skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In every society, the wealthy have advantages over those who are less well off, and the shock to me would be to discover that such advantages did not extend to a higher rate of admission to the best schools. In my thinking, to call this a "scam" says more about the author than it does about the admissions process he is questioning.

I think a lot is revealed here in the way the author handles the SAT. This test is still widely used as a major part of admissions. The author cites academic studies indicating a strong correlation between high test scores and high family income. So far, so good. It is the conclusion he draws from this that is suspect, and that is to suggest that the test simply serves as a false cover for institutions claiming to admit based solely on merit while systematically favoring the wealthy in reality - hence the alleged scam.

This to me is logically flawed along post hoc, ergo propter hoc lines. If the SAT truly does not test for merit, that is fine - abolish it. If, however, it does indeed test for merit and rich kids tend to do better at it, this means only that such kids tend on average to be better prepared academically at this stage in life than are poorer kids. But isn't that what a system based on merit is supposed to determine? Why then call it a scam?

Apart from the SAT, it may be that the author's other evidence in support of his contention is enough to support his thesis. When I hear "scam," however, I expect something pretty strong to support it and when I see the sort of analysis that appears here with respect to the SAT, I tend to think that the author himself is prejudiced on this issue (i.e., that he himself prefers to see a leveling quite apart from merit and is using a hypocrisy argument merely as an attack tool), leading me to regard the rest of what he says with a healthy measure of skepticism.
Or eSATA, of course.
Interesting take on the multiple brand, P&G-esque approach. Would be a significant departure from today where Google is very consistent throughout its products. On the other hand, basically any website with AdSense is an offshoot of Google, no?

People definitely don't care, and I believe this is because they don't know. Do people really realize that Google has so much information and is nearly at the center of the lives and livelihoods of many people and companies? I don't think so. Most don't even know how Google makes money. Heck, most people don't care enough and don't know enough to use Chrome or Firefox over IE8.
You are conflating vocational training with degree acquisition, which sometimes overlap, but usually do not.
Student test scores also strongly correlate with parent test scores, even more so than inter-generational earnings correlates. In the paper "Do Smart Parents Raise Smart Children?", Anger and Heineck assert that while a 10% increase in parents’ income raises children’s income by 2%, a 10% increase in parents’ test scores raises children’s test scores by 4.5%. Perhaps the real problem is that mediocre parents raise mediocre children, and no amount of test retooling is going to change that fact. In their book Herrnstein and Murray establish a strong correlation between income and intelligence. The chart at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve#Author.27s_follo... is particularly telling.

It stands to reason that if intelligent people are very likely to earn high incomes, and are also very likely to have intelligent children, that intelligent children are likely to have parents with high incomes. Retooling higher education so that it is as fair and ineffective as primary and secondary public education doesn't seem like a particularly good idea.
"Indeed, I couldn't even get him to speculate about moving the 360 forward to a more modern chip technology. This would reduce the Xbox's manufacturing cost and also produce a console that generated less heat and cost less to run -- benefits that have already accrued to Sony with the launch of the PS3 Slim. It should also be more reliable."

You have to take news about future versions of existing consoles with enormous grains of salt. The last few updates have been announced as quietly as possible, as close to the actual release as possible, because they don't want people to hold off purchasing a console while waiting for the new revision. If they are planning on sticking with the current XBox 360 platform for another 2 years, I'm sure we'll get a new chipset iteration. Why? Because there's no way they'll pass all the savings on to the consumer, so they'll make more money. But don't expect them to announce it years in advance; expect something more like "weeks".

Besides, it's not as if they are still shipping the original design: http://kotaku.com/305370/xbox-360-falcon-chips-have-landed
Well, I think the combination of Natal + XBox360 would effectively be the next generation for Xbox
Blogger? Youtube? Doubleclick? ...

You know. HN readers know.

The rest knows?
hm. well, for most server-side stuff, you really should be doing a little learning before just installing something. But yeah, for the desktop, that does sound like an interesting idea.
I understand Dave's motivations but I don't agree
with his position that investors are like football coaches. That condescension is the heart of many poor investor relationships.

@Hiten, do you really look to your investors for guidance on design and marketing? Those seem to me to be your personal strengths.

All this to nitpick on one small point in the original post. Dave naturally writes for the funding audience so that is his target of the rant. His general point I agree with.
I think YouTube did the right thing. You don't want to become an "Internet meme" at least not when you're 13 and can't possibly see the consequences of your "fame". Had YouTube not pulled the plug this could have become an experience that deformed and damaged the kid's self image which is something very dangerous in the pre-teen age. This way however, this will be a cool story he will able to brag about to his friends over and over again: "Have I told you the story when I suddenly became an Internet celebrity but YouTube shut it down"?

Seriously I thing that being a bit of protective over kids is not that a bad thing at all. Of course I'm not saying that childhood should be a prison or something but some due parenting is totally fine. I know that I did a lot of stupid things when I was a kid (without my parents knowledge), who knows what sort of stuff I would've done if I was actually allowed to do them?
No she didn't. Any good description of the history of the word "bug" would include this 1878 quote from Edison:

It has been just so in all of my inventions. The first step is an intuition, and comes with a burst, then difficulties arise — this thing gives out and [it is] then that 'Bugs' — as such little faults and difficulties are called — show themselves and months of intense watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success or failure is certainly reached.

Or read the log entry from the team "First actual case of bug being found", which has a clear interpretation that that word was used before then.

If you want more, see another Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bug
Show HN: My latest pet project, pydroid
The PHP guys are right in the same sense a store is right that it doesn't have to take a return without a receipt. But most stores will do so anyway in order to maintain good will. Whenever we come across undocumented or undefined behavior that will change in a new release, we try very hard to not change it unless it's absolutely necessary.
You Can use Myentunnel
"The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it. Those are the real things." — Richard Feynman

:)
The Project Euler questions start easy enough. But I would not attempt to solve the later ones during a shower.
At the end of the article, the author suggests to look at proxytunnel and http://dag.wieers.com/howto/ssh-http-tunneling if you want to do this under Linux.

I just want to point out that this last option does a lot more than what the article does: it actually encapsulates the ssh session in HTTPS requests, so it'll work even if your firewall does layer-7 filtering. The article just runs sshd on port 443 and connects to that.
This is incorrect, at least at "named" med schools. Family background, ethnic background, collegiate pedigree, etc, are still of tremendous importance for admission, and can overcome GPA and MCAT.
Is It Worth Being Wise?
Software Category
Sophisticated segmentation and branding makes sense for a marketing organization which doesn't truly have diverse product lines. See Apple under Scully for a sign of how poorly it works for technology organizations.

Besides, Google is a technical company run by software developers. Their idea of marketing is building a better mouse trap. Changing that attitude would be a major cultural shift.
It would probably be not too difficult to find the macros that generate the index and add in the appropriate PdfTeX instructions to make hyperlinks.

Although, as a veteran Knuth code reader, I would say that his code is intended to be read linearly, like a book, rather than in bits and pieces. (Think of it like dynamic programming: it's more efficient to start from the little functions and work your way up, than to start from the big functions and recurse your way down.)
Secure Passwords sans SSL
I knew a black premed and a middle-eastern premed.

Both of them came from privileged families, yet had below par scores and grades, and both managed to get into Harvard med.
How does one get into this? Are you a teacher, or are schools also looking for professionals in other fields to help out?
We already do edit titles. Particularly Smashing Magazine type titles ("50 CSS Guides You Have to Read Now" -> "CSS Guides"), those that bait HN specifically, and those that are false, like this one. We also fix typos and solecisms in titles, even if they occur in the original.
Did you consider "Free" as ONE OF the amounts in the field? That could conceivably have given you the extent of the gap between "Free" and "Paid" for your product. You could have used the data to figure out your the correct price points.

I'm sure most hackers in this discussion have heard of the famous article by Fred Wilson 3 years ago, but here it is anyway:
http://redeye.firstround.com/2007/03/the_first_penny.html
Relevant: "A Functional Description of T E X's Formula Layout (1997)":

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.39.6...

They rewrote the formula layout into purely (?) functional SML, and made it fairly easy to understand along the way.
Slim’s Prototyping Station
I've been using *NIX as my primary desktop for a very long time. For most of that time, I used the same server distros on my desktop as on my servers (why learn a new system, right?) and it was kindof a pain in the ass. But, I figured, it was worth it, as I could use what I learned at my dayjob.

But two years ago or so, I switched to a desktop distro; ubuntu. It was striking. setting the thing up was actually easier than setting up a windows box for gaming (no digging around for drivers, etc... the box doesn't slowly become less reliable as you add new software.) my laptop (thinkpad X60s) works out of box. Every peripheral I've needed, from the internal EVDO modem to usb->serial adapter 'just works'
Worldwide Telescope, Photosynth, Surface, HealthNet, .NET, Mediaroom, Natal, Azure, Windows 7, Office 2007+, Sync.

And those are just the commercial products. Microsoft also contributes plenty of purely academic research to various tech related fields, including AI research, electronics, and biotech.
See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1043296
I don't see what value this post adds to HN. Perhaps if you added some statistics this would be more interesting.
Maybe I'm missing something, but finding live on Mars would just be a single data point. It would in no way provide a meaningful forecast to our own fate.
That is a particularly egregious one, which I just fixed. I was there, and he said nothing of the sort. Frankly a lame move by Marshall to generate pageviews for an article with practically no content.
It's only dystopian if you're human. I, for one, welcome our new virtual overlords.

The really depressing thing is that if we do get taken over by an AI, it'll probably be written in C++...
how is this different from http digest authentication?
That doesn't mean they see real products and virtual products as equal. It is simply acknowledging that virtual products exist.
Yeah, but for all he knows they'll have the intelligence of the common house fly. And not only is that incredibly unlikely anyway, it's essentially no different from dying out altogether. And who really cares? None of us will live that long anyway.
That's an interesting reason why people might use a headhunter... but it seems a little weird; I mean, unless you have collaboration between headhunting firms, getting one firm to stop poaching your guys might not get you a whole lot.

I always thought the value proposition of headhunters was some sort of plausible deniability thing. You know, so there wasn't a question of you hiring your golf buddy or something.
Good writeup, ssh tunnels are something I can’t live without…

Step 9 can be skipped completely if no proxy is needed to be configured.

Also don’t forget, doing all of this still sends the DNS requests in the clear to the usual/old dns server and not through EC2. If the DNS server is also meant to filter and redirect, this can be an issue. To go around that, in firefox you can go to about:config and set network.proxy.socks_remote_dns = true

And for linux folks... you don't need any tools or any more special config... just run the ssh command with switch -D <SOCKS_PORT_NUMBER> and configure firefox or your browser to use that.
I used to use mytop but since 2 years or so, I use innotop now, which is just like mytop but with more features geared towards InnoDB tables:
http://innotop.sourceforge.net/

It also works pretty much the same as mytop for MyIsam tables, I use innotop in such away on one of the sites I own.
Write for Ten - write about anything for 10 minutes
This is why I hesitate to release open source software.
I think that nobody really knows it. It you go to the YouTube home page, there's no mention of Google other than "Add youtube to your google homepage" (might be different in other localization though)
The thing I find with netbooks is that almost everyone is universally happy with them: geeks and non-geeks alike. It seems the only people really complaining are technology writers looking for more readers.
I wasn't saying they see them as equal. I'm saying they see them as more equal than they did when virtual products were seen as totally worthless.
The Edge Annual Question 2010. How is the Internet changing the way you think?
"If the child already has an imaginary friend"

Wouldn't that make the child schizophrenic? I have never experienced children having imaginary friends - is that a normal thing to have?

Also, I don't see why imagination should also require belief in imaginary things.
This brings up a good point, though: there's a reason people that have struggled with the lack of built in functionality in languages like C tend to be better programmers, even if they make a switch to languages with more featureful standard libs. The act of hacking your way through even the smallest tasks teaches you a lot.

And there are plenty of times in Excel where you'll need to hack your way through - it's got a lot of functionality, but once you move past what it's specifically designed to do, you'll start to get annoyed. That's when you start seeing INDIRECT and VLOOKUP all over the place, and you start to curse the developers that designed the whole damn system.

More than a few times I've started some analysis in Excel, but decided in the end that I'd just rather fiddle with primitive arrays in a sane programming language because of the hoops you need to jump through in Excel. Perhaps if the scripting language was anything but VBA, if it was less tedious to add built in functions that you can use from the spreadsheet, or if the syntax for working with the spreadsheet from within VBA wasn't so heavy, it would be more tolerable, but you can't win them all...
It appears that it's this box that is currently harvesting the energy

http://www.engadget.com/photos/airnergy-wifi-power-system-ha...
Wasn't it Rubenstein that lost the battle within Apple to build the iPhone with the iPod team on an embedded Linux platform?

If so then I can imagine he hasn't touched the iPhone. He's not some johnny-come-lately that's wowed by the very idea of the iPhone but someone who has fought for a different vision even before the iPhone existed.

I can imagine many such creators Intentionally don't bother themselves with what their competitors are doing.
Art vs. Computer Science
Beerbotprime, a robot that might get you a date.
Depends on your market position. You can create a lot of value in the marketplace by commoditizing and simplifying an over-serviced, over-delivered, over-matched product.

This works in software too. For instance, Gmail and Amazon Web Services pull prices down on webmail and cloud services respectfully.

If the competition's strength is excellent service for more, provide no service for less. I know it sounds weird, but it has often worked. In a maturing market, many pragmatic and conservative customers will prefer the cheaper, simpler packaged product. The key is that you cut prices by far less than the actual cost of service of the premium competition, so you can make more profit across a wider base of customers.
Already submitted as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1033994
So collisions in MD5^2 will be a superset of collisions in MD5. Iterating thousands of times will further increase the number of collisions.

This is 100% true, but 99% irrelevant. For any good hash, the number of collisions only increases linearly (proof: if it increased any faster, you would have a fast collision-finding algorithm); so you'd need to iterate your hash an unreasonably large number of times before extra collisions outweighed the benefit of slowing down the attacker.

That said: This is exactly why we have PBKDF2. PBKDF1 was just an iterated hash; PBKDF2 was introduced to "reduce concerns about the recursion degenerating into a small set of values".
the world described would have singularity-ed "long ago".
Lindows had this and later on they offered it for Ubuntu. It was called click'n'run.

Looks like it still exists in some form at http://www.cnr.com
How far out can ET hear us?
Has anyone on HN actually worked for a company that filters internet traffic? Would anyone on HN work at a company that filters http? I've always thought that if a company could effectively block internet traffic with a filter on a proxy then the problem wasn't that employees were wasting time surfing; the problem was that they were hiring employees incapable of getting around it.
Ah, I should go a bit further:

I got introduced to Adventure during Harvard Summer School in 1978, where they had a mostly idle much hacked UNIX V6 system on their single PDP-11/70 for all the undergraduates (HRSTS). It had a file system full of goodies and learning to navigate the Colossal Cave and an hierarchical file system really went well together.

(Prior to that was punched card FORTRAN IV (really more like a II) on an IBM 1130 ... so that was quite a step up!)
I thought the obvious next version was interesting as well. It doesn't exactly paint a very nice picture of men.

How can I get my husband to
...fall in love with me again
...be more affectionate
...love me again
...help around the house
...want me
...be more romantic
...lose weight
...talk to me
...leave the house
...stop drinking

How can I get my wife to
...love me again
...swing
...lose weight
...shave
...trust me again
...love me
...shut up

I assume that I got more common completions for the first than the second because women are more likely to use Google to seek advice.
I like that!
What more ?

3)...
man. future google is only a marginally-better cattle farmer than the current ones. it seems we're more efficiently used, and for less time, but we're still animals on a farm. when's that going to change?
There's no need for one... up until the day it is announced. Standard PR playbook.
Brings this to mind (albeit indirectly) http://xkcd.com/603/

Variation is probably the most resilient feature of humanity, which I think is commonly overlooked in these sorts of dystopisms. Well written, though, and a fun short read.
I think the correct term would be 'malicious agent', which is a program which does something bad, but we don't know what for now.
Mozilla to abandon Firefox extensions?
This is security FAIL. I repeat, DO NOT DO THIS.

Without SSL, you have no guarantee that the login form has not been tampered with; instead of hashing the password and sending the hash to the real server, an attacker can substitute a page which doesn't do any hashing and sends the password to the attacker.

(Technically there's a slight benefit, in that this will protect you from purely passive attacks. But the odds of that distinction mattering are approximately zero.)
A new and improved TeX?
Wrong. Cable companies pay for content, and recoup their money (+profit) through a combination of subscriptions and advertising. The cable gets ~$1200 + advertising revenue per customer per year, and from this pool they can buy content from content producers like NBC, Viacom, etc.

Now consider that Google makes about $40/user/year off ads. Even if Hulu made as much money per user per year as Google, they'd still be making < 5% of what Time Warner Cable makes per user per year, selling arguably the same content.

So as cable TV subscribers are replaced by lower-value internet TV viewers we should expect the total amount of money available to buy content to decrease rapidly. Consequently, there will be less money available to produce said content.

So when Kagan says "Somebody has to pay. It’s not going to stay on Hulu forever for free" she's exactly correct.

Whether or not that matters is another discussion.
The government filters http.

People generally assume that it's okay to slack off as long as you get your assigned work completed.
I love it, except for the project name. I was thinking it was going to be another "Run Python on Android" project.
so it'll take 30% longer to be governed?
If you pair the questions together, they solve themselves!
well, we do not need Facebook. But we do not need directories or bathrooms, it just happen that they exists. So, if facebook, is existing it means that are a few millions of people out there that found it at least entertaining if not useful. From there, my resquest: Is it possible to conceive and develop a social service à la Facebook, but open-source, where the rool is privacy and not ads ? ;-)
Yeah, I wasn't sure about the name. Any suggestions on an alternative?