skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's probably why rdl and a lot of people on HN disagree with the article. In SV, being at a funded startup as an engineer often (not always) means you left or declined a big company job, a job which is often higher-paying (in base salary). And if the startup fails, there will be no negative effect on your career, unless you failed for malicious reasons (e.g. blew investor's money on parties). If you are a founder, your startup experience will be perfectly valid experience to other companies. If you are an engineer, you will get a new job in no time (in the current climate).

The reason SV is relevant is because the article is specifically talking about YC.
You'll note that mtgox had funds taken from it

Source, please? How much did mtgox lose?
If you're telling me about hacks, I want them to be short and to the point. This article seems to go on and on.
So instead of "research project", a better description would be "very low on the list of priorities, nobody cares about it"?
This may have been from before he discovered sex.
I don't want to get dragged down by measuring intelligence with IQ. It's a vague and unclear measure at best.

But to answer the spirit of your question. It depends.

What's the cognitive task I'm gifted at?
Did I do that task?
Why should I feel shameful for doing that?

If I'm good at rational reasoning, is doing the act of reasoning bad?

If I'm good at advanced physics, is doing physics bad?

If I'm good at painting, or music, or solving rubik's cubes, or biology or psychology, is the act of doing those things I'm good at something I should be bothered about?

There's a significant social stigma about being smarter than everybody else in the room. They're elevated on a weird kind of pedestal both to celebrate, but also to make sure they don't get in too close of contact with the normal folks. It's not fun. Most really smart folks just want to contribute and be useful and use their gifts. Just like tall people tend to play basketball or musically gifted people want to play music.

We don't really celebrate demonstrations of intelligence. It's weird and bizarre and worthy of study and research, but not use. The really really intelligent folks find themselves locked away solving other people's problems for them, rather than being engaged.

> Do you do anything productive to take advantage of your high IQ? I didn't see it yet.

If I'm good at a cognitive task, is there something useful I can do with it?

A criticism that I think is rightfully levied on people like Marilyn Vos Savant is that she doesn't use her gifts for anything particularly useful. Solving other people's brain teasers every week is pretty low on the accomplishment scale.

I try to put what I can do to good use, but outside of the startup sphere I've worked on some very hard, very vexing World problems and been successful in some cases, less successful in others. A byproduct of that work is some cool and elegant technology and approaches that I try to share with others, some of which has had some pretty big impacts on the world which I'm very proud of. It hasn't made me FU rich, but that's never been what I was aiming for. I live very comfortably.

I've also, quite literally, been the guy locked away in a room to solve a hard problem. It's not fun, and it brings up those deep feelings of social isolation. I'm not a person, I'm a functional black box nobody knows quite how to deal with.

But, something I really enjoy, figuring out how to take the advanced work and make it usable by regular folks is a pretty engaging and pretty striking challenge.
No, the reason sugar gets a bad rep is because of what it does to your body. The insulin response to sugar is the primary way your body stores fat and sugar itself is readily converted to fat. The glucose & fructose spikes are also source of inflammation. It is believed that this inflammation is the cause of some of the damage related to heart disease, etc.
(Pssst... hey kid... c'mere a minute. Tell ya somethin'. Ya wanna sell stuff? Then stfu about yer junk. Cuz... <tch> seriously? NO body wants to hear that shit. Know whutta mean? Jus' sayin'...)
And, I hate to tell ya this, but... <ahem>... that guy's title... if it is, as you say, "a joke"... it sure ain't the biggest one.
But, ya don't have to take MY word for it. Life is a great educator. Bit heavy-handed at times, but... you guys'll find that out. Have at it, kid. Take yer best shot.
Hope ya got a 'Plan B'.
I have no idea what you mean by "functional difference" here. But there are significant differences in both metabolic requirements and sugar structure between fructose and sucrose (that being one whole glucose moiety). The glycosidic bond of the disaccharide requires a specific enzyme sucrase.
Sugar is not the culprit behind all the diseases listed in the article. Obesity is

And sugar is culprit behind overeating and obesity.
Hopefully what happened with pulseaudio does not happen with init
Police Intimidation Resisted, Man Changes National Surveillance Policy
No. People continue to work on it. A lot of time has been spent on it. I really don't appreciate your mischaracterization.
A side note: If you claim that people are missing the point, then you need to state that point (and why). Otherwise you're just leaving those people confused and/or angry.
Why is that not a right way of communicating? He's right. Could Linus deliver the same message beating around the bush? The message is clear and to the point.

I honestly don't see an alternative, even though I would never communicate in such a way.
And it's officially just "pile of poo"; the source isn't specified.
Who are you to say my kids can't eat Arsenic Flakes or Lead-frosted Crunchies?
That is a bit weird thing to say. Lots and lots of things can be found using a search engine, but it doesn't mean they shouldn't be taught.
Rates of type 2 diabetes are in the non-overweight population are extremely low.

Skinny people can get type 1 diabetes, but that's a completely different disease -- acquired hypoinsulinaemia, as opposed to hyperlipedaemia. (Note, neither diabetes is essentially about glucose; it just happens that hyperglycaemia is a symptom of both diseases, and Aretaeus didn't know better.)
Create Non-Blocking User Interface in Android
Late reply, but #electronics is full of the nicest, most helpful people I've ever met.
Just to reinforce things: we are talking about kids very early in their math career. And math is drill; Khan academy, all that. It's an investment.

You can do drill in 8th grade, or you can do it in your freshman year of college.

The point is:

1) I thought it annoying and pointless in the 8th grade. Oh clever me, I knew so much better.

2) People who sucked it up and did it, with whom I shared classes, blew my doors off in college math courses for a couple of years. A teacher made this the central fact of the algebra class they took.

3) Then I took the discrete math course, and stopped having trouble.

There is something to this. Rigor is not natural. Learning rigor is essential to being able to operate your life well.
Exception Handling features in JDK 7
I'd like for you to actually explain how it's wrong to say that replacing a fat-heavy diet with a sugar-heavy diet is bad for health. You dismiss their premises and conclusions by saying they're looking at the wrong culprit for health problems. I'd prefer if you dealt with their premises and conclusions by falsifying said premises and conclusions.
In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women.
> The downside to failure is exceptionally low. It's all other people's money (at least in Silicon Valley);

Wall Street is all playing middleman with other peoples' money too.
At a demonstration against surveillance, why film all of our faces?
That won't work because Tor is too slow. I'd use only if i was a terrorist - it's too slow even for pedophiles. If we want people to use crypto en masse, we have to give them something faster.

But the general idea is correct.
Why not a separate package altogether? That way the Chrome team can focus on Chrome, and the Developer Tools team can focus on producing a high-quality website debugger.
Yes, he is exaggerating. Go is nowhere near as expressive or productive as C#.
Heart disease etc, including[1]:

"This is why hemoglobin A1C is frequently used in studies that try to correlate blood sugar control to various disease processes like Alzheimer’s, mild cognitive impairment, and coronary artery disease.
It’s well documented that glycated hemoglobin is a powerful risk factor for diabetes, but it’s also been correlated with risk for stroke, coronary heart disease, and death from other illnesses. These correlations have been shown to be strongest with any measurement of hemoglobin A1C above 6.0 percent.
We now have evidence to show that elevated hemoglobin A1C is associated with changes in brain size. In one particularly profound study, published in the journal Neurology, researchers looking at MRIs to determine which lab test correlated best with brain atrophy found that the hemoglobin A1C demonstrated the most powerful relationship.[2]”

[1] Perlmutter, David. “Grain Brain.”

[2] “C. Enzinger, et al., “Risk Factors for Progression of Brain Atrophy in Aging: Six-year Follow-up of Normal Subjects,” Neurology 64, no. 10 (May 24, 2005): 1704–11.”
Also, do lots of maintenance programming. Finding bugs in code someone else wrote is generally much more difficult (and in my opinion valuable in learning sense), because you aren't familiar with it.
press "E" in grub, then add init="/bin/busybox" to the kernel command line. Then apt-get purge systemd (mounting may or may not be necessary).

That way you can still claim "the first thing I did was to remove it". But contrary to pulse, it will also be the last ;)
There's a fantastic, in-depth article on Unicode and NSString (the default string class in Objective-C) that was published a couple days ago, which covered a lot of the same material but from an Objective-C standpoint instead.

http://www.objc.io/issue-9/unicode.html
Product Management Excellence, VenueBook, and Marching on
>The insulin response to sugar is the primary way your body stores fat and sugar itself is readily converted to fat

This is a common myth, but it's wrong. Dietary fat is what is primarily stored and leads to weight gain during caloric excess; dietary carbs just decrease the amount of fat being used for energy, but can also get stored as fat tissue during overfeeding in a process called de novo lipogenesis (which is what you're describing) [1] [4]. Would you believe protein also elicits an insulin response? [2] So why not just eat butter? Well, it turns out fat can get stored without insulin at all, with the help of a little molecule called acylation stimulation protein [3].

Nutrition is harder than it seems. Again, it all comes back to calories in vs calories out.

[1] http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/74/6/707.full

[2] http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/66/5/1264.full.pdf

[3] http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/insulin-levels-and...

[4] http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/nutrition/nutrient-intake-n...
I would imagine that that would only be activated with a full deployment of FB, so developers wouldn't have to worry about it.
More info.

Anti-sugar: http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/3821440.htm

Anti-anti-sugar: http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s3888657.htm

The whole thing strikes me as quite sensationalist, and I suspect that digging into the research would affirm the cholesterol <-> heart disease link. For now, I'll trust the scientific consensus over these crackpot types.
The most interesting assertion in this video is that the facebook algorithm sends out user updates to a sample of their fans/subscribers and that the engagement performance within that sample is a key determining factor as to whether an update is shared more broadly in news feeds.

If that is in fact the case and purchasing facebook ads indirectly increases the amount of fake/automated likes included within that sample (thereby negatively impacting the overall engagement metrics on your posts) then the purchase of facebook advertising has the side effect of diminishing your ability to organically drive traffic and engagement.

To put it another way. This would be like if buying Google Adwords advertising not only got you fake/automated traffic, but also simultaneously decreased your organic, unpaid search rankings.
> secure life making a few hundred thousand dollars a year in an essentially mind-numbing profession that does little for humanity is unthinkably depressing.

You realize Wall Street bankers make a few million dollars a year doing mind-numbing work that does little for humanity, right?
The various proposals have been circulated amongst a small group of core Go contributors. That has been sufficient to drive the process so far, with many options being explored in detail. The work continues to evolve.

We're not university professors. We're not publishing papers or other "researchy output". We're just trying to get stuff done. If we publish all the works-in-progress we will distract the community from the more pressing concerns of today's Go programmers. We all already spend way too much time reading mail, and generics is a hot topic (obviously). The last thing we need is more (redundant) mail.
Doing YC seems to me very similar to forming a band, writing a movie script, or attempting to become a successful actor, athlete, etc. If you go into the scenario expecting that failure is not an option, you will almost surely be disappointed. If you understand (really) that it is high risk/high reward, and the cost of failure can be as low as a teeny bit of your pride, it can be a great learning experience, providing you with a glimpse of a world outside the proverbial cubicle of a safe, predictable life.
Java, Scala, Clojure, Haskell, C#, F#, Scheme (do Rackets Places count?) all have their equivalents.
I'm just guessing, but it occurs to me that prior to the 20th century the average European probably consumed more ethanol than refined sugar.
My college experience was that teachers taught how to pass exams, as described in the article. But when asking the teacher how the math worked, they were unable to because they learned and were trained through the same system. They didn't 'do' math or know math. They didn't possess the deeper understanding I was looking for someone to explain.
I can't say I am entirely unsympathetic to the criticisms.

But to be plausible the author had to reinforce the investment banking alternative with a close personal connection between good cousin Eric and someone already established in the industry. It's not that YC's model is perfect, but at least it is nakedly tuned toward making money for YC rather than providing good jobs for one's buddies.
Yeah, the family and significant obligations one takes on with age are terrible excuses for not aiming high. Losers!!
> In addition to the mirrors and nail files, Goldman Sachs provided T-shirts and key chains to hold headphone cords.

(Doesn't say if the t-shirts were women's cuts)

Google brought socks.
Well it can't. Take for example "sort", "map", "filter" etc.

That it can abstract some other "common patterns" doesn't solve this.
Suppose you play baseball. You have a teammate who is less talented than you are. You are the best hitters on the team. He works hard; you don't. You both play Little League, then High School, then when you encounter American Legion pitchers, he can adapt and you can't - because he'ds developed a structure in which to learn to improve. You have now encountered a massive opportunity cost from not properly evaluating how to use your time.
I'll explain it to the best of my understanding, at least in a narrow scope.

A user on an exchange requests to withdraw btc. MtGox creates a transaction with a tx hash of abc1234cdf... and sends it to the blockchain, polling for the status of tx hash "abc1234cdf...".

Due to tx malleability, the tx hash can change by changing some of the tx data (in insignificant ways), which doesn't invalidate the tx signatures.

A malicious user could wait for MtGox to create a tx, flip a bit and resubmit the tx and try to get it confirmed under a different hash, invalidating Gox's tx as a double spend.

Which leaves Gox polling for the status of tx hash "abc1234cdf...", which will never confirm.

A user then submits a support request and says their tx is "Stuck". MtGox then creates a new tx, Which doesn't respend the same coins, and thus, the user is paid 2x.
Precisely. Experiment: eat 500 calories of sugar (ice cream, soda, candy). Wait 15-20 minutes, how hungry are you?

Now, eat 500 calories of fat (heavy cream, bacon, pork belly, etc). Wait 15-20 minutes, how hungry are you?

I've done this experiment a few times now, and without fail, I crave more food after the sugar and can't eat another bite after the fat.
Facebook Paper – Hit or Flop
There goes the Internet.
This is faulty though, no? You're risking your best alternative to eating ramen over the course of those N years. That alternative is very, very high for anyone getting into YC at this point.
s/Marxists/Progressives/

Marx was a progressive (i.e. he saw history as an endless march towards progress). But not all progressives are Marxists.

If you buy the myth of progress, then eliminating divisions in society and traditional institutions like strong families is good because it is good for that sort of individualism which supports a modern corporate economy. on the other hand, if you don't buy it, then you might start asking why family businesses and expecting to retire with the kids are so bad, and why we sacrifice family on the alter of individualism.....

I consider myself to be on the "light side" of post-modernism, namely that side which looks to the premodern past for truth (not the dark side which tends to discount all knowledge).
I think when you say that there "is no functional difference between HFCS and table sugar" you mean that sucrose is broken down to 50% glucose and 50% fructose during digestion, which is correct (although HFCS is not 50-50 but close).

The move to HFCS was for price reasons, so it won't be a "minor increase in prices", this may actually be more acceptable way to curb sugar use than taxing it.
My point has nothing to do with the validity of what you said. I have no doubt that most people's problems are trivial to you, and that you could easily find effective solutions for them.
Rather, my point is that you said what you did. The geniuses I've met were typically far more graceful about their intelligence.
The announcement was good enough for pastebin but not their own homepage?
Not affiliated with the product at all but I don't know why more products don't work like this. It's just genius.

With a ukelele ;]
I advocate moderation and balance. Consume reasonable calorie and macronutrient (protein, fat, carbohydrate) quantities. Eat what allows you to do that. For me, those carbs come from doughnuts and candy but also from brown rice and pasta. Just like my meats include both lean meats (chicken breast) and fatty, delicious meats (bacon). Combine this with exercise and all you'll avoid all the scary things the article talks about.
Your assumptions about a high fat diet are a function of the "greatest health scam of the century":

“Somehow we have been led to believe that dietary fat will raise our cholesterol, which will in turn increase our risk for heart attacks and strokes. This notion continues to prevail despite research from nineteen years ago that proved otherwise. In 1994, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a trial that compared older adults with high cholesterol (levels above 240 mg/dl) to those with normal levels (below 200 mg/dl).9 Over the course of four years, researchers at Yale University measured total cholesterol and high-density lipoprotein (HDL) in almost one thousand participants; they also tracked hospitalizations for heart attack and unstable angina and the rates of death from heart disease and from any other cause. No differences were found between the two groups. People with low total cholesterol had as many heart attacks and died just as frequently as those with high total cholesterol. And reviews of multiple large studies have routinely failed to find correlation between cholesterol levels and heart disease.10 Mounting research like this has prompted Dr. George Mann, a researcher with the Framingham Heart Study, to go on record stating:
The diet heart hypothesis that suggests that a high intake “of fat or cholesterol causes heart disease has been repeatedly shown to be wrong, and yet, for complicated reasons of pride, profit, and prejudice, the hypothesis continues to be exploited by scientists, fund-raising enterprise, food companies, and even governmental agencies. The public is being deceived by the greatest health scam of the century.11”

9. H. M. Krumholz, et al., “Lack of Association Between Cholesterol and Coronary Heart Disease Mortality and Morbidity and All-cause Mortality in Persons Older Than 70 Years,” JAMA 272, no. 17 (November 2, 1994): 1335–40.

10. H. Petousis-Harris, “Saturated Fat Has Been Unfairly Demonised: Yes,” Primary Health Care 3, no. 4 (December 1, 2011): 317–19.

11. http://www.survivediabetes.com/lowfat.html.”
Ask HN: CtrlP for Emacs?
Having recently made the switch from Vim to Emacs + Evil (and friends) there is one plugin that I haven't been able to replace yet: CtrlP.vim

The closest I've come to replicate its behavior in Emacs is with Projectile + Helm. The downside being that Helm has no integration with ido-flx, or grizzl, or any amazing fuzzy searching and ranking algorithm like CtrlP does.

What do ex-Vimmers that have been spoiled by CtrlP use to replicate its awesomeoness in Emacs?
Viber hires Goldman Sachs to find buyer for $500-600m
Same happened to me somewhere else. My advice for these situations is ASAP or GTFO the acquired unit. ASAP, lateral into the larger company if that's the kind of place you think you want to work, or GTFO the whole place whenever you feel like it. Regardless, get away from the acquired company so you don't become deadwood.
A small very vocal subset of users is going to throw a fit. And a forked version of the browser (Iceweasel?) is going to strip out the ad functionality, assuming it is not just a toggle in the browser.

"Mozilla is moving from a dumb window to the internet to a smart agent on behalf of the user, putting the user first," Mr. Herman said.

Or Mozilla is trying to pay the bills and not be so beholden to Google. I don't think users are clamoring for more advertising.

Good move, if they manage to pull it off well enough.
For you, maybe.

I'm apparently kind of a spaz when it comes to pens. I have to buy pens with caps, because my clicky pens always activate in my pocket and then literally ruin my pants by barfing ink all over them. It's also a huge pain when I've been out in the cold, or the pen has been upside-down in my pocket and the ink flows away from the tip, or there's some rubbish stuck in the nib and the pen just doesn't write consistently. And I don't run out of ink all that often, but the pens I use are opaque and so I don't know it's coming until I go to write one day and nothing happens.

In the grand scheme of things compared to things like world hunger and tribalism in Africa, yeah these are pretty insignificant, first-world problems. But in the writing implement space, they're legitimate.

So no, we're not curing cancer or anything here. But I bought the $29 one from a few years ago linked in the article, just to see if it will work out for me. Worst case, I'm out a few bucks and I leave a negative review so the next person maybe doesn't make the same mistake. Best case, I've upgraded my everyday carry and possibly saved some of my pants from an inky death.

And that, to me, would be worth thirty bucks.