistakes rather than crow about their successes are the ones who improve over time.
"it appears they're trying to crash the kernel by locking a region of memory that shouldn't be locked"

...or, they're second-rate programmers who don't test their code very thoroughly.

Yes, he is going overboard by claiming "deliberate sabotage." Every hacker wants his 15 minutes of /., and he got his. However, the important overlooked fact here is about halfway down in his post:

"I've found separate DSDT tables that the BIOS hands to Linux specifically, changing it to point to the DSDT tables Vista gets fixes all Linux issues with this board."

That is, the problem isn't that they screwed up the Linux implementation of their BIOS, it's that they created different rules for Linux to follow when the Vista ones worked just fine. I still have a hard time attributing it to malice, but this is very asinine indeed.
And for most code where the speed actually matters, the code is sufficiently complicated that you'll never really know whether it's truly as fast as it could possibly be.
Thank God, I was getting worried! :-)
The correlation between size and intelligence is positive, because malnutrition can lower adult IQ and adult size. That correlation is a lot stronger when you control for other variables, of course.

And 'speed and intelligence' is not quite the correlation you want -- IQ correlates with mental reaction time, so smarties may be 'faster' for short distances because they get a head start.

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

(The talk page for this article is delightful, by the way)
You mean MySQL can give you the answer in constant or log time. But folks like me, who naively use the count() aggregate like we've been taught in books, are going to have scalability problems unless we understand the internals of the database engine.

That was my point: it's not a slam against MySQL per se, it's a slam against the whole development metaphor, which seems to derive unholy pleasure in hiding critically important implementation details from the developer.
From reading the original article, it seems that Linux can use the DSDT table handed to Vista, but that Foxconn's BIOS deliberately detects Linux, and hands it a broken DSDT table; I will wager that this behavior does violate the ACPI specifications, which Foxconn claims to honor.

It's equivalent to having a web application that states that it is W3C-standards compliant, purchasing a subscription, and then discovering that it only works in IE, not because Firefox and Safari don't work with it, but because they've added a bit of browser-detection code that turns other browsers over to Tubgirl.
The best analogy of why DPI is a really bad idea
But if someone doesn't use (postgresql|mysql|appengine|lisp|python|rails|dojo|jquery|prototype|mac|linux|win) for their project, it will just die!

;-)
Saying someone is mistaken because they used "if not" instead of "unless" doesn't align with my understanding either, as I tried to point out by listing yet another way to write the same thing.

OTOH, you made a much more interesting statement than simply saying you didn't like "unless," you took things into a discussion about programming languages resembling vs. not resembling English.

Ruby has a bunch of lispy things that have nothing to do with English, but it also has a bunch of Perl-inspired things that have a lot to do with expressing logical ideas in English-y "prose."

If you can reconcile those two things, then yeah, you'll like all of Ruby. If not, you'll probably find a subset that pleases you. So sure, I can see that you might like the Ruby you use.
In the dev team I'm on we are constantly working within "aggressive" deadlines. Almost daily we come across a problem, brainstorm the ways of fixing it, and choose a path. Most of the time we can pick the one everyone agrees is the best way, or the Right Way.

Every once in awhile we're stuck at 3 days to code freeze (the product isn't a website, so we physically send out a DVD with our product on it, so quietly pushing out hotfixes isn't an option) and come across a bug that almost no user will care about that has two solutions:

1) Fix the problem the correct way. We don't know exactly what the correct way is, but we know it'll take a month or longer to code.

2) Apply some hack that gets it to work. This is usually something ugly and imperfect, but it's possible to do in 2 hours. We can tackle the problem again and attempt to get at a better solution.

If we don't ship on time, we lose piles of money. Guess which one we end up choosing ;)

Option 2 is fairly rarely chosen, but all it takes is for it to happen once or twice to have comments like the above in code, and forgotten.

Right... that whole Right Way (tm) thing is mostly tongue in cheek. It almost always refers to the way I want it done, and is a fairly flexible way.
Programming: Art, Not Science
what? HN is a site where anyone can create an account and post comments in seconds. This may suprise you but the but the non-bay area heathens have Internet too.
Well, one way to look at it is that they have no need for any public relations of the kind he talks about. One consequence over the endless fawning and hyping over everything they do is that people are willing to let everything slide and will still buy and hype their products.

Anyone remember the iPhone launch when people asked about an SDK? Jobs said there's no need for one ("the web is your SDK!" or something along those lines) and people started parroting that line whenever this valid criticism was brought up. Now that they have an SDK, albeit one with ridiculous and draconian restrictions, people are still parroting Apple's lines: You can't have background processes because of security[1]! You must submit to the App Store because Apple knows better than people what they should be allowed to have!

Think I'm being hard and unfair towards Apple? Then just imagine other companies doing what Apple does and ask yourselves what the reaction will be:

-What will happen if BlackBerry's email service goes down periodically and loses your email?

-What will happen if Microsoft demands 30% of all developer revenues for their products and limits the distribution of applications?

[1] Choosing security over liberty... where have I heard this line before?
I am tired of the puzzle approach to recruiting.

Ultimately it is nothing but an upfront investment I have to make just to gain an interview, without a guarantee for a job. How would you like a job ad that read "to apply, send us 1000$ in cash"?
Bomb Blasts Hit Bangalore, Impact to Be Felt in Silicon Valley - GigaOM
Firefox plugin Socialbrowse launches in-page commenting
open source lives
"Have him show a way to delete something without warning that I will not regret later..."

An undo feature might be a better alternative in specific cases, if it's feasible to implement and it's not too dramatic an operation.
If we are talking only about Windows GUI development, then the choice is rather poor. Microsoft did everything to knock everyone out of competition in the area, so we are left only with .NET and languages Microsoft is kind to support.
You said you use "unless" in English as if that proved it was good to use it in boolean logic too. It doesn't. For example, I am happy to use !, &&, and || in my code, even though they aren't English. The criterion for what makes good code is different than what is good English.

My point was that I think an explicit not is clearer than unless in cases sufficiently complex as to require stopping to think about it. If you're trying to keep track of multiple negations, then having one be in a different form than all the rest does not help. (And meanwhile, there is nothing wrong with a habit of always using if).
Imagine an ideal math class as Lockhart might envision: one that focuses on the art, joy, and beauty of mathematics, in which students genuinely play with mathematical ideas. Then, ask yourself how the progress of these students could be evaluated via standardized testing. The two mix poorly.
Yes, this seems like a foolish way to erode the Google brand. They were already serving ads on every search that returned Wikipedia entries; is the long-term damage to their brand really worth the extra money?

Given that it's probably impossible to design a simple PageRank algorithm (because it will be gamed, overnight, by SEO experts), and because Google has to keep the algorithm secret anyway (for the same reason), the only reason to trust PageRank is Google's impartiality: Because they're haven't been in the publishing business themselves (at least not conspicuously) they don't have a particular incentive to favor their own content as they tweak the PageRank settings. It's just not possible for Google to become a publisher and still retain consumer confidence in their core product.

Nothing will happen in the short term. Brand erosion is like soil erosion: you don't notice the individual grains trickling downhill, but then you wake up one day and the mountain is missing. There was a time when Yahoo was the king of search, and that time is over for a reason.
Early adopters are going to start scanning the skies once again, waiting for the arrival of Google's competition.
progressive
liberal
conservative
concensus
centre
extremist
far-right
respect
Escaped 'spam king' allegedly kills self, family
Hi, Occam here. This is just a map of the white/black ratio of each position. There is a 15 point difference between the mean IQ of European-descended (white) Americans and African-descended (black) Americans Please note this is something You Can't Say so don't speak publicly of it.

The most interesting thing to note here is that white players score about half a standard deviation higher than the national white IQ, and black players score about half half a standard deviation higher than the national black IQ. Since life is sort of an IQ test, this isn't too surprising. There are a lot bad decisions you can make to screw up your football career before making the NFL - a higher IQ will keep you away from these things.

As always Steve Sailer is indispensable in these matters: "Are football players dumb? Actually, they are fairly smart. The NFL requires draft prospects to take the Wonderlic IQ test. Offensive guards averaged 107, centers and punters 106, quarterbacks and kickers 104. The speed positions averaged lower: halfbacks, free safeties, cornerbacks, and wide receivers averaged from 91 to 94. Still, at both the white positions and the black positions, prospects scored about a half standard deviation higher than the respective white and black national means.

Of course, IQ tests do a lousy job of measuring improvisational mental ability, which football players, especially the black ones, are particularly good at. (See my classic article "Great Black Hopes" for the full story.)"

That article is here: http://www.isteve.com/blackath.htm
fwiw, QB Vince Young also scored a 6.
For me, with deletion, in all cases it's better. Given that it's sometimes really hard to undelete (or technically impossible, as in the case of an FTP client, for example), I'd rather get the confirmation box before the deletion is done.
RIP Randy. I know I will miss his fearless spirit.
Randy's mother was my English teacher in High School. Small world. Bummer to lose a brilliant professor, but he certainly has left his mark on the world.
Trig is useless. There is about 2weeks of useful math and the rest is a waste of time. People like putting trig on tests but the basic 4 year HS math program should be:

Logic + Algebra I, Geometry with a touch of number theory and topology, Grab Bag (1 year including the useful parts of Algebra II, Trig, and pre Calculus), Calculus I.
In this study the authors measured the activity of most of the genes in the worm genome and found that quite a large number change in activity ‘expression’ in old versus young worms. In general, for most genes, the amount of protein produced from that gene is proportional to the amount of messenger RNA transcribed. Transcription factors are proteins that regulate (either increase or decrease) the production of messenger RNA. In this article the authors found evidence that decreased levels of one particular transcription factor ‘elt-3’ may account for many of the other changes in gene expression at old age. They showed that elt-3 levels decreased with age and that this was caused by an increase in the expression of two other transcription factors ‘elt-5’ and ‘elt-6’ which normally repress elt-3 expression. They show that if the levels of elt-5 and elt-6 are experimentally reduced then elt-3 does not decrease with age and the worms live longer. They propose that an increase in elt-5 / elt-6 is a normal part of worm development but that it continues inappropriately into adulthood where it has deleterious effects that lead to aging. This is potentially interesting because to date there has been a huge amount of evidence supporting the ‘unrepaired damage’ theories of aging; this is the first evidence that aging can be a consequence of inappropriate regulation of developmental pathways.

However this study has a number of limitations. Firstly, experimental removal of elt-3 expression has no effect on lifespan whatever despite causing the same changes in gene expression that are seen at old age. Secondly, experimental reduction of elt-5 / elt-6 only increased maximum lifespan from 20 to 24 days – other mutations, such as the daf-2 mutation, increase maximal lifespan to close to 50 days. Finally they do not address the mechanism of increased elt-5 / elt-6 expression with age beyond speculating that it is a disregulated developmental process; it is entirely possible that changes in expression of these factors are simply a downstream consequence of some other aging related change. Finally even if it were proven that aging in C elegans is programmed like Salmon which die soon after breeding, this would likely have no relevance to much longer living organisms such as mammals which almost certainly age by different mechanisms.
Nice. I would even suggest learning HTML/CSS, followed by Javascript as a first true programming language. Many a CS professor may disagree, and for the true hardcore CS students, JS will only take you so far. But for the average high school student who has no desire or need to understand the complexities of compilation, GUI libraries, memory allocation, etc., Javascript is a great way to learn programming quickly and visually without the "voodoo" involved in getting a C script to run.

Not to mention, limited experience with HTML/CSS/JS is probably far better on the resume/useful in the job market than limited experience in C/Java/Python.
A better metaphor would be "what should I make it out of?" You can build a house out of straw, sticks, bricks, or titanium. But these have different advantages, drawbacks, and costs.

When it comes down to it, metaphors for software are almost always particularly flawed.
Why I Love Corporate Blogs (And You Should Too)
And This is Why China is Every Internet Company’s Dream
I did a startup that went under in 2001 that did exactly what the article is talking about. It's all about timing I guess.
I'm not following your logic. ACPI is a published, open standard. Foxconn doesn't need to do anything for "linux" or "windows" specifically. They just put the tables in memory and hand them to the OS to use.

But they aren't. They're specifically testing for OS versions and handing back different (and, in this case, broken) data to "linux" software. At best, that's horribly broken and a reason to avoid Foxconn hardware. Excusing it with this "Certification(tm)" canard is just spin, and you appear to have fallen for it hook, line and sinker.
Why it’s Time for Facebook to Sell
So it's a minimax strategy. Or maximin. Or...sheesh, one of these days I oughtta learn game theory.
Here's a few more:

- Knol articles aren't CC-licensed by default. So not only can't people log in and update them (a facility which, arguably, makes Wikipedia a bit too dynamic) but they can't even clone them under their own byline and make fixes. The result is going to be a bunch of sad-looking abandoned articles, like the dregs of About.com. Say what you will about Wikipedia: The thing is often up-to-date within minutes.

- If, indeed, Knol gets favorable treatment in PageRank -- even if its advantage is only slight -- people will soon figure out that it's more profitable to dump 10,000 crappy articles on Knol than to craft one perfect article and keep it updated. The ads will show up anyway. Heck, it might be more profitable to put up a page with poor content and a bunch of ads -- that way frustrated readers will click through on the ads to escape. That's how domain squatting works.

We can certainly look forward to seeing just about every Wikipedia article mirrored on Knol. The software to do that is being written right now; maybe it has already been written. Interestingly, sites filled with ads used to do that to get a lot of PageRank, but I haven't seen any of those sites on a Google search recently. I guess that might change now that Google's getting into the linkjacking business.
"The criterion for what makes good code is different than what is good English."

In total, yes, but that does not mean that there are no things that work in English that also happen to work in code.

Furthermore, it is difficult to generalize about this: some programming languages are entirely unlike English and work very well, others attempt to be like English and are terrible, while others attempt to be like English in some ways and work.

And further to that, some parts of some programs attempt to be like English and work well, while other parts of programs work well when nothing like English.

Now while I understand bang, andand, and oror, they are a terrible legacy of our C++ days. Bang is especially unforgiveable. If we must have a prefix operator, what is wrong with ~, the actual standard symbol for negation?

;-)

p.s. This thread may seem to be a digression, but it seems quite pertinent to an article that talks about writing code for readability.