skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Go take that class at Johns Hopkins, then click on this link: http://store.wolfram.com/view/app/mathforstudents - $139.95 for a fully functional student version. You can also get a semester version for $44.95.

"Note: Mathematica for Students is intended for students enrolled in accredited academic institutions and is for use on a student's own personal computer."
Planet of the sex goddesses, got it.
google subgenius
An Anecdote can have a place and a purpose - heck, that's most of my blog.

But the plural of 'Anecdote' is not 'Data'.
Science fiction is the cutting edge of literature. A sci-fi writer won the Nobel Prize in 2007; Philip Dick and Frank Herbert were the foremost writers of the 50s and 60s, in terms of pushing the envelope, along with only Beckett on the proper literature side.
"LoseThos" 64-bit Open Source OS: For Programming as Entertainment
Um, lemme see if I understand here, what you're saying... Are you claiming that (a) I'm successful, and (b) I think that I'm successful because I'm smarter and worked harder and (c) Malcolm Gladwell thinks I'm successful because of good luck and timing and that (d) therefore I'm mad at Gladwell's new book and that (e) therefore I decided to slam it? Is that your theory?
There are many theories that Gladwell's book ties together, and there's some pretty serious data on each of them. I know three, and all of this book I've read are excerpts. Each of his books includes a reading list and citations, and I don't think this will be any different. In particular, page 10 of Flynn's book is worth reading. It is not merely Gladwell's hypothesis.

Terman et. al's studies of gifted children (http://books.google.com/books?id=MXwVAAAAIAAJ&printsec=f...)

Sherar et. al's study of physical maturity in hockey player development (http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a778078133~...)

Flynn's book "On Intelligence" and review of the growing IQ of the worldwide population and ethnographic studies of Chinese. (http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=qvBipuypY...)

I don't think one should claim an insufficient justification of his hypotheses without actually examining the justification thoroughly.

Oftentimes, for Gladwell in particular, people claim that he's being unrigorous, imprecise, or incomplete. He's not being incomplete. He's being concise. If he weren't concise, almost nobody would pay any attention. Almost nobody would learn anything from him. And almost nobody would, wanting to learn more, have the opportunity to follow the reference list that he carefully puts out. Which I guess few people do, anyway.
The length of the yellow at Traffic lights are at times calibrated to maximize fines rather then minimize deaths.

Some of this bullshit does cost lives.
"Neither a borrower nor a lender be."

Ah, if Lehman Bros and GM had followed that advice. Of course, it's almost moot now - try borrowing from anybody these days!
Ron Pollack's work with the Dancing Bear Fund
A great site about Ron Pollack's Hedge Fund Experience and other Foundations.
Sounds entertaining. I'll give the developer credit: he/she knows what he wants from that project, and that's half the battle. No feature creep in his mind.
Your follow-up makes a lot more sense and seems less judgmental, thank you for clarifying. There is one part I have to disagree with, though:

...the loss to society is large.

There will always be people looking for the quick buck, quick fix, quick... everything. From FB app overnight success stories to sculpting your abs while watching TV, most everybody wants to exert the least amount of effort for the most amount of gain; usually so little effort that the gain they think they can achieve is nigh impossible.

These are not the types of people who start businesses, period. They don't spend 6 days a week at the gym. If they want to "get rich quick" after reading an article such as this, it stands to reason they wanted to do the same thing before reading it. The only possible outcomes for these types of people are, (a) failure or (b) short-term success with long-term failure.

The author doesn't strike me as that type of person, even if he does inspire subsequent lazy people to be just un-lazy enough to jump on a bandwagon created by the media. Finally: Thanks for the compliment ;)
Congrats Xobni!
Most non-fiction books and essays are collections of anecdotes plus a guiding interpretation. Data (as in statistics) is hard to come by and rarely reliable. And without the interpretation, you simply have a bunch of mindless facts. The world has an infinite number of facts. Selecting facts and arranging them in a coherent interpretation is what most writing is about. Even the driest history textbook is mostly a work of interpretation.

Still, something about both Friedman and Gladwell really bothers me. I think it is simply that I believe their theories are mostly wrong or useless. It's not the style or methodology that is the problem, but the results.
Hahahah, it's good to see you've got a sense of humor, Auston. :)
I don't see how they can find a better CEO.
I didn't even read the article because it was on CNN, anything from CNN is sus enough, even more so with such a hyped title.
1. I'm saying your timing is suspicious.
2. My own anecdotal experience tells me successful people want to believe they earned their success through brains and hard work
3. Gladwell states that a good portion of success is due to hard work but that you have to be lucky enough to be able to put in the 10,000 hours at the right time and of course, have the luxury of putting in that kind of dedication

So bottom line, he really flatters successful people on the surface, while making the successful folk equal to the rest of us.

I don't think you are "mad" at Gladwell. I just think the motivation is strong and possibly an unconscious aversion to accepting that your success may be in huge part due to luck.

But then. Take with a huge grain of salt some asshole spouting off on a forum.

Believe it or not, you are one of my heroes, and I never seriously expected YOU of all people to be reading this.

Cheers to you and don't stop doing what you do. We are a better field because of it.
I think you're setting an unattainable goal that would make for an extremely boring read. You might enjoy statistics that much, but most people don't.

Every single one of us is a collection of anecdotes, personal experiences and gathered data. Every single viewpoint ever held by every single person is a theory based on such a collection.

You aren't honestly suggesting that those opinions that are based more on the first two than the latter are completely invalid, thus unworthy of being shared?

Sure, books like the ones you describe - and in fact I'd posit at least 80% of your own blog posts, if not more - are more heavily invested in anecdote than they are proper data. They, and the conclusions they present are nonetheless valid pieces of information and help build a balanced view that is continually evolving.

The world is simply too complex a place to gather hard data on every possible subject matter before forming an opinion or articulating a theory. Some of the most outlandish theories in history - evolution, string theory, climate change all come to mind - start from anecdote and observation prior to being supported by hard facts and abundant data.
I am troubled that the US justice system seems devoid of a basic understanding of modern technology.

These cards don't in any reasonable sense identify a person's whereabouts. They are cloneable, easily used by anyone. They are in no way tied to a particular person.
And this is why I'm happy not to live anymore in my own country (france)...
If you have a link, it's best to not put a description in the textbox on the submit page. Just put the description on the page you're linking to, and we'll get the idea :)
Congratulations! Xobni is making my Gmail look worse and worse every day. Hopefully one day Xobni infiltrates more than just Outlook :)
I've had a high paying job since July. July to October I saved and saved. Mid-october I decided that I need to do my bit to help. I've been shopping ;-) 3k for a camera, 1080p TV, eating out as much as I can, travelling. Will anyone notice?
Probably true. I'm probably suffering from some kind of temporary airport-bookstore-induced dementia which is making me particularly intolerant to this particular genre.
http://groups.google.com/group/mi.jobs/msg/d81b6c1fa8f361fc
It'll be interesting to see how much these will cost. 4 Teraflops of single precision calculation is very impressive, however if you need double precision, the speed is not quite as impressive at 400 Gflops - although still very good compared to my laptop with 20 Gflops :)

The main drawback with these is that you have to use CUDA, which certainly takes a while before you wrap your mind across. I played CUDA for a while but considered it is too much effort for something which is very specialised and might not become mainstream. Still there seems to be many people using CUDA and with lots of research roles - see the CUDA forums.
Those calculatem people are constantly emailing me asking if I'll link to them.
Essays aren't science, and shouldn't be held to the same intellectual standard. They don't have to be self-contained packets of truth, because we are reading them to be entertained, and are supposed to be discerning consumers of information, capable of filtering out others' over-generalizations and strained metaphors.

Obviously, it's best if an essay is both truthful and entertaining, but if an author decides to trade scientific precision to achieve a more vibrant story, that's fine with me. The world is far too big to stick to the facts.
Thanks for this and the other above replies.

Regarding inheritance, I once had a conversation with a "application architect" who advised staying away from inheritance until you fully grok it, because it's easy to paint yourself into a corner with it (he then disappeared before I could question him further). The only issues I could think of at the time was stuff like say you have a bird class which contains a "fly" method, with duck and emu child classes (now I'm using the dodgy animal examples :P), the duck and most other birds should be able to fly, but the emu and some others should not. What is the better practice way of dealing with this issue? And what other adverse issues can arise when using inheritance?

It has been recommended to me in the past that when it comes to systems that require more abstract objects, this is where researching design patterns would assist. However, pretty much all the design pattern literature I can find is not directly related to my current language of choice, Ruby. I can find lots of stuff talking about design patterns in Java and whatever else, which still provides some utility, but is there any books/articles that anyone can recommend on design patterns etc. using Ruby?
This hit the nail on the head as to why I don't care for Gladwell's writings. I'm tired of telling smart friends that I think his books are largely useless (and incredibly boring) and getting the same look I would if I said that Jesus and L Ron Hubbard came to me in a dream and gave me a great recipe for chicken chili.

Though unlike Chris Anderson, at least the anecdotes Gladwell bases his stories on are true, rather than mistaken third-party analysis.
(Foo|Bar|Un) Conferences
Well, I'll give you the recent explosion of opinions on how our world works, that's for sure. It's getting people to do what they should have been doing in high-school though, which is think about why things are the way they are.

There are different stages of the journey, I suppose.
Roach Bait
Roach Bait – ePest Solutions offers a full line of professional pest control supplies, traps, baits for the Do It Yourself Pest Control homeowner. Control your house and control your pests!
How many browser tabs do you have open right now?
The New Citysearch Launches in Beta, Goes Hyper-Social With Facebook Connect
Isn't most of what most of Gladwell writes a genralised case of "Alien's cause global warming."
http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-alienscauseglobalwarmi...
Those of you interested in Silicon Valley trivia might note that the name Mathematica was suggested by someone named Steven Jobs: http://reference.wolfram.com/legacy/v1/contents/acknowledgme...

The name is a little misleading though, as the later releases have shown Mathematica to be a great general symbolic manipulation program not just for, say, Calculus homework, but Wolfram had already used the name SMP, and the other options just didn't seem as catchy: http://www.stephenwolfram.com/scrapbook/internals/page5/3.ht...
This makes sense to me. Detroit has failed and there is no data that shows they can innovate.

America doesn't need to bail out the big three, it needs to ensure that the next generation of automobiles are built here and competitive in the global market.

I see no reason why the government should not consider investing the entire industry as opposed to 3 failed companies.
This is a fascinating project.
"The book review is impressively hypocritical. She ruthlessly disdains Malcolm Gladwell's use of selectively chosen biographical examples and anecdotal evidence, and then proceeds to selectively cherry-pick examples, to optimally infuriate politically correct sensibilities. She then lampoons him for incompleteness."

You've pretty much described 95% of the fun of reading the New York Times' book review. It's a public forum for less-famous writers to snipe at more-famous ones -- it's practically the first blog.
Just curious: Why are ereg_ functions never to be used? If you need to handle POSIX compatible regular expressions instead of PCRE, wouldn't you use ereg_ instead of preg_ ? (Or am I wrong about this?)
If I saw a rabbit right now, I'd certainly give chase.
I am troubled that the this guy's Metrocard is the only reason he's not in a jail right now.
shrugs

I have the feeling that if anything like the 'singularity' happens, it will feel fairly normal to the participants. There are many things today that would seem completely 'sci-fi' to people even a few decades ago. But we're still going to be resource and physics constrained, unless society changes our conscious enough that memes and genes won't still end up in an endless hunt for exponential growth.
Google Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Thanks guys! If you want to help us spread the email love outside of our little community, please help us digg this story here: http://digg.com/microsoft/Xobni_did_it_4_reasons_your_Outloo...
I was pleased to find that Ruby isn't like this. So param=[] means param=Array.new, and it gets called every single time you call the method with a parameter missing.
best approach to de-retarding outlook: don't use it

now let me guess a thousand respondents will tell me they are "forced" to use outlook. i call bullshit. where are these mythical phbs that walk around checking on what mail client you are using. and don't tell me you have to use outlook to extract excrete...err exchange calendar notifications...it took me all of about ten minutes to extract those in gnus using elisp
Pretty sweet man.
Wow I never knew the proper definition for WPM - when I was young I started learning to type in VI and I practiced speed which as I recall was around 60 words / min, but trying out my typing speed on that webpage I find my speed under proper WPM definition I'm doing 110 WPM awesome :))

Typing fast and efficiently has many benefits - you save energy, you do things faster. Although in the case of programming typing speed is only one factor which determine how well you program. One could argue that learning more powerful languages or the ability to problem solve are equally if not more important.
The Downward Spiral: from Scala to Haskell to Clojure
You missed a big point. It's not that it's perfect proof, court cases never have that. It's evidence, that's all. When you put that together with other information it all adds up to a picture.

In the computer world you are used to perfect security or it's useless. It's not like that in most fields though.
I don't understand how this is possible - doesn't it cost about $1 for a meal at a fast food place? I don't care how bad things are, everyone can manage to make $1 per day - even if you have to sit on the street and beg.

If this was about how kids were only eating junk food I'd understand - but no food at all?
Top 500 Supercomputers
What like chips is yummy?
the point of a cdn is to give you an SLA and honor it. how they configure their delivery platform should be opaque to you, its not like you are going to be getting a shell on the cdn machines anyway
The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: part two
The Software Product Myth
Will the U.S. Recession Mean the End of Offshore Outsourcing?
Right on. This reminds me of how TJ Rodgers, of Cypress Semiconductors, defended his lobbying by quoting Milton Friedman; "It's OK to play by the rules of a game, even if you disagree with them."
$1 for a meal at a fast food place? WTF? You can get carbonated corn syrup (also know as Pepsi) for a dollar at your typical McD/Burger King/etc. Not much else.

All other "meals" start north of $5, plus tax.
but is it really his Metrocard :P
Fair enough, and perhaps I am being a bit too harsh. :-) I would point out that I haven't wished anything but the best for this guy, and have congratulated him several times in my comments. I also like seeing a Second City showing in downtown Chicago as much as the next guy :-). I can't say I have any specific criticisms with regard to entertainment. What bothers me is when things of little value are assigned a very high value.

I will say this: entrepreneurs are people with particularly powerful talent; with that power comes a responsibility. Imagine the choice between developing a Facebook application that lets friends buy digital icons of drinks for their friends (why not just real drinks :-p) versus an Facebook application for FreeRice [1]. A responsible entrepreneur would develop the FreeRice application, even though profit might be smaller. A more concrete example can be seen in Google. They own the most valuable piece of real estate on the internet (their homepage), yet they don't monetize it. Their restrictions on content on AdSense are stricter than they are required to be by law. The list could go on.

As tdavis pointed out, there will always be people looking for a quick buck. Let them monetize the things that don't really matter. Instead, skilled entrepreneurs should tackle the more difficult problems and monetize things that create value and have real impact on lives.

I may be stretching your analogy, but I would compare Google search to the works of Claude Monet and most Facebook/AppStore applications to paint by number. If the media keeps sensationalizing paint by number, eventually people will believe in it.

[1] http://freerice.com/
Mark Cuban Can’t Help Himself, He’s Going To Fight The SEC In Public
Generally speaking, that's a fair statement. But when a whole bunch of companies suddenly do layoffs you have to ask yourself if it's just another fad. They're not all running out of money at the same moment that the press is going hogwild with "the Valley is melting!" stories.
Aseem Sood
iNFINITY is my daily blog, where I post frequently about, the latest from my life or others’s, people
who matter or don’t, often with an undercurrent of sarcastic humour. Its a vent to all my frustrations, anger and of course creativity.
> Ultimately, this is why I like Python. The belief that best practices shouldn't be optional, and that they shouldn't be difficult creates a community where you actively want to go and learn from people's code.

This place I know was one of the earliest adopters of Python, and the code they barfed up must be the buggiest, ugliest (GUI), slowest in its class software I've ever seen. It's so buggy, it's insane: typos, calling methods that don't exist, assuming arbitrary user input does not have 'keywords' in them...

They couldn't write code in C, so they thought the problem was with the language and switched to Python.

I say, lousy programmers, if they don't want to look for another occupation, should stick with Java - at least the typos will be caught more frequently.
Apparently Gladwell cites that poor children actually 'learn faster,' increasing performance scores at a rate faster than higher class children, during the school year, but lose this benefit during the summer. Perhaps this is one contributing factor? (I don't have the primary source, he mentions this on a review from his yet-to-be-released book)
Why McDonald's Fries Taste So Good
THE iNFINITY
The March of Access Control
You can argue whether it's a meal, but a cheeseburger at McDonald's costs below one dollar, and a double cheeseburger is $1, soon to be raised to $1.19 according to some news I just googled.
My guess is it is possible thanks to careful redefining the meaning of the word "hunger". According to the article, more than one out of ten Americans "struggled with hunger" in 2007. If you can believe this, you will believe anything.
Credit card transactions would be the every man's evidence of whereabouts.
10 Tips for Building a Profitable Business » Dogster Inc. Company Blog
Maybe it doesn't enforce them, but suppose the police scans my computer and finds lots of MP3s signed to Matt Maroon, would it really not matter? (Honestly I don't know - but if it doesn't matter, why encode the name to begin with?).
Xobni Adds Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Skype, Hoovers, And The Kitchen Sink
Indeed. And Michiko Kakutani happens to be somewhat famous for her negative pieces on famous writers.
that's the first time i've logged into digg in like... 6 months.
Kind off gives me an idea to make a special card that one can carry that is somehow linked to your identity and records all your whereabouts in a way that can't be faked.

Then if you ever have to prove that you were in a certain place you can give the card. Obviously it would make it pretty hard if you were lying so no one would want to carry it :)

(ignoring the various technology restrictions of this scheme)
looks like someone is hoping for a microsoft yahoo merger soon.
"Galdwell certainly isn't science, but I don't think he proclaims to be either."

The problem is that the majority of people will think it is science. It is written in a book, so it has to be true.
It makes sense to you because you're an ecnomically-minded person judging by your other commetns. A lot of hackers get offended when presented with unpleasnat but economically sound theories like this and start downmodding.

It upsets me some because I want to be heard and understood, but then it also gives me an edge. Funny how that works.
Hertzberg and Handey, always look forward to reading them every week when they have a spot.
The stupidity of some people can hardly be blamed on the author of the book.
Looks like that strategy is working for them. http://www.google.com/search?q=poker+calculator
I am the only one who has never heard of hoovers before?
What can the Pareto Principle do for you?
Microsoft Kills One Security Suite, Launches Another
Is there ever all this hype/bullshit drama around Python? I never see it on HN; it's almost always seems Rails related for whatever reason.

I'm so glad TicketStumbler is built on Python.
A coworker of mine uses one and loves it.
Unfortunately, the link to the Wolfram talk on Feedburner isn't working. Here's a link to the transcript of the talk (the mp3 is also available for iPod-achievers by going to the talk index): http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/talks/ycombinator...

The talk is worth a read, but he doesn't give out any secrets to success ("work hard"), and note that the title of the talk is "On Starting a Long Term Company." It seems aimed at solving the problem of "How can I get the people, software, and money for my research?" rather than the problem of "How can I afford that ocean-front mansion and retire at 30?"
I wish he/she laid out his own experiences and skills first before sounding like a sycophantic name dropper.

And the change the world shit is lame.
Fun!

I still email them every once in a while.
NASA Successfully Tests Interplanetary Internet