skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, in the terminology of the article, and in the terminology of Kahneman, the issue investigated IS cognitive. For the authors who have done this body of research, "cognition" is a broader term than "intelligence," and what goes awry in the wrong decision-making that Kahneman observed is cognition that is of poor quality, that is irrational.

The article claims that there ARE measures (tests) to distinguish rational decisions from irrational decisions. Many forms of irrational cognition, as the author of the submitted article acknowledges, are biased to go wrong in one way rather than another because of emotional factors and the like, but the error is still fundamentally a cognitive error.

It is a very good idea for web developers to test their assumptions with carefully designed observations. Sometimes those observations can lead to surprising, counterintuitive results that produce a significant business advantage. The author of the submitted article says (in other writings) that individuals developing strong skills of rationality is important in a world in which businesses try to take advantage of irrational thinking to sell products to consumers.
Any "serious" web programmers looking for new web startup ideas, contact me at quasi.entrepreneur@gmail.com

This is more than just the idea and includes some proprietary assets.

Please only those who are "serious" or serial entrepreneurs respond, preferably with a Bio.
The author's response to both comments above would be that all human beings reliably make many irrational ("illogical") decisions every day, and don't even notice themselves doing so.
Success Breeds Success in Startups
behaving in ways that maximise achievment of your goal(s)

But that's exactly what IQ tests measure, at least in the context of academic and job performance.

The longer book, published only at the beginning of this year, by the same author includes numerous examples of high-IQ individuals NOT achieving their goals because of nimble but irrational thinking. The kind of tests developed by Kahneman (and replicated in practice by many other investigators, repeatedly) show that IQ scores are essentially devoid of predictive value in showing who will make rational decisions most consistently. (Most human beings don't make rational decisions particularly often, and having a higher IQ doesn't lower the rate of irrational decisions on many kinds of tests of rationality.)

The data can be found in the abundant citations to the primary research literature in the book by the same author. I'm all too well aware that you know how to find the book

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=622924

so rather than repeat myself here, I'll simply mention that the book is well evidenced, well written, interesting, and a good contribution to the popular literature by scholars on cognitive psychology.
Well, that was a nice ad.
> Depends on your definition of poor.

While we could define "poor" as "wearing yellow pants", such a definition isn't useful.

> If everybody in a country is making more, the price of living will be higher as well. If you're in the lower x%, you'll still have a hard time to pay for it.

That depends on what "it" we're talking about.

Suppose that 95% of the population can afford to travel at Warp 10 to {wherever}. Does that imply that the remaining 5% are necessarily "poor"? To me, whether they're poor depends on facts not in evidence, namely, what can they afford?

Those who define poverty in relative terms are basically in the envy camp; they're unhappy if someone has more. Me, I'm in the greed camp. I don't care what other people have - I care what I have.
Having potential romantic partners assume from your career that you're smart and well-to-do rather than unattractive and unfeeling.

Res Ipsa Loquitur. This is called "confirmation bias."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
(Please don't downvote because you disagree. Downvoting is for people who are adding nothing to the conversation or actively trolling.)

I was totally with you until the "I refuse to apologize for it" part. I'll apologize for it, because that's a part of being decent. I'll also explain the effect that kind of clothing has, and if the lady in question doesn't change the way she dresses, I'll inform HR so they are aware.
Kahneman's test of the conjunction fallacy

http://books.google.com/books?id=FfTVDY-zrCoC&pg=PA66...

is culturally fair, in that people from all cultures fall for the fallacy, and there is no question about what the right answer is to a test that tests on that fallacy.
What exactly does "a woman who dresses provocatively" distract you from? I can see how it might be enjoyable, but I'm not sure how that would prevent you from doing work. I also don't see why you can't keep those thoughts to yourself, just like you don't make fun of "a provocatively stupid guy" to their face.

On the other side of the coin, if you work closely with 10 other people of the opposite sex, it confuses me as to why you wouldn't think one of those people would be attracted to you. Who else would they be attracted to?
The 20 USD/h sounded like a bit much, so I did a check on that number. According to a site about wages by the largest Dutch union, the minimum wage for a 40 hour workweek is 1491.70 EUR/month. That comes down to about 8.61 EUR/h or (current FX on Yahoo) 12.06 USD/h. It may be higher if a union negotiated more for a certain sector, but in general, 12.06 USD/h is the minimum wage.

It seems like Ms. Mees is exaggerating a bit to make her point.

Another inaccuracy in her article surfaces when she refers to the polls that say that Wilders' party is currently leading. The polls she is referring to suffer from severe selection bias. People sign up to be part of the panel that gets polled. Since Wilders' supporters are mostly disgruntled with current political affairs, it seems very likely that they are overrepresented in those polls.

I don't think she was aware of that though. These polls are done weekly and generally get some press (sad but true), mostly without any critical note (or any note at all) about the methodology (even sadder). [Wilders' may very well gain quite a following, but it's not evident from those polls.]
What is the goal of this checklist, other than causing a series of individual guilt trips for a gender imbalance that results from societal factors and/or legitimate gender predispositions for/against our field? What are we supposed to do? Do these people think we don't wish there were more women in the field?

Also, I'm sure the ensuing discussion is going to resemble at least three other HN discussions.
The individual items for such tests have already been made, without any shots having been fired. The money barrier is that a test publisher would have to conduct a validation study of a battery of such items on a norming population, and a publisher will only do that if it expects a market to develop for such tests. If people don't want to know who is more rational and who is less rational--perhaps because of what they would find out about themselves--it may be difficult initially to establish a market for rationality tests.
the second "r", right?
Bali Vacation and Holiday Packages | NakBali.com
> Many other countries around the world abolished slavery without going to war. That makes our heroes seem like they were a bit foolish, doesn't it?

In other words, they waited until they could abolish slavery without going to war. While waiting was good for not-slaves, it wasn't much good for the folks who were slaves during that time.
Is Twitter abandoning their 140-character limit?
I doubt this law will pass constitutional muster.

But, if you don't want to be the first test case, I suggest using Tor for posting anything online. You might want to use an anonymous username, but every time cops have been sent to my house over a forum posting, the username gets lost and they only care about the IP that they got obtained from the site operator. (But also keep in mind that an IP address and a username don't prove that you did anything illegal, so laws like this are extremely hard to enforce.)

IANAL, of course, but I do have firsthand experience on this matter. (Also, Slashdot says they delete the IP address of comments, but they don't. :)

Anyway, let them harass the Tor endpoint in Egypt, or something, not you.
I was just discussing this exact topic with a geneticist friend of mine about 15 minutes ago. Small world.

One thing it does prove is that the problem of cancer suppression has been solved before. By evolution. That should give researchers a bit of hope at least.

Edit: He happens to think the linked hypothesis in the article is "bullshit."
"WWII was about saving Jews" may be a popular view now, but the death camps and the like were not well known during the war.

I doubt that many Russians fought to save Jews, or that common knowledge of the Holocaust would have changed the number. Maybe some French and Italians might have been more interested.
You're right, it is easy to get rich writing iPhone apps. That guy is trying to keep his $20/day gravy train all to himself. What a bastard!
I didn't see that. When does that come up?
It does catch one thing that my usual testing doesn't: trailing commas. I am in the habit of defining maps like this:

var foo = {
foo: "bar",
bar: "baz",
};

This works in Firefox, but not in IE. Arghhh!

Perhaps I should do it Haskell-style:

var foo = { foo: "bar"
, bar: "baz"
};

I find that to be pretty ugly, though, and think it's easier to just omit the trailing comma. Reluctantly.
Before saying my piece let me point out that I'm someone who grew up around In-N-Out and who couldn't live without it. I know the secret menu and know how to find the Bible verses on the packaging. I've even ordered a Flying Dutchmann on occasion so I'm a huge fan.

But I don't think their success is of the type that most people here would be looking for. They are essentially a very large small business. They've expanded very slowly and to this day are only in 4 states (after 61 years in business)

Basically if you want to know how to build a successful niche look at In-N-Out. But anyone who wants a big success is better off looking at Mcdonalds (sad as that fact is)
He missed some:

First try a zlib of the entire thing, not each version, since it will effectively find all the common lines and not repeat them.

Next, instead of pure keyframes, let the keyframes themself be chained. That should save a ton of space, without being really slow. (And then recurse if you like - every ten keyframes, add a supra-keyframe, etc. recurse all the way down.)
Refactoring legacy projects using scaffolding
> While we could define "poor" as "wearing yellow pants", such a definition isn't useful.

Yes, but you may have noticed that I described a definition after my statement, which is the generally accepted definition of poverty in The Netherlands, the country under discussion. By all means, disagree (I'm not sure I agree with it myself), but brushing it aside as some random statement with the usefulness of "wearing yellow pants" is not really fair.

> That depends on what "it" we're talking about.

Random stuff. May include foodstuff, may also include random luxury stuff. Obviously for the former it's important, while for the latter it's supposed to be normal.

> Those who define poverty in relative terms are basically in the envy camp; they're unhappy if someone has more.

True enough, but that would seem to be the more "normal" attitude. (Keeping up with the Joneses and such.)

Before the banks fouled up and it became trendy, the Dutch were already in uproar about high salaries for some top dogs. This has lead to something called the "Balkenende-limit": no one in the public or semi-public sector is allowed to earn more than the prime minister (Balkenende currently). While this is reasonable (it is public money after all), minor uproars break out from time to time when a newspaper gets his hand on somebody's wage details, even if that person is in the private sector.

Interesting enough, nobody cares about the salary paid to soccer players, which are just as high.
Thanks for crashing my server, guys :)

Now that I've made an account here I do want to clarify that clearly there is an exponential curve upward from the chart positions I am at currently (although, probably not so dramatic in the social networking category). Clearly once you reach the top 10 you are looking at a couple hundred downloads a day, and the overall top 10 is said to start at 10,000 downloads a day.

So yes, you CAN make a good deal of money off of an app. My point is, 99.9% of app developers aren't.
Participate in the making of a product: from concept to creation
You would apologize if a tornado wrecked someone's home? If wild birds living in your acreage pooped on their car? If someone crashed their car (car C) because the car in front of you (car A) stopped, and you (car B) crashed into it, thereby causing all the cars behind you to do the same?

All of these things are, at best, accidents. However, unlike normal accidents, where you could have prevented them by close scrutiny of your environment, this kind of accident may have an original cause that puts you somewhere in the "chain of responsibility", but what actually ended up doing the damage was pure probability and physics. These things are usually called "acts of God", or, to be more empirical, "acts of nature."

Our evolutionary urges and drives are such an act. Why apologize for them? What are you actually apologizing for? Being unable to compensate for them?
Lazy man's 404 page
Interesting. And now that I've read Measurement in Psychology I understand what that means. (Thanks for the tip, btw.) My thinking though was more along the lines that such a test would prove very controversial if it effectively allowed employers to screen out, say, all religious people or something like that. (Without actually asking any questions about whether they believed in god or what religion they were.)

Incidentally, do you know if anyone has ever made a test of intellectual curiosity?
These guys are brilliant, and this is definitely a hacker-friendly site. It will be interesting to see how this goes over. . . community-managed ideas and all.
However, the extent of the U.S. land mass is bounded in the west by the Rockies and the deserts of the Great Basin, so in reality, the amount of arable land that both countries started out with is comparable.

Finally, something I can use WA for :)

http://www19.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=argentina+arable+land...
It's not an active distraction: there is a certain type of woman (a minority, but a very vocal one) that will get pissed off when a man's visual autonomic systems examine them differently than they examine men. A man's eyes are doing something passive that he's completely unaware of; this woman is actively watching the man's eyes to see where he's looking in order to decide whether to be offended by his "distractedness."
Although the discussion of the Kelly criterion is an interesting academic exercise, the analysis does not apply to an actual lottery like 6/49, because it is based on a false assumption:

... "assuming that I can avoid picking the same numbers as someone else".

Unfortunately, as the number of tickets purchased increases, the probability that another person chooses the same numbers as you also increases. Thus, when there is a large prize, it becomes very likely that it will be shared.
Maybe It’s Time to Look at Windows Home Server
Looking at the data published by the Dutch Statistics Bureau, it seems to me that the most pronounced drop is in the money crimes. They have been falling quite heavily since 2002 (after a jump up two years before). Violence seems to be steady for the past four years, while vandalism has been mostly growing for the past 15 years.

(Using crimes committed per 100'000 people between ages 12 and 79.)

For those that speak Dutch, the link to the table is:
http://statline.cbs.nl/StatWeb/publication/?VW=T&DM=SLNL...

On a semi-related note: I'm quite pleased that the Statistics Bureau's StatLine application now works in my browser. It's mostly HTML right now. It used to be mostly Java.
“Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”

Good! People who set out to intentionally ("with the intent") intimidate, harass, or distress another individual ("a person") deserves punishment. The word "substantial" demonstrates it's for incidents far beyond just saying something like "You're a dick" or "You're wrong because X, Y and Z."

As is usual, though, the problem here isn't with the law as-written but the way it can be misinterpreted and abused by unethical lawyers and judges. How do you prove intent to cause distress? If I were to make a flippant comment about "Christians" believing in "fictional characters", let's say, it should be obvious I'm not intending to offend or cause emotional distress to "a person", but could the law be twisted to force me to prove my innocence in such a minor instance?
Interestingly, she possesses this bias as well:

"If you're married, having people take you to lunch without them speculating on how your spouse would feel about them taking you to lunch."

She is assuming here that the person "taking them out to lunch" is also male. If the offerer were female and the offered were male and married, there definitely would be speculation as to his fidelity, perhaps moreso than with the roles reversed.
If you can put enough processors and memory close enough, it seems as though you should be able to model a few hundred or thousand neurons on each processor, to assume the worst case. We've already moved past the need for neuron-level parallelism, so from here on the question is what order of magnitude of neurons can be modeled on a single processor.

(Again, assuming the worst case that we have to model neurons to get intelligent systems before we can figure out exactly how to produce intelligence in a less simulation-oriented manner).
The man who could have been richer than Bill Gates
So basically, the theory is that once you get big enough, your tumors themselves get tumors?
The 600,000 figure is probably just the number of times the SDK was downloaded (if the figure is at all legitimate; someone could have just made it up).

Boucher says it a lot better: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607884
To be fair, he gives a very clear explanation of how he came to his opinion on case statements -- he started out favoring them. So it's more "opinion informed by experience" than just "opinion".
Poll: What enterpreneur stage are you in?
The usual choices, first time entrepreneur, repeat entrepreneur without success, repeat entrepreneur with a successful exit.

For the sake of argument, successful exit would be something where you cashed out for a million or its something that's still running and making you 100k/yr profit.
First time entrepreneur. This is my first startup.
Repeat entrepreneur, one prior startup, didn't succeed.
Repeat entrepreneur, numerous prior startups, didn't succeed.
Repeat entrepreneur, one prior successful startup.
Repeat entrepreneur, series of prior successful startups.
Repeat entrepreneur, mix of success/failure in prior start ups.
Father of WWW Advocates Linking
In terms of analyzing crime, that's not necessarily the best strategy. Otherwise, how do you explain why Enron executives were willing to defraud companies for millions when they were already very wealthy?

What it essentially boils down to is some variation of "Well, so and so has a Lamborghini, but I've only got a Corvette."
Ah yeah. I think that article had a much lower estimate of developer sign ups as well.
Chief among those privileges not in the checklist: attendance at Wellesley College!
"that any platform which isn't under 100% open source control is a risky investment"

No. Not at all. I have invested a lot in AIX, DB2, Oracle and Solaris over the years. It's just that handing the reference to what your product should be compatible with to Microsoft and then trying to compete against them in one of their cash-cows is pretty much the ultimate stupid thing one could try.

Microsoft has been caught more than once in unethical and illegal activities, so, why take the risk? Are the APIs so far superior than anything else around? Is it working? Is it bringing a meaningful flow of new cross-platform software? Are the languages so wonderful nothing else comes close?

And yes: the US patent system is deeply flawed. And so is he justice system that allowed MS to abuse its monopoly numerous times. I can only hope both get fixed because the US is too an important market to ignore. It seems the EU has a good grip on the situation and maybe the US can follow its leadership on this.
What genius thought Gawker would buy a blog about vampires?
Incidentally, do you know if anyone has ever made a test of intellectual curiosity?

Google tells me that people have worked on the issue.

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordD...

http://epublications.bond.edu.au/greg_boyle/9/

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a785038693~...

I'm not aware of any test battery related to curiosity in wide clinical use.
Interesting, ... the synonym network containing "black" contains 26,330 words.

The entire English language must be partitioned into "K" non-overlapping synonym networks.
What is the value of "K" ?

I wonder if K = 2, ... and the other synonym network contains "white".

If K > 2, then how many words are in the "white" synonym network, and what other words are not connected with "black" or "white" ?

Whatever K is, it must be relatively small, since there are only so many words in the language, and the synonym networks seem rather large.
I may be mistaken, but I read the enzymes that allows cancer (and HIV) to continuously replicate unlike normal cells that die - may be a way to drastically reduce aging if engineered into human DNA.
I guess the next logical question is "who cares if they are offended". People get offended when they find out that I am an atheist. It's their problem, though, not mine.
This just lowers your odds, and can be factored into the likelyhood (although I assume that this actually tops the expected return below zero.)
Hmmm, this posting got 5 pts of karma (signifying interest, I presume), but nobody has posted a comment offering a solution.
#Self Promotion Disclaimer - Eclipse Plugin for jsLint

http://www.rockstarapps.com/joomla-1.5.8/products/jslint-ecl...
They Died for You: What Americans should know about World War II
Summary: a previously successful entrepreneur is two-thirds more likely to succeed in his next venture than a first-time entrepreneur. Part of this difference is (obviously) attributable to skill, but the paper makes and supports the claim that part of it is due to the fact that past success improves perception, making it easier get funded and to hire smart people. The key statement (slightly edited) is:

"Successful entrepreneurs are somewhat better than unsuccessful ones; the differential is amplified by their ability to attract more and better resources."

They define success as going public, but claim that "the findings are similar" if success is defined to include acquisitions and mergers.
Why is a big success "better" than a niche success? Why do more people here want it? (Not asking you in particular, just the room in general.)
I am confused as to why the delta-without-keyframes takes too long to measure. At most, you have to do 500 disk reads (which is more than 1, but still not very slow), and then do 500 delta applications, which should also not be particularly slow.

I would like to see his code and test data, but I couldn't find a link.