skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Stupid compared to what?

There are functionally illiterate people who make millions of dollars per year. And there are people with sky-high IQs that collect subway cards and remain jobless.

When you start throwing around words like "stupid" or "smart", you have to provide some kind of context. For instance, I have a high ability to learn languages. Yet I only know English and a smattering of French. To somebody who speaks seven languages, I'm dumb. But to me, I just never developed that talent. Whereas to me, the guy who knows seven languages and can't create a web page is stupid (perhaps), etc.

Lots of people don't know or can't do things that I can do. Likewise, I don't know and can't do a lot of things other people can. If I were to dwell on this disparity, it would say a lot more about my ego than the human population.
dono. I've met more than a few smart people working in the service industry. (I've hired a few, too, with good results.)

Personally, when I hire someone, I rate hobby experience as more desirable than paid experience. I can give you paid experience. At least for SysAdmins, I can train you in all the gotchas of production. But I can't make you like it.
Like that unwanted .NET plug-in for Windows users?
Then give the children a chance to develop themselves further; more advanced tasks, other variations of the same task, ask them to explain to you how they think when they solve the task, give them something completely different to spend 20 minutes learning/doing, etc.
If most of the train ends up either floating in the ocean or a couple miles under the surface, you would, at least, have a very interesting trainwreck.
YUI's graded browser support chart dropped support for IE6 under Windows 2000 this month:

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/

But IE6 under Windows XP continues to cling on, and it isn't in their forecast for the next quarter:

http://yuiblog.com/blog/2009/07/02/gbs-update-20090702/

Which means Yahoo, at least, expects IE6 to still be relevant in 6 months.
So let them finish their homework in 10 minutes, and then find something that will take the child more than 10 minutes to do. And praise them for working on that. If praising the 10-minute homework effort is ridiculous, then don't do it. Raise the bar. There's got to be something in the whole field of mathematics that would take the kid more than 10 minutes. (General disclaimers apply, I'm sure there are limits to how high you can raise the bar before the kid goes homicidal on you.)
Given that Rhino runs on top of the JVM, ServerJS is already available on AppEngine. Take a look here: http://dev.helma.org/ng/Running+Rhino+and+Helma+NG+on+Google...
The site itself includes a link at the bottom to their own extremetracking.com stats page, driven by the page insert:

http://extremetracking.com/open;unique?login=freshjer

It reports 440 visitors for the April period Compete reports 178. (As Compete notes, "Small Sample - Datapoints are estimates".)

Eyeballing it as about 400 unique visitors a month, so maybe 4800/year (with some double-counting), $2 million / 440 = ~$420/visitor, which still seems like a lot. Perhaps they do a lot of de facto wholesaling -- previous month visitors and word-of-mouth customers now buy in bulk each month, for resale, without necessarily going through the web page. And maybe they had a nice jerky business under another name even before opening 'freshjerky.com'.
You're completely misunderstanding my point: A little bit beyond subsistence, my money goes towards frivolous expenditures that have a significantly diminishing ROI in terms of happiness.

I'm not running a business here. I'm just a dude. I don't have profits, I don't have shareholders, I can't issue dividends; maximizing my assets or cash on hand isn't going to make me feel a whole lot better. SO, if I am given more money, it isn't going to actually DO a whole lot for me, personally.

Also, let me rephrase what I was saying about being bad about spending money: I'm not bad about managing it. I save much of my disposable income. I don't buy more than I earn. I don't have any credit problems. But when I do spend money beyond the basic necessities, it is nearly inevitably on things that aren't bettering me or the people around me. I don't make the world a better place when I dispose of my income. And if I had more money to just SPEND, I wouldn't actually be any happier for it.
I think lectures are better/detailed due to feedback from the audience. The lecturer can guess when to go fast and when to go slow(and explain more) by gauging the audience. In some cases the author of a book can guess what his audience can think and provide explanations in advance. But thinking what your reader might think is hard. I feel in the case of the author of the article it was just an accident that he is very similar to the audience that was present during the video lecture.
At Yahoo our "browser share" stats mean "unique visitors using this browser". A certain amount of effort goes into de-duplicating users to get the "unique" score, but there's a pretty big margin of error.

Page views are not taken into account, and downloads/installs are absolutely not considered (because nobody has reliable numbers on those anyway, not even the browser makers).
This is not terribly surprising. The concepts behind the static type system of ML - from back the late 70s - are still "groundbreaking" for industry programmers. Virtual machine-based languages and automated memory management were done several times over, but they were only taken seriously after being massively marketed through Java.

I know a certain Unix junkie. She has chosen to stick to the old standbys of C and Perl. She doesn't want to even look at revision control yet - "too complicated" she says. Fortunately, this is just a hobby right now and she isn't going out and doing commercial work in such a state, but if someone who ostensibly is enjoying themselves programming isn't willing to go out and play with languages and tools, I doubt the situation is much better for a commercially-driven developer.

As long as our development environments are perpetually being replaced by new ones, I think it will be an uphill battle to get the research tech to the mainstream. New environments are almost always crude and barebones. By the time they're mature, people are already starting to move on to the next one. We can only hope for some stability in the future; at that point, the dynamics of programming may take a major turn for the better.
Depends on who your client is. If you're running a tech-y website/blog and most of your users are running Safari or the next FF beta, you're generally OK not supporting IE6, and can probably even pull off a snarky message that pops up alerting your IE6 users that they're using a crappy browser. If your client is a financial services company that mandates its employees use Win NT, your cries of "but IE6 is dead!" will be drowned out by angry shouts of "our interwebs site is broke!"

Charts like this are helpful because they give us a sense for the current, global browser-usage climate and trends. However, global statistics alone should never be used to determine which browsers your site should support, as a cross-section of your niche of users may vary widely from this data.
Oh, am I. Yes, economic necessity can be a diversion, and it's important to ensure you don't get trapped by said diversion. But to think you can't learn anything from being diverted is foolish. You can, and you can leverage that experience in a variety of ways so in that sense it is not a terminal disaster.

Actually, I do work in a highly competitive industry of the kind you describe, the film business, and networking and word of mouth does matter. And I've done a lot of free work to get a toehold in it - in that sense, my comments were far too general and therefore wrong. On the other hand, those were mostly cooperative ventures where everyone was working for free or nominal payment.

Let me rephrase: unpaid internships at well-established, highly profitable companies are a scam. If you can afford the risk of having a clueless newbie around, you can afford to pay them minimum wage. If the work needs doing, then plainly it has some economic value. So does the learning environment for the intern, but that doesn't pay the rent while they're working for you. Landlords, retailers etc. aren't in the business of giving the first one away, they tend to request money up front.

It's not the shitty menial work I object to, mastering those tasks with a smile is an essential quality in many industries. It's the willingness to exploit people when you can afford to pay them without any significant cost to yourself. Shitty menial work on internships does filter out people who can't get shit done, have an entitlement attitude etc. Unpaid internships filter out anyone anyone who doesn't have a financial safety net, regardless of their skillset, motivation, or potential benefit to your organization. Working a second job for that period can be impractical, considering that the eager intern wants to give 110% to show off how great they are.

Is it really too much to ask that in return for such a commitment, someone should get paid enough to afford food, laundry, transit and a bed to sleep in?
Though he did recently pay out $1,000 for a hole in djbdns: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.network.djbdns/13864

Still, a pretty impressive track record!
The real question is not whether Windows 7 is worth its cost, but if the downgrade-to-XP option is still worth to pay for.

IMHO, Win7 sucks less than Vista - it's snappy, partly because we have much faster computers (at least I do) than when Vista was launched, and is much less of a disruption, even for a XP user. It was inevitable: software designed for XP may have problems with Vista, but programs designed for Vista run well under 7.

Will I drop Ubuntu for it? No way.
The Mighty Airship
It's quite possible that instead of crashing, you will end up with a spam zombie.
Web based IT ecosystem on a shoestring?
I might start working as the IT guy for a real estate startup which really needs a streamlined IT eco system to be succesful. What I would like to have is a web based ERP that manages data about staff, sales, real estates, buyers/sellers, accounting, etc. I also want to be able to create totally separate sites and blogs that can exchange data with the ERP.

I understand that such a system might be complex and espensive, but I've done enough research to know that there are open source ERPs, CMSs, blogs, etc that are quite competent. I don't, however, know if there is a combination of open source product that developers prefer to work with. Do you? If you had to create such a system with of the shelf products, which ones (floss and commercial) would you chose. If you think I'm completely off base, I'm more than willing to hear your suggestions on alternative solutions.

Thank you for your insights.
There are three areas in Canada that I'd call tech centers. I've heard all three of them referred to as 'Silicon Valley North': Southern Ontario (Waterloo, Toronto), Montreal, and Southern BC (Vancouver, Victoria).
It can connect to a wireless keyboard or, at least, a USB one, right?
I expect the average person to be less intelligent than many of my better-educated peers expect. Heh. I know one guy who is much better educated, and somewhat more intelligent than I am who thought I was average. At the time, we had the same job description (he was a bit more senior to me, and quite a bit more competent, but we did basically the same work.) - the point was, in his world, someone in the 98th percentile seemed, to him, average.
The point I made was somewhat more limited than what I think you are arguing against. Obviously, wealth needs to be properly allocated or it is useless. However, my argument was merely that the solution to one particular problem ("how to care for people replaced by robots") would be cheap in the particular future envisioned.

Consider how this might work in modern terms. If you can't survive in the modern economy, you are provided with food and a bed to sleep in. We actually have such a system (homeless shelters + soup kitchens) and the cost of providing it is a negligible fraction of our GDP.

The problem comes when you try to add too much to this basic package, or when corruption eats up big chunks of wealth. I don't disagree with any of that.

And you are probably right about jealousy: people will feel poor when they get free health care but immortality pills are only for the rich. But that's a separate issue.
Course listings are news, now?
have you ever sent an email to a manager or sales person? these statistics should surprise no one.
Point taken. I will consider it. For now, however, I'm of the opinion that there's a lot more herb use around the world than Ritalin use, and in 5 or ten years maybe all these experimenters with brain enhancement (and not simple amphetamines) will give us better data to make decisions with.

I think there is an implied dichotomy that I did not mean to make: I'm perfectly happy with people hacking their brains. I'm perfectly happy with the natural state of mankind being some sort of intoxication, whether it's spoiled fruits, running, nicotine, or whatever.

I'm just amused at the rationales being used, which seem to me to have all sort of inner contradictions.
Postini: Google's take on e-mail security
The upside of a top tier education is in realizing that you can always improve your work in some manner. The pitfall is when that sentiment morphs into your work being inadequate.

A year later and I'm still wrestling with accepting the things I produce.
"Steam was our nuclear power and computer technology combined."
"It streamlines IT management to the point that a smaller IT staff can concentrate on improving and expanding the business's infrastructure instead of merely maintaining it."

It's painfully obvious you never had to manage a virus/malware outbreak.

See, Windows has GUI tools that will help you point-and-click your way into the illusion of maintainability. With Linux, you could buy something like Canonical's Landscape management tool or quite easily roll out your own, if you don't need all those bells and whistles.

Locking down a Linux desktop is very simple. Keeping a Windows desktop secure is next to impossible.
In case other people don't recognize "PTO", it stands for "Paid Time Off" (e.g. holidays).
exactly, I'm sick of the "but XP gets the job done"-attitude. Yes, there's no killer feature, that would absolutely demand an upgrade, but all the minor changes and usability improvements add up. I'm kinda annoyed that I have to use a XP machine at work, since I've been spoiled by W7 beta at home for a while now.
Ditto with scholarships.
So, answering the grand-grand-parent, "Microsoft does".
doesn't really apply to startups. Yahoo is huge and mainstream, they HAVE to support every browser, they can't present a crappy looking site to 5% of their users. That 5% means millions of users getting a crappy experience, and possibly going elsewhere.

On the other hand, startups can afford to show a "crappy looking" version of the site since its more or less expected. + the % of IE6 users is much smaller for startups, since startups typically have early adopter users.
What Is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect
This is a joke, right? All these supposed researchers are saying is that "it's possible for humans to echolocate, provide we figure out how to do it".
iPhone 3GS. Jailbreak. Mac.
Understanding a bar chart or a pie chart is something you learned at some point. It takes a while to learn to inteprete these things.

Most people are not dumb. They are rather smart, but they focus their thoughts on the things they have interest in. In other things, they do not pay attention.
"There will always be a company that replaces you. At some point your BlackSwan competitor will appear and they will kick your ass. Their product will be better or more interesting or just better marketed than yours, and it also will be free."

I don't understand why this argument is being specifically tied to freemium models, it sounds like a normal threat in business no matter what your revenue model is like.
Facebook doesn't want you to deactivate your account.
Watching people who think they're so smart that they can sit in judgment of others without understanding them.
We do rent most textbooks. Buy a book for x, use it for the semester, sell it back for y (y <= x), and the rental cost per day is (x-y)/numDays. This doesn't work for the new editions problem of course.
The problem is that most people just see it as another ~$100 they'll have to spend to upgrade, and that isn't worth it to most.

I think it's worth the upgrade, but 90% of my family doesn't and I'll need to upgrade them with a pirated version once it's released + cracked.
This operation cannot be undone
The original hardcover edition of this book by James R. Flynn came out in 2007, and I read it immediately. Now I've just read the new chapters in the 2009 updated paperback edition, mentioned in the submitted link.

Another participant here on HN recently kindly submitted a commentary article from the Chronicle of Higher Education criticizing Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. Flynn has a new chapter in his book with a very thoughtful criticism of Gardner's theory, with especially good insight into the behavior of educational administrators that have eagerly adapted Gardner's views in ways that Gardner himself might not approve. Flynn's chapter on Gardner is a great example of writing that "delights the mind"

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

and provides a framework for further thoughtful research. His other two new chapters are also up-to-the-minute summaries of some of the latest research on human intelligence, with significant contributions from other researchers such as Linda Gottfredson.

A good recent overview of Flynn's views from a lecture by Flynn can be found at

http://www.psychometrics.sps.cam.ac.uk/page/109/beyond-the-f...
I don't know about you, but yes, I've read railway accident post-mortems before.

We have sort of a professional interest here. We may not all be airline avionics engineers... we may not be any of us airline avionics engineers... but the failure of complicated systems is certainly something we all have to deal with, hacker or startup founder, and learning about them is not time wasted.
Nobody who is an entrepreneur has any delusions of safety, we know the risks we are taking.

Not true! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=683810
Unveiling the New Influencers
If you have a problem with it, flag it and stop whining.
While not applicable to other areas, I know that conference papers in CS (and many journal articles as well) have stringent page limits. Thus, given a short amount of space, you have to prioritize what goes in the paper.

Secondly, when writing an academic paper, the primary goal is to keep the reader/reviewer interested. That is why proofs, simple calculations, and other such "trivial matters" are relegated to appendices -- the flow of the main paper should not be disrupted by these.

Finally, one advantage to omitting steps is to ensure that the reader is putting in effort to understand the concepts. Fully drawn-out text would invite people to do conceptual "copy-paste," which would cause problems when they try to apply their knowledge to real-world problems. An analogue of this phenomenon is seen on the web with php programmers, who frequently copy-paste php code found from various tutorials without really understanding what's going on.

However, for in-depth tutorials published online, I agree with the author that super-detailed texts are best. And here, the practical issue of the time spent by the author typing, checking, and revising the tutorial starts to become the dominant reason why tutorials aren't so detailed -- at some point, it's simply not worth the author's time.
Look at what every other western country does. They pretty much all have some form of "socialised" medicine aka universal healthcare. In New Zealand, we spend about 1/4 as much per capita on healthcare, yet we live longer and have better stats re child mortality and the like. We are not particularly good either, there are a lot of countries doing better than us.

The role of insurance is then to cover the difference between basic health care and premium.

The main objections I have seen from yanks is:
1 It's socialism! Maybe, depending on your definition, but it works. The word "socialism" should not be an off switch for your brain.
2 I don't want to pay for someone else's health care. If you have insurance, you already are paying for someone else's healthcare. Sometimes they are paying for you, that's how insurance works.
There is the small problem of postage costs. Compare a movie in a sleeve to a huge book.
See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=687962

And when going to the page I had three ad popups try to take over my machine - I had to resort to a kill command to close the windows. Last time I go to an "India Times" article.
Amphetamines are well known to induce mania, which is one reason they are no longer used, as there were formerly used, to treat depression.

I'd like to see some medical references for the statement "amphetamines don't cause brain damage," because study of long-term neurotoxicity or neuroprotective effects of most medicines is still in very early stages. What medical journal references can you cite on that point for amphetamines?
That's a really good way of empathising with your users. I've seen "sitename will miss you!" type messages, getting social connections involved would be a hell of a lot more persuasive.
I think you over-estimate the creativity of the MBA class, particularly in public companies.

While people with imagination and empathy for customers might see this as a worthwhile idea, which would actually positively benefit both the customers and the business, in the rarefied air of balance sheets and "strategy", I'd bet a brick to London that those extra three people would be seen as a cost, and would be made redundant at the first opportunity.
I get "Page Not Found" on all the Notes.
I couldn't agree more. The author nailed it here. The web is bringing all these disparate voices, all these writers from different backgrounds, ethnicities and walks of life, together. The resulting collage is enriching for aspiring writers and normal folks alike.

Also, I think this is the crux of the article:

True, much of what is written online is quotidian, informational, ephemeral. But writing has always been so: traditional newspapers line bird-cages a day later; lab reports describe methodology in tedious detail; the founding fathers wrote what they ate for lunch. And the quality of many blogs is high, indistinguishable in eloquence and intellect from many traditionally published works.

Well said.
Claiming "_______ will miss you" is not always a safe assumption...and at worst is a lie:)
Evil with style.
The idea in the paper is not to encrypt every packet, but every DNS packet. Something like a (better) substitute to DNSSEC... Good read.
Using audio and video in Firefox
Potion, _why's experimental language. It's cool to play with something bleeding edge, though something about the language itself makes it feel like Python. Maybe the use of colons to define functions/blocks.
I think calling anywhere 'Silicon Valley North' is more an attempt at marketing the location to businesses, rather than actually reflecting a 'Silicon Valley' like area where investment, technology, risk taking and knowledge or access to knowledge intersect.

I've heard Vancouver referred to as Hollywood North, but a significant portion of Film/TV production actually happens in Vancouver.

How many start-up successes have you heard of from Ottawa?
Stupider is not a real word. Using words like 'Stupider' or 'Stupidest' are stupid.
Not a valid comparison. Freenet and DNSCurve perform completely different tasks.