skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, I've read the book, and I would recommend it. The book makes multiple claims: The first is that given the proper environment (physical & mental fitness), we can run very long distances. This I think it proves very well with the Tarahumara tribe example.

It then goes on to make the claim that humans evolved to run long distances, in order to do persistence hunting. Persistence hunting is basically outrunning an animal for long distances so that it just drops down because it is tired. While persistence hunting itself exists, it is a stretch to say that this is how humans evolved.

The Ardi discovery that made news a few months ago shows that Ardi's environment was not really the savannah, but something that had far more trees. Persistence hunting requires a savannah like environment.

In the end, all I'm saying is that it is ok to say that humans can run long distances, but saying humans evolved to do that is far trickier and requires a lot more proof. The scientists involved in the Ardi discovery do not make any claims at all (after 15 years of studying fossils in one region). They are far more humble, and say that many different scenarios are possible.

Popular book writers on the other hand have to explain things to a lay audience, and usually provide one point of view (which typically fits their own mental model). Confirmation bias is usually rampant.
I find that having a quality is inversely proportional to how often you talk about it.
Teaching/learning is far more than just acquiring knowledge.
Just the mere presence of a human being, let alone a sympathetic one, transforms the whole learning experience.

A good teacher shapes the children's mind, inspires and motivates children to do things that otherwise they would probably not dream of doing. I still remember some of my old high-school and college teachers.

With that being said, I'm sure the learning/teaching experience can be vastly increased by using appropriate software.
You don't have to guess if you're willing to move a little forward in time:

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html

So the average 20 year old in 1850 could expect to live an additional 40 years, to roughly age 60. The curve started flattening after WW1 and continued doing so until around the 70s and 80s.
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1240
This post makes me want to start a blog, just to answer some of these questions.

Go is really hard to teach. I try to avoid it whenever possible. This isn't trying to be a wiseass; i find this actually has some great effects. I've found teaching go has to be a student-driven process to be successful; the onus is on the student to generate questions, and, to go another step, the student must seek & have the experiences that will generate the questions. This almost always means playing go for yourself.

This implies that the student has already conquered a lot of (very real) internal fears; the fear of performing incompetently, the fear of being thought dumb. The fear of failure, basically. An interesting thing to run across on a blog for entrepreneurs.

The saddest part about that article was that so many of those sentences are "I" sentences; you write "I feel" this, "i think" that, "I am [x], i won't be [y], i will never be [z]". Even the comments about your friend are defined in terms of yourself. The problem is that probably no one else is as concerned about your performance as you are.

This is something that could be incredibly liberating from the right perspective. Who is judging you here? Not your friend, certainly! It's not a reflection on your character unless you make it one -- and you don't have to make it one.

Your conclusions at the end are so close!
"The courage to play incompetently is a cure for fear of incompetence"
this is true, but it's almost a tautology. Perhaps a more useful formulation is this:
"The courage to play incompetently is a cure for incompetence." Maybe it is the only cure.

Relax, enjoy, & Dare To Suck -- your performance at something you've never done is not and will not be used as a measurement of your worth as a person. That gift of "curiousity & fearlessness" is not a personality trait; people get nervous when they feel like they're being judged. You're not -- at least, not by anyone but yourself.

See also: http://senseis.xmp.net/?FearOfLosing
and the go proverb "lose your first 100 games as quickly as you can"

relax & good luck

-seigenblues

P.S. I will happily answer any go questions. Send me a link to your game & questions, (perhaps on eidogo.com), and i will try to answer to the best of my ability (4d kgs).
One of the most stupid questions I've ever seen.
Fixed-point calculations (and square roots) in Clojure
But can you make a bang big enough to break into the cabin and crash the plane into, say, a large building in a major metropolitan city?
This is the best app I have used in a LONG time! Keep up the good work!
It's probably about as easy to lay out a big case that humans evolved for rock climbing and swimming. We out perform plenty of animals at that.
amichail is deliberately trolling.
One big feature is thatAero is supported in Windows Vista and Windows 7 now.
It's also important to make a distinction between "the human body evolved to run long distances" and "the human body is well-suited to running and doing it for long distances is good for you". The latter seems like something we can (and should try to) prove now, without relying on the past for evidence. Knowing how our ancestors lived is nice but I'm personally more interested in knowing what's good for me, here, now.
Good point. Luddite is the wrong word. I meant to say that there should be some minimum assumed level of expertise of your target market. "Intuitive" is often synonymous with "familiar," and an interface should be able to make some assumptions about the experience and abilities of the user.
This is one of the reasons why we need human teachers:

http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/teaching-linear-algebra...

more at : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=850485
"I'm learning to play the guitar, I draw, I read, I think, but I don't feel I exist.As if my biggest priority in life were enjoying it, learning to live it. But I want to do something else, man. I want to have a voice."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemianism
But only on a GPU >= nVidia 9400
jokes about airport security are so overdone that there's actually signs at the airport warning you not to make jokes about airport security.

That's not why those signs are there. They're there because it removes the "I was just joking!" defense.
Wordpress.com's threading leaves much to be desired I'm afraid.

I can't judge what would be mainstream in US accurately enough to rate your school I'm afraid. I'd see some of the details of the main schools as they write up their courses in journal articles; but my experience is mostly with Irish universities. However, from what several people here and back on the blog and over on reddit are saying, it sounds like the average Irish CS degree is a step or two ahead of at least some US schools. Which I have to say is a major surprise to me, since US schools were (I thought, from speaking to grad students and academics from them) better funded than Irish ones.
The majority of startups also don't stick with anything beyond the initial thrill. That's something you have to learn for yourself: no external organization is going to hand it to you.

When I started actually completing projects (and I was older than this guy is), it was largely because I'd tried a bunch of things in superficial depth and found that they weren't all that satisfying. I bounced from a physics major to philosophy to sociology back to physics and finally ended up with a CS degree. I tried out orchestra and guitar and bass and taiko and sailing and fanfiction and sci-fi/fantasy and programming as hobbies. I "learned" dozens of programming languages by website & academic paper before actually settling down to write some code. I needed that experience to figure out for myself what I really considered important and was willing to put the time into learning well.
This is a mighty strange time and place to be pitching a URL shortening service.
Working Hard is overrated
Stop downvoting him. Sublimated sex drive is an incredibly powerful force, and drives thousands of people to take up positions in society (doctor, lawyer, programmer) instead of wandering the earth, content with food and drink.
If the plane flies near said metropolitan area at the right angle then, technically, the rest is just maths and timing. :)

EDIT: damn I thought I was being genuinely amusing :(
The linker can inspect a direct link to see where it was pointing, in order to find it on archive.org or to contact the linkee and notify them the link went down. If a shortener goes down, the linker only has the obfuscated url, and has to rely only on their memory to redirect the link.
There are a lot of things I like about Vaynerchuk, but I never expected the book to have much merit. All the points you make were pretty easy to predict.

Meanwhile, I think the real story would be how he grew his brick-and-mortar wine business, and what impact his online activity had (or didn't have) on that business. It's funny that the growth of his actual store is the accomplishment that gives him the right to be a business expert, but very little ever gets said about it other than the often repeated "$4M to $50M in 3 years" or something close to that.
Surely it'll be a news item:

"Fred changed his status from Living to Dead!"
Our list is obviously smaller, but with somewhere around 1000 members, I don't find the moderation duties difficult to keep up with. And we've only let spam through a couple of times.
Infeasible, as in their explosives would not have detonated. Don't lecture me about "credibility", educate yourself about the facts of the case.

But yes, I'm sure the TSA and its supporters can devise ever-so-many facts about how we have to be protected from water-bottle bombs that fortunately don't require any more special disposal than tossing in a garbage can.
I do wonder, if we see a large rise in Netbook popularity, if that two-column format will die. They already look pretty terrible compared to even good web formatting and I can't imagine that reading the PDFs of them on eBooks are going to go without complaint.
When I started my last big project it was several years ago and PHP5 had just been released. I had been doing PHP for many years before that (since PHP3 -- moved from Perl to ASP to PHP). At the same time I've been doing desktop and mobile development in C++, VB, and C#. I also keep up with Python and other tools to see how things are progressing.

So I needed to start up a new project those years ago and it really wasn't the best time to learn another language. Ruby and Python were still a bit lame in the web space at that time. I'm not even sure Rails was out at the time; and if it was it was really new. I definitely didn't need to start a massive project on something that was very much untested. Performance and stability are also factors.

You are entitled to your opinion, but I don't find PHP to be all that painful. I've built up a large body of code and, more specifically, a coding style that makes PHP as productive to me as most other languages. For example, all my objects inherit from a root Object class that provides automatic properties: declare a method as setFoo and you use $object->foo = 'hello' to call it. My framework library is very modular and uses the autoload facility. I have a template library that is like smarty only less weird (and much less code). I have a few different database abstractions for different needs. Entity objects that can be loaded and saved. Classes for quick inline queries (similar to what you've used in other examples). An an abstraction for larger more complex SQL queries. In addition to basic templating for the UI, I also have something akin to ASP.NET user controls so I can built up complex forms just by adding tags to the template. The UI is connected end-to-end with the database so load, save, and validation is automatically generated (including client-side javascript) from a description of the data. I can push about a CRUD page in minutes.

So really, I have lots of reasons besides ignorance to stick with PHP at this point. Now, if I had to start the project again now, I'd have re-evaluate all my options but it would have to weighted against the body of code and knowledge I already have. I won't claim that PHP is better than any other language -- but it's really not as bad as you make it out to be. Just look at all the things that are possible in it!
"People really need to start calling these things what they are: electronic strip search machines."

That will never happen. Given the choice between two methods of searches, both of which have equal safety outcomes, people prefer the strip search over the non-invasive one.

Jeffrey Rosen wrote an entire book about this phenomenon; the book is The Naked Crowd. You can read the story, which is on page 1 of the book, via the Amazon sample:

http://www.amazon.com/Naked-Crowd-Reclaiming-Security-Freedo...
Someone piss in your Wheaties?
See also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690538

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690636
There are empirical studies out there. No reason to speculate. The results: Mostly meh (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=808082). Not much of a difference either way, if any.

Looking at the history of how we write and print it is very hard for me to actually believe that serifs were put on letters with legibility in mind. One of the oldest examples of the use of serifs is this inscription: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/002_Conra... (jpg, Trajan’s Column, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajan%27s_Column). And this kind of script was pretty much only used for monuments. Why optimise that for fast reading of long texts at small sizes?

I believe there were aesthetic reasons. Maybe even engineering reasons (pure speculation: it could be that carving into stone with the tools available at the time automatically produces little serifs – so they just decided to make them all look consistent). But legibility? I doubt it.
Nearly a decade ago, Arachnophilia 4.0 eased me into web design, which was my first stepping stone to web programming (good move on my part: I'm rubbish at design).

His CareWare philosophy introduced me to free software in a way that really resonated with me; and his well-argued antipathy toward Microsoft got me re-thinking what it means to use - and depend on - closed, proprietary technologies.

Finally, though I'm at best a mediocre, self-taught programmer, his sheer creativity and productiveness over the years has inspired me to create and produce in my own turn.

I have never met or even corresponded with him, but I owe him a large debt of gratitude for helping to shape the programmer I have become.
To learn to be human.
Yes, but could you make a bomb from a set of laptop batteries as easily as you could from a prepared liquid? That's the thing about prepared liquids, you can do all the chemical processing until the whole things is already practically a bomb. Regarding what happens to confiscated liquids, as the TSA person helpfully mentioned, they are working on a system to test liquids but they do not have one yet.

If you think about the TSA requirements, they are not stupid after all.

Personally I do not get why people complain about the TSA. After 9/11, when there were stories of the most terrible offenses against personal liberties, of people getting picked up on the streets and not seen or heard from again for years, the mainstream press did not utter a word.

But when people are forced to give up their water bottle there is all sorts of bitching and complaints. Because the shared assumption is that only muslims get wisked away in the middle of the night not to be heard from again and that, while regretable, is something that we have to live with for our safety. But the waterbottle thing happens to everyone, so it cannot be tolerated!
I'm not sure if it's a funding issue. It's more of a philosophical one. We've been telling kids for the last few decades that colelge is the path to success, and we've lowered standards so much that everyone goes to college, so that it's actually true.

College is quickly becoming a big commodity business, rather than a place to learn.
Historians Reassess Battle of Agincourt
I think one can't say to himself he is brilliant, this is so dangerous.

My father tells me how much surprised it is when he sees back their school mates,now that he is retired, they expected the brilliant people in class to success.

This is what really happened:

The brilliant people(3 hipersmart guys) took a normal job and lived a normal live. People that had enormous problems in school, became presidents of big companies, made their own restaurants chains,got political power, became famous as scientific researchers...

Wow: Nobody would have expected that!!

I think those brilliant people were very good at learning and memorizing when the answer is known, but not so good facing risk and failure, fighting against unknown.

PS: There was a time I got 10 over 10 score in some exams like math when a lot of people didn't pass. I felt great(and superior) about being considered intelligent, but at the same I felt frightened about losing my position, so I stooped asking stupid questions (what would they think about me).

Later I discovered I love asking stupid questions, and I love testing new things, often it goes bad, so I felt liberated making enough grades and not being ultrasmart, but feeling this stupid man can kick some smart asses if I work hard.
Making it electronic completely defuses the embarrassment aspect of it though.

I believe you would be hard-pressed to rouse a lot of righteous indignation over magnetometers.
On one occasion I accidentally passed through security with with a Swiss Army knife in my backpack.

What's funny to me is that upon discovering so after getting to the gate I was much more worried about someone finding out I accidentally brought a pocket knife with me, rather than the possibility of someone else with nefarious intentions having also gotten past security with one.
> The dollar signs are not the problem with PHP's variables. Their global scope is.

I think you sort of have that backwards, all variables in PHP are local unless you go out of your way to make them global (or just start typing into an empty file without any functions). I pretty much surrender the global scope. None of my variables are global except for static class members. I don't have any global functions, except static class methods.

> Quick example; if you want to pass around a callback that has state

I don't pass around callbacks that have state very often. I tune my programming style to the language that I'm working on. Often there are different ways of handling the situation in PHP -- it's is actually quite dynamic in places. I prefer to keep my pages pretty KISS anyway -- I can do hell of a lot (see my other replies) without needing stateful callbacks.

> If you are going to write PHP code that looks exactly like Java, why not just use Java and get your 70x speed boost?

I don't know, why are Java sites so painfully slow and all PHP sites so fast?
Trust is a powerful thing. You can get a lot more done when you have trust. It would be a shame to break that trust for no real reason other than it seemed like a clever idea at the time.
I'd say it's much better to do things you can get out of "until you figure it out", because figuring it out often requires going down many blind alleys, and it's nice to be able to turn around and go back if you don't like one.

If I had to give advice to struggling young college grads who don't yet know what they want to do with their life, it'd be take a job. Any job, though you should preference ones that will expose you to new ideas and talented people. Go as far as you can with it, then if it's not working out, take another job. Repeat until you have a fair picture of what the working world is like, then start a company. It'll fail (first startups always do), but by then you should have a good idea of what you really want to do, so you can take the job that will most help you achieve that, and start another company a few years down the road.

Unfortunately, most directionless people either go to grad school or join the military, which are about the two worst things you can do. Because both are fairly hard to get out of, and if you find out 3 months in that it's not what you really want, the time spent in them is basically a big sunk cost.
It seems as though he's trying to see himself rather than wine. I like GV, but I care more about the results and how to's than personality and motivational speaking.
You know that recently a terrorist tried to use a bomb in his intestine to assassinate a Saudi-Arabian prince (http://www.nypost.com/p/news/international/qaeda_ass_assin_h...). (I know, not the greatest source).

As soon as one of those is discovered at an airport, according to your reasoning about the TSA's rationales, they would have to and should cavity search every passenger.

The real questions underlying a topic like this are:

Why do the people have so little say in their own security?

Why do people accept being separated, rudely interrogated, strip-searched, subjected to (unconstitutionally) secret laws and regulations, etc.?

Why are expert opinions completely ignored?

Just because it's "rational" for the TSA/US Government to cover their asses doesn't mean people shouldn't make a fuss about it. Democracy and liberty vitally depend on people making a (meaningful) fuss.
It's all about the use case. Duh!

"Using the right tool for the job!" --someone smart

No one claims that key-value stores will entirely replace relational databases. But there are use cases for it where it doesn't make sense to use a relational store, cause no relations are required. E.g., I've personally created a property table in MySQL before. But a key-value store would have been way more suitable for it.

And not just more suitable, but also faster. But don't worry, *SQL excels on other fronts.

Also, Redis is not CouchDB, not even close.

CouchDB is not a key-value store but a documented oriented database. Suitable in case it's hard to normalize your data (or you're fucking tired of doing it again and again). It's also extemely fast on read and easy to integrate (HTTP).

I suggest further reading. Less complaining. Maybe attend one of those conferences. Don't waste your time on Hacker News. =)
If you're disappointed with the quality/performance of Fusion 2, why would you pay more and blindly upgrade to 3 without actually knowing that it has measurably improved?

Either way, please report back after the upgrade. The 'new features' list isn't terribly compelling, but a genuine performance boost (on, say, a dual-core MacBook Pro, not just an 8-core MacPro) would be.
We're discussing the fact that the TSA left the safety of their lair to try to debunk an online comic by a well-known figure in techy circles. This is a remarkable event.

Hence, we are remarking.
I think your comment is funny, but it's probably also the fastest way to get yourself a private strip-search if you say it in earshot of a TSA employee!
I completely agree, and actually this blog post has gotten me thinking about different solutions and how they might look.

It seems like a perfect project to use Lamson (http://www.zedshaw.com/projects/lamson/) as a starting point for.
It's spectacularly useful, and I personally really love using it - but to say it's an industry standard the way C or C++ are is to stretch the point a wee bit too far unfortunately.

Still though, we use some languages for teaching (like Pascal or Modula-2) which don't have the kind of industrial usage levels of C or C++, so we might see Python being taken up sooner rather than later. I think there are one or two courses already using it over here on a trial basis.
In Twitter’s Wake: a ‘real-time network’ revolution bides its time
i was foolish enough to expect this would take me to a product page on apple.com