skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are a million critiques, many of which I've read. Some are better than others. By far the most ill-informed is The Mismeasure of Man. It's the worst of the bunch, written by an idiot. If you want a intelligent critique, I can point you to some.

Now, Murray had problems in The Bell Curve -- he didn't properly understand regression to the mean, for example. But did you students actually read it before laughing? He was pretty solid on most of the genetic topics he covered (a small part of the book).

Here's a good start to correcting your opinion about Gould: http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2009/01/a_week_with_gre.h...
Yeah, been walking around that thing for the past couple of years of Cocoaheads meetings on the CMU campus.

Too bad it's an eyesore.

So much of modern architecture is an emperor-no-clothes situation, because no one has the guts to stand up and say it's ugly.

Or take the Scala center at MIT--a kid's fun-house building. It's very clever on one scale, but what will people in 50 years think? They'll think our generation was nuts.

These wild-idea-du-jour kinds of buildings will not endure the test of time.
the easier it is to create an account, the more astroturfing will happen.
I've been wondering about this: for personal projects, Python is compelling. But when you start working with multiple developers, the lack of compile time type checking seems like it would lead to a lot of subtle runtime errors. How do multi-person Python projects deal with this?
There's more than just haskell talks, though the recent ones are from the Haskell Symposium at ACM SIGPLAN
If it's a bad habit? 1 or 2 repetitions.

If it's a good habit? Apparently never.
Hey, I'm a real live schizophrenic and I've been hear 18 months. The site is rad, but I'm a dues-paying subscriber on last.fm. My critique of this site rests about the exclusivity of demographic. Does anyone outside of 18-24yr-olds show up on the radar?
Thanks, we only rolled that out late last night, the about page definitely needs some wording adding, will be done ASAP. Thanks for the feedback.

Mat
That headline didn't kick me much (well, so you can build a website on clojure, duh!) but while clicking through that site I was fascinated by their writing about the company philosophy.

http://www.freiheit.com/tag/Jobs#ag9mZGN3ZWJzaXRldGVzdDFyDQs...

The english translation is horrible but here some highlights from the Jobs-page:

* The day begins at 9:00AM, not later, preferably earlier.

* Release dates are never(!) shifted.

* We believe in the "Broken Window"-theory. Companies degenerate, too. That begins with a paperclip laying around. Consequently every employee must empty their desk before they leave.

Along these lines there's this cultish subtone in all of their writing which is hard to translate. Reading their blurbs gave me the chills like no other company description I've ever read. Definitely has a "zombie B-movie" taste to it.
What a great word.

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

"Astroturfing is a word in English describing formal political, advertising, or public relations campaigns seeking to create the impression of being spontaneous "grassroots" behavior, hence the reference to the artificial grass, AstroTurf."
I'm not a perl guy, but have found cpan to actually feel like a library - you get differences in quality and no standard approach to anything but it's a vast resource.

I am a Perl guy, and you are not far from the truth. CPAN has a staggering number of modules, many of which are battle-hardened, brilliant pieces of code, many more of which are multiple v0.01 half-assings of the same purpose, and some of which are just toys.

The there's-more-than-one-way-to-do-it (TIMTOWTDI) philosophy of the Perl community practicallly ensures that CPAN will be this way. Rarely is there a "canonical" way to do anything. There isn't and never will be a list of CPAN modules indexed by quality.

I have been writing Perl professionally for about ten years now. I love and appreciate CPAN as a resource, and there is nothing like it in other languages. But for common constructs, I also appreciate having a single, well-written module as part of the language core, rather than fishing through six or seven e.g. DateTime implementations and trying to decide which one suits me best. I do Ruby work as well, and I am quite pleased with the Ruby core libs in this way. (The OO-all-the-way-down design of Ruby helps too.)
A family income of $300k is upper class, by the way. No one likes to call themselves rich, but $300k is at least in the top 10%, which is decidedly not middle.
I don't see how it benefits the submission though when it's so evident. I personally didn't even follow the link because of these spamlike comments.
Unable to reclaim old HN account
I'm posting here in hopes of getting my 'trickjarrett' account back. I've emailed PG twice over the past few weeks, all to no avail. Not even a response. I know he's busy and gets a lot of emails, but if the solution as has been posted elsewhere is to contact him about it, it's pretty shoddy to not get any responses...

So I've decided to just give up waiting and create a second account in the hopes of one day regaining my old, more comfortable, user account.
I'm glad that we a) have a community that is smart enough to pick up on this and fast (doesn't take rocket science) b) actually cares about pointing it out. People always ask me why HN hasn't gone to shit and I point to comments like this. ++community
Maybe there should be a Karma threshold on commenting on "Rate My Startup" posts
That's my fault, can assure you none of them are fake, lot of them are new though. Tweeted the link out, and our followers seem a little excited to help out today, a few probably just signed up.

Mat
> It annoys me greatly when I see people can read my book for free somewhere because I don't get paid.

Do you object to public libraries?
You forgot to add the argument that it's (strictly speaking) more accurate, since Yehuda is just one of the tribes.

But s/Hebrew/Colored/. Same arguments apply, but---here we are.
You're whole scientific reasoning is based on....The Bell Curve?!

I'd have a laugh too. And some of whatever you're drinking.
> based on a survey of 549 company founders across a variety of industries
Crowdsourcing is customer development to the extreme. By placing R&D in control of the customers, only products which are useful are likely to emerge. More companies (especially those which high brand recognition) should be using this technique. It generates quality products for relatively low costs.
The gripe is not that default behavior exists. The gripe is that, once you have made an element draggable, you need to override a few seemingly-unrelated default behaviors in order to implement the most obvious form of drag-and-drop. Or, more precisely: you need to turn off not one, but two "drag" defaults in order to react to "drop" events.
I subscribe via RSS using Firefox's live bookmark feature (so, I've got a directory of bookmarks that list rss article titles). When I want to read an article, I go to the site and read it via that RSS bookmark link (ads are there and all).

Do you use RSS differently? If so, how?
Isn't this solved by the "draggable" attribute? Why work at the events-level at all for this.
That's the exact reason they push interns beyond breaking point. My friend regularly made silly, dangerous mistakes when tired - every time he did a serious dressing down ensued.

Because he was an intern a qualified doctor always double checked him so none of the mistakes were enacted. But he learned his limits and how far it was safe to go.

People put their lives in the hands of doctors; they are under pressure, overworked and often have a tiny margin for error. Knowing your limits is one of the most important aspects.

This is the reason usually only the brightest and hardest workers at school make the grade to become a doctor. Not because of their smarts - but because they can concentrate and focus on a task and achieve highly on it in a consistent way, even under pressure.
absolutely. it's great for a few reasons:

a) you get constructive feedback. it may be tough to swallow, but it's usually not trollish at all.

b) you get to see new products and learn just by reading the threads. seriously, someone should put together a domain or something like it, listing all these type of posts.

c) unless you're launching something appealing to hackers/startups, they won't be long term users. the cool thing is, a lot of interesting people may contact you or become a connection through this.
I think the place the article here goes wrong is "This theory stands in contrast to the idea that sleep has a restorative function...". I don't know if the original proponent is claiming this, as I find the post can be read either way.

Basic evolutionary theory would point out that even if sleep started out as a totally optional thing that could be skipped with no loss, that evolution would rapidly start using the sleep period as a hook to load in other things that provided an adaptive advantage. For instance, as long as you're going to be sitting there doing little-to-nothing in a controlled, predictable manner, why not load all your muscle repair into that time period, leaving your wakefulness period with muscles not concerned about repair? Why not load various cognitive batch processes into the sleep period, as long as it is there, leaving you with a brain that isn't worried about those things during the wakefulness period and therefore spending more energy on useful computation, or even just plain spending less?

I've actually directly observed this process in my evolutionary computation homework assignments. I choose that phrasing to indicate my not-extensive experience on the topic, and that even so, I've seen this, where chunks of useful code get loaded up with other stuff that bears some sort of relationship to the original. (And evolution has a strange idea of "relationship".) (I do sometimes think that evolutionary computation should be a required course for biologist PhDs; the hands-on experience is invaluable.)

I often wonder at "either/or" arguments in the context of evolution; to me it betrays a profound misunderstanding about the process. It is the very incarnation of a "both/and" process. Is sleep an optional resting period just to conserve energy, or a time for healing, recovery, and cognitive batch processes? Perhaps there was a brief time when the answer was one or the other, but today the answer is simply "Yes", in general. (Your Species' Mileage May Vary, I'm speaking to the general case.)
Did they figure out the Napoleon Dynamite conundrum?
I would note that I think Pittsburgh and Boston are both more segregated than the average American city -- Boston famously so.
imo, the greatest improvement in this process is made when both sides (interviewer and interviewee) realize it's a two way street - a mutually beneficial relationship.

Both sides, pick some problems that NONE of you know the answer to and work through them together. If the interviewer wants to do a group interview, let the person interviewing bring some friends along, too.
Adoptabot: the Friendly Household Upcycled Robot
No, and especially not in Europe where I get paid when people take my book out of the library :-)

http://www.plr.uk.com/

But even without that I don't have an objection to libraries because they do not copy my book, they simply lend it.
I understood that, but don't accept the premise of the "digital" changes the world (in this context). Can you imagine a business selling bootleg (hard) copies of text books opening shop in a university town? What's so hard about making paper copies? Sell it at a bit over copying cost and you'd still be underselling the legitimate publisher by a huge margin. Where would the students buy their books?

The fact that the content is in "digital" even makes checking for notices of copyrights that much more trivial. We're all geeks here, so lets be honest:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/15490856/Java-Pocket-Guide-by-ORei...

"Copyright (c) 2008 Robert Liguori and Patricia Liguori. All rights reserved."

If you are taking a digital format and converting it to the scribd format, how trivial is it for you to write a function that greps for the "Copyright" and "all rights reserved" phrases in the text?

The Olive Oil business:
(A protection racket. Organized crime. etc.)

I hope she gets her pound of flesh.
I assume they have a cron job running to keep the site alive - Google App Engine for Java has a nasty habit of putting your app to sleep and then it takes 20 or 30 seconds to wake it up (at least that's what happens with JRuby - I don't know about Clojure).
I'm curoius why everyone resizes images when they're uploaded.

I think the better way is not in any way changing the uploaded file, instead resizing it when it's actually requested by a client.
This way, your pages can ask server for whatever actual size they need in the moment instead of setting image size once in stone.
Like, if you've uploaded kitty.jpg, you can then ask for kitty_120x50.jpg or kitty_300x.jpg or kitty_x200.jpg (with missing dimension being calculated to preserve ratio).

If course, resized files are stored along with the original to avoid costly resizing process each time. If there's already a copy with required sizes, it's served really, really fast.
Human beings are still evolving. Much or most of what's been changing in recent evolutionary history have to do with brain development. When you examine things like the HapMap, you find that the gene distribution of these changes is different in different places. Yes, I mean different in that non-PC way.

Are a couple of recent papers from Science good enough?

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/309/5741/1717

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/309/5741/1720
Hi CTurner,

I don't know why you were downmodded... what you said makes perfect sense.

I am firmly in the camp of Achieve and Prosper. Being Jewish helps :) , but the Immigrant bit was the mainstay of my comment. jews have been thrown out of lots of countries (including Egypt/Israel/Iran in Bible) so it may be in our blood to be Immigrants and thus to trust most in the care you can provide to your own family via success. I know lots of 5 generation jews who underperform versus some dynamic Israelis. Different topic, different discussion.

--

I only commented on it because I work extensively with Charities. I now do volunteer work with the IT4Communities[1] and have worked with lots of others in the past too.

I have perceived an active repulsion to Money and Success amongst many Charity Staff. These staff are often recruited from the community which normally does the rest of the caring.

This is where I have developed my idea that the Fear of Money is actually misguided Concern for Community. They love their community as it struggles to help the needy and are petrified of being left as the only broke fuckers who care as the University grads end up in finance.

----------

[1] http://www.it4communities.org.uk/it4c/home/index.jsp
COBOL turns 50
In reality COBOL will be the 100 year language, it's halfway there.
Does anybody actually like tag clouds? I've always wondered.
All of these compounded over hundreds and possibly thousands of years could have possibly affected the IQ of the Jewish population. There is one problem with this idea, in that most of that requires an elevated IQ to begin with.

I don't understand why this requires an elevated IQ to start with. If we suppose that IQ is partly genetic, and therefore subject to random mutations, and if we further suppose that the smarter offspring have better opportunities to mate, then wouldn't that be enough to end up with a smarter group of people over time?
Interview with Mark Zuckerberg
Papers here:

http://www.netflixprize.com/assets/GrandPrize2009_BPC_BellKo...

http://www.netflixprize.com/assets/GrandPrize2009_BPC_BigCha...

http://www.netflixprize.com/assets/GrandPrize2009_BPC_Pragma...
Shell script to ping multiple hosts
Genachowski announces new FCC website
Thanks for pointing me towards some more, competition...they look to have a very clean setup.

Beatnex is aiming to differentiate itself from those type of sites though by providing real-life services through the web. While the likes of thesixtyone and Amie Street help a band sell their music digitally, we believe that their ultimate success is rooted in engaging fans in a physical manner. For example, we have created an automatic gig booking system of sorts. The band simply picks a date, time, and a desired venue, then a request is sent off to the appropriate people. This venue will then have all the information they need about the band, and can accept their request instantly.

We also believe that those little plastic discs that the RIAA peddles aren't dead in the water. In a recent study, 90% of 18-25 year olds said that they would like to purchase a CD even if they can download the same music online. Its simply a matter of creating value for those customers through creativity (ie. buy a cd, get a jam session with the band). We have arranged the capability to offer on-demand pro CD creation--the band doesn't have to invest a dime in that production.

These are just a couple of directions that we are going in right now, thanks for your feedback!
still close enough to search for things.

% postcode

NG15

% ff http://www.google.com/webhp?q=ng15+curry

bah google changed their uri scheme
Is that - yes they're considered spammy, or yes it's a valid form of getting feedback? Or both?
I just use the version number -- who needs another set of names to remember[^1]?

[^1]: I'm looking at you, Apple.
If you're making 300k you're in the top one percent, or very near: http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032007/hhinc/new06_000.htm

There's a lot of room at the bottom.
I don't know.

One thing that we all must keep in mind, not all Jews are smart and intelligent, as with any other group. It just happens that of the extremely smart people in the world today making breakthrough advancements, there's a good chance that they are Jewish.

>If you're willing to believe IQ is genetic, you must also believe IQ is is a stronger factor than work ethic (How do you make italics/quotes on HN)

A stronger factor contributing to what?

Doing well, being able to provided for yourself and your family doesn't require a high IQ. One can do that merely with an average IQ, and do well in life, as long as on has a good work ethic.

Having said that, it isn't very likely that a person with a slightly above average IQ will be able to produce the type of works of say a Newton or Einstein. That requires a genius IQ which almost nobody has, of any ethnic group.

Although East Asians have one of the highest average IQ's, they have not dominated intellectually in the same way as Europeans. It's fascinating to me, asking why Europeans and not Asians, dominated the world, especially given the huge population of East Asians. It's a very complicated and touchy subject, but fascinating nonetheless.
> The only large – and lets say profitable and growing – startup that uses Java is LinkedIn.

Mint uses Java a ton too and they did ok:
http://mint.jobscore.com/jobs/mint/javasoftwareengineerbacke...
Pay Me for Before, or Pay Me for Later
I don't think your two stories are the same thing. The MIT professor was being blunt, but not rude, and providing helpful advice (if not in a pleasant form). The medical professor was being rude to the point of abuse, and was not being helpful so much as an enforcer of the insane culture of medical training that causes residents to have to stay up for several nights in a row in the first place. (IIRC, sleep deprivation has been shown to lead to increased medical errors.)
I'm really tired of all the people who think they have the line on the best way to do something, particularly when that something involves interacting with human beings. We're all hill climbing here. Nobody even knows if we're on the right mountain.

He has some points, but misses others. Ability to code on a whiteboard is a valuable skill for a collaborative lead developer. For a junior guy getting his direction from elsewhere, not so much. Some people's work persona comes out right away. Other people take months. One great developer who worked for me seemed like a total failure till he came out of his shell.

Human beings are too complex for one-size-fits-all evaluation. This applies to the interviewer as much as the interviewee. Will your "best way" be best for me? Probably not. Can I learn from works best for you? Absolutely!

A little humility goes a long way.
Do you mean that a substantial number of the respondent entrepreneurs founded companies that are not "startups" (i.e. aren't small)?
Also, for teh peanut gallery:

Look at paragraph 2:

In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren't really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn't better content cost more?

and paragraph 4:

Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. Book publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing and distributing books. They treat the words printed in the book the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on its fabrics.

Consider these two claims:

- CLAIM A: "prices don't depend on quality of content"

- CLAIM B: "prices depend on manufacturing cost" (=> CLAIM A)

...which claim would you imagine the author to be advancing? "CLAIM A" -- that content quality has nothing to do with pricing? -- or "CLAIM B" -- that 'publishers...set prices based on the cost of [manufacturing]'?

If, further, interposed between those paragraphs you saw paragraph 3:

A copy of Time costs $5 for 58 pages, or 8.6 cents a page. The Economist costs $7 for 86 pages, or 8.1 cents a page. Better journalism is actually slightly cheaper.

...which claim does that paragraph do more to support?

If I've misread the essay I think I can be forgiven for assuming pg attempted to argue that price is set based on cost of manufacture (and not just that 'quality of content does not dictate price').
The performance problems he mentions probably aren't due to a lack of JIT, but rather to poor garbage collection performance. One of the biggest problems with developing a real-time app on Android is that the garbage collector can take 200ms at a time to run, which will kill your real time output. In order to avoid this, one must be careful not to allocate objects in performance intensive code (typically through resource pools).

Unfortunately many of the standard Java library classes contain allocations that one has no control over. Consequently, for real time output, one has to throw out many of the things that make Java easier to use.
Your Scribd example is a bad one because that's an example of O'Reilly putting a sample of that book on Scribd to tempt people to buy the real thing.

Basically, I think she's going to have a really hard time proving any harm. She says her book was downloaded 100 times. Now prove that that equals 100 lost sales, or X lost sales for any value of X.

My assumption is that if my book was downloaded from Scribd 100 times that I've lost way less than 100 sales (if any) which at royalty rates on a book means I might have lost a couple of dollars. For that reason I wouldn't sue Scribd.
Thanks mahmud!

I suppose a currently unfunded startup taking down a conglomerate represented by several billion dollar companies is slightly unlikely :) Nevertheless, it is my grand dream. Thanks for the encouragement and you will definitely be hearing more from us.
The building is pretty huge. The old police building was only part of the new footprint.
No, that only a tiny fraction of small companies are startups. Most small companies are local service businesses or one-man consulting operations.
Developers: Win $1000 in Google App Engine Credit + A Netbook