skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure where "crowd behavior" comes into this. In the 16th century, we believed that the species of the Earth were created whole by a God. Now, science has provided a better more defensible explanation. It is this pattern I was referring to, that's been repeated endlessly cross many phenomena formerly best explained by religion, to the point the religion is only left with "well, where did the big bang come from?"
The best conversation I ever had of this type converged to people going around in a circle making toasts.
faith: firm belief in something for which there is no proof

Being atheist is not a matter of faith; it's a matter of logic and science. To have faith is to believe in something that does not make logical sense and has not and cannot be proved scientifically. There is NO faith involved with an atheist.
Atheism allows you to take it further. Atheism says that since the world is governed by physical laws alone, anything not forbidden by the laws of physics is achievable. You don't have to concede that one day you'll join her in a hole in the ground: we become masters of our fate and, with enough creativity and engineering, throw off the pessimism imposed by religion.
Pick an adviser. The school you go to is the school your adviser is located at. I wrote some previous comments on this topic:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=247160

To answer your specific question, it's definitely a place worth checking out. There are great CS theory/math people here. The culture is friendly but a bit isolating. You will need to actively work at meeting people you don't directly work for.
Intriguing article.

I'm undecided about the usefulness of IQ tests, but I'm avoiding taking any at all, which I suppose puts me in the "anti" camp. If I took one, I suspect the result would either go to my head if it's high (for some unknown value of "high") or be heartbreakingly disappointing, with nothing in between. Which is somewhat silly I suppose, particularly as it contradicts the idea that it's not a useful measure.

(as a background: I'm often assumed to be the smartest person out of pretty much any group of people I happen to find myself in, which brings with it a whole slew of expectations and social awkwardness. It's a vicious cycle in that once people notice it, my reputation eventually precedes me. As a result I regularly feel the need to "flee" from jobs, clubs, cities, etc. and "reset" everyone's expectations. I'm finding freelancing/consulting easier than holding a job. And yet there's the nagging pressure of expectation from family, etc. that I "live up to my potential")
> but it takes too much mental overhead to figure that out at every such stage in every conversation

This is the heart of the matter, I think. A large part of the brain's power seems to be tuned for sensing status and other social friend-or-foe questions. It's a genuinely complex problem, and it's hard to do while you're also thinking hard about something else.

(The flip side of this is that sometimes it's useful to anthropomorphize the elements of the problem, and that explaining a problem to someone else often brings out aspects you've overlooked.)
Yes, he does. I've spoken to a few quants at Soros' fund.

He doesn't use them as his main strategy, but if he is, e.g. betting that GM will go bankrupt, he still wants a quant to tell him which CDS to buy, or to determine what happens to his portfolio as a whole if X happens to the market.
Yes, because the group IQ tests are lumped in with achievement tests kids often have no idea that it is different from the other achievement tests, whereas the psychologist tests certainly stand out. Looks like NYC public schools recently adopted a group IQ test after years of using the real thing... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otis-Lennon_School_Ability_Test

Also see this comment from Ronald Hoeflin (an author of multiple super IQ tests) about verbal intelligence. http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/ultra.html

>A comment on verbal intelligence: Some people wonder about the value of verbal items as a measure of "intelligence," since trying such items seems to involve little or no intellectual effort. From the purely statistical standpoint, many studies repeatedly showed that verbal intelligence, including the sheer size of one's vocabulary, has one of the highest correlations of any type of test item with overall intelligence as measured by tests containing a wide variety of test items. See for example the book Intelligence in the United States, published around 1958, for ample documentation. On the purely intuitive level, one might say that learning a language, including vocabulary, is for the child like decoding hieroglyphics. The brighter child will master this decoding process far more readily than the average child. Later, of course, one can artificially boost the size of one's vocabulary, but cleverly designed tests of verbal intelligence can get around this problem by relying on somewhat atypical verbal items that one would be unlikely to pick up through a "vocabulary improvement" course but that a gifted child would be likely to have picked up if he has been reasonably inquisitive -- and isn't inquisitiveness an important part of intelligence? Finally, to use a computer analogy, a powerful computer without adequate software (analogous to verbal intelligence in humans) would be relatively unproductive no matter how powerful the hardware. -- RKH

He has one more test that is publicly posted. http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/titan.html
Apparently, "as an entrepeneur you are obviously a free spirit, not the kind of person that settles well in a normal job, we would never hire people with a failed startup on their resume".

By their own logic (maybe I'm giving them too much credit, by assuming consistency) they probably wouldn't want to hire someone with a successful startup either.
The DiggBar controversy summarised in two easy screenshots
About your last comment: take responsibility for your actions.

The real question (which neither the OP nor I am qualified to answer) is whether a startup opens more doors than it closes, not whether it closes one particular door. Obviously, there are all kinds of people in the world with all sorts of stupid biases; there's someone out there who will decide not to hire you because you went to the same school as some intern he disliked.
Let me get this straight--you're bitter because you didn't get hired by a company that evidently doesn't even want you to have any ambition or initiative of your own? I would be relieved if I was in your position.
Google Easter Eggs, Tricks and Hacks | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
Unlikely. I doubt that's the real reason -- it's just the excuse the recruiter told you.

You probably just had a bad interview. Either you're not completely qualified, or they didn't feel you were a good fit for the team. Maybe they didn't like some of your answers to the interview questions. Or, somebody else beat you out for the position.

Using careful wording you can spin any negative experience into something positive. I'd recommend doing that with your startup.
GitBug: an App Engine-based issue tracker for GitHub
Thanks to the Internet, now it takes only 24 years to publish one's physics experiment result :P

Don't get me wrong, this is very cool -- hope I'll have all the facilities (mainly a large, undisturbed basement) when my son grows up to do it together with him.
In my experience within the UK graduate market I find that recruiters for larger companies usually give very frank and honest reasons for not hiring you.
Canadian immigration does do ranking in a fairly efficient way: applicants must support documentation on a wide array of subjects, such as educational background, linguistic capability, etc. This is backed up by verification during the (later) interview process.

The idea is that each applicant is scored based on things such as English/French fluency (bonus points for both), educational background, field of expertise, etc.

You don't need to carefully pore over every case to do some reasonable level of ranking.
let me simplify -- he did not become a billionaire by using quant strategies. He may use them to optimize his trades, but has doesn't actually NEED them.

It would have been better if you mentioned Renaissance or one of the funds that are actually driven by quant strategies.
Where's HN and Twitter? :)
Just curious... why hasn't StumbleUpon been pulled into this fight? They've had their own frame-based bar for a while now.
My theory:

Everyone has two brains, a "people" brain and a "stuff" brain. Most people use them roughly equally, but some use one more than the other.

When we were kids, my sister and I used to argue because she thought that her stuffed animals had feelings, and that birds had conversations about specific things. She was always attributing human emotions to things that didn't have them. Even now, she does it with her cat: if the cat trips and falls and walks away with its head down, my sister will say, "Aww, she's embarrassed!" -- even though cats don't understand embarrassment and the cat is probably just tired.

Unsurprisingly, my sister is religious and I'm not. Religion is what happens when people misapply their people brain to thinking about stuff. They get a vague sense that the world is alive, and then explain it in whatever concrete terms their culture provides (God, in our case).

Nerdiness is what happens when people misapply their stuff brain to thinking about people. Nerds misinterpret other people because they fail to attribute emotions to them. However, unlike religious people, nerds usually realize at some point that they have a problem and can try to change. Except in extreme cases, religious people suffer no consequences for being wrong, so they have no reason to change.

Since women tend to be more interested in people and men more interested in stuff, this also explains why women are more often religious, and men are more often nerds.
I'd love to know more about it if you could provide a reference. I'm especially curious about how applicable it is to other religions.
Time Travel Cheat Sheet
Given that the rant comes from Merlin, it's likely that he has his tongue somewhere in his cheek

Edit added later: After hearing the podcast, he might just be sincere about this. Somewhat weird to see Merlin's cynicism not laced with a healthy dose of sarcasm.
Unless you know something the rest of us don't, I think you're grossly misinformed. There's no skilled labour immigration track in the USA, and the only way to live/work in the country for many people is on the H-1B and TN visas. The latter does not lead to permanent residence, while the former does (and chains to your sponsor company as a wage slave).

The point that the article (and other posters here) are making is that you should be allowing these people to wander Silicon Valley looking for jobs. Instead of treating them as temps who must leave the country shortly, they need to be welcomed and given the opportunity to become Americans.
The trick to success in those conversations is to realize that, as long as you're not offensive, no one gives a fuck about the verbal content, most of which is excruciatingly boring. Intellectually, it's like a 6-year-old's soccer game where no one will remember the score tomorrow. Those are the conversations in which 90%+ of how you're perceived is based on body language, tone of voice, etc. If you think for too long about what you're going to say, or get really into what you're talking about and ignore others' lack of interest, or get into debate mode, you'll lose.
That looks great! Thanks for the link.
I'm going to rail against the fast-paced, impersonal nature of communicating internet by posting something fast and impersonal on the internet!
People hiring for jobs have better things to do than to make up stories for why they didn't hire people.
You are in the UK? Perhaps, after collecting some more feedback from other companies, you should add your perspective to the prevailing wisdom here. It sounds like the Silicon Valley software culture may be a bit more accepting of startup experience than in the UK.

That said, it may be beneficial for you to think about how you are selling yourself and your experience.
A few customers thought we might have been referencing Fight Club, but I don't think it was conscious. I think whoever coded the base game template just liked that color :-)
Ironically he isn't blocking the diggbar.
Why do I want to be superficially likable? Because I meet many people for only brief periods of time; not enough for them to learn how deep and interesting I may be. At the same time, I don't want them to think that I'm boring, or that I didn't like them. Maybe we'll meet again in future. Being superficially likable is social lubricant.

I agree you can't forge deep friendships on the basis of anything other than mutual compatibility, and trying to fake that is doomed to failure. But casual friendships are open to hacking, and that's what the advice in this article is about. Casual friendships can also be the starting point for deeper ones, so messing them up is probably inadvisable.
Honda Makes Sleep Prevention Road Grooves Into Music - William Tell Overture To Be Exact
The usual advice is to create a wacky visual association when you hear the person's name. Ideally the visual association would relate the name to a feature of the person.

So maybe you meet someone named Henry. You would imagine that there is a hen on top of his head laying an egg.

Now you just need to remember to create the initial imagery whenever meeting someone.
My sense is that he's completely sincere about the whole thing.

He amplified the opinions expressed here in this talk with John Gruber: http://www.43folders.com/2009/03/25/blogs-turbocharged
I was going to create a poll on Myers-Briggs personality types but found that there already is a poll started by epi0Bauqu. Please consider voting to increase the HN sample size (if you didn't already).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=204240
This reminds me of the physics "practical experiment" we had to do as part of the Cambridge physics tripos (at the Cavendish lab). It was also about measuring gravity, using a pendulum though I forget the exact details, but we then iterated the experimental set up based on the initial results, in theory to get much higher final accuracy than our clock could give.

I thought it was completely dishonest, because if your initial reading was off, then the final answer came out ludicrously wrong. The distribution of the outcome was no longer normally distributed around g, but now had a long tail of catastrophically wrong values. Presumably a good experimenter would simply have thrown away such an 'obviously wrong' value.

I'm amused to think that a large number of those same physicists that happily sat through that experiment then went on to work as quants, where they essentially happily rebalanced probability distributions in exactly the same way, though with a lot more at stake this time around when they eventually got their catastrophically wrong value.
I would be relieved if I was in your position.

I don't think you know enough of his situation to say that. It might not be the best place in the world to work but I imagine after your startup runs out of money, you just want a paycheck.
Some links on Computational Photography, for those who may be interested in this emerging field:

http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/computational-ph...

http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/sp07/6.088/index.html

http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/courses/15-463/2005_fall/www/463....

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2005/cs4803cp_summer

http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs448-04-spring
In childhood, it's bewildering but not so bad. In adolescence, it's awful. In adulthood, it's good, so long as you're able to get past your shitty teenage years.

The transition point (from disadvantage to benefit) is, on average, late college. One would expect it to happen earlier, but what usually happens in college (even, if not especially, in elite ones) is that the less talented half emerge as social leaders, not because there's any persisting malice toward smart people, but because they had better previous experiences.
Cool! Here's the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMxyu1UwuIk
As Stephen Hawking says about IQ:

"Q: What is your I.Q.?

"A: I have no idea. People who boast about their I.Q. are losers."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/magazine/12QUESTIONS.html
I believe that it can be a psychological burden, and possibly be a cause for much unhappiness. Not as a direct result of the IQ, but because of the expectations of yourself and others.

From an early age, I became aware of the positive reactions I got from people when I spoke about science or math. I believe that this pushed me towards these fields. After two decades of being a successful engineer, it occurs to me that another path might have brought just as much satisfaction, and quite possibly more.

My own son at one year, is impressing the hell out of me with what he understands already. I want to cushion him from having his future brainwashed into him by admiring do-gooders. I want to give him the freedom to become a fisherman or a farmer or anything else, without feeling like he's letting down mankind or himself.

We're the ones who make IQ a burden, but recognizing that fact, I think, can be freeing.
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They should recreate this experiment at school - it's one thing learning about all the theory, but all the practical experience you get involves the earth's gravitational field. This is way cooler, more instructive, and definitely more impressive.

I never bothered to look up how big the weights were that cavendish used (I assumed they were two orders of magnitude larger than the author used), nor did I bother to estimate whether it would be feasible to measure gravity between household objects. I'm now wishing I had. Maybe I'll try it one of these days. (I took extra physics at school and studied physics at university and haven't touched the subject since graduating, so I'm extremely bummed that we never did fun experiments like this)
NONE of the "uncommonly difficult IQ tests" mentioned on that very interesting site have ever been properly validated.
If I was looking now, I'd only use Craigslist
In the US, people usually ignore you when you call to ask this question, or give an incredibly generic answer.
17-year-old claims responsibility for Twitter worm
Unfortunately, they are common at the kind of events (such as parties) that one usually goes to in order to enlarge one's social circle.

I actually don't enjoy such events very much, but I do enjoy knowing people, so I go.
Current IQ test scoring is always done on the basis of standard deviation scores for the comparison population. That is because, as you correctly point out, child IQ scores lead to nonsense results if they are taken to be ratios of one "mental age" to another "mental age."
A master's degree in computer engineering could give CS a run for its money. There's enough overlap with CS that a Computer E grad student can learn as much CS as they like, while still having job prospects in a bunch of nice hardware-related jobs. And really, computer hardware is just plain fun.
Amazing. I never knew one could measure the gravitational force between two non-astronomically sized objects. This is really really amazing. I can't believe I never heard about it before.
I actually agree almost %100 - the initial article's tone was very, well, Johan Harri in The Independent (London-tabloidesque is putting it mildly :)), but the subject was interesting. This one is indeed about rhetoric and trolls - while an interesting subject, not sure this is where I'd go for advice on it..
I doubt that the recruiter who told you "we would never hire people with a failed startup on their resume" is actually speaking true company policy.

"Thanks HN. You lied to me about the true cost of a failed startup." Are you kidding? Surely, you aren't ready to blame those trying to help you for one bad encounter with a knucklehead recruiter with a bad attitude.
> Start a side conversation if you can

Divide and conquer is a very powerful group dynamic technique. For example, group of 5. Get one person talking to you (that's 2). Draw another one in (that's 3 - you control the group).

Divide and conquer can be used in darker ways. The Delphi Technique. I have recollections of this being used without my knowledge at the time. It is amazingly effective.

"Using the "divide and conquer" technique, he/she manipulates one group opinion against the other."

http://www.seanet.com/~barkonwd/school/DELPHI.HTM
http://www.booli.se in Sweden. Pretty good UI.
I'm going to guess that it was due to how you behaved during your interview. If you are going for a corporate job, you need to pretty much crap all over your startup experience. You need to talk about how it just wasn't for you, and that you have no plans to ever do it again.

If you talk about how cool it was, and how you plan to do it again, they won't want to hire you, thinking you are just there for a few months until you go back to doing startups
Nice! I've always wanted a conversation to spontaneously become less like ethernet and more like token ring.
That varies so much by company though. I've had everything from silence to a very detailed feedback letter.
"In 1985, Guinness World Records accepted that she had answered every question correctly on an adult Stanford-Binet IQ test at the age of just 10, a result that gave her a corresponding mental age of 22 years and 11 months, and an unearthly IQ of 228."

This is totally bogus, because the Stanford-Binet Form L-M, an IQ test I also took as a child, was never, ever normed on a sample of adults. Not once, not ever. The L-M is strictly a child IQ test, and poorly normed for children also. The names in the test scoring manual for mental age levels (X number of years plus Y level of months) were GUESSES, and it is plain that they are guesses set in such a manner that they grossly overestimate the IQ scores of many L-M test-takers (yes, possibly including me). In any event, the L-M is now obsolete. The Stanford-Binet L-M was reviewed in the Buros Mental Measurements Yearbook, a standard reference book available in most university libraries and in better-stocked public libraries. volume 7. A citation to the Buros review can be found in a compilation volume about mental tests (Keyser & Sweetland 1984). A complete reprint of that review can be found in the one-volume compilation by Buros (1975). David Freides (1970), then associate professor and now professor of psychology at Emory University, began his review by saying, "My comments in 1970 are not very different from those made by F. L. Wells 32 years ago in The 1938 Mental Measurements Yearbook. The Binet scales have been around for a long time and their faults are well known." Professor Freides continued with a critique of the assumptions underlying the design of the test, and specifically mentioned clinical situations in which SB L-M scores should not be taken at face value. He concluded his review with the Latin phrase "Requiescat in pace," indicating he thought the test was moribund in 1970.
And why would a company want to hire someone that 'just wants a paycheck'?
It's true that a monolithic software company might feel someone with a mind of their own was too free-spirited to fit in. But if that's the case, surely you don't want to be working for the company anyway? And if it's a recurring pattern, take the startup off your resume if you can't reword it.