skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is surprising, and disappointing, that in 2010 we still need to have a conversation about whether diversity is important. I'm especially surprised to see this come up on Hacker News, rather than some fringe site.

This debate has been going on for 40 years now. I would think by now its been established that diversity has importance in its own right, not just in what it does for individuals who are included on campus for non-traditional reasons, but also for all the other people on campus. Certainly, diversity on campus is important for everyone who aspires to any kind of leadership position, since any leader today will be leading in a diverse environment.
Step 1: send a message. "Hi, I operate ThatHigh.com, which gets 720k pageviews a month. I saw that you advertise on HighTimes.com and thought my audience would also love your product. I'm currently looking for an advertiser for the 728x60 leaderboard on the home page. I'll split the traffic between you and one other advertiser, so you'll get about 360k impressions a month. I can offer it at $3000/month [try for about $10 CPM]. Let me know if that works for you."

Step 2: Send an invoice using Freshbooks or Blinksale.

Step 3: Install the creative using Google Ad Manager.

You can also try setting up zones through BuySellAds.com, and advertisers can buy directly when they visit your site. They take a cut, though.
Several months ago I switched to a Merkur 180 long and experimented with several blades. I found the Feathers to be my least favorite blade, even though they are revered on Badger and Blade. They feel too harsh. I settled on Derby's. I get at least 4 comfortable, close shaves. I won't ever go back the shaving 'systems'.
No, that strictly depends on how you've designed your site. To have your site look the best in ALL browsers, make subtle use of CSS3 effects. Don't _rely_ on them. If you follow that, you won't be writing off "50%" of your users design-wise.
I feel exactly the opposite about my phone. It just needs to make calls.
It's run by PHBs that get angry because your office is "messy" and "has too many things in it", I swear.

/bitter
ooc is a ... high-level, low-level programming language.

Can someone please explain how it can be both?
It is mathematically impossible to privilege one group without "disprivileging" another in a zero-sum game like college admissions. The question of whether affirmative action "punishes" some people isn't even interesting, the question is a borderline-tautological "yes". The question is, is that what we want to do? And even if historically the answer was "yes", is it still what we want to do? And what do we want to do in the future?

I'm not commenting on the answer to those questions, subtly or otherwise. (Except inasmuch that some people would rather we not ask them at all and just take various answers as axiomatically true without examination.)
Great advice, thanks alot.
I was under the impression you needed a credit card with a European address to register for their premium services.
Anyone know otherwise?
HTML5 "apps"
Absolutely, excellent point. IE9 is promising to be an excellent browser. Once it comes out we should absolutely encourage people to upgrade. The day PIE is obsolete will be a very happy day. :)
IE8 isn't 'old' IE, it's 'current' IE. It will definitely be good if in the future IE supports CSS3 properly, but if you're making or supporting something today, you need to make it work on the browsers people are actually using today.

And for most markets, that's IE, and frequently not even IE8.
This place had something like five thousand servers over several data centers. Like most places that size or larger, the admin never actually sees the servers. You (the admin) get a serial console and at best tell the monkey to replace part X or Y. At worst, it gets shipped back to dell, and reported as a new box when dell doesn't fix it (dell never fixes intermittent problems, unless you can tell them /exactly/ what the problem is. )
So in order to not be screwed by the system, should my hapa kids self identify as asian or white?
An interesting new RNG by George Marsaglia
>I don't think anyone disagrees that China will out pace the US in technology at some point within the next two generations

I disagree. There is a barrier to go from manufacturing to innovating, and it's one that China is not going to find easy to break through. There is a political, cultural, and social infrastructure in America that China simply does not have.

Innovators are people who typically want to be free. They solve problems because they don't like being constrained. A country like America accommodates innovators very well: we allow people to express their political opinions openly, accept or even celebrate people's eccentricities, and promote almost a true meritocracy. I don't see China reaching that level in two generations.
Here's a thought, build a few products to sell yourself.

You have a super specific audience, one that skews to the younger end I imagine.

I bet some good t-shirts with short / popular slogans would do well, probably posters too.

A few years back CollegeHumor was selling $18.00 t-shirts at a 30,000/MONTH clip:

http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/3/collegehumor-guys-secr...

T-shirts, posters, etc are all extremely easy to fulfill via 3rd party and move internally when the model is proven.

If that sounds appealing start with a simple survey to try and figure out what your audience would be interested in.
Is Microsoft's next $1 billion dollar business the Kinect?
There have been many formulations of the root problem in such cases, Campbell's formulation fits best here.

Campbell's law: The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbells_Law
Classy! Is your handle intentionally ironic?
> Not recommending it = you should skip it.

Nonsense. There is a whole vast middle ground between "recommended" and "you should skip it".

Consumer Reports is about helping people make educated choices, not some remedial "yes/no" recommendation. They rate the iPhone 4 very highly but have a reservation about it. You have to strain pretty hard to read that as "skip it".

(I do agree with you about the questionable quality of their tech reviews, though. I do find them frustrating at times)
It can be very expressive and high-level when you just want to get stuff done - but it also allows you to get down to the bare metal in case you have to/want to.

You can turn off the GC, control when and how the memory gets allocated, use pointers to deal with raw memory blocks, easily link with ASM, and the consuming features are easy to avoid - leaving you with a nicer syntax for C. Of course, in the real world you probably want to find a compromise and not go 'full metal'.
From what I hear, it seems like a good introduction to the principles of programming, if nothing else. I didn't learn to program until my freshman year of college (and had no prior CS experience), but found that some similar-sounding software I had used for a long time had prepared me for actual programming in a surprising way ("Game Maker", for what it's worth). If the App Inventor ends up being anything like that, and actually useful for creating apps, it will certainly be a good reinforcement for basic programming concepts. On the other hand, by its very design it will be limited in what it can accomplish. How much is a matter to be seen!
Let's not forget conditional comments. The overhead for other browsers could be completely negligible.
Bootstrapping a prototype-based object-oriented language in 44 lines of code.
Few would argue diversity isn't important. It is not terribly well established that cutting along racial boundaries is the correct way to establish diversity.

Shouldn't we give affirmative-action style bonuses to conservatives, since they are grossly underrepresented on campus? After all, everyone ought to agree that students should be exposed to such common viewpoints; whether you think that's because student education is being limited for lack of exposure to their different viewpoints or whether you consider the ideas so transparently false that students can be safely exposed to the ideas so that they can be shown how transparently false they are, using the same racial-diversity logic says that we ought to be giving huge conservative bonuses for admission and tenure positions. What advantage is "diversity" if the result is merely a rainbow of people all identically singing the praises of the white-liberal-sourced diversity ideals?

The affirmative action for diversity logic does not trivially obviously cover skin color issues. It argues for ideological diversity, then slides in race as a proxy for ideology when you aren't looking. I consider the entire race-based affirmative action line of logic pretty offensively racist if you actually analyze it.

(I'm not arguing in favor of conservative affirmative action bonuses. Look more closely if you think I just did.)
It won't really matter, though you should probably take pains to avoid looking like Just Another Smart Asian Kid.

I wrote a glowing review for my alma mater about a student I interviewed which focused on her cheerleading, sense of humor, and overcoming of societal discrimination, because "smart Asian worked hard and wants to go to med school" is not a strong marketing move. (Incidentally, you know how culture sometimes gets in the way of academic success? In this case, a cultural background which places emphasis on hard work and scholastic achievement is a tremendous impediment to maximizing for what admissions officers actually care about.)

In the alternative, you can have your kids apply to a Japanese university, where they will be judged by their test scores without regard to their race.
Well obviously Social Security is an entitlement program. So is Veterans Benefits and Services. That doesn't make either welfare.

Anyways most of this is a terminology argument. You're defining welfare broadly as any government spending for the purpose of helping (mostly poor) people. The researchers defined welfare narrowly as the federal government's contribution towards the cost of sending people welfare checks. (That would be money spent on TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families).) Reasonable arguments can be formulated for either definition. The fact that they use a more narrow and technical definition doesn't make their definition wrong. Nor does it indicate any dishonesty on their part.
I suspect that was a reference to this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/12/technology/12google.html

"User testing has been done mainly in schools with groups that included sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students and university undergraduates who are not computer science majors."
I honestly don't know. beyond physical hardware transfers (shipping a disk) I don't think the average person has a connection that could upload terabytes of data.

you'd have to assume much of the data is already in the cloud. i'm no expert on the matter, but I'm sure someone on HN could figure out the solution. I was merely proposing the idea.
Come on guys. Let's imagine a hypothetical situation where blacks are dumber than anyone else. Blacks are ALREADY at the bottom of the socio-economic classes, they are already responsible for a majority of crime, what EXACTLY do you think would be the result of a fair admission process?

These people who are at the bottom will stay even more firmly entrenched at the bottom, will commit more crime and continue to justify the stereotypes.

If you believe that blacks are dumber than anyone else (like the linked article), then you have to support affirmative action, otherwise you are setting up a society segregated by intelligence, which will also directly correspond to skin color.

So blacks will always be at the bottom, and people of black skin will automatically fall into that category with very little chance of getting out, even if they are clever, as there will be many people justifying the opposite stereotype.

Imagine all colleges had 5% less space for students. That's the only effect of affirmative action. If you want to campaign for something, then campaign that 5% more students should be taken in - one for every student who got in as a result of affirmative action. That's a win-win.
Our doors are open until 11:30, so feel free to drop by anytime before we close up the office.
I hate putting people in to boxes. Youre the "programmer guy", and I'm the "business guy". Thats the type of attitude that breeds "shady craigslist entrepreneurs that you speak of. People who believe they have no part in programming or designing, and are simply the "idea guys" and never dabble with code.

Was it wrong of me to attempt to learn something even though I was a "business guy" from the start? I tried programming, I wasn't successful at it, but I've gained a greater appreciation for it. I also attempted designing, and I loved it. I created a visually appealing website and actually learned a lot [by the way, people go to college for graphic design degrees too, doesn't mean I had a "special drive to become good at it"].

Theres nothing that will come out of dismissing someone as the "business-guy" or the "programmer", we all have the potential to do so many other things, and sometimes it works, but other times it doesnt. There's no harm in trying though.
He's working with rjbs over at pobox.com now. I've seen him in #dbix-class swearing at my code a few times.

We tried to get him to YAPC::NA but he has this thing called a family that apparently sometimes intervenes with his ability to gallivant across the country, so I had to get Damian to heckle my "I wanted to be MJD when I grew up" joke instead.
If it just needs to make calls, don't get a smart phone.
"There's a market price for all the different options"

The market isn't efficient though, because there isn't enough information (tho your comment and the GP are helping increase that). It may very well be that there are worse deals at some points.
Ask HN: Who's on Forrst?
I got an account there recently the place looks like an interesting community, not too dissimilar to the HN. Is anyone else there too? Care to compare the impressions?
Ask HN: What to do with spare domains?
I am curious if anyone has any ways of making money with their unused domains? Parking for advertising never worked for me.

What should I do with my unused domains that I want to keep?
I am drawing a distinction between someone likely to only currently be a good individual contributor, and thus who will not have the option of founding his own startup at that point in time, and a well rounded candidate who brings a lot more to the table. One percent is a lot of equity even as employee one if that person is not going to be in a leadership role later. It was what the mint designer and a few other first hire top notch individual contributors at startups I know have received.

I definitely agree you get more equity during bootstrap time vs. in series a funded startups. I just think the combination of survivorship bias and cash comp makes it a better deal to wait.

Actually someone respectable (Suster?) posted a few months back about how there are discontinuities...and that immediately pre series a closing is a much better time to join than immediately post, since the reduction in risk is far smaller than the reduction in equity. I think the opposite is true between employee one and immediately post a.

By real financing I include mega angel seed rounds. For me a 1.5 seed round vs a 3 vc series a is a distinction without a difference.
Apologies. That's something I overlooked and it definitely does go to show how much I have to learn.
Aerial photographs are now toggle-able for certain areas in Google Maps. Personally, I would have preferred a link explaining it with the submitted link as a comment.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/google_adds_45_degree_...
Well, go for it then - that'd be awesome! If you tweet @shadowcat_mst when you're ready I'll make sure your PAUSE account gets approved quickly (you're also welcome to bug me about how to build dists etc., I'm always happy to walk people through their first upload).

Note that if you already have an account and uploads, I apologise for not recognising who you are but you're still welcome to bug me if there's anything I can do to help :)
Improvement of superconductors within reach
great designs. and your blog is truly awesome!
Questions About Google's New App Inventor
How to get video replay right for a better worldcup? - xdamman's posterous
IQuit
This is a great idea, but I'm unclear of the particulars on how to pursue it. I don't have very much money, and I can't afford (currently) to just order 500 tshirts and spend 1000 bucks on it.

Are you suggesting something like Cafepress? I'm terrible at graphic design and not sure what to put on the tshirts other than a logo...
A Macbook Air (Gen 2) with the SSD. Sometimes connected to a screen + bluetooth magic mouse & keyboard.
I sold my more powerful 15" MacBook Pro because it was too heavy. The Air is powerful enough for what the java dev and iphone + web app tinkering that I do.
I really love the freedom afforded by the light weight. It makes it much easier to program and procrastinate away from the desk (in bed, armchair ...). I just wish it didn't overheat so easily, especially in bed, but flashblock and click2flash help a lot.

I am trying to use a fixed height stand up desk, but I don't feel I have the correct height yet.
So much for that idea. I just heard this story reported on NPR.
As totally cheezy as it sounds, I "gradually woke up one morning" and realized what it was that I wanted to accomplish with my life. My newfound goal was going to require more resources than I could ever accumulate by selling backpacking gear, so at that moment I decided it was time to get back into the tech industry. (I still have fond memories of my time away from it though.)

I haven't felt anything close to the same burnout since. Although I'm often stressed out over one thing or another, for the most part I'm pretty happy with the way everything is now.
Probably not, since Ook was designed for orangutans. However, those orangutans would probably take offense to describing their work as 'monkey'ing around since avoiding that word is one of the design principles.

http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/ook.html
Hack A Day Answers: new hardware hacking Q and A forum
I say the point goes to HilbertSpace here. I think Nudge wasn't merely suggesting that there's another way to interpret the quote, but was rather suggesting that was the intended way to interpret the quote. Of course, Nudge was right about that.
- 7" LCD screen of questionable quality vs. 10" IPS LCD screen. Article even says "It’s not a very bright screen, like the iPad."
- It’s a resistive screen - No multitouch... "It simply won’t be as responsive as an iPad."
- Slow CPU - "It’s not a blazing fast CPU. The specs haven’t been published, but I suspect this is in the 400-600MHz range."
- Limited software - is ANY Android developer going to write software that supports the custom resolution of an unsupported 7" tablet? Anyone? Anyone? Buehler?

This might sell a few hundred copies to hackers and other people that like rooting their devices. It will be 0.000000001% of the total tablet market, while iPad sells 2 million per month.
Imagine all colleges had 5% less space for students. That's the only effect of affirmative action.

It isn't, for the same reason that having one drinking fountain in twenty marked Whites Only has salience far in excess of a 5% decrease in the supply of drinking fountains.
Why not LLVM? Some language compiling to C99 seems kind of outdated since we have LLVM. (And if C99 is really wanted, LLVM can output that too. Whereby nobody really is keeping that up-to-date because noone really is interested in it.)
I also read it several years ago too and I frequently pick it up and re-read bits. It's changed my programming style for the better, not just Perl, but related languages. MJD, wherever you are, good work.
Software uses Twitter, Flickr to let dissidents send coded messages
rock, ooc's compiler, supports compilation with clang ;)
This is great! I knew my laziness would pay off and someone would eventually fix the problem without having to image-ify all the CSS rounded corners in my new app :) Thanks.
Pittsburgh gives birth to tech firms, but can't keep them
C++, as an example, can also be both.
I definitely agree re exercise.

A good relationship, kids, and general family life also seems to help people survive high stress, but high stress often leads to a bad home life which can make it worse yet.
Good fiction doesn't need to 'make sense' either.

Of course, what qualifies as 'good' is subjective, and to get a little meta, fiction doesn't make sense - we make sense of fiction, just as with life. See also: religion vs. science.
Liquidation preferences are wacky -- I would have never understood them without several patient explanations on HN. I'm curious: is modeling their effects just common Valley knowledge that you'd do effortlessly during a job interview, or would most candidates be as unknowingly ignorant of their effects as I was a year ago?
Does this ring true for most of the readers here, or is it just the author's self-reflection? I had something similar to that mindset into my early 20s and then grew out of it (which coincided with a professional life after college, with working with intelligent people). I have no problem asking others for things/help, and I can still give it in spades.
So what you are saying is that discriminating in some way has a strong effect on the perception of society in general?

Yes, there is this theoretical moral debate about what is right and what is wrong, but the real effect of doing what you say is right, would result in universities of only asians and whites, and the blacks mostly doing manual labour.

Is THAT right?
Sorry you were worried. I lost my job in 09/2009, but got a new one in 12/2009. I am okay, just very busy dealing with having two children instead of one. This is starting to get easier as they get older.

I got out of the habit of blogging while I was unemployed. I hope to get back in the habit again soon, but I don't know when it will happen.

Thanks for being concerned.
Knew a professor long ago who had worked for the AEC out on Long Island when a student. Some of the scientists would tune a cyclotron by putting an eye behind the target and waiting for the retina to light up, she said. She also said that a number had developed cataracts at an early age.
I've been following Ooc for a long time, mostly because I liked the syntax. It's a weird blend of C and Ruby.

nddrylliog, I think you should make the "jump to" navigation easier to find in the intro guide.
You mean ooc -> (rock ->) C -> (clang ->) llvm?

I mean ooc -> llvm.

Not only that it is obviously faster and simpler, it is also better to maintain and better to optimise. And it gives more power and possibilities to the ooc compiler.
Amazon's Elastic MapReduce does a decent job of this, and there's a GUI for it in the form of the Console (http://console.aws.amazon.com): http://aws.amazon.com/elasticmapreduce/
> My salary is nearly back up to what it used to be now though.

How much do you figure is your overall loss because of joining (in $) ? Does your equity make up for that ?
Wow. I was secretly trying to get you to find an answer to one of Keith Rabois questions on quora. I forgot he qualified it as post 1999. Can you do that too?

National Instruments is an amazing company...I was fortunate to get to use their products on some projects as a teenager.
Try to pass them off as Hispanic.
Microsoft's Windows Phone Developer Tools package goes to beta