skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It would be amusing to have a bunch of people take the same IQ test, then tally all the plausible yet contradictory answers they produced to the same questions. Done well, that could be an effective demolition of the whole charade (though not in the sense that it would get anyone to change their mind about it).

The trouble with such tests is that they like you to be intelligent, but not too intelligent. So what they measure is efficiency of conformance. Is that what we should be optimizing for? I don't think so.

It seems absurd that something so obviously unintelligent would be the key to measuring intelligence.

Edit: oh, I see I'm just repeating what the OP has already brilliantly said. What a great and devastating little article.
Thanks :)

Well I was thinking I would put a search bar on the main article list as a way to filter the main article list. But I'll definitely consider this possibility too. And yeah you're probably right about differentiating subreddits from Support and history. Thanks for the feedback!
And if more than one theory is more-or-less equally probable, simple, and in accord with observed reality then you test all of them to see which you can eliminate. Repeat.
Edgerank has changed again? Then stop being lazy and deal with it
This is very true. In a way, now I think that protecting children from the fact of (natural) death is counter-productive. I think that when a relative dies it is important to make children part of the grieving process and to show how important family and friends are, how important it is to show support for the bereaved, and how important it is to live life knowing that it does not last for ever and that it is important to see the 'big picture'.

I would like to add, condolences for your loss. I lost my parents recently too and it has slowed me down and made me appreciate my family and my life more, and made me less spoilt.
Some people use strong magnets as fake tongue or cheek piercings.

(http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/7393684/Fake-piercing...)

I'm not saying this is a valid reason to ban the sale of these items. (Sell anything, so long as you make clear warnings about non-obvious risks. Thus, a chainsaw doesn't need much warnings, because it's a chainsaw. But little magnetic balls which are very appealing to children but also dangerous - yep, give them some clear warnings.)
I've seen a few comments on HN and the blog about this question -- I think it's important to note that the article mentions this question was a set of pictures:

>>One test had many rows of small pictures, and I had to choose the odd one out in each row.

So the arguments about the number of letters, the order of the letter, etc wouldn't make sense here.
But the person in the picture is specifically labeled a model: a profession which - by definition - means they are there to be pretty and "submissive" (in the sense that any employee is "submissive" to their employer).

Would it be better if it were a male model?
Fair, but most programmers blogs have very little traffic
Processing is taking a lot of time.
For those of you who haven't had a CPR refresher in a few years, they now heavily promote the use of AED's [Automated external defibrillator]. The prognosis for recovery after CPR alone is in the single digits and moves well, well into the double digits if supplemented with an AED.

Gyms, schools, and works areas should all have a $1000.00 AED onsite. I was surprised that he had to wait for the ambulance to arrive before being defibrillated, since he was in a gym.
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who thinks "responsive" design is completely overblown.

I think it's absolutely necessary to have different layouts for desktop and mobile. But the idea that they need to "flow into each other", I just don't buy. I mean, I've never seen anyone (in a real-life use case) resize their browser window to be narrow on their desktop, and iPads deal quite well with desktop-sized sites (especially navigating in horizontal mode).

The problem I have with fluidly "responsive design" is that it drastically overcomplicates everything. Good design becomes a lot harder, because you can't really keep in your head all the possible variations. A/B testing is drastically overcomplicated, because maybe something works in large width, doesn't work in 3/4 width, works again in 1/2 width, and doesn't work again in 1/4 width, because of the way elements pop around. And it just severly limits the kind of layout you can do. And like I said previously, for what? People don't really use "in-between" sizes, at least not that I've seen.

To me, "responsive design" just seems like a clever theoretical idea, without any real-life benefits. When I make a mobile version of a site, it's usually drastically different from the desktop site -- because it's organized vertically, because there's less that can be shown at once, because mobile users often have a completely different set of use cases than desktop users. It's a completely different beast.

In the vast majority of cases, I think it's impossible to shoehorn a truly good desktop experience and a truly good mobile experience together into a single "responsive design". I get that people are trying, but I'm just not convinced by the efforts.
FWIW, T-Mobile has recently withdrawn this plan, it is no longer available for new or switching customers. Cheapest "unlimited*" prepaid data plan is now $50 a month.
Since I read it, with pleasure, on my iPhone I would beg to differ :)

(Also in the usability tests I've done I've never seen text length be an issue for readers on mobile. I'd be interested if you seen something different.)
Yes. The context that has to be taken into account includes the social context, ie. 'I am sitting in a room taking a test, I cannot request clarification of the question, the person who wrote this test may be far less intelligent than me, etc'.

By making an effort to choose the possible answer that I perceive as the most boring and conformist, rather than one I might find brilliant, funny, novel, and suggestive of further even more interesting ideas, I am pursuing a strategy of "favouring theories that match every other part of observable reality", as you put it.
Studies show high correlation between iq and a host of personal outcomes (divorce, income, etc).

Many iq tests actually measure multiple types of intelligences then combine them.
Is Office even necessary anymore? Where I work, most people are using LibreOffice or Google Docs and not a single complaint about document exchange or document formats. There's a few Office holdouts, but even they haven't had an issue exchanging documents with the rest of us. Even I behave like a normal human being and use LibreOffice instead of Emacs when I wanna play nice at work.

What exactly is the killer feature of Office to people not obsessed with Outlook? Mac doesn't even have that, having to settle for EntouRAGE. (EDIT: My mistake, not used Mac Office in a long while -- Outlook now exists!)
A Capitalist's Dilemma. Are our startups empowering or efficient innovations?
it actually takes time to download the video, and transcode it into mp3. especially when you run it on just a 2-core medium instance.
I'm confused (and perhaps younger than you). It went like this: servers under desk -> colo -> vps/cloud/everything as a service? There wasn't a huge dedicated hosting market between colo and cloud?
You might also want to spend a couple of bucks on some icons :). It's amazing what higher quality image assets will do to improve overall impression of an app.
Don't worry, I do mean the "cannot" version. Reread my post and note how I described the process. Asking the people I knew who had worked at the election commission in the last few years was only to confirm what I had concluded from my own experiences voting. The method used (in my state at least) does not have a way to identify me personally, even if a corrupt politician stole all the boxes post election and emptied them in his office. So that takes care of the "won't" case vs the "cannot" case.
The problem with Occam's Razor is that it requires you to identify the simplest explanation. In fields like for example molecular biology deciding what is 'the simplest' often is difficult and debatable.
Accessors: There and Back Again
I thought it was funny that the judge Specified Arial add the font.
Best viewed in Netscape 4.7.
NBC Sites Hacked
I am annoyed and frustrated by so,e software therefor it's okay for me to not pay for it? Give me a break. This is such a lame justification for piracy. If the author truly wants to pay for it then he will. Saying you want to pay for it in an attempt to seem on the up and up and really wanting to pay for something are different. I can understand the frustration and I can empathize and I can get on board with the idea that the process they put you through to buy Office is ridiculous but I can't buy the justification for piracy. Just because you sell software yourself for a living doesmt put you in a position to decide when it's okay to pirate software. The author may consider the way in which he sells his software to be superior and therefore it's not okay to pirate what he sells but when it comes to someone else's well that's a different story. But its a slippery slope. Microsoft's process certainly is ludicrous but it's not long before people start saying "you want me to enter an email address to buy software? Oh, that's too much, I think I'll just pirate it, thanks".

Calling it one's and zeros doesn't justify it either. I hate the ones and zeros argument. You're not paying for one's and zeros. You're paying for the value the software creates for you. It may only need to be coded and compiled once but does that mean that after the first person gets value from it that the software has been paid for? Of course not.

If someone creates software and you value what it can do then you are obligated to pay for it if that's what the creator asks. Argue about the definition of stealing till your blue in the face but it doesn't change the fact that you are depriving the author of revenue they would otherwise have gotten. It is stealing and to say otherwise is to do some impressive mental gymnastics.

The system may suck but piracy isn't going to solve the problem. It's just going to create more problems. Using Office without a license doesn't hurt Microsoft. What hurts them is a more popular alternative. The only thing that will change what the author complains about is someone else creating some half decent office replacement in a way that shows Microsoft how to do it right. If such a program existed and were widely adopted you'd better believe they'd take notice and shape up. Piracy hurts people. It doesn't hurt the big guys though and we know it so we all tend to justify it. But that same attitude that gets people thinking its okay to pirate Office allows people to justify pirating software from smaller companies and that's who it hurts.

I see no justification for piracy.
> I've never seen anyone (in a real-life use case) resize their browser window to be narrow on their desktop,

I do this very very often.

I will be watching a YouTube video or a BBC iPlayer video in one window. Then I'll open another browser window and resize it to be tall and thin.

It is infuriating just how poorly most website cope with this tall thin window. And really, most text is easier to read in a narrow column.
I know it's just an off-the-cuff remark, but the last comment annoys me. Implying that sociologists are responsible for the existence of society is as silly as implying that biologists are responsible for that of biology.
This is my first technical blog post; I am looking forward to your comments.
"And no one would dispute that the key to all this success has been education."

I would.

Singapore is what it is because of their strategic placing in the wold today. The only reason the English decided to convert this tropical island in the commerce nucleus it is.

People always rationalize how when something good happens to them it is always because of their merit alone.

Spain discovered America because it is on the extreme of Europe and not in the center, Germany is an Industrial nation because it has so much water and coal, and is very cheap to transport things and USA has the bigger and most fertile plains in the world for a very small population.

Now ask an American, German or a person from Singapore what is the key of success and they will tell you hard work of course, but they don't work harder than people from Central African Republic(I had been there, very beautiful and rich but in the middle of nowhere, with no infrastructure, and very poor).
Outlook on Mac certainly exists - and is much, much better than the thoroughly aneurysm-inducing Entourage.

But yeah, at my last two jobs we've exclusively used Google Docs, and it's been a dream. No more hunting your inbox for a (probably outdated) copy of the Office doc. Sharing is a dream.

It's not quite as usable as a native app. I would be rather happy if there were a native client to GDocs, but as it stands, the ability to collaborate, share, and disseminate far, far trumps whatever usability gaps between it and Office.
Having given my share of IQ tests, personally I always felt that they lacked in many sense. Once while researching about it I came across theory of multiple intelligence by Howard Gardner (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligence...). Though not completely clear the basic idea behind it seems more logical to me.
I think it's more an excuse for the employer, if he's an employee too. Imagine this situation:

superior.- This guy is a disaster, why did you even hire him?

employer.- Well, he had a X degree in Y.
What are the legalities involved here? If you attempt to help are you opening yourself up to potential blame and legal action? What about DNR wishes the person may or may not have, or religious beliefs?
A similar thing occurred to me not too long ago, when I was learning about type theory: if you have the type of some function, then the set of possible implementations of that function is (usually) countably infinite, so the type doesn’t really tell you anything. But of course you probably care only about one of the simplest, so the type really does tell you an awful lot.

Anyway, I’m with you on the business of IQ tests. The problem is that as answers become increasingly open-ended, they are both more representative of a person’s actual intelligence, and more difficult to score objectively.
"And what did the genius do when not teaching LSAT prep courses? Why, he worked at Target."

Kafka was a clerk at an insurance company. Einstein was an assistant patent examiner. Wittgenstein was a gardener at a monastery and then a primary school teacher.

Van Gogh only ever sold one painting during his life, and that was to his brother.

There are hordes of other people widely regarded as "geniuses", who lived and died in dire poverty. Many others were cheated out of the fame and fortune they deserved by others who got the credit. And many more are probably still unrecognized.

The cold hard fact of the matter is that the world generally does not reward intelligence, "genius", or even hard work. True, some have the temperament and luck to scale the greasy pole of "success", but many others don't -- or choose to focus their energies elsewhere.
It was an amazing article, really, it get a tear out of me.

Thank you for sharing so much.
In a lot of modern biology however you will have tens or hundreds of thousands of equally simple competing hypotheses. Biologist have had to adapt to this by using multiple hypothesis testing methods, but Prisig was working well before this became standard, so perhaps this was the barrier he was running up against.
Windows 8 vs OSX in a meme
It is popular among developers because:

- you can source control your blog content

- update your blog without ever leaving command line terminal or having to use less productive web interface

- use markdown, textile, html or whatever suits you

- easy to host and easy to scale

- no need to feel obligated to apply security patches

For me these are great reasons to migrate away from WordPress, Drupal and so on.
This is the most sincere and human thing you've ever written, Dustin. Bravo.
Worry not, your title is fine.
When I was trying to look up an article from about the call to "redesign" hot dogs, I found this quote:

"No parents can watch all of their kids 100% of the time. The best way to protect kids is to design these risks out of existence."
-- Gary Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-02-22-1Achok...

I feel that this is a sad state of affairs.
This is a very simplified view of the education system in Singapore. Of course education should be important, but it can also go too far.

I've been in Singapore for 1 year as an exchange student. While I managed to cope well, many slightly less talented students suffer from the great workload and have almost no free time. In a middle class secondary school, about 95% of the children need tuition to keep up with school. Weeks or even months before their exams, all free time is eliminated and dedicated to studying.

The learning itself isn't perfect either. It's heavily focused on memorization and involves no oral participation. Foreign languages are almost never taught; math and natural sciences matter the most. Competition is promoted instead of teamwork (not only amongst students, but also amongst teachers and civil servants in general). The teachers are ranked according to their students' results, which does work as a motivator, but discourages them to explain any background information or topics that are not required from exams.

Parents urge their children to get the best degree they can in order to be able to take up the best paying job they can find. Money is the measure and not personal satisfaction. Arts, therefore, are not very popular.

I'm highlighting here all negative aspects to contrast the posted article; of course it is good that Singapore does promote education and the education system certainly works better than the ones of most other countries. Also, this is not directly related to Singapore, but represents the Confucianist mentality that one can find to a lot extremer extents in Japan, China and Korea.
A PC is not only about ergonomics - and Microsoft's strength is not based on that. It's based on computers with lots of Microsoft software installed that's tied to lots of locally stored data that make moving to a competing platform more difficult.

My mother has very little data on her computer and all of it could fit on a USB stick with ease. I'll bet she is closer to the typical PC user than anyone on HN and that is why PCs, as we know them, have very little future beyond a niche.
Regarding the "power" issue: iPads today are 1.x (1.4?) GHz Dual Core computing beasts with graphics coprocessor performance that's just amazing.

My NeXT Cube 2nd gen had a 25 MHz 68040, so even giving some slack that's a factor 40-50 slower, and it was not just OK as a content-creation machine, it was awesome.

When software is slow, it is usually the fault of the software, not a limitation of the hardware.

That doesn't mean that other cases don't exist, and rendering certainly sounds like one of them, but they are rare, and may then be better handled by remote server farms anyway.
I think that Occam's razor says, that if we have several theories that describe reality with the same accuracy, we should chose the most succint (least redundant).
How about when you pay USD$10,000 for a niche software package with a crappy USB hardware dongle with drivers that only work on Windows XP, despite the application itself working just fine under Windows 7 64-bit?

When I asked the vendor, I was told I could pay another $10,000 so I could buy a new version of the software that just so happened to have a newer DRM dongle.

At that point you really have four options:

1.) Hope someone else pirated it.
2.) Kill a few evenings cracking the application with IDA Pro.
3.) Forever remain on Windows XP on a graphics workstation, unable to use the entirety of RAM installed, or some horrible dual-boot situation isolating you from the rest of your tools.
4.) Pay ANOTHER $10,000.

Seriously, you have no position to tell anyone that there's 'no justification'. It's obvious you're missing real world experience here. I picked #2, myself, but I'd have rather saved time and picked #1 if it had already been done.
Nobody wants to live in a world where people find a dying person laying on the floor and let him die because they're afraid of legal issues. The law protects you from such nonsense.

Even if it didn't, in my opinion, no person worth a damn would allow that consideration to color their response.
That's no excuse. He may be a great guy but the OP's point stil stands. In general we're all great people until we're not. I'm a nice guy but I've been known to be a total asshole like anybody else. Cool guys act like dicks sometimes and a record of being a good guy doesn't excuse one for doing something uncool.

Bill Clinton left us with a surplus. He also cheated on his wife. Still a good president but cheating is a dick move. See what I'm saying (please don't read into it and focus on the wrong thing now)?
Not sure what you mean by 'frequentist', but one thing is for sure: the more hypotheses that occur to you, the longer it takes to go through them testing each one not only for consistency, plausibility etc, but also for how likely it is that you think the test-writer would prefer the rationale for that answer. If only a few hypotheses occur to you, and they tend to be in the same ballpark as those that would occur to the average test-writer, you have an advantage.
This is the current federal law on the subject: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/search/display.html?terms=...

Basically, you are immune from liability unless you either: 1) are a licensed professional acting within the scope of your employment, in which case normal professional liability rules would apply; or 2) do something that a court finds grossly negligent.
Instead of putting the load on his own server he should have used youtube server with a small quality video but download the song in the back-end for the next time.
it is distinctly the odd-one out because it doesn't even refer to a specific genus

Cow can refer to female elephants as well
True, the article certainly leaves out a lot there. I would, however, attribute Singapore's success to their own good leadership. The Brits certainly were not the ones who developed it to what it is today.
I am naive when it comes to Android updates.

The purpose of the article was to focus on why A]auto updating is beneficial from a security standpoint. I'm assuming the end user doesn't want their device compromised. They want security baked in.

I also agree that automatic updates don't make sense from an economic standpoint. But, users assume applications are secure when they purchase. It is up to the manufacturer or the developer to make sure the users of their applications and devices aren't being compromised because of their mistakes.
Saving lives with the mobile phone
Going on 10 years, similar experience. People don't understand how much suddenness of the death affects you. What I have come to realize is that there is no right way to deal with people dealing with death. And that everyone will deal with death differently. I remember at my dad's funeral stuff the number one line I heard from people was, "if you ever need anything..." I didn't know what that meant then, or now. But its a good line.

As a side note, I was in AP comp sci at the time with only 4 other students. Our teacher was an ex marine computer programming since the punch card days and really strict and emotionless. My indian friend that was in the class with me said that it was so sad and quiet in class the next day that they could hear the teachers heartbeat. I'll never forget that line.