skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend of mine. I was ranting to him how I didn't feel good enough in any single pursuit and was upset at having so many hobbies and side-interests diluting my ability to be much better at any one thing. He basically told me: "Well, no one has the exact same set of skills that you do and being diverse in training is a virtue. Plus, even if there is someone better than you at everything you do, that person's really fucking busy right now, so there's still a lot of work to do"
I sincerely wish that I had spoken to this guy ten years ago as it would have saved me a lot of time, effort and anguish.

If you can prove your idea has traction in the marketplace then he's right the investors will come to you.
Glenn Branca suggests instant availability of old music is bad for new music
Browser Sketch Pad
Kinda scratching my head. It's definitely a well done site and app. Problem is, there is no problem here. I'm not going to ship you a package to your @twittername address. The few times a year I send someone something via mail, I'm going to want it to be over and done with. I don't want to have to wait for you to respond to a tweet (which 90% of the people I know don't regularly use or ever will).
Why type systems are interesting
Newton is also believed to have been homosexual in a severely homophobic society, which puts a definite crimp in your lifestyle. Also his alchemical researches definitely gave him mercury exposure, which is doesn't help your personality either.

That said, going back to the root post I have never noticed a strong correlation between IQ and personality. The few studies with actual evidence that I've seen (ahem, which this is not) haven't seen one either. Therefore I am strongly inclined to ignore this blog.
Everything you need to know about 'popular culture'
I believe every repository is 404'd right now on Github.
Free File Hosting Made Simple - MediaFire
Hmm, I tried with GHC 6.10 and the python dicts are still faster. I'm told that the judy array on hackage is the way to go for mutable maps but I haven't tried it personally.
Air Force orders another 2200 Playstation 3s
I'm trying hard not to fall for the obvious trap of buying the Browser Sketch Pad linked in his post, but I want it so bad.
On that note:

I'm building a site and would eventually like to start accepting email addresses for beta testers. I've never done beta testing before and don't know where to begin. How do you email everybody? Do you send them all the same email, or do you individually email everybody with a personalized beta code so that you can keep track of how many people are participating? It's all very foreign to me...

Any suggestions?
I found this very amusing. I can definitely relate. However, the title of this post doesn't accurately reflect the contents of the post.
When gifted adolescents are compared to general high school students according to their preference for intuition, they are more likely to enjoy solving new problems and dislike doing the same thing repeatedly.

My take: they've become bored as hell, conditioned over the years of idiot level race-to-the-bottom schooling to hate doing what they're assigned the way they're supposed to do it because they don't require as much repetition as other people apparently do in order to "get" things. To get any intellectual enjoyment, they had to find interesting stuff on their own.

I'd also suspect that the introvert part comes about mostly because of the various social stigmas against doing well in school; later in life, a lot of people that were silent outcasts in school really come out of their shells once they're around people that value skills other than throwing balls around.

In other words, my take is that there may be a causal relationship here, in that "giftedness" (whatever that really means) tends to force people towards a certain personality type in most high school environments.

I'd be very curious to see if these results continue to hold in cultures where there is less teaching to the bottom and more respect for academic talents.
Why Big Media's Anti-Google Counter-Revolution Will Fail
How to share secrets in a negotiation
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Enjoy the turkey!
So, talking about this and reading what links I could find from your originally linked article, as well as reading up on Claudio Stampi leaves me no more illuminated. Stampi's book Why We Nap is out of print, my library does not have a copy, and I can't find any other references to actual studies that prove the arguments against polyphasic sleep, though the opinion of most folks does seem to be that it's not a replacement for a full nights sleep. I just can't figure out how they know, rather than merely think so. There seems to be a tremendous amount of regurgitation of party lines and mentioning of the same few, mostly dubious, sources. I think damned near everybody involved in the conversation, including you and I, understands less about sleep than they think they do.

You're right, however, that there is a cult-like feeling around polyphasic sleep discussion, and I view that sort of thing with extreme skepticism...but I'm surprised to find it happening on both sides. The "debunkers" are just as guilty of making unbacked claims, and poorly citing their opinions.

Every time I've seen a straight up assertion about how long one should sleep, whether napping can reduce the total number of hours needed, etc. I'm unable to find a study that directly backs the assertion. I guess such studies must exist, but no one is linking to them. Even Wikipedia is surprisingly lacking in citations of directly relevant scientific research on the matter.
well, the /next/ time you need furniture, now you'll know there's an IKEA in Malmo - I suppose they put manager Gustavsson's profile in the public Malmo network, and the brilliance is in getting the word to spread so quickly (for free! minus products) in the relevant geographical region. Even giveaways usually have marketing budgets for signs, pamphlets, postcards...
Ask HN:  Is there a service for micro-endorsements on the web?
Suppose a user makes a claim in a discussion forum without justification or with justification that I do not understand.

Whether it's worth time and effort to pursue this further depends on the expertise of that user for that topic.

Is there a service where I could check that his/her expertise in this topic has been endorsed by someone with expertise in that topic?

You could calculate PageRank on the expertise endorsement graph for a given topic to determine the extent of expertise on that topic.
FORTRAN 4 noobs
Damn you and the incredibly funny time sink you rode in on, sir. However, it does provide a witty example of how one should disengage from a disastrous client. I could have used this a few months ago.
The open CV lib is in C (with IPP cpu-optomized assembler if you want) calling the functions from python doesn't slow you down - unless you do something really dumb like trying to itrerate over pixels in the python cde.
Top 10 Latin American Startups
I thought the tidbit of how the engineer moved from California to New York was interesting. Seems like New York is really growing to be a hotbed for awesome startups. Watch out San Fran!
From what I remember, it usually means "Scored in the top N% on a standardized test", where N is some small-ish number, roughly proportional to the amount of noise that local parents make when their children don't get labeled as "gifted." In my town parents tended to make a lot of noise, so it was around 15 or 20% of the students, but in some cases people got in directly because of parental bitching, so I don't know what the real cutoff was from the tests (which everyone had to take, at least in my school district).

Some of the dumbest people I've ever had the displeasure to interact with were in the gifted program, and a couple of the smartest ones were not; it's a rough measure, certainly, but that doesn't mean it's altogether meaningless. It probably has a decent but not overwhelming correlation with actual intelligence, whatever way you may wish to define that.

Edit: It's also worth noting that more and more districts don't have gifted programs any more, due to an increased emphasis on getting the lowest scoring students past thresholds for NCLB.

I'd be curious to hear what others here thought of these programs if they were available - the one that I was a part of actually pulled us out of school one full day per week, and let us choose and work on our own projects, so I found it very valuable, far more than the missed schooldays would have been, but I know there's a lot of variability in these things.
Poll: Is humility an important trait for entrepreneurs?
Is humility an important trait for entrepreneurs to have? Are successful entrepreneurs humble or do they lack humility?
Humility is not important
Humility is somewhat important
Humility is pretty important
Humility is very important
Scala Incubator
Agreed. I've logged into sites using OpenID, and while I can step through the process, I don't quite understand what's going on behind the scenes, except that it let's me log in to a site in a very obtuse fashion.
I asked kenneth at the euc about the test suite and he said there would be some tests initially and more to come

(crosses fingers)
It's not solving a problem, it's making the solution more convenient.
I can't imagine battle.net is very big anymore...
I got the point, I just don't agree that it's essential or even all that effective to become niche. In fact I can think of many examples were becoming niche will hurt you in the long term - I mean, hey, my niche used to be Perl :)

Which I guess is my point - if you're a programmer and looking to add a language to your toolkit, surely a programming language would be the better choice?
Well done post. You could find a reason not to do anything. Google? Check out the search engines that already exist and own the space. Apple? No one wants a computer for personal use. Dropbox? File storage has been done and no margins. Twitter? 140 characters is worthless. Vizio? Enough TVs exist. YCombinator? WTF are you going to do with $15k.
I could go on and on and on. Seriously, just fucking build it. If for some odd reason NOTHING at all exists like what you're doing, a competitor will come along that does. There is nothing and I mean nothing that a smart team of 20 somethings can't build nowadays. At worst, you'll have something that you, yourself love. That's the key to all of this: Build something YOU want, then adapt it so it works for a broader range of people if need be. If the tshirt for getting accepted to ycombinator is: build something people want and the tshirt for getting acquired is: i built something people want, the tshirt for getting asked to interview/demo should be: i built something I wanted.
Free open source project management tool for small team. easy and useful.
Apparently WoW is now part of Battle.net:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle.net#World_of_Warcraft
The Real Problem With the Climate Science Emails
> I have trouble even checking what colors changed each frame in under 1 second
Sounds like it will work great until you send a GPS tracker along.
If you look at the original article, it could also be interpreted as rationalizing the reasons the author has difficulty getting laid (per the conclusion). Weak though it is in scholarly terms, I found it quite thought-provoking nevertheless - reasoning from general principles without correctly weighting the desirability of likely social outcomes can create all sorts of problems.

IQ (or abstract reasoning ability or whatever you'd like to call it) ain't everything; there's a big difference between being clever and being cunning, and I've often wished there were a way to rebalance the stats :)
I disagree. The only Tumblr blogs I see are snippets usually consisting of artsy text-based graphics or camera phone pictures. And they don't allow comments. I just don't get it...
so yes I understand that.

I also understand that Hollywood finds it safer to remake (and make sequels to) old successes than to innovate

As an end user I wish it wasn't like that. I can live with Hollywood because it is possible to make low budget movies and people do - there is a thriving independent film industry. Likewise for software its affordable to start up on your own and innovate. Hardware is a whole other kettle of fish though - to afford to work with and on the miniaturisation needed for these kind of devices - its still beyond most small enterprises. Which is where innovation typically resides.

Yes of course its safer for these people to spend their money following the leaders - just that it would be nice if there where a few more leaders (and I speak as someone who has many mac computers)
The challenge: Don't speak in future tense
Great post. Whenever I see a product similar to something I'm developing, it makes me feel better to know that there is a market for what I'm building.
Swipely Seeks Front-End XHTML/CSS/JS Developer
Have his results and methodology been replicated by other researchers, though? I've had trouble finding mentions of such. Having a methodology that only one guy can "make work" sounds more than a little like Steven Hayne's bite mark frauds.
Resources for Scala Compiler Hacking
I think you're confusing introversion with shyness.

People who are shy are afraid of other people. People who are introverted just don't enjoy talking with a lot of other people.
Good point but the funny thing is that I did not find a single spelling mistake in the OP's post or his about section. Compare that to a TC post about the wakeband and its riddled with spelling errors. So maybe he is being facetious.
List of Rails CMS software
Bit commitment is a core concept in crypto -- this is also a piss-poor commitment protocol. After I flip the coin and say tails you can claim to have "won" and when I dispute the result you just pull out a sentence that has TAIL at the front and claim that this is what you sent to me. How can either party prove the claim? If you build a good bit commitment scheme you can get by with a very small number of message exchanges and still have both parties accept the results.

Start with the wikipedia entry for bit commitment, read Blum's coin flipping over the telephone paper and work your way up to zero knowledge protocols...
This thinking has led me to start (and continue) two projects so far: a Twitter client and a Google Reader replacement.

I'm constantly questioning the value of my efforts when solutions already exist, but it turns out that irritation is a pretty solid motivator. =^)
Skifree clone done in HTML5 Canvas element
Agreed in principle, though I've never played EVE. The other option is to police - moderate, I supposed, in an online game - and we've all seen how well this works in regular society. I would imagine that this only becomes feasible when the number of "illegal" actions are relatively small and capable of being adjudicated by a few mods rather than a flat-out broken part of the game that is widely exploited.
TiVo subscription numbers back where they were in 2004
quick pointer - it runs a lot faster in Chrome than it does in Firefox
No. It's just plain wrong.
Funny. There's a whole load of code out there that could've done with being created by someone who'd taken a data structures and algorithms class or two. I wouldn't exactly classify that as questionably valuable.

And, really, I don't understand university education being classified as following directions. It's far more self directed than earlier education, and indeed the jobs that follow education - unless my experience was massively atypical.
Anecdotes do not equate or imply a trend.
There's Always An Excuse Not to Give
No, it wasn't. Both companies make money by harnessing unpaid volunteers and using their work to prey on small businesses.
Git for Subversion users
You're overlooking the scaling factors at work here, though, which make the "our world has too many good people" worries lose a lot of their force.

As long as the need for labor scales roughly in line with the population and the supply of competitors scales with the population as well, then your economic prospects are equally good whether you're in the top 1% (or .0001%) of a thousand people in a field or a hundred million.

You just need to make sure you're in a field where the need for labor (and the compensation's correlation with talent) scales properly with the population. A good surgeon is always going to be in a decent situation, because the demand for surgeons is exactly proportional to the number of people around; a high level competitive athlete is probably much worse off as the population grows, because the number of paying athletic competitions is mostly uncorrelated to the population (though other opportunities correlate better, like teaching gym class, being a personal trainer, etc. - music is similar, in that the number of massively profitable rock stars is mostly constant, but the more mundane opportunities, like gigs and lessons, grow in line with the population).

Startups probably walk both sides of the line depending on the specific business plan, and I suspect that a lot of them do have plenty to fear from the growing pool of competent entrepreneurial programmers. One of the issues here is that the supply of programmers is probably growing a bit faster than the population; then again, so is the need for them, especially as the world shifts more and more towards the digital, so it's possible that there's still a good balance there, I'm not sure.
Camels and Rubber Duckies - "How much should I charge for my software?"
One of the biggest questions you're going to be asking now is, "How much should I charge for my software?" When you ask the experts they don't seem to know. Pricing is a deep, dark mystery, they tell you. The biggest mistake software companies make is charging too little, so they don't get enough income, and they have to go out of business. An even bigger mistake, yes, even bigger than the biggest mistake, is charging too much, so they don't get enough customers, and they have to go out of business.
the yes/no pie chart was especially hilarious
Come on. It's Sweden. It's IKEA. I think most Swedes have heard of IKEA by now and would be aware if a new IKEA was opening in the vicinity. And Malmo is not exactly a tiny, unknown backwater. They've probably had IKEA in Malmo for decades.

I suspect the Facebook campaign was novel but not a brilliant runaway success, as measured by an increase is sales.
Apple Accepts PhoneGap For iPhone Development
Interesting. If it could be integrated easily with discussion platforms, I can see it catching on in contexts like HN where discussion quality is valued.
Yes, they recently required that all accounts switch over to Battle.net (the cutoff date was sometime early november, after a months notice).

The public reasoning about it is so users can use the same email/password combination for WoW as well as the other upcoming Blizzard games like Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, and whatever their new IP next-gen MMO ends up becoming. The private reasons one can only guess, but I would assume at least that they can do stat tracking much easier with the new system.
This was submitted earlier today and killed.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=961354
Smooth seas don't make skillful sailors
Yeah! If not the BEST motivator.
And, of course, building applications is useful practice if nothing else. I recently finished a poor reddit clone which I have no intention of actually using to test some of these new fangled key-value stores.
Ask HN: Is united states bending before china?
Isnt it true that US$ is so weak and it is limping instead of falling only because of China?

First time Mr. Obama denied visit to Dalai Lama. Isnt because he bowed before chinese pressure?

Obama also signed join agreement that delcared China a party of India-Pak conflicts.

Seem like when China says Jump Us leaders hurry up to ask "How High".

Are all these signs that US is going down?
This will not work, but the next stage will be "cooperating" with the DoJ and filing amicus briefs in a trumped-up antitrust case.
Cardigans are from Jönköping..not Malmö...totally different.
I have also realized one thing: there is always room for one more. Unless the market your are aiming at is incredibly small, chances are it will never be covered 100%, hence you'll always have at least some room to get in.

It's really incredible that us techies are always looking for something completely different to do, when instead we could just do something that is already proven and make money out of it, and even more money if we do it really well. Think car dealerships for example, it doesn't matter that someone already invented them and that there are thousands of them, people still want to buy cars and try new stuff, same with restaurants, supermarkets, electronics..... you get the idea.
I'd actually say that, if your not inventig some crazy cutting edge new technology, then whatever web app you're building already exists.

I also thought it is quote obvious to do it anyways. No two apps are the same, just similar.
I'm not familiar with tumblr's community: perhaps you could link to a couple of shining examples?
I stopped reading at Someone who had just finished read A Farewell to Alms would respond "If American workers aren't better educated than they were in the 1970s, why would you expect their wages to rise?" (He hyperlinked A Farewell to Alms, which is a book he wrote.)

Whether or not American workers are better educated than they were in the 1970s, economists claim that productivity has been rapidly growing over the last few decades. Growth in productivity is direct evidence of room for compensation to grow as well. Therefore if wages haven't grown we need to look elsewhere than "the workers aren't good enough to justify higher wages" for an explanation.

The fact that he doesn't know basic economic facts about productivity and wages is enough that I have no interest in listening to his explanations of how to improve wages by making workers more productive.

I don't pretend to have anything like a full explanation for why productivity and wages are not more strongly correlated. But it is worth noting that during the last boom wages remained steady but money spent by employers on workers grew at a healthy pace. Unfortunately the growth in spending mostly got sucked up by higher health care premiums, so wages remained flat.

Unless you can fix economic trends like that one, I guarantee that the correlation between wages and productivity will remain weak.
Assuming you have a printer, just download the zip from the upper left hand corner here: http://960.gs/

There is a PDF in it that has basically the same thing for free, and you can print as many pages as you want.

(Direct zip link: http://960.gs/files/960_download.zip - The PDF is in a folder called "sketch_sheets")

Those stencils do look cool though ;)
> Tumblr just broke into the Top 100

Top 100 what? Top 100 websites by traffic?
I've never heard that. Can you substantiate that?
Common sense is the beliefs held by common people, by definition common people are much lower IQ than someone in the 170+ IQ range.

It would shock me if someone in the 170+ IQ range believed much of what "common" people believe. If they did, it would imply we have an extraordinarily well educated population and an extraordinarily boring genius class.
Rightly. Reddit and Digg are that way.
Construction robot inspired by sci-fi flick Aliens
my other 'favorite' expression "don't re-invent the wheel". Some times you just have to, to make it better. People ignore the fact that the wheel has been 're-invented' many times throughout the ages, otherwise our cars will still be running on stone wheels like the Flintstones.
Blueprints for tons of stuff, including sci-fi ships.
Feynman reportedly tested at 125 on an IQ test in high school. Which just indicates how completely useless that test was.