skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A weak defense, insofar as he picked only one point to go all-in on, and it's probably the least significant one. Also, notice his attempt to trivialize "igon value" as "my spelling"; the appropriate phrase would have been "my ignorance". I'd say this rebuttal does more to expose Gladwell as a sleight-of-hand artist than Pinker's actual critique did. It doesn't mean that Gladwell isn't a superbly entertaining writer and storyteller, though; and at his best, a popularizer of damned interesting stuff.
In case you didn't get this in-joke, this is Jason Fried's speach @mrshoe was referencing in his comment: http://www.justin.tv/clip/b897875d2e8cd907
As long as we are returning to the "Gladwell is full of shit" meme, I recommend the Vanity Fair satire of Gladwell (http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/12/gladwell-...) for anyone in search of a quick laugh.
There's another reason for email quotas. The versions of Outlook in use by many companies use a PST (Outlook's data file format) format that totally breaks when it reaches 2 GB. Fixing it requires either truncating part of the file and forcing it to rebuild the internal structures or restoring from a backup.
That was my thought exactly. He zoomed in on the one wrong thing he could find and tried to associate the whole review with that thing.

An honest reply would be to say: Pinker got everything right except this football thing.

In this case, the "everything else" is of much higher importance than the football thing.
New Amazon Authentication Method - Christopher's Gentle Fist
Interesting. Do you have evidence for this? I looked around the internet and couldn't find any.

I actually didn't use that analogy blindly. I have experience in construction. I have never been in a situation where it would be easier to mash in a screw with a hammer than use a drill. In fact, I have tried to do that before and it's extremely hard.

It is also not necessary to drill a pilot hole when drilling normal wood screws into typical construction pine or plywood.

You drill pilot holes in hardwood, because otherwise the screw is hard to drill and because there is a risk that the wood might split. In those cases, you would want to drill a pilot hole before putting a similarly sized nail in too.
Actually, no...unfortunately. I think while I am at the Hacker dojo, I'll make some more friends as I'm here. But that's a great idea, I just hope to make some friends that will tolerate questions that are rather basic..
Would you happen to know a similar book available for Ruby, if you have any ideas?
Wow. That is hilarious. Takes the piss out of a large swath of middlebrow journalism along with Gladwell, too.

“The conclusion is both remarkable and inescapable but also—most importantly—counter-intuitive,” Dr. Bunquum told me over a glass of organic lemonade in his stunn­ing waterstulp, or waterside studio, near Rotterdam.

I'm trying hard not to giggle because the person next to me is actually getting work done. Oh yeah, work...
Executive Leadership Series: Rackspace VP Lew Moorman
Can you explain more? I ran a few searches where goodreads results show up and I have a hard time seeing how it's different from Amazon results. The page has useful information about the book, people's ratings and reviews, where I can buy it, etc. How are these "fakes"?
Thank you so much jacques, and I will absolutely keep you updated. I hope that things will go well. Actually, (2) is the way that I previously learned finance, and it worked incredibly well. Thanks for the advice, and I'll be sure to follow through with that.

Would you have any suggestions for (3)? Someone had also previously mentioned railscasts, and I came across rails tutors, but I was looking for something that could help me get started on the basics.. My dad recommended programming for dummies, but that series usually seems to only cover cursory explanations. (Maybe I'm wrong?)
"But at the end of the day, understand that you will always pay more (in many ways) than what you had hoped or planned to pay."

This could have been a point in itself.
Thanks Chris, will do!
can I jump in on this? I think this is exactly what I've been needing.
I'm surprised that all responses seem to be on Pinker's side, but here is my take on it

>>What do Sailor's beliefs about an unrelated issue have to do with his analysis of NFL

Well, the credibility of a source (and his past "research" conclusion about racial superiority) is a factor in reviewing conclusions.

>>Gladwell seems to rely on ad-homenim.

This is subjective, but imo calling Pinker an "IQ fundamentalist" is a pretty mild response to the much more harsh attacks from Pinker.

>>I was absolutely shocked when Pinker's writing revealed that Gladwell in his book referred to an "igon value"

imo questionable spelling is better than questionable data.
An example from today: I knocked two items of my internal todo list. Tasks I kept putting off you see. Now they've exited my brain where they stink up my thought process and idle moments.
Thank you all so much! I will definitely keep you updated of my progress, and if there is anyone who would like to e-mail me to get in contact with me, my e-mail is in my profile. Thanks again!
How to Control the World
Can I give you something to add to your list?

6. Every publicly visible action you take intersects with marketing.

There's no easily visible link on your blog that directs to your actual product. Being a "technically savvy" user, I changed blog.bluyah.net to www.bluyah.net, and got a "Welcome to Rails" page.

After digging around your blog, I realised that I'm actually supposed to go to bluyah.COM. Please don't make it so hard for someone who stumbles onto your blog to learn about your product.

And while I was trying to figure out where to get information about your product, the subtitle of your blog, "Report Blogging for the Rest of Us", really confused me. What does that even mean?

Hope that helps, and thanks for the article.
100 percent absolutely. My e-mail is in my profile, and I would be very happy to be a part of this!
Java Strings in switch and closures
He zoomed in on the one wrong thing he could find

Not necessarily: the key to getting a letter to the editor published is to make a single coherent point, and to express yourself well. A letter to the editor is not the right venue for a point-by-point refutation of someone else's work.
"No one will ever be as excited about your [product, service, business] as you are."

This is so true. It is sometimes very hard for you to transfer the excitement of your idea or product onto others. That's why it's important to find co-founders that 'share' your vision, or you might risk loosing interest in own project yourself.
This was asked recently. You might find some inspiration in this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=913911
You're right. :x

It was a while since I looked at the original question.

It would be interesting to hear what he's actually trying to do. Looking closely at the question, he wants all open tags, but not ones that are self-closing.

My guess is that he is trying to find HTML elements that have content. That should, of course, be done with a parser. But you're right that he could be doing something completely tangential to the structure.
Awesome talk by Jeff Bezos on the next web innovation (2003)
8 Pricing Strategies you can Implement Right Now
Teaching is a step down in pay, but not in compensation. Teachers get summers off, short working hours, public sector union pensions/health plans, earlier than normal retirement, and ridiculous job security.

http://web.missouri.edu/~podgurskym/articles/files/fringe_be...
It isn't. However, it takes only 11 of HN's multitudes of users to decide that they thought it was interesting, and upvote it, to put it on the front page.
How about the fact that Steve Sailer has absolutely no domain knowledge of NFL draft picks besides being (maybe) an American football fan?

I'm familiar with Sailer myself, and I'd say anyone who uses him to back up their hypothesis is suspect. Every angle Sailer plays is somehow tied to race and the genetics of race; it's neither objective nor logical.
Deadly Startup Diseases—and How to Cure Them
I loved his interview posted earlier today, so looked up his talks and found this one. It's an old one from 2003 but is really interesting where Bezos draws an analogy between the Internet and the gold rush. The 1908 Hurley washing machine analogy is also wicked.
I heard of this in my Copyright class, but it never hit me that this would turn the tables on the RIAA companies.
Generate Excel spreadsheets in PHP
How the hell does someone lecturing us on social sciences have little-to-no math background?

Are you being intentionally humorous? I thought it was a sad but accepted fact that, on the aggregate, the Social Sciences were largely rather unscientific.
Bertrand Russell had his own take on the "Igon Value Problem":

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
Since you just posted two different "Top N Things" articles in a row, I thought I'd point out the guidelines:

If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If the term "igon value" had been replaced with "eigenvalue", would the usage or context have been incorrect?

In other words, a mere misspelling -- while embarrassing -- doesn't demonstrate that someone has "little-to-no math background".
most offices wouldn't be able to exist without their mean policies.

Man, talk about inflammatory. Offices have existed for centuries without mean IT policies. I'm not even sure how to read your comment in such a way that it models ANY reality.
Sailer's introduction to many, including myself, was his posting of mile-long screeds, primarily regarding race and IQ, in the comments of Gladwell's blog. He was banned from same and his comments removed in late 2006:

http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/2006/12/the_lunatic_...

He seems to be trying to make a name of himself in part by carrying on a one-sided debate with Gladwell, which in itself makes him a suspect source even if he wasn't already familiar to the blog's long-time readers.
The trick is not to have users design for you. You're only soliciting what they're thinking and how they act. It's up to you to decide what to do with that information, not the user.
Good point. While I provided a bunch of examples, I didn't exhaust the number of examples of this trend. Search is another, and so are mobile experiences (beyond the App Store).

At least with search there's a degree of "infinite" in the results. Of course, the results are defined by SEO and robots.txt files, and so aren't as egalitarian as URLs, but search engines are another example of the increasing minimization of URLs in interfaces.
Maybe the solution is "simply" to build stuff that is so cool that nobody can afford to lock it out of their platform.

Also, there always seems to be a mass market of people doing what everybody else does (TV, Facebook, ...?), and lots of companies survive with the few more curious remaining people.
No, he doesn't. The closest thing to a true ad-hominem fallacious point in his reply would be his mentioning of Sailer's opinion that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites. However, he immediately follows that up by addressing Sailer's actual data, cited by Pinker.

I need a fancy-sounding Latin term for "trotting out 'ad hominem' when there is no such thing"...
I would disagree. Just because the App Store is designed to make it easier to get apps onto the phone, nothing prevents these apps from being accessible by URLs. In fact, many iPhone-friendly apps are available as web apps that simply look and behave like native apps — and the distinction between native and web is becoming evermore so slight.

I think that there is a role for App Stores in the future, but I think that the healthiest future would be comprised of hybrid app stores that give you access to the best web and native apps — without having to distinguish. Thus you could go through the app store if you want the exposure, or you could go directly to the web app's URL if you knew it.

Seems simple enough to me.
thanks for sharing. Those jokes also seem to apply to some of the homework problems encountered in the 2nd edition. I had no clue that Professor Bunyan was a reference to Paul Bunyan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bunyan).
Unfortunately the original research paper by Berri and Simmons is locked up behind a paywall. But Sailer does seem to make a good point - if you measure QB performance on a per-play basis, the low-end of the draft order is going to be dominated by the few Tom Brady's of the world (draft number 199, 3 Super Bowl rings, lots of plays) because most late draft picks don't even get any NFL snaps.

It would be like saying IQ is not correlated with Nobel Prize awards, if you only look at people who have earned PhD's.
Offices have existed for centuries without mean IT policies.

Are you suggesting that we do away with computers in the workplace?

Unfortunately, the IT systems that people use in their offices, and the people supporting said systems are compliments to one another.
Copyright needs to be reconsidered, especially in this ever changing digital world we live where, copies can be made in the blink of an eye.

On the other hand, Record Labels are evil. They continue to rip off artists by claiming ownership of (the artist's work) through copyright, while giving the 'Content Creators' very little.

The RIAA's days are numbered...

Great post!
A binary distinction between "stupid" (Gladwell?) and "clever" (domain expert) isn't very helpful here. Gladwell's ability to take obscure scientific results and present them in a relevant, insightful way is very powerful. If anything, I think the lesson is about being careful when drawing conclusions outside your domain of expertise, and that it is always helpful to get outside reviewers for your work (astonishing that a mistake of this magnitude slipped into a published book!).
People who know what eigenvalues are don't misspell "eigenvalue" as "igon value," ever. Malcolm Gladwell doesn't know what eigenvalues are. That's the only point, really, but it's a pretty big one -- Gladwell's stock in trade is the popularization of counterintuitive statistical studies and their conclusions, and if he's never learnt any linear algebra he's not in a good position to actually understand those studies.
My websites started with someone else asking permission to post something I had written on her site. She made a little subsite on her site for my stuff. I sent more content to add to it occasionally. When she could no longer keep up, she gifted me the templates. My then-husband was pursing a degree in computer science and took a few minutes to explain a few things to me (like what an FTP program was) and I started with a Yahoo account which apparently wasn't very hacker friendly. I later moved my sites to something with more flexibility when I knew more. Initially, I could only copy and paste colors to change backgrounds and copy and paste text to make a new page. The first time I tried to change anything structurally, I messed it all up. The woman who wrote the original templates kind of mentored me for a time and I eventually used some CD's, online sites, and a book or two to learn more coding, supplemented with talking with friends online who knew more than I did. I still tend to look things up "as needed". I do okay these days with my websites. They are in (X)HTML and CSS.

My current goal is to learn a programming language so I can write a game. I have yet to seriously pursue that. I don't have a deadline though. Que sera, sera.

I hope my story is helpful to you and good luck with this.
I ran some informal benchmarks in Lua to see how switching from 32 to 64 bit affected memory usage, and it seemed to take very roughly 1.3-1.4 times as much. There's other noise in the totals besides just doubling pointer size, though - padding in C structs due to pointer alignment, for example.
Procedure in Plain Air
You know its a bad day when encyclopediadramatica.com is a valid reference.
I have never understood the educational purpose of tenure for pre-university level teachers. It just seems like a symptom of teacher unions holding the system hostage.
Even if he just wants to identify a single opening tag his task seems quite hopeless, though. Since the tag can have any number of attributes and apparently attributes can have all sorts of values (inluding "<" according to another SO comment). Maybe it is not impossible, but it is unlikely to be pretty.
Never implement a feature for a “potential” customer

That's a gem. It's common to hear the mantra "avoid feature creep," but this is a much clearer way of saying it.

I was at the Seattle Tech Startups meeting that the author mentions, and his dislike of public speaking wasn't apparent at all. Kudos to him.
Alternatively, get your hands on a free IRC client and hang around #ruby and #rubyonrails on irc.freenode.net.

Hit or miss, at times, but being able to chat live with real Ruby and Rails programmers is pretty helpful.
The fact that he pointed out a error in analysis in no way affects your opinion of the conclusion?

The whole point of Gladwell's assertion is that if Pinker is this haphazard in gathering supporting data, perhaps his entire review is nothing more than opinion.

While there's nothing wrong with that - being a review and all - it certainly isn't a factual debunking of data.

(btw I'm not debunking the assertion, just your reasoning)
The awesome power of pretending
What caches are they referring to? DB caches? Anyone know what tools they may be referring to?
> /combine.php?test1&test2

that's a pretty hideous URL. I'd want to alias that using mod rewrite or something. I'd also probably want to do this as part of a build script and just let the web server serve the static files. Then you'd probably just run the dynamic one on your dev server to save you having to build.
A Brief History of Solar Sails
"I think most artists simply want to know the easiest quickest way to make money for themselves doing what they enjoy doing (the smart ones anyway). Fans just want a powerful escape."

It has been proven time and time again that fans will pay for music, if the price is right, and their demands are met.

I think artists both want to get paid, and ALSO reach more fans that enjoy their music.
I agree, but he did have options.

Why didn't he do it on his blog, then? Or say at the end of a letter: For a more complete response to pinker, see [URL].

We can conclude that he either had lots of other good arguments but chose to focus on that minor one, or that he didn't have good rebuttals for the other things.
Just addressing your first sentence -- since I don't know Gladwell well enough personally to respond to the others -- it's not beyond the realm of imagination that he uses a ghost writer, or that someone transcribes for him, or even that he uses voice recognition software (as one of my clients does, which prompted my initial response).

My point was whether the usage was incorrect, because it's not impossible to misspell it and still know the meaning of the term.
It might be faster to push a button and get a ticket, if you're already standing in front of the machine. How are these people all getting to the clinic? Are they driving? Taking public transportation? Cabs? Where are they parking?

Now they all go home and come back a second time?
Communicating the Dangers of Nuclear Waste to Future Generations
You might be right, but he could've handled this with more professionalism.
Reads a bit like Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World"
Paul Allen diagnosed with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma
You're assuming that the 9 years of work are somehow equal to the 36 years of enjoyment.

Nobody with a child would ever say this. You won't have 36 years of pleasure if you are "absent" for the first 9.
After reading that I felt like I had just visited a used car dealer.
I found the way that the linked interpreter above implements dimensions rather confusing, mostly.

Thanks for the offer, but I didn't get that far because I decided I was better off focusing on Erlang for the time being. I'm very curious about that language family, I'm just trying to not spread myself too thin. When I get back to it, I'll try working through the J labs - it's probably a much better way to pick it up than untangling a semi-obfuscated interpreter.
He wasn't fired but let go. It's a world of difference between the two.
Is 2 weeks a legal requirement in some states? I have yet to see that here in California, except once in an employment contract for a company headquartered in NJ.

The advice I generally give is also Golden Rule based, which is to give the amount of notice one reasonably believes would be given in a layoff. This is, of course, easiest with a company that has already gone through such a thing, having already set an expectation.
Steve Blank's "accelerator" view of VC financing begs this question: why not raise debt instead of equity?

Any banker will agree that equity is the worst way to raise funds. It's a fair deal if the investor is taking a risk. But if you really have a working business model, that "just needs money", I don't think there is that much risk... normally the risk is the discovery of that model.
Devious...

What bugs me about this closed stuff is that if they'd open it up it would get so much better faster. Hackable hardware seems such a no-brainer.
All good advice. This alone doesn't warrant praise though, since good advice often finds it's way to the homepage.

No, what makes this worth reading are three things, a very rare combination: the advice is succinct, honest, and non-obvious.
biz2hack....like everybody else pointed out, the best way to get into it is to jump in with trying small changes, and seeing the effect of those changes. I was in a similar position as you recently, except that I know all the fundamentals of programming - did a BA in Comp Sci :)

However, I have recently taken a liking to Ruby and am committed to learning Rails. I looked at many Ruby books and even tried the poignant Ruby tutorial that other posters have linked to, but I found the best tutorial & accompany book is the 'Learn to Program in Ruby' book by Chris Pine. http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/ He started writing a Ruby tutorial online and refined it according to feedback from readers. Then once he had all of that done, he published it in a complete book. But the bulk of the tutorial is still available free at the link I posted above.

Chris does an awesome job of making programming accessible. He assumes you don't have any experience programming, and breaks down everything into 'human-friendly' language. It is hands-down one of the best programming texts/tutorials I have ever seen. The truth is, I have been searching for a similar text for Rails, but haven't found it.

If you start there, I think that would be a good place to start.

Keep us posted on how it all goes.

Good luck!
"that changing the incentives around teaching will lead to changes in how teachers are taught (second paragraph after the big chart), which would seem to imply the author does indeed consider that part of the problem."

It's part of the problem, but a very small part relative to other problems related to incentives in the field, which chiefly relate to pay, merit, and the relative ability of highly qualified people to get other jobs.