skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Replace "engineers" here with occupation x, and this statement will be true from the viewpoint of every x in the world.

I have been in companies where engineers with questionable managerial/leadership skills were elevated to top positions. The results weren't pretty.
Shopping cart zoom UI
Trying to be private in JavaScript
Compared to other profs. From his homepage:

"First I am interested in why people tend to have overly favorable and objectively indefensible views of their own abilities, talents, and moral character. For example, a full 94% of college professors state that they do "above average" work, although it is statistically impossible for virtually everybody to be above average."

http://www.psych.cornell.edu/people/Faculty/dad6
Looks vaguely like Tcl, which is, of course, a prefix notation language itself.
Keep your old boss happy (i.e. dont just quit to start a startup).

If mine goes down the pan I still have my old job (within reason) to go back to (in point of fact I am still working there almost full time, but the points stands :D).
If rule-based NLP is what he's truly referring to, he is actually very much on the money. Rule-based NLP gets too complicated too quickly and is useless when analyzing a language other than the target language or analyzing a piece of text that is poorly-formed (bad grammar/spelling) or heavily peppered with loan words and loan constructions.

Much like how Good Old-Fashioned AI has proven to be cumbersome and non-analogous to how biological brains actually work, rule-based NLP is flawed at its core. Statistical NLP has proven to be much more powerful, extensible, and tolerant to near-misses.
Constant Gateway
I didn't misinterpret.

"Dumb people don't know they are dumb" is an idea I think most of us hold (or held before reading this). [insert reference to pg essay/xkcd here]. This article discusses that idea.

The second sentence of the title suggests there is more (or less) to it than we previously thought.

A more accurate title ("All are skill unaware") would be harder to mentally classify. I thought the idea in the blog post was important enough that a small amount of inaccuracy was justified.
pseudoscience is the worst kind of "science".

its amazing how graphs and pretty rhetoric trick uneducated readers.

see: current HN post #1 -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=366857
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Discusses accessory needs for the T-Mobile G1. Includes memory cards, chargers, screen protectors, stylus pen, bluetooth, mounts, kits, skins, cases, headphones
I think your analysis is way off. The problems you cite are not problems of size but of population density. And I would not think that anybody in their right mind would argue that the cure for Africa's many problems is more population

You cite length of borders as an issue. Borders grow as the square root of the size of a country, and if we assume that population & resources grow linearly with the area of a country, securing borders is actually easier for big countries.

The cost of having a strong enough security forces and of building adequate transport infrastructure should not depend on the size of the countries, but on the population density -- when expressed as percentage of GDP.

Africa's population density is not exceptional in any way:
Africa: 30 person per km^2 (and this includes the Sahara where basically nobody lives -- almost a third of Africa)
South America: 21
USA: 31
Mexico: 55
Twitter: where tempests find teapots
Liberate OpenPoker
I'm trying to exit the poker business and raise money for my new startup, one I truly believe in!
allowing smart people creative freedom seems to solve so many problems that it blows my mind its not more common.

as far as i can tell, thats the thesis behind google's 20% time. i think its even cooler that Honda encourages this behavior and that system is so intrinsic to their culture that they don't even use it as a major selling point to potential employees. just business as usual.

innovation seems to be so rarely rewarded in stiff corporate environments and thats a damn shame.
@brusgfire: If you mix these 6 pre-defined widths for columns you will have many many more combinations.
Another fun fact that impressed me:
If you dumped all the people of the world in Texas, it will have the same population density as New York city.
First law on holes - when you're in one, stop digging!

- Denis Healey
Article misses the biggest drawback: Windows spends a lot of system resources operating a GUI that is entirely unnecessary for a web server or file server. Windows is monolithic, all or nothing, its GUI always has to be installed and running. UNIX started as a server and GUI parts were added later. Windows started as a GUI and network services were an after thought.
Next time, please don't inject bias in the headline. The title should have been "Overcoming Bias: All Are Skill Unaware." Luckily, on this site we have comment sections for each article where we can...comment.
A GUI that's doing nothing because no-one's logged in at the console consumes a trivial amount of system resources on any even semi-modern system.
I like Mark's introduction to caching, a bit more detailed, without pictures: http://www.mnot.net/cache_docs/
Here's a map for those who, like me, found your description hard to visualise: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Africa-regions.png
I totally agree with this, and the reason is simple: my US friends often fail to get the dripping sarcasm of my UK ones, so I don't expect a software package to.

From a practical perspective, it's remarkable how often you can cheat your way out of not needing NLP. Google is in a way a prime example of that.
E-Cracker (9.0, 10.0, 11.0) and facebook cracker team evaiding the law
Hello folks,

I am an Penetration tester that works for a small company based in London UK and I just wanted to discuss something that my assosiate was telling me earlier this morning as it is a great concern to most people.

The so called "E-Cracker" team lead my Programmer/hacker "System Error" the once leader of the formidable "Hackers Paradise" crew ( http://hackersparadise.synthasite.com ) who "supposedly" ended his hacking career in early 2008 amongst other members have secretly re-united and creating very dangerouse software that is being sold to the public.

To mention some of them are, E-Cracker 9.0, 10.0, 11.0 pro edition and Facebook cracker which are being sold to the public cheaply.., my assosiate purchased E-Cracker 10.0 from on of there websites and he said he successfully cracked around 10 googlemail accounts and 19 hotmail accounts within three hours of testing on our test accounts.

This is an extremely high risk for all sorts of things like social engineering, Steeling identities and bank account information etc and is being sold to the public for (I think he said £28). Since these tools have come out google, yahoo and hotmail have employed approx 544 more IT Security staff but still these tools work against their efforts, they use free domain sites like http://ecracker.weebly.com/ and I have repoted them (there are many sites they use) but because of the legal disclamer saying "This tool is for ethical use only, we will not be held accountable for your meliciouse actions etc) they wont close the site as they say they are not breaking the law!

This has been reported to the cyber crime division and I am sure the Hacker/Programmer Systemerror ( 5y573m.3rr0r@gmail.com ) and the rest of his team are on the run, but what do we do in the meantime? this security risk is a new level high and it seem's nothing has been done about it.
yeah, I can't tell some words apart. Hooked on phonics phucked me up.

I also had speech disorders and couldn't talk so others understood me till I was four. There are still some words I never say right. I could give a shit. I lost enough sleep over it.

Are you one of the idiots who thinks spelling indicates intelligence? All U do correcting otherz is show how 1950s yur thinking iz.
There is a sort of government like that, it's called technocracy, "scientific government". That is where bureacracy comes from, you know, nowadays it's a term of contempt but once, it was the pinnacle of scientific management and government. The EU is a good example of a technocracy, while there is an elected component, all the real power is in the hands of appointed officials. China is another technocracy. Judge for yourself how well that works.
i think there are still plenty of fun things to find in stock market data. most quants are looking at the same problem. i play with market data a lot and you'd be amazed how uneducated the general public seems to be.

also, i second ntoshev's recommendations for netflix prize -ish applications. collaborative filtering/clustering seems to be an inadequate science at best as far as i can tell.
Looked for comparisons on this vs YUI css , couldn't find many.......doesn't malo mean bad in spanish? :)
Get a globe.
That occured to me, too, but is it really necessary? Also, will a graduate program lead to practical applications?
Dammit. Upvoted because it's near the lunch hour...
this is phenomenal. i hate this blog in general, but this was a good post, and i think it aptly describes America's consumption problem.

Americans consume for fun instead of necessity.

The "shopping as an outlet for women" idea has never made sense to me. It seems to me that some people shop not even because they enjoy OWNING the items they buy, but because they enjoy BUYING the items they buy.

Retail industry's dream come true.
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Hackers have always had these sort of tools, and so long as they hold that disclaimer it's legal. It's the whole reason I had a sticker in college that said 'Coding is not a crime.'

The common comparison being drawn between the software and guns. Do we come down on the gun manufacturers or the people who use the guns?

Legally the responsibility falls on the person who uses the software and not on the software maker so long as they say they do not condone the illegal use of it.

As to what we do, we encourage our users to make secure passwords. Or employ some more unusual security measures.

A few months ago I saw a script that used a photo for login. You clicked in four places on the image and then when you wanted to login you entered your username and repeated the four clicks as your login. This obviously has some security issues of its own, but it's a novel security feature and one that provides for more options.

Unfortunately though the game between lock makers and lock pickers will continue ad infinitum, the only true security comes through obscurity.
I must have played the demo to Mirror's Edge 50 times.

Proprioception (wow, that's actually in the spell checker) has been up and coming in video games for some time now. One of the first games to really pursue it was Thief 3, with it's "body awareness" system. When playing in the first-person perspective your 3d avatar is still being rendered, and you see your body in motion as you try to stealth your way through dimly lit alleys and try to get the drop on guards. Assassin's Creed also had a fantastic sense of "realness" to your body motion. It was played in the 3rd-person, but the rock-solid interaction between your very acrobatic character and the environment was the major selling point of the game to me.

A good friend of mine has a very difficult time with first-person games. I remember that he would have to not watch when others were playing them. The feeling of lack of control led to him becoming very nauseous. When he was playing though he had no trouble as long as he disabled the popular "head bobbing camera" features. I personally never had any problem with either situation - but I also can read in a moving vehicle and never get motion-sick, so maybe I'm an aberration.

What blows me away about Mirror's Edge is how effective it is at simulating this sense of self. When I'm running along and leap across a 20-foot void between buildings and tuck into a roll when I land, I see my arms and legs curl up and see the perspective do a slightly off-kilter 360 as I pull my neck in. Amazingly, this is entirely non-disorienting. I know exactly where the terrain lies when I get up and keep running along at top speed. It's exhilarating. Doing a wall run into a jump kicking off vertically to land on the roof a floor up involves two 180-degree snap turns and yet I feel in control of myself the entire way up. Fantastic. Jumping off of a building into a rolling landing and then doing a flying kick to disarm a guard is an absolutely fluid motion. And my arms and legs are all in their proper place. The game developers nailed the sense of place and person in this game.

In real life I'm pretty awkward. Just... ungainly. In role-playing terms I'd have high dexterity but low agility - fine motor coordination comes much more naturally to me. I think that this imbalance is part of why Mirror's Edge appeals to me so much. It allows me to take part in actions that are otherwise unavailable to me. That's part of the allure of video games, and even all fiction. It's the opportunity to step into someone else's split-toed running shoes.

If you get the chance, try playing Mirror's Edge. I know that I will be buying a copy when it comes out on Tuesday.
MakeFive (YC 09 rejects) add nifty stuff 
Hi all,

We were aiming for a placement in the spring session of YC, but alas, were rejected. :-(

So, now that we've gotten over the fact that we won't have tans in the spring, we're back to slogging away in rainy Vancouver. (Sigh.) It would have been awesome to take part in YC, but we're still pretty excited about where this is going.

We went live with an updated version of MakeFive last week, and I thought I'd let you guys know. If you have a chance, take a boo. We'd welcome any new members and (of course) would appreciate any feedback you might like to share! It's here: http://www.makefive.com

All the best with your projects!

Eric
"so much noise from the kids"

Rich Hickey has recorded several hours of video describing Clojure in comprehensive detail from talks at various user groups and such. I really don't understand how it is so hard to ignore the "noise from the kids" and get the information you need to decide if you want to use Clojure or not. Are you implying that the kids will take the language in the direction they want it to go? I very much doubt that. Mr. Hickey seems very committed to his language and I don't see any indication that he might let go of the reins any time soon. One of the benefits of the benevolent dictator model.

Distinctions with Common Lisp are certainly rational reasons for choosing CL over Clojure, though. For myself, the easy availability of Java libraries trumps whatever else I might like about CL. I work at a university and take classes part time, and even in this environment there is a Java library for pretty much everything. The one time I tried to get a CL library working on SBCL that was developed for LispWorks, I suddenly had to understand pretty intimately almost everything about those two dialects on a deep level if I were to have any chance of porting it over. It was a pretty terrifying experience.

I definitely respect that you have a different set of priorities and opinions about why Common Lisp is best for you. But I remain unconvinced by your arguments referencing the Clojure community. I'm guessing that's where we'll agree to disagree.
As a map nut I take this opportunity to plug the Winkel-Tripel projection that National Geographic chose ten years ago. It's quite beautifully balanced despite being neither equal-area nor equal-angle:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Winkel-tripel-projection....
nearer dinner time here :)
I would argue that the (overcomingbias.com) after the link is fine to convey what blog the article is on, and the title should just be "All Are Skill Unaware".

But that's just a nit, and I do generally prefer a poster-bias-free headline.
I've done this in the past (not interested). Make sure that you define (and follow) a solid change management process between you and the admin. Two people making random changes to a server, without good communications and logging between them, is a great recipe for frustration and downtime.
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How to Permanently Delete Data from Your Hard Drive
There are people who do this, I'd suggest you start a thread at Web Hosting Talk if you want to get some recommendations.
This is my favorite Honda ad of all time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2VCfOC69jc

Lots of neat innovative processes/thinking coming out of Japanese carmakers, I wonder how GM, etc. went down the unproductivity path...
Post Religion anti indoctrination memetic innoculation is Kids saying:

Jesus Christ is maybe the son of god.
Allah is God, maybe, and maybe mohommed was his prophet.
Maybe you should kill Buddha on the path if you meet him.
Maybe the world will change in 2012.
Maybe the pope is the rock Christ built his church on.
Maybe there is no God.
Maybe earth has a soul and we are all parts of it as our neurons are parts of our brain.
Maybe there was a virgin birth.

And then learning how to repeat any word the same way they chant "Allah" or "ohm" and get the same neurological effect.
Great interview, I enjoyed both Blink and Tipping Point.

However, I bristle at this:
WSJ: Do you worry that you extrapolate too much from too little?
MG: No. It's better to err on the side of over-extrapolation.

I definitely disagree. Overextrapolation is a problem in our society. People try so hard to find signal where there's only noise, then find some conclusion and pass it as fact. Eventually someone of consequence believes it and it ultimately pollutes the information landscape.

Most people don't understand science or statistics, so it frightens me that spurious correlations (with terrible r^2 values) seem to become new "facts".

I used to work in a genome sequencing lab. DNA has lots of secrets for us to uncover. DNA might contain clues for discovering genes related to diseases like Alzheimers. One might extrapolate that genetic code contains the possibility of understanding or even curing some disease. The problem is thats a dangerous extrapolation and when it becomes commonplace to believe that human genome research can rid the world of disease (which some people somehow subscribe to), we've overstepped some boundaries.

Overextrapolation, as a rule, is not the way to go.
Indeed. Establishing a source code repository and insisting on its use for all configuration files can also be worthwhile.
Flagged for the use of "(YC 09 rejects)" in the title -- labelling a company as a YC reject is misleading, because it implies a value judgement which wasn't made ("not accepted" is not a synonym for "rejected").
Except for South Africa of course, the wealthiest country on the continent.
My wife was all atwitter about this too. Good for them.
Oops, the extra title bit must be my SEO talking :^)
> Arguing over who spends more time keeping up to date is pointless.

Agreed! but that wasn't what vaksel was arguing. He argued that CS requires "constant refreshes", unlike "pretty much any other job".

I'm simply arguing that the medical field, at least, requires just as much "refreshing" of skill as CS does.

(re the specific example of doctors, the niceness of the places where they get certified is utterly irrelevant, as indeed are generally their certifications. It requires a lot of continuing education to be a doctor, and it also requires a lot of expensive, worthless certifications.)
That's why I submitted it.
Mark Cuban Charged w/ Insider Trading Over Sale of Mamma.com
Saw it on WSJ today - can't find link though. Saw this as backstory: http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3376981
It depends on your setup. The game itself already has a pretty wide FOV. I'm playing on a 73" widescreen TV and the sense of immersion is impressive.
Interestingly, the only country I can think of off the top of my head with an engineer "in charge" is Iran. I don't think Dr Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a great example of how a country should be run.
OK - I'll try that now thanks, HN is usually my first port of call.
Anecdotal ramblings, spotty biochemistry, and a few fuzz charts. Edward Tufte would make a poignant chart describing the aneurysm he'd get from reading this.

That being said, I anecdotally agree with the thesis: Drink coffee to improve your natural strengths instead of trying to BigPharma more hours into the day.
if we assume that population & resources grow linearly with the area of a country

Why would you assume that?

Africa's population density is not exceptional in any way

But Earth's population density is off the chart compared to other planets. Africa is too big to generalize. The USA has both New York City and Wyoming. Population and economic value are intensely concentrated in cities, so being big or small doesn't matter. Having productive cities does.
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[Ask YC] - Licensing opinion
What am I trying to achieve.

I am trying to sell licenses for code which solves a common pain point in web-application development. I want to

1. Allow open source applications to use it in the webapp without paying me.

2. Charge a license fee for non OS applications.

How can I license to achieve this? Would QPL be a good license for use here?
Oh, so that's what it was. I read the entire article to try and figure out what NLP meant, and still didn't figure it out.
The "HP Way" used to be somewhat like this, didn't it?
You are right. It took me a little bit to actually understand the process. This is actually very smart! Thanks for this, I'll look at incorporating this into my ongoing projects and see how it works out.
I'm sure it's not necessary. You haven't said why you want to learn statistics. Is it just for fun, or do you have some eventual practical application in mind?

Personally, I just learn the bits I need, as I need them.
So that's it? you think despite all that has been done the police won't have a leg to stand on?

One of our pen-testers is an experienced software developer, and he said he's scene some of this "System error's" tools when the site was open and some open source ones like SynGUI (Denial of Service tool), TrojanGUI, viruses etc and he said he's a very talented programmer in C, C++ and Java, he is highly skilled in math, Physics, Artificial intelligence, Graphics, Game development, networking and he said he would imagine he's done the CEH and CISSP course by his knowledge so he's a pretty dangerouse cyber criminal - the police should catch him before him and his freinds do more major damage to something??

I understand that it's the user who uses the software are responsible for their own actions, but isn't it time that we make hacking tools illegal? or atleast make it for personal use only and with strict rules like "they can't be sold or distributed to the public"? or maybe something like "You have to have a license to create such software"?

Just because their is a disclaimer saying that it shouldn't be used meliciously, I think we all know that it will be and thus it should be removed, I am going to speak about this tommorow in our conference as this can not be dismissed so easily.

Does anyone know anymore about this Systemerror guy and the people he works with?

I would like more info as it may help me do something about it.
In isolation, your title conveys the opposite of the article's meaning. If you didn't misinterpret, then you made a very poor editorial choice... As others have pointed out, it's safer to not change the title - or, if you feel you must, at least use a verbatim quote from near the top of the article. In this case, there is no such suitable quote, so just use the title.
An Electric Car Loses Its Juice