skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Of course every college boasts about its efforts to enroll a more racially diverse student body. But here are the facts: A New York Times article in 2004 revealed that Harvard’s incoming freshman class was 9 percent black, but between one-half and two-thirds of those black students were actually West Indian or African immigrants or the children of immigrants, and many others were biracial."

Without the information of how many actually applied, how many were on the appropriate level to apply and how many wanted to go to any college, this part seems meaningless. Is it still wrong if it was also 9% that applied in the first place? Maybe the number was higher, maybe lower - we have no context to judge.
Canada?
I'm sure the people who actually work on webOS do and have looked at the iPhone. It's nice to have a CEO like Jobs with clear vision for a product but I don't think that's the case for the Pre.
I must say I'm pretty amazed what my Eee PC can do.

I can have my basic Ubuntu configuration in that little beast -- it's powerful enough so that I don't have to make any trade-offs. I'll just install Ubuntu on it, remove some unused services, copy over my home directory from backups, and I'm done.

With that, I am able to surf the web pretty much like on a "real" computer but I can do that many times with a single charge and it'll last for days. I often take it with me for a weekend trip without the charger and it has more than enough juice to spend a few hours online.

Alternatively, I can fire up Emacs, Slime, JVM and Clojure and hack for five to six hours without charging. And that pretty much tops my priority list. What a little thing that is!
So now we can have self-powered Wifi access points? ;)

I'm surprised this has the RCA name on it, I don't see how you could physically make this device work with any degree of reliability in a common environment.

Given the size and price tag ($40), there can't be a whole lot in this box, other than a tuned coil and some passive circuitry. It seems like if it was "that easy" it would have been done by now.
YouTube Suspends Kid's Account, Gets Porn Fest In Protest
The author had a good point to be made but took too long to get it across.
Perhaps if that scene hadn't been mirrored elsewhere in the book, you'd have an argument; however, as somebody else said in this thread, Rand doesn't leave her writing up to interpretation. She clearly states multiple times that she doesn't believe catastrophe is capable of hurting good people. Note how while bad countries are hit by hurricanes and floods, Dagny never once has to worry about the weather, or about anything other than the bad people in her way.

it's a parable of suicide by stupidity

Do you realize how ghastly a concept that is? To say that if you think things Ayn Rand thinks are bad, you're essentially killing yourself? We call that fascism.
Very interesting, thanks for this.
He isn't saying that no one at Palm has ever used an iPhone. So I am not sure him using one matters. If Jobs doesn't use a blackberry or a PC or Balmer doesn't use an MAC or Larry doesn't use Sybase, it doesn't mean their companies don't learn from the competitors.
For the first time in my life, I read something about the future that sounds realistic... but still scary...
Bostrom is untroubled by the idea that humans will evolve to be unrecognisable; but he hopes we will indeed have those descendants.
> 2. Sufficiently advanced technologies would be indistinguishable, intentionally, a la Star Trek's noncontact per Federation agreement.

would be? Why on earth would they inevitably - every single one of them - develop such a civilization? We most certainly haven't; we'll set aside a few areas as parks, but even those are heavily contaminated by our civilization.

Why wouldn't they make Dyson spheres around all their stars - spheres which ought to have shown up on our infrared surveys - and use that energy? Think of all the computations and matter they'd be wasting by just letting the star blaze away. A few parks, sure, but an entire universe of them?

That point sounds like wishful thinking. 'They'll be, like, cosmic hippies man - they won't want to go around harshing Mother Nature's groove.'

> 3. In terms of the author's "Great Filter" idea, maybe some fraction of the supernovas observed by astronomers are really interstellar industrial accidents.

Then why aren't the astronomers & astrophysicists in a tizzy about how all these supernovas simply don't mesh with the well-thought-out models? Supernovas are the outcomes of processes which take millions upon millions (or billions) of years to finish. I doubt their models of include a random fudge factor to explain away alien Homers.
Twitail
Loneliness is catching even in social networks
RailsBridge BugMash for Rails 3 is this weekend
He had a good point and took so long to make it so carefully because he knows that if he doesn't, people will make all sorts of dumb comments & objections.

This HN submission actually isn't even all that bad as far as it goes; check the comments on some of Bostrom's submissions to other, more popular, fora and you'll be routinely smacking your forehead.
Agreed. A friend just installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix on my Asus 1000HE and it's very nice. I'm not a power user or Linux "geek" but have to say I love it. It felt great to completely blow Win XP off the unit... it became a completely new computer all over again after having it for 8 months. Really turned it into a new experience. Very fast. Easy to use. Chrome works beautifully. The whole experience makes XP appear even more ridiculously slow (and bloated) than i'd realized.

Oh, one last thing - Chrome is incredible! What a difference it makes - super fast, quick loading, no bloat. I loaded it at work on an older Win XP Pro unit and it made IE8 look so poorly executed. I've also used Chrome on our fleet of macs at home and am impressed with its speed.
Post-humans would need resources too, even if it's just 1 kcal/year to run themselves in simulation. That could add up quickly if even just one of them decided to forkbomb itself.
Yes, we're about to enter another dimension. A time when external drives are as fast as internal ones.

Just checking - is this hyperbole? I've had external Firewire drives that offered noticably more bandwidth than my internal drives at the time, & before that, scsi.
He does use the word "independently", presumably to take this into account.
You're right in noting that Rubinstein did not say that no one at Palm has ever used an iPhone before. I can virtually guarantee you that any of the CEOs you mentioned that are worth their weight in salt has at least tried the products you mentioned. That is what the author is getting at. He's concerned that Rubinstein has not used an iPhone at all.

As an aside, "a Mac" is a computer, "a MAC" is a network identifier.
WELCOM TO: http://www.wowowbiz.com
boot.ugg.jacket.jeans.sweart. (UGG)
jordan air max oakland dunks $39;
Christan Audigier BIKINI JACKET $30;
gstar coogi evisu true jeans $35-39;
coach chanel gucci LV handbags $36; Welcome you to visit thanks
http://www.wowowbiz.com
WELCOM TO: http://www.wowowbiz.com
boot.ugg.jacket.jeans.sweart. (UGG)
jordan air max oakland dunks $39;
Christan Audigier BIKINI JACKET $30;
gstar coogi evisu true jeans $35-39;
coach chanel gucci LV handbags $36; Welcome you to visit thanks
http://www.wowowbiz.com
uygu
Best Practices To Develop Perfect Websites for iPhone and Mobile Devices
Open-sourcing the .tex for the first 3 volumes?
You're still off by a power of ten in the areas: 10x10cm = 0.01 m2. (Edit: by the way, I think you also plugged in the sphere volume formula - surface is 4.pi.r²).

Radius of one meter is a bit close - make that three, and you're off by another order of magnitude - 10 uW harvestable.
Excellent Asimov-like short story..
I completely disagree, the author is definitely taking it too far. Not in terms of technology, but in terms of Google dominance.
> All this means is that the economics academia is following into the trap of Schoclastism, and insular world that uses complicated and absurd methods of research, increasingly divorced from reality.

That's being a little unfair on the scholastics. They did a lot of important work (particularly on logic), and the renaissance didn't just spring into existence out of nothing.
The fear mongering security specialist
Btw, A through D are false even with respect to the US.

It is very rare for American companies to hire foreigners not already present in the US. They usually hire young people who've come to the US to study for a BS/MS/PhD. It's a myth that people can "get off the plane immediately start working".

It's exceedingly difficult for a foreigner to get hired to work in the US unless he's already in the US (IMHO, mostly because of the costs/hassles in doing an in-person interview, and the cornucopia of talent in the US).

Having said this, I still think the US has one of the best visa policies in the world.

To answer your question: so far as I know, India's work visa program is easier than USA's. But that means nothing because there's very little demand to go work in India. :)
I can't advise books, but I want to add that beyond the vanilla statistics often taught you'll also probably want to read a book on probability theory and/or combinatorics. These along with some basic calculus are the important underpinning maths that let you build statistics.
Thanks for clarifying. I figured it was obvious.
Nice, but there is also of course that old line of thinking that expansionist civilization did exist, and Earth, in fact, was colonized.
Thanks for the additional info clofresh
Downvote me all you want, but the bubble was caused by the desire of the people to consume outstripping their ability to create value. Advertising aims to increase the desire to consume.

Which of those statements is false?
Another day on the Internet. It seems some people just have way too much free time on their hands. Nothing to see here, move along.
Facebook | Ottavio Piras
Must browse for anyone interested in the strategies and understanding of analytics & marketing for modern web businesses. I git it a solid 9/10 (a little too long)

Certainly enjoyed p331 VC question/answers section
On the other hand, resumption of specie payments following the greenback period during the Civil War was accompanied by economic growth (see Friedman's "Monetary History of the United States", one of these days I'll finish that book). There is no essential causal link between gold and depressions; if there were there wouldn't be so many goldbug economists.
A quite dystopian vision, with the main character is essentially powered by a future Google, which in its turn is powered by the main character. A very tightly coupled future which doesn't seem to point to much individual freedom. I think the future is quite different. 1 hour of work and 7 hours of play? Nah. Then you can easily compete by just working a bit more and soon only those that work more are competitive. Humans are very creative and find different uses for their tools than this.
Well, the thing is Rubinstein is considered the father of the iPod. Effectively this should make him one of the people you'd go to for a revolutionary product, particularly one that would compete with the iPhone. Him saying he never used an iPhone at all just shows he's either lying (which may be the case), or that he's naive in thinking he can create a breakthrough product set to dethrone the iPhone without at least taking a peak at what Apple has done in order to do better himself.
If you enjoyed that you'll probably enjoy Doctorow's Scroogled: http://craphound.com/?p=1902
2. "...cosmic hippies man -" We are not hippies (there are some) but we have to struggle to get permission to remove a beaver dam even if it is flooding our home, and we are far from ADVANCED! The reasons for noncontact may be as beyond our comprehension as a sump pump is to a beaver.

3. Don't get too attached to current favorite theories-Dark Matter-Dark Energy-etc(massive fudge factor) because they are always subject to reinterpretation when new data is uncovered. "Difficult to see, Always in motion the future is."
Highly skilled people should have little problems with visas, however, it depends on the country (Europe has heterogeneous immigration policies).
Google will dominate because we don't care. It's written in the text and I see it everyday with people moving to Chrome and all that.

I think that the author makes a mistake when he talks about Google as being one thing. It's much more likely that it will brand itself with different names just like Pepsi having hundreds of brand without us knowing it.
The actual source can be found at
http://www.dyalog.com/dfnsdws/c_life.htm
Which is surprising given the fact that Rubinstein is not the MBA, parachuted in from some other corporation, type of CEO. He is a technical person, probably more of a technical manager than, say, a hands-on circuit designer, but nonetheless he is a technical person. He was one at Apple, and he started as the topmost one on the WebOS/Pre project at Palm. If I were to expect a CEO to be closely managing the development of their company's product, that certainly would be Jon Rubinstein.
Yes. Javascript is also readily available on most (all?) Windows machines.
Use compojure and clojure commons. You might want to use leiningen too. It is definately worth really checking out the clojure commons thoroughly before you start looking for other software packages, you'll have something to judge them against. For my own purpouses I've found the database bindings in commons good enough, and there's tons of cool stuf in commons that I would like to play with.
Given identical situations, average management will always take the cheapest/shortest option. regardless of quality.

The quick fix in the middle of the night just takes attention form a serious issue and delays it's repair till it later again becomes serious enough to need managements attention.

A real hero will be professional enough to stop the presses, call attention to the problem and assure it gets fixed once for all.

Using the "Technical Debt" analogy, a heroic solution is no more than borrowing money from a loan shark at horrendous interest to pay todays due mortgage.
Unfortunately, I have seen these status-hacking methods work outside the improv/acting world. In a large company, the smarter but quiet and submissive employee will lose out to the obnoxious, high-sounding more social one. In social circles, the loud person A who pokes fun at B gains the attention and admiration of the crowd. Pick up artists often use the technique of lowering their target's self-esteem as a method of gaining alpha-status, respect and ultimately winning over their target.

I find it disturbing and often battle with the fact that these superficial methods actually work and can affect a person's ability to get ahead. At one of the previous startup schools, I think I remember that the theme around PG's talk was "be good". It's disturbing because using some of these methods to raise one's status feels "anti-good" and counter-intuitive.
Two hours old (albeit on a Sunday), and the only thing in this post is the sound of crickets chirping.

I have been learning Clojure, and the lack of responses is a bit of a surprise.

Perhaps #clojure on freenode will get more responses?
All of that, but replace Terminal.app with iTerm.app -- it's 2010 and Apple still hasn't released a terminal emulator that supports 256 colors.
Current Crop of Smartphones: A Cost and Feature Comparison
There's an alternative explaination in
`Burning the Cosmic Commons: Evolutionary Strategies for Interstellar Colonization` (http://hanson.gmu.edu/filluniv.pdf):

"Attempts to model interstellar colonization may seem hopelessly compromised by uncertainties regarding the technologies and preferences of advanced civilizations. If light speed limits travel speeds, however, then a selection effect may eventually determine frontier behavior. Making weak assumptions about colonization technology, we use this selection effect to predict colonists' behavior, including which oases they colonize, how long they stay there, how many seeds they then launch, how fast and far those seeds fly, and how behavior changes with increasing congestion. This colonization model explains several astrophysical puzzles, predicting lone oases like ours, amid large quiet regions with vast unused resources."

The point of the submitted article seems to be already mentioned in:

"The Great Filter - Are We Almost Past It?" (first version August 1996) (http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html)

"Humanity seems to have a bright future, i.e., a non-trivial chance of expanding to fill the universe with lasting life. But the fact that space near us seems dead now tells us that any given piece of dead matter faces an astronomically low chance of begating such a future. There thus exists a great filter between death and expanding lasting life, and humanity faces the ominous question: how far along this filter are we?

Combining standard stories of biologists, astronomers, physicists, and social scientists would lead us to expect a much smaller filter than we observe. Thus one of these stories must be wrong. To find out who is wrong, and to inform our choices, we should study and reconsider all these areas. In particular we should seek evidence of extraterrestrials, such as via radio signals, Mars fossils, or dark matter astronomy. But contrary to common expectations, evidence of extraterrestrials is likely bad (though valuable) news. The easier it was for life to evolve to our stage, the bleaker our future chances probably are."

Both links are from the collection `The Economics of Science Fiction' (http://hanson.gmu.edu/econofsf.html)
One thing I can say is that medical school admissions, while incredibly tough and competitive, is far more egalitarian than undergrad admissions. Med schools want the best students, period. They don't really care where you came from or who your parents were, but that you took advantage of all the opportunities availed to you in your college, and perhaps made some of your own.
You created a bit of a strawman in your post. But anyways, look below.

From http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/publications/factsht/cri...:

> Past year illicit drug users were also about 16 times more likely than nonusers to report being arrested and booked for larceny or theft; more than 14 times more likely to be arrested and booked for such offenses as driving under the influence, drunkenness, or liquor law violations; and more than 9 times more likely to be arrested and booked on an assault charge.

You can look at that website for several statistics. You will note that that website shows increased offenses for drug users that are not related to traditional "drug-trafficking" or "black-market" activities (so this can’t be blamed on the prohibition of drugs).

> I understand the connection between the drug trade and the violent crime, pertaining to the criminal element of the black market; but the notion that I'm buying weed today, raping/murdering tomorrow, is nonsense.

You should make a distinction between hard and soft drugs. Claiming that weed is safe, therefore all drugs are safe isn’t correct – and it is a strawman. That website clearly states that drug-users have a significantly increased crime rate. I am not going to discuss in detail the causes of crime for drug users (which doesn’t have anything to do with any statement I made).

From the same website:

> Another dimension of drug-related crime is committing an offense to obtain money (or goods to sell to get money) to support drug use. According to the 1991 joint survey of Federal and State prison inmates, an estimated 17 percent of State prisoners and 10 percent of Federal prisoners reported committing their offense to get money to buy drugs;

And the conclusion:

> The evidence indicates that drug users are more likely than nonusers to commit crimes, that arrestees frequently were under the influence of a drug at the time they committed their offense, and that drugs generate violence.
Cloud delusions at the turn of the decade
A developer's-eye view of smartphone platforms
Simon Peyton Jones on How to give a good research talk
PHP Bug: #50696: number_format when passed a 0, returns null
That's not what I found interesting about it. If you watch the kids video it is being filmed by the grandmother. Presumably she isn't below the age limit.
I love CC, but I think is more a matter of 'negotiation' between the writer and the publisher. Let me explain...

There's an Argentinian journalist/writer, Hernan Casciari, who became popular after he won the Deutsche Welle Best Blog in 2005 [1]. It was a fictional blog about a 'fat woman' he was impersonting. The idea of the blog, was also sold to make theatre and a TV series.
Casciari success was in part thanks to the Internet, and he always had this clear. The day a publisher came to his door inclusive.
He came to an agreement with a spanish publisher [2] that allows him to publish the books for free in his blog the same day it's available in the store shelfs. For instance, recently he made available his last book [3].

I don't actually know if he's using CC or other special license for his work, but if the author has the will to share his work freely and make a business out of it, it's possible.

[1][en] http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,1783798,00.html
[2][es] http://randomhousemondadori.es/
[3][es] http://orsai.es/2009/09/el_pibe_que_arruinaba_las_fotos_1.ph...
The plug in charger is a nice idea, but the wifi recharging battery is a killer app. If they've got a patent on the battery, and they can have it built into ebook readers and other mobile devices they stand to make a lot of money.
"top" clone for MySQL
I agree. Though your grandfather comment still confuses me.

If you are implementing a language (for which you also have some say in its design) and your compiler is too slow, then I would start e.g. by investigating caching strategies instead of switching implementation languages.
Formatting Multipart Formdata in Erlang
This article is my call for all programmers to finally learn enough about statistics to at least know they don’t know shit.

His call can be generalized: "This article is my call for all programmers to finally learn enough about [insert here] to at least know they don’t know shit."

The power that we programmers have as little gods inside systems of our own making, tends to have us over-estimate how much we know. Thus our penchant for posting stuff that makes experts in various technical and scientific fields roll their eyes.
Then use a C-interpreter for development.
I was at a social network security conference recently where someone from Youtube gave a talk about the issues they face. He said 4chan has been trying to porn-flood them for a long time (echoing what the Youtube representative said in this article), and described some of their attempts. The general ineptitude of the attacks is hilarious: in one instance, they apparently failed to take timezones into consideration in launching a co-ordinated attack.

Why am I mentioning this? Because of the "Myth of the Superuser," the tendency of the media to exaggerate and lawmakers to overreact to the power of pranksters online. I refer to this paper by Paul Ohm: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=967372

4chan in particular tends to be sensationalized so often, so it's good to keep the right perspective.
College is just a big inefficient n-player prisoner's dilemma. Defection is getting a degree. Cooperating is not getting a degree. As soon as one person defects, everybody defects and are worse off than if nobody defected. (If everybody has a degree you have no competitive advantage in the job market, and you are ~100K poorer; thus everybody is worse off than if nobody had purhcased a degree). The system merely serves as a proxy for IQ tests which are generally illegal in hiring.