skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The quality of a man’s sperm depends on how intelligent he is, and vice versa

It is unfortunate that an article talking about intelligence starts with a tautology.
Maybe try the idea that everyone works twice as hard, but instead of building twice as much stuff, everyone just builds the same products better.

(Of course, if you think about this carefully enough, the distinction between "more" stuff and "better" stuff falls apart.)
I think that their privacy implementation was the first of its kind. That was the first site that I joined that didn't give me a URL. It was all about being a closed system, and I loved that and still do.

I'd also say that their ridiculous emphasis on minimalism should count as groundbreaking, because no other site gets that right, but that always leads to arguments.
Johnnie Cochrane and celebrity plastic surgeons don't earn 30× as much as other doctors and lawyers because their compensation is set by a guild; if anything, guilds tend to assign scale and frown on those who charge more (and prosecute those who charge less). They earn 30× as much because people are willing to pay 30× as much for their services.
I was hoping for up to 1m delay, hence the "-ish" in free.
Will This Music Keyboard Be A Game-Changer?
take out the "might" option.
Oh? I've found that a healthy nerdery is a key component to getting much of anything interesting done. For people who are so often socially stupid, and yet involved in business, which is so socially dependent, I'd think that the development of good nerderies would be a fairly relevant topic.

Maybe I'm just more socially stupid than the average nerd, so this stuff seems less obvious to me.
I've fallen in love with the vertical selection feature (option + drag).

You can even create a vertical insertion point and anything you type or delete will appear or disappear on all selected lines.
Well... I see making people smarter _is_ both a contraceptive _and_ reduces the number of religious nuts.

That messes with a lot of interests...
I truly do hope that tangible good comes out this research

No need to hope. I'm sure the H.M. case, once it became widely publicized among a new generation of doctors, did a lot to help discredit psychosurgery. Even without listening to your NPR piece (which I will not do :) I'm pretty sure that that's a good thing.
My buddy's company: www.predictwallstreet.com

If you use Ameritrade, they've probably given you stock advice already.
In fact Memento is pretty much the only movie that treats amnesia scientifically. In movies, when you get amnesia you forget who you are, but after that you are able to function normally. This almost never happens in the real world, and when it does it is usually psychological rather than a blow to the head. Even less realistic is getting all your memories restored after a second blow to the head.

For more:
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=53...
Payne says "My only hesitation was that TextMate was getting to be practically (although hyperbolically) abandonware. Thankfully, this fear was assuaged by a recent update over the Thanksgiving holiday. It lives!"

I can't find any reference to such an update - according to VersionTracker, the last update was 1.5.7 on 10/26/07.
Ask HN: Review My WebApp
It's been a long time, but in the last week Youtube is finally starting to redesign itself, which is a good thing.

I just hope the player itself changes. That's always been my biggest problem with their video. I hate that the control doesn't disappear when you're full-screened.
That's a good point. What if Einstein's mother had be deficient in folic acid and iodine while pregnant?
Open source is like open laws, so bloody vast it takes people who you have to pay vast sums of money to spend the time to interpret and advise you on it. So you don't have to spend the vast amount of time to use it.
Ask YC: Google and Obama
Google and Obama are both for network neutrality which is a great thing. They are both understand the power of the internet to connect people and share ideas and make a little money at the same time.

Google is also a major force in the content that is visible on the internet (simply because they are the first stop for people to find information). For example, they remove copyrighted material from Youtube, spam blogs from blogger and sites with high page ranks from search that only deliver the viewer the latest and greatest in malware. Doing this is great and provides a better service to all users. But I think it is fair to say Google controls quite a bit on content.

Eric Schmidt has been a supporter of Obama and was a possible choice to be the technology czar (http://bit.ly/8OkP).

I don't believe there will be some vast conspiracy between the Obama administration and Google to take over the world.

Questions to think about:
1. Is a relationship between someone in power and somebody with the ability to control media content (even if in a limited domain) a good thing?
2. Who regulates it?
3. And how do we keep these relationships transparent in the sense we are certain we are getting unfiltered content?
4. Is any of the above a reasonable concern?
5. While it's probably not a big concern today will it be more of a concern in the future?
Do it yourself. Dreamhost + One click WP install == working wordpress. You don't even have to ever log into the terminal. Plus having your own domain name makes you look more professional.
The ticker seems to be only for their forecasts? (love the idea of a prediction market for the stock market, btw)
Personally I found it refreshing. Most of the front page is VC, food, money & politics.
I've always wondered why linux has a hard time with suspend and hibernate, while on windows (and osx) there usually isn't any problems at all.
Paul,

Great post, extremely poignant!

In a few years time, VCs may be pitching to Entrepreneurs (Dragon's Den Syle! [1]) :-)

Links:

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDczbpIO85g - note these guys like most missed the Linked Data URI pitch with their DNA miscue

Kingsley Idehen
http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
I noticed that, too. Perhaps he is referring to "Cutting-Edge" updates? I'm on build 1436 (Minor Updates) and 1496 is available now.
Ah, that's it - I hadn't noticed that option in the Preferences. But yes, turn on Cutting Edge updates in the Updates preference, and now I get offered 1496.
Jason Santa Maria asks designers to share their first websites
How is Guy Kawasaki using what he teaches in his books?
Unix? Why? You mean, making choices over what framework to use would be easier, and there would be less low-level mucking? Less wandering in the dark over documentation?

Not my experience. I would second his proposition that VB6 was great at what it was doing. It just worked.
Because hardware vendors work directly with windows to make suspend / hibernate work correctly.

Because for a long time, apple only had one architecture to worry about.

Because linux has only gotten "big enough to pay attention to" in the last few years.
You have a good point here, and I hadn't thought of it that way before.

Somewhat related, it does seem like a major factor in the importance of people's software accomplishments (measured economically or however) is the importance of the problem they were trying to solve. Build an easy-to-use web site builder for Microsoft Windows in 1994? Sell to AOL, retire to Switzerland at 35, spend your spare time mentoring the young, designing prosthetic limbs, writing new operating systems in Python, or whatever floats your boat. (Incidentally, to me, that seems like getting paid 10× as much as the average COBOL cubicle drone who retires at 65.) Build it for NeXTStep instead? Nobody will remember.

Hamming's "You and Your Research" makes this point about scientific accomplishments: working on great problems is a sine qua non of scientific greatness.

To tie back to your point, when someone has some vague notions about what they need done, the first thing you have to do to make incredible software for them is to figure out what they would think was "incredible" — that is, figure out which problems to solve, and which to postpone. Because if you get that wrong, all the rest of your work is more or less wasted.

As Hamming points out, it's not enough for the solution of a problem to be desirable; it also has to be feasible. That clearly involves some risk.
Was that said by "good" Valerio or "evil" Valerio?
Video killed the Internet star.
And all the smug emacs and vim users just nod and says "Welcome to the party".
Interesting analogy. And still better than closed laws.
Is it true that Obama was spotted using MSN search?

OMG! LOL! WTF?
Have you developed evil tech today?
Do you feel that the technology your developing is doing good in the world or doing evil?
I think the relative value they charge relates to what other people are charging. A hair dresser might charge 50x what other hairdressers charge, but in the back of peoples heads they compare the price to other hair dressers and not doctors. If your 10x as good you can charge 5 - 50x as much, but not 50,000x as much without a lot of brand advertising.
Qitera: Social Bookmarking for the Deep Web
Actually, I think the Army came up with it first. I could have sworn they've been prepared for dropping in boxes of servers with power/network hookups into warzones for awhile.
http://sethmason.com/blog/23/vim-tip-select-column
So craftsmen are now "widgets"? That's an absurd idea.
sounds.. bayesian.
:%s/party/war

:P
Michael Jordan is part-owner of the Charlotte Bobcats, actually, and I think there are a number of Google and Microsoft employees who are richer than Michael Jordan (who apparently has about US$400M and recently had to pay US$168M in a divorce settlement). It's true that it's because they're part-owners of Google and Microsoft, but that ownership was granted because of work they did, not (for the most part) because of dollars they contributed.

So I think the premise of the article is wrong; some programmers do earn as much as sports stars and star musicians. I don't have a good sense for how the numbers shake out in the aggregate.
I don't think you can call it groundbreaking if someone else is already doing it (I am taking the word at its most literal I guess i.e. breaking new ground).

Their privacy system is similar to MySpace's except they apply it to more things. MySpace had a system that allowed you to restrict certain things from non-friends before Facebook. Facebook's privacy system has become much more robust though.
Pluto?
So what exactly is so interesting about this study? Is it supposed to be astonishing that the function of my brain and the function of... the rest of my body are correlated? That if you starve one you starve the other? That if you do exercises to improve the circulation of one, you improve the circulation of the other? That if you get better sleep and avoid stress both of these things will improve?

And what does the finding necessarily have to do with genetics, except in the frenzied minds of the genetically obsessed?

From the article:

Hitherto, biologists have tended to disaggregate the idea of fitness into a series of adaptations that are more or less independent of each other. This work adds to the idea of a general fitness factor, f, that is similar in concept to g—and of which g is one manifestation.

This is the obvious, dressed up as insight and deployed against a pitiful straw man. Biologists have certainly known, as everyone knows, that aspects of fitness are not "more or less independent of each other": My sperm count, my brain function, my ability to win an arm-wrestling competition, and my tendency to resist getting colds are scarcely independent of my diet or my exercise. (Which, indeed, means that they are scarcely independent of my parents' skill at earning money or my society's skill at storing food to sustain itself through droughts.)

Better insights, please. Or, perhaps, better journalism.
Banner Ad Marketplaces For Making Money Buying, Selling Ads On Your Blog
L. Peter Deutsch, who is by anyone's measure one of history's greatest programmers, spent many years working on basically just GhostScript, basically by himself (code contributions he received were not up to his standards). He made a good living at it and has a substantial amount of savings as a result. I don't really have any idea whether that means US$2M or US$2B, though. Maybe he'll donate some of his savings to some charity and we'll get an idea of their scale.

So I think GhostScript might demonstrate, or at least approximate, the limit of what one person working by himself can do.

("Greatest": he wrote approximately the second Lisp interpreter when he was 15; with Butler Lampson he wrote the QED editor, on which ed and thus vi are based; he invented JIT compilation; he did a bunch of stuff at PARC in the 1970s that I don't even know about; and he successfully competed with Adobe in the PostScript RIP market for decades.)
I would imagine soccer salary levels fall dramatically once you drop below the very top of the sport. Unlike programmers which can be far from the top (Gates? bad example) but still make a reasonable living.

Does anyone know a low level soccer player who makes a decent middle class living? Is there a working 'minor-leagues' for the soccer world?
A devious manager would praise this guy, raise his pay 25%, but quietly give him double the work. A really devious one would find some way to document the resulting increase in productivity and take the credit.

But the really insightful one would let this guy try to find ways to make the whole group more productive or reduce its bug rate.
I like this, but have no clue how I would use it beside for some BeautifulSoup page manipulation....
Trash Your Ex On Craigslist, Go Directly To Jail
The work of programmers scales really well, too. There are a number of pieces of software used by more than a billion people: Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Word, Firefox, Google, Apache, PHP, and the operating system they run on: Linux. And that's exactly why the best-paid programmers make a lot more money than the best-paid soccer stars.
You seem defensive. Don't you believe it's better to be physically fit and energetic than not, or do you argue that fitness and health is truly irrelevant to your role as an employee?

You could suppose that there is an unfair cognitive bias at work (see /beauty premium/) which could favor one candidate over the other. But think about how an interviewer would consider the physically fit you versus the physically unfit you. This is the real point, not how you compare to someone else.
Why does this require a solution though? Why is it a problem?

It's a problem because the company culture (probably) won't tolerate it, but instead will act to preserve itself at all costs, including the cost of reduced productivity. So when I said "obvious solution" I should perhaps have added "within the parameters of the existing culture".

I sympathize with your values, but the idea that you can change a corporate culture to make it recognize productivity in a more rational way is a fantasy. It's actually a harmful fantasy because it deceives many creative people into spending their time and energy on environments that will never fully recognize them.

To paraphrase what Max Born said about science, new models are accepted in the market not because companies change, but because old companies die.

Edit: Having a clear way to measure productivity wouldn't change a thing. If maximizing productivity were the value driving behavior, things would already be different even without a measure.
Please add item summary abstracts (or better yet complete text) to your RSS feed. Publishing headlines only doesn't convey enough information to decide whether the article is worth clicking through to.
Authors@Google: Howard Zinn
Can't you write Rails templates with DreamWeaver? Is it a lot harder than assembling dialog boxes in VB? I've basically never used DreamWeaver and I haven't used VB since 1997, so I don't really know.
He said planet ... that probably means Mercury now.
Apache + Passenger -vs- nginx + mongrel
Do modern IDEs make us dumber?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1597642154209383351
There are lots of emacs and vim refugees in TextMate land as well. (I'm a refugee from both.)
No problem. (I'd reply privately if I could, so as not to clutter up the thread, sorry.)
One of the things that has occurred to me recently is that if someone was able to change the economics (even further) of processing a huge amount of data a la Google on a _much_ smaller budget, that could be one of the new sparks that kicks off the next trend.
Sounds like you described our service exactly: http://zipiko.com/
Excellent point about the brain damage.

What I was mostly thinking about was studies like the Stanford prison experiment. Studies that require volunteers to be put in unethical situations.
jEdit has this too. alt-backslash and ctrl-backslash toggle multiple selection/insert and rectangular selection/insert. So you can select multiple blocks of text, then what you type will replace all of them at once.
Google Friend Connect is slapdash and confusing; Facebook Connect is not bad
Python3 won't be standard until it's adopted as the main python of several widespread linux distros and available in a clean, batteries included way for OSX and all 36 flavours of windows.

Bitching about py3k is basically whining about being forced to learn new things.

The one question I have is are people going to start using different filename conventions?

I could see temporarily associating .py3 with a /usr/local/bin/py3k for testing purposes and porting 2.6 to 3, but I really hope it doesn't become a widespread practice.
UK Astronaut Teddy Bears (30Km on a weather balloon)
Big surprise. They guy's sick of programming because he never liked coding in the first place. This is his ideal development model:

"I used to do storyboards right in the VB6 IDE asking the business guys what they wanted, 'so you need a form, with a list box and what should be in the list box, and when you clicked ok, now what...' And on it went. In a couple of days to a week, we basically had the front end of the application prototyped. Since it was back in the 'two tier' days all we had to do was hook it up to the database. And if we got really 'fancy', (or had the luxury), we added a third tier of business logic written out as VB6 classes, not in the stored procs, and after a bunch of testing, report writing, etc., boom! off it goes into production."

I hate Dreamweaver's design mode. Sure, only writing straight HTML/CSS/JavaScript over the many years has arguably taken more effort. I had to learn the "complexities" of my environment, that the author bemoans, such as browser bugs (found a new one that's IE7-exclusive the other day), but now I can recognize and solve browser bugs almost instantly and can build pages blind. As a result, the finished product is always of the highest quality and very robust.
Isn't VB.NET lots faster than VB by virtue of targeting a fully blown JITing VM? That's a damn good "yes, but".
I think the breaking ground was that Facebook's primary feature was security. MySpace had it, but they didn't emphasize it, and even when security was on, they tried to make profiles display like public pages - they just made them sparser.

Facebook introduced the completely blank page that you get when you try to go to a restricted profile. It was pretty cutting edge when I registered in 2005-06.
the semantic web doesn't have to actively "think" it just needs the ability to allow users of the web to properly define relationships itself democratically so to speak and display the internet using these relationships.

we're starting to see the formation of web 3.0 with social tagging, voting, rating, commenting, and flagging. this along with the vetting of user profiles via reputationing systems is solidifying the structure of the web we are to use in the future
No, he wouldn't want to be close to Sun :-)
heck if I know. MS also has a DnD-style form assembler for ASP.Net, I don't know why he didn't/couldn't use that.

I was just trying to show where he was coming from.
Session Hijacking
They don't make us dumber...they do make it a bit harder to become smarter though, since they do so much for us.
Maybe you could write a short description of the app to encourage people to comment?
And that's exactly why the best-paid programmers make a lot more money than the best-paid soccer stars.

Upmodded, of course.

The irony is that this was the thesis that I set out to write about when I started composing my post. And yet I somehow completely lost my train of thought! I guess I had more fun thinking about why, when a soccer star makes $49M a year (which, of course, happens only at the peak of his career), people notice:

http://www.forbes.com/2008/04/30/best-paid-soccer-biz-soccer...

... but when a programmer makes an average of $12M a day over 24 years people can manage to forget about him.

(That's Bill Gates, assigning him $0 when Microsoft was founded in 1975 and $101 billion in 1999 when his wealth peaked, and assuming linear growth -- which is obviously wrong, of course; I was just too lazy to do the exponential assumption. He was obviously making money at a much lower rate at first... and a much higher rate later.)
+ Change the language: "We have generated a pair..." makes it sound like I just ran an RSA command. shudder

+ Make the URL's less horrendous. Try to create unique combinations of words and numbers, perhaps even using a fun words dictionary: ex: http://InviteUp.com/i/party-on-330/ instead of http://InviteUp.com/i/yfncxgerht -- hey, someone might even remember it or be willing to put it on a flier.

+ I'm sure you'll get to this, but spend 10 minutes and apply some color before you show it to too many folks--maybe theme it according to the time of year.

Overall, I really like the speed and simplicity. Great job.
I always thought programmers were more prestige- or interest-oriented than money-oriented. This would help explain why pay is not as proportional as in other industries.

J. Random programmer who works at Do-No-Evil Geek-owned Company works on software that millions of normal people will use, but gets paid 40k, is much better off than J. Random programmer who works for Enterprise Software Factory who gets paid 40k and has to wear a tie and work in a cubicle on software 20 people may really give a crap about.

You will see the same skewed numbers at work in the video games industry, where employers know they can pay you barely anything for the right to wear whatever you want to work and work on something cool that people care about.
Note that if you cut and paste Alex's .ackrc (at least in Firefox 3), you'll get one leading whitespace character on each line. This will cause problems if you don't notice it. :)
Part of the problem is that people rarely hire someone to be creative. They hire because they have a distinct need. I think it was 37Signals that referred to this as "the tyranny of the client."

I've always performed better when I had wide latitude, but this is difficult to pull off in "the real world." In college and especially grad school, I could get out of all kinds of exams and assignments by suggesting a different project to a professor. They'd get interested and say "sure, do that instead."

Thing is, it really didn't cost them anything. Giving a student an "A" even though he didn't do the assigned homework is, of course, very different from cutting a programmer a check even though he didn't complete the assigned project.

In general, I'd figure employers are looking for the 10X productivity, whereas investors are looking for the creativity.

You have to live an edgier life to get to be creative. The closest thing I've heard in the corporate world is Google's 20% thing. There are other avenues as well: I worked a while at Sun, and I managed to get a couple of projects accepted well enough that they became my full time job.
Exactly what power does the CEO hold over the board of directors (most of whom are independently wealthy anyway)?

They treat the CEO well because he's their buddy.