skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder if there's any pattern to the order in which people discover the special properties. I saw it as: green, no frame, small, circle.
This may not apply to the author of the linked blog post, but it's long been a pet peeve of mine how casually people dismiss intelligence testing after seeing one or two examples of poorly designed questions. The rarely considered reality is that IQ tests vary widely in quality.

Some reasons are obvious: The test might be intentionally designed to measure something other than IQ (success in college, performance on a job, money spent on College Board® prep courses). The test might be designed to test within a particular IQ range, whether high or low. The test might be designed only to be taken by people fluent in a particular language, or who received an education from a particular school. And so on.

But the biggest and least obvious reason why bad IQ tests are everywhere is that good IQ tests are not only difficult to make, but expensive to make. Good tests are not made by geniuses in armchairs thinking up riddles. Test design is an empirical science, and the final judges of any question's value are the statistical relationships that show up in the answers when the test is given.

Empirical evidence sterilizes tests from the biases of their authors, and does so much more effectively than waiting for complaints from morally outraged observers. Questions that penalize takers of different cultural backgrounds are bad questions not because they're socially repugnant, but because they're noisy--you can demonstrate that people who otherwise score highly get the question wrong more often than they should. Questions like those addressed in the blog post, where some really smart people are attracted to a "wrong" answer, will have negative inter-question correlations among the brightest subjects, which is a giant blinking neon sign in any analysis.

This sanitizing effect is so strong that the tests which show the most desirable psychometric properties, such as Raven's Progressive Matrices, often evoke the opposite complaint: they're so minimal and homogenous in form that it's hard to accept they're a better measure of IQ than scattershot tests of imperfect analogies and odd-one-out puzzles. If you're curious, RPM goes a little something like this: http://iqtest.dk/main.swf

IQ testing is a complicated science, and discrediting it because there's one or two (or fifty) dumb questions on the SATs is like giving up on journalism after reading an issue of USA Today.
Flying up from DC on Sunday, leaving Tuesday afternoon.
Should be able to come!
Either bills don't matter, in which case voting on them without knowing what they say is fine (but why are we wasting our time on it?), or they do matter, in which case they should be read and understood.

Is there more to it than that? Maybe a continuum of importance, where some proportion of the voters has to know some proportion of what the bill means. Then the rest can use a combination of guesswork and party line to make their decision... ? Oh wait.

It's a robust system! really!
That's the problem -- anything that makes you "more focused" will stun your creativity and may cause you to obsessively repeat mindless tasks and anything that makes you more creative will prevent you from getting anything done.

So in the end you may as well just use your original god-provided brain.
This article has a few flaws.

First, I disagree with the definition of parallelism. So the whole argument becomes moot to begin with.

Second, the author conveniently ignores that languages with side-effects can also be automatically parallelized by their compiler, which achieves the same effect as the parallelism described for functional languages. Which makes the point of the article moot again.

In conclusion (to me at least), this article adds to the confusion rather than offer the clarity it was aiming for.
Question for you: I am a Chinese manufacturer of some product whose manufacture would in the USA require some patent licenses. If I would like to export my product for sale in the USA, is it the case that:

- (1) patents, schmatents! It's not under patent in China, so I can export to USA whilst scoffing at the USA patents?

- (2) if not necessarily me then someone in the distribution chain will have to obtain proper patent licenses before putting the goods up for sale in the USA

You're a real life patent attorney so you should know this.
Is the single word really necessary? I mean, it already says "google.com" up in the URL bar, so you know what you're looking at.
I should be there, and might bring 1 other.
Poll: do you use an e-ink device
I am wondering what the uptake of e-ink devices is in this crowd. (Kindles, Sony eReaders etc)

(No ulterior business motive - just curious)
I do not have an e-ink device predominantly because of DRM-related concerns
I do not have an e-ink device (for any other reason)
I own one but use it rarely.
I own one and do use it, but still read books on paper predominantly
I own one and do the majority of my book reading on it.
I suppose it would make sense to mention in the post title that this is Cambridge, MA as opposed to the fake, less-known Cambridge in England. (I would have gone if it was the second one though).
Compile C and C++ code to run on the ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2)
Google doesn't have special access to the iPhone, they use the same SDK as everyone else with the exception of a couple of private APIs though that's fairly common.

http://daringfireball.net/2008/12/private
Congress will be OK with this I think, they'll just make each law span 1000s of pages.
New Military Surveillance Bot Can Jump Over 25 Foot Walls
The problem here is that there is a chasm between the students that want to learn, and the students that see learning as a chore, and just 'want to have fun' because 'learning/reading is for nerds.'

Just allowing students to learn what they want to, won't necessarily change the 'poor' culture that discourages learning (e.g. poor, racist blacks that view learning as a 'white thing' or just poor people that view people that want to learn or are 'smart' as pretentious).
I'm curious. How would you define parallelism?
Can you really develop complex web apps just using scripting languages
Is it really possible to write complex web application using just python or another scripting language like Ruby?

What have you found Python to be best for when doing web apps and what development sets do you most commonly use?
It wouldn't be making you "dumber" then, it would simply be making you less creative. I know a lot of brilliant people who are not creative whatsoever. I also know a bunch of very creative people who would normally be considered dumb using common metrics. less creative != dumb
I'm honestly curious... what kind of defensive programming techniques could you use to try and deal with this?
Ask HN: Graph theory books?
Hi all, i searched on google and can't seem to find this discussed before.

Does anyone know of a great book to self study graph theory? I studied it in school a while ago, but now i realized that graph theory is very important to algorithms.

Thanks a lot for any suggestions!

Jason
Oh, you were referring to the syscalls/portability tradeoff. In that case it's still not really a counter example, because Apache made the same decision in its early versions (Unix only). And that's a reasonable decision to make given the tradeoffs, I think.

The point that I was more upset with was the "threads are dead, pre-fork is the way to go" section of the article.

However, thinking about it more now, even the syscalls vs. portability arguments presented here are another example of forgetting the past (or just never being aware of it). After all the work from the Python devs to encapsulate syscalls in the standard library and provide a portable API to them, Jacob Kaplan-Moss says, "I’m a bit dismayed to see [syscalls] relegated to the dusty corners of our shiny dynamic languages."
Originally from here: http://www.markedwardcampos.com/index.php?/design/master-loc...

It has been updated relative to the submitted version.
JWZ and the Palm App Catalog, Part II
Freepbx.org
I use
Linux (Ubuntu) to do pen testing
Mac at home for iPhone development
PC (Vista (un)Ultimate) at home for development
PC (Windows XP) for day job
Hello!? nginx is a POSIX network application written in C. Of course it uses syscalls. As the previous poster pointed out you are also wrong in that nginx uses anything like a prefork model. It _may_ fork of a process or more if it detect that it is running on a SMP system to take advantage more than one CPU. But each process has a strictly async io architecture handling request/responses within a big loop.
Do everything twice and make sure the results match.
Seems a bit out of date. RightScale posted this follow-up yesterday that seems to have more information as to the actual number of instances launched.

http://blog.rightscale.com/2009/10/05/amazon-usage-estimates...
You may "disagree" with this definition, but it's one that is commonly used by computer scientists. So it's a definition that is useful to know if you plan on doing or studying any research in this field. For example, see section 4.3 of this paper by Peter van Roy (author of the well-known Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming):

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3465

Here's van Roy's definition:

"Concurrency should not be confused with parallelism. Concurrency is a language concept and parallelism is a hardware concept. Two parts are parallel if they execute simultaneously on multiple processors. Concurrency and parallelism are orthogonal: it is possible to run concurrent programs on a single processor (using preemptive scheduling and time slices) and to run sequential programs on multiple processors (by parallelizing the calculations)."

And no, languages with side-effects cannot be automatically parallelized without changing the semantics and introducing observable nondeterminism - not nearly to the same extent as pure languages. The examples I've seen essentially work for side-effect-free subsets, which kind of misses the point. Your C compiler may be able to vectorize a loop of arithmetic operations, but as soon as your code includes an external function call the compiler has know way of knowing whether that function performs I/O or modifies global variables, so it cannot safely make parallel calls to that function.
FYI: The Thirsty Scholar has Trivia Sunday nights at 8, and it's pretty popular, so you might want to get there a bit early to grab a table.
I think the main problem is in the posters definition:

A parallel program, on the other hand, is one that merely runs on multiple processors, with the goal of hopefully running faster than it would on a single CPU.

It's an incredibly vague definition that actually encompasses concurrency too..

Wikipedia puts it quite succinctly:

Parallel computing is a form of computation in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously,[1] operating on the principle that large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which are then solved concurrently ("in parallel").

The WP article then goes on to discuss specific forms of parallelism; some concurrent, some not necessarily so.

This article appears to be so heavily focused on the idea that concurrency and parallelism are discrete and disconnected that it seems to forget there is a bigger picture.

The writer has a strong key point. Parallelism !== Concurrency (note the double =). However it's ignoring the fact that they DO intersect frequently.
Yes, I do know the answer to that but I am not sure how it goes along with the theory of US global dominance trough patents.

If a US company wants to export something to China it needs a Chinese patent. US companies can get patents in China and Chinese companies can get them in the US. So I am not sure how a supposedly easy patent system in the US translates to plans for global dominance.

It could be argued that an easy patent system can be used for protectionism (i.e., like hidden tariffs) but I am not sure I buy this either because the US patent systems should be just as accessible to foreign companies as US ones.

I think the US is generally pro-patent and pro-IP because we know that one of the few areas we hold some kind of competitive advantage is in RD, design, arts, etc. We have to keep our hands on these intangible goods because if it comes down to making things we are really, really behind.
What do you define as complex web applications?
Sorry, I was unclear. By "investment" I meant the time required to listen to you describe your idea and figure out for themselves if it's worth pursuing. It's not an investment of money, but that doesn't make it any less of an investment.
Microsoft Donates $100,000 to Approve R-71
That's the point I was trying to make. If you take only the people who're good at what they do and put a serious effort into what they do, I doubt you'll see as many failures as the 1 in 100,000 would indicate.
Interesting :) Would you like to share any details on the concept? You can email me at: joubee{dot}com or I'll keep checking back here. It really depends on how 'big' the idea is. Is it scalable? Is there a business model? Are there other less obvious benefits to working on the project. Love to know about it though.
Only if he is one of the larger shareholders.
You should try 'Algorithms in C++ Part 5: Graph Algorithms (3rd Edition)' i had lots of fun with that one :).

note: fun == countless nights solving problems :P

note2: link to the book http://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Part-Graph-3rd-Pt-5/dp/0201...
Also - how committed are you to this idea and why? Will you just forget about it when it doesn't magically make you a billion overnight. Will you see this through?
"Over" reported is yet to be seen. Perhaps the ease of reporting today makes this one seem more pronounced than others, but I think it is also worse than any since the great depression and we still don't know if it won't be worse.

Some really depressing news today is that gold hit a record high. Many believe oil will be priced in another currency or basket of currencies. Such a move will take more wind out of America's sails. The journey isn't over.
Dell’s Android phone is coming to the U.S.
The fact that education has little or no effect on IQ happens to be true, but it's not guaranteed by definition or design. I.e., it's logically possible (and, in fact, popularly believed) that education makes your brain work better in general, and that learning French will improve your chess rating and your grades in calculus class. It was discovered that education doesn't help general intelligence much through tests designed on more fundamental principles like elimination of group factors and improving test-retest reliability.
Yes. You could then show that the person has "bought cash", but not what was bought with it.

How is it different from a $100 gift card from any store?
Makes these servers seem huge by comparison:
http://www.actus-mac.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/mac-mini...
One day we're going to look at these dark days of app approval processes, registration fees, application fees, fragmented platforms, crazy APIs and laugh. Or cry.

What an awkward phase.

I for one hope for a decent cross-platform browser API that lets me access mobile phone functions (database / GPS / camera) in js and just be done with all this drama.
That's actually the biggest advantage of Linux.
To be safe you need to do everything 3 times and call a vote. Typically with 3 complete systems of identical nature.
"For the majority party, legislative timing plays a big role in whether a bill will pass because support can be fleeting."

Perhaps your bill doesn't deserve to pass if you can't even keep your supporters on your side for more than 12 hours or so...
What happens when the code doing the comparison becomes corrupted? Do the comparison twice? What happens when the code controlling the evaluation of both comparisons becomes corrupted?

Your data and your instruction set are in the same memory. Even if they are separated into different areas of memory to prevent buffer overflow exploits, it's all still in memory. Once the memory starts going, you're kind of screwed. It's the same as how -- in respect to computer security -- once someone has physical access to the machine, you're screwed.

With respect to memory errors in distributed environments, usually such environments are distributed to increased the processing power for number crunching. If you run all calculations twice and have code comparing them for acceptance, you're more than doubling your processing requirements.

But at the end of the day, it's all a matter of what level of risk is acceptable (or tolerable). There is no magic bullet to fix these issues.
Well, once you've done it twice and the results don't match you'll probably re-run it a third time. It wouldn't make sense to just choose the result that 'makes sense' at that point.
There's a very good movie "The Oxford Murders", where the math professor talks about that. Every sequence has many answers, the trick is to find how to build the sequence you want and when you achieve thar, your answer is as correct as the "right answer".
I'm all for IE if they at least push for IE8.
The point of the post you are responding to is that it uses syscalls. I'm not entirely certain what about that warrants a "!?"; could you enlighten me?
Those rows of white LEDs are incredily eerie.
awesome post, good quotes from smart people. I particularly liked Guy Kawasaki's response. Short, sweet, included some alltop links :)
This is a non-sensical argument. Where did you get this false spectrum of creative <-> focused from?
Yea, programmers don't do that because in the vast majority of programs written, this would be absurd, costly, and not at all worth the effort.
Why You Haven’t Got Your Google Wave Invite Yet
One would think he did. Google started to get some significant traction not long after when he allegedly invested, so IMO, it wouldn't have made much sense for him not to wait.
That's an amazingly simplistic concept with an awesome result. It probably could have been built by a kid with a RC car hobbie, but it was built by a company that just scored another government contract and was aided by MIT. Kinda funny.
They're orthogonal.

When I'm focused, I still get odd, interesting ideas popping in my head, but I have the wherewithal to either ignore them or to jot them down for latter.

There's a difference between focused and indifferent. My experience with assorted nootropics is that, with the better ones, boring things are still boring, but I have the means to do them anyway if I have to.
Those aren't actually screenshots of Google's Google Voice app, it's one of the third-party ones that has since been pulled.

I have GV Mobile Premium (the one pictured) and like it quite a bit. Having used it I find it hard to belive that someone would be confused between it and the native iPhone dialer - it's just not that similar.
There is a difference between pain response and suffering. The latter requires the consciousness to know what the future has in store for the organism. Animals can be abused, but very few of them have the level of consciousness required for the abuse to be "torture." You can pretend that animals are people too all you want, but wishing it to be true does not make it so.
"Oh, certainly. I've never found a case where there's genuine ambiguity ..."

I recall a test that asked to pick the one word out of four that was different or didn't fit or something.

The thing was, three out of four words described red objects. But a different three out of four words had one syllable; the other had two.

So it them became a game of, What was the test creator likely thinking?
So, $99 fee and $50 per app for the "real" app store. I wonder how this is going to effect the developer's decision on what pricing should be and how feature filled the application will be?
Dan was by far the greatest guy in our summer batch. He was truly one of the most generous people I've ever met. He went out of his way to help us out on so many occasions. He never asked for a favor in return, nor did he even expect one. He just helped us because that was the kind of giving person he was. Rest in peace, Dan. You'll be missed.
I agree; what he wants is a stellar idea and how it should work for definite.

The problem is twofold.

Firstly Apple. They achieved unbelievable lockin (even accounting for jailbreaking) with the App Store and are certainly raking in a fortune with it. Im not surprised Palm want a portion of the pie.

Secondly; I bet you the Pre is "sold" at a loss. Because Palm looked at the App Store and thought "hey that is a limitless pot of money, lets do it!". Im sure the Iphone/Ipod Touch is sold for the same sort of "loss" - the profit is from tertiary services (this is a fairly standard model, right).

We already have a dangerous simile for this sort of loss leader system: it's called printed news media. They make money off of advertising revenue and that is falling apart as things evolve.

There will be a revolution in phone software at some point; a time when phone providers finally realise they should open up their phones to other OS's the same way computers are. When that happens these companies are fucked; and I dont think it can be too far away. The number of disgruntled App store devs is growing, Android is increasing in popularity and gaining market traction (though I dont rate any of the production phones yet) and it looks like Palm devs will be joining the pool. That is a dangerous group of people :D
I think that it's funny that a lot of people are saying that the 'odd one' is the 'normal one'. It's just a matter of common features. The large, red, bordered square is the only one that shares more than 2 features with all of the other objects.

Features
========

Color Frame Size Shape
----- ----- ---- -----
1. red yes large square
2. red no large square
3. red yes large circle
4. green yes large square
5. red yes small square

Features in Common
==================

1 2 3 4 5
1 - 3 3 3 3
2 3 - 2 2 2
3 3 2 - 2 2
4 3 2 2 - 2
5 3 2 2 2 -
I'm already in Boston, but taking the day off from work on Monday.
You're ignoring that the voting code would be a very small fraction of your RAM and thus less likely to be corrupted. But it's academic since no one runs twice to avoid the cost of ECC.
Roughly on the app store topic, an app store for TVs/set top boxes is going to be big one day in the near future. Could quickly take the Apple TV to a new level.
I realize that. My point is that there is no 100% solution.
I was going to ask if you guys have a similar site to http://www.saynoto0870.co.uk that turns premium numbers into local phone numbers for standard rate calls.

But I found it.

http://www.saynoto1890.com/

The UK version of that has saved me crap loads in customer service call costs.
BotPrize: A Turing Test for Unreal Tournament Bots
I am not sure I see the "open" trend. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the future is the integrated hardware / software / store. Look at game consoles, iphone, and palm pre. The "open" computer might actually be a blip in computing history. (Please Note: I am not liking or advocating this trend)
I am a university student right now so I don't have time for this idea. I want to give it away to someone else and see what they can do with it. I'm asking if that's something that's feasible and would make sense.
Start-up Secrets: Tips from America's Coolest Young Entrepreneurs
Apple becomes first tech co. to ditch U.S. Chamber of Commerce over emissions