skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The best way to test this would be to approach it like Intelligence research originally approached that hypothesis for IQ scores: by testing a reasonably large set of twins separated at birth. That's such a tricky criteria to come by, I can't imagine it'll be easy to do again, but it did help cement the idea that IQ was likely not significantly impacted cultural/environmental factors, and thus possibly a result of subtle genetic traits. The interesting thing about those studies though, was that the separated twins tended to have a lot of other unexpectedly subtle quirks in common too (such as sense of humor). So in that context, I actually wouldn't be surprised if rationality falls under those similarities as well.
But you know why they had to use a company like Facebook to make their example? Post-SarBox, which I think was more like the final nails in the coffin vs. "single-handedly", only wild successes like it are able to do IPOs.

Legal and regulatory changes in the late '50s created the ecosystem that had IPOs as an ideal exit, and this had a fantastic half-century run ending with SarBox. And since then people are chasing 140 characters instead of flying cars, to paraphrase Peter Thiel. So much destroyed value I'm sure it has more than a little to do with their being no end in sight for the Great Recession.
use S/MIME, leave gpg for special cases.

S/MIME works everywhere (Outlook, Mail.app, iOS, Thunderbird, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Lotus, ... ) out of the box. No plugins required.
They have made serious effort with developer tooling, especially with Source Maps.
This doesn't happen here in Norway either. It might have something to do with the (more or less) mandatory 14 week paternity leave.
I know a woman from Iran who has gone through something similar. She came to Canada to study as a grad student. Brilliant woman! At first we were the enemy. She wore the hijab, maintained links with home and didn't socialize.I think having adult male students treat her like Canadians generally treat teachers really threw her for a loop! Gradually she started making friends and connecting with colleagues. Eventually the hijab was tossed in the bin and she seemed essentially Western. She also completely cut off contact with her family and is still apt to spout off angrily if Iran is even mentioned. Her family's worst fears were made manifest. She was seduced and corrupted by Western devils. She is probably an embarrassment to them, but a distant one.

This is the scary thing. For many women, the price of freedom in the West is losing their home and family forever. I've seen other equally brilliant women in similar circumstances maintain their walls throughout their studies and disappear back home never to be heard from again. For them, the price of freedom is too high. I can't imagine what it must be like to face such a choice.

-----------------

Edit: While some would say this is a social issue that doesn't belong on HN, these women are potentially your coworkers or employees. I would argue that they have special needs which may be important to understand. Specifically, if your workplace is full of people who don't socialize with each other outside work hours, the odds of these women going back home, possibly without much warning, probably increase significantly.
Thanks. I just thought people other than web developers should read it too. It's a great list of thought-provoking questions we should all ask of ourselves.
I would suggest the following (it's definitely not a one off ala day of the jackal, but it seems feasible.

* Start with modern world bribe money (say 500k)
* find out who works at mid-level of the passport office
* approach them with the following (true) story - we are MI6, or at least a small department of it. We have to travel to various countries, but these days once my iris is scanned as Joe it's very awkward coming in 6 months as Frank on a different job. So we need people like you to swap in and out iris scans as we need them, no traces left.

We will show you how to steal your bosses password.

* if you chosen correctly, she is already working for a different agency and is happy to increase the salary again.

Ask for new passport in new name.
I would say that about 96% of investors "buy high, sell low" because they can't stomach real volatility. How many mom and pop investors dumped their equity funds in the deepest depths of the recession? It's sad to think about. Much more important than access to a hot IPO is having enough capital, and enough knowledge, and perhaps enough reassurance, to hang in through the ups and downs. If you can give people that and a few broad-based, low ER index funds then they will do just fine.
I took a quick look at tech companies that went public in the 80s up to today (1) and it's not as simple as Scott makes it out to be. The annualized returns are comparable now to what they were in the "glory days" due to companies like Tesla and Netflix but the massive long term returns are going to be harder/impossible to achieve.

Sure we may not have the chance for another Microsoft going public but there's still opportunity, it just takes a bit more effort and moving money around more frequently.

1. The post itself is not 100% relevant but the table of returns is worth taking a look at: http://dangoldin.com/2013/05/24/investing-in-tech-stocks/
I've seen it suggested that sugar-free drinks will result in an expectation of energy. The body gets none of that energy. It compensates by seeking more energy.

Just drink water. It's virtually free. Soft drinks allow for a huge profit margin because they have been processed and you have been programmed over years to like them.
Erm, have you guys heard of things like index funds? There are plenty of ways to play the game and not take too much risk from one company.
I have a script. I put in search terms, it pops out the list of items, along with estimated numbers of comments. I then, by hand, construct the reply.
I couldn't keep the sound on and had to mute it.
Yeah, class Child extends Parent
I just discovered this little fun game and am currently playing here [1]. It's much more interesting than it sounds

1: https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/SPYysxjUMQP
I suppose you are referring to the parent comment to your comment (but maybe not). As always, the solution to such a problem is to upvote a better comment, or perhaps writing the better commment for the same comment level yourself.
A few dozen go pro's are not going to cost much and we have surveillance pretty much everywhere else, so why not here. Every post office in the USA has about 25 high res cameras.
This is super awesome. Good job, Atlassian.
> I argued that there is an infinite number of conspiracy theories that would satisfy the available facts.

Thus, you can't say it wasn't a conspiracy. Yeah, you can't say it was one either. Both of you are jumping to conclusions, what's irrational by the definition of the article.
Yeah, I hung out there. Also contributed a bit. No, most of my macro ideas come from Scheme.
The Flight Data Recorder will have recorded everything anyways
Nobody I know denies that the US IPO market almost entirely shut down after SarBox. Correlation does not imply causation, and I personally think it was only the last set of nails in this coffin, but from that time sequence and a lot of anecdotal data of people saying SarBox is why they aren't going public has resulted in it being the commonly accepted reason.
This is not very interesing, it's just someone who mixed up the concept of meshnet and darknet and tried to compare I2P with CJDNS, which makes no sense.
Most of the 96% of "investors" locked out of startup financing because of accreditation rules would be very poorly served by startup investing.

Also regularly overlooked: the risks to startups of accepting funding from underqualified investors. Equity is ownership. Ownership involves baggage. A degree of trust and reputation protection undergirds both sides of startup investing --- and we still get occasional horror stories.

This is a situation that looks terrible in black-and-white numbers, but is probably not as bad as it seems.
Sorry, late reply; I suppose it comes down to the definition of "a specific question". Often I will be looking for recommended tools/resources/approaches. Look at something like http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17489/best-environment-fo...

I like questions like this being closed, particularly if they draw out a ton of useful information like this one. Maybe my pain could be eased a little if they had some better boilerplate explanations. To me "Not constructive" in this case is just misleading, wrong and rude.
> Delayed IPOs = 96% of Americans don't have access to wealth creation of investing in the fastest growing companies

48% of Americans don't own stocks at all.
The post on A16Z can be characterized as "talking one's own book" [1]

While convenient to cherry-pick MSFT as an example, there was also countless wealth lost in the dot com explosion (Webvan, eToys, Pets.com, etc)

Yes going public today is harder and that means companies generally have to have a better answer to "how will you make money (profitably)" than they once did. And that is probably a good thing.

It's also surprising that venture capitalists who have on the whole been unable to beat the S&P500 think that the layperson investing in tech companies would fare so well.

[1] http://invest.yourdictionary.com/talking-one-s-book
Interesting idea. Could be useful for some turn based games. Demos are cool. However, if developers really want people to pay attention, writing some docs is a must.

I'm currently developing a 2D HTML5 Canvas strategy game using EaselJS, and I can't count how many times I visited their online docs. Probably 50+ times. Look at the level of detail:

http://www.createjs.com/Docs/EaselJS/modules/EaselJS.html

And I would call this bare minimum you need to get your library to be used by someone else. I still had to Google and ask the developers some specific stuff, but it's enough to get you going.
You honestly think employees at a company that offers 4 months paternity leave don't have enough free time to read a single book? I am struggling to understand if you're trolling, or really don't understand long term productivity and business as much as it seems...
Huffduffer - your own podcast feed
Not even close RE: MBA. There is an insane glut of MBAs because of rational choice to go there where MBAs used to have a ton of opportunity. Then the economy crashed and now STEM fields are being mined for business intelligence / game theorists that can learn rudimentary business practices on the fly (or the company will pay for a night-time MBA).
I also discuss how many feel that George W. Bush was dysrationalic.

No, he outright makes that "diagnosis" of the former president, going so far as to title the chapter 1 "teaser" of his book "Inside George W. Bush's Mind". It's available here:

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/excerpts/stanovich_what.p...

Maybe he's being cagey about it because his "evidence" is incredibly weak sauce. He expects most of the audience for his book to nod along when he describes a guy who managed to achieve the highest political office in an incredibly competitive environment as unable to make rational decisions. He cites for his analysis of GWB's cognitive function a whole two people.

First, there's David Frum[1], who served as a speechwriter for 13 months from early 2001 to early 2002. Before that he had "no connection to the campaign or the Bush family". He's used that stint to great career effect, but seriously, there are a lot of folks who worked more closely with Bush for a longer period of time and have written about his thought and leadership style. Surely if Stanovich wasn't just looking for a good "hook" to snare his liberal readership, he could have found better sources, critical and otherwise[2]. Oh, and Frum was a huge initial supporter of the Iraq invasion, and obviously Stanovich or his imagined readership wouldn't dream of calling that a clearly irrational decision.

Second, there's a bit from a George Will column. The section in italics was strangely omitted by Stanovich:

"He has neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments about competing approaches to construing the Constitution. Few presidents acquire such abilities in the course of their pre-presidential careers, and this president particularly is not disposed to such reflections."

So which U.S. presidents weren't "dysrationalic" by this standard?

This guy may be a terrific research psychologist, but he's obviously not above slandering a president and pandering to his readership with bad scholarship just to sell books.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Frum

[2] http://keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/
I forgot about that when I said the program doesn't once ask what the truth is. You may be right that they gave a misleading answer, but at least they (momentarily) brought up the question.
You and I might choose Basecamp but it's amazing how many people refuse to use it for silly reasons like "It doesn't have gant charts".

Many of the competitors that have launched and have fallen into obscurity from your point of view are actually generating healthy profits from a few thousand customers in an industry you don't know.

There are huge opportunities for brilliant web developers to release a first product, or version of a product, in an obscure market and use the profits to build something amazing with wider appeal.
Very thorough answer but I am think there are a lot of scenarios where you don't need every aspect of this solution. I think unique ids and message ordering can handle many cases although not the scenario in the answer. Not sure if someone mentioned but operational transforms might also apply.
The W3C working group will eventually produce a crypto API standard, though whether that standard will meet the requirements you describe remains to be seen. In particular, it exposes primitives (the proposed API can definitely be called in unsound ways), which a whole lot of people think is a terrible idea but which the standard editor seems bound and determined to ship. It's very frustrating.
Meetings: to take or not to take?
They have something like this already, it's called a Flight Data Recorder
I did once visit a McDonalds in Romania where they required a pin number to enter the toilets, that was given out with purchases. However, standing by the door and waiting for someone to walk out worked quite well too.
I hear this, but I have absolutely zero idea how to get s/mime working and I'm faintly aware it might involve having to buy a digital certificate off someone (and doesn't that mean that someone could decrypt my email anyway? if they're the ones who generate the certificate?)

What I'm trying to say here is: I'm a bit of a geek, and if I don't understand how it works, there's no way e.g. my parents are. If s/mime is the solution, there's a serious education battle that needs to be fought.

I say this as someone who uses GPG (via GPG Tools on OS X) without any bother.
Very happy to hear that. Please feel free to re-write/copy chunks of it for another audience, all I ask is that you link back to it :)
"Erm," IPOs aren't usually added to index funds till much later.
This is a great, moving piece, broadly reflective of a lot of issues I feel strongly about, and I was thrilled to read it.

But I also don't think political stories like this belong on HN, even when those politics overlap mine almost entirely. I can't imagine how HN will find a way to disagree with itself on this article, and dread any discussion we might have about it.

I flagged this and hope others will too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

Also, random internet sites suggest a calorie is not a calorie is not a calorie. For example:

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/06/when-a-calorie...
This is very neat. Because some of the more complicated constructions get very busy, it would be helpful to be able to erase unwanted arcs/lines.
They would probably be relieved if you kept the same hours they did. If you don't have family to go home to you have a competitive advantage in the work place over those who do, as there is probably nothing that needs to take priority over your work.
RE: clearance vs use

Yes, that is correct, there are a small number of people who have clearances purely for mechanical reasons, like janitors and such. However, it is useful to recognize that the total number of clearances is at roughly the same level as at the peak of the cold war. When the enemy was entire countries, not a few thousand guys living in caves.

RE: secrecy

I was referring to the FISA court's secrecy being an artifact of the cold war, not the secrecy every single classified program. There is no reason beyond inertia and the ease that comes with lack of accountability for the FISA court to be so secretive. However, I am stunned by the leap of logic it requires to say that public knowledge results in no oversight.
If someone says "most people are peasants", why would that be a statement about their personality, rather than their situation? To me that's still an objection to something read into it.
I hope "now" is never 1970-01-01 00:00:00.

Edit:

if now is None:
now = time.time()
GRAPHIC video of actual crash
http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/us/2013/07/07/vo...
Think that's bad in a Western country? Try being a white guy taking your Filipina girlfriend's daughter to school or anywhere else. You're a white guy with a little girl in the country which is supposedly a destination for pedophiles.

I think it's all in his head though. He is probably projecting his fears of what people think about him. And why would you care what parents at a playground think of you anyways?
Ask HN: What To-Do app do you use?
I don't think the 'not enough energy' argument is particularly strong. To flip a plane over, you have to lift up the plane's center of gravity by about half its length (probably less, as the nose can go down a bit during the flip. Also, if the pivot point is below the fuselage, the engines will provide torque during flipping.

Let's take a 60m long body and assume perfect conversion of horizontal speed (=kinetic energy) into vertical speed (=potential energy). To lift the body by an average 30m, it would need a speed of sqrt(2gh) = sqrt(600) or less than 25m/s. That's less than 90 km/h.

Google gives me a landing speed of about 250 km/h for a 777. That gives us a factor of 3 in speed, or 7 to 8 in kinetic energy to cater for inelastic collisions, air resistance, energy loss digging the nose wheel or the whole nose into the ground to create a pivot point, etc.

Also, and probably more convincing, there's the example from a DC-10 crash in Sioux City in 1989. Both http://www.airdisaster.com/reports/ntsb/AAR90-06.pdf and http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19890719-1 mention the word 'cartwheel', and that's also what I remember from the video (which I can't find now)
You should listen to OTM more. It's media criticism, so what reporting it does will necessarily seem like navel-gazing. But there's been some really great stuff on it.

A less... lubricated... venue for this kind of analysis is Jack Schafer's work for Reuters. Schafer has none of the insider status that OTM does.
That's why I said "things like index funds", and many NASDAQ index funds would or could be IPO company origin weighted.

It's the principle; at the opposite end, put your money for this sort of thing into 12 or 20 companies. OK, with a minimum reasonable investment of 100 shares that's a lot of money, but individuals can still do it.
Introducing dPerf – A Distributed Low Impact CPU Profiler for iOS
4% seems like an awfully high fraction of the population that would theoretically have access to the best startup investment opportunities. Even if you are an accredited investor, you simply don't have access to many of the best performing hedge funds. They are simply closed to you. They don't want your money.

I imagine there would be something similar in venture investing as well. One such example would be the lack of personal contacts which prevents us from investing at the best opportunities. It's debatable whether secondary exchanges have enough liquidity and trading volume to make investing in them pragmatic for anything less than the top 0.5% of the population with respect to net worth. Even then, the lack of due diligence would be frightening.
>What is behind this new culture of fear is politics: fear is great for manipulating the masses, most effective when those who promote it can present themselves as a solution.

I hear people from all walks of life make claims like this constantly. While I don't doubt that some use fear to purposefully manipulate us, I do not see it as the norm. The media doesn't care about controlling us. It cares about it's viewership. If fears sells, you can bet your ass they're going to scare the hell out of us. They don't care about dumbing us down, but if all we want to see is celebrity gossip, they're going to oblige.
I'm not going to discuss arguments about one of the beliefs of a non-rational person. If you feel a pressing need to iron out the finer distinctions of such stuff, I'm certain there are multiple suitable sub-reddits.

(But I'll add: There are also an infinite number of non-conspiracy theories fitting the facts.)

Edit: coldtea, sorry I'm not going to discuss e.g. if an infinite number of possible alien species could be responsible for 9/11. (And no, not even if the possibly existing alien species are enumerable :-) ) See above. I might, if I had more time.
The secret is to have lots of powerful people with competing interests.

Generally it has worked well to date.
It's worth mentioning that the path-integral formulation had a seed in Dirac: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_integral_formulation
Hey Nathan,

Just add a "shameless self-plug" or "* this is my product". I guess it's important to mention that you are advertising "your" product.
I wonder what we'd all pay to have garbage hauled away if we didn't have a ready supply of ex-convicts for whom this was one of the higher paying jobs available to them?
>Such a sad, sad waste of a good brain.

Except if he is right, you know. Which depends on which conspiracies he is arguing about, and on what depth. It's just as wrong to assume the official or popular version of the stories was correct, just because it was reported in the media that way.

If he argued for example that there was widespread surveillance of Americans 2 years ago, lots of people would have told him "No, that's a conspiracy theory". Well, turns out it wasn't.

If somebody argued that the CIA knowlingly had people sell crack in the USA in order to finance foreign operations, people would also yell that it's a conspiracy theory. But then you get this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_and_Contras_cocaine_traffic...
Well that's the joke.

They can construe, manipulate and torque that to mean whatever they want or rather the lack of whatever they want.
Another vote for ESC cancelling the current construction.

It's just a new condition in onkeydown:

else if (e.keyCode === 27) {
deselect();
}

While we're at it, make Shift+z redo.

else if (e.keyCode === 90) {
//"z"
if (e.shiftKey) {
changes.redo();
}
else {
changes.undo();
changes.record(1);
}
}

And let's not clutter up the user's history. Swapping

window.location.hash=currenthash;
...
window.location.hash=hash;

with

window.location.replace(currenthash);
...
window.location.replace(hash);

fixes that one.

It's the little things in life, man…