skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The ability to immediately see what's wrong with things can be useful, but can also be dangerous. It's the stuff that obsessions are made of, if left unchecked.

Where computers are concerned, I agree that people have a tendency to ignore the flaws. And I guess that's because they find computers enough of a nuisance already, if they started paying attention to what's wrong with them, they would find that they cause more problems than they solve.

I have submitted countless bug reports, often in the first few days of usage. And I have stopped using some software for the sole reason that their creators didn't pay enough attention to fixing bugs.

I can certainly identify with the author's premise. But I think this is more that just seeing what's wrong with stuff: it's more about knowing that perfection can't be reached, but not because we didn't point out what needs to be done to reach it.
what's the problem with [2]?

It tries to draw conclusions about the relative divergence times of different genes based on degrees of sequence similarity. This evidence is extremely weak, as there are much more likely explanations for the observed patterns of sequence variation, such as a shift in the selection pressure on a gene down the chimp/human lineage, for instance. Despite this weakness, they chose to highlight the sensational conclusion that human and chimp ancestors must have swapped genes through mating long after the presumed speciation time. This was irresponsible, because it caused a widespread public sensation when the paper came out.

it seems pretty harsh to lump it together with [1]...

I'm not lumping them together. The common characteristic is that they're both garbage. The conclusion of [2] is a subtler form of it but not to an evolutionary scientist: the problem with it was immediately obvious to me and many others as soon as it came out. And it's a more serious corruption of scientific discourse because it's a Nature article. The data the analysis was based on has merit, though.
Every time I apply for a job, my engineering degree cuts out two or three annoying questions (which they might not even bother to ask before throwing my CV away).

I'm thinking about moving to Hong Kong. A masters degree makes immigration trivial.

Sometimes I find that an interesting problem is related to something I studied in college and so I know where to start.

When I meet the parents of the girls I date I start with a few extra points of reputation in hand.

Each time I sit more professional exams the whole process is well within my comfort zone so I can concentrate on the material rather than stress about the outcome.

Not a bad investment if you ask me - although no one has asked me where I went to school in years either.
I don't think that's true. I know many people who work towards a classless society, which isn't segmented into groups with antagonistic interests. After all, no one believes in the class societies of the past, like under the pharoahs, feudalism, slavery; which took generations to overthrow. (And during those times, persuasive justifications were offered for those systems.)

I'm personally interested in Participatory Economics (Parecon for short), which is a model for a decentralized classless economy, which offers properties that I think many people want from their economic system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics
"A company looking for new hires can't give everyone a month-long trial to see what their ability is firsthand, so credentials like GPA and degree serve as a heuristic."

This is just corporate propaganda. GPA has no correlation with work performance, it's only used because it's a legal way to keep minorities out of the workforce.
After reading that column, read "Logical Fallacies used to dismiss the evidence on intelligence testing" by Linda S. Gottfredson. It's available here:
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2009fallacies....

Now, go back and re-read the New York Times piece.

How many fallacies did you notice?
Is Linux ruining my chance at a good software engineering career?
The source code is available under the Apache License 2.0

Click the "community" link. You'll see the "Open source" header at the bottom of the page

http://code.google.com/p/page-speed/
Perhaps competition is good because it is a framework for criticism what tends to encourage continued effort and refinement, rather than discourage it.
Classified information: why newsprint doesn't pay in the USA
Reminds me of the rice paddy chapter in the Outliers, and to me they are equally not very scientific.
More specifically, something like this, will add kinda functional downmod arrows:

// Find all <a> links with an id of up_* then add a downmod arrow which upvotes everything apart from this article on the page.

var links = document.getElementsByTagName("a"); // Look at all links...

for (var i=0;i<links.length;i++) {
var alink = links.item(i);
if (alink.id.substring(0,3)=="up_") {
// We found one...

var downer = document.createElement("a");
var img = document.createElement("img");
img.src = "/graydown.gif";
img.style.border = "0";
downer.appendChild(img);
alink.parentNode.appendChild(document.createElement("br"));
alink.parentNode.appendChild(downer);
downer.href = "#";
downer.onclick = function(n) {
return function() {
downmod(n);
}
}(alink);
}

// Downmod by upvoting everything else...
function downmod(node) {
var links = document.getElementsByTagName("a"); // Look at all links...

for (var i=0;i<links.length;i++) {
var alink = links.item(i);
if (alink.id.substring(0,3)=="up_") {
// We found one...
if (alink!=node) vote(alink); // Vote for it...
}
}
}
There are two aspects to this. Firstly, postmodernism hardly concerns itself with venturing into scientific arenas at all. The endeavors which Sokal et al. deride are not representative of postmodernism as a whole.

Secondly, while I haven't read the papers from which Sokal et al. take their examples, and don't know what they were about, I am certain that they're not trying to contribute to scientific knowledge in any conventional sense. I gather from a friend who studies this stuff that Irigaray was playing with the language of scientific discourse in some way. I haven't looked into it further. Some of the stuff Sokal derides certainly deserves it. One of his examples is where Irigaray's work is used to justify sloppy thinking about feminism in science education. That is definitely problematic and deserves to be dismissed out of hand. But generally speaking, Sokal picked out these quotes without clearly explaining their context and intent, and that seems problematic, too.
Creating a Startup - Choosing a Company Type
Sometimes I feel inferior to those that went to school at all. But then it passes and I realize I have no loans to pay back.
Newsweek: Is your cell phone spying on you?
Sorry for the delay, Vaskel! Had a bit of traveling to do these past few days. I went from Chicago to Atlanta for my Father's wedding - what a to-do, great fun. (TMI? :) )

In our eyes 10mpg is a huge savings. Couple that with efficiency gains by utilizing lightweight materials, and boost that with a clean diesel with reduced emissions; for Local Motors, this is the way to move forward. We are not looking for a one-time solution and we will get better as time goes on. With each step, with each vehicle we can only hope to improve with each iteration.

Your views are well heard, and we are aware that many share your views on the type of engine which would be easiest to use and manipulate. If we have made a mistake and the 335d is too difficult, the Rally Fighter is fit for 2 other engine opitons - among those is a plain ol' gasoline engine. Not our favorite option, but we do hear you.

Laughed about the bat shit crazy ex girlfriend. Thank you for that :)

Your words, "Give the people a choice" hits home. The open development process at local-motors.com is exactly that - a forum for participation and choice. While we can digest what you say in this space, the votes of our community members and dedicated participants are the votes and voices we follow. We want your voice to be heard. If you would prefer to wait for a vehicle that is more personal, one that you would use and have a personal vested interest in, I understand. I don't think the desert racing segment is your cup o' tea. But your opinion is so valuable, so consider yourself invited to take part.

RE: "zero mainstream appeal", the segment is certainly limited and the choice is intentional. This is a segment in which we could build a product to have very clear improvements over anything else on the market. A segment that is already building cars, and a segment that is passionate like you wouldn't believe. We will build cars for the tarmac, for Jersey - but we will not, not, not build cars for the masses. Please everyone, and you will eventually please no one. The future of exciting products and cars is niche and supported by a hands-on experience. Again, time will tell as to whether we are "right". I hope you will stay close so we can hash out this conversation again as we grow, and as new niche local markets make their desires known.

I also want to note that I think all of your notes on the US auto industry and market potential are more or less right on. There is space for not only more cars in the segments you mentioned, there is also room for more car companies. I agree with you.

Trust that we have done our "homework", and our business model is viable on a local level w/ limited production for niche markets. The changes you are suggesting we make ("build for mainstream enthusiast", "target millions") would make us un-local motors - and that is not our goal.

This company and community is focused on creating a unique local experience for local enthusiasts. Your suggestions & strategy may be viable, but it is not local.

Thanks again!

Ariel Ferreira

aferreira@local-motors.com
Mainstream commentary on the IQ debate is worthless. The vast majority are too innumerate to understand statistical concepts used in gathering the data in the first place.
Nokia 2600 classic GOLD Unlocked
The Nokia 2600 Classic is pretty low level when it comes to features. It supports Bluetooth 2.0, MP3 ringtones, built-in FM radio and a VGA camera. But what the Nokia 2600 classic lacks in features, it makes up in style and price.
Ask HN: Review our iPhone App 
Hi Guys,

A friend and I just released our first iPhone App--it's a colorblind simulator:

http://www.huetility.com

(http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=317595979&mt=8)

We were really hoping to get some feedback from HN community... How should we price it? What categories make sense? How should we publicize it? What would you do differently? Any advice/comments/feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Luke
Thanks for the feedback pj, the experiences you had in school were fundamental to your learning the basics of computers. I'd argue you could have learned much if not all of that on your own, or with some friends in less time than it took you to graduate. In addition things have changed so much in the past 20 years that the nand gates I used to play with in school don't aid me much in understanding modern digital circuitry, I have to keep reading and learning-> school was only the beginning.

My quick background: physics undergrad (then a MSEE). It shouldn't have taken 6 years of my life to learn what I needed. There were some incredible serendipitous finds, but the timeline is too long and the focus just wasn't there. By the end of my first year I was learning with friends in study groups and from books much more than I got out of class. I learned coding on the job. It was an engineering position so my school wasn't wasted per se. But any Basic (on the TI99) or pascal toy coding I did beforehand did little to prepare me. Real work experience was a powerful teacher.

Actually working with a group of software developers, following some standards, and working on my own small/easy sections of the code at first is what eventually cemented the process of coding. But then there was the matter of design.

The design of structures, data flow, processes came from working problems that demanded real time (or near real time) efficiency. I learned with C++, and veered away from java for the speed issue.

Would you agree there is room for alternative learning besides college educations in preparation for tomorrow's workforce?
Agree massively. If you read up on some of the ideas behind philosophy, it makes a lot of sense as a "philosophy of the modern age". Of course, there's a lot of garbage ideas in there as well, but it's worth at least reading up on the basic ideas behind it, rather than just lol'ing at some cherry-picked quotes.

I find McLuhan idea's about the role of media within society interesting, and very relevant to any working with Internet-related projects. The same could be said for a lot of postmodern ideas, which seem to partly revolve around the fact that the changes wrought by modern technology question the foundations of things like psychology, society, gender and so on.
The Inequality Taboo
> America is far closer to a meritocracy than any other country.

If we're talking about politics - which is the reason that plutocracy is coming into play - then you're mistaken. As the other commentor points out, plutocracy means that money gives you political clout/power.

Compare the corruption rates in the US elections to a country like, say, Finland (which ranks lowest on corruption—that is, has the least). Go to Finland during an election and you'll see posters everywhere that feature tens of faces of people from every income level who are running for office. I can tell you that, as an American, this experience for me was not only surreal but almost disturbing.

Then look at the US, where the vast majority of politicians are rich to begin with and become only more enriched. Look at PACs, which use money to create voting blocs inside the governing bodies, and how lobbyists tend to write laws and then lawmakers simply sign them.

I remember reading an article in the NYT last fall, quoting a guy who heads up one of the international voting monitoring organizations. He said that the US is so bad, we don't even meet their minimum requirements for monitoring.

Money = power in the US. That hasn't changed much since its beginnings.

The sentiment that "The US is bad, sure, but it's better than all the alternatives!" is common here on HN (and among educated Americans in general). I really wish people would question it more and look at facts, and travel outside, to see that it's not true.

Maybe it feels like betrayal to say "Actually, the US is just really bad," but how can you heal a major wound if you won't even admit that you're bleeding out long enough to apply some pressure?
Most of these pro-rated tuition policies are very, very new; until very recently, even students at top schools were expected to take out loans to cover some medium-sized fraction of the tuition costs. By comparison, going to a rather good state school, I got paid a net of around $8k per year to go to college.

The financial equation is different for every person, but the value add of a name-brand school over a state school is typically a hard sell--for a motivated student a decent education is available everywhere.
Things like this make me glad to have grown up in the UK. I went to Cambridge, which is (at least academically) as good a university as you can find, and it's a state school. You apply through the unified UCAS system and the fees - around £3000 a year now, I think - are the same as you'd pay at almost any UK university.

Sure, you get more private school kids and people from rich backgrounds, but it's not nearly as unbalanced as the scenario you paint.
This article seems to be mostly Airbus-bashing. This part about the 'coffin-corner' is just ridiculous. If flying was that dangerous, the safety records should look differently.
Airbus' fly-by-wire system is built specifically to keep the plane on the save side of the flying envelope and will actively prevent the pilot from swaying out of it. This is its purpose and design.
I think the most frustrating thing about this particular article and the way it's presented is the fact that this is, in essence, a literature overview/summary by Dawkins. Very little of the content involved in the piece is original thinking by St. Dawkins.

He's not disrobing anyone (perish the thought), he's reporting on Skoal & Bricmont disrobing people.
"The quickest way to fix the education system in this country is to basically pay kids to learn."

No, it's not.

http://www.amazon.com/Punished-Rewards-Trouble-Incentive-Pra...
Currently a Warwick student. It's a great university, and I'm glad I chose to come here than try to apply for Oxbridge - I believe they are the best universities in the UK, but not by such a massive margin as people make out. If you say you're an Oxford student, anyone in the country will be impressed. Many people will not have heard of Warwick or Bristol university, or will assume they are just bog-standard institutions.

I have to disagree, though, with the comment that anyone with brains can get into Oxbridge - from what I've heard, they seem much more obsessed with preliminary interviews than other UK institutions - potential applicants stay for several days of interviews IIRC. Many private school kids get special tuition to pass these tests, which is an advantage that state school kids don't have.
Mwell, I'm not really satisfied by your answer. Both "1" and "0" are well-defined expressions; division is also well-defined, but, in order to avoid logical contradictions, we cannot meaningfully define the division of 1 and 0. To me, that sounds exactly like what you described above, and I thought that the axiom of choice was the analog of the "you can't divide by 0" rule.
Kind of like most of the rest of us. I remember watching eBay's IPO and thinking I should get some of that - but not doing it. Then setting out on my own in late 1999 only to get crushed in the bubble. Seems like I've been following the internet for 15 years now, aware of what is going on, able to make a living, but always just a step behind.
Are the majority of jobs really for Microsoft products. I am surprised.
meh it's not a race thing, it's a cultural thing.

if children are patterned to strive for excellence by the culture they grow up in, they will do better than typical lax parenting.

if they investigated further into individual situations and compared them you would see that successful students either have very attentive parents nurturing them or they have another familial situation that is driving them
Arrington is getting A LOT of death threats over this, according to this UPDATE:

"Update: Many comments are complaining about comment moderation. This isn’t about free speech. It’s about dozens of death threats and hundreds of others saying pretty horrible things about one of of us. You may think that your comment needs to get heard and that calling for someone to die shouldn’t be taken seriously. But multiply that by hundreds and maybe you’ll get a sense of this. I was rude. I made the problem worse by saying things because I thought he was play-mad. and then i apologized. i may be a lot of things but i don’t think i deserve to die over this. please. stop. i can’t deal with the death threats after what happened last year and then this year in europe. leo won. you guys won. i surrender. just stop. please. stop."
awesome, we'll finally get to know how close getting kneed in the nuts is to childbirth
There's no bad publicity.
The point of the article isn't that IQ differences don't exist. Only that on average how hard you work is much more important than how smart you are in achieving success. At least in the measures used in the article - graduate degrees and income.

From the article:

"In any case, he says, the evidence is overwhelming that what is distinctive about these three groups is not innate advantage but rather a tendency to get the most out of the firepower they have."
The easiest way to find awesome professors is talk to upperclassmen and grad students in your major. Grad students have to meet and talk with profs a lot more than undergrads, so they usually get a better feel for profs.
Did anyone notice the tricky wording when he talked about race?

"Asian-Americans are renowned...for ruining grade curves in schools across the land...

As for Jews...a quarter of Jewish adults in the United States have earned a graduate degree, compared with 6 percent of the population as a whole.

West Indian blacks,...are one-third more likely to graduate from college than African-Americans as a whole..."

So Asians and Jews outperform all Americans, while West Indian Blacks only outperform American Blacks (but presumably not Americans in aggregate [1])? This hardly seems like evidence against racial differences in intelligence/achievement.

(Note: I don't have a strong opinion on racial IQ differences, just pointing out the tricky wording in the article. Unfortunately, the science on that topic tends to be written mostly by activists on both sides, and is fairly untrustworthy.)

[1] I assume that if West Indian blacks outperformed Americans, Kristoff would have mentioned it (as he did with Asians and Jews).
Education Pays: 2008 Unemployment, Pay, and Education Level
I can't say I've seen a link I disliked so much that I felt the need to hunt down something to help drive it off the front page. This incentive seems dubious, and if real, the benefits dubious.
The way to rise above IQ is to stop thinking about oneself and stop being so competitive. This parochial attitude leads to depression and failure.

The truest, most promising motivation for mastering a field or a craft lies in the beauty of the craft itself. Beauty is the greatest stimulus for creativity and imagination. It makes all things gentle and easy. Technical competence follows as the night the day.
I had to set lots of `visible?', `touch sensitive?', etc., flags based on Boolean expressions. I ended up with things like

foo->vis = a || (b || !c && (...)) && z;

Coding standards, and the arbiters at code review, insisted on a nested set of if-then-else statements comparing, e.g. a == TRUE, rather than just `a', with the many blocks being either foo->vis = TRUE or FALSE as appropriate.

This resulted in my two or three line statements turning into many more lines, which then gave them cause for concern because their style had swelled functions to where they thought they were getting too large!

Plus, the C compiler, one of IBM's, produced better POWER code for my line than theirs.

I finally got them to back down when I gave them a code sample in their style for study. Even when I pointed out it had an error they couldn't find it. I'd deliberately missed an else-block off an if-statement that had started a dozen lines before. This would mean foo->vis sometimes wasn't written to at all; impossible with my version.
Flixster - Share Movie Ratings with Friends
The majority of commercial software shops are probably developing on the MS stack. Smaller shops, startups, small online services are more likely to be on the LAMP stack. My shop is on the MS stack, and we will hire people with solid OO design, database design, and n-tier application architecture chops. The toolset isn't important.

Likewise, when looking for a job, look for people making something you wants to make, with similar attitudes and interests to yours, and care less about the tools they're using.

The comments at Stack Overflow are all over the map I notice.
Aint that the truth. I started a business in 1999, as well. I didn't really get crushed, but it wasn't particularly easy street either. I just always thought of the people behind Wired as being smarter than me since they've had so many early successes, but I can see how they fail pretty clearly, and it seems like an even harder fail because they moved with such assurance and competence in the beginning. I guess the really smart people left.