skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If a five year old actually did that, wouldn't you think it's a clear indication of intelligence?
Microsoft will donate 8 meals to the poor if you download IE
I do something similar with labels and filters.

I basically setup multiple email addresses in my Apps email account, then create a Label for each one.

Then setup filters to check the 'to:' and 'from:' fields for a given email address, and apply the label.

Now your 'Labels' sidebar acts as that drop-down that you wanted.
Free logic book: Introduction to Proof Theory (1998) (PDFs)
Would be nice to have a list of all sites of this type and a general indication of their quality.

It's certainly an interesting way to get stuff done.
Why do we still defer to IQ? It's a 2D approach at measuring intelligence in a 3D world.

"The scale, properly speaking, does not permit the measure of intelligence, because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured."
-Alfred Binet, 1905
I see two problems with this statement:

1. This only works if you're willing to seclude yourself in the Microsoft Yurt and never leave. Technical benefits aside, history has shown MS is not afraid to abandon projects. It's a dangerous position to take, in my opinion.

And I sincerely doubt a port of Clojure to .NET would result in a 0-difference result. We're back to the exact same problem that plagues other lisp implementations right now, which is to say we haven't really bought much.

2. It's not that different from how things are in the C world, save that you'd share more of your runtime infrastructure. My job has been full of instances where an executable interacts with a diverse set of languages. One example I work on daily includes Erlang, Ruby, Prolog, and C++ all in one space, calling around (in a structured way, of course). The implication that you cannot make modern languages communicate without a single umbrella runtime is demonstrably false.
Good list. Three years ago I made a working demo of #22 but then got distracted by personal problems. Thanks for reminding me.
I know exactly how you feel. I was recently laid off for 5 weeks and worked full-time on my startup. Working from home was so awesome... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=641400

With that said, here are my thoughts.

First of all, you're lucky if you enjoy your job and work with friends. I would strongly suggest that you see if you can work part-time while you "do your own thing", with a possibility of coming back full-time, should you ever "come to your senses".

With no plan, no idea, no help and no anything, I don't see how you can support yourself past "several months at least". One remedy is to find a fledgling startup to join. It's risky without knowing the other founders well, but it could be good experience.

My #1 recommendation for you is to read the following links:

http://www.slideshare.net/venturehacks/customer-development-...

http://steveblank.com/2009/08/27/the-leading-cause-of-startu...

http://steveblank.com/2009/08/31/the-customer-development-ma...

Basically, the idea is to verify that your idea can actually make money before you write one line of code. Since you're probably heavy on tech and light on customer development, use this time to learn and experiment. I'm not telling you this as a know-it-all, I'm telling you this as someone who wishes they would have done it years ago.

Good luck with whatever you choose to do.

EDIT: spelling
How are you finding Feller?

I've been through Shiryaev and have very mixed feelings on that one.
Dear writer. In the future, please refrain from telling your visitors "Well if you ain't gonna read the whole thing here's the best". Having your article on one fucking page usually ensures people will scroll to the bottom. Thank you.
These rentacoder or elance sites make money by being the middleman. You can do the same by hiring these same workers overseas and reselling their services to local companies at a premium.
How does one discover that they have brain cancer?
just read this on reddit [http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/9g3ml/ebay_sells...]:

> was on a team that looked at buying Skype 2.5 years ago. The company was making only $0.19 per user per year at that time (ARPU) and bleeding to death. $2.0 billion is an insanely high figure to pay for Skype - not sure how this investor group is going to recover their money
I suppose the test measures the ability to differentiate details among items. I can see how this would be a sign of intelligence. If two people cannot understand how two things are different, then they cannot learn. Learning is about assimilating new information, but if the person doesn't believe or see that there is new information there, then no new neurons will be formed to store the new information.
Her defense of inherited wealth amounted to the right of the creator of the wealth to dispose of it as he/she chooses. If he leaves it to his children, fine, if he gives it to a house for stray cats, fine,it's HIS choice because he earned it.
I never did understand this averseness to anything not algol-derived... I personally like Lisps syntax (fuck off, even though it looks different and uses "s-expressions" and code as data and all the rest - ITS STILL SYNTAX) and I like point free syntax and forth-like syntax and prolog intrigues me and ML has interesting syntax too and ...

My point is: ITS JUST SYNTAX! Syntax doesn't define the language, just the look. I do like a nice, clean, concise syntax though.
Scratch your own itch: build something you either need and doesn't exist or it does exist but sucks.
Shouldn't we ask ourselves if this goal is reasonable? Making arbitrary software is at the limits of our capacity right now, even if people devote their lives to it as a profession, passion, and an art.

It's one thing to take an approach like Apple Automator (a much beloved automation environment), but it's another entirely to say, "General Purpose Software should be within the grasp of the 'average person.'" It's not clear that the goal is even reasonable! A lot of software, to do what it does, requires the use of complex mathematics, algorithms, and cryptography that frequently even the implementors only vaguely understand. Manipulating those in an abstract and correct fashion is difficult in the extreme (e.g., the morass of timing attacks that have plagued modern implementations of cryptographic protocols). We can barely make software with smart people!
>> " It's trivially extensible; if you control both ends of the connection, grab a namespace and go to town."

So what's the point of using xmpp at all? Why not just use a specific protocol geared to your use case? Using your own simple protocol is also trivially extensible. And human readable. Writing a parser for a json like syntax is also trivial - contrast this with an xml parser which is not trivial.
Where's that friend button when you need it...

How about this:

Find some idea, get your friend on board as an investor / advisor ? You guys seem to get along well and have each others interests at heart otherwise you wouldn't say you loved the job that much.

Three birds with one stone, angel investor / mentor / continued professional relationship, only this time you are in charge.
Thanks a lot! This is precisely the kind of answer I wanted. Don't want to stay for part-time, though; I'm terrible at switching from project to project, this takes days.
It also seems to help the claim that school dumbs you down.

I was with you and agreeing with you until this line. By itself this article provides no evidence of that.

Now, if something like "And of those who did not yet attend school or where home schooled 90% of those classified as gifted in initial testing retained that classification 18 months later..." But it did not do that.

As it stands, this is much better evidence of how much and how rapidly brains can change at that age, but nothing more without further facts.

I do agree with your other points though, and think that that portion is well worth following up on.
These are great questions and ones we're beginning to explore. For instance, suppose the frontal cortex of a precious 8-year-old looks more like that of a ten-year-old. They could have simply developed faster but will regress to the mean by the end of maturation (early twenties). Or they could continue to be more advanced for their age.

Conversely, I'm more interested by the kids who are "delayed" in their cortical development. Those are the kids that get shunted into remedial programs and stigmatized throughout their schooling. It's perhaps an undeserved regressive cycle rather than the progressive one in the case of gifted kids.

One thought I can't shake: Imagine a day where kids are sorted into classrooms, and subjects, based on the state of their brain development. Of course, there's a simplifying assumption in there that it's a passive process of cortical development. Still, we can do so much better than sorting kids based on age and IQ.
All I get is a box with:

Type your comment here.

Am I missing something?
I have been searching high and low for something like this for months -- I have a number of clients that have been begging me for this, as well as something for my own needs.

I'm excitedly posting a link to this on my personal site, and today I have a lot of phone calls to make to clients.

Why is it that the best products and services are also the hardest to find when you're looking for them?
Diabetes vs Medical ID's
Is that last bit in the book or elsewhere?
The price comparison with other solutions isn't really fair. The cost per PB of these storage building blocks is directly compared to complete storage solutions from companies like NetApp and EMC. In the end the cost of the complete solution they assemble these building blocks into may well be cheaper than solutions from other companies and that's the number they should be using for comparison.
So true. In fact, I laugh when I see managers come out to the "secretary" to setup an appointment instead of using outlook. The time they spend telling the secretary what they want is more than the time it takes to add a few people to an invite and send it out.

And yes, I'm talking about technology managers (not managers of developers but developers who became managers).
I would go SaaS only. The ones who insist on having everything on their servers are probably going to be high-maintenance customers you don't want to deal with anyway. Remember the 80/20 rule. The 20% of your clients who want the download will take up 80% of your time.

You have to convince them that SaaS is the better deal - regular, automatic updates, tight security, redundant backups, and reliable access - and they won't want to consider the downloadable version.

You should prefer SaaS because you can charge them more in the long run if you get them dependent on you, in addition to reducing the setup time and effort.
Interesting that they use 'financial analyst' to represent an equivalently intelligent adult.
SNI looks nice but considering that amount of SSL libraries out there that don't support it (including browsers), it will probably be something like 5-10 years before we could deploy SNI for a general purpose site/service.
In the next section they say they have implemented the machine level redundancy. As for geographic redundancy I think the idea is that you use them for that. As in you backup your data locally and then send it to them as a redundant copy.
You're overparsing my intention. When you work for another company, there is always someone else who ultimately has to sign off on your decisions; I'd far rather be the person with whom the buck always stops.
Do you know if baby size at birth is correlated to higher intelligence later in life? Also, what about the amount of hair a child is born with? Any correlation there?
Schools used to use a better approach. They began using lock-step age grouping in the 1850s.

http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html
So ramen profitability will take you five years? That's pretty depressing - I don't want to think about that scenario :-)
Requires a login, and won't let me contribute something that might be useful without first giving an email address.

That's their chicken-and-egg problem, and it's in their hands. Let people contribute without a login, let them benefit from their contributions, and people will play. Control the quality in the first stages and you have a viable product.
Service Idea: S3 offsite backups. Run http://www.eucalyptus.com/open/ on this kind of hardware.
Making arbitrary software is at the limits of our capacity right now, even if people devote their lives to it as a profession, passion, and an art.

Yeah, you are exactly right. Programming languages need to be designed for the very best programmers -- they are the ones that need the productivity boost. For me, not understanding the language is never a problem. Making something "easier to understand" will not help me write software that goes together faster or ends up more reliable. It often has the opposite effect; Java's lack of ... everything, for the sake of simplicity, really slows me down. Comparatively, learning a new concept is much easier. If I start using a library that uses Arrows, I read the Arrow paper, spend a few days playing with it, and then I have one more tool that will help me be more productive every day for the rest of my life. Making a language that doesn't have arrows saves me reading a paper about them, but it wastes my time every day for the rest of my life.

So, "simple" programming languages -- do not want. I am not saying that you should start your "intro to computer programming" class with a long lecture about category theory, but I am saying that you should never hide things from people that want to know about them.
3 drivers of growth for your business model. Choose one.
Thanks for the links and clarification.

The page on browser.urlbar.richResults says: "Has an effect in * Mozilla Firefox (nightly builds from 2007-11-29 to 2007-12-17)"

So I guess you need to do what it says under "Background" to get rid of the awesome bar: "If you’d like to disable the improved Location Bar dropdown in a version of Firefox without this preference, try the oldbar extension."
Just to clarify; I find it depressing that more people don't want to learn about things and figure out how they work. I don't call them names. ;)
Seems to be a teaser. Feels dirty/sploggy.
I suppose the test measures the ability to differentiate details among items. I can see how this would be a sign of intelligence.

This was Francis Galton's theory of intelligence more than a century ago, but repeated studies have shown that sensory discrimination is very poorly correlated with anything that can properly be called "intelligence" among adult test-takers.

http://www.personalityresearch.org/acton/sense.html
Twitter Bar
"I love my cracker roots."

Yes!
Keep in mind, self control is a better indicator for real-world success than is IQ. searchyc for the article, it was linked here.
Sadly, 1984 likewise seems to have predicted many current things.
Airborne Wi-Fi May Soar Despite the Doubters
It shall certainly be a shame to have you contribute less. I found your comments to be insightful and useful personally.

Also, while I personally think that having this site mostly focused on more technical matters is nice, I do think there is room for nontechnical contributors in general.
Funnel Analysis with Mixpanel (YC S09)
USPTO: Using Three Knowledge Bases To Diagnose Is Patentable [umm... how?]
"They are phenomenally accurate at predicting full-scale intelligence scores."

You are arguing against the statement without the word "scores" in it. That's not the same statement. The statement as it was made is correct, and there's no need for a study to be cited; this is the study being cited.

Note how the authors go on to point out that if this simple test has a 99% correlation with the complicated test, then, logically, they are effectively the same test, and if you can't believe that line sorting is an adequate intelligence indicator, than neither are the conventional tests.

Slow down with the shooting-from-the-hip there; this entire article is all about how bad tests are for determining intelligence, if you actually read it. It's not just the "later paragraphs".
That was from june 10th until August 8th, 2009, so it's over.

Pity, if I would have known I would have fired up some wget threads.

Imagine google getting in on that, bankrupting a competitor and solving world hunger in one go.
Thanks for sharing the quotation from Alfred Binet, developer of the first practical IQ test battery (for the unambitious purpose of efficient school placement of elementary pupils in schools with lock-step age grading). His view was correct then, and it is still correct today, but widely ignored.

More recent authors who criticize the mainstream psychometric concept of intelligence (operationalized as IQ scores) include Keith Stanovich.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...
When will stackexchange be available? (it's now 9/1 everywhere)
Yeah, it was very depressing when it first hit me. Great learning experience though.
The last bit is in Shurkin's book, and also in a book by Eysenck, with the primary source in both cases cited as personal recollections of the two Nobel Prize winners.

I think it is independently historically verifiable that both Alvarez and Shockley attended schools where Terman did testing for ascertainment for his longitudinal study. It is definitely historically verifiable that neither Nobel prize winner was included in the study--Shurkin had full access to the study data files.
I predict it will be ready in 6 to 8 more weeks.
I had a look at this and it is quite promising.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=789312
Hm. If Lisp would be an "everybodys" language, what would be the Lisp then?
Actually, the main success of lisp comes from its purity its scientific deepness. If you try to follow another goal, you just lose vision for your actual one.
If somebody really needs an "everybodys" language, for example because he is a lawyer or something else, okay. There is Python, Javascript, Java and many other languages who try in different ways to be for everybody. And all of them are important. As is Lisp, how it is.
1. Start a forum.

2. Invent some certification program that doesn't make a lot of sense for people running sketchy businesses.

3. ???

4. $400,000/month!
Hmm… I can think of one reason. Public school is designed for the bottom 60%. Therefore the top 40% will always be dragged down towards that level.

I also found (this may not be true in general) that the majority of public school teachers come from the bottom 60% and they have a serious lack of ambition.
Horse hockey.

While I know that there are a lot of horror stories (and I can tell a few), some of the most productive "programmers" I've ever met used MS Access or Excel.

If you don't consider advanced usage of these applications as a form of programming, then you are illustrating the point: It is not only possible to "dumb down" programming, it is inevitable. So much so that you haven't even noticed it happening.
Go ahead and try it, and you'll find out why.

Why not use a better protocol to send email? Why are we still using HTTP to send web traffic, even though we've really gotten beyond what it is good at? Why am I FTP-ing a file even as we speak?

You're basically asking why utopia doesn't exist. You won't like the answers, so I'm not going to bother with them. All I can say is: Try it. See how far you get. I'm not kidding. This isn't just a rhetorical device. Go out and try to define your own protocol. See how many people rush over to join in. Maybe you'll pull off an Atom, but the odds are long.

(In fact, I do use my own protocol when I control both endpoints, even in a use case that looks a lot like XMPP, and in fact it is JSON based. The project I am working on right now has that as its backbone. But I know the limits of that approach. Bear that in mind as you try to understand where I'm coming from.)
Amusing: "He believes that people will be drawn to the bike because it requires more work to cycle and therefore will provide more exercise for the cyclist than a conventional bike."
He rambles a lot, but he's right about the need for a new Lisp, and refers to the ILC'05 presentations by Dussud, Baker, and McCarthy on "Re-inventing Lisp". Those are some pretty radical proposals. (Summaries: http://www.findinglisp.com/blog/2005/06/ilc-2005-wednesday-r...).

I think the trouble with Lisp (and Scheme) is that there's so much cruft and inconsistency beneath the veneer of simplicity (see http://tnovelli.blogspot.com/2009/08/lisp-crisis.html). Lisp is a great language to study; I just wish it was more practical and popular. It sucks having to choose between awkward (Lisp) and inflexible (everything else). :-(
... slightly off topic, but do you have a good resource for learning Arrows? It's on my list of things to do, but I haven't dug around for a good example yet.
Interesting. Wouldn't this also reduce the validity of this 5 minute IQ test?

I suppose there could be physical issues, like poor vision or tactile sensitivity that would affect a test like this. So I wonder, perhaps people who can see better are more likely to be smarter simply because they can observe more items in the world.
The link above is an animation of the Rouleaux Triangle and will draw a square with rounded corners. In this article, the author talks about a variant of that triangle that will draw exact squares.
I found a recently published list of 20 of them. This is by no means a complete list, and there is no indication of quality that I can find.

http://acrisdesign.com/2009/08/hello-world/
You are arguing against the statement without the word "scores" in it.

I agree with you that the overall tenor of the blog post is skepticism about early childhood IQ tests, but I am additionally skeptical of the Swiss test-giver's claim that his sensory perception test correlates well with IQ scores of children at the same age. That's just his claim so far. The blog post doesn't include anyone "showing the work" to show that that is replicable result. It would be a very strange result, actually, inconsistent with results that have been replicated many times (as mentioned in a scientific publication I linked to in another reply in this rapidly growing thread).

http://www.personalityresearch.org/acton/sense.html

But, yes, even if the quick-and-dirty test correlates very well with preschool IQ tests, that doesn't mean much, because preschool IQ tests--all of them--correlate poorly with anything of interest, including subsequent IQ scores, that shows up at school age.
executive summary:

build a forum community, talk to the community about what they need, build something around their needs, and sell it to them. they don't want to buy it? ask why not, and fix it.
If you are really interested in the math involved you can look at any algorithms book. I used this one in my undergrad:
http://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Jon-Kleinberg/dp/0321...

Its a good introduction, but it will require you to be decent at math and know how to do proofs.

On the other hand, if you are interested in how programs can express things, then maybe you want to learn about some CS theory. Specifically, some lambda calculus would be good to learn, but I don't have any good suggestions.

Note: All of these will be easier to read if you are pretty good at programming, so I'd say follow at least the first piece of advise above.
This is not apples vs apples. Some of those items are living cows, and some are cooked steaks served with a side of mashed potatoes. I'm sure the cow looks cheap (per pound) until you are tasked with turning it into a steak.