skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So the vast majority of people misunderstand intelligence, at least as measured by IQ tests, as being a limiting factor for performance and potential, while it is actually just a measurement of current abilities.

> the penultimate chapter is a list of 14 examples in which science has failed because of social blindness.

This carries through more broadly and generally to the application of many incorrect fundamental assumptions to the design of our institutions, which consistently fail because of the resulting flawed structures.
Productivity hack - from Twitter and RSS feeds to OmniFocus
Blackberry Internet Service Web Site
The consumer packaged goods industry generates two TRILLION dollars a year in the US, by selling us things we don't think we need, through branding and marketing. Bottled water is an entire industry that was built on selling us plastic bottles filled with an abundantly free resource by convincing us we needed it through, you guessed it: advertising.

There are many, many industries that rely on brand awareness to sell there goods. There is an amazing quote which I unfortunately couldn't find that goes something like this:

"In order to reach the small segment of the population
that is interested in buying Mercedes, everyone in the
world must know what our brand stands for."

Ads with intent drive clear, immediate ROI, but they can only ever capture the segment of the market that know what they want. Display ads on the web may not be the future of advertising, but it isn't going to go away, even if cable TV died tomorrow. In fact, the very fact that this discussion keeps coming up makes it pretty clear that there is a huge opportunity to innovate in this market. Maybe the advice should be: don't build a business that runs on static display ads, do try to find an innovative ad model that engages users and works for brands. Ads, for example, like the interactive old spice ad on vimeo. Immediate ROI? No. Massive brand awareness? Absolutely.

http://vimeo.com/47875656
I like MongoMapper over Mongoid, personally; Mongoid seems to have breaking changes even between minor versions.
This is a silly reductionist article.

For me, pursuing an engineering PhD has facilitated an early career pivot away from trading (which after 2008, is so f'in boring and has zero growth).

As someone with an entrepreneurial bent used to working 90 hour weeks, I have certain skills that jive well with many talented researchers who, contrary to the ivory tower window dressing, like money very much. Personally, I h8 MBAs and would much rather be surrounded by entrepreneurial PhDs.

Like anything, you get out what you put in. After two short years, business ventures are starting to pan out and I'm far more optimistic about my career now than I ever was in finance (including those salad days of HFT during the collapse).

If you're straight outta school and want a PhD because you plan on becoming an academic, well, good luck with that (the pension system is argument enough against this for me). If you want more education to better take advantage of the wealth of technology in the pipeline, welcome to the party.
> Valve makes games people actually want to run, rather than most of the games we work with now...

BURN!

And I know I've said this before, but there are open-source drivers for the other vendors' cards as well...and I think they'd benefit tremendously from some Valve love.
all of the code that HP/Palm originally developed is under Apache 2.0. There may be parts like our customized build of Qt that are under other licenses.
I'd be more interested in a system that knows the grammar rules of several foreign languages and can realistically fake me being a native of that language attempting English. Bonus points for a "proficiency" parameter.
No, do "hate the playa" (for want of a better term).

When you hear about the druggie who knocked someone on the head for a fix, the bigger culprits are
1) the law for driving the prices up to cause the druggie to need to rob someone to be able to afford a fix
2) the dealer for supplying the stuff at a high price and purposely "hooking" the junkie
3) the druggie, who has an addictive personality, but choses not to show the strength to say "no"

I place the blame in that order.
A similar story can be said for Apple. Apple should be thought of poorly for being a playa. They knew their attack wasn't really at Samsung, or Google, or Android. It was at competition and innovation and hence, at society.

For the record, I come from a family where one member fell into category 3 (druggie). Unless you experience it, it's very hard to understand the non-monetary cost to a family when one of your ranks strays down the path of drugs and destruction. Thankfully, this black sheep seems to be on the mend after -decades- of abuse to us all.
29 Hackathons in the United States for September 2012
This makes sense. If you're very interested, it doesn't feel like an obligation, so a longer school year is like "more time doing what you like".

The problem is, like someone has already pointed out, schools fail to do this. So you end up with what we have here in Brazil. We've been making the school year longer every few years. When I was a kid, I used to have 3 months of vacation in summer and 1 month in the winter. Kids now have about a month in summer and 2 weeks in the winter, and education has never been worse here. Longer school years, by themselves, do absolutely NOTHING.

(EDIT: Grammar)
Interesting concept. Can you create an app in PHP off of the iPad and then run it on the iPad? That would be useful too.
Perhaps the author works on ads for a living, and wants less competition...
Protein impedes microcirculation of malaria-infected red blood cells
A linux/Steam console would be pretty sick.
You can extend your effective IQ using tools as well. I bet your IQ as tested while you have access to an internet-connected computer would be way higher than your IQ as tested on a closed-book test.
Make a puzzle game that people have to complete before they can talk to you, with variable difficulty levels for when you are feeling particularly anti-social.
Linode's Newark Data Center Down
Linode's NJ data center is unaccessible.

http://status.linode.com/
At least there's a public controversy about those things. Some specific comments about how the Constitution may not be as dead as you think:

> Bradley Manning, Kim Dotcom/MegaUpload.

I'm pretty sure that the latter is still winding its way through the court system. Not sure about the former. But Manning was also a member of the military, so it makes sense that he should be held to a higher standard than random civilians, with respect to leaking of classified information.

> Presumption of innocence

US citizens held for similar reasons? Citation needed.

> Reasonable search and seizure

Warrantless GPS transmitters were unanimously ruled illegal by the Supreme Court [1]. As for your point about email, I'd believe it -- but again, I'm not familiar with it, citation needed.

> Telecom immunity

Yes, this is a really crappy, sleazy thing our government did. But I'd guess ex post facto only applies to criminalizing behavior after the fact, not decriminalizing it.

[1] http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/judicial/story/2012-...
Quantity != quality.

If poor kids need something to do over the summer, why not invest in some positive activities for them, instead of punishing everyone?
There are so many other variables that have dramatically changed over the last 400 years that there is no way to test whether this was a result of ip protection or not.
FCC to review the relative value of low, high, and super-high spectrum licenses
If you know several languages well, the project's characteristics will usually make the language choice obvious.

I'd recommend against learning a new language for a new project.
An apprenticeship in UX design
He refused his doctors' advice about surgery. He said it was because he was scared and didn't want to face reality, but not taking care of yourself for the sake of your family seems like a jerk move to me.
I think there's a false dichotomy here between solving a problem and building an ad-supported service. Facebook definitely solves a number of problems. How to keep in touch with people, communicate, share photos, etc. That's why people use it. Admittedly it doesn't do anything that couldn't be done (or wasn't done) another way before it existed, but it reduces the friction and wraps them up into a great package.

If free social networks were banned, a lot of people would still pay $5 or $10/mo to use Facebook. But since a law like that seems unlikely in most countries, people will always gravitate to a free solution or some other method of monetization more creative than direct payment has to win.
Great idea, but its sort of like temporarily damming up a whitewater in order to avoid being drowned. You know you are going to be slammed when you remove the dam.
Never mind the looks
Eben has the patience of a saint.

The irony of that exchange was that Eben showed pretty amazing customer service the whole time.
> Bottled water is an entire industry that was built on selling us plastic bottles filled with an abundantly free resource by convincing us we needed it through, you guessed it: advertising.

I drank the bottle of water on my nightstand when I woke up this morning in my hotel. I was a bit hungover and feeling lazy. Advertising had nothing to do with it. I wanted the bottle of water to make my morning a little easier.

Yes, people buy things they want but don't need! It's almost like there's more to life than the raw inputs the human body requires.
WebOS would have been so awesome if Palm had put it on nicer hardware and found a way to get developers on-board.
Third point - some advertising actually advertises things that you like and will enhance your life.

I know that's not a particularly popular opinion, but looking around me, I can see several things I first heard about via advertising, later purchased, and still enjoy.

Bad advertising's bad - not all advertising.
Thanks for sharing! It sounds like the lessons you learned will provide a much clearer path in the future. Moving forward, how has your perspective changed on 1) ego & 'personal issues' 2) Spending $10K & 9months for validation 3) where the opportunity exists today ?
You can turn off a filter by adding an impossible condition, such as subject:thisfilterisoff.
It still hard enough to get ahold of them one at a time paying full price. They are definitely not at the "free samples and thousands of orders" stage. As I understand it, the foundation doesn't even directly control production. Even if "Steve" had been reasonable, it's a perfectly understandable policy.

Those interested in samples and big orders would be much better off talking directly to the distributors.
I suspect "Steve's" address is in Nigeria.
Analytics, search indexing, recommendations, various datasets that support search ranking, and some other things.
>I'm not saying that Samsung is innocent

You've got to get past this mindset. Was there prior art? Did Apple really invent this? Were the patents specific, non-obvious, etc.

No, No, ...

When you add that the outcome stifles innovation and a you add a broken IP system, you have so many nails in the coffin, it isn't funny.

Case closed.
I have to admit guilt here :-) Nice that someone found it too. +1 for GEB.
To expand on the concept of intent from the point of view of the user... I don't mind ads... when I am looking for ads. Otherwise they are at best a nuisance and at worst polluting. Here is a useful heuristic for a search engine that wants to improve on Google: If(contains adsense), then (probably a junk article, exclude).

What ad platforms like Facebook, Google, and most others is missing is some form of curating. A hobby of mine is woodworking. In the past I have been involved in amateur radio and know several people who still are. We homeschool our children. I bring this up because when I encounter a magazine on one of these topics I buy it, largely for the advertisements. I want to know what products are available. Repeated another way, not only am I looking at the ads, but I am PAYING for the privilege of looking at the ads. Why? The ads are always on target, directly related to the topic of the magazine. The number of scam ads are close to 0. I don't click on an ad to be taken to a "landing page" asking me for an email address to sign up for a service that doesn't exist yet.

Want to fix ads online? Develop an environment where the ads are that good that I want to see them and will not be wasting my time.
I'm confused. Is #1 supposed to be a rebuttal? Or was your point to reiterate why ads are beneficial to "free users in Africa".
This paragraph is tail-wagging-the-dog reasoning:

Although it’s unknown how these preferences translate into the careers people actually pursue, the implication is that only about half of doctoral science students are really gunning for academic positions. NSF data support this. In 2010, about 50 percent of new science Ph.D.s went on to do postdoctoral research at a university—the contract job long considered a necessary step for landing a professorship.

Grad students who are looking for jobs know ahead of time how competitive it is to get academic positions. We can do the math. When it was time for me and the others in my group to start thinking about what to do next, we looked at the Computer Research Association numbers: 1500 new CS PhDs were made the prior year, and there were 100 academic CS positions open in the country. So our competition was roughly 1500 people plus more experienced people switching from industry to academia, or tenured professors changing universities. (In which case it's possible their old position may not be filled.)

We also had spent many years observing the professor hiring process at two schools, and knew what it took to be competitive.

I imagine some new PhDs don't try for academic jobs because they've ruled it out as unrealistic. They may not be trying for an academic job, but for some of them, they are still on Plan B.

My point: even though 50% of new science PhDs don't go for academic positions, it's still a problem for them that there are so few academic positions.

I'm pleased to read an essay which distinguishes between technical and liberal arts PhDs, and I agree with the things that are not related to this point. But this point is a big one, and I'm afraid the author is misinterpreting the results of the cited studies.
It's a sign of a high EQ to have a neutral response to being told 'your IQ is x'. It's actually just another part of the battery of psychological tests.
For the lazy: http://adblockplus.org/en/
Since she's the co-founder, I assume this is at least a little different than someone pushing an ideology for profit. Presumably she really believes that a longer school year would benefit children, and both writing the article and co-founding the non-profit are meant to further that goal.

Instead, say, someone being hired to be the CEO of the non-profit, and then suddenly discovering a passion for doing whatever it is that helps pay the bills.
Advertising is now an art form. But not the ads you see on the web. Leave ads to the print, radio and TV folks.
http://status.linode.com/2012/08/newark-connectivity-issue.h...
In all the very good discussion here, and not one mention of the menu at the top of the HN page. The first text link in the menu bar is... "new"

There's an entire section devoted to new, or future Page 1 articles.

The inclusion of the link must mean that there was either a demand for it or a belief that readers would want to know about the articles with future potential to make the first page. Anecdotal at best, but it seems to support the idea that there is some innate bias toward the next new thing.
I saw that quote on Spent by Geoffrey Miller. It's about conspicuous consumption. That is something that I stand against, as does he. He provides some sensible alternatives (and some that don't make any sense). I still recommend the book.
Sorry. NoScript is having fits over your page, burping XSS warnings to the max. I'll pass for now.
I wonder if this says more about the people who write the articles or the nature of the subjects themselves?
Because you redeem it for equity at a rate defined in the next round but within the cap and discount parameters.
Do you really still expect quality content on HN nowadays? Even after that week where 5 articles along the lines of "I woke up at 5am and ate a slice of cold ham to start my metabolism" made it to the front page?
I would like to agree, but have to point out that ads are the honest counterpart of the widespread guerilla marketing: fake reviews and forum posts, paid editorials and tv shows. As annoying (and technically backwards, i.e. still using document.write() and cache-busting headers etc.) it may be, the thriving online advertising industry prevents dishonest practices to a large extent - and it enables users to block ads!
Yes, it's essentially an app that creates online conference calls. I would have liked to ship some more features (list of participants, chatting, etc) but didn't have time.

This app also showcases two early versions of NPM modules for Twilio:

1) twiliosig[1]: used to valid that HTTP requests for TwiML documents are coming from Twilio.com and not an unwanted 3rd party.

2) twilio-client-token[2]: used to generate JSON web tokens[3]. This is a hard requirement for Node.js developers who want to build Twilio Client[4] web applications.

[1]: https://npmjs.org/package/twiliosig

[2]: https://npmjs.org/package/twilio-client-token

[3]: http://self-issued.info/docs/draft-ietf-oauth-json-web-token...

[4]: http://www.twilio.com/docs/client/twilio-js
Except that interest doesn't work on a large scale. Schools exist to educate all their students to roughly the same level. Teaching by inspiring interest is a great idea, but one teacher does not have the means to teach the unique interests of 30 kids. To make that plan a success, you'd have to abolish the entire school system.
The Flynn effect tends to be used to support the feeling that intelligence isn't something you're born with.

People who think that intelligence is innate will refer to the "g factor".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_%28psychometrics%29

The racist (technically speaking) and controversial Jean Rushton believes that "gains in IQ over time (the Lynn-Flynn effect) are unrelated to g".

What's really going on with discussions like this is that humanity seems to have come to the conclusion that "smarter is better". Intelligence almost certainly exists, but is quite difficult to quantify exactly, and is further complicated by the fact that people resent others who are "better" than them. Given that there is a genetic component to intelligence to a certain degree, race becomes a factor and leads to a line of inductive reasoning that makes people uncomfortable:

1) Smarter is better
2) Intelligence is genetic
3) Race determines genetics
4) One race is better than another
5) Hitler was right (or other outrageous conclusion)

As far as I can tell when you see terms like "g factor", "Flynn effect", "multiple intelligences", "crystallized intelligence", "fluid intelligence", "cultural fair IQ tests", "The bell curve"... people are really secretly arguing about one race or sex being smarter than the other, or not.
It’s 2 pm. Alice goes to Facebook. Bob goes to Amazon. Charlie goes to Twitter.

If you have to bet on which site I'd most likely actually be on on a random afternoon at 2pm, it wouldn't be Amazon; it would almost certainly be facebook.
Not if you use Horner's method. Evaluating a(x-p)(x-q) takes two additions and two multiplications. Evaluating ax^2 + bx + c with Horner's method as (ax + b)x + c takes two additions and two multiplications as well. Factoring a polynomial to save on evaluation is as inefficient and roundabout as factoring a pair of integers to help compute their greatest common divisor. You're replacing an easy problem with a much harder one.
The sound of a collective face-palm rolls like thunder through the hills...
Somehow there was Emotion/Psychology loop there. Now it goes even further, than yours image, the loop is Argument/Philosophy now. Clearly, wikipedia is changing or tool was enhanced :)
Actually, there are plenty of academic positions available for science Ph.D.s, just not university posts. The country is aching for quality high school science and math teachers, also for quality subject education of science and math teachers.
So OP thinks that google should stop working on ads and should start charging for all its free services?

There's nothing wrong with ads - just make them good and make sure it aligns with the product (Adsense).
I'm looking for a reference for the point, and my keyword searches on Google have yet to take me to the right place, but I recall that research has shown that gifted students actually have learning GAINS when they are out of school during summer, but then the school year begins with review of the material that other students didn't learn even during school the year before. So one strategy to make the time that children spend in school more worthwhile would be to let learners advance at their own pace, and not put all learners into lock-step grades in school by age.

http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html

We don't group students by height, or by weight, or by social maturity, or by sports skill, so there isn't any good basis for grouping them by age when we could group them by achieved subject-matter level, and have each class in each subject proceed through the lessons just as rapidly as learners can with the best matching instruction.
Not sure why you are getting down votes, but checking over Wikipedia confirms your comment

In the context of academic degrees, the term "philosophy" does not refer solely to the field of philosophy, but is used in a broader sense in accordance with its original Greek meaning, which is "love of wisdom". In most of Europe, all fields other than theology, law and medicine were traditionally known as philosophy. The doctorate of philosophy as it exists today originated as a doctorate in the liberal arts at the Humboldt University of Berlin, and was eventually adopted by United States universities, becoming common in large parts of the world in the 20th century.[1] In many countries, the doctorate of philosophy is still awarded only in the liberal arts, which is known as "philosophy" in continental Europe.
If patents and copyright never existed, where would society be today? What impact would it have had on the industrial revolution? clock making? pharmaceuticals? material science and genetics?

Would we have been set back a century? A year? Or developed even farther? How much farther and at what cost? Of course nobody knows, all I know is it's useful to remember it goes far beyond Apple and the RIAA... and things will change incrementally as they always have.
I'll chime in. If we want to provide GMail free to people in Africa, then we just do it. Govt subsidize it or something. Quit shoe-horning philanthropic efforts into somebody's business model.
I saw that, but it doesn't seem to implement any of the indexes you'd need in order to run a bloom query efficiently.

That being said, if you stored your bitvector as an array of powers of two, then it would work. But that would be horribly inefficient in terms of space usage.
>Why not make decisions for a few percent of companies turnover?

The problem is that this case wasn't really about Samsung, and it wasn't really about a few companies, or the fine. This was a high profile case about a broken IP system, a rogue gorilla and an outcome that stifles innovation in the technical arena (not just smartphones). You don't think someone will think twice before even going near Apple again, regardless of the validity (or prior art) of the patent? I am incredulous that anyone could have come to the conclusion of this juror, particularly someone with a tech background.

Hopefully, this won't be the last battle that could turn this madness around.