skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting indeed, but not all that relevant to my point.

Regarding the first study: it looks at a small wealth shock (bringing people to the median level of wealth at the time), and compares outcomes (occupational status, literacy, education) that were largely irrelevant to the median people of the time. Simply put, why would you expect people winning a median level of wealth in 1832, a time when the median person was a poorly-literate or illiterate, uneducated, farmer, and then expect that the winners would be more educated, more literate, or have an occupation other than farming? Besides all that, it addresses a different point than the one I'm making. It essentially goes toward showing that poor people, given a windfall of wealth, do not invest it in their childrens' education. But whether your parents invested in your education or not is not a "chosen behavior" on your part. It's an external variable you have no control over. To counter my argument, what you need is a study showing either that rich people don't invest more in their children than poor people, or one showing that such investment doesn't matter.

Regarding the second study, I'm not sure what sort of extrapolations you can draw from a data set that consists purely of people who were already in financial trouble. These people probably have impulse control issues. Is that a "chosen behavior?" It's something we can measure in kids that are just a few years old.

If you really want to discern the magnitude of the impact of "chosen behavior" you have to factor out the effects of things that aren't "chosen behaviors."

The bottom line is that you don't choose your parents, and you don't choose the things you inherit from them. You don't choose your IQ, you don't choose the size of your trust fund, you don't choose to learn how to behave in professional society from an early age, you don't choose many personality factors like attentiveness or impulsiveness, etc. These things are not "chosen behaviors."
This piece was written by Gladwell in response to Chabris. Between the two of them, Chabris, as a PhD holder and tenured professor, clearly has the higher ground when it comes to understanding the science in question.

Yes, Gladwell mentions Alter and Oppenheimer in his writing, but remember that the knock against Gladwell is that he selectively brandishes science when it suits his narrative. He's just doing that again here.

The fundamental complaint from Chabris is that Gladwell did not even acknowledge the existence of any controversy on this subject in his book. He simply picked the study he liked best and wrote about it as if it were fact.
I was just considering transposing some of the characters in my name with Cyrillic characters -- I wonder if that'd work?

E.g. replace "a" (97) with "а" (1072).
At first the idea of every device having a public IP address seemed like a security nightmare to me... but how easy is port-scanning the IPv6 Internet? If the addresses are sequential it obviously won't make any difference (you just need a list of ISP address ranges, e.g. from BGP, and start from the bottom), but maybe we can hand out addresses some other way that will make it very unlikely to find another device on the Internet? Slighly related: is the last bit the reason why we still haven't met any aliens?
Looks like it could be a cool book, but sorry Silicon Valley, "fittest people in tech" isn't actually a thing.

Sincerely,

The Rest of the World
The only thing worse than this article was my decision to click on it.
Remote-controlled model aircraft has been around for a long time, and I suspect there have been plenty of crashes and horrific injuries. I fail to understand why, all of a sudden, terms like "UAV" and "drone" are being used to describe aircraft which from a safety perspective are fundamentally very similar to RC aircraft decades ago. I do understand the privacy issues that have changed in the last decade due mostly to the miniaturization and price decrease of quality cameras, but safety doesn't seem to have worsened.
Seems very similar to the Asus Transformer, another table with a keyboard docking station that makes it laptop-like.
I have heard the pencil yarn more than once. In fact, I lerned about it from seeing repeated on HN.

The inference is that today's news on gov't waste is also potentially a "myth".

Any specific news, or just the news in these times? I had a conversation with some people a week ago who were saying that it was good the CDC was shut down, and claims that it might interfere with its public health mission were just nonsense. A week later I'm hearing news that 30 or 40 of them have been recalled from furlough to deal with the salmonella outbreak that has hospitalized people in 18 states.
Building smaller starter homes, with more "basic" decorator options would help, e.g., does a starter home have to have 2.5 bathrooms? The counter-argument, right or wrong, is that builders say that with the proffers they are required to pay, they can't make a decent profit on smaller, more basic homes and that the buying public doesn't want them.
Ask HN: Would it be possible to open-source healthcare.gov?
Sounds crazy, but why isn't public software, well... public?
This is the same argument against paying employees more than $epsilon: there is someone hungrier than you who will work for less.

It isn't really interesting to observe that people want free stuff. It is interesting to unite producers to get a better price for their effort, and to tackle the behemoths who can afford to dumb content below cost. It is interesting to try to convince consumers to stop wasting their lives, and to demand better content worth a higher price.
But the thing is, that means you aren't his audience. Sure, there are circumstances under which you'll read his output, but if you're not willing to play the game then you're no use to him.

What a publisher can sell profitably to advertisers now is a small, engaged audience - not massive numbers of people who couldn't care less and just pass through.
You can't opt out of people talking about you on the Internet.
More interesting is that reduction in childhood exposure to lead is the most significant factor. Levitt counters the debunking of his theory two paragraphs down from your link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impact_of_Legalized_Abortio...
I recently tried to do this. Facebook actually will recognize if a name sounds "too fake" and reject it, saying that you can only use a real name.

https://www.facebook.com/help/112146705538576

Facebook is just shooting themselves in the foot. Instead of accommodating for it's users it wants its users to accommodate for facebook. These decisions are just silly and a slap in the face to anyone who wants a shred of privacy.
I think radio jamming would be much cheaper and more effective. Most short-range RC aircraft run on very widely-available consumer spectrum bands like 2.4GHz.
You can always deactivate your account and only enable it when you need to use it.
$1m sounds like peanuts for a bunch of R&D on a mass-market high-tech consumer product.
You're probably right about visual works, I haven't used it since 2005 so I kind of fell in that window.

I don't have a problem w/ non-native looking GUI's in principle, but I just think Squeak and Pharo are kinda fugly. Bad spacing, weird colors, weird fonts. If that only effected my development environment I could live with it, but if the apps I make are also going to look like that? Ick. The only thing I'd really use it for is writing games where GUI's are always going to be custom anyway. (I think Smalltalk in general would be great for game development actually.)

Another thing is that at least in other smalltalks, it generally used OS windows at least. The controls might look weird, but it does feel like part of the system. Writing code in Squeak feels like you're either using a VM or Remote Desktop, it's just totally isolated.

The thing is most of these, in isolation, aren't deal killers, but once you've added up enough weird points it gets a bit too weird. You could make similar arguments about Java, but I think the difference is in magnitude: Java's weirdness is kind of weird, smalltalk's weirdness is really weird.
... What? Wouldn't people just block your posts?
I'll mess around with it and see if I can make it better :D. thanks again for the feedback, seriously.
I've been buying a decent amount of furniture lately with Prime for free shipping. Not 2 day but still, getting 60 pound stuff shipped for free has surely got to cost them.
Yep, that code was actually legacy code that ended up causing problems. I stripped it out :D, but only after I'd spent a few hours messing around with this.
I love it. I'd sign up for a service that automatically posts inane crap.
yes, and automatic browser updates by default is a great new change as well for IE (unfortunately nothing for people sticking to their XP, though)
As somebody who is in a hiring position and aspires to a more gender-balanced work-place, I've found it really disheartening that so few applicants are female. We have mostly male developers and leadership, so I understand that a female coming into our office might not feel particularly attracted to it. I guess it is a slow process to try to improve that situation.
Amazon launches AWS Activate for new startups
South Africa Education Department bans Open Source Software
Okay, I concede you didn't imply a lack of demand and that I misunderstood your primary point. For what it is worth you are making a lot of assumptions in order to make your point that Obamacare might not succeed.

My second point stands. Your experience of the media coverage, while valid, doesn't necessarily represent fact. You have to admit it is possible that a reporter managed to interview someone who signed up and you and your news sources were unaware. Even if you proved this point to be true what does it say? No one has signed up? People don't want to be interviewed? Obamacare will fail? I don't get it.
It's important to note that even if the HSTS header was present on the mobile site, the exploit would still be possible since many mobile browsers do not support HSTS[1].

[1]http://michael-coates.blogspot.com/2013/09/security-capabili...
Had mine since the 70s. Still works fine. Worth a million dollars in my book.
ChocolateAsAService
I am starting a new side project called Curious Chocolate (http://curiouschocolate.com). You can subscribe and you will receive some sort of unique chocolate every month. Next month's chocolate is Bacon Chocolate. I would love to hear what you think, get some feedback, and if you are interested, I would love it if you subscribed. Thanks!
Is Bitcoin Responsible for Silk Road’s Success? You Decide.
New tool, git-related 0.1
No. Homes they are unaffordable are not expensive homes, they are expensive land. Building a mini house is a waste of effort and drives costs up, as it will need to be knocked down or mangled later to support expansion.
After you choose to "permanently" delete your account, you'll get a message that says, "Your personal account was recently disabled by Facebook" two weeks later.
I can understand why you would want to do this. But, I don't think it is in society's best interest to think of information about a person as being generally owned by them. I can see restricting certain harmful things you might want to do with that information, but I think you're correct in your conclusion that such a request would be a significant overreach.
MSIE is still lagging far behind in HTML5 standards: http://html5test.com/results/desktop.html

While MSIE may be 'good' browser (tastes may vary, I find the UI horrible) it's damaging to the web ecosystem to have MSIE leading the marketshare. It's advantageous for Microsoft to limit new features and keep interoperability between browsers low. As a result the entire web using public loses out on having new features and having a broader choice.

Chrome and Firefox are built on open source software, so when an issue occurs you can participate in the process of it being fixed.
Yes. If you're discriminating on the basis of gender, how is that not sexist?
I use a GMail plugin that looks up social media accounts attached to a given email address, and I'm always amused by the misspelled names that appear.
Now you can compose and convert html to image
The moment that you wrongly publish something as public and he his monitoring your account, or when Facebook decides that addresses/events are public too, you are ed up
I don't have any opinion one way or another about Gladwell but it really lowers my opinion of MIT to see them publishing posts such as this. The author has not read the book in question (or for all I know any book by Gladwell) and seems to be regurgitating the argument of a second author. I'd expect this from some rag not MIT.
"Then, if you'd like your account permanently deleted with no option for recovery, log into your account and fill out this form."

So it is possible to delete your account "completely". I did this once and I have never been more happier. I actually spent time being tense when Facebook rolled out a new privacy blunder and would rush to check all settings. Imagine the time wasted.

So to all those who are contemplating deleting the account but can't - do it. It's totally worth it.
IGoogle will be shutting down in 22 days
Any time we see a phenomenon breaking down along gender or race lines, when skin color and genitals are not involved, that's a red flag that people are being excluded for silly reasons.

Well that's a sweeping statement if I ever saw one. Are you prepared to stand behind it? I'll give you a moment to reconsider.

Edit: Seriously, you all believe that any time there is a gender disparity not involving genitals, it is happening for "silly reasons"? There is not one job where gender-related phenotypes might naturally result in skewed distribution?
Actually the system is set up to guarantee that even federally funded software, and associated research is restricted from being made available to the public. Some cogent comments on why this so, from a minor rant on this topic. http://goo.gl/ISdpc7
> Some day, someone's grandkid is going to be spouting something about "10,000 hours" and not even know where it comes from.

Which will replace the even more flawed understanding of "born with it".

We all go through life with flawed mental models, which aren't perfect but are better than a complete lack of understanding. Over time, we make those models in the general consciousness better, even if they continue to lag behind true scientific understanding.
In five centuries from now we will be running on computers or god knows what. If anyone was still interested in history they could download it right to their brain instantly.

Ok that sounds a lot more absurd than I intended, but it also seems absurd to me that in five centuries there will still be normal humans around telling oral myths.
Mozilla Appmaker
I go a step further, I generally ask not to have photos taken. Other than pictures of me as a child, my family and friends actually have no recent photos of me. For the most part, people are quite compliant of that request.
We've actually have more detailed posts now (i.e. http://blog.leanstack.io/the-cloud-stack-that-helped-sendgri...). But I'm with you on context, we're going the interview route moving forward. Glad to chat with you and anyone else to brainstorm and see how I can be helpful though. Feel free to email me at yonas@leanstack.io.
Here's another classic. A 55 gallon drum full of personal lubricant: http://www.amazon.com/Passion-Natural-Water-Based-Lubricant-...
One of my most popular answers on Stack Overflow has been about exactly these properties. This trick you are using is new to me and you've helped me improve the answer so it works for any URL. Thank you!

Updated answer here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6944744/javascript-get-po...

I also created a JSFiddle to test here:

http://jsfiddle.net/nchaves/vMrjs/2/
Make a hardware RNG that's truly random by detecting the interval between decay events :)
Are there any SR-like marketplaces that don't use Bitcoin? If not, why not?
a big "fuck you" to anyone with an unusual name.
That's also a minor side issue: it'll cost you a sub-1-second page load time but it doesn't cause the kinds of problems people are talking about where the backend components are overloaded to the point of failure.

The size of healthcare.gov is actually well under the average:

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/131010_ZG_X5C/1/details/

(see http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2013/06/05/web-page-growt...)

For comparison, look at WashingtonPost.com: it uses considerably more data and more total requests and yet the page loads much faster:

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/131010_GG_XDK/

If you look carefully, though, you'll see a) that they aren't setting Cache-Control headers and are setting ETags (both performance killers) and b) there's this weird staggered response behaviour which indicates something is seriously wrong. It seems to handle much better in Chrome - 3s vs 70! - so presumably there's some interaction with the browser going on as well:

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/131010_ZW_XD6/1/details/
I've always defended Facebook and found it really useful. However recently I've noticed how little I use it and that I could (and would like to) delete my account.

There is one thing holding me back though. Photos. When I'm out with friends etc. I don't take photos. There are usually one or two people who do and I can rely on those photos being made available to me through Facebook/tagging. If I delete my Facebook account I lose the opportunity to view/save those photos.
OT:
I used this site just a couple of weeks ago when looking for a fountain pen. Went looking for the TWSBI 540 as suggested there; ended up with the the 580 and can highly recommend it.

Whilst I did check it out, I didn't like the look of the Pilot Vanishing Point. I wasn't sure if I'd agree with the clip being at the wrong end.
Here are a few (in no particular order):

- Dynamic Programming

- Graph algorithms: Traversal (A*), shortest path (Dijkstra, Bidirectional, Floyd–Warshall), minimum spanning tree

- Recursive Search Techniques

- Search Trees (binary, n-ary, splay, AVL)

- Suffix trees

- Parsing using regex

- Sorting (with all the variations)

- Hashing

- Greedy Algos

- Divide and conquer

- Genetic algorithms

There are a few other algorithms that are must-know too. I guess that would depend on the domain we are in (computer vision, machine learning, NLP, etc).
It is expensive, but it's also possible.
From game jam to market in one month
Congrats for completing a book, it takes work.

As an entrepreneur I read anything that could improve my business, but I find kindle Cloud or those services poor. I hate DRM, so normally I have to ask for the printed version with all the inconveniences and cost(I live outside US), for then cutting the sides(very fast with a power tool) and feeding the book to my fantastic Fujitsu Snapcan scanner. Then the pages are stored in a box in the loft.

So obviously I prefer to buy a PDF which is not available here.

Not having read the book, it seems to me like you are naturally inclined for achieving things by your own personality(the book is using lots of "how I...", I, I, I, me, me. The main question in business use to be how people that are different than you could express their best potential.

I see lots of books or talks of how to improve the business and step number 1 is planning everything, of course the people giving the talk are planners, they love planning everything by nature, and people that attend are naturally plan haters by nature too.

If you have dogs you see dogs like golden retrievers that love water, and others hate it, like some children love some toys and not others by nature.

Usually "one size does not fit all", personality types have to be studied so you could see what could or could not be done with the people you have.
You "felt like a sucker" and from another comment "feel like I've been lied to"?

Do other people's comments and criticisms make you change your mind about something that easily? If you thought it was a good book when you read it, why would anything anyone else says change that? (Short of, say, Gladwell made up the entire thing or has been rampantly plagiarizing without attribution.)

Gladwell's books are very well-written narrative combining summarized research studies, anecdotal stories and histories to support his overall thesis. It is not a scientific study. He "connects the dots" of what he believes to be the central theme of his book. I haven't seen anywhere that he "lied".

There will always be detractors to any non-fiction author, especially one so popular. (See Nassim Taleb's books as another example.) If you can find a non-fiction book without major detractors, it probably isn't very good.
Mini houses use less land. More likely, they are small apartments, though; single dwelling houses are not very practical where land is expensive, even if Americans tend to pretend so.
It's not uncommon for researchers to dispute follow-up studies that fail to reproduce their results. Their reputations are at stake, if it points to methodological errors (which seems to be the case here).

The problem here is Gladwell didn't even hint that there is significant doubt about the methodology of study he cited. Note his dismissive term for it: a "intramural argument". Chabris just "doesn't like" the study, as if it's a shirt in a color that doesn't suit him.

These are not equivalent things. It's not just a difference of opinion or who tells a better story or who has more letters after their name. What matters is the science behind it, and Gladwell is intentionally perverting it in the service of a better story. That's a huge disservice to the public when it comes to popularizing science.
I, and other people I know, replace a letter in our names with an accented one. As long as you stay in the UTF-8 Latin alphabet, Facebook won't complain about the name change; and as far as I can tell this completely removes me from searches containing my real unaccented name.
>
One of my biggest pet peeves is endless emails sent to everyone in the organization by someone who just wanted to share an article that he/she thought was interesting. Then someone replies all with a comment, another person replies all, and soon, my email client just kept on buzzing even if the topic doesn't concern or interest me.

> And the most frustrating thing is there's no rule that I can create to filter out those kind of emails.

FYI, Gmail lets you mute threads, which addresses this exact use case.
awesome! glad I could help.
Drones can operate completely autonomously, with no RF link.
I respectfully disagree. Dialog is a good thing. He may very well be wrong at times though I don't believe he's attempting to mislead people.

Personally, I never want to stop saying, "What if". That question has led to amazing things.
you (& afandian) make a good point, and i believe that's roughly how py.test does it, by rewriting the code of test modules before running tests. which would be fair to call magic.

http://pytest.org/latest/assert.html#advanced-assertion-intr...
Their searching does transposition too. I'm able to search for Russian friends of mine who use their Russian-spelled names by typing in transliterated English.
This has always been a problem for me. I can't even use gotomeeting on my ubuntu machine, which is my primary OS. Great to see someone working this out.
If men were being prevented or dissuaded from entering the tech industry then sure, that would be sexist.

Efforts to counter sexism against women are not sexist against men.
Its amazing how "need" leads to innovation.
After the pen, Now the problem is How to make smartphones for space. How exactly will you make a smartphone, and all of its sensors like accelerometer work in space ?
The federal marketplace application runs off of the healthcare.gov domain so I think he meant the marketplace solution as well.

I highly doubt that will happen though. Check out this laundry list of high-priced contractors that have "contributed" to the mess: http://reporting.sunlightfoundation.com/2013/aca-contractors...