skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, I would agree. He states that the SAT score serves as a "proxy" for the resources such students have had available to them in high school and, one would infer, is therefore rigged against middle class and poor students who had lesser quality resources at their disposal.

The unstated premise, though, is that elite academic institutions have a social obligation to act affirmatively to equalize outcomes in society by finding alternative ways to qualify students for admission besides the academic capabilities such students demonstrate at the time of applying. Since they have no way of knowing who has what innate merit that may not yet be reflected in academic test scores or historic grades, this ipso facto leads to a system where they have to apply quotas or arbitrary weighting adjustments (e.g., x% upward adjustment in GPA to account for having come from a poor school district) to achieve the equalization sought. Such adjustments will then have the effect of excluding some applicants with higher current performance scores in favor of others with what administrators deem greater unrealized merit, which seems a fairly arbitrary outcome. Whether this would lead to inclusion of more students based on true merit would seem to me to be a dubious proposition but it would decidedly put the schools in the business of trying to iron out social inequalities through admissions standards tied to something other than measurable academic criteria. This is the logical outcome of divorcing the idea of merit from any objective means of measuring it.
anApple,

Four Bean Soup's account wasn't closed, the paypal account is fine. Paypal disabled the gateway credit card processing with no explanation of why. Providing paperwork is easy, but they never asked for more of it to get the gateway set back up.
Yeah, me too .. I thought it was related to Android. Just a little "branding" issue there ;)
Why do you think it is fluff that is of no use to anyone.

It is not like HNers aren't interested in girls.
Sidenote: non-profit doesn't imply something isn't a scam or involves fraud.
Show HN: My exercise bike hooked up to an xbox - pedal faster to drive faster.
This is arguably one of the most important breakthroughs ever in the field of computing.
Just a note - that third title by IDEO is a free dl from their site, http://www.ideo.com/work/featured/kellogg
The problem is really stated in the article. As prices worldwide goes up the incentive to pump up more expensive sources of oil increases.

However, the price of transporting and fertilizing food is not a cost we really have the luxury of tampering with. 1 Billion people live on a dollar or less, since those same people are very effected by the food price it's them that pay the highest price of dearer oil.
Gouge?

We all have to live by selling dearly and buying lowly.
Thanks for the tip on the 1810 - and hope you feel better.

I have a 17" MBP right now, and while it is one awesome machine.. it's too damn big to haul with me all the time. I'm looking for something small that I can take to meetings or to the coffee shop if I just need to do some surfing/take notes/write a few emails.
What you describe is ineptitude and inability to provide service at a massive scale. That is bad, but it is not "evil."
I don't think anyone actually thinks PayPal is "evil" (in the Jungian sense), but, as this story suggests, and the story it linked to suggests, and as the number of upvotes its received suggests, there is plenty of evidence that indicates PayPal isn't known for stellar customer service, and therefore you might at least want to consider having a Plan B before signing up with them.

Just ask Google:

http://www.google.com/search?q=paypal+horror+story
Add or remove RAM (basically change the amount) clear NV memory three times (you'll hear the dong 3 times) and that will clear the OpenFirmware password... at least on older PPC Mac Minis.
Just because you do a lot of good does not mean you can just get off with a lot of bad. Their customer service is horrible and they don't deal with issues such as this the proper way. I agree with you, they've done a ton to democratize banking. What good is all that if you lose all the money they've allowed you to make because they have poor customer service practices?
http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nchem....
There's an opportunity here for an Answers-like service...
Well put! I think the headline was just for grabbing attention, but the moral of the story is to always have a backup plan if you use paypal.
My roommate and I, who are both paleo, were just looking at this. We were wondering how profitable it was, do you have any idea?
I once imagine a tubes network for delivering beverages from the fridge that's located in an outside unit on the property.

Also, a serviceman come by every once and a while to fill up the fridge when it get empty. Of course, security measures are there to prevent unauthorized people from filling the fridge with poisonous beverages or stealing them. The transaction are then already billed somewhere on the internet.

All the programmer have to do is press a button or order from a fridge...and viola! A nice cold beverage is delivered via pneumatic tubes to his desk.

With a little bit of programming, you could have it deliver beverages at regular interval.

Ultimate convenience!
How to incentivize research scientists
I had it autocomplete [how can i get my par] and most of them were sensible suggestions, until it got to [how can i get my parakeet to eat my diarrhea]. WTF?
Cool, thanks. I'm checking it out now.
autopylot?
I will buy the Natal version. Maybe you can patent some version of an exercise controller hooked up to a 3d camera system?

This is a really cool thing to have built; I remember playing a game of exactly this nature at Disneyworld more than than ten years ago.
Lots of great info from Robb Wolf's site:
http://robbwolf.com/

And The Paleolithic Solution podcast by Robb Wolf and Andy Deis [iTunes Link]:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcas...

Robb Wolf runs Norcal Strength and Conditioning in Chico, California: http://www.crossfitnorcal.com/
http://www.cathletics.com/
Your line of reasoning flawed, in that it can be applied to anyplace where one option surpasses the other. Without a car as a point of reference, would you notice a horse and buggy are so bad?

Yes, I would live with the scrolling on the Android, because I'd say to myself, "That's pretty good for a mobile phone." However iPhone 1.0's scrolling was vastly superior to today's Android. That's over two years ago. I think it's safe to declare iPhone 1.0 as the bar.

And, again, I'm not criticizing the thump-to-a-stop behavior. I'm criticizing the frame rate and responsiveness.
Two things: There is no peak oil at all, and oil prices are being manipulated as a volatile market for better profits (terrorism, hurricane season, etc)

There are billions, quadrillions and gazillions of oil and gas reserves, only in Saudi Arabia.

wikipedia: aramco

Come back after you read the whole page and understand how hard we are being 'pumped' in the ass by BigOil.
This looks like nothing but BS to me, there's a reason this is in the NYT's Style section.

The most telling quote from the article is “I didn’t want to do some faddish diet that my sister would do,” Mr. Durant said. This just reeks of pathetic insecurity, I'm not surprised the conclusions he came to were ridiculous.

Apparently, there's not even much of a consensus about what people used to eat back then. According to Wikipedia: However, there is little direct evidence of the relative proportions of plant and animal foods.[94] According to some anthropologists and advocates of the modern Paleolithic diet, Paleolithic hunter-gatherers consumed a significant amount of meat and possibly obtained most of their food from hunting.[95] Competing hypotheses suggest that Paleolithic humans may have consumed a plant-based diet in general,[58] or that hunting and gathering possibly contributed equally to their diet.[96] One hypothesis is that carbohydrate tubers (plant underground storage organs) may have been eaten in high amounts by our pre-agricultural humans.[97][98][99][100] However, the relative proportions of plant and animal foods in the diets of Paleolithic peoples probably varied between regions. For instance, hunter gatherers in tropical regions such as Africa probably consumed a plant-based diet, while populations in colder regions such as Northern Europe most likely obtained most of their food from meat.[101]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic#Diet_and_nutrition

This whole thing smacks of a silly trend among a small group of NY hipsters to sound cool and eat a shit load of meat.
why should this be accessed through a web browser?

I have no idea what kind of answer you're looking for. If not technical then what, philosophical? I never knew that writing a web app required such justification. Especially one as trivial as this.

Web browsers imply a certain social cognitive model.

Bullshit. Remember that the single most successful kind of web application--the kind which nobody will bat an eye at you for using instead of a desktop application--is email, which is exactly as social regardless of how you access it. There is no "public, status-seeking" mindset to web based email that is missing with desktop email. The web is just an interface in that case. So to with this.

* So the question is, why did the developer choose the web mindset, rather than the desktop mindset, when options (Fluid, Prism) are available that nullify the disadvantages of the desktop mindset?*

Why should the developer care at all about these? He doesn't have to do anything special for the small number of users who choose to use them.
If these things we're built into new apartments, people would use less cars if groceries could be sendt by tube. Groceries could even be sendt without packaging. Catering could become cheaper and better.
The mini ice age starts here
You should always have a backup plan no matter who you use. You don't want a single point of failure on your ability to receive payments.
It is very bizarre that netbooks, of all things, are something that people react to in such an idealistic (not sure if that it the right word) way.

There are some interesting debates like cloud vs local power or reinventing (touch screen) vs tweaking (small keyboard) embedded but you can talk about these separately if they are really what you are getting at. Netbooks are just another range of options in the computer family alongside normal laptops, desktops, desktop replacements, workstations, etc.).

Why would anybody possibly object to that? I mean there are plenty of reasons for plenty of people not to by one (I don't have one) or not to personally like them (eg can't adjust to the keyboard).

Why do people object to (or defend) their existence?
I'm not surprised because I have heard that people use Google in this "asking a question" way (I'll call it the "Ask Jeeves Technique"). None the less it still feels odd to me. This is because when I am searching for an answer to a question on Google, I will usually type in a portion of the answer that I feel would be predictable, To take a random example: "The population of Iceland is" (with actual quotes so as to pick up the whole phrase). I don't have a name for this technique (perhaps "Answer Prediction" or the "Reverse Ask Jeeves Technique"), but I usually find it works to my satisfaction. Otherwise, I'm like you, I type in separate keywords that don't make a complete sentence.

I have theorised in the past that perhaps the reason some people use the "Ask Jeeves technique" while I and others might use the "Answer Prediction" technique might be due to me having a clearer general understanding of the way that search engines collect and index their data, i.e. (to oversimplify things for the purpose of illustration) I get that the search engine is just matching text patterns to my query, where as perhaps less technical people don't really understand this and if they think of it at all, they might unconsciously imagine that the Google search page is the interface to some kind of Sky Net like artificial intelligence that is able to take their question, ponder it and provide the most relevant answers. Maybe anthropomorphising our tools is the human default?

Or maybe I'm totally off base here... just some random musings really.
I'm on the side of PayPal is evil.

I'm tempted to ask everyone who has been affected by PayPal's "security measures" (a frozen account) to write a post and submit it to a blog. -But I don't want to waste anyone's time. Anyways. Aye. I have been affected.
The Goldfish Solution
Conceptual metaphor
Do you learn more from a resounding success or a crashing failure?
Trademarks only apply in the domain the term is used in. So we can trademark common words already used elsewhere as long as they're not already associated with something in that domain. If I made harddrives called Banana, I could trademark Banana in that domain, but I would have no claim over it in, say, the food industry. Nor could I get a trademark on "Harddrive" in the harddrive industry.

The obvious example is Windows.
JKat - A Concatenative Language on the JVM
Taken, unfortunately (that was my first idea before AutoPy).
Awesome! I'll definitely be playing with it soon.
Me too. I said: "sweet, I'm officially a New Caveman now. I wonder what New Dawn of Man awaits me after this."
While I'm in no position to comment on the accuracy of the article, being neither an energy analyst or oil industry specialist, I'm getting a bit tired of the vicious ad-hominen attacks in blog comments about articles such as this one. It's ok to do reasoned debate, but calling everyone who disagrees with you 'in payment of big oil' is very childish. This same feature cuts across all climate-change and peak-oil articles on both sides of the argument. You can't win an argument by name calling and shouting, unless you're in the playground with other 5 year olds.
If it scale and lives up to the general description it will be. Whether it will do that it another question.
Wow, this is a great read. It's long, but full of gems and interesting talking points.

>> “I think it would be easy for common-sense Americans to draw up a list of big things that would seem to demand concerted effort. Deficits are too big. Health costs are unacceptable. Oil. And yet we have a political system that seems to be constantly consumed with trivial things. We cannot seriously grapple with the big issues. Tactics consume strategy.

Probably true, but the question is just how many common-sense Americans do we have? I live in Boston now, but I'm originally from a suburban town in Georgia. When I visit home, people commonly express to me their fears of impending terrorist attacks, their theories about how drugs and atheism are corrupting society, etc. Then these same people hop in their SUVs and drive 90MPH to the nearest McDonald's.

Average people don't like to worry about reasonable long-term problems. It's just too boring. They'd rather fret over the remote possibility that some Islamic extremists will fly planes into their homes. Thus, we spend trillions of dollars and thousands of lives fighting in the desert while our economy tanks.

>> the most worrisome symptom was the relative shortage of a jeremiad theme under Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush, and now Obama. This he attributed to Ronald Reagan, “who managed to equate criticism with anti-Americanism, and render unintelligible bad news about America.”

I can't count how many times I've heard, "If you don't like it then you can find another country," in response to criticism of American government. Yuck.
Perhaps I was too terse. The point of the xkcd strip is that the ants conducted a very shallow test (looking for life that was most similar to theirs) and then gave up. The post I responded to made a similar comment generalizing about the nature of "the Universe", which is indicative of the same fallacy.

Which is the point of the xkcd strip (the alt-text makes it even more clear). It isn't about ants, ants don't read xkcd. The point is that despite all of what we've done we have barely scratched the surface of knowing or understanding the universe. We are as ignorant of the nature of intelligent life in the universe, even whether it exists outside of Earth or not, as the depicted ants are of human civilization. Far more so, in fact.
T. Boone Pickens would disagree. In his book The First Billion is the Hardest, he asserts that we've already reached peak oil. His reasoning was that reserves held by oil companies are being depleted faster than new reserves are being discovered. While he isn't exactly disinterested given his investments in natural gas and wind energy, he does offer a unique perspective as a former oilman. Perhaps this is why he stressed the foreign policy benefits of domestically produced energy, rather than the economic ones.

However, the article does show the economic reality of dwindling oil supplies. As easy sources dry up, higher cost reserves become economically feasible. The higher the cost is driven, the more attractive alternative energy sources should become. An all electric car should be an easy sell as long as the range is adequate (~80 miles), and the cost isn't exorbitant (< $40k). They should cost an order of magnitude less ($0.10/gallon equivalent) than fossil fuel powered vehicles to operate and require less maintenance.
This is why people write postmortems and reflect upon their failures.

Anyway, I'd think it should be fairly evident to anyone who's both succeeded and failed that the successes teach you more. Problem is, you usually don't have the choice between succeeding and failing. If you did, wouldn't everyone just choose to succeed?

You have the choice between trying and not trying. And you'll learn more from trying and failing than you will from not trying. That's why people say "Failure is a good teacher". It's not that it's a better teacher than success, it's that it's a better teacher than not trying at all.
the goldfish server allows normal hosted websites add realtime characteristics to their website.
I just got an account today after lurking a few months and read the FAQ just after reading the "Built By Google" story. To poke fun at the FAQ "OMG HN is turning into reddit!!1!" It all ties together nicely from an AI standpoint though. Granted the material is generated by users, but isn't there a hint of AI to it? Look past what the user typed and rather how they're using the service. It's tech and it's a "hack."
That's been one of Google's strengths for a while, though - searching without worrying about "x AND NOT y" markup. DWIM.
The wiser I become, the less money I have.

I never understood why, in my case, they were inversely proportional.
paypal's security measures can seem draconian, but they are necessary in many ways. the relative ease with which you can open an paypal account (versus another type of merchant account) makes them vulnerable to fraud. i'm not saying it couldn't be improved, i'm just saying that it's necessary in many ways.

where paypal falls on its face (in my humble & biased opinion) is that they are pretty inflexible and unaccomodating with customer service. this turns a frustrating situation into an "evil" one.

disclaimer: i cofounded wepay.com, which competes with paypal (in a few limited ways)
So you think it provides some insight into something or other? Not just a cheap laugh? It seems to me to be quite a long way from "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".
While that would be an awesome Jetsons future, this doesn't seem like the kind of system that would well for long-distances, amateurs, heavy items, or fragile foods (would you like your 6-pack of beer shaken or shaken?). It's like the tunnels under Chicago that were supposed to revolutionize delivery, but didn't.
(Tunnels: http://users.ameritech.net/chicagotunnel/tunnel1.html )
While there are some interested points about the national psyche, to me, you just can't ignore the deficit problem. Endlessly spending more money than you ean will eventually cause problems, whether you're an individual, business or government. I don't know if the problem will be this year or in 50 years, but something has to give somewhere along the line.
1. Price goes up -> 2. production increases -> 3. supply outstrips demand -> 4. price goes down -> 5. production decreases -> 6. demand outstrips supply -> loop to 1

This is how the cycle has always gone throughout the oil age and how it will always continue until oil is made obsolete.

Oil obsolete? Steps 1 and 6, fortunately, are where the alternative energy advances are always made. While not continuous, they are cumulative (despite occasional attempts to distort this alternative market by incumbent forces).

Ultimately alternative energy will win, the scrappy startups will evolve into fat-cat incumbents, and then their markets will follow the same six-step cycle above, just like oil.
"However, compare that with what's accomplished with rather less money in the private sector"

You got a little confirmation bias on your shirt there. It's easy to look around and find successful private-industry projects that had limited budgets. It's also easy to forget about massive corporate boondoggles that sank millions or billions of dollars and were then shuttered for lack of practical use, lack of profitability, or because of project mismanagement. Generally, nobody notices or cares because the taxpayer didn't lose out.

Though we can never show it, I doubt we would have an internet or GPS satellite system today if that same time and money were spent by private industry rather than DARPA. Private industry is notoriously short-sighted, and have absolutely no interest in the kinds of projects that DARPA (and government in general) can afford to focus on. No "responsible" corporation will drop tens of billions of dollars on R&D for projects like "an open spec global precision navigation system" or "a network where any node can communicate with any other node using standardized open protocols". There isn't any profit motive.

BTW, "a relative few of these military technologies turned out to be really useful" is a gigantic understatement. These technologies spawned billion dollar industries, enabled the creation of thousands of companies and millions of jobs, revolutionized our economy and our information infrastructure, and ignited a cultural revolution. That's more than just "really useful".

As I said, either Shapiro is either short-sighted or maliciously misleading. I'm personally going for maliciously misleading to further his agenda.
"I pointed out that California collects a larger percentage of its citizens’ income than all but five other states (10.5 percent; source). Shouldn’t it be possible to run the state on 10.5 percent of income?

Despite the fact that all of my interlocutors had university educations, sometimes including PhDs, all were so deeply invested in the idea that their insolvent state government is starved for revenue that they were unable to parse the information."

Perhaps they were just stunned that someone with a PhD doesn't know that income tax isn't the whole story?

California state revenue, 2009: $88 Billion (source: http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/pdf/BudgetSummary/SummaryCharts.pd..., chart SUM-01)

California population: 36.8 million (July, 2008; source: US Census)

CA Revenue per capita: $2391.30

Texas state revenue, 2009: $78 Billion (source: http://www.cpa.state.tx.us/taxbud/bre2008/BRE_2008-09.pdf, page 3)

Texas population: 24.3 million (July, 2008; source: US Census)

TX Revenue per capita: $3209.88

"Conservative" Texas takes in almost a thousand bucks more per person in taxes and fees than does "liberal" California.

UPDATE: I made a mistake. The numbers for Texas are reported on a biennial basis, whereas for California, they're reported on an annual basis. See my reply to cwan below for details. When you get the annual numbers from the Texas budget summary, they appear to take in about 32% less per capita than California.