skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An emotional reaction to this kind of realism is understandable considering how much people want to believe they can be be great at anything.

But the truth is that innate differences matter not just in athletics, but in any endeavor. Even the famous Polgar sisters you mention both trailed men who had later starts and less formal early training for their entire careers. UK marathoner Paula Radcliffe's career is similar in many respects.

In general, the "purer" an endeavor is the more decisive innate differences are. By this I mean that innate differences will matter more for runners than for basketball players, more for speed skaters than hockey players, more for mathematicians than for hedge fund quants, etc...

But there is a great deal of evidence that innate differences create uncrossable chasms in skills far outside of athletics.

Music: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1209186.stm

Motor Skills: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1209186.stm

IQ & Cortical Thickening: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/30/science/30brain.html?_r=1

Language: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/05/050517063228.ht...

Facial recognition: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/01/face-recognition/

None of this means that willpower doesn't matter. Of course it does. However, at least accepting the reality that we don't all have the exact same potential at every pursuit can be beneficial. For one thing, it's signal not to heavily invest in a tournament-style career, such as modelling or concert violin playing, unless you have a clear aptitude. Even for more forgiving careers, where merely being competent is enough to make a good living, it's rational to choose a career that aligns with your natural talents. Why put X amount of effort to be in the 70th percentile of some field when the same amount of effort would make you 90th percentile in another comparably in-demand field? Most people are happier doing what they're good at.
Here's the thing. "You can do anything" is obviously bullshit if you take it too literally. It's trivial to spend your time thinking of loads of counterexamples, especially if you have that engineer knack of being painfully logical.

I think people mean it as shorthand for "You can do amazing things if you put your mind to it," and damn it, there's an awful lot of truth to that.
Because they had an awful quarter from an EPS perspective. Their revenue growth increased. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with this.
Yeah, I understand ways to work around it.. it's more of why isn't it a feature? In SugarSync, Carbonite and Moxy I can quite literally do:

right click -> Sync Folder (or some variation thereof)

and it just works.
Hey, I just wrote a post about how I learned to make websites: http://nickmudge.info/index.php?post=145
Google doodle me on my birthday, thank you Google.
i think they may have waited too long,
facebook in my opinion is more or less a product,
not a company ...
you know how we compare g+ to facebook, now google is company, they made g+ which may or may not be big
but for google its just one more product they made

and products have a life cycles ... and its definitely
not the growth cycle for facebook anymore, i think they are in maturity now ... and i think they should have went for IPO while still in growth

and they definitely need to start making new products ... they need to innovate or die! simple and basic, but i believe correct
I'm reasonably sure that this used to be the case but hasn't for a good while. I know at some point Box2D used a sort-and-prune algorithm but they may have moved on to quadtrees or space-filling curves by now. You could also try Chipmunk which provides several collision recipes too, and may be faster for lots of similarly-sized objects. And you can always ignore either of them for collisions and take it as a learning experience to implement different algorithms yourself.

But you really need to just make it and see. Even a naive n^2 algorithm will be fine, for small values of n. If you have a lot of objects though you might even be forced into using a 3D engine and making the GPU do some work. Once you're in the process of making your game you'll be more aware of what specific optimizations you can make (such as sprite groups).
If a drop of the bucket is a years worth of non-GAAP profit, I guess you're right.
Assuming they use straight up salted sha256, my five year old core2 laptop does at least 10,000 per second, per core. They could check every user for the top 10k passwords for a few hundred bucks of EC2 time.
Thank god for the cash.
Firefox 14.0.1, Windows 7 x64. Grey line is visible for a split second as page loads then disappears. EDIT: well now this is bizarre - it disappears and reappears as I scroll.
That's awesome, fascinating stuff - thank you!
The "Groupon is a giant Ponzi scheme" conventional wisdom slingers of HN haven't been proven right about anything.
If you do number one, please for the sake of geekiness make the una corda pedal do something with the computer's volume.
Mozilla is actually looking to hire somebody to work on platform integration on OSX: http://careers.mozilla.org/en-US/position/oBuTVfwD
I'm on Firefox 15, Windows 8 preview x64. Gray line stays visible. Odd.
Why does everyone always reduce everything I say on here to a simplistic strawman?

I didn't say untrained engineer > doctor

I said, untrained engineer > most sundry health problems, doctor > untrained engineer for everything else.

Stop wasting peoples' time with strawmen and be more charitable to their intellect.
From the FAQ Under 'Why Facebook [for logins]?' "We're building the Digg for 2012" - I get that like 1/13 people on the planet are on Facebook, but what about the other 12? Twitter? Or even shudder Google?

My lawd man, build your own. You restricted yourself to 6 weeks, not users.
Cheap fiber? I'm pretty sure Google's prices are not far off from Fios with a smaller channel lineup.
I'm a fan of the Dan Plan. Pretty cool idea. You should check it out: http://thedanplan.com/
from the WSJ today, Facebooks forward PE is 45, and trailing is 81.

http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2012/07/31/tweet-this-j-c-pe...

"
Tweet this: Facebook shares have been pushed down so far, so fast, that they now cost less than J.C. Penney shares. J.C. Penney shares right now are around $22.55, Facebook shares are around $21.75.

Now we know what you’re going to say: look at the valuations, dummy! (There, we saved you the trouble.) J.C. Penney’s PE (forward, one-year) is about 18. Facebook’s is 45 (and it’s trailing PE is 81). Plus, J.C. Penney has about 219 million shares outstanding; Facebook has 2.1 billion.
"
> A single, unqualified anecdote out of a few million Galaxy Tab

That was not a single anecdote, that was a rollup of return reasons. Quoting Samsung's own document:

"The most common pattern is that a customer returns the product which was purchased because the customer thought it was an Apple iPad 2."

Also, places like BestBuy often display things out of the box, and parents often buy the things their kids showed them.

Consider:

"Mom, buy me this," showing Mom an iPad.

Mom gets to the store, and sees these on display:

http://cdn.redmondpie.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/default...

Mom buys the one on the right. If you really think that confusion is so far fetched, you are not the typical Best Buy customer.

As this article[1] says, "There’s little doubt those of us familiar with techie gadgets aren’t going to mistake a Galaxy Tab for an iPad, it’s of little surprise plenty of customers have been fooled, and although Samsung claims to have shipped many millions of units of the slate, it’s currently unknown just how many of those were sold."

1. http://www.redmondpie.com/best-buy-galaxy-tab-buyers-thought...
Ah, so this was the surprise they were talking about. Nice.
That he's annoyed by a platitude from an athlete in a puff-piece interview.
Literally, one line of code? That's a pretty amazing claim. How familiar are you with Google's code?
Again, feel free to email me. I will look around. Last time I was in Lombok the internet connections weren't so good, but that was 8 years ago, and I would expect that there are major improvements.
In general, it is highly inappropriate to title yourself a scientist without a PhD. A 20 year old undergraduate with an enthusiasm is not a biologist. You claim to hate the dilution of the title, yet have upgraded yourself without earning it by either mastery produced via a doctorate or via a proven professional track record.

Maybe you should consider titling yourself software engineer or program developer until you've produced something that shows mastery to the world.
Twitter Stats and Bots
Ping Golf Bgas
Bullshit is beautiful. I like that :)
There is definitely something to being too dumb or optimistic to realize that what you're trying to do is much harder than you thought. Most entrepreneurs have encountered this.
Cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Vr3hZXr...
It would be useful info to know what triggered their email.
A password as secure as my phone is not promising; T-Mobible was recently happy to reset my lost PIN by having me give the last four digits of any phone number I'd dialled in the last 23 hours. I don't really think it's as useful two-factor because the token is only as secure as another company's password system. (Aside from the problems that you have to have a Google Account and a smartphone.)

I looked into this recently when Dreamhost launched google-authenticator instead of two-factor auth. Disappointing.
right, I'm familiar with sapir-whorf...but the parent comment here specifically refers to sapir-whorf as "mumbo-jumbo". Seems like the linguists still aren't keen on it.
http://imgur.com/dFXFa

There is a grey line in frames 1 and 3 but not in 2.
I had no idea this was a New Zealand founded company until I saw this as news on the NZ Herald website.

Great to see a Kiwi tech startup seeing this kind of success!
Publish/Subscribe Systems
> Would they still subsidize phones?

Is subsidizing phones actually a good idea?

To me, it is one features of the US mobile phone market that looks particularly unhealthy. For instance, the subsidy is biggest reason cellular networks can start messing around with what you can and can't run on your phone in the first place. Otherwise, if you didn't like how your carrier crippled your phone, you'd wouldn't buy your phone from them (at least for AT&T and T-Mobile, though I suspect competitive pressure would drag Verizon, Sprint and the rest along, for the most part).
Want to build the next Sparrow? Streak (YC S11) is looking for mobile engineers
We’re a YC summer 2011 company working on email. We’re two technical co-founders looking to bring on our first engineering hire. We can’t build features fast enough to keep up with users’ demands and our growth. That’s where you come in - we need someone who likes building product, pushing code everyday and making our service FAST.

* We believe every business process (sales, bug tracking, hiring, customer support, etc.) should be done using email - we just need two things:
a)metadata inside email
b)better email clients that understand this higher level of abstraction

* We’ve built V1 of our webapp on top of Gmail, but users are clamoring for mobile clients as well. We can’t just build on top of mail.app or android’s gmail - so we’re building a full blown email client (that’s where you come in) + streak functionality in native apps

* You’ll own the entire native app but work closely with a designer and the founders

* You’ll come up with a different mail + streak experience for mobile - not just a port of the web apps

Obviously:

- Great compensation and real ownership (both equity and over the product)

- We’ll make your life easier. Our benefits package is amazing

- We’re very well funded by elite silicon valley investors

Our requirements:

- you are intellectually curious

- you have built native mobile apps (iOS or Android) before

Email us at first@streak.com if you are interested and please include any mobile apps you’ve built in the past.
To be honest, people wouldn't pursue or even try swimming if they weren't predisposed to.
You implicitly know if you can progress to a certain level when you start.

YES some people have the capability and DO NOT try. Maybe the message works for them. But for the VAST majority that's not the case.

Following that logic we'd (almost) all be champions by now.

But then you go with "you may find the goal is out of reach". That's the freaking point of the article. Can't have it both ways.
Show HN: Dropbox organizer SortMyBox now integrates with Box
I can't quite make out the picture in your link, but if it is the same shirt that I had years ago, the plane is upside-down, headed for the ground, and in a flat spin. As my uncle said, "it certainly is a bad attitude."
"[D]umbest blog post I've read in a while" isn't very constructive, but it's not an attack on the entire blog either, just on that particular post.
Here's what Scott Forstall said:

“We’re unifying your phone number and your Apple ID,” said iOS guru Scott Forstall at WWDC today. “So if someone calls you on your phone number with a FaceTime call, you can answer the call on your iPad or even your Mac. And we’re doing the exact same thing with iMessage.”

I think you need iOS 6 to set it up, but clearly it will work on OS X afterwards.
I received it on two dropbox accounts. Different password on both. In fact I've never used the same password twice in my life.
Moreover, no one is seriously questioning the long-term stability of Amazon or its revenue model. A stark contrast with the situation Facebook finds itself in.
One of the more glaring security issues with Dropbox, is the way they are handling 3rd party integration.

Giving full access to some random new startup or app is NOT cool. Sure I don't have to, but people also like to try new stuff, and the integration is half the reason for using cloud services in the first place.

In fact this really applies to all 'platform' plays facebook, linkedin etc. Rather request minimum priviledges to inter-operate or authenticate, rather than sweeping authorizations.
No offence but your 'guess' is not very useful.

e: really, is downvoting appropriate here? I can quite easily speculate that i don't think the nexus Q sounds that great (and thats what i'd put my money on), but the electronics exist, and cheap enough, to allow it to potentially sound fantastic. I was hoping someone might have some first hand experience to get better than speculation.
The only compelling feature for me on this is the Skype integration. I would love to use GTalk/Hangout if only more people use it.
Mind telling us why we got the email? Since I never used the same password twice your official explanation is bullshit. It's looking more like you have no idea what someone did on your network so you just blasted out a mass email and forced people to change their password.
Not to mention reduced carbon emissions if all said cars were, say, electric.

I kept thinking of _The Fifth Element_ while reading your comment. Except instead of flying cars, HOV lanes packed tightly together carrying thousands of passengers traveling safely at 90 MPH. Saving emissions, being efficient. I can see it happening.
Essentially, excel is a functional language, without the ability for recursion. If there were a built in array datatype, that'd be possible. There's a few papers floating around explaining an integration between Haskell and excel, described in some places as hsExcel, but I haven't seen a working copy.
Isn't this just the various banks pulling capital back out? They invested lots of money in the days after the IPO to keep the price close to the target (to avoid spooking investors).

The strategy behind the high dollar IPO was to maximize the return to the early investors who wanted to cash out and who were influential in the IPO negotiations.

The investment banks look at the IPO price in terms of the risk that the sell side of the firm will look bad. Once sufficient time has passed nobody assumes the bank had anything to do with propping up the price weeks after the IPO, when in fact it has lots of control over this.

Also, the relationship between share price and marginal supply and demand is by no means likely to be linear.
According to company cofounder Anand Kulkarni, the aim is to get the crowd of workers to "behave much more like an automatic resource than like individual and unreliable human beings."

Rationally, this makes sense. Emotionally, I find it repulsive. I'm not sure which impulse is stronger.

I feel like if I were involved in this company, I'd have to focus to some extent on providing a leg up to people in developing countries. Turning people into (potentially miserable) cogs in a machine would weigh on me after a while.
Same for me on Firefox 14 on 10.8, both examples look the same.
Could you elaborate on this point?
I think Google may have stolen Steve Jobs reality distortion field if you seriously think Google is the only company making a serious go at all three of those.
I was setting up my wife's account for youtube and accidentally put today's date in for her birthdate. I was immediately locked out and had to pay a fee to get her email back.
While Mr Wadwha certainly has every right to express his opinion, I do feel that he frequently casts his opponents in the most negative light possible (in previous articles, he has often used the term "xenophobe"). In this article, he is somewhat kinder: "Detractors insist that there is no engineer shortage and that America should close its doors to foreigners because they take jobs away from citizens."

The US currently takes 1.2 million immigrants legally into the country every year. Many people who object to the H1B visa have absolutely no problem with this - they are just opposed to a specialized visa designed to bring in more engineers when wage growth does not suggest a shortage. This is a long, long way from wanting to "close its doors to foreigners."

Next, Mr Wadhwa claims that "if Bernstein spent any time talking to Silicon Valley executives or reading tech blogs like TechCrunch, he would learn that wages are indeed going up and that there is, in fact, a war for talent. These are already some of the highest paying jobs in the country—with salaries commonly in the six figures."

I find this to be a particularly weak argument. Is Mr Wadhwa saying that we should just take silicon valley executives' word for it, and maybe read some tech blogs? No need to bother with actually looking at or measuring wage growth? I'm also surprised that Mr Wadhwa thinks that "six figures" is particularly impressive in San Francisco or New York, especially considering the high wages available to the "best and brightest" in other fields.
>According to Borthwick, it would have cost “hundreds of thousands per month” to keep the site running on its old platform. Even though the site was state-of-the-art just a few years ago, most of the infrastructure would be considered legacy technology by a modern startup. Because of this, the new Digg team decided to throw away virtually all of the old underpinning of the site in favor of a fresh start. Borthwick wants to rebuild the company and to do so, he says, it’s important to turn it back into startup mode and develop a completely new and modern platform to develop the new Digg on.

Anyone know the tech stack they're using? Don't see anything specific on their website (blog, about, careers).
>I don't think we're that far past doctors just being quacks throwing spaghetti at the proverbial wall. They don't seem to be able to, in any given single case, observe/detect/test for much unless there's an associated infection or physical injury.

>be more charitable to their intellect.

Uh.. ok.
It seems like what you want is a learning resource that is geared towards having the learner building something real. In that case you should try Udacity's CS253(http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs253/CourseRev/apr20...). It's a 7 week course that'll teach you how to build a blog using Python and Google App Engine and the video lectures have been recorded by Steve Huffman, co-founder of Reddit.
If you want to learn LISP, then there is Land of Lisp(http://landoflisp.com/), which teaches you to make games using LISP, and for Python is the free to download Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python(http://inventwithpython.com/)
I know this may be a totally foreign concept to people living in the valley, but a driverless car isn't very interesting to people who can just walk onto a regular, punctual bus or subway service on near every corner.
Hong Kong's first Startup Bootcamp
> llamaseries

Is this a hilarious typo for "monasteries" or is this an actual thing?
Just FYI, Cotendo has real time purging (and has for several years).

Also, your Asian/Australian pricing is ridiculous.
The better way to learn to code is to try teaching. Go through the process of trying to explain what you've already learned to someone else and it will crystallize a lot faster than if you're just mulling it over yourself.

Once you're past the first stage of learning, where you're starting to understand what you don't understand, you can make use of places like StackOverflow either as a reference or as a source of answers now that you know enough to frame a question.

The reason you don't see a lot of visual tutorials is because they're very time consuming to construct and present. Peep Code (https://peepcode.com/) does their best, though, but since this requires a lot of work, they charge for the lessons.
I find the references to "God" (e.g., "...why did God choose to do it that way and not some other way?") to be both distracting and unhelpful working through the text itself. It signals to my brain (possibly incorrectly) that either (1) the author is trying to inject an unwarranted religious idea into an otherwise potentially helpful explanation in a devious way, or (2) the author has sadly mis-chosen a loaded term that doesn't add anything helpful to the explanation at all, and instead detracts from working through it because it creates the nagging question in my head of, "Is he really suggesting that God (whatever that may be in the reader's mind) chose to do this?".

A better option (for just the chosen example) would be: "... why does the Universe do it that way and not some other way?".
Jailbreak tweak enables Nitro JavaScript engine in 3rd party iOS apps ($0.99)
I just read the other day that if you disable the tethering on Sprint's website and only enable it on days that you need it, they actually pro-rate the $29.99/month charge to only the days that you enable or use it. So it comes out to $1/day rather than the whole $30/month. Still haven't confirmed that, but I need to look into it.
What problems get solved during an extreme depth dive? How are they more complex than what other athletes face?
You are probably being too abstract here. What you are saying is true as a general statement, but in Gmail's case, it's big draw was its simple, fast and clean interface that stood as a stark contrast to hotmail and yahoo. The storage it offered was bound to be matched by others soon, but the Ui design was something that could have used incremental feature improvements, not the drastic Web 2.0 treatment it received.

Today's gmail interface is hard to use and is slow. Very arguably a far cry from the perfection it seemed to be in 2004.
Google postpones Nexus Q launch
Bug Out Bag Essentials
The bugout bag, BOB, GO bag, or the 72 hour bag is your best bet in case of a major emergency; mega-quake, super-tsunami, World War III — your standard WSHTF scenario. Here are some essential gear and stuff to put inside your own BoB.
That was Techcrunch's characterization of it, not a direct quote from Borthwick or anyone at Betaworks.