skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At the current state of research, nobody claims to know enough about how the brain works to conclude that the mind is "an empty plate of neuron waiting to be connected." Trisomy 21, or Down Syndrome, can be classified as mental retardation, and you might call it an abnormal lack of mental capacity. This is a completely genetic abnormality. Obviously, they go through the same stages of neonatal development, neuron pruning, etc., but their ability to form neuronal connections, like yours and mine, is limited, at birth.

I picked a rather extreme example just to illustrate the point. I don't disagree with everything you wrote, but it is a mistake to believe early manifestations of genius have nothing, or even little, innate roots. Daniel Tammet is your living example. If his brain were a bit different, he'd be just another Kim Peek. It will be very hard to argue that this is due to rigorous practice from an early age. Kids with autism don't just gradually lose their aptitude to comprehend emotions by lack of practice. They are born with a dysfunctional empathy circuit. Kids with epilepsy don't just develop their symptoms. They are testable and predictable, and heritable.

I'm not saying what you say is wrong -- it depends on what you mean by intelligence. But you're being unspecific about "intelligence" while being specific about how it is related to genetic, inborn traits. This opens the door wide to attacks like mine -- just pointing it out.

One more thing. The statement "The theory of races after all started in Germany" evaluates to false. I assume you're referring to early 20th century Germany. It started with the European colonialists, which wasn't even such a German thing. That's also the Eurocentric interpretation of the word. I'm sure other cultures had their own ideas of race dating to much earlier. The Chinese always called the people outside their country borders barbarians. And Orthodox Jews consider themselves the chosen people. Take that interpretation, then I'm among the unchosen barbarians, or race, whatever.
Chat with Tim O'Reilly about social and data web trends [video]
Adam's Manifesto (from Xobni)
I saw a FF plug for book comparison shopping but you guys did it for everything... congrats on launching!
In addition to being so interesting, it's also a vivid case study in ideology vs reality based action, and the importance of demand in determining supply. Not to mention not underestimating your competition. All valid points.
Yikes. Sometimes I feel like we're devolving... soon we'll communicate using grunts.

I don't think anyone even pronounces that word... never heard anyone say it.
Can't really blame him, the article's headline is incredibly deceiving. There's a huge difference between finding signs of life and signs of a place where life could sprout. That's a pretty huge blemish on Telegraph's credibility.
Maybe for an individual team, there aren't enough games in a season to allow for a reasonable randomized test? It would make sense, perhaps, if your major league franchise controlled enough minor league teams, to use them as guinea pigs. The players and coaches might get a bit upset by being used like that though.
Unless maybe your startup is called stufftodowhentheeconomyisnotinarecession.com.
Why PHP should never be taught.
New battery can fully recharge in 5 minutes and lasts for 10 years
I think for the YC audience, it isn't a choice between having a family or not. I think the article is supposed to be an affirmation of what PG says in Why Not Not to Start a Startup: http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html.

It's good for us to know that someone else out there is affirming the YC model: do it young, before kids.
How to Misunderstand Free Software
GearsMonkey: Google Gears + Greasemonkey to take Wikipedia offline
It's also annoying that there aren't any unsigned (primitive) data types in Java. You end up doing weird bitwise operations to get the correct results.

for example, to convert an unsigned byte to an integer:

byte a = (some unsigned byte data);
int b = 0xff & a;
How to Write Energy Efficient Apps
Ah, so you're one of those people who still thinks Macs are only for artists, your grandma, and stupid people...
Easy Ways to End All Diseases Immediately (and Forever)
"100% organic traffic!"

Does the FDA or USDA certify internet traffic as organic?
So, I put myself in impatient person who just wants a cheaper price on stuff mode.

I went to your site and quickly downloaded it. Then, I was confused by where PriceAdvance was installed. Then I noticed it was on the bottom right, but when I tried to access it, I could only disable it. So, I went back to your site.

1) Your demo has no sound. I had no idea what was going on.
2) When I went to Best Buy, like the demo, Price Advance was still loading (understandable because you just launched and the server calls have got to be pretty high.
3) I still have no idea what you guys do. Perhaps a short and sweet little phrase could help out.
4) I think your server just crashed because neither PriceAdvance or your website are working.

For the brief amount of time, I think you need to spell it out to me what I'm downloading and how it works.
We're moving from CentOS/Ubuntu to FreeBSD for all our *nix boxes. The decision was motivated by hatred acquired for CentOS over time and the fact our systems administrator is most familiar with FreeBSD.
Why Facebook is not the future of the web
My laptop, being 4.5 years old, turns out to be a pretty good benchmark of all these Flash based video sites. The good ones aren't choppy, the bad ones are unbearably choppy.

This is one of the bad ones...
The article states he works for free at the Nike store and others because of child labor laws.
wow that's awesome. keep it up and get to a production version with ie support fast.
Microsoft Offers Free Copy of Windows Vista Ultimate if you Surrender Privacy
Thanks! This is exactly what we need to hear. I'll make a point of updating copy and getting a new video in place shortly (we're definitely experiencing some temp slowdowns due to traffic).
You're definitely on to something, but let's be realistic here. You're no Pollground.
it would be cool if people did things they wanted to do instead of things that look good on applications

if colleges didn't care about them, I think membership in student council, natl honor society, habitat for humanity, chess club, band, etc, etc would fall by 99%

people should just be real
Why Drupal does not use PHP classes
"The coding utilizes Amazon EC2 so running costs are low"

Uh huh... using EC2 for storage sounds like a bad idea, especially since data on EC2 instances isn't persistent...

While I'm sure they meant S3, you have to wonder about a company that uses them in their product yet still confuses the two.
10 Sites Offering Free Linux Courses Online
Pygooglechart: Python wrapper for Google charts API
Creating Games in Ruby
Because no one ever takes classes they're interested in and actually manages to do well in them...
Thank you for your suggestions, they are really helpful.
Our servers have been getting hit pretty hard for the last few hours. We are doing what we can to optimize and scale with the traffic.

Our extension lets you browse/search e-commerce sites like Amazon, Best Buy, Circuit City, Wal-Mart, etc. and get comparison prices inline from other merchants. The results displayed are done through perfect product matching, so you will never get a macbook while searching for an ipod.

If you have anymore questions, feel free to ask. Thanks again for the comments.
Somewhat misleading title... it doesn't last for 10 years between charges, the total lifespan is 10 years under certain conditions:

Toshiba described the Super Charge ion Battery, or SCiB, as a "breakthrough rechargeable battery" that can be fully recharged in five minutes and has a lifespan of more than 10 years if completely run down and recharged once a day.
Best websites to view on iPhone's MobileSafari: all of them.
Many of you are missing the point. (neilc has it right) I didn't want to achieve straight A's for the sake of achieving straight A's. It is not like I told anyone (or needed to prove myself to anyone else). I did it because that was the mark of achieving mastery in the course (now you may disagree with that). Most of the poeple I knew that claimed to be learning a lot outside of the class curriculum and ended up with C's actually didn't learn very much because they spent more time slacking off than trying to learn.

As far as spending time to get A's instead of exploring, I didn't mention it but besides the two internships I also participated in a study aboard at the University of Manchester (England) and traveled all over Europe.

People see this issue as black and white, but trying to get A's does not preclude you from doing other things. You just have to be willing to put in the time to get A's (ie, learning the subject matter) PLUS do other things. Most people don't have the work ethic.

-Robbie
And every instance of "child genius" that has been studied has boiled down to no innate ability, but rigorous practice from an early age.

Completely laughable, and completely unverifiable. The only passable tests of such things that I am aware of are studies of separated twins, which have indicated quite clearly, time and time again, that variance in intelligence is attributable in great part to inheritance. There's no arguing around such tests--bring up as many chimpanzee breeds that you want.

Meaning that "intelligence" is largely learned, mind is an empty plate of neurons waiting to be connected.

The oldest error in the discussion. Start your elementary education in the subject here:

http://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/06...

Pinker spends an enormous amount of time bowing down to the antique emotionalisms of the age, and so the book shouldn't be too offensive to the weak-hearted.

EDIT:

user:	politrix

created:	1 day ago
I think the YC audience may be more diverse than you realize--there may be many with families and some with grandchildren. Also, starting a family and starting a start-up are both a process. Is it less work when you have 12 employees and a large payroll to meet than when you and your co-founders are still struggling to find the first niche for your product? Both are stressful in different ways. From what I read of PG's quote it's "I wouldn't advise anyone with a family to start a startup. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, just that I don't want to take responsibility for advising it."
And your evidence?

Good luck.
The fact that they're valued as much as GE and yet still can't make any money w/o investors speaks volumes.
The up-to-date bit is my main issue. AFAIK the FreeBSD ports tree is never forked into a release branch which receives security updates and nothing else. And you'll find randomly broken stuff from time to time.
Top 10 Scientific Discoveries of 2007
Questions about the future of AJAX
RadioHead going back to CD/Download sales, no more free ride.
Pretty badass guys. Big ups on the chicago front!
It seems pretty blindingly obvious that intelligence is both genetic and environmental. They're not exclusive.
The state of volunteer destributed computing
Ahmadinejad spends 15 minutes a week blogging.
Merriam-Webster new word of the year.
The best one is in Java:

http://ishi.blog2.fc2.com/blog-entry-161.html

...or the most surreal, anyway.
Far more effective: http://vhemt.org
What are your hate points about CentOS?
Yes, I fully agree. My question is why we should expect the probability of there being life on Mars to be appreciably above zero. It sounds like wishful thinking.

As far as we know, life is not something that happens often nor easily, and there isn't any significant indication that there's life on Mars. So far it seems like we've picked our favorite hypothesis (that there's life on Mars) and are now scurrying around looking for any bits of evidence to support it. "Oooh look, there's some water! And some silica!"

I'll avoid drawing the obvious comparison to creationism. Oops, too late. ;)
How to Track Down Anyone Online
I'm pretty sure that FedEx (at least, the 'Home' company, I don't know whether they all share IT) does not do this. I believe they use MapQuest, maybe licensed. Yet, FedEx brags that they're beating UPS (growing 15% / year) because FedEx is the more innovative company. I guess this is a wrinkle.

At least their routes go clockwise, eliminating ~1 left-hand turn :)
Honda Demos ASIMO Robot In Japan (impressive!)
> Smart people became priests and monks, who, while not completely celibate in the real world, still had much lower rates of reproduction.

Actually that's not the case. Popes and priests used to have orgies and sex parties; the reason to go into the clergy was for money and power. They had a racket going, collecting money from poor villagers; joining up was how you cashed in. They were FAR from celibate.

http://www.cracked.com/article_15648_five-biggest-badass-pop...

Similar history for Dalai Lamas; they used to go to war, have illegitimate offspring, etc.

In outlying areas where there wasn't much power to be had, you joined up with the local monks/priests if you didn't have other job skills and thus no way to support a wife/family, so it wasn't as if the most promising males were all taking themselves out of the gene pool or anything close to it.

And you don't need a 1:1 ratio of fathers to mothers; a single smart, powerful male can father hundreds or thousands of children, and pass on his "smart genes".
I've been saying that over and over. Maybe you should say that to someone else.
> If what I.Q. tests measure is immutable and innate

The entire premise is wrong. IQ scores typically rise 5-15 points on a second test, now that the taker knows what kind of questions to expect. IQ tests can be studied and practiced for.

Just like if you hear enough logic puzzles, you can work out solutions to similar problems without needing the "AHA!" moment of insight that you needed the first time.
That sure sounds like a joke.
> On my drive home the worst case scenario is that I will be killed in a car accident

No, the worst case scenario is you crash and are alive but trapped... At night, the ice weasels come.
Or you can live somewhere that has left turn arrows at most intersections.

Like The O.C.
Exactly. This person is comparing the straight-A's lifestyle to doing nothing, and ignoring the opportunity cost they paid. What else could they have learned or done during that time?
Recession - yep, in fact we're probably in one already. Too much wealth is being destroyed in this mortgage crunch/housing decline. Depression, though? Not likely - though I have heard very well connected folks say that we're probalby at the greatest risk of a depression since the 30's. Still, that risk is probably something less than 5%.

However, it's quite possible that this will be a rather deep recession - probably the deepest since the 1980 - 1982 recession. I was in college then. It was very difficult to find work of any kind.

The question on the table is should you leave your likely very safe government job to do this startup. I'll guess this is a software startup of some sort, and that your main expense is living expenses as you develop the code. That being the case, you should probably have at least 2 years worth of living expenses in the bank prior to doing this. A credit-crunch recession such as the one shaping up now means that it's going to be very difficult to borrow money. So do plan to self-fund as much as possible right now. Also, who are your target customers? Will they have trouble coming up with the money to pay you if we get a serious recession? - this is something you should think about.

If you don't have enough money on hand to be able to live for a couple of years, then I'd probably caution you to wait until you do have that much saved up. In the meantime, while you continue to work and save you'll have time to find out if this is just going to be a mild recession or something much more serious.
I don't know that I'd spend 4 years chasing grades that don't matter on the chance that maybe I'd want to go to grad school.
I actually think she's creating something very different from drones. It sounds like she's pushing kids to do extraordinary things that they wouldn't think of doing by themselves, but as long as those are the things about which the kids are passionate (music, science, photography, etc). Even if the end goal is to get into a good college, I don't think it diminishes from those kids' achievements under her guidance.

In the end, it sounds like if the parents and the kids were a bit creative they wouldn't need that woman's services. But she helps the would-be uncreative drones be less drone-like, and that's what helps them get admitted.
Per the http standard header responses are terminated with \r\n\r\n, however the headers on Hacker News are terminated with \n\n. See: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec4.html
I only spent one seconds on your site before commenting.

In that time I knew what the product, why it's useful for me, and how it worked.

Most 'check out my idea' posts on new.yc never get to two seconds. You're ahead of all of them.
For some really well-drawn, original games (simplistic gameplay, but I think that makes them fun and lighthearted - besides, what do you want from a Flash game?), there's http://www.orisinal.com
6 months is fine in normal circumstances, but if you're going to quit a very safe job and start a company of your own you probably want to have a good deal more than six months worth of expenses on hand - probably more like 2 years given the current economic outlook.

Thing is, it's gonna take several months to develop the product (probably code in this case) and then you have to try to market it and find paying customers - that takes time. And then customers might want additional features and changes. More time. When it's all said and done it's likely to take a lot longer than six months to get to the point where there is some cash coming in. You don't want to be in a situation where you just exhausted your six months cash and now you have to go back to work in the middle of your product development cycle. Give yourself some breathing room and have 18 to 24 months expenses on hand.
Definitely -- my favorite one on the Good Experience list is this one. http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/g3/bugs.htm The comment on Good Experience is "Elegant and soothing".
Confirmed: Penthouse Buys AdultFriendFinder For $500 Million
Obviously intelligence has a genetic factor, there is no question about that. Why is cat's intellect different from humans? Due to its DNA. But that is not the point, when it comes to humans, there is no significant enough variation that could lead into large scale intellectual differences. Likewise due to the genetic mixing you couldn't label one traditionally understood "race" as one or the other. Furthermore it makes little sense from evolutionary perspective.

The child genius comment is not laughable. A genius is always tied to a particular skill given in a cultural context. For example playing a piano, or juggling. It is possible that a child is born with certain innate physical qualities that help him in whatever he practices. Like being fair, or strong, tall, etc... But to assume that any 5 year old learned to play piano as some kind of a genetic gift is far more ludicrous. It takes hard practice to perfect your body and mind to work in unison for any particular task, approximately the same for everyone bar perhaps the effects of personal motivation and rigor of the exercise.

With the exception of people with disorders that in some way may make them amazingly good at certain tasks, like having eidetic memory.
"@shayan: My team and I have 6 months of savings, meaning we can pay the bills for 6 months before we either need income or investment. Do you think that is long enough?"

I'm not @shayan, but I'll put in my 2cents: no. It's not enough. Given the current economic conditions and the realities of startups you should have more like 18 to 24 months worth of expenses saved up. Because: 1) you don't want to have to go hat in hand to VC at a very vulnerable time and 2) you don't want to have to go back to work in the middle of your development cycle because you ran out of money.

Yes, you may think it'll only take six months till you get some cashflow, but it'll likely take longer than that.

Now is as good a time as any to do a startup, but do make sure you're adequately capitalized.
The point of college is more babysitting, except this time you pay for it (in grade school, taxes paid for it).

If this gets you in debt, you then have to work it off by being supervised in yet another babysitting situation/nanny-state position, working for The Man.

Any benefits you manage to get out of it are incidental.
Lowering rates won't help the current situation much if at all. The current problem is a crisis of confidence. That confidence can only be restored if the big financial outfits like Citibank come clean about their exposure to MBS and bad debt. As long as they continue to hide their exposure such as by creating this "super SIV" or whatever they're calling it this week, the problems will just fester and confidence will not return - we'll end up with a stagnant economy like Japan had from the early 90's till about 2004.
I disagree...

I only glanced at their website for about 10-15 seconds
and I understood what the product was...
Or just offer a money back guarantee and honour it. Make 50k off of the 20% who make it through, and Robert's yer mother's brother.
"Dear Erlang I: X I like you. Really, I do. But until you can read lines of text out of a file and do basic pattern-matching against them acceptably fast (which most people would say is faster than Ruby), you're stuck in a niche; you're a thought experiment and a consciousness-raiser and an engineering showpiece, but you're not a general-purpose tool. Sorry."

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/09/22/Erlang
The genetic diseases you mentioned are significant mutations leading into strong dysfunctionalities in how the brain is supposed to function. Leading it not to function correctly. This is far from evolutionary path leading one population of people into some sort of mental retardation, especially when evolutionary selection would be against it. In addition most of the mentioned diseases are recessive which is the only reason they have survived, as any offspring with the disease won't survive to pass the genes on.

Autism is a different case because it's not necessarily genetic (although I'm not sure if there are also genetic cases). In fact autism cases have exploded in recent history, so environmental factors are likely a contributor. One such theory is the vaccines containing mercury which is a strong neuro-toxin decaying neuron connections which would result into the observed behavior. I'm not going into that discussion however.

I'm being unspecific about intelligence because it's inherently a very ambiguous concept, which is one of the fallacies of the IQ testing and the arguments given by the racists like in this thread. I can see short comings and non-objectiveness in almost every IQ test I have seen. And that without even taking into account the fact that they're "adjusted" periodically to reflect the norm which obviously means they're not perfectly objective to begin with.

I was referring to 18th century Germany and for example theories created by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blumenbach
Actually, that's the one I play most often, too. (For some definition of "often"; I don't play games much.)

A couple other good ones I've played are http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/g3/bauns.htm and http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/g3/bells.htm (apropos of winter time). Honestly, most of them are really worthwhile.