skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I haven't read the book, but there is a pretty good TED talk by him based on the book.
http://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_mcdougall_are_we_born_t...
Facebook cracks down on fake "Likes"
No worries, good luck!
Group Theory and the Rubik’s Cube
> I don't know that we'll ever see card stacks and the like in Android

I think ICS's Recent Apps view and Chrome's card-like tab switching show that Google is (cautiously?) approaching a card stack UI.
Oracle releases patches for Java vulnerability CVE-2012-4681 | The Hacker News
Yes, the sigils can make Perl code look noisy, especially as Perl uses curly braces and semicolons too. However, they do have a couple of nice benefits: firstly, they make variable interpolation easier (and less noisy!) than in other languages like Ruby and Python. Secondly, sigils make it easy to see what kind of data you are dealing with, obviating the need to scroll through your program to the variable declaration.
The downvotes are unfortunate, because you're absolutely right. Intelligence has an associated cost. Natural selection will only spread "intelligence genes" if the benefit outweighs the cost. In pre-modern societies, this was likely not the case. "Social intelligence" was likely much more useful than abstract reasoning ability.

Even today, the Einsteins and Teslas don't do better in the mating game than the Brad Pitts and Kobe Bryants (likely much worse).

Edit: it would be interesting if HN handles were attached to downvotes. People would likely think twice before knee-jerk downvoting if they couldn't do it anonymously.
There is a lot of selection bias there. 9 out of 10 people I see day-to-day make more than twice the per-capita median income. That isn't evidence that the median income is incorrectly computed.
Not really sure if he means the microprocessor/CPU or whatever technology processes contact on a multitouch screen.
I have no idea who they are in real life, so I can't say.

The deleted comment was not written by any of them.
For the real-time data synchronization part, try dropping dotCloud JS into your Django app: http://js.dotcloud.com

It doesn't do live templating, though.
It will be interesting to see what Valve _recommends_ as their preferred Linux distribution and even more so if they roll their own.
U.S. Census: "Race" has "social definition" and isn't anthropology or genetics
Malware Attack on 2nd Largest Liquefied Natural Gas Producer
The consumer packaged goods industry generates two TRILLION dollars a year in the US, by selling us things we don't think we need

This is kind of misleading.

We certainly do need a substantial portion of that two trillion dollars worth of consumer packaged goods.

Perhaps not all of it - the electric powered corn buttering gadget is not a "fundamental need" - but things like kleenex, towels, soap are pretty basic, no?
As "Brave New World" author Aldous Huxley said of the human condition before his death "..try to be a little kinder"
Amazing how lazy wireless companies are. http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/14/3/033001/article
Shouldn't Microsoft be getting the props in this case? Samsung makes great displays (they make the MBPr display too) but the OS is the limiting factor in actually running them at the native resolution.
Here's a fantastic presentation about API design:
http://mollyrocket.com/873
I don't know about "IQ tests seem to be terrible at measuring actual brilliance." - Some of the components of IQ tests are fantastically accurate. I can't read maps, I can't put a monitor back in it's box. And I score very poorly on the pattern assessment components of IQ tests. I guess you might say I'm "mid-to-high level mentally retarded on pattern assessment."

Likewise, I have a friend who is world class _stellar_ at putting Monitors back in complicated styrofoam packing and into boxes (Seriously - his ability in this task is amazing) - and he tests off the chart on the pattern recognition component of IQ tests.

So - I can, based on the admittedly small anecdotal sample of n=2, suggest that there is strong predictive power of at least some elements of the IQ tests.
I'm super interested in this! Any code examples you can point to?
Also, we need to take a larger view of what "intelligence" is. Take the longer view of human history, and we all are probably geniuses. Those intelligence genes have indeed spread across the gene pool. It's just new ones (or new combinations of existing genes) are now showing themselves and need time to prove their fitness.
Unless it's a company that cures cancer over the internet, your startup isn't enriching anyone's life.

There's a lot of room to operate between "curing cancer" and "not enriching anyone's life".
Global economy fix: convince 1210 people to live on $12.10 Million per Year
There are clear, genetic clusters corresponding with what we generally call races.

The fact that some people, mostly from the former European colonies, won't perfectly fit doesn't change that. The fact that this distinction is blurred, emphasized, or altered for political reasons doesn't change that. The fact that outward features, which are often used as proxy for the underlying genetics, can sometimes be misleading doesn't change that.

Also, I don't think "almost all of us" or even most of us wouldn't fit into those clusters. Do you have a source?

I understand that Obama is not exactly technically black; that legal, political or self-identified race may not align with those clusters or even known ancestry but it doesn't invalidate the concept. Just like there are people who are legally blind, and a subgroup who really can't see anything.
I learned perl in the past (I'd rate myself as ~somewhat proficient~, ignoring 'new style perl'), and I like the language. That puts me in a strange place when I talk to friends: I don't know ruby nor python, but do think that perl's a nice language. A strange position to be in, by now.

That said: The do what I mean paragraph kind of reminded me of the Stripe CTF. One of the levels (5?) was vulnerable to pass parameters to a POST handler via query string. In other words: In level 5 in that CTF, if you followed one possible solution, you abused this flexibility.

So .. maybe it's not always a good thing? Including this particular reference in the article?
Here is the blood test for black:

http://www.wired.com/politics/law/magazine/16-01/ps_dna
They'd get more signups (and more of them would be for traditional accounts) if they did some fairly trivial work to make the sign up process sound like it actually created customer value.

Here's their home page: http://www.shopobot.com/

The button to show that modal window is "JOIN NOW" with microcopy "It's free." That microcopy is the best part of the whole experience.

Clicking the JOIN NOW button brings up the modal window:

"Welcome! How would you like to sign up?"

Absolutely nothing here promises benefits to the customers. Consider something like:

Button: "Start Saving Money!"

"Save money when stores change prices. How should we tell you?"

[Login with Facebook] or [Get an email]

microcopy: "We never post to Facebook. Shopobot is totally free. You can stop getting email at any time."

Clicking "Get an email" would bring you to the signup form, currently a DailyCred interstitial, which is (at present) an experience which will not maximize conversion rates, to put it lightly.

https://www.dailycred.com/oauth/authorize?client_id=ceb6f715... <-- don't worry, I won't use that client ID, feel free to click it

That page should:

1) Remind people why they want to sign up for Shopobot

2) Have button copy which suggests value, rather than "Sign Up". Ideally, it should have copy which recalls the scent of the interaction on their page.

3) Continue providing risk-reducers like "free", "we won't spam you", etc.

If you're wondering whether to use DailyCred or roll your own login system, by the way... how much is 20 ~ 40% more users worth to you? Enough to justify the whole hour it will take to roll a login system? Good, thought so. (+)

(+ I'm sort of intrigued by the parts of their offering which do not actually sign up users and log them in. However, it strikes me that bundling them with logins is an exceptionally bad idea, and as you need them you can either implement them ala carte or plug in a provider who would let you keep control over the most important 30 seconds of a customer's relationship with you.)
"Dumb fucks" - Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook users

You can trust Facebook. Why wouldn't you? Facebook is lovely.
I'm always amazed and sceptical of such stories of people carrying a fuckton of money or other precious/confidential stuff on them and then forgetting them in a cab/subway/restaurant. I get uneasy with just three-digit amounts and check almost compulsively if my wallet is still in its place, and they guy manages to forget a briefcase with 600K? Doesn't add up.
There are ways around the fw password, so it's an additional layer against the uninitiated but probably won't help you much and can cause problems for legitimate users.
It's all about figuring out how to combine knowledge to get an answer. Which is also what you use a relational database for so I don't see how you can do one and not the other.

Which is exactly my point, again. It's not that I can't do both. It's that, although both questions take similar intelligence, one of them is phrased in an unfamiliar way. I start off disadvantaged in the former question because my lack of familiarity with what the "correct" answer should look like. With the latter, I know how to begin thinking and answering. Yet, an IQ only provides one of these options so if I got the one I was not familiar with, I would score low. My point is that is not a sign of a lack of intelligence.

Just like saying "no camels means no camels" indicates an understanding of the dumb-but-simple question. Saying "some camels" is the answer I won't accept.

But to understand a question, the premise of it has to make sense to you. For my example, I can understand the question because I'm aware that there is a real solution. In the example from the article, to ask farmers who only know about cities with camels about the camels in a city where there are no camels doesn't make sense to them. It's an unnecessary abstraction and just shows that they haven't experienced a situation rather than that they can't answer a simple question.

To me it's almost as if someone asked me "in a math system where 1 * a is not a, what is 1 * a?" or "what is 2 + 2 for arbitrarily large values of 2?" Simplicity is subjective.
Two For the Road: In Praise of Pair Programming
"did not find any important genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms or copy number variants, and did not replicate genetic variants that had previously been associated with cognitive ability"

It's worth making another point here - just because there is no single gene for a trait does not make in unheritable, and just because a trait is genetic does not mean there is a single gene for it.

Eye color, for example, is clearly a genetic trait, but may be controlled by as many as 16 different genes. Race is also genetic, but really is shorthand for variation in hundreds, maybe thousands of genes.

It's well-established that intelligence is polygenic. That doesn't mean it's not genetic - if everybody had the same genes, ~80% of the variation in intelligence would be eliminated. It also doesn't mean that there's a single genetic switch we can throw to design a master race of human geniuses. It means exactly what it says: that there are some combination of genes that interact together to produce ~70-90% of the variance in the measured quantity that we label "intelligence".
The hardest part about API design is picking the appropriate primitives in the first place. Use cases are relatively easy--somebody has a problem, come up with a solution--but any solution can be expressed in a myriad of different ways. The way that the API designer expresses that solution to the users of the API will impact the way code is written.

Users generally won't understand the implementation of the API, so instead they build a model of how they think the entire system operates. In the process, they make assumptions about performance, side effects, etc. that may be totally incorrect. Good APIs anticipate these assumptions and make them relatively easy to predict with some level of experience, either from elsewhere in the API or from similar APIs.
He is missing one thing a great start-up engineer should have: a great big chunk of equity, preferably all of it.
My wallet is devoid of cash money and I compulsively check my pocket if I'm convinced it feels lighter than it should. All the time.

But I've been mugged before, so am probably a lot more aware.
I don't hate having a single sign on option, but I hate not having more control what data is available to the app.
Only if Q is knowable.
I think the main point is that IQ measures some sort of current fluid intelligence. It doesn't measure other types of intelligence, and most importantly it doesn't measure potential. So the blanket concept of it defining someone's common-understanding-of-"intelligence" is flawed to the extent of it being a pointless or harmful measure in many of cases.
Yea...that's ridiculous!
Really ? I expected the incredibly dumb "Apple patented round corners" meme from somewhere like Engadget not HN.
Sell it as a portable display not a laptop. Give it connectivity via a variety of connectors (not just HDMI). It would be far more useful than an iPad. Keep dreaming, right?
From Facebook's documentation:

"When a user auths your app and you request no additional permissions, your application will have access to only the user's basic information. By default, this includes certain properties of the User object such as id, name, picture, gender, and their locale. Certain connections of the User object such as the Friends connection are also available. If the user has made more of their data public, more information will be available."

Source: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/permissio...
Isn't Meteor written in Node?

Maybe this is an ignorant question -- but how would you integrate it into a Rails app?
Why does it have to be about brilliance. The US armed forces is one of the bigger users of IQ tests and has plenty of data showing higher IQ scores leads to better performance.
I should set up paloal.to with LocalWiki. Too bad I moved out of Palo Alto.
I'd say that this is also where good documentation comes into play. Anyone who is going to be spending a lot of time with your API should be able to fully trust it and eventually have a strong understanding of how the system works by simply looking up things in the documentation.

If you're selling an API though, it's even more important that most users can just drop it in and forget about it. This is how you maximize evaluation to purchase conversions. The implication of this is you need to spend a lot of time thinking hard about what defaults would be best for most users. Of course, you don't always get this right off the bat but the sales and support teams will let you know pretty quickly how it's going after the initial release of a new product.
As a self-trained programmer who cut his chops on Perl, I find it a bit humorous that people complain about reading Perl, while every coding test at a job interview involves some five-way algorithm or other generally-arcane CS concept that CS people spend two years practicing and that the business will never use. Two forms of complexity, one valued much higher within the industry.
Intel hosts Dr. Martin Odersky presenting Scala 2.10
Why would you name this the same thing as a popular iterative map reduce implementation?
Using any single artist as a barometer for library completeness is probably not a great metric.
I know of no other language that has anything like cpantesters.org. Everything that gets uploaded to the CPAN gets tested automatically on a large matrix of Perl versions and host platforms, often within minutes of the upload. Furthermore, the entirety of CPAN is the continuous integration test suite for Perl 5 itself.

Edit to add: I know why this sounded familiar! I had forgotten I wrote about it recently:

http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2012/08/why-i-use-perl-tes...
Which didn't work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNAPrint_Genomics http://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/3008240

It doesn't even pass the smell test. Seriously: would Obama (who's turning into quite the counterexample here) show up "black" or "white" on that test? If the answer isn't "both" (it has to be, as he's almost literally 50/50) then the test can't work. If it is "both", then what meaning did "black" have again as a genetic grouping?

People insist on misinterpreting me here. I'm not saying that it's impossible to tell if someone has ancestry from africa or east asia or wherever. I'm saying that blocking real people (i.e. not members of an isolated subgroup with pure ancestry) up into a "race" like "asian" or (especially) "black", doing studies on them (like an IQ test) and arguing that this is "valid" because those groups are "genetically defined" is wrong. It's bad science. Please stop.
I use Perl for the Turing completeness.
Would love to hear more about that story. I feel that you got lucky they didn't have a gun with them or anything of the sort (unless you don't live in the US ;) ).
This just further proves how disconnected Mark & Friends are from the real world.

In real life, people talk very differently when they're:

- around their friends

- with their family

- with their lover

- in public

- at work

- online

So this "one identity" + "real name policy" + "privacy is dead" nonsense is just disheartening. There will always be a need for humans to keep secrets, to have separate identities, to keep the people in their lives separate, and the topics they talk about separate. "Sign in with facebook" just breaks all those rules.

Not everyone shits and showers with the bathroom door open.
Techvibes: Canadian Startup Closes $500,000 Seed Round
The whole idea of Meteor is to abstract away the server-side APIs commonly found in JS apps.

How does rails fit into that picture at all?

Backbone.js and Ember.js are already great for working with rails/REST apps...
You are exactly right. But for some cases, it is a great thing. You obviously need to know when is the right time to be explicit. I remember doing the Stripe CTF and I was like, I wish all people would learn to be explicit about those parameters.

Thanks for the feedback :).
Announce imminent closure of nascent service, submit to HN

Get more traffic than you ever had in 9 months previous combined

...

Profit

(colour me sceptic)
If the title is a question, the answer is usually NO.
Unless its a scientific article ...

disclaimer: a Phd student
When the things that make me weak and strange get
engineered away

Cory Doctorow wrote a story based on that lyric:
http://www.tor.com/stories/2008/08/weak-and-strange

I like Jonathan Coulton (especially "Re: Your Brains", but I actually read (or started...) the story before I heard of that song.
I've been looking at different security issues that I should protect against, and came across this article, and I also find it hard to believe that I'll need to worry about this even though the author insists that it's doable.

I wonder if this is more relavant in much higher profile attacks (cyberwar,etc) than in some webapp.
A universal Turing machine on Penrose tilings
Biggest age group for MMO games: 8-12
>> EVERY OTHER LANGUAGE DOES THAT

Do you really know about this?

I've done a bit of Python lately. The infrastructure isn't close (see e.g. Perl Testers, chromatic had a blog post about it quite recently). Also, CPAN is much richer than pypi.
I agree that it's selection bias.

The kind of people who go around talking / bragging about their IQs are likely to overlap with that set of people that score well on formal cognitive tests, IQ or otherwise. (See, the entire membership of "Mensa", for example.)

(And if a person who was very into tests and intelligence also scored 95, you'd probably not hear a peep out of them - it would misalign with their self image.)

Finally, the typical person scoring 80-85 in IQ is not likely to be the kind of person who enjoys taking such tests, or considers their IQ or their intellectual ability as an important aspect of their personal identity.
>because evolution would likely have spread them to everyone.

This is just your bias in what you think is more beneficial informing your belief that more intelligence = better survival. If this is the case, why aren't all apes just as intelligent as us? Has no ape simply ever had the luck to have a mutation that improved the carrier's intelligence? This is implausible. The answer is that one's environment determines what is selected for, and it is not the case that more intelligence is necessarily more fit for survival. Not even in modern times.
Good luck fat
Jacob Thornton (Co author of Bootstrap) is leaving Twitter. Wish him well!
"College algebra" is usually taken by people who haven't had algebra, geometry and trigonometry classes in middle or high school. If you had all those classes, many colleges allow you to enroll in calculus as a freshman (sometimes you have to take a placement test), or you can even skip some of the calculus sequence with AP credit.

College algebra isn't something that a lot of math, science and engineering majors take, especially if they're toward the top of the class and haven't taken the easy road in their high school course selections.
Slowness is a Side Effect
>Notice 'parseLogLoudly'. You could not implement that

Fair point, and that's due to my failure in not providing an optional side-effect function arg to `parse-log-skip`. And this brings up a related point, namely that the author of the lib is still responsible for crafting the API. For example, if the author of `parseLog` had not included `recover FixEntry`, would it be possible for the caller to implement it via a condition system? Would that even be a good idea? Using the pseudo-python, the only approach I can think of would be:

def parseLogInteractively(file):
do:
return parseLog(file)
handle ParseError, e:
line = askToFixEntry(e.text)
retry

That reference to `line` is pretty horrific.

Perhaps this is one of those cases where a simplified example helps convey the concept, but is too simple to show where other approaches would fall short.

>mass duplication of code

I'm not clear on what you mean. Multiple functions with different behaviour seems not to altogether different from one function with implicit switches that change its behaviour.
> I've always wondered why more websites/apps didn't have their own user database

Because your password database is a liability. And it's a huge pain in the ass to store securely. And a breach at another site can harm your users if they re-used their password. And there's a huge amount of friction when you ask users to create and manage yet another password.

Seriously, traditional login systems suck. They're great for privacy and maintaining direct control over your user data, but they're a huge pain.

I don't want to shill, but Mozilla is aiming to address the bulk of this with Persona (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Persona), which will have an api-stable "beta" release in about two weeks. However, it works right now and has been deployed on sites like https://voo.st/ as an alternative to forced-social login.
Have you tried reading sample interview questions?
I am not convinced. If they were getting ready for a "steambox", why would they be spending their time getting their stuff in working order on multiple drivers? And if they were going to pick one and stick with it, I would think that Intel's would be out of the running to begin with.

That they are taking Intel's cards seriously suggests to me that they really do intend on taking Linux on consumer laptops/desktops seriously. They may still go for a dedicated Linux console, but I think that will be very much in addition to Linux on the desktop.