Emil Sit

"Thanks for pointing that out." - Danielle Fong

""However, every time I read his work, I wish that experts of the fields he reports on would also write popular expositions that could be consumed by an audience like that of the New Yorker." I wish that were true too. I am trying in my own blog to present my work in both a form accessible to the literate public and helpful for researchers (though I have neither published most of my work yet, nor attracted an audience the size of the New Yorker so you will just have to be patient!) Arguably, Flynn did his best with "What is intelligence?" but people probably ran for the hills at the first formula. Such is life. But there are at least a few scientists who write for the public audience, Dawkins, Dyson, Hawking and Pinker perhaps most relevantly today, that do attract a wide readership. I honestly think Gladwell does a better job presenting things straight than Hawking. The rice field argument, while apparently silly, doesn't strike me as particularly wrong. I'm merely unconvinced. Does..." - Danielle Fong

"Apparently Gladwell cites that poor children actually 'learn faster,' increasing performance scores at a rate faster than higher class children, during the school year, but lose this benefit during the summer. Perhaps this is one contributing factor? (I don't have the primary source, he mentions this on a review from his yet-to-be-released book)" - Danielle Fong

"shrugs I have the feeling that if anything like the 'singularity' happens, it will feel fairly normal to the participants. The are many things today that would seem completely 'sci-fi' to people even a few decades ago. But we're still going to be resource and physics constrained, unless society changes our conscious enough that memes and genes won't still end up in an endless hunt for exponential growth." - Danielle Fong

"There are many theories that Gladwell's book ties together, and there's some pretty serious data on each of them. I know three, and all of this book I've read are excerpts. Each of his books includes a reading list and citations, and I don't think this will be any different. Terman et. al's studies of gifted children (http://books.google.com/books?......) Sherar et. al's study of physical maturity in hockey player development (http://www.informaworld.com/sm......) Flynn's study of the changing IQ of the population and ethnographic studies of Chinese. (http://books.google.com/books?......) I don't think one should claim an insufficient justification of his hypotheses without actually examining the justification thoroughly. Oftentimes, for Gladwell in particular, people claim that he's being unrigorous, imprecise, or incomplete. He's not being incomplete. He's being concise. If he weren't concise, almost nobody would..." - Danielle Fong

"The book review is impressively hypocritical. She ruthlessly disdains Malcolm Gladwell's use of selectively chosen biographical examples and anecdotal evidence, and then proceeds to selectively cherry-pick examples, to optimally infuriate politically correct sensibilities. She then lampoons him for incompleteness. She mentions only one of the many larger studies that he cites, the Terman study. Was the Terman study wide ranging? Yes. Does it fit Gladwell's hypothesis that the opportunities one is offered matter? Yes. Does she show it to be incorrect? No. Does she attack any part of it? No. Does she mention any of the other studies that Gladwell mentions? That major hockey players are nearly all born in the first three months of the year? Ericsson's studies on expertise? Flynn's analysis on historic chinatowns? No! If I present a theory, and back it up with a bunch of other data points, one should not be able to pick out a single data point, claim that I am basing my loose hypothesis..." - Danielle Fong

"Some of this stuff is jaw droppingly awesome. But I have to say, the most useful things for me will be the discrete calculus, the new visualizations, and the enhanced typesetting and UI. Many of the new mathematical additions are very interesting but very specific. I am very happy that Mathematica 7 ships with so much data. Data processing and procurement is a perpetual burden for those in chemistry, life science and environmental science. I'll be glad if this tax has somewhat lifted it." - Danielle Fong

"In 10^10^(big number) years? :-)" - Danielle Fong

"I meant two things: 1) Worship of icons and behaviors instead of the things which they represent; that is, cargo cult entrepreneurship. This is my own vague and probably incorrect usage. 2) If someone exclaims "Let's change the world," I would ask "Which part? Why?" Iconoclasm has a secondary meaning "A person who attacks settled beliefs or institutions." Changing the world does; to do so vaguely, or at random, or without actually mentioning the target, is not always such a sane thing to do." - Danielle Fong

"I think it's cool too. And I'd give them encouragement. And I'd try to resist the urge to pat them on the head. But as for why it's getting voted up, that's my assessment. Honestly, I really dislike the self-consciously self-focused articles we've been getting like our "10 Ways to Get Motivated..." articles. It's so... contentless. I come here for "Hacker News," not "'Hacker News,' News."" - Danielle Fong

"Vagueness, name dropping, iconoclasm, hubris, and absurd sentences like 'If you have nothing better to do, let's change the world.' All in the context of a world with enough information on starting web businesses online to read past this level of naivety. All things hackers intend to bristle at. On the scale from savvy to clueless, this doesn't rate well. But the snarky tone of the headline isn't any better. Sequoia isn't even spelled properly..." - Danielle Fong

"I don't know many either. My theory is that the interests of many were formed and set in cliques in high school, which I wasn't around to see. The few people I know now who are interested in such things also enjoy science and technology and art. You know the phrase 'six degrees of separation?' I feel like it must be at least three or four. I have little to no contact with these people, even though they're all around me. I felt similarly when I went to a baseball game, once. Wow." - Danielle Fong

"Digg commentary is at times, physically painful for me to read. Like someone punched me in the gut. What stupidity and ignorance. What a cesspool. What is it about certain internet places that make people so awful? Anonymity? Or are there people actually that bad all around me, in real life, and I simply don't notice?" - Danielle Fong

reddit.com has sub-sections, e.g. http://www.reddit.com/r/progra... , and you can open your own ones - Michael Kuhn

Maybe I should finally jump ship to Reddit, then. - Christopher Granade

oh shit! I'm totally screwed... - Jeremy Zawodny

"Yeah, it did. "Screw the environment. Those things are only interesting because of internet Male's bizarre fascination with them. Instead, let me write about whether Barack Obama is anorexic?! That's what real girls want to hear about..." Not going to let it keep me down, though. We just sent out a bunch of letters to investors. Low and behold, we now have a pitch." - Danielle Fong