skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Barrett argues that we should also use this crisis to: 1) require every state to benchmark their education standards against the best in the world, not the state next door"

This would help a lot. I find I can reliably challenge most advanced math students in the United States just by serving them problems from grade-level standard curriculum textbooks from Singapore. For my best students, I have to turn to problems adapted from "key" school textbooks from China.
I took the 'lines of code' thing as satirizing management.
No, that's Google that has a search monopoly at the moment, and seriously needs a challenger.
I don't see He3 being the next oil. By the time we are able to colonize the solar system like that, fusion power may very well seem like an interesting antique.
This news report badly needs checking by Peter Norvig's helpful checklist of what can go wrong in interpreting scientific research findings.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
Oh God, I'm at best a 17 kyu and haven't played in a while either. Well, let's change that.
SarbOx has something to do with starting up small businesses? I'm glad to see someone's (Craig Barrett, in this case) parochial interests being so poorly disguised as a prescription for American economic woes.
> I find I can reliably challenge most advanced math students in the United States just by serving them problems from grade-level standard curriculum textbooks from Singapore.

If it's not asking too much, can you give some examples? Are these contest-style problems, or computational problems?
>Let's hope they never get beyond 2.

Why?
Are you using the Japanese or Chinese scoring system?

EDIT: Also, I'd like a way to send a message to the person I'm requesting to play with. I checked to see what the message was like and for someone who doesn't know what it's about might be confused, even consider it spam.
Why does every arm chair discussion of evolutionary psychology veer to social hierarchy? The evidence is quite convincing that pre-agricultural humans were not so much hierarchical.

Yes, and also human beings were not as constrained geographically, but could leave one hunting band to wander off to an area previously unoccupied by human beings for most of human evolutionary history.
I'm a moderator at SEOBook, which is not SEOMoz.

The aside about Internet Marketing -- if you ever look up the terms Internet Marketing or Make Money Online you'll find a wealth of squeeze pages with long copy attempting to convince you that $79.95 or $500 is all you need to make millions on Google. These places are little better than scams targeting the desperate and ignorant. So when I give advice like "Hey, don't sweat the small stuff, speculative spending on SEO is smart even if it doesn't immediately result in sales this time" I wanted to add a disclaimer "But don't get suckered, because exactly those words get repeated by people looking for suckers".
The first solid-state quantum processor
Spoken like a low karma user. /grump
[video] Richard Phillips Feynman - The Last Journey Of A Genius
Having thought about this article for a day, I'm wondering what the view of the cited scientist is of elevated human mood states, those that correspond to pathological states of hypomania and mania. One of the tricky issues in treating depression is to avoid inducing mania.
VC's Mathematical Challenge
This is a great idea!

To explain the history a bit: I originally wrote this site so that I could play with my friends, whose email addresses (and twitter accounts) I know. That's why there are no accounts on the site itself right now. (And as I've mentioned elsewhere, accounts starts to look more like other services I know, so I'm less excited about going that direction.)

The site has enough traffic these days that I could imagine a match-making service that didn't require an account; you just get in line and give a rough sense of how good you are, and when a match is found both players get an email (or twitter) and away they go.

Does this sound like a good feature? I think it would be easy to add!
Perhaps, but is Microsoft, a convicted monopoly abuser, the right challenger? Microsoft has already a powerful grip on the whole industry (why do you think multi-processors and 64-bit computing took that long to catch?) for us to feel too comfortable with them gaining more power.

Google has a monopoly on search, but Microsoft has a couple at least as valuable as Google's.
Characterizations of Gould as a Marxist biologist are roughly as ad hominem as that article accuses Gould of being.

As I have asked people to do before,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=555734

I'd love to hear from people who disagree with [insert name of controversial figure here] just why they disagree with that person, not just their party label for that person. It is perfectly possible for a person who has wrong ideas to have other, correct ideas.
Tarn Adams, the developer of Dwarf Fortress ( bay12games.com/dwarves/ ), is working on the game fulltime. He gets enough in donations to get by for the most part, but even living cheaply he still ended up spending around $2000 more than he took in last year.
Ask HN: You lose your job, with 2 months of savings. What do you do?
This is one of those "if the worst happens" hypotheticals, though I'd imagine it has happened to some of us. You lose your job, get no severance, and have 2 months of savings. Let's also assume that no one in your network can help you out.

Where do you send your first 10 resumes, and what roles do you ask for/expect? (Also state where you are in your career.) Do you take roles below your ability (and the attendant career risks) or hold out for something interesting?
Looks great for an alpha.

Some suggestions:

1. Improve the interface and make it clear how to use the app. The language isn't clear to me, such as the difference between a 'tracker' and an 'area'.

2. Make it so I can enter a days worth of data very easily. One single form for all my trackers.

3. Make it so I can compete/compare myself with other users. Maybe just friends that I select or maybe any other users. You could add user ranking charts, graphs, etc.
it's a biochemical imbalance, not a psychological reaction

To call depression a "chemical imbalance" is what physicians, compassionately, tell their patients to encourage them to take their medicines. But the doses of lithium, the best evidenced drug for depression, that are in the therapeutic range are many times higher than the natural level of lithium that occurs in any healthy untreated human being, and perilously close to the toxic dose.

The current view is that depression strikes people who have a genetic vulnerability (that much would be either biochemical or structural, perhaps a different vulnerability in different patients) who also experience certain kinds of environmental stress (perhaps not always the same kinds of stress for all patients with the same underlying vulnerability). That medicines relieve depression--as some plainly do for many patients--doesn't prove that what the patients had beforehand was a lack of those medicines, or even exactly an imbalance of the brain chemicals most influenced by those medicines. The most effective treatment for depression generally appears to be a both-and of prescribed medications and evidence-based cognitive therapy.
Now that it is open source, I'm aware of at least two efforts that will provide tools to help with scoring once the game is finished. Currently scoring is up to the players after the game is done.

As for the message: interesting. It says, effectively: "Someone started a game of Go with you; click here to play." Is that really so confusing? What would you say instead? Do you want control of subject, message contents, both?
This reminded me of a recent thread on another one of his blog entries. Seems somewhat relevant (not wasting time, and what to do if he were to not say no to you):

Preparing For A First Meeting With Me

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=615464
Google Tries To Persuade Federal Regulators That It Is Vulnerable To Competition
I'm a sucker for cool typography.
Less is more: Stalkr
Teens don't twitter because they are in constant contact with other teens, especially through texting.
These Singapore Primary Mathematics series placement tests

http://www.singaporemath.com/Placement_Test_s/86.htm

give some idea of problem types at different grade levels. They are not exhaustive, of course, as the distributor of the books doesn't want to give away all their content for free online.
"That essentially no papers do so illustrates the problem with such a strategy: as long as one reasonable-substitute competitor allows inlinking, bloggers/aggregators don't care, and the anti-inlinking paper has only hurt itself."

Or they really have no understanding of the technology. Every so often some site complains about "deep linking" (the misnomer itself indicate their level of cluelessness). They seek out legal sanctions when some simple site coding would fix the problem faster and cheaper.
Haha!

As it happens, I watched Helvetica a few days before I built this site. I had in mind the typographer who was viscerally angry about Helvetica's popularity; he described Helvetica as "textual dung." I decided I disagree!
Let's not assume that no one in your network can help you out. This is a worst case scenario that requires the help of those close to you - family, extended family and close friends if necessary. The approach you take is also going to be highly relative to your experience level. Obviously if you have a ton of experience and there is going to be a bidding war for your talent, then there's not much to worry about. Otherwise a job search that takes six months or more to find a job that is suited to your goals is not unheard of and, indeed, I would say is actually the norm. Some people will say a good engineer should be able to get a job in two weeks regardless of the economy. And I've heard of that. But don't count on it. Instead make preparations for an extended job search and use undesirable work - office temp work, etc - to build up some savings so you can get out of your relatives' hair.
New Treatment for Cancer Shows Promise in Testing
Nature abstract:
http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nbt.1547...
That article is interesting, but his headshot creeps me out while I read it.
It's just that the message sounds a lot like that website that mass-emailed people with the message "someone wants to share pictures with you, click here to see them" or something like that.

A simple textbox containing some optional text to be sent along with the email to provide some context would be nice.

As for the message itself, maybe adding some of the game details such as board size and each player's colors? For someone who knows Go this would make the email seem more legitimate. And/Or you could add a "What's this" at the email's bottom that's only added to game invites that briefly described your app.

Damnit, I know Python, time to check out the code and stop writing lists of stuff you should do!
If you accept the popular premise that man is a pleistocene animal designed to live in hunter-gatherer bands then you don't really have to wonder much about the innate social tendencies of humans. We have dozens of detailed ethnographies of hunter-gatherer bands. They are socially flat. Some people are highly esteemed, but nobody has any sort of disproportionate power.

> the ape social structure left in our genomes

The apes and the gibbons vary dramatically so it seems a bit silly to expect useful common denominator social behaviors applicable to humans. Bonobos and gorillas and orangutans are all very different. And none of the apes are at all comparable to humans in how they make their living. None of them are primarily team hunters.
Well, I didn't say "behind what exists on the web today." Blackboard has the dominant share of the commercial e-learning industry, and Moodle is popular as an open-source alternative.

Both of them are expensive to operate and out of range for many smaller schools.

And both of changed little in the past 5 years to enhance collaboration and sharing among students.
Somebody might find this useful: http://github.com/burke/cljtemplate -- a barebones template project for clojure, using ant, with compilation for java and clojure source.
As a foreigner in the US about to finish a MS degree in IT and travel back home, I find Friedman's words apropos. The limitation on H-1B visas does more harm than good. I've met many young, intelligent knowledge workers about to get their advanced degrees who, unfortunately, find themselves unable to stay in this country because of visa restrictions. Sending those brains back home is a mistake. A new approach is required if the US veritably wants to foster innovation and entrepreneurship.
I remember when David Siegel's Creating Killer Web Sites came out. It was the bomb. Full of lots of ideas and techniques for creating busy, complex, taken-straight-from-print Web pages that take forever to load.

Of course, I didn't quite see it that way as the time; I was thrilled to use the single-pixel hack and get my table spacing Just Right for the sliced and diced images.

Looking at these new site, I feel as if the designers have been given a copy of that book and fallen in love.

http://www.webdevelopersjournal.com/books/killer.html
I think that study ( and the others mentioned in post ) need to consider carefully their control (comparison) groups.

Yes, posting anything online is an activity that draws more introverts than extroverts. Hence: more people who are less practiced in their social skills, perhaps partly because they enjoy less practicing/developing social skills.

Similar findings (not necessarily the "grumpiness" factor") might be discovered comparing fiction writers and night club entertainers.

As for the scoring lower on "openness" - I'd have to see how that was operationalized. Were they "less open" to unsubstantiatable claims of UFO sightings, etc., and insisting on documentation?

One man's closed-mindedness is another's insistence on scientific method.

--recovering research psychologist
Thanks, those are great.

"A bell rings every 25 minutes while another bell rings every 40 minutes. Suppose
they rang together at 6 a.m., when will they ring together again?"

Very cute. Do you find that students prefer such problems to the normal "plug and chug" type? (Also, when you say "advanced math students", what age are you talking about?)
So I have a 23" widescreen monitor that can do 1080p. What if I had a 30" monitor? Would Hulu want to block it then? What if I have a 50" monitor? When does it turn into a "TV" that Hulu would block?

When you put a couch in front of the monitor. Then it becomes "TV"

Try writing the Terms of Service for that. "You are authorized to watch Hulu on a computer monitor up to 30" in size. You are not authorized to watch hulu while sitting on a couch, or in the presence of more than 2 people, or with munchies."
with people routinely replaced on a 5-year or so basis to mitigate bureaucracy formation

Is that how DARPA works?
Surreal Appeal of the Falkirk Wheel
First off, I love it that you made a game without flash. way to stick it to the man. I also have some javascript games on my site http://kidbuilder.net

To improve it: Why not add instructions? I'm not sure how to play. Also, The main page is just a little taller than the screen on my hp laptop. I had to scroll down to find the play link.
"the aggregator or blogger earned enough money to survive (since what he did is not that expensive), while the news outlet who did the reporting didn't earn enough to operate."

Great point! This is why I'm worried about a future without NYTimes and other traditional news outlets. The most dangerous possibility is that there won't be any economic incentive left to do the original investigative reporting. But maybe we don't need any economic incentive anyway, and we'll get plenty of free news from the twitter-ers, casual bloggers, cellphone video uploaders and other common folk.
Drat! I tried to be careful about the size of the main page so that you'd never have to scroll. What browser, and what screen resolution do you have? I will correct for it.

I definitely intend to add instructions to the site soon. I also want to add full-on interactive tutorials so that new players can learn the game. But... time! :-)
Haha, awesome. I think this would be a great set of changes!

Cheers.
Again, on the contrary, Hulu themselves offer a "lean back" (their words, not mine) experience through the Hulu Desktop application.
My answer to your assertions is yes and no. Majoring in Math/Computer Science will definitely be an asset if you want to create the next Matlab or Mathematica. However, if your goal is write the ultimate "For Dummies" book, your technical background will probably work against you if you are unable to dumb yourself down, so to speak.

Having majored in both Mathematics and Computer Science, I can honestly say it has been invaluable for my career and I my current entrepreneur endeavors.

The most important thing that you'll have to learn is, if you want to be successful, you'll have understand those around you. Having a Math/CS education is not the issue. Not having the personal skills to recognize deficiencies in yourself and others is what is going to hurt you.
>You're spreading pop-science FUD designed to create the exact misconceptions you are spreading.

I don't think you looked at a single one of the links I posted. You are very caught up in what Zubrin says, but you are not looking at what anyone else says. So how do you know he's right, and they are wrong?
They are currently in the #2 in the four step Gandhi scale

The famous "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" is not an authentic Gandhi quote. That is, no one has ever found any evidence that Gandhi said it. Personally, I think it's a great line, but too modern -- too sound-bitey -- to have come from Gandhi (though he was certainly capable of wit, e.g. http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/will/CPP/gandhi.html).

It's common for great lines to get falsely attributed to great persons: it increases their chance of being repeated. One might call them "cuckoo quotes" since, like eggs planted in other birds' nests, they are memes planted in other people's reputations.

Edit: I love the internet. It turns out the one-liner is a paraphrase of a speech made to a clothing workers' union (presumably not by Gandhi) in 1914:

First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you. And that, is what is going to happen to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=I-0UAAAAIAAJ&q=%22fir...
Sarychev Peak Eruption, Kuril Islands (images from space)
They are self-contained but not self-sustaining.

The ISS is also self-contained.
What an amazing device. I can't see any practical justification for it, but it is a cool piece of art.
Ramanujam(indian mathematician with no formal training) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan - for an insight into how his thought process may be. Without all that formal training, how did he treat maths?

Kathy Sierra -In college, there is nothing motivating than talks about "being passionate" and "You can do it!" - talks. Kathy Sierra knows the hacks of the brain (i think).

Someone who talks about HOW they hacked their way rather than someone who presents their entire hardwork in one sentence. [for context, Adam Savage talking about creating a dodo skeleton, http://fora.tv/2008/12/12/MythBusters_Co-Host_Adam_Savage_on...]
Just signed up and started playing around with it (although I agree with snitko, there needs to be something pre-signup to tell you what it is). When I went to log activity, it said "Work done", with a '0' in the field. This doesn't tell you what you're measuring, which I believe is a problem. For instance, is this lines of code? Is it the number of goals I met? Can I type in what I did and have it log that?

Needs more user direction, but I like the idea and I'll certainly keep an eye on it.

Edit: Also, OpenID support would be nice, but is not a dealbreaker by any means. Nice work so far, for sure.
Echo, the girl profiled in the post, sends and receives 14,000 messages a month. 29 messages per waking hour. My fingers would be worn down to nubbins.
Evolution has a long history and vestigial adaptations don't instantly disappear if they are part of complex systems. Rat brains also use dopamine and there seems to be a link between dopamine and depression so it's roots might be vary ancient.

Looking modern males at the average American high school, biker gang, or hunting party and you will notice social stratification. Humans don't do the Alpha with harem, but young men often fight for levels of dominance. In scripted environments they might fight over academic prowess but simple fist fighting is not that uncommon. And when males fight you get into some basic game theory as to how much energy to expend and damage to risk.

If the systems that cause depression where useful thought human history then removing the possibility of depression may have had serious costs.

PS: Just because the human brain works extremely well does not mean it's elegant.

Edit: Modern hunter gathers have just as much history as we do. Extrapolating how humans lived 500,000 years ago from what we have seen modern bands do is a mistake.
You sure about LG and Lenovo?
MagicJack revenue more than $100 million/year
I agree, "Adopt, Adopt, Adtop" is much more important. Michael Schrage has made this point many times: "innovation is not what inventors develop, it's what customers adopt." It would be more useful for Friedman to encourage experimentation by business, especially to look at practices in adjacent industries that could be incorporated into their own business.
Thank you. I was/I am.
From the wikipedia entry on DARPA:

Although individual projects typically last three to five years, major technological challenges may be addressed over longer time periods, ensuring patient investment on a series of focused steps and keeping teams together for ongoing collaboration. Continued funding for DARPA projects is based on passing specific milestones, sometimes called “go/no-go’s.

From the DARPA website:

To maintain an entrepreneurial atmosphere and the flow of new ideas, DARPA hires Program Managers for only four to six years because the best way to foster new ideas is to bring in new people with fresh outlooks. New people also ensure that DARPA has very few institutional interests beyond innovation, because new Program Managers are willing to redirect the work of their predecessors – and even undo it, if necessary.
Alles klar, Herr Kommissar. Danke. :).
Hey. What happened to good old fashioned "make something people want" - the tribe will build itself, as long as you're solving someone's problem! :)
There were no humans 500,000 years ago. Fully modern humans are more like 60,000 years old. And truly cognitively modern humans are more recent than that.

> Looking modern males at the average American high school, biker gang, or hunting party

Well, I say you watch too many B movies. Struggling for social dominance in a hunting party? Really? Nobody fought for "dominance" at any social institution I've been involved with. However, people do all kinds of weird things, much like zoo animals, when caged in unnatural environments like public schools, housing projects, corporate cube farms, and prisons.
I really wish people would stop naming their software 'Alice.' This is at least the third one I've seen.

On the other hand, it sounds effective at getting people interested in programming.
NASA - JPL Solar System Simulator
Amazon Taps its Inner Apple
Tech gets obsolete a lot faster than physics. The energy of fusion is physics, not tech.
Translators Wanted at LinkedIn. The Pay? $0 an Hour.