Viewing profile — chesser

> Here's the original article. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1007137 Not available without subscription. Even so, the media described in the abstract makes no mention …

> Unfortunately, it only takes a few extremely chauvinistic individuals to sour an entire field towards women. They are simply reflecting the social mores of their day. IBM had the…

Since they only had two groups, one of them HAD to come out ahead. I also noted it listed MEAN score instead of MEDIAN. This would allow for a small number of people to spike the s…

In my above comment I worked out that there MUST be genetic differences. Even if you start from a point of complete genetic equality in aptitude, all it takes is any kind of cultur…

It's very plausible that older generations are much more sexist in certain ways. For example, Feynman getting the nearest "girl" to fetch his soup. http://www.longnow.org/essays/ri…

These studies are nutty. You can't separate diet from activity; you can't treat wide categories of food so indiscriminately; you can't use BMI or weight instead of body composition…

I don't think an AI Justin Bieber is that far off. AIs can create pop music in your virtual world if you like that sort of thing. All the other AIs will be talking about it, so you…

"Aspiring female scientists and mathematicians still have to contend with the inaccurate stereotype that men are innately better at them in their chosen fields." I wasn't aware tha…

Identity theft is a much broader issue than just credit reports. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_theft Essentially it's a way to accrue benefits while pushing any negative co…

Eventually, copyright will die off completely. It's just a matter of when. When we have sci-fi nanoreplicators that can copy luxury (flying) cars, food, etc., all scarcity will be …

It's one thing to nuke links, but this apparently went beyond that. From the TC comments: "Wow, you can't type ANY form of lamebook.com, lamebook DOT com, lame+book DOT com...NOTHI…

Copyright law was originally instituted to cover written works. There is a ton of case law. It would not have been kind to them. Nobody "forced" them out of business, they voluntar…

2) I'm not criticizing the idea of funding, I'm saying the amount is small. Google got either $100k total or $100k each from David Cheriton and Andy Bechtolsheim, depending on whic…

> I got an email from Paul Graham saying basically that being a single founder put me at a disadvantage, because two founders can talk each other out of bad ideas, but I appeared t…

We could start a betting pool on the number of years until the government makes it compulsory.

As someone who remembers BBSes and Usenet flamewars, I can't emphasize enough how bad an idea it is to have your real identity linked to everything you do. It also makes it very di…

> Sure, but thousands of people phoning in to say “you’re an utter asshole” — leading to the site’s closure That isn't why they closed. Think what would have happened to them if th…

Actually the so-called "mob justice" was a HUGE FAVOR. I'll explain. How would you feel if your start-up was ripped off? Would you want HN people to rally around you, or would that…

They take a long time if you have to rebuild the indexes, which is what you have to do if you only have a text dump. For MySQL, using the standard format (MyISAM), you can just do …

Fortunately, there is this thing called "science" which means we can understand things about the world regardless of where we live. As Dawkins would say, there is no such thing as …

Boxers punching with no tape is a good way to get broken wrists.

You never "win". Having been in a hospital due to an accident, I would never want to put anyone else in there. And if I was put there by someone else, I would probably have been ob…

"a pejorative modifier to refer to a person who experiences something vicariously rather than first-hand, or to a casual critic who lacks practical experience " Ironically the most…

Your post is a good illustration of the type of attitude we want to scrupulously avoid when appointing someone to be in charge of a database.

> The half a million users validates their techniques, Let me introduce you to my friend, GeoCities. Funny thing about free hosting. > no matter how much armchair quarterbacking. T…