skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
hmm... I could understand how you could defend something like Africans are, on average, less educated than Japanese or something like Africans have less opportunity from their environment to educate themselves and thus have less knowledge and intelligence (but then which type of intelligence?) than Japanese...

But defending your original quote, you would have to prove me that african kids raised in the same conditions as japanese kids are less intelligent than the japanese kids... And I don't believe there is any studies proving this...

In our world there is no equality of circumstances and we are pretty much a product of our environment so how could the produce of wildly varying environment be equal? So I don't think you can single out a 'race' as being more or less intelligent, you have to consider the political environment, the culture, the natural environment... and so on
I think people who pursue startups see the world as revolving around them.

In any case, I would like to know about tech examples of this:

So if you want to discover things that have been overlooked till now, one really good place to look is in our blind spot: in our natural, naive belief that it's all about us. And expect to encounter ferocious opposition if you do.
That all depends on what one is actually looking to find in an applicant. If the goal of the question is to actually determine if the interviewee has the ability to research a problem, think it through, and implement the solution, then the "homework" approach is definitely superior.

However, if the thrust of the question is to see the applicant think on his/her feet and possibly apply some knowledge from a college class on algorithms (I never covered a problem in this depth in my undergrad comp sci education, but it's definitely standard to discuss computing order statistics), presenting it in the interview is best. The idea of the solution as presented here could easily be sketched out in the interview, and a skilled interviewer could lead the applicant through fleshing out some details if that was so desired.

That said, I think the latter is more often the goal of a final round interview.
Read the chapter on sense making from The Black Swan for a possible reason for why we normally don't see randomness.
To help with all the many postings expressing surprise at a misidentification: How long was your sample? According to the link posted by fixz, http://alias-i.com/lingpipe/demos/tutorial/langid/read-me.ht... , this is using letter-frequency statistics. It's very easy to fool such a system by feeding it a very short sample. For a similar problem that can arise with trying to auto-detect encodings, see: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/03/24/95235.a...

Try feeding it a bit more than a single word or sentence.
More recommendations of books that can change our thinking, please...
I think octave is targeting matlab ddirectly, though mathmatica is obviously another competitor to both.
"You see this goblet?" asks Achaan Chaa, the Thai meditation master.

"For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it.
It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in
beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it.
But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over
or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and
shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’

When I understand that the glass is already broken,
every moment with it is precious."
"Man is the only animal that runs simply to do it."

I don't buy that. My dogs, when let loose in an open field, will run huge, sweeping circles and loops at top speed simply for the fun of it as far as I can tell. Perhaps a better way to put it is that wild animals tend not to run for fun - but domestication, on the other hand, changes things pretty dramatically. I get the impression the author was trying to take that moment to make humans stand out as some kind of special, superior animal in this one case because most of the rest of the examples had humans losing the race. (couldn't resist...)
Interesting article, but I kind of wish the author would use a few capital letters.
I only meant in the context of eating something after using the device. I'm assuming seeing with the tongue would put one in a state of mind more ready to accept sight on the tongue, so I wonder what colors would do right after that. I guess it's also worth wondering if fizzy drinks would feel like tv snow.
Truly social data
"PDF is good for printing, but that's it. Don't use it for online presentation."

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030714.html
I'd find it hard to make abstractions if I assumed everything was random coincidence.
This is a brilliant piece imho because not only is it a lesson to the community but because the example also edifies what the gurus are telling us. Agreed, it would be great to see more stories like this. Maybe one of the "incubators" could take this on?
This seems like the beginning of another argument in favor of an idea I've been kicking around for a little while now: combine http with bittorrent in some seamless fashion to really make more of the web better distributed.
Could a language ... cater to average programmers and be despised by hackers?

Who a language "caters to", who an "average" programmer is, and who a "hacker" is are all social constructs which have no relationship to the objective reality of what features are in a language. People who wish to assert their superiority are quite willing to do so regardless of the technical merits of the matter.

Thus, rather than wasting one's time with meaningless geek-on-geek pissing matches, you should probably just get back to writing software which solves problems for people. You can do that in most languages -- even in Lisp.
That statement was more about the parent's attitude than the article in question - yes we need a deterrant for harassing witnesses because without it we cannot have a legal system.

I don't think prison is the answer except when we decide that the person in question believes themselves above the law/is too great a risk.

We do need some sort of means of deterrant and stripping one's liberty should be strong enough - to introduce someone into a enclosed society (prison) where rape, violence and drug abuse may as well be decriminalised seems too much for most crimes.

People commit crimes because either a) they don't think they'll be caught, b) they don't care if they get caught or c) they're insane. People that respect the law rarely do so because of the threat of punishment.
The blub argument is about not understanding that there are tools out there that do things that you can't currently imagine due to your immersion in your current toolset or a very narrow world view.
Yes, exactly.

"Blub" is just a derogatory word for "you only know one programming language". Become fluent in a bunch of them, and then you have the information you need to make your own conclusion.

As you write more and more of your own software, you'll see what features make that easy for you. You'll also see what features you can live without. You might even come up with ideas for new language features, and you'll see the value of being able to implement new language features without writing a new language. Very meta, but everything is related...
brilliant post. there is a fine line here but imagine a world in which criticism was not the knee jerk reaction? not just in business but in general. at school, in the playground, on the playing field, in politics. it makes me think of 2 things: Ben Zander's "the art of possibility" and something else that I can't remember right now.
WoW was niche once? In Australia nearly all stock was sold out to pre-orders and it was about 6 weeks before there were any game cards that weren't pre-ordered.
That's why I work for myself now. I used to work 12 hours a day for my employer, but it never got me anywhere. I don't think I'm the type suited for a 2-hour workday.
A big "seconded" for SoftLayer here. I've trusted a lot of stuff to them in the last few years and never had a problem.
I work almost all of the time I'm at work, and I certainly am not most productive in those hours. I'm most productive from like 8-10 and then from 2-3.
I've had a few VPS off them for small projects over the last year and it's all worked great.
This question would be the length of a book if I had to define those words. Any hostility you detected was imagined. I was only pondering if a language in a certain style could be overly restrictive.
So it has been proved we weren't created by (a) (g)God? Truly?

I'm not convinced.
He also wrote an article at A List Apart on the same subject: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/indefenseofeyecandy/
Great looking presentation. Would have loved to hear it too.

Was the following ever true?

...it doesn't matter how pretty your site is or how many "bells and whistles" you have. While a high-quality site is important, the majority of people today value usability more than good looks or fanciness.

I firmly believe that if we (the collective we) don't start paying more attention to aesthetics, we are not going to survive this mess. The human landscape needs to start looking better. Would you rather have a trailer or one of these? http://www.smallhousestyle.com/2007/07/23/the-mill-house-by-...

I know that not everyone can afford one of these but if there was more desire for them in the market the prices would come down and possibly be more competitive with a double wide.
Good stuff. I would only change to title to "Why Everyone Should Stop Using XML."
With a short follow-up rant :-)

http://blogs.fluidinfo.com/fluidDB/2009/08/24/cloud-storage-...
"See randomness" has been a favorite proverb of mine ever since I read it. I also tend to use it when evaluating systems / situations from a risk management perspective (eg. raising kids).
None of your memories are true. Not as far as you can tell by introspection, at least.

We tell ourselves stories about ourselves -- our favorite subject -- and those narratives, compressed versions of our experiences, become our memories. They're all, every one of them, shaded by the theme we want for the story.

That doesn't have to be a bad thing: keep telling yourself as the hero of the story of Good Samaritin, the Valiant Little Tailer, or the Adventurous Entrepreneur, and you start to believe it ... and then you start living up to the story.
I'm usually most productive when I am about to leave the office. It's kind of strange and annoying at times.
Have you looked into EC2 at all?

While they have precanned "instance types" as well, they also offer a separate Elastic Block Storage service where you can ask for as much storage as you want, and it acts like a virtual hard disk on your partition.

http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/
Amazing. I'm going to give my new 13" MBP a few more months but this seems like a great mod.
Some people do more, some less.

Most people think they do much more.

At several large companies I worked at, it was absolutely impossible to do anything more that. Their structure made crushed any attempt at it with meetings. There were weeks where I had over 30 hours of meetings scheduled. Meetings where everyone felt productive but nothing really was accomplished.
Yes: http://weblog.raganwald.com/2006/10/are-we-blub-programmers....
There are languages that have useful features that lisp lacks. For example, Haskell has lazy evaluation and automatic compiler generated program correctness proofs (a decent type system).

Then there are languages that try to be even more powerful than Haskell, for example Epigram, which has dependent types.

Lazy evaluation is probably the language feature that is most mainstream that lisp lacks. For those not familiar with the abstraction benefits of lazy evaluation, consider a library for dealing with prime numbers. In a language without lazy evaluation, you are going to need an API with a function for getting the n_th prime number, a function for testing if a number is a prime number, a function for getting the smallest prime number larger than the number x, and a bunch of other functions.

In Haskell, the API only needs a single variable, called "primes" that is simply the infinite list of all the prime numbers:

primes :: [Integer] -- primes is of type list of Integer

Thanks to lazy evaluation, this single variable is all that is needed to support all of the above operations in an efficient way. For example, to get the n_th prime number you simply write (primes !! n)

Now, this may look cool, but what does it have to do with abstraction? Since "primes" is a regular list, I can use it with any list function and build more complex things out of it. I can also have a list of all the catalan numbers in the same way, and all my functions that I've written that do cool things with the prime numbers can now be instantly used against catalan numbers.

You can manually do lazy evaluation in languages that don't natively have it, but unless you do it everywhere you won't get the abstraction benefits, and if you do do it everywhere then the compiler almost certainly will not be able to optimize it as well as a native implementation.
They're a 'big brand' to Google because of the domain authority (registered in 96) and the hundreds of thousands of pages of unique content.

Back on topic: "cloaking" typically refers to hiding sketchy links, not hiding content or charging for it as Expert Sex Change does.
Will they run flat out, and to exhaustion?

Kids will come home completely wiped, and adults push themself even farther, will animals do that on their own?
If you can observe randomness, does that affect its randomness?
I've noticed that when I ascend (descend?) into the land of proofs, I get annoyed with fuzzy imprecise human matters.
The magician is an excellent example for yet another reason: one of the classic tricks in his arsenal is to narrate what's going on as he does it, and only lie just a little bit.

As you well know, when a magician tells you that he surely couldn't have influenced the cards which were in your hand the whole time (that little bit where he helped you straightened out the deck you just cut of course doesn't count), the trick's already over.

But when it's all over, what narrative does the audience tell themselves?
Very positive experience here. Also, they offer 32bits slices, while slicehost only offer 64bits.
CCP's economist, sadly, does not understand how EVE's economy works. His reports are many things -- "incorrect", "irrelevant", "incomprehensible" -- but never useful or informative. Most of the research into EVE's economy is performed by the large player power blocs, who have the incentives and knowledge necessary to understand EVE.
Why You Need a Plain Text Resume to Apply for Jobs Online
I think your question actually demonstrates a principle behind this essay. Paradigm shifts come from discarding assumptions. Often, this is embodied as correcting the question instead of the answer.

To me, the most convincing atheist argument has always been some variation of Russell's teapot.

Accepting Russell's argument (which I think is very hard not to without challenging knowledge generally) you cease to ask that question. Just because religion happens to usually come before atheism doesn't mean that atheism needs to prove itself. The burden of proof is on the theist because of the nature of the claim.

There is no need to prove that gods do not exist to be an atheist.
Actually, this statement of PG’s about Darwin’s contemporaries is pretty oversimplified. Evolution-like ideas had been “in the air” for several decades when Darwin published, and at the time, many regarded them as heresy (by default), while others had bought into them. Natural selection was indeed a new idea, but while it strengthened the argument for evolution tremendously by providing a plausible mechanism, and while the giant pile of evidence in Darwin’s book was extremely important, the debates at the time weren’t all that different in tone from the ones that happen today (except that today all of the legitimate scientists are on one side these days).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_evolutionary_thought

Lamark’s main works were from the turn of the 19th century, as was Cuvier’s work on extinction, and Darwin’s uncle Erasmus’s descriptions of “metamorphoses”. Paley’s Natural Theology, which originated the famous “watchmaker” analogy for God, was from 1802. The Vestiges, published anonymously in 1844, sparked massive controversy that was the talk of “educated” people throughout the world. Indeed, when Darwin finally published the Origin in 1859, the scientific/religious debate had been widespread for 50 years, and in the general public consciousness for at least a decade or two; Darwin himself had been well aware of it as a young man.
So basically you find you can't use logical discourse or demonstrate your truths scientifically and so resort to ad hominem attacks?
That article seemed full of purpose the first time I read it, the second time, not so much. More like a random selection of slogans and triviality.
If you want to give away as little money as possible, remove all occurrences of C D M and A. It seems like that's all anyone ever guesses.
"Ajax on Rails," while focussed on Ajax, has a lot of really good general information on Rails too, and is extremely well written. It's somewhat outdated now (really all Rails books are) but still very much worth reading IMHO.
Wild animals - I doubt they'd ever take that risk. Domesticated ones? I think so. I've seen my dogs expend so much energy in a day that they can hardly walk and even appear to stumble or plop down on the floor without their usual grace. My parents' older dog will spend a day being hyper-excited (usually caused by the presence of my dogs.. :) and refuse to move by evening. Like, literally, she curls up in a ball and will not move for anything. Calling her name, getting excited for her to come, tugging on her collar, holding food in front of her... etc. When she gets that way, you just have to pick her up if you want her to move - because she won't (or can't) do it on her own.

Perhaps it's just dogs and humans. I've never seen my cat get that excited. :) My 8mo old, though, will wipe himself out if allowed to. I've seen him push himself so long and hard that he climbed halfway up a pair of steps and fell asleep in the process. (Was terrible cute seeing him asleep on the step - looked oddly comfortable...)
Start-Ups Are Poised For Latest Space Race
If you're interested in the part about endurance adaptations for persistence hunts, this book is great:

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

http://www.amazon.com/Born-Run-Hidden-Superathletes-Greatest...

(if you are not interested, I wager after starting the book you will be :-))
You say he is "overstating [your] claims" yet you wish the death of all religious people? You flame and then smother so that you can flame once more it seems.
Persistence Hunting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wI-9RJi0Qo
Holidays Reservation Online
For me, Dawkins had a similar effect but on a different topic. I'm younger than pg, so maybe I grew up with the idea that we are just another species on its way.

What I did get snapped into was understanding 2 things about evolution by natural selection:

1) It is an abstract principle. It exists very comfortably outside of genetics or even biology in a very similar way to numbers existing outside of apples and oranges.

2) It is creation. That is, it has abilities so similar to what we call creativity that it can very plausibly be called creativity.

Just defining and demonstrating memes along with his description of some classroom experiment drawing boats brought those two things home. After that, I got why biologists are so in love with evolution.

Biology happens to utilise this powerful principle. Happens to. There may be many such powerful principles out there without a flagship product. Undiscovered.
No I think Common Lisp does have more mistakes than Scheme. But I should have said, "Scheme isn't as laden with mistakes..." And that's partly because most of the current Scheme standard was evolved after the Common Lisp standard was set.

Agreed on your last point, and I recommend trying Clojure out for some little project. It might surprise you how much more succinct it is than Common Lisp. Arc too, from what I've heard.
Python Bytecode Disassembler
Five Myths About Health Care Around the World
Do you think there would be an advantage for a ycombinator like group that wasn't based in the United States? Or do other venture capitalists have this covered?
It's probably not a coincidence that Mr. Graham revisited this essay after having his first child; there's nothing quite like parenthood for ejecting you from the center of your own universe.
I think the Apple ads try and cast PC as a representation of conformity, they aren't making fun of PC.
I recommend the film Rashomon, one of my favorite explorations of the theme of fallible memory. Several observers all remember a scene completely differently, and the film shows each version in turn, without offering any way to tell whether any is more true than another.

Also, Memento is a great mind-bender, if you think writing things down makes anyone sure of anything.
You've reductio'd to something that isn't absurdum.
I'm surprised to see so many negative comments. It's not about neglecting your duties or pawning your work onto someone else. It's about doing your job quickly and efficiently. My personal opinion is many jobs should not be structured as hourly full time positions but should instead be based off your actual value and efficiently. So if you can get the work done in 10 hours a week that should be it. You get paid 4x as much per hour. Many companies are starting to move towards independent contractors who are paid on a more realistic and honest scale and compete against each other on value & efficiency. I think it's a good thing. Of course it does not apply to all office jobs and probably not even the majority of jobs. It tends to be more common with engineers.
I think he is merely referring to the assertive nature of this part of essay:

No, it turns out, humans are not created by God in his own image; they're just one species among many, descended not merely from apes, but from microorganisms.
I love this tool. Been bookmarked.

There's something seriously wrong with the web (or my usage of it). Whenever I need something like this, I cant find it. Go on google, search for any kind of tool. No matter how you word it, the results never get passed 1999.

Yesterday I needed something to convert a couple timezones. Try finding something via google. Every relevant keyword match was a pile of shit tool belongs in 1995.

One idea is that the people who are good at making tools are the exact opposite of the people who are good at SEO.

Or I could just be doing something wrong. Not using google right, or maybe I should be using a different search engine. Help would be appreciated!
I occasionally think of adding lazy evaluation to Arc. I could make news.arc about 5 lines shorter if I had it. It could be that there are other types of code where it would make a more significant difference, though.
How do we know that we are one of the few animals that can run long distance? We might be one of the three who HAVE, but that is only because we have attempted. And one of the other two animals who has run long distance, a siberian husky, has only done it because humans forced him to.

Where is the proof that other animals are physically unable to run long distance? Just because a horse doesn't drink the water does not mean he can't.
My comment still applies.

I'm not really trying to convince anyone, just showing how for many people the process of changing their mind about God involved the principle outlined in the essay and demonstrated in these comments.

According to Russell (with whom I agree) The fallacy lies in the question, a common place for blind spots to hide.