skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you really want to compute this, I think you'll need to use marginal benefits of math skills, which varies a lot by person and environment. It depends on not just other aptitudes, but also preferences and circumstances surrounding that person. Britney Spears or Tiger Woods probably wouldn't benefit much from Calculus.

Even for an 'average' salary person, it depends a lot on other skills s/he has. A top salesperson/marketing wizard does not need calculus and can earn several times the salary of the best engineer who does not pursue business or get involved in a startup.

The premise that Q-N is positive could be flawed from the start. See, e.g. "A Whole New Mind" http://www.amazon.com/Whole-New-Mind-Information-Conceptual/...
Here's the article:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d0960f18-4303-11de-b793-00144feabd...
The people at Microsoft who are responsible for this should be questioned.
Sorry if I picked an inappropriate example. It was quite hard to get to the meat of what the author was saying, which I think just goes further to highlight my point.

And no, I don't think looking at the survival rates of fat children is going to help test the hypothesis. For one thing, we live in very different conditions today to those we evolved in so very few observations of modern society are relevant.

It may well be impossible to test the claim "God made it", but it's bordering on impossible to test these evolutionary claims too.

Not to suggest that I disagree with the study of anthropology -- far from it. I just don't think it's a science.
It also seems like this extension has vulnerabilities INSIDE of it, so that raises some larger questions.

From that post, someone states that Firefox may not have the access required to remove the registry key for application extensions (because that is all it is for extensions installed this way) and thus the Uninstall button is disabled. I think that given that circumstance, a reason should be explained to the end-user of WHY.
A reassuring chart:

http://blogs.payscale.com/salary_report_kris_cowan/2008/07/l...

Computer Science and engineering students seem to get about $20,000 more in starting salary on average.

Using the data on median salaries (http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/degrees.asp), the top 10 majors were all quantitative topics, with the possible exception of economics. The top majors, all quantitative, averaged between 90 and 100 thousand per year, with the non quantitative vocational majors averaging about 60-80, and the bottom tier (Sociology, Drama, ect.) averaging about 50-60. The information does not include people who attend grad school.

The 'quant premium' seems to be about $25,000 per year over other useful majors, and $40,000 per year over generic college degree.
Maybe cheating is a leading indicator of efficiency, you get things done no matter what :)
I also believe saving is what families should do, but capitalist economies are based on spending. If everyone saves everything, and spends nothing - or next to nothing - on non-essential commodities, companies will suffer. And we don't need more bankrupt businesses.
Shriya Saran Very Hot in Kareena's Tashan Look
I don't believe it will have a macro effect on the economy, but these small "glimmers of hope", as Obama calls them, need to be worked upon. The truth of the matter is that if we focus on the economy, and not in the people, it would be better if people spent more.

That's the whole point of tax reductions: giving more money to the tax payer in order to increase spending. That's what has been done for years. Remember a while back, when the government gave around $700 USD (?) to Americans so they could go out and spend that money.
The force of competition will keep free available for a long, long time to come. As long as the marginal cost of reproduction & distribution stays close to zero and the initial investment is not too high, free is a great model for a new product/content to gain wide market acceptance.

An alternative to free will only be available if the content/resource is scarce enough (i.e. high barrier to entry) that no more than a handful of producers can create a competitive product.

These conditions seem applicable to only a few niches.
Sometimes Hardware is Expensive, and so is time though.

I think often times in a startup, especially one thats bootstrapped, its easy to get caught up in trying to optimize everything too early on to scale for a million users before you have your first thousand. Sometimes you have to optimize for your development time first and product development goals, and leave the optimization till you get a bit of runway.
You're just rationalizing. It doesn't matter how much value you place on the assignment. It only matters if you cut corners.
Free is not dead and it never will be. Going forward people will always be able to distribute information for a negligible cost and many will chose to do so freely. From a business perspective the advertising business model is the only one that has had any widespread success for content and there aren't a lot of reasons to see this changing.
It's not a bad idea to look at new products without any kind of bias. For example some month ago I started looking for the first times to Microsoft Live image search features, and I found many things about this service that are better than Google images search.
I really hope, not.
In other words, figure it out for yourself in your particular situation. Do the back of the envelope calcs. The reason why articles like this and the opposing view at Coding Horror are posted is because authors want to draw attention to management with preconceived notions.
How the Web and the Weblog have changed Writing
Wow! Was really a good read. I don't care if the writings are biologically in good quality, but it definitely fed something different in to my tech-wired brain after a long time.
There may not be many people who are explicitly or publicly opposed to freedom, but consider certain elements of our system:

government bailouts, payroll taxes, immigration law, sales taxes, teachers unions, Social Security, eminent domain, death taxes, stadium deals, cab medallions, government pensions, whatever it is that the NSA does, Medicare, Amtrak, income taxes, city planning commissions, stock price lawsuits, mandatory government fees, property taxes, random police searches, wealth taxes, rent control, energy taxes, airport security, what the CIA does to people, mileage taxes, corrupt politicians with dirty money in the freezer keeping their jobs, sin taxes, wiretapping backbones, tax credits, alternative minimum tax, airport landing slots

My point is that there is a revealed preference at work here
No more Digg shouts: Rationalizations Why Digg Needs a Better R&D Department
I’m not a power-digger, and never cared much to be one. But, after reading a couple of articles about Digg putting an end to the “shouts” feature, it got me thinking: What the hell are they doing?
In other words: Free will be dead when Marketing is too.
I don't know much about the cellular demographics so it is difficult to argue that but some of his 'gotchas' are a little silly.

>One analyst predicts fewer than 150,000 units units at launch.

This is because Palm knows its audience. No one who wants a Palm Pre is going to sit in a line like they are waiting for Halo 2. Why would they overstock stores and allow media spin it as a massive failure before it even truly launches?

>The second major "gotcha" is that we're in a massive recession. People aren't buying phones like they would in better economic times.

This makes sense and all but the Pre isn't competing against the iPhones ALREADY sold. It is competing against the iPhone being released this quarter. Which will endure the same economic terms.
Flagged!

Trolling for traffic with empty drivel, then astroturfing to stir controversy is lame.
http://www.prospects.ac.uk/cms/ShowPage/Home_page/What_do_gr...

From the above page, in the UK:

Financial returns

Back in 2001, the government reported that graduates' lifetime earnings would be £400,000 greater than those who ended their full-time education with A-levels. Recent estimates have been more conservative. According to a study from the University of Wales Swansea, after taking into accounts the costs of acquiring a degree (foregone earnings and tuition costs), male graduates can expect to see their lifetime earnings (net of taxes) increased by £141,539 over similar men who finished their education with two or more A-levels. The corresponding figure for women is £157,982, reinforcing the findings from other studies that women benefit even more than their male counterpart from a university education.

...

The financial benefits of a degree are, perhaps unsurprisingly, subject dependent. Maths and computing degrees were found to offer the greatest increase in lifetime earnings for male graduates, whilst a degree in education represents the highest returns for women. The Swansea report concluded that the cost of gaining a degree is far less than the potential increase in lifetime earnings for the majority of graduates.

Unattributed - you can Google:

"Both graduates and non graduates who took Maths A-level ended up earning on average 10 percent more than those of similar ability and background who did not"

There's lots more if you look for it. The consensus is that having a qualification in mathematics has a measurable impact on your earnings.
I once used to believe that "I cheat because I can, not because I have to". I like to think I'm a pretty smart guy, but that phrase was just a way for me to justify procasination. Nowadays, no, I don't cheat :)
Plus, it's a lot cheaper to rent a private office than to rent a studio.

I'm not sure where you'd be able to find a "private" office in SF which is cheaper than a studio and where people aren't going to notice that you are living there. The cheap offices are usually larger office spaces split up. I.e. close quarters. It's the neighbors you need to worry about, not the landlord.

Keep in mind that a net connection is also more expensive at an office, you'll need a gym membership in order to take a shower, eat out every meal, regular chiropractor visits, psychotherapy sessions, etc. If you add it all up you probably won't be saving any money.
That's some crazy grammar in the article headline. Is "media's" the possessive of the the plural of medium? And how does that make sense?
http://www.google.com/trends?q=django+python%2C+ruby+on+rail...

sigh
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I have to respectfully disagree with you. It's true that there is a large group of kids who would be better served if their teachers focused more on applications; however, I think that there's an equally large (if not bigger) group of students for whom learning about applications is not helpful. When I was in public school, my teachers always made an effort to highlight how the math we were learning could be applied to real world problem -- the end result was that often the struggling students would say "You use this to build rocket ships? Well I'm NEVER going to do that... I give up."

The most important thing we can do is change our attitude. It's hard to develop an interest in something that you find difficult when you're receiving mixed messages from all of the adults in your life; when adults will demand you get better grades all while telling you it's okay because "math is for nerds" or "not everyone can do math."

I did well (good grades, but it's not like I was Terence Tao or anything) in math in school, and my teachers in other subjects, my coaches, my friends' parents, etc, acted like I was a freak because of it. You can't give a high five with one hand while you're pointing and laughing with the other. This is the attitude that must change before we can raise a generation who take pride in developing math skills.
Transliterature, A Humanist Design
This is not a problem of hardware vs software. It's a problem of vendor's money vs your own. Of course he doesn't care. Actually, the more you spend on hardware the cheaper the software seems.
Use of the word "sexy" 30 times in something purporting to be scientific; reliance on anecdotes rather than research to make points.

In general it sets off the crackpot alarm for me which means that I take anything else said therein with a grain of salt. One so large, as it were, that it wasn't even worth continuing to read after a certain point.
Microsoft Silverlight vs Google Wave: Why Karma Matters
That's not a 'bug', it's the expected behavior of the current design and implementation. From the optimization overview (http://www.sqlite.org/optoverview.html):

The current implementation of SQLite uses only loop joins. That is to say, joins are implemented as nested loops.

Know your tools.
Just to tug sideways a little bit, math skills can be a form of marketing in almost every profession, even if the skills are only superficial. A person who can offer brief explanations for math concepts to lay audiences, or can compute in his head quickly, can use those abilities at the right moments to gain an incredible (albeit somewhat undeserved) level of credibility.

Between my partner and I, I often play the "technical guy" role during sales meetings, and simply multiplying fairly large numbers in my head before the client has a chance to fumble for a calculator really puts me in a position of "credible expert" by way of the Halo Effect.

It's a subtle effect, and it can easily become obnoxious, but it's worth considering.
In the US, just Republicans and Democrats.
Depends on the country, the industry, and what happens to the industry in the future.
What if a million people stopped paying their taxes in protest?
Keep a Programming Diary
Yeah, if you can make software run 100 times faster with lots of profiling and hand optimisations, that $300 laptop is basically a $30,000 laptop.
As another commenter suggested, there is a stark difference between high school and universities. high schools in the US can be justifiably compared to prisons in this sense, but universities cannot.
I rely on a windows xp running over virtualbox for testing websites on IE these days.
reason should be explained to the end-user of WHY

Marketdroids who hold their customers in contempt. People like this guy:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097531/
Since the submitter did not see necessary to add information about "plinky", my hesitant 5-second peek at the unknown URL reveals some type of weird poll/questionnaire site with probably some "social media" scheme.
Oh. I thought those photos were part of the results of the preceding Wolfram Alpha query.
"For one thing, we live in very different conditions today to those we evolved in"

I think ultimately biology goes back to the laws of physics, and I don't think those have changed much in the last couple of 1000 years. Also, I think we have some idea what life was 10000 years ago - there certainly was no breast enhancement surgery, and no anti baby pill, for example.

That is precisely where I see a difference from the "god made it" hypothesis: for evolution and biology, and relationships and stuff, there ARE models, which can be used to predict things (either for the future, or for data points in the past). There is no such thing for "god made it". Therefore I don't understand why you think the "fat" theory can not be put to the test. Maybe my ideas were not convincing - I am not a biologist anyway. But that doesn't prove that there can be no test. In physics, there also is not always a test to test a theory. There are theoretical physicists and practical physicists, and some practitioners are considered brilliant for finding good way to test certain theories.

Of course I admit that strictly speaking, I am not making a 100% case against the god hypothesis. You could answer "of course, god made it so that {insert elaborate theory from physics}, then there would be something to test". But I hope you know what I mean anyway.

Not 100% sure what constitutes a science, either - this discussion made me think of court cases. Suppose you want to find out who committed a murder. You can not test that either - you can only collect evidence that person X did it, but I don't think you can test it (no repeatable test for the future - you can only kill the victim once). Is it therefore not a science? But still it seems possible at least in some cases to identify the murder with high certainty.
Also, why does Firefox let an extension decide whether it is uninstallable or not?

In the OP, commenter WladimirPalant says that's a side effect of a Firefox feature which allows plug-ins to be registered via the Windows Registry. But disabling will have the exact same effect: the plugin is not loaded.
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Man, when this happened, it was the worst. See, at my college, it logs you in with a fresh copy of everything, every time you log in. And it automatically applies patches. This patch came out after the latest image was made, so when you log in, it grabs the patch and installs it. Every time. Then, you start Fx, and it has to install the patch, and restart itself. Every time.

Takes almost 8 minutes to log in. It's the absolute worst.
"The history of India's independence movement"... now that's a good one !!
1) In my view, the problem is that there are too many restrictions on H1Bs, not too few. Notably, they should be able to switch employers without being deported (I guess they can now, but I've heard the time window to get a new employer to pick up your sponsorship is ridiculously short, and the amount of red tape your new employer has to cut through is considerable). This would cut the competitive disadvantage that an H1B has because they're effectively locked in to one employer, which would raise their salaries up to the market price.

2.) I'm all for it, because it recognizes that programmers are not interchangeable. I find it ironic that the same people who complain about employers treating them like interchangeable cogs in a wheel then turn around and argue that H1Bs are taking jobs away from them, which implies that they are interchangeable cogs in a wheel. One or the other, man - either you are a beautiful unique snowflake, in which case you have nothing to worry about from H1B competition, or you aren't, and should worry about becoming one because you're screwed wage-wise anyway.

Your post has also touched on a couple pet peeves on mine, which are:

3) I find it disconcerting that after all the time I've spent with computers, one of the biggest factors in my career is still that I was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There're many Indian or Chinese programmers who study for years - since they're little kids - so that they can do well on the college entrance exams, get into IIT or Chinghua, and then emigrate to the United States in a reasonably high-paying tech field. It seems vaguely un-American that being an American trumps smarts, hard-work, and prudent risk-taking.

4) What's with this deification of a particular price level ("should pay he market price of MY country")? I see this with home and stock market prices too - people assume that whatever the high is what prices should always be, and will go to great levels to keep them from going down. The market price is a signal - it tells you whether there is currently more supply for an industry than demand. If there is, perhaps you should adjust your behavior accordingly (eg. find a different subspecialty) instead of complaining about wages falling.
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That is a new, interesting angle no one else has offerred, and it must have been inventd by someone for some reason.

Isn't that reason enough?
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This article was disappointing. I thought he was going to identify the salient features of writing designed for the web. Hopefully he will in his talk.
If you don't like the way a teacher or a school runs things, then don't cheat. Vote with your feet.

Requiring students to memorize has as much to do with the logistics of testing as it does with learning. If you think the school is being lazy and making it easier for them to test at the expense of substantive (non-rote) learning, then why go there?

Even if this is high school, there are still choices. There are people who have gotten into the Ivies with a GED. If you are the right kind of person, you will do substantive work, be recognized and succeed. You can add the drop out, get a GED and do volunteer work step to this plan:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/1/24/11657/1141

If most people voted with their feet, then schools would get a lot better, fast. Instead, people cheat, which enables the schools to keep up their appearances. You're just as guilty of propagating the paper-reality of testing over actual learning.
For some reason, whenever I read Greenspun's writing, I get the feeling it is written partially tongue-in-cheek.

This particular article is mostly on the mark, but in the world where everyone's thoughts are heard, filtering becomes extremely important.
Reading the article I got the question "Then why people say Paris Hilton is sexy?"
Freeware Software Picks of 2009 (so far) 
I briefly started delving into programming and decided to start to learn Python, and after several days and pages and pages of reading I realized that just to learn what the hell I was looking at on the screen would take me a long time, but I wanted to do some real programming, if at least very amateur. Several websites later and Alice walks into my life.
A fairly well written post, i'm in full agreement.

While Microsoft may have some great technology in their portfolio, I simply don't want to use much of it because of how little I can trust them.

In Google's case, they're not really asking me to trust them so much, by documenting and open sourcing many of the technologies they're trying to push, I can at least feel like I have some degree of protection.

If there was a 'Google Silverlight' (as hypothesised in the article) it would probably be under consideration as a platform for the next version of my product but Microsoft's Silverlight falls very much short.
Quoting a comment on the article by WladimirPalant:

----------
Unfortunately, this is only partially Microsoft's fault. Firefox makes it easy for applications to ship their own browser extensions - they only need to add a registry entry that points to the extension's directory. But Firefox cannot uninstall extensions that were installed like this (because it didn't install them in the first place, because it might require administrator rights and because doing that would affect other Firefox profiles as well). So while this feature is great for application developers, it is rather flawed from user's point of view.
-----------
I pointed out that there is no need for a seeming disadvantage to be offset by some redeeming advantage.

You could come up with any number of possible reasons if you were looking for a "reason," although it could simply be a side-effect of some other mutation (such as the layout of the pelvis, intestines and abdominal muscles being more efficient for hunting/etc. without the "extra" parts.)

Here is another important inversion that you seem not to have considered, though: do you think that when externalisation first happened, testicles were as sensitive to pain as they are now?
Ask HN: How should I get started with Linux application programming?
I've been asked about the possibility of creating a Linux-based point of sale program to be used in two local businesses. The program would be doing customer and inventory management, as well as tracking orders and statistics. I've never done any large-scale programming before, and would like some advice about what technologies and/or practices to use. Any websites you've found helpful with be most appreciated as well.

Any programming language, but preferably FOSS, of course, as this will be on a Linux system.

Thanks :)