skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Probably the most poorly-written article I've read this week. But it's basically correct. Learning ability in individuals is highly correlated across different skills, and is very stable over the individual's life. It's also correlated to reaction times in tests of basic reflexes. And the dynamic range of the correlated bits (g) across the population is not small. I've yet to encounter a serious denial of these points.

Taken separately, nature and nurture are necessary but not sufficient conditions on achievement. They're also both heritable. And we know that g is heritable. It seems likely that between nature and nurture, the former is more important, but I'm not aware of any compelling evidence for this.
Australian Web Filter To Censor Downloaded Games
> This happens quite often but people seem to vote it up out of fear of neglecting their religious duties.

This made me laugh out loud. The truth can be hilarious sometimes.
Man Charged In 'Virtual Porn' Case
Johnny Chung Lee - Foldable Display Tracking using the Wiimote
Founders Fund: Eyeing Life Beyond Consumer Web Startups
This study http://www.oniros.fr/A1350.pdf seems to indicate that sleep duration has no effect. Their interpretation is that a process is triggerd when you enter sleep but once triggered it is independent of wheter you sleep or not.
Extremely notable events will pop-up everywhere. Before I saw it here, I had heard it on two IRC channels, saw it on a few news sites and I did a Google News search for it (which didn't add anything at all, because all those news things said nothing other than "MJ rushed to hospital" and after that "MJ died").

If HN is your only source of world news, I suggest you find at least one more. There are many things that don't pop up hear, that probably are relevant to you.
Yeah, he's the famous one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase

I don't know what else has been done in that field. Any pointers?
Yeah, scriptaculous doesn't suddenly stop to work just the alpha of V2 is out! :) Also, most concepts of the old version still apply to the new one.
> the question becomes "is this event big enough to justify such an exception?"

If that's the question, what's the added value of putting it here as well. If it's already big enough to justify an exception, it's big enough to be mentioned everywhere.

Surely the question should be: "Will the discussion on HN be interesting?" Since the discussion is mostly meta-commentary, I'm inclined to say it isn't.
And 3rd, he was a child abuser himself.

Downmod me only if you would have done the same while he was alive. Being dead doesn't forgive you what you've done.
If HN is your only source of world news, I suggest you find at least one more

Google News and the news sites I have tried have way too much information. I want the top 10 or so current-events general-interest stories of the year: more than that would be just noise.

If you know of a news source like that besides Hacker News, I would be most grateful if you told me.
(disclaimer: I'm Thomas Fuchs) The reasons are manifold, but the core reasons are as follows:

1) the scriptaculous fx framework was the first serious JS/DOM animation toolkit out there, and by version 1.8.X it was full of old cruft (e.g. hacks for browsers no one uses anymore)

2) I personally needed some more mature effects for my projects (like the pepsicozeitgeist twitter vis amy hoy did with me)

and maybe most important:
3) hacking just for the fun of it :)
I'm a freelancer, and I have 2-3 long time clients. For several reasons this year I haven't looked for new ones, so work is not much.

A couple of months ago I did something between risky and impolite. I started insisting, as hard as I could, that they only used phone/ymess for emergencies. Normal communication like feature requests of bug reports should be either by mail, a bug-reporting app or monthly face to face meetings.

It was ugly, to say the least, and at one point I thought I would have to choose between the policy and one client, but it worked out in the end. It helped that I was always very prompt with the owners of the businesses, but they had little time to call me anyways.

Anyways, why did that do my job better? For one thing, I am much less stressed. I barely get one phone call per day. Second when I start working on a project I don't solve just one bug at a time anymore, so I'm a lot more productive and a lot less prone to mistakes. And third, a lot of problems which were false alarms don't even get to me anymore. Writing a mail is apparently different enough from grabbing a phone that even the total number dropped (which is made up in the face 2 face meetings, when I press them for bugs and features).

Anyways, even if it made their experience worse (at least for a while), I think it was well worth it. I don't know how this would work if you were employed, but I'm guessing obtaining 2-3 hours per day of closed phones/messengers/emails from your boss would make a lot of difference.
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You may want to also take a look at http://www.linode.com, they give more ram, for the same price, and have a pretty slick, albeit not as pretty control area.
You are definetely right but let me just comment about the physiological exception.

In the in the case of this blog post the might actually be some differences. The writer may really have some genetic problem in his/her circadian clock. Sleep is known to be under regulation of two mechanism: a circadian mechanism (about 24 hour for most of us) and a homeostatic mechanism. It is known (it is actually one of the few things we actually know pretty well about sleep) that the NREM is under control of the homeostatic mechanism while REM is under control of the circadian mechanism.

The blog author has a longer cycle and it is likely that his/her REM kicks in later on in their night, therefore being incompatible with obtaining enough REM. By doing polyphasic he/she might be able to compensate for that.
Thats pretty crazy. I am running a similar size app with 2gb slice. Although it can probably take quite a bit more (10x views) .
Funnily enough, I was on IRC when someone announced that Michael Jackson had died, rather than on Twitter, and the first thing I did was to go to my Twitter client to see if anyone else had mentioned it. The fact that everyone was talking about MJ dying confirmed that the IRC announcement was not a hoax, or at least not a hoax by the announcer.

After that, Twitter was neither more nor less useful than CNN, which waited until they had confirmations signed in triplicate before they announced that yes, MJ was actually dead.

On the other hand, Twitter was a lot more fun than CNN, with various bits of irreverence and word-plays on MJ songs popping up here and there on the Twitter-stream... something that traditional media would (rightly) never dare to do.

Death is funnier on Twitter.
It confuses me that anyone can believe that liberalism or technological advance are not universally desirable. I am similarly confused (though interested) by the "prime directive" approach that academics often advocate in dealing with undeveloped cultures.
Would a public plan have lower administrative costs? Well, how often are public enterprises run more efficiently than private ones? Why did practically all economically advanced nations dismantle their public airlines, phone companies, and so on, invariably obtaining lower administrative costs and consumer prices?

Funnily enough, a number of these advanced nations did not dismantle their public health plans.
The article doesn't do a good job of "proving" its points. The derived catch which makes it HN content is that R&D gets bit hard.

My personal opinion, you need a two step plan:

1 - outlaw preexisting condition exclusion. Its probably necessary to achieve the rest of the plan.

2 - force all policies to publish per person cost. The current private market segments by negotiating separate deals per company. This has to end in order to have transparent choice amongst providers. Also allows employers to get out of the way. A person, not an employee makes their choice and pays for it.

You do the above and you get efficient and open competition. End of story. Well, except: if you choose the policy with less bells and whistles and then when you get cancer switch to the better coverage when you actually do get cancer, it screws things up. Anyone got a solution to this part?
Pretty flawed, unfortunately. I left this as a comment, but it has yet to be moderated through.

----

You’re doing a good thing by trying to elucidate basic concepts, but I’m afraid your article has a bunch of errors that means it’s not as helpful as it could be.

“Big O specifically describes the worst-case scenario” - this isn’t true. g(n) = O(f(n)) simply means that f(n) asymptotically bounds g(n) as n->inf - but the functions involved could be anything and don’t necessarily refer to the worst case. For example, they could be the average case running times of an algorithm, or something completely different. Also remember that for any n, g(n) could be > f(n), so f(n) is not worst case in that respect either.

“O(1) describes an algorithm that will always execute in the same time (or space) regardless of the size of the input data set.” - curiously, also not true. It just means that there’s eventually an upper limit on how much space an algorithm will use, or that eventually as n gets larger the resource consumption of the algorithm becomes constant.

“The example below also demonstrates how Big O favours the worst-case performance scenario; a matching string could be found during any iteration of the for loop and the function would return early” - same point about g(n) = O(f(n)) not being worst case necessarily - you’ve set the problem up so that N is the worst (and average) case running time. However we can say that the best case running time of linear search is O(1).

“O(2^N) denotes an algorithm whose growth will double with each additional element in the input data set.” - also you need to remember that these are upper bounds, and aren’t necessarily tight. That linear search example, which you wrote as O(N), is also O(2^N). If we replace O by \Theta then we begin to get to the behaviour you’re describing, but remember that these things only are true as N gets sufficiently large.
Not to mention opening up a huge array of Open Source software written in C/C++ for possible porting to Android, without having to rewrite entirely in a JVM language. Like, say, NetHack.
Will Twitter Start Charging?
I use linode and have had absolutely no problems (they even upgraded our storage and RAM a while back for free). I have a 360M and a 720M and both scream for what I use them for (mostly catalyst).
No, the musical counterpart would be performing someone else's song and claiming you wrote it.

Plagiarism != copyright infringement.
This is going to be great for those of us who want to use the Android platform to develop synthesizers and other music-processing applications. I for one am going to be checking this out over the weekend and porting some synth code to see what sort of performance I can get .. so far with Java, its been dismal.
256K (zipped) download, says it all.
I came here for topic specific issue - namely, technology and small scale business. All I see, on the other hand, are "this is why this tool suck/rule", "10 things/laws...", "Somebody Someone says..." - and now this, general news. That is what I get on reddit, HN degraded, unfortunately. I'm signing off.
I am pretty sure I am talking about the device as a whole. I don't care for the exact reason that prevents me from running arbitrary software on it, be it hardware, software or even legalware ("you agree not to execute any unapproved software...").

It might even have a supercomputer hidden inside - as long as someone else decides what I run on it, it isn't a fully capable computer.
I don't think the analogy holds very well. Woonerven have a speed limit called "a horse's walk" (less than 20 kph). Obviously such a speed limit is not what Python's about.

Woonerven also contain many speed-decreasing measures like speed bumps, chicanes, etc. There may be no traffic lights, but there certainly are measures to influence driver behavior forcefully.
Thanks everyone for suggestions.

Just for the reference, here is another related topic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=193308
I use this technique as well, an additional benefit is the record of requests from specific individuals: "Hey boss, check out how many times X has emailed me asking to reboot his 'workstation' for him."
I've thought about this too. Basically, once you switched, you'd obsolete a hell of a lot of stuff. For it to make sense, a large portion of the developed world would have to switch at the same time as you too. So unlikely to happen.

At the same time, I'm still trying to figure out why the USA doesn't strike imperial measurement from the books.
It is asinine. I think the multitude of stories about twitter being a "bad news source" are mostly out of frustration after seeing CNN covering tweets rather than doing any real reporting. I think twitter definitely has its place in the news, but as something to supplement the story, not be the source entirely.
Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt; the status quo must be maintained, our holy profit margins must be unstained.

I hate to say it, but Obama is right on about the idea that the current system needs competition to shake the parasites loose. There are a lot of middlemen and a lot of misaligned incentives in our current system that must be squeezed out.

Since the nation seems to be in a Keynesian mood at this point, here is my modest proposal for how to organize medical research for the next twenty years as a public/private partnership on a par with the moon race or the interstate freeway system.

The basic structure is a patent pool with a set of protocols for licensing advances from research shops and licensing assemblies for manufacturing. Define a small set of ideal medical technology goals; a universal medical imager, a universal portable pathology lab, a universal pharmacopia, and a universal medical expert system to tie it all together. Allow anyone to present model assemblies of technology that approach one of the defined goals. Have a fast track approval process for testing assemblies and licensing them for release to manufacturing. Every year, or every three months, pick the top 5 designs in each category and release them to manufacturing with a minimum guaranteed order for any manufacturer taking the product to market within a short time frame. Iterate, until we have a functionally complete autodoc that is as capable as the entire Mayo Clinic is today, and yet so affordable that middle class people can choose to have them in their homes.

Done properly it would be a self-funding effort after the first few years, and it would take health maintenance and medical surveillance out of the hands of the health insurance mafia.
4th he was abused by millions of fans and continues to be abused after his death

On the subject of child abuse (it had to come up at some point) all I will say is he wasnt a child abuser in the sense of pure evil (met some, he was nothing like that :)). More like unable to comprehend right/wrong and emotionally regressed. He needed help and no one gave it to him.
64 would be more useful, and not too big a change.
The most famous living person in the world?

Nah.

Maybe in the past but in recent years before his trial he had slipped out of knowledge. Even after the trial he slipped back into obscurity until recently.

I dont think he can be compared globally to, for example, David Beckham in modern times.
Ahm, that's the size with the offline documentation and all. The library itself is about 5k minified and gzipped, plus 35k or so for Prototype.
Fashions nest- Fashion Beauty Designer
THe only change I see (if the "pirates win" - and disregarding that that is a broad and odd sentence in itself) is lots of companies going out of business, a decline in published music quality and lots and lots of bands struggling to make money (oh and faty cat agents who figured that live bookings are their only revenue stream).

Lose, lose IMO.
I'm not sure where you're quoting from, but that's not really what happened. Sokal wrote the text himself as a parody (http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/li...).
My guess is that it's because you can divide sexagesimal time units into more useful fractions. That, in turn, might have simplified geartrain design in early timepieces.

100 = 2x2x5x5, while 60 = 2x2x5x3. A 100-minute hour would be divisible into twentieths, tenths, fifths, quarters, and halves, while a 60-minute hour would additionally be divisible by thirds, twelfths, and fifteenths.

Other than that, I got nothing. Somebody on time-nuts would likely know.
It confuses me that anyone can believe that liberalism or technological advance are not universally desirable.

You want a quick sampling of various theories? (I should point out that I don't believe everything I've read, if it wasn't totally obvious from my first comment.)

Liberalism is a myth that the West uses when it needs a convenient excuse for a war and/or resource exploitation.

Cultural diversity is groovy. (Sometimes phrased as: cultural diversity, like ecological diversity, is imperative to the physical survival of the human race.) Introduction of "foreign" technology inevitably results in culture loss.

Technological advance sometimes results in taking the old evil things and making us much, much better at them. See: ultrasounds in China, radios in Rwanda, railroads in the United States, civil engineering in Iraq, the cotton gin in the American South, etc etc

On balance, I think most technological progress is a great thing. I might not be quite a booster if I had been kidnapped by a rival tribe to be sold across the ocean into slavery because some American inventor had figured out how to make cotton farming scale. And I don't think I would be that persuaded to change my mind just because a lot of people were finally able to purchase cotton shirts due to the deal.
It was a matter of minutes for me both times I went from a 256 to 512 slice.
Uh ... Except at each point in time, there can be a different best selling album. It's not as if it's now a universal constant, that can never change, is it?

On the other hand, with the concept of "album" feeling slightly old-school, perhaps that makes it less probably that the king is ever dethroned, who knows.
Who's In Charge Of Apple App Store? Anyone?
My prediction is that they will charge for certain search routines and other such tools for corporate clients. ie: selling tweets to advertisers that sell whatever it is you say in your tweet that you need or want. At least that is what I would do.
Lets see. I have 3 slices, 2 of which are publicly accessible.

512 MB:
Apache2 / PHP, serves a dozen websites last time I checked, most notably a forum that has a few thousand hits a day and my blog, which when it gets spiky goes up to X0,000 hits in a day.

256 MB (until recently):
Bingo Card Creator, which is Nginx => 2x Mongrel.

I bumped the 256 up to 512 (a process that took me above 5 minutes and a restart) when I started developing the new version, so that I could fit a staging server on the same box. Currently it has about 6 Rails instances running on it at any given time (2x Mongrels for the live site, 2x for the staging, 2x for DelayedJob or consoles). After I release the new version I'm probably going to put the staging server on another box and reallocate the saved memory to more instances for the production site.
Not DoS but Michael collapses AOL, Google, various parts of web
First pricing for hosted Apple Push Notification Gateway API announced
I dunno, that rang true for me. I have two degrees in math and found most of what I studied easy, but algebraic topology utterly humiliated me -- it was just too abstract for me to feel like I had any grasp on what it was talking about.
Any tiny change when it comes to systems is huge. U.S. teaches but does not rely on the metric system for that reason.
I consider it more a source of hypotheses, especially regarding any topic of potential interest to pop culture.

Disclosure: I actually wait for next NPR news hour to see if anything of real importance (to me) happened. ...less distracting than a chronic monitoring of tweets :/
you can download the pdf version of "why we nap" here if you suscribe :

http://www.sleepwarrior.com/why-we-nap-claudio-stampi-pdf
I can see one little problem when the hardware/operating system of the competition doesn't match the set of features of Apple. After all, many applications for the iphone became famous for using multitouch / the accelerometer and not every competition phone has those.
> Anyone got a solution to this part?

A single, government run, national health service, paid for by taxation?

Works OK for the rest of the world, and I don't quite buy the "US is subsidising the rest of the world's socialised health services" argument in the article. I read that pharmaceutical marketing spending is more than R&D spending (but still need to find a good source).

http://www.google.com/search?&q=pharmaceutical+r%26d+mar...
The article is really badly flawed. It does not even touch the reason why we use Big-O notation in the first place. That is to avoid clutter like constant factors or the basis of logratihms.

If it would than such mistakes as in the example for binary search
"a data set containing 10 items takes one second to complete, a data set containing 100 items takes two seconds, and a data set containing 1000 items will take three seconds."

would not occur.

Also a logarithm does NOT have a "curve that PEAKS [my emphasis] at the beginning and slowly flattens out as the size".
Works OK for the rest of the world isn't a good answer -- the rest of the world doesn't have free speech, and the us constitution which does not provide for the federal government to do anything even remotely close to health care.
Twitter software applications prone to crashes, tests show
>Whether this is a good or a bad thing, I'll leave up to you. But it seems likely that if the pirates win, both the industry _and_ the pirates will disappear...

Pirates will disappear as pirates, they will still be there as music sharers.

The meaning of your post is not very clear to me, i don't know if you mean commercially produced music will disappear.
If that's what you think, it's an incredibly short sighted view, and is not at all likely to happen, even if music sharing is legalized across all countries in the world.
Although, your writing leaves room for interpretation, you may also be speaking about a different economical model, in wich case i agree with you
I know it is not how it is commonly used, but health insurance is supposed to be insurance. So a preexisting condition, already exists... it'd be like purchasing fire insurance after your house burned down -- it does not work.

How about this, remove all regulations relating to the medical industry. Let states step in if they feel there are any problems, remove all tax incentives for employer provided health care. Stop medicaid etc.
That's an important point. The author says that sleeping "is intuitively an evolutionary disadvantage". That's false, the fact that many species do sleep shows that is is an advantage indeed. Otherwise, there would not be these species.
Well, now that we got MJ out of our pants, can we go back to bitching about something being an obvious politics story? "Hi tc!"
How to Eliminate Compulsive Internet Fiddling: Defeating Procrastination