skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Open Yale Courses - Game Theory
park slope here

also: http://hackrtrackr.com/
Probably. And then near the new york area next. Good 'ol Silicon (V)alley.
It's possible though that this is analogous with running. An IQ test could be seem as a relative sprint whereas the business of solving genuinely complex problems might be a marathon.

A 'sprinting test' may actually provide a rough gauge of general fitness and physical ability - and in so doing be a rough predictor of marathon performance in the general populace. But at the higher levels those with fast twitch muscles are actually at a disadvantage in a marathon against those with slow twitch muscles. Extrapolating the sprint result to the marathon only works at the very crudest level.

Of course I'm not saying this is actually the case with intelligence but in certainly could be.
Aussie living in Hong Kong
Smart people tend to be good ping pong players too, if they try, because you have to process so much information in such a short time, and then act on it.
Coding Errors that Affect Security
Yup, in Boston.
We should be happy that RMS is out there fighting the good fight. Though most of us don't go quite as far as he does, our livelihood depends on the availability of Free and open source software, and the ideals of the Free Software Movement. Democratic society is built on debate. When you have people at various extremes arguing you end up somewhere in the middle and I'm glad RMS is there to skew the average.
Michael Lewis on the bailout: Opacity over outrage
Salt Lake City, UT
Hartford, CT
But in Rails land, there have been significant changes over the last two years in addressing a number of the issues.

Of course, let's not forget that Rails 3.0 (which is where the merge with Merb will be accomplished) will give Rails more of the points he highlighted in that article.

I'd love to see a balanced comparison using more up to date versions and see how it fares...
Hey, can you send me an email? I import an herb that grows in Indonesia and if I can secure it at less than the prevailing wholesale price me and a wholesaler could make millions of dollars.
Hey, send me an email please, would love to talk briefly as I am looking for a business partner in indonesia.
John Hege dead in Oakland shooting
If that were true, why would would the FSF say that
"using the Lesser GPL permits use of the library in proprietary programs; using the ordinary GPL for a library makes it available only for free programs" [http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html]? The LGPL is not designed to trick you into using the moral equivalent of the GPL; it's designed to occupy the middle ground between GPL and BSD licenses.
Two exceptions:

1. Many computer vision algorithms (Canny...) are more clever than search.

2. Fourier analysis is not search.

But maybe that's too low-level to be "real" AI.
Representing the 309! Not there now, but grew up in Rock Island... many moons ago!
I don't understand why anyone would use a "textmate lookalike" on linux if they already had the real thing on OSX.
Make that three of us. Even when I'm looking at Campfire, I'm still reading the black box through the corner of my eye.

Also, I think it looks like the second half and the first half were designed by totally different guys. The first is really colorful, which helps tell the sections apart, but the second is nothing like that, just their plain old vanilla. And at the end...wham! The black box of death again.
This is really just pointing out that IQ tests are time based and so people who think faster do better at them. Measures of intelligence that are not time based might not show the same difference.

I often found in school / college that I could answer all the questions on tests and exams but not in the time given. It always felt a little unfair that others who were actually less capable sometimes got higher scores simply because they were faster at those parts they could do.
Southern Thailand (originally from The Netherlands)
Is there a HN meetup in Boston? If not, I'd be happy to organize one.
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Fast deserialization in Python
I'm from Cincinnati, currently living in Rochester, NY for university, but planning to move back this summer....
me also and am looking for a startup co-founder.

Hacking in scheme on a web- data- related prototype as outlined on quantblog.wordpress.com.
Holy fuck: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/03/cant_let...

When you out-self-congratulate Dave Winer in a blog post, and manage to be an even bigger douchebag than him in the aftermath, it's seriously time to re-evaluate what you're doing with your life.
The real question is the value of an exclusive education vs the cost of such an education. An extra 100k by graduation requires a huge increase in lifetime earnings to balance it out.

"those who attended the most selective colleges would earn an average of $2.9 million during their careers; those who attended the next most selective colleges would earn $2.8 million; and those who attended all other colleges would average $2.5 million." (Clearly, with those numbers paying for such an education is an net economic loss on average.)

PS: Granted if your getting a free ride then it's not that big a deal. However, the only reason the question shows up is an increase in tuition to the student and or their family.
That would be awesome. I prefer using Mercurial to Bazaar, but I really need the subversion client interface.
About (1), I wrote some software that finds text in an image, by searching for items and filtering with rules.

Maybe in my post, I was being too general.

I studied neural networks at University too, and maybe I don't use them because I find them hard to apply to a search task.

But all the AI module's theory (outside of neural nets) was about searching trees, etc.
That green they use is kinda hard on the eyes...
How To Remotely Admin Servers Via Twitter
Some Melburnians listed on this page.
Cocoa with Love: Recreating UITableViewController to increase code reuse
I'm in London, Ont.
This article is on the money. All the bluster and outrage about the employee bonuses is merely because it's been successfully framed as a moral issue and not a financial issue.

All crises need a scapegoat and the management of AIG have been rightly or wrongly handed the role. If each household in the US had been handed an invoice for $5000 to raise the hundreds aof billions to bail out AIG, then the bailout would never have happened. Yet you can argue the same thing has happened. And most of the money went to counterparties, like Goldman Sachs, courtesy of Paulson.
Count me in as #5.
Big it up for the Kiwis.
Greetings from Ulverstone, Tasmania. Latitude: 41° 8' 60 S. Anyone further south? Dunedin? Hobart? Antarctica?
Think I may be the only South Carolina HN member lol
I find it interesting that the reports tend to consistently state that college prestige is indeed important for students from lower income families. I found that to be enormously true, myself. I am from a working-class background -- did my undergraduate degree at a state school, and found it boring and, really, a waste of time -- much like high school. But I also think now that a lot of this was my own fault -- I had no idea how to approach college, and how to really make it work for me.

Later, I then did a graduate program at an Ivy League school -- and the scales fell away from my eyes. The most important thing I learned there, I think, was how successful people work in the world -- how to resourcefully make the most out of every opportunity, how to seize the initiative, how to make connections. I have the feeling that if I hadn't been brought up in the class I was, I would have inhaled these things at my parents' knee -- as it was, it took me much, much longer than it should have; but it was an enormous lesson, and almost worth the ridiculous student loans I now owe. ;-)

(I am also by no means saying that an Ivy League school is the only place for lower-class kids to learn how to work the world -- far from it! I was just not talented enough to figure it out myself, and the experience made all the difference in the world for me.)
.. except in the terminal .. ;-)
curl http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse 2>/dev/null | grep '="command"' | perl -pe 's#</?div.*?>##g' | bash
It's easy to see how strange cultural taboos could get formed with this type of thing. Imagine a bunch of people in a tribe doing something on a beach (I don't know, eating crayfish or something). All of a sudden a huge explosion erupts on the horizon and the air is filled with a sulphuric stench. The medicine man/chief/authority figure says 'the gods are not pleased, we should not eat the crayfish'. They gather up all the crayfish and throw them back into the sea. The eruptions stop. Thus : the people stop eating crayfish for fear of upsetting their god.
The king of customer development starts a blog (and tweets too)
People's Republic of Oregon
Tallahassee, Florida. (It's probably too much to hope that anyone on HN is near there)
Another cool thing to check for is hackers at your school who are on hacker news: http://www.hnDir.com
Austin, Texas : Live music capital of the world!
yes, dogfish head 60 Minute IPA is the closest you'll get to cask in a bottle
If you think while playing then you cant play well. I play reasonable good ping pong, and many times I am also watching me play.I do not know what I will do because I did not decide consciously.
Pmxdr: postMessage XDR JavaScript Library
Your question presumes that knowledge and understanding are the primary issues in getting "the old generation" on the net. They are important, of course, but I wonder if, in some cases, the critical issues are those related to filtering a large number of inputs.

Consider: I'm 43 (and at least on the edge of what some of you would call "the old generation"). I find large portions of the web to be unusable without flashblock. I'm sure I have a well developed case of banner blindness (of which I'm very glad), but some pages are still rough.

Now take a 70-year-old who grew up in a media-poor environment and has little computer experience, and stick a typical web page in front of them. If it's something to read, sure, they can read it. But navigation, search, etc., all require finding the right thing to click on, and ignoring all the distractions. Can they do that easily, even if they know how?

I just went to the Amazon home page, certainly one of the calmer commercial pages on the web, and counted the number of clickable regions on my screen. Result: 143. I can easily imagine someone who knows what they want to do and how to do it, still having trouble getting it done, when confronted with that many choices.

Now take that person to an animation-heavy page. They see 100+ choices, of which 30 of the wrong ones are insistently clamoring for attention. Is this going to work, even if they know what to do?

The real question here is whether the kind of unconscious filtering we all do is something the old can (easily) learn. And if it is, how to best ensure that someone learns it. I'm afraid I don't know the answer to either of those questions.
Ask YC: Where do you advertise online?
I've had some success with Adwords, Yahoo's equiv, FB and StumbleUpon. Where else do you suggest?
I enjoyed reading Mr. Stallman's proposal. I support it and I would like the abilities he mentions, to turn off and replace javascript, to be included in Firefox.

Most of what you say is well-hashed anti-GPL stuff. A few web searches should provide you with all of those arguments, much more carefully written, and save you a good deal of ranting time.

Personally, I don't think there is any good reason to believe that the copyright system promotes the economy or general society, or "the Useful Arts and Sciences" as it is required to do by the US Constitution. Your examples of iPhone and Facebook applications and writing a database are not very convincing. Why should programmers everywhere be constrained from copying something in order to subsidize the creation of iFart ? Giant multi-national corporations use GPLd versions of Oracle competitors, even through MySQL and Postgres and SQLite are licensed in exactly the way you object to, and somehow the free market system still figured out how to pay programmers to work on those projects.
I'm interested in a Silicon Valley vs non-Silicon Valley poll.
This is right on the money. A question though, what does being relentlessly resourceful to others reflect?

Personally, I think that's where the challenge in life is. It's a challenge before and after the money or success comes.
It's not just name dropping. While I appreciate the extra links, they do very little to put the project in context or explain why we should care. Alan Kay isn't just a big name, he's also a good essayist. While light on technical details, his articles are what prompted me to go out and learn more about FoNC and COLA.
I have tried AdWords and Facebook. They worked in the sense that people visited my site, but they did not work in the sense that no one bought anything from me; however that may be due to my site and product, not the advertising.
Top IT locations
Very good article, to add the list of advantages a small startup has against an established vendor.

Anyone who worked for a large company knows how long it takes for any significant decision to happen, and how much hedging and precaution is built in each. Large corporations move slower.

The counterpoint to this is that if a large company ever decides to really go after you, it will be really tough because they have resources that you cannot possibly match.

Think an army of thousands of sales people badmouthing you to your potential customers, for instance. Or offering a free product to kill your only source of revenue.

It can play both ways.
That's one of the problems with neural nets...there's usually no easy way for a human to understand what the actual decision process is (in sharp contrast to, say, decision trees).
I'm from New Zealand as well.
Also interesting, one of the links on the site leads to another discussion which claims that there is a correlation between higher intelligence and lower wages for those whose highest degree is a bachelors. The study partially attributes this to the bad advice that more intelligent students tend to get from their parents ("study what you love", as opposed to "study something practical").

(Referenced link is http://www.halfsigma.com/2006/07/higher_intellig.html )
Brisbane, Australia.
i don't know much about anything, but i do know how to make basic concrete, i do know how to make basic alloys and i do know about things like penicillin and other natural drugs.

i don't need anything fancy to make use of this knowledge. i could build a house, farm some crops, and stay kind of healthy with this knowledge. could make this happen in a very short period of time if the knowledge is retained. its just a matter of reogranizing to build back up the structures of society if we still had our knowledge.

it would take much longer to relearn, because you would have to relearn the knowledge and then rediscover how to structure society. if we had residual buildings and computers, they'd be useless as they went into disrepair due to our lack of knowledge.
How much people earn is not the only test of the quality of their education.
I don't find that especially convincing - there is no machine intelligence we don't understand, since we have created all of it.

I would say that AI includes a few classes of algorithms related to solving certain types of problems (detection, planning, concept abstraction), or perhaps related to certain techniques for solving problems (heuristic search, ML, vision, etc.).
Several of the comments lead me to believe that people aren't reading to the end of the article.

Robin's final conclusion is that the more prestigious name does matter, and that the study has been misinterpreted.
That's why he says "Ack! I was almost conned by elite journal editors and media reporters into believing a comforting lie!"
They went for the terminal look, but some of us have dark on light terminals too! Finally a site where command-control-alt-8 comes in handy.

Great tips though, although not all of them work on OSX, and it does't advertise this. Love the !! command (runs previous command as sudo), had completely forgotten about it.
AI includes heuristic search (and a great many problems can be solved with heuristic search), but it includes other things as well.
It was a speaker at a panel at TieCON 2007.

I have no idea how he pulled it off. You are right, thinking biotech and startup makes it seem like it would require a lot of investment. At the same time, there are plenty of folks in desperate situations able to raise money and build a company. How they raise money etc. simply becomes a part of the detail when you are that desperate.

He may have had a well-connected cofounder. Or professor. I don't know.
I'm seeing it on Eee Linux, which lacks a number of 'web-safe' fonts, and if it did have them it would have no idea how to properly display them. I think we rightly fall in edge cases not worth supporting, alongside IE6 ( http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/index.php?browser=ie6&url... and http://37signals.blogs.com/products/2008/07/basecamp-phasin.... ).

It wouldn't be a ton of trouble to make the text bubbles expand to fit the text (one more div and splitting the background images, I suspect but won't confirm). But their goal was, I assume, to have a well-aligned, eye-catching 2x2 grid, and they chose not to support rare-ish cases where that wouldn't be what was rendered rather than cluttering their markup.
Why? If you buy into exponentially increasing progress, then most of the graphs seem to indicate that it will happen within a lifespan from now, especially if you consider the medical advances that will come in the intervening time.
"Online Personal Brand" is certainly something I've considered - it's why I've never cultivated a handle and just register as 'Jacob Aldridge' (or as close as User ID formats allow) wherever I go.

There's the fear that this involves one part of my life (say, work) with another (say, a weird fan film I did when I was at uni), but I actually enjoy combining them - my business clients enjoy knowing about my Guinness World Record, HN etc.

Five years ago it was much easier for me - probably 80% of the ego surf for my name was me. There's been a glut of Jacob Aldridges reaching their teenage years (and therefore Facebook, media etc) since then - much more diluted Google / Brand results.
Frequent reader, less frequent poster and #6 from Melbourne (Geelong to be exact!)
I use it on my blackberry, because it works a lot better than the browser it ships with. But that's it since it first released and I used it some.
Who Really Rules?
Chicago! (Oak Park, Illinois)
Every leader of such a movement by definition must be an extremist, even if it makes them look foolish

Why? RMS's movement would benefit most from convincing us, as developers, to contribute to FOSS. I pray that being a foolish-looking extremist isn't the best way to do that.
I'm from New Zealand too. I'm in Taiwan now though.
It is certainly not impossible; I did it. It requires very specific circumstances to be able to bootstrap a biotech company. What's more common is probably what I call an East Coast style business: you write a business plan, then you go raise money to execute it.
I like freedom. Freedom is good. The only question in this instance is - freedom for whom? Freedom for the developer to write code without comments, so that you can't hack it? Or freedom for you to read his code? I think that javascript currently embodies both of these freedoms in the best possible way. The author does not force you to execute his scripts; by your http request you asked for them. At the same time he is not being forced by you to make his source code "intelligible."

The implementation of JavaScript is most likely open source, and the script's code is obviously available. Am I missing something? Is he saying that it's not "Open Source" if it doesn't have enough comments?

Trying to prevent people from releasing source code without comments because it's not easily hackable is a bit much. Almost everything about RMS is "a bit much" though, and that's why so many hackers like him ;)
Kathmandu, Nepal. Currently in Louisiana.
Bangalore, India
Human brains live on the ‘edge of chaos’
the description of how you handle your written/paper to-dos is the same as how I do it normally.

i will try this out for a bit
Here is a pie chart with the current data from the poll:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=350x170&chd=t:193...

Or if you want to see realtime data, you can use following bookmarklet to embed chart directly into this page:

----

javascript:function loadScript(scriptURL){var s=document.createElement('SCRIPT');s.setAttribute('language','JavaScript'); s.setAttribute('src',scriptURL);document.body.appendChild(s);}loadScript('http://alteredqualia.com/visualization/hn/hn_poll_graph.js');

----
Kharagpur, India :)
Surfaces beyond the third dimension
Did you read the article?

First of all, it's just talking about undergrad - not graduate school. They are different.

Second, the study cited shows that attending a prestigious school does increase earnings, contrary to some misinterpretations in the mainstream media. The article is about how/why the mainstream media misinterpreted/misrepresented the Dale and Kruger study.
Pittsburgh! :)
I'd email you but I already belong to the mail lists for Dorkbot, Refresh, Devhouse, etc and don't want duped emails. :)
Santa Clarita, CA (Just above LA). Anyone else from around there?
What has he really accomplished? All he has done is shift the focus from desktop development to SAAS models. Why do you think all software companies are doing SAAS now? We can use gpl on the server and not have to release our code. Just like google. You get the best of both worlds. FOSS becomes the infrastructure.

FOSS can't compete in this space because they can't afford the servers - you have to have revenue to make it in SAAS.
For a nonGPL Free operating system, see losethos, http://www.losethos.com. I hope to make money from it somehow if it becomes popular. Damn linux commies.
Cochin, India
Boston here to
That was a great video. I made this post with an interest primarily in the expert systems part of AI and this video solidified by interest.

I now know what I'm going to do after the internet. :)
AcademicEarth.org is a non-profit compiling free online courses (MIT, Yale, etc).

I've started two and think both are very good:

Yale, History of the US civil war with prof. David W. Blight

and

MIT, Physics: Classical Mechanics with prof. Walter Lewin
Scaling my app is not a big issue. It's deployed with multiple small user groups - not large consumer sites.
Ron Paul: Believer in small government predicts 15-year depression
When we were coming up with this list I joked that San Francisco should be considered a separate region from Silicon Valley if only because companies from the valley actually turn a profit at some point.

So if SF and Silicon Valley had been grouped together (which they probably should have; separating them is somewhat of a copout for a list that includes Japan, an entire country) what is the missing area on the list?

My vote goes to Portland, OR. :)
Sure, every account is an asset but the assets in accounts have to be recorded as liabilities - that is why they had losses way in excess of the cash they raised. The point of the article is PayPal ran risks (violating banking laws, risking a run on their cash) an established company never could have.
Ask HN: Market research and HN community norms
I am considering launching a service that specifically targets hackers, independent (tech) contractors, tech entrepreneurs, etc. and I would like to post a poll on Hacker News for the purpose of market research. Before I post the poll, however, I want to make sure posting a poll for market research would not violate any HN community norms. Please note the poll would be limited to a market research question only, and NOT marketing/sales. Thanks all for your input.