skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The secret of making money on the Internet
Not so long ago, I saw a video that inspired me.
This is a presentation made by David Heinemeier Hansson , creator of Ruby on Rails.
He explains how we can make money on the internet. I though I should share this, not only is a complete fresh way to see it, but also inspiring.
any standardized measure claiming to accurately measure beyond 2.5 sds would be a very noisy measure, almost pointlessly so

Yes. Even better than saying "measure" would be to say "estimate of rank order," but indeed it has been well known for a long time that IQ tests have their greatest error of estimation at the high end of the IQ scale. Lewis Terman, the developer of the first widely used school IQ test in the United States, the Stanford-Binet, noted that error of estimation in IQ scores increases as IQ scores are above the mean.

"The reader should not lose sight of the fact that a test with even a high reliability yields scores which have an appreciable probable error. The probable error in terms of mental age is of course larger with older than with young children because of the increasing spread of mental age as we go from younger to older groups. For this reason it has been customary to express the P.E. [probable error] of a Binet score in terms of I.Q., since the spread of Binet I.Q.'s is fairly constant from age to age. However, when our correlation arrays [between Form L and Form M] were plotted for separate age groups they were all discovered to be distinctly fan-shaped. Figure 3 is typical of the arrays at every age level.

http://learninfreedom.org/Terman%201937%20Figure%203.gif

"From Figure 3 it becomes clear that the probable error of an I.Q. score is not a constant amount, but a variable which increases as I.Q. increases. It has frequently been noted in the literature that gifted subjects show greater I.Q. fluctuation than do clinical cases with low I.Q.'s . . . . we now see that this trend is inherent in the I.Q. technique itself, and might have been predicted on logical grounds." (Terman & Merrill, 1937, p. 44)

Terman, Lewis & Merrill, Maude (1937). Measuring Intelligence: A Guide to the Administration of the New Revised Stanford-Binet Tests of Intelligence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
I am a MENSA member. I've been to a few meetings and regularly enjoy reading the Intelligencer. Other than that, nothing much, life as usual.
Is anyone working on making Wikipedia computable a la Wolfram Alpha?
A first step would be to have public domain source code associated with articles where it would make sense. Moreover, you would be able to execute this code via the web on Wikipedia data/examples possibly even with an animation explaining what is going on.

A second step would be to allow you to easily combine computations via the web, though not necessarily using a natural language interface.

UPDATE: The emphasis would be on the open source code, animations to understand it, and ways to combine this code to perform more complex computations in a practical and simple way (not a natural language interface). People could get the data from more trusted sources if necessary.
Can't be much worse than a doctor not knowing the answer and making a wild guess.

We place way to much implicit trust in medical professionals and esp. doctors. Look at how many crappy IT workers are out there I've got to believe that the medical field can't be much different.
"i think the point here is that for the first time in quite a while the dollar has a legitimate _chance_ at hitting a doomsday scenario. whether or not that happens remains to be seen, but the odds are greater than they have been historically."

The odd thing is that for most of that time period, there were always folks saying that we not only had a chance of hitting the doomsday scenario, it was virtually certain. The first time I encountered people saying that the Fed was destroying the money supply and we would all be doomed to hyperinflation and a survivalist existence, it was 1991 and I was 10 years old (it probably would've been earlier, but my dad wouldn't let me read his newsletters before then). And folks were certain it would happen by the end of Clinton's first year in office...no wait, by 1997...no, at the Millenium...no, by 2005...no, by fall of 2006...no, 2007 will surely be it...YES, finally it's 2008 and the world's falling apart, except it's going to get a lot worse by 2010!

Kinda like the boy who cried wolf.

"keep in mind that during the depression we were on the gold standard, thus there was none of the inflationary/deflationary risk of a fiat currency.."

Then why did it deflate so much from 1929-1932, or inflate so much from 1932-1937?
It is a pity the author thinks 6-8 weeks is the ideal duration for such a trip.. yes that is about when the inital novelty wears off and it doesnt feel much like a regular "vacation" any longer. As much as the tourist/traveler characterization is a cliche, this is where you stop being the former and start being the latter...

I can recommend going at least 6 months abroad, if you can make the time.
The US govt has ~11T in debt, not 100+T. I think you're mistaking gross debt positions with net position?
I don't know why Wikipedia continues to get a bad wrap for what it is: a very general source of information online. I doubt any Doctor would consult Wikipedia in making a decision on diagnosis or treatment.

However, Wikipedia continues to be the best source of general information online. It is the Encyclopedia Brittanica of our time. It provides information which can then be used as a launching point for further research.

Doctors in particular are some of the most knowledgeable people around. They are, and have to be, life-long learners. With that said, Wikipedia is an excellent resource to begin online research, but it is by no means definitive. So this "study" is by no means troubling to me.
Economists of education think much of the purported value of a college degree comes not from what college study adds to the value of a job-seeker, but from what a college degree signals about characteristics the job-seeker had to have to be admitted to college. One thing a college degree signals is a THRESHOLD level of scholastic ability (the better term for what IQ scores estimate). In the United States, there are severe legal difficulties related to using mental test scores to screen job applicants--the same difficulties don't relate to requiring all job applicants to have a college degree.
4chan is not so amoral as to find incorrect pharmaceutical information lulz-worthy

Uh. http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Epilepsy_Foundation
That will be awesome, except for one thing. Wikipedia is editable by everyone, so the data results couldn't be 100% accurate.
Of course, in the case of a true doomsday situation, gold will also inflate - people will be desperate, and increasing amounts of gold required to get anywhere. Without a functioning economy, everything is scarce => expensive.
I joined Mensa back in high school because they held cocktail parties... The most enjoyable part of the Mensa experience for me was taking the test - there were a couple of lousy (IMHO) questions, and unlike other exams with practical consequences, I felt free to write my (possibly totally off-base) criticisms on the exam.
"massive amount of baby boomers retiring/draining SS and medicare"

This is deflationary, at least in asset markets. Retiring baby boomers = pulling their money out of the stock market = falling stock prices.

"the disappearance of our manufacturing sectors"

Deflationary in consumer markets, inflation in asset markets, at least to the extent that it results in job losses and concentration of wealth among a professional/capitalist class. Wealthy people tend to spend a lower fraction of their income.

"the increasing commodity (food, oil) prices,"

This is an effect, not a cause. Saying that higher prices cause inflation (while somewhat true...see wage/price spiral) is circular reasoning.

"the need to pay back 100T+ debt owed to foreign countries and to ourselves"

Deflationary. Debt increases the money supply; paying back that debt reduces it. This is a large part of why the Fed's actions haven't triggered inflation: they're compensating for destruction of money as homeowners default in droves.
I said "100T+ debt owed to foreign countries and to ourselves"

For a brief summary, check this link
http://www.usdebtclock.org/

The link doesn't include US company debts (10T), or derivatives owed to other countries (200T)
My opinion is that MENSA is for people whose main accomplishment in life is doing well on an IQ test. And who are insecure enough about it to pay someone else to validate that accomplishment. This opinion is shared by a number of people that I respect.

If you actually do something that requires using your brain, you should meet plenty of other people who have good brains and have done something with them. The "have done something" bit makes them into more interesting people to be around. Plus you don't have to pay for that privilege.

Random disclaimer. I am not a MENSA member. However my GRE scores qualify me for membership in most high IQ organizations, including MENSA.
As regards your last sentence, MS licensing does definitely limit your ability to scale out (over multiple servers, see http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001279.html). Mono might just save MS from losing the server mindshare entirely if it can talk itself into letting go of the license more than even the community "promise."

I have been pleasantly surprised to find C#/.NET is quite good. Please do force MS' hand by supporting the alternatives. The more good alternatives there are to .NET including improvements to Java, Scala or what have you, the more likely MS will do the smart long-term thing and loosen its licensing restrictions.

(please do say why you might disagree - I'm genuinely curious)
The article made a point of distinguishing the comparison between Java and C# as languages, not between Java and .NET as platforms.
I am reminded of an episode tagline from Futurama - "Not a Substitute for Human Interaction" (S2E19).
It's really not very difficult to get into MENSA. The test is about the equivalent of a US public school gifted program. I think the "average" hackernews user would pass without much of a problem. It's far more difficult (and prestigious in my opinion) to get into YCombinator.

If you're looking to meet interesting and intelligent people, you're probably better off finding a community oriented website with content that appeals to you and going to meet ups. Personally I would much prefer an HN meetup to a MENSA gathering.
I added word wrap to notepad! (well, less the horizontal scrollbar... a quick web search shows that is bugged in Silverlight) I'm not sure if simply saving it counts as publishing it, or what?

That was surprisingly easy and fun. I think you've got something here, but it clearly has a long way to go.
I'd upmod you more if I could...
Concentrate helps you work & study by eliminating distractions (mac app)
I use Paycycle.com. It's great!
overreact much?
My best guess:

1)They negotiate free happy hour terms with the bar. The bar is probably happy to provide an hour of free drinks (its a promotional cost) in exchange for getting X number of drinkers in the door.

2) The arbitrage is on what % of the free drinkers will convert to paid drinkers. Notice that only well drinks and Bud is included in the free drink definition. So everything else is an upsell revenue opportunity for the bar. I am assuming the site gets some cut of the paid drinks (high margin product).
I have no experience with Mensa myself, but generally, you don't want to hang around people who have a lot (money, intelligence, looks), what you want to do is to hang around people who do a lot (entrepreneurs, hackers, writers, artists, physically active people).

And, for the inevitable objection: yes, you could be a do-er who also ended up having a lot. But the reverse is not necessarily true.
disturbingly disturbing.... I wonder when he graduated from sex surrogates to regular hookers?
That's pretty unscientific :-) To measure anything that fast reliably you have to do it more than once:

[ron@mickey:~/foo]$ cat foo
foo

[ron@mickey:~/foo]$ time for i in {1..1000}; do cp foo foo.c.$i; done
real	0m2.705s
user	0m0.524s
sys	0m2.190s

[ron@mickey:~/foo]$ time for i in {1..1000}; do ln foo foo.l.$i; done
real	0m2.618s
user	0m0.486s
sys	0m2.008s
"keep in mind that during the depression we were on the gold standard, thus there was none of the inflationary/deflationary risk of a fiat currency"

Sure there was. Gold as currency is just as susceptible to instability as anything else, as a simple thought experiment can show.

Consider that the supply of gold, though growing, grows extremely slowly. The supply of goods and services which are exchanged in economic transactions (and for which currency acts as a proxy), however, goes through great spurts of growth which the supply of gold cannot hope to match. Thus, a gold standard during such a spurt can only lead to widespread deflation (as would any currency which failed to keep pace with the quantity of goods and services it must stand in for).

I really don't know why people harbor this mystical belief that a shiny piece of metal is somehow immune to well-understood economic principles.
People with mutation in this single gene lose the ability for vocal learning and speech. How do you explain that?
This might just be me, but the background is kind of distracting.
Whatever happened to the TouchBook that was demo'ed a while back? They seem like they're a lot further ahead, have an (optional) keyboard attachment, can stand the screen up, and maybe a real software stack.
As an introvert, I find it stressful to watch TV shows about relationships after spending a day around people. Watching some sort of documentary/news/etc. is ok though. However, I hadn't thought consciously about this until reading the link.

Conversely, my extroverted wife enjoys watching shows about relationships, even when she's tired.
District Court Judge Orders Facebook To Reveal Source Code In Patent Dispute
That's why they have different releases of the .Net run-time.
Death by a million cuts. The scope-resolution operator doesn't matter. The weird scoping rules aren't so bad. The inconsistent function parameters are really no big deal. What's one more mis-feature right?

I was really hoping that PHP was going to grow up and shed some its moronic nature but this is yet another half-ass solution.
FCC Takes On Apple And AT&T Over Google Voice Rejection
My "daily drivers" are C# and Python. I'm picking up Clojure right now, but haven't really done much with it - I really like lisps in general, but for some reason always fall back to either C# or Python when I need to write something I'm going to maintain.

If I were in your shoes, I would start with Python and Django. It's a good framework on a good language, and most importantly, Django has a very good community and almost peerless documentation that's available for free online.

Ruby on Rails is also quite nice, I'm just not a big Ruby fan. There is no reason for this other than personal preference. Scala seems very interesting, but I personally don't see a gain in learning it (since I have C# in my toolbox). Your mileage may vary.

For whatever it's worth, everyone I've dealt with seems to have had a pretty painless transition from C++ to C#. I am not a Java person, so I can't really speak to that.
Kameer rouge
NASA is underfunded ? The whole Space Shuttle program is a huge waste of money. Robots are far better in space than humans.
Just replace "surrogate" with "framework" and "my sexuality" with "my coding abilities"

Voila! HN.
Thing is, IQ matters to the arrogant arses that you might want to trump. So for a normal person, the response to "hey, I have 150 IQ, I'm right damnit" is "Oh my god, I can't believe he just said that. Or thinks it matters." But to the person with the 150 IQ who's sure he's right because of it, it may be somewhat more effective to say "Yeah, I have 170, can we talk about something else now?"
if nothing in a folder changed, then the individual files aren't hardlinked. if you dump 5k files into an archive folder, then assuming your inbox has an update, and the archive folder doesn't, it's 5k less hardlinks being made.
You believe the same Fed that gave bankers billions of dollars and is actively working against congress to be audited, is going to 'decrease the money supply', ignore our huge debt and save us all?

You are drinking alot of government kool-aid. Keep watching CNBC.
I would guess it is responsible for one crucial part for the "speech apparatus", but that doesn't make it the speed apparatus. A car without the ignition loses the ability to drive, yet the ignition hardly seems the most important part in the car.

I feel the same uneasyness when I hear "hormone X is the cause of ability Y" - sure, maybe if Hormone X is missing, ability Y is missing. But Hormone X does not manufacture Y, it is just a messenger that makes something else produce Y. Likewise I suspect speech is possible because of the combined effects of several genes. If one is missing, maybe the system fails - but perhaps it could be replaced with something else, given time.

Sorry, it is late, I feel unable to express myself more clearly atm.
Apple Patches iPhone SMS Security Hole With Software Update
Student Must Pay $675,000 in Downloading Case
BTW, that's Mexican slang. For most Spanish speakers outside of Mexico mensa has no meaning.
what is SF an acronym for? Science Fiction, San Francisco ?
We have floor tiles that are "high flow", cast aluminum which means 50% of them are not there. The photographer but nice lights under the floor. He did a lot of interesting lighting. Trust me, it's the machine room.

-Ron
Powerset aka. Bing
There is an open source project extracting data, but I forget what it is called. Freebase is doing it commercially (they maintain a separate database, but I believe they have import data from wikipedia too). They provide an API and (IIRC) a data dump, but with a more restrictive license than Wikipedia itself has (again, IIRC).
Just like any other theory which is trying to explain why have humans evolved so differently than just about any other mammal species.
I'm impressed with how quickly the FCC is responding (and that it's responding at all). The questions are thorough and well thought-out too. There's still hope...
Is this likely to cause any change of course? Does the FCC's inquiry have enough weight to spur a different stance on the issue?
I wonder if they could've avoided this mess for API developers using UUIDs instead of integers for tweet ids.
The can of concentrate is rough, too, the perspective's off. Plus it looks like a battery.
well, one danger is medical companies recommending their drugs directly to consumers. I've heard that consumers often enter medical offices requesting specific drugs which may or may not be best for their condition. I hear that some are very adamant, convinced that a specific drug is what they need.
Not in my experience - in Australia, Mensa is a sort of lonely-hearts club for single, middle-aged programmers. The few meetings I went to were as tedious, awkward and onanistically self-congratulatory as you would expect, and I let my membership lapse soon after.

I've heard that in other parts of the world membership can be very worth-while, as long as there are active SIGs within your field of interest.

Oh, and whatever you do, please don't put Mensa membership on your CV, unless you want to look like a prat. Joining Mensa is not an accomplishment - if you're applying for a job in the upper tiers of any white-collar profession, being in the 98th percentile is pretty much a given.
RIAA wins $675,000, or $22,500 per song in Tenenbaum Case
I have a gun. You have gold. Which do you think is more valuable?

Force trumps money, currency, and metal. In a true doomsday situation, the guy with the gun will always have more in the bank than the guy with the gold.
Few things are 100% accurate. More specifically for wikipedia, the results will not be 100% repeatable. Not necessarily a problem, but something to take into account.
I really try not to curse much, but I'm using it here for emphasis. It's the kind of emphasis that cursing can't even do justice to because I just want to scream at the top of my lungs:

THIS IS FUCKING RIDICULOUS.
Maybe you'll meet Asia Carrera.
Particularly interesting are the last two questions:

5. What other applications have been rejected for use on the iPhone and for what reasons? Is there a list of prohibited applications or of categories of applications that is provided to potential vendors/developers? If so, is this posted on the iTunes website or otherwise disclosed to consumers?

6. What are the standards for considering and approving iPhone applications? What is the approval process for such applications (timing, reasons for rejection, appeal process, etc.)? What is the percentage of applications that are rejected? What are the major reasons for rejecting an application?
Yeah, but gold can buy you not only guns, but people with guns.
We are, but like the future, it isn't evenly distributed yet.
It's sad, but this isn't really an interesting argument any more these days. Even as a staunch java supporter, I wouldn't try to argue Java is in and of itself as good as C#. I'm more interested in how the 2nd generation JVM languages (Scala, Groovy, etc) compare with C# or the other options on .NET, and on the pros and cons of the whole platform and ecosystem.

For my money, no matter how good C# is, I'm not willing to be tied to an environment where the only full, modern implementation is tied to a single platform.
I'm curious what jurisdiction the FCC has over Apple (other than clearing the devices for interference). AT & T I can understand. Anybody know?
As stated, it's only for members being paid on equity distributions.
Just an inquiry no... I think most of us are hoping that it's the beginning of something larger and that Apple/AT&T will be forced to compromise.

EDIT: typo
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=735687
This can't end well. At the end of the day, Apple and AT&T have the right (or should have the right) to make any agreements they find necessary, and customers obviously have the power to reject the iPhone and AT&T if this matters enough to them. The government gets involved when consumers want to have their cake and eat it too -- you want the iPhone Apple & AT&T are offering BUT you aren't willing to accept their price and terms.

I know this isn't going to be a terribly popular point here, because, well, we all do want to get our way. But just consider how much you'd like to find yourself on the receiving end of one of these letters.
They make money by aggregating the activity and doing real-time and historical analysis. People will pay very good money for those things, especially with the size of the datasets bit.ly has at its disposal.
Oh, come now. What you say is correct and this is a big problem for the US, even more so for Europe, but that's a fiscal matter, not a monetary one. Indeed, if your hyperinflation scenario were to come true, one of the silver linings would be that we'd inflate away much of our external debt.

But really, we both know the Fed is tinkering with monetary policy in response to the recent financial crisis, not in response to the upcoming demographic one. Unless you want to go all tinfoil hat and say they provoked the former in order to deal with the latter by stealth :)

I feel you're shifting the goalposts a little with this post, although it is an interesting issue in its own right.
How work expands to fill available time (1955)
Uber Best: 9 Fresh Roundups With The Coolest Articles From The Design Community
Heroku: Amazon EBS Performance (YC W08)
Not necessarily. Some of the FCC's questions are simply about clarifying policies. Maybe the average consumer won't read through (or care about) a list of prohibited app or app categories, but it sure would help developers.
That's what you have sugar pills for, the placebo effect will work miracles for these patients.