skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many good points but missing one important observation. The cliques in school are hierarchical in nature. All groups may be exclusive toward other members but a band geek cannot make a jock's life miserable as a pastime. Members of each clique can torment those in the "lower castes" with virtually no social cost for those actions. For fun, to fit in, because daddy never hugged them, whatever.

The Nerds and programmers almost always find themselves on the bottom. Things look different when you're a Dalit.
Willkommen zu Firefox
This writer is really clueless as to what high school is like for those on the bottom of the heap -- I mean, really, no idea at all.

For that reason, it's hard to listen to what else he has to say, no matter how relevant or (potentially) awesome.

Obvious that he's never been the low end of the totem pole. It may be different now, but when I was in high school, geeks and nerds got shit on by every group -- the jocks, the actors and actresses. Everyone.
The Dr Frankenstein theme.

BTW strictly speaking, that's criticizing reading, not writing. Which may sound like a distinction without a difference, but I find the act of writing improves my recall; and, sadly, reading my notes profoundly unenlightening.

Also, the article says it's even more effective (I must try this) to say it aloud. I expect further interactivity with ones mental model (problem solving, discussion, argument) improves it further still.
Maybe a way to think about it is that practicing placing it into memory makes you get better at placing it into memory; and practicing recalling that information from memory makes you get get better at recalling it from memory.

I've noticed that I know I lot of things that are difficult for me to recall: there's not much point having something in memory if you can't recall it, so maybe that's the important thing to practice?
Facebook's Privacy Settings Present Intrinsic Limitations To The Platform
Ugh, typography on that page is a mess. The title shadow is distracting, and the leading feels cramped.

Off topic, but please fix.
He makes a few decent points, but it really doesn't seem like he understands nerds or complex social interactions between different personality types very well.
Stress Tests: Most of the 19 Banks Passed
The arguments against municipal networks are not that trivial. If a muni network is funded with tax money, ISPs can legitimately claim that they have no power to tax. If a city both runs its own network and regulates networks, there is a possible conflict of interest. There is also an argument that municipal bonds have a lower cost of capital, but I don't understand the details.
If you guys have never seen the Dilbert cartoon "The Knack", have a look...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmYDgncMhXw
It will lighten your mood after reading this post...
Anyone from evanston taking the purple line/red line? Hit me up (if you want to meet up before hand).
The actual discussion will also improve recall, because you are recalling the information in many ways, and exercising your mental model of it. The process of discussion gives you practice in recalling and using the information.

You may also learn something from the discussion itself, become aware of gaps, fill those gaps, get addition points of view and ways to think about it, reasons for holding opinions, which ones seem right but are wrong and why (and which ones seemed stupid at first but - dramatically - aren't). The social aspect, and the competitive aspect, will help you engage. Later, you might even recall some aspects episodically, e.g. "Jones said this, and Bloggs undercut him, and then I showed they were both wrong, and everyone laughed". Memorable.

I agree that anticipation of a discussion will also make your preparation for it more effective.
There are certainly differences, as you point out. It'd be amazing if you averaged up all male specimens and all female specimens on the planet and the averages lined up on anything.

The question isn't so much if there are differences, but if they reasonably correspond to the gender gap in programming. There are obviously social factors at work since fields like being a high school math teacher, which usually requires a degree in mathematics, is dominated by women, but being a computer programmer, which requires less mathematics, is not.

If the gap was, say, you know, 10% I might say, "Yeah, there you go. Gender differences." But given that a lot of software shops are upwards of 95% male, I don't think you can claim that the remaining 5% of women that crossed the bar were the only ones smart enough to write PHP.

And see, that's the thing. If all of the great programmers were men and the bad programmers were about 50/50, that'd support the gender gap thesis more. I mean, certainly most women that are in the top 10% of their class could be trained to be poor PHP programmers. It's not rocket surgery. But they're not there and there is a dearth of bad male PHP programmers (who may be otherwise intelligent). So it seems to be a little more complicated than "innate ability".
It's a bit silly comparing it to a last generation disk format just to get a bigger multiple to write about. 600mb -> 4.7gb -> 50gb -> 500gb means that if this ever reaches the market it's just continuing the pattern. Barely newsworthy, and definitely not exciting.
Once you eliminate the jocks and cheerleaders, the hierarchy actually seems to disappear. The nerds still try to be alienated for the most part, but the without the focus on sports, I find that all the other cliques just become 'different' instead of one being higher than the other. That might just be at my school though.
To quote reddit header for this link: "All papers should be written in this style". Maybe not all, but yes, everything is very nicely presented.
What makes a great writer? Someone who understands both angles, someone who has been both popular and a nerd. See Paul Graham's Why Nerds Are Unpopular, which was the first essay I ever read of Paul's in high school as a sophomore and that got me hooked on reading the rest of his: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
How convenient, since Mr. Vinge, at 85 years old, will hopefully still be alive!

BTW Vernor Vinge is a great author. I heard he's working on a third book in the Fire Upon the Deep & A Deepness in the Sky series. Looking forward to it!
Science is not done by consensus. What the hell is "climate scientist" anyway. Perhaps you'd like to post some of the solved problems in "climate science". Computer models of the climate are a joke. They don't even take into account clouds.You can't make a model of a problem with thousands of free variables. The evidence at this point is on the side of the sun causing any warming and CO2 rising AFTER warming occurs.
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It really depends on the school. In my high school there was no dominant clique, so the situation was somewhat as the author described. Sure people made fun of nerds, mostly because they left themselves open to it by being different and socially awkward, but there was definitely no strict hierarchy amongst cliques. I think there is some truth to the idea that certain nerds create a sense of superiority as a defense mechanism (think Comic Book Guy), but that is not the root cause of the nerd's social status.

After the opening section I think the rant goes completely off the deep end with a rapid succession of wrong-headed generalizations. It reads like an 18-year-old who just finished high school and now thinks he's got it all figured out. The idea that programmers define themselves by what they are not, or by nitpicking inconsequential details is laughable. Sure programmers may be a bit more prone to nasty protracted flamewars over subtle issues, but we don't define ourselves that way. Sure our communities form around tools moreso than ideas (though not exclusively), but that's simply a matter of necessity given the detail of using any particular tool well. Personally I find the notion that "I define myself as a programmer" offensive. Programming is something I do, and I do it reasonably well, but at the end of the day it's only one of many things I do, and it's certainly not "who I am."
With no $10 laptop in sight, India buys 250,000 OLPCs
RE: My failed tweets,

Richard Fateman's reviews of Mathematica are at:

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/papers/mma.pdf
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/papers/mma6rev.pdf

MockMMA is at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/mma1.6/

The most interesting discussions to me are in the first link: specifically, the limitations surrounding the use of pattern matching for the type system, the limitation of limiting UpValues to a single depth, and the analysis of the 'infinite' evaluation model.
"To clarify, add detail".

If only more app designers used the style of analysis that Tufte demonstrates in the article to critique their own "chartoon" interfaces.

His key insight is that apps can really benefit by removing user interface clutter (appearance/disappearance through user context, low contrast colours or "intuitive" gestural controls), maximising usable information density (color, texture, images, text, zebra-striping all targeted at conveying information, not simply design) either in breadth of scope or detail for a smaller number of items.

I've been a bit disappointed in the current crop of iPhone designs since I saw this presentation last year. They don't need the Tufte aesthetic or sparklines, all they should be is not cartoony, information-lite, or ugly apps.

I'm interested in recommendations for tight, good design in recent iPhone apps. Are there any good candidates?
Amazon Acquires Stanza, an E-Book Application for the iPhone
The Flash doesn't work on that page for me, and it works on every other page I've been to this month.

Why I don't like Flash.
Michio Kaku On Aliens Physics by UFO Stream
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There's something ironic about a post on nerds being deliberately exclusionary which redirects IE browsers to a Safari download link.
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Weightbot and Convertbot are beautifully designed.
http://tapbots.com/weightbot/
http://tapbots.com/convertbot/
I don't see anyone else mentioning a line of credit - when you're young and without many assets, it's easier to apply and get one while still employed, and perhaps a bit more flexible than a credit card. I definitely having one useful a few times when cash was tight starting my company.
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The issue with speed I have comes from the heavy numerical use I'm putting it to: strongly coupled nonlinear differential equations. What worries me is that NDSolve is 1400 pages long, written mostly in C, and relies heavily upon the compiler framework underneath, but it still takes minutes to evaluate what should in most cases take seconds. I suspect this is partly because the flexibility of the language makes it difficult to optimize during compilation, though of course it's difficult to tell from my vantage.

It would be beautiful, however, if NDSolve were implemented in the language itself. If the speed is sufficient for numerical code, then it should be sufficient to write that numerical code in the Mathematica language, and rely on compilation for a speed up. But that path hasn't been taken. While the compiler is immature, it seems that as a company it would make sense to adopt this strategy rather than relying mostly on a monolithic kernel built in C.

Circa MMA 2, Mathematica's kernel code was about 350,000 lines of C, whereas Maple had a Kernel of only about 20,000, with most of the routines written in Maple itself.

Pattern matching is wonderfully beautiful as a core concept, though.
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"you need to be smart in order to be a part of the group"

This is a wrong assumption, because there are people who are smart but are not (computer) nerds.
I was just looking for something like this actually. My designer/friend's workload is too high at the moment...and if you're a hacker/designer looking for a project to work on, preferably in the bay area, hit me up: david.ziegler {at} gmail.com
not as hilarious as shutting down GeoCities - $100m vs. $4bn
Interesting move, since I think the Kindle iPhone app is already sweet.
the argument "you need to be smart in order to be part of the group" is the not the same as "being smart means you are in the group".
A group of people are certainly free to organize a non-profit and do this whenever they want. When "the government" (state, local, etc) does it, its quite a different animal.

Lets say it actually costs $40 to provide this service. TWarner currently provides it for $45 and makes $5 a month per subscriber. The local government provides it for $35. They make -$5 per subscriber. The deficit is covered by taxes (probably a $10-$20 tax increase as government is rarely very efficient).

It is now impossible for any carrier to provide the service and make money. Its actually costing the consumers more. People who don't even use it are paying for it. The market has been defacto-socialized, perhaps without even a proper vote.

The cable companies suck monkey balls but this is not automatically the right thing either. It might very well be. Local governments usually do a pretty good job with water. Still, it should not be undertaken lightly no matter how mad at comcast you might be.
MS debuts Vine, an app for real-time community coordinating
Yahoo should throw this guy a fucking sitemap. That's the least they could do.
Hasn't this been around for a while now? Are there new features now or something?
Strange ... I thought Obama had put a cap on executive pay for institutions receiving federal money.
I'm sorry that's complete BS. Yes there are arrogant nerds and especially more on the internet where the 'geeky' have held sway for longer. But the simple fact is that as noonespecial pointed out, the sporty 'popular' will be more confident in a group of nerds than the other way around because there is no risk for them. The nerds can't make their day-to-day life in school a living hell.
what a sad, angry little man...
seems as if he has a problem with introverts
This is what it takes to be a success. That simple.
How I finally understood the Y Combinator
It all has to do with the perceived attractiveness of the group members, especially those composed primarily of females. If they attractive people are spread out among groups, the cliques are separate but equal. If they're concentrated, the cliques become hierarchical.

A desired group can basically set the hierarchy by what they define as attractive.

Most people don't actually want to leave the social group that they're in, as pg observed in one of his essays. The one exception is when their group is specifically a lesser version of another, usually the hangers-on.The nerds may really like programming and have no desire to play sports -- but they would love to date the attractive girls from any group.

The verbal and physical abuse in the system comes from members of a group which has attractive members of the opposite sex trying to keep down the others. For example, the jocks know that the nerds would like to date the cheerleaders, and so the jocks act to keep their supremacy.

It's high school, it's all about sex, what did you expect?
that cap is only going forward, it doesn't apply.
Are iPhone apps the new gold rush?
Thanks to the media and the astounding success of some iPhone apps, suddenly everyone around me seems to think it's an easy route to riches, especially for the lazy and unmotivated acquaintances of mine (who can't code). Any one experience the same? Is the media exaggerating success?
Why not just upvote the original, am I missing something here?
I for one am happy that geocities is no more. In 1997 I put up a slightly embarrassing personal page there (I was 17 at the time) and then forgot a password. For years every time anyone (e.g. prospective employer) would search for my name they would come across that site. My numerous attempts to contact Yahoo about the password were unsuccessful.
I think he makes a good point in that nerds tend to exclude themselves, but I think it's a defense mechanism from being rejected. Believe me, when I was in jr. high and high school (more than 20 years ago, now) I wanted to "join the crowd" badly. I wasn't allowed in, and I felt awkward every time I tried to join in. I just didn't fit the social milieu. I didn't feel the need to exclude others (there's a difference between this and excluding yourself). If someone else wanted to be my friend I gladly accepted them. So I don't get this whole thing about how "nerds exclude everyone else." That wasn't my experience.
> Cheerleader come over and ask about programming? Shot down. Invitation to a study group? Rejected. The most bitingly ironic comes when a person in a group of nerds gets an invitation to a party. If you’re one of the more social people in your scene, try it. Invite an anime person or a programmer - one of those people - out to an event. Chances are you’ll be declined. There’s every possibility you’ll be rejected impolitely.

I agree completely that nerds do this. I did this. But I never did it to be "elite", or to keep the other person "below" me. Instead, I always assumed that the cheerleader (or whomever it was) was playing a very nasty practical joke on me—that if I accepted, they'd laugh in my face and wander away, or worse, I'd show up at the party to find myself a scapegoat for some random act of civil unrest previously committed that night by the partygoers. And yes, I even made friends only with other nerds—but only because I could tell, by the fear they showed toward the other groups, that they were a prey, not a predator, species, and were thus unlikely to harm me if I associated with them.

(If you can't tell, I was bullied for my entire elementary school life before entering high-school; I imagine I would have had quite a different outlook otherwise. Thankfully, by grade 11 or so, the concept of "clique" had dissolved in my high-school, so I did get to discover what a mentally-healthy high-school experience was like.)
On its own yes. But in the phrase used:

"Cheerleader come over and ask about programming? Shot down. Invitation to a study group? Rejected. The most bitingly ironic comes when a person in a group of nerds gets an invitation to a party. If you’re one of the more social people in your scene, try it. Invite an anime person or a programmer - one of those people - out to an event. Chances are you’ll be declined. There’s every possibility you’ll be rejected impolitely. The whole concept of the nerd clique is based on elitism: you need to be smart in order to be a part of the group."

I've read once about a cheerleader who became a rocket scientist.

The article is based on wrong assumptions. People don't reject you because you belong to a "smart" group but rather because "computer nerds" tend to lack social skills (at some point in their early life at least), that make seem akward. or themselves reject specific attitude/people who they don't feel combatible, so it's a human behaviour thing that you should expect that those you reject they will reject you.
Counting occurences in clojure
This is rambling and seems to be entirely empirically false. On top of it makes a vice out of "nerdiness" and a virtue of "coolness" ("uncool asshole") without any sort of argument to back it.
That's a good point. My high school was oddly non-hierarchical and the reason was the attractiveness was diversified across cliques. The cheerleaders were actually regularly mocked for being ugly.
Has someone done something similar with other languages?
Eek, that'd be "typography".
FTA: "It's been awhile since Microsoft introduced a game-changing social Web application, but Vine -- a service that's debuting today with a beta test in Seattle -- could be a contender."

I'm gonna say "no". First of all, because it's a widget at heart. I see it allows some sort of mobile alerts, but a game-changing app will probably be much more mobile-centric.

Second, because it looks like MS is gonna try to route adoption of this tool through local governments. As Craigslist and Facebook have proven, regionally-based apps/networks grow better when they're not managed by the governing institution.

The idea of alerting people of local emergencies is a nice one, but Twitter has already given us a glimpse of its usefulness in that regard.
I'd LOVE to see browsers support typographically correct hyphenation, it'd make narrow columns of text look sooo much better.
They were the "it" thing 1.5 years ago. Now we have better market data about the odds of hitting it big (for non-fart apps that is.)
Heh, I knew that but you are right to accuse me of forgetting Poland.
"The response that I try to lob into these discussions, reduced to its crudest form, is: Mark Zuckerberg is the CEO of one of the largest web sites on the planet, and his web site is beautiful, and it brings joy to a lot of people, so apparently being a good programmer isn’t what makes you design beautiful things that make people happy, in which case being a good programmer sounds like a fucking waste."

Mark Zuckerberg is the CEO of Facebook. His coding abilities cannot be judged unless it is known how much of the Facebook code he actually wrote. I assume the majority of it was not written by him.
Ego: http://ego-app.com/
> CS degrees are irrelevant for most of the good jobs.

This is only true if you already have significant experience.
Where's the article? I get the Safari download splash, but I can't see or find the article.

Reading the comments, I guess I don't care and aren't missing much.
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Idiocracy! Maybe it's just me, but my mind just hovers past anything with cute graphics when I'm trying to grok technical information.

Samething with typos and cutesy phrases; I'm more forgiving of raw research papers, and harshest on blogs. If I get even the slightest hint that a blogger is an enthusiastic newb, i close the tab.