skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
he is talking about doing it yourself.

upgrading ram is extremely easy, you just open up the computer, and stick the ramstick in.
Yeah, but I'm not sure what that has to do with upgrading to 4GB... he isn't telling us to add an additional 4GB to make it 8GB total.

Also, even 8GB of RAM for a laptop in two DIMMs from Newegg or Crucial is $650, so in my opinion 8GB is out of the question for now, official upgrade or not.
This is really cool. One of the most useful search engines I've seen in a long time, not to mention open source.
Maybe they should hide some malware on a Firefox-only site?
I believe the 2GB option on the 13" macbook pro is two 1GB sticks. So you'd have to buy two "chips".
I did extensive research on this thing when I was doing my last start-up. It's a clustering engine, but it is limited in that it is specifically tuned to cluster search results. For example, it returns poor clustering results if you input a set of long text documents; it works much better when its input consists of a query string and a set of titles and short snippets.
I agree with a vast majority of this, except for the qualification of time.

There are many brands of mediocre programmer, some of which would claim a finished product well before the good programmer. But, the code will prove a nigh-unmaintainable disaster that will required all sorts of time later when a new feature is requested or bugs start creeping out.

There are times when a good programmer will take considerably longer than a bad programmer, and might spend time futzing around with different implementations, moving code around, creating various data structures, etc.

Depending on the task, I would argue that can be a good thing. The good programmer is attempting to understand and present a clear conceptual model of the problem and solution in his code; the mediocre programmer might just create a litany of special cases for the cases specified right now just so they can get that particular program behind them.

Although the mediocre programmer might produce code faster, I would argue the good programmer is still 10x more productive, because he has done that much more thinking than the mediocre programmer. Perhaps when you refer to futzing, you mean changing the code just for the sake of another commit to show management, where nothing is learned and nothing is improved.

Also, a good programmer might come back two months from now, with the knowledge he gained from some other project, and make a change to the program that tangibly improves it for the better. The mediocre programmer will have put all that behind them; it is not on their list of projects and requirements, therefore they won't bother, nor will they bother even mention it to anyone.

But, I suspect this sort of comparison of timespans varies with size, and with the difficulty of the problem space.

And yeah, N^2 different answers. :-)
Your MacBook (Pro)? should have 4GB+ of RAM considering the marginal difference in price.
I think Robin Hanson and you are both right: I tend to overestimate the intelligence of random samples in the population (the receptionist), but, in trying to correct for that, I end up underestimating the knowledge/capabilities of at least some of my peers.
I think people are as smart as they need to be. You don't need to be able to summarize tabular data if you work at a fast food shop (e.g. as a waiter).

And it definitely has to do with the circles you hang around in. As a programmer you're more likely to be in a rather smart circle.
What's an example of how average people deflate one's expectations of humanity?
You should also drop in a half terabyte drive.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148...
Something doesn't make sense. $2 million in sales with just 178 monthly visitors?

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/freshjerky.com/?metric=uv
2x2gb laptop DDR3 goes for about $60, so while the language of the original post is not clear, the price is correct.
Watching people who can barely afford to eat play the lottery because they think they might actually win.

Watching people who shouldn't be buying anything on credit judging the qualify of a loan by the monthly payment.

Watching people base their entire lives around a book written by a bunch of ignorant (by modern standards) pre-industrial men, and praying to the sky weekly to make their lives better.
I think that estimating about non-peers is most dangerous. How smart/dumb is the guy who fixes your car? Or the lady who owns a flower shop?

I think it's quite a stretch to assume too much about intelligence simply on the basis of vocation, etc. And the tests that Hanson cites are highly based on reading comprehension (a skill not needed in many vocations)... the seeming logic problems are all simple enough to be understood by a chimp, so if humans miss them it's probably due to some other factor.
I think it might be fairer to say that most people don't realize how many stupid people there are. This drags the average down, of course, but most of them aren't relevant to me. Hanging out with intelligent people leads me to believe that people are intelligent, which is a) wrong and b) totally fine. Because it holds true for those people with whom I interact, my mistaken assumption is perfectly safe, and on the whole can lead me to make more accurate judgments in most cases.
I just read his biography.

Basically, he tried stopping taking amphetamines, and was okay, but couldn't do any math without them. He was dependent on them.
In that case, I need to make a purchase. :)
No, you should put in a SSD. The performance is awesome; put your big files on a server.
I have a dream that someday JS will be the only language on the server and the client.

I hope Google implements Server JS in AppEngine next to Python and Java to give it the push it needs to completely take over the world.

No, I haven't tested any server JS flavor yet, I hope they are as easy as the client version.

<b><% i=2; print ['sucks','dunno','roolz'][i]; %></b>

lovely!
Or depending on your priorities, get a smaller 7200RPM drive for the same price. Faster seek and transfer times make it feel more responsive, at the cost of reduced battery life.
instead of taking stuff to get temporarily smarter how about NOT taking stuff that is known to cause you damage in the long term ?

So, no drinking, no smoking, no other drugs, just healthy food and a good rhythm in your life. And preferably a significant other of the same mindset. You'll be surprized by how well you can perform without any 'additives' when you're well rested and healthy.
Flow is a very interesting concept, but I don't think the author gets it right when he says he doesn't have it at all.
2GB chips already ? Man, Moore's law never ceases to surprise me.
Why are air crash investigations so newsworthy?

People should know by now that air travel is much safer than car travel, so this won't affect their safety in any tangible way.

Perhaps this is more about a fascination with flight? Most people would like to learn to fly if they could?
Embedding Clojure
You forgot to mention bandwidth as part of the fundamental datacenter cost structure. Some datacenter operators are charging up to $200/month to drop dark fiber into your cage/rack/cabinet. It is then up to you to negotiate a primary and secondary connectivity provider. At non-bulk rates (meaning around 10-100Mbps) this can be up to $50/megabit. Bulk rates look better - but only because if you're pushing that much traffic, you must be rich.

This is part of the reason cloud computing should be taken with a grain of salt. There can be fantastic economies of scale when applied correctly (say, on a properly built CDN solution) - but be wary whenever "cheap" and "computing" are mentioned in the same sentence. Someone has to be paying for all of that power, space, and bandwidth.
3 generations. My paternal grand-grandparents came to Turkey from Razgrad,Bulgaria and my maternal grand-grandparents came from Thessalonica.
Apple considers RAM user serviceable, so upgrading to 4GB wont void your Apple care. Just take the time for a week to monitor your RAM usage. You'll probably notice that you max out 2GBs a lot. If you do any kind of virtualization, you definitely need 4GB so you can allocate a decent amount of RAM to your virtual machine. If you aren't doing any virtualization... why not?

A previous poster is correct that you do need to buy two sticks. Also, I would hold on to your Apple memory just in case. Even though installing your own RAM is ok, you'll want to pop back in the Apple memory before you send it in for service. There's no guarantee they wont swap out your RAM for new Apple RAM while they are trying to diagnose the problem.
Highly doubt this, unless the XBox comes with a keyboard and a mouse. Some genres simply can't be played with controllers.
While it may be cheap, it still amazes me that software can somehow manage to use all that memory.
A common mistake among smart people (and everyone else) is to overestimate people on some things and underestimate people on others.

I'm not sure what the article is saying beyond this.
They wouldn't. And if they lied to you, that's fraud, and you can press charges against them.

If they don't lie, but they don't tell you good things about their platform (you'll have to judge the amount of 'spin' on your own)...then move on. It's really that simple.

From your example, you could contact Facebook and ask for some stats about their application platform (telling them that your company is thinking about building an app for that platform). If they refuse to give you stats, either ask to be transferred to a 'higher-up', or tell them you're sorry you couldn't work together and get off the phone. If they do give you stats, you need to judge for yourself if building your app will be profitable on that platform.

There is absolutely no company (or person) in the world that is going to be able to quote you a hard number on the amount of profit your app is going to make before it exists.
Why are lectures more detailed than texts?
It's called Risk Aversion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_aversion
Seriously? This is front-page material now, telling other users how they should have their computers configured?

Also, don't some of the older MBP's have a 3GB max?
This research is one of the most fascinating things I've come across in a while: The idea that, regardless of whether there is such a thing as an innate trait of "intelligence", your belief that you are either good at something or not will hurt your performance.
I think it's more about a fascination with a puzzle that is very difficult to solve. 200+ don't normally die at once without any explanation as to root cause.
Textbooks are usually placed on reserve, which has a 2 hour time limit. You take the book, get the work you done you need to do, and return it right there. There should be a waiting list as well, so you can time your workload appropriately. With a little advanced planning, you should be able to work the system.
> No sense in supporting a browser that will become irrelevant in 6 months.

and not a browser like another, one that will require radical changes to your site code in order to barely work.
Study Deconstructs Canadian Copyright Lobby Deception
States try to get extra sales tax. Amazon rescinds affiliate program in e.g., Rhode Island. Rhode Island ex-affiliates of Amazon suffer and lose revenue in addition to that they previously gained from Amazon, decreasing the overall tax the state previously received.
Yeah, the older (pre-LED backlighting) MBPs have a limit of 3 gigs. You can give it a 4th gig, but the system just ignores it.
Yes, they do have a 3GB limit. You can put 4GB in the system, but OS X Leopard will only use the first 3GB. Speaking from experience with a circa late-2007 MBP Core2 Duo.
Uninformed musing follows:

Sales are shifting to the internet, and taxes are failing to follow...

Will the internet motivate states to shift the burden once carried by regressive sales tax structures to progressive income tax structures?
"vendor lock-in"?
Computational Drug Discovery
Moved from Israel.
You have to keep your personal bar set high, though not letting that demoralize you, and not self-congratulate yourself too much when comparing yourself to the "average" person. Just being in the top 2% or 0.2% of IQ, does not guarantee success (sometimes quite the opposite!).
Isn't that 11 generations?
I really need to get a new computer, a 2006 MBP only has a 2GB limit! And I'm currently using 95% of it...as well as a 1.76GB swap.

Though getting a new computer (Mac) is easier said than done, I definitely can't afford one anytime soon. Putting one on a credit card seems so tempting... :D
Actually...it's a little different. In the stock market, that gain you're talking about comes from investing in the 'market portfolio', which is equivalent to investing money in every single stock on the market. That would be like betting on all of the numbers on the board at once -- because of the payouts on individual numbers, 35 to 1, you'll eventually still go broke.

You could easily make back-to-back-to-back-... poor decisions and end up broke, because 'broke' is an absorbing state and most math models assume you're stuck at 0 once you hit 0.

See "Martingale" at wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_%28betting_system%29
I remember reading this when it first came out in 2007, and it's stuck with me ever since. When my boys (now 5yo and 3yo) do accomplish something super cool (riding a bike, catching a ball, learning to swim), I remind them that it was lots of practice that got them there. Praising effort instead of intelligence feels right, but I really, really hope this doesn't turn out to be some quack parental theory that leaves them in rehab for the rest of their lives.
So if a mysterious train accident kills the same number, people would be just as interested in that puzzle?
Depends on what you're doing. IE6 causes more JS problems than HTML/CSS.
Austin Heap to release Haystack for Iran
I get the idea. However, I would be severely challenged to actually measure any of that. To me that means that "only a good programmer knows another good programmer", which is a hard situation to start from when you are trying to reward good programmers.
The software community has rejected the best research in compilers/languages
Bernstein's New Mission Is To Cryptographically Protect Every Internet Packet
You can definitely get some windows in full screen. There is a program called megazoomer which will allow you get fullscreen for a lot of OSX apps. I use it all the time to have a full screen terminal. I also use full screen in Mac Vim which I believe is a built in feature, not added in by megazoomer.

Edit: typo
> Simply throw your waste into a bin in your back-yard

Our apartment-living friends don't have back-yards.

As a youth, I tried the above strategy to deal with yard-waste, which is bio-degradable. (I did it to get out of some disposal tasks.)

It doesn't actually work.

Folks who have actually spent time in the wild will know why, or at least be able to point out how it fails. (Think trees and the like.)
Welcome to Sealand. Now bugger off (2000)
For those that don't know, Daniel Bernstein is the author of qmail, which is probably one of the most secure pieces of software ever written (and a mail transfer agent at that!). Around its initial release, Bernstein offered $500 dollars for a verifiable security hole in the software. He has recently raised it to $1000, and it's hasn't been claimed yet.

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein

Homepage: http://cr.yp.to/
His son is not a gamer.
I think it's about the primal fascination with ways you might be killed. I think it this is a primal response to a category of information and the news essentially exploits it. I think some part of the brain perks up at "new danger" and is fascinated/captivated by it.

I think the investigation stories are supported by interest in the original crash. I think the same thing about the "X attacks and or kills person" stories and the rest of the "person killed in X odd circumstance stories".
Yeah but that is DDR3. The current price at crucial for 2 sticks of laptop DDR3 is $900. The current price of 4GB of the same memory is $64. Huge difference for the high density sticks. Though if you are running ddr2 you can get 8GB for 400.
I don't think it ever really was. Seattle, Toronto, Montreal maybe. But Ottawa ?
Being on Compuserve with a blazing fast 140 baud modem was expensive.
My buddy being busted for plagiarizing a paper from Compuserve in 1986..Priceless.
But you would always have up to 3 months worth of garbage in your backyard. And what of human waste, or any waste that is unattractive stinky, or takes up too much room? There will always be a need for infrastructure. The trick is to automate the infrastructure so that humans can be employed on more productive work.

This is why I support automated checkout stands at stores. By automating jobs away, there are more people capable of doing things that we can't automate yet, and more money available to pay them. Example: a store installs the automated checkout stands and reduces the number of cashiers from 4 to 1. Assuming the automated stands cost $0 to maintain (not true, but the cost I believe is trending that way) then the store can have those 3 displaced employees work the store helping customers find what they need. There are now 3 extra people working at a zero net cost to the company.
Being intelligent as a part of one's identity is not a good idea. I know this from my own experience--I skipped second grade, and was never comfortable in school.

This praise business to me is a subset of what I have come to believe is "raising the kid by remote control". For example, yelling from the other room "I can tell you aren't doing your homework". Far better to sit with the children during homework time, tv off, be available to them, answer any question they want to ask. This is all about them learning to be the pilot in their own life.

This is as important for the father to do as the mother. And yes, this takes time.
> From anti-corruption point of view, this is really going to be helpful. Any government aid etc can be tracked using the UID (i.e. to see who the beneficiary was). Currently a majority of such funds are eaten up by the politicians and bureaucrats. So perhaps that will get reduced.

"perhaps"? That's your plan? Hope is not a plan.

Unless Indian pols,grifters, and the like are significantly less competent than American ones, an ID card won't have any effect on corruption, waste of govt aid, and so on.
Nethack runs pretty well in the browser too.

http://www.big-ape.net/nethax/
> The government will not use these cards to track you or anything.

While there are some instances where a govt has resisted the temptation to use technology to its fullest for its own interests, the majority are limited only by their competence.

It will be used for tracking because it can be used for tracking and that's one thing that govt folk like to do.
It seems that the major safety lessons are learned only after a crash.
I understand his point, of course. What I am objecting to is that 'no, true happiness is beyond price' does not usefully address the question asked.

The point I'm trying to make is that someone like White (who is obviously respected by someone who asks him such a question) would do better to drop the role of philosopher king and instead give the questioner the psychological push back out into the world they are so obviously asking for.

I have some first-hand experience of White's situation: what I learned was that hand-waving answers like this are not actionable. Someone who has enough decision power to be rewarded with very large amounts of money wants concrete answers and is suspicious of equivocation.
> Right now I have a ration card which is particularly necessary to get a cooking gas connection

Let me suggest that your problem is not the lack of an ID card but rationing.
No mayday call? How weird...
I don't think you know very much about London's history. It's been a multi-cultural melting pot since about the 12th century, and people have been complaining about it losing its quintessentially English character for nearly as long.

(Read Peter Ackroyd's "London: The Biography" for a good overview)
What about a website that only vomits on IE users?
omg squeel! these are awesome.

> "All the work you see in pyvcs and django-vcs took 48 hours to complete, with both of us working evenings and a little bit during the day on these projects."

48 man-hours total or each? either way, not bad.

bwt, actual link, which for some reason wasn't even a link in the blog post:
http://github.com/alex/django-vcs/tree/master
http://github.com/alex/pyvcs/tree/master
Paper Made Website Designs
Creativity comes in many shapes, sizes and colors – and it just so happens that today we’re looking at some of the amazing work people do with paper textures in web design. From their portfolio websites, to blogs and resource websites, this post is going to showcase 35 of the best paper made website designs.
From my own experience, I can say 'don't feel bad, this is character-forming and will give you insights you can use later'. At the same time, unpaid internships are a scam.
i dont know how they calc the stats - IE is already dying or may be dead .... this is because there will be mix-up(layers) on the top of IE, for example it is possible that all PCs that came with IE6 pre-installed cant be taken in to the account as most of them might be using other browsers. If you calc the pure downloads then IE is dead.... users have multiple browsers but they rarely use IE - it is sad that MS killed netscape to make it sort of mandatory to have IE, but still they couldn't sustain the lead - when people bypass your product and specially go on the net to download your competitor's product that means you're nearly DEAD. and BTW who is the competitor? the same guy whose product you killed years a go!!!! GOOD REVENGE !!!! NICE JOB, Eric Schmidt !!!
FTA: So I would argue further that the “innovation probability” of a high I.Q. individual whose family has been in the U.S. for many generations is less than that of someone who’s new to our nation and has a comparable intellect, but far more desire.

It sounds to me like the author stating an obvious, and often repeated, point. Perseverance/hard work is a much better predictor of success than raw intelligence. Immigrants, for a couple of generations at least, have the work ethic. Based on other posts to this discussion, this fizzles our by the fourth generation, so you're stuck on a tread mill of bringing in new hard workers to fuel the engine. Is that really the only way to handle this? It doesn't seem to address the root cause.

As far as the requirement to post a job to prove no American worker could fill the role, I think it's common knowledge that this aspect of the system is heavily (and easily) gamed.

The H1-B program does need to be reworked. It seems like the H1-B visa should provide more freedom to the individual to innovate--start their own company and not be so beholden to their sponsor. I am making an assumption that the hard working, hungry H1-B holder is more likely to start their own company. This is where innovation creation thrives and, therefore, where there is great potential value in H1-B visa reform.
Not at all : pilots are so busy trying to get the aircraft under control they may not have had time to issue a Mayday. We don't know the time period between loss of control and impact, we don't know much at all.
Amphetamines don't cause brain damage in either case -- look at the military use, from World War II on.
Humans can develop echolocation like dolphins and bats
It's like the boy who cried wolf. I've seen so many of these articles, it hardly means anything to me anymore.
People should know by now that air travel is much safer than car travel

It depends how you drive and how you fly.