skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The blog article with a link to chapter one of the study can be found here:
http://blogs.ft.com/crookblog/2008/03/the-dumbing-of-america...

Seems to be a position paper used to support higher H1B limits. But I found the bit about "immigrant entrepreneurs" to be interesting. Quote:

"The survey found a substantial rise in the share of immigrant- founded venture capital–backed companies in America. The share rose from just 7 percent in 1970–80 to 20 percent in 1980–89"
You should watch the SICP videos, and play along with MzScheme.

Sussman has a sort of rythym when he closes parens. It was definitely a moment for me when I sort of recognised myself doing it.

I think once you have written enough functions in Lisp or Scheme, it becomes ingrained, that you sort of parens-match whilst reading back through the function.

I've only written a few thousand lines, so it doesn't take that much practice. Obviously you sort of need a real project to even make a dent in picking up a language.
There are plenty of stories of registrars going out of business, killing websites in the process when their lookups die.

I have never had a problem with GoDaddy and use them for all of my own domain names as well as my clients'. I've never had anything but good experiences with them and I'm not worried that they'll shutter the place tomorrow.

If you feel good about registering your names with "NameCheap" and confident they'll be around, go for it. I wish you the best of luck.
Quick fact check: Applecare is 10-15% of the cost of macbook airs and 24" iMacs. Maybe an ipod or something is higher, but they are replacing a lot of units dropped in toilets there.

Having bought many apple products starting back with that newfangled Apple][+...

I don't buy Applecare on desktop machines. It isn't rocket science and when they do screw up (one of my iMacG5s went through 3 motherboards with the bad capacitor problems) they typically cover it on extended warranty. Same with an early graphite Airport, bad caps 13 months out, but I replaced them myself before an extended warranty was announced.

Laptops are different though, there is an incentive to cut structure and flirt with the fringes of heat dissipation... I'm about even on laptops. Just before the 3 year period ends I send them in to repair the accumulated defects, such as a mild case of backlight blotchulism and a flakey keyboard backlight in a PBG4. I've extended the life of my PBG4 from 3 to 5 years because I had the warranty. I would not have paid $800 to have it repaired as a 3 year old machine. If I had had applecare on my PB5300 I would have made them fix the SCSI port, but managed to live without it.

Just think of it as insurance. Apple is telling you the expected cost of repairs for years 2 and 3 is around 10-15% of the purchase price. Most machines will not have any Applecare work and it is money wasted, unless you live close enough to the wire that an unexpected $800 bill to keep your computer running is a problem, then you might like it for the insurance aspect.

It added 13% to the cost of the lowest end Macbook Air that I just bought my wife. (Yeah, I know, I paid extra for a slower machine, but she carries it around a lot and wouldn't notice "fast".)
Are the accounts submitting this stuff coming from a particular IP range? Just a suggestion but you could always block their subnet.
Once you've settled upon an idea, it's maybe best to really believe "Ideas are worthless" in order to stay monomaniacal about the one at hand.
"I've thought about this for a bit and realized that both camps ... are wrong, at least when stated so simply."

Applies to basically every pair of controversial and/or reasonably substantial claims on the web. Obviously the right answer is always "it depends." But I already knew that, having read two opposing viewpoints and synthesized their conclusions.

In summary: C'mon, pick a side!
These arguments probably would not last as long if you actually track down the source. Because chances are they have addressed your objections. From the study, which is linked from the blog post which can be found above:

"It is important to note that no attempt is made in figure 1.3 to “adjust for quality differences” in tertiary educational experiences between countries. Of course, not every university around the globe is a Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge, or Indian Institute of Technology, so invariably considerable “skill aspects” are not included in ﬁ gure 1.3. Such comparisons are significantly beyond the scope of this policy analysis. However, following the axiom that tertiary training is what principally enables individuals to quickly grasp new complex subjects and therefore makes it easier to train them on the (especially services-sector) job, it seems evident that in terms of describing the overall level of high-skilled workers in different countries’ workforces, any impact of quality differences among universities will be swamped by the quantitative differences in tertiary skill uptake depicted in figure 1.3.16"
I have been using lunarpages.com for my site saarr.com since two years. I did not face any major issues with them.
I agree with you, judgement i.e. decision making is very very important. One needs to understand the art & science of decision making in general and from an individual perspective how that individual (you) makes decisions and then apply that to any decision making, be it startups or buying a car.

This is why it's important to read, understand and internalize essay's and books from folks like Charlie Munger, Robert Cialdini, Scott Plous from a decision making perspective, and folks like PG, Marc Andreessen and yourself from a startup perspective.

Re: There are also people wandering around in the flat lands near the mountains.

Most of these folks suffer from cognitive dissonance :-)
I don't see why most of the people here would have any problem criticizing apple. Like say, on all their evil attempts at music industry domination, restrictive apis and what not. We do admit they make some sexy hardware tough.
I'm glad you pointed out that contradiction. I've been aware of it for a while, but I couldn't really express it. I think you present a good 'unification' theory.
Paul, is there something in this essay that people who are already attempting good judgment and execution can take away from it? On first reading it looks like the audience is (1) idea guys or (2) people who execute, but underestimate the value of judgment.
After years of using Thinkpads of various types myself, for my son's college work I got him an HP 2710p convertible tablet, and it has worked very well for him (I didn't like the Thinkpad tablet at all) - I'm thinking of getting a second HP tablet for myself to run Ubuntu on it (I use that exclusively these days on half a dozen different servers and notebooks around here (including my still going strong old A20P), after using several other distros over the last decade). We had gotten him a Motion Computing tablet, but were quite disappointed, and not that surprised nor unhappy when it broke a few days after the warranty expired. Anyway, the HP tablet is fairly nice and might be a third option for you.
Funny, entrecard is one of the companies presenting at the Cambridge Web Innovators Group (http://webinno17.eventbrite.com/) next week. I'm no longer sure if it was a bad thing that we couldn't get a spot to present there.
Linux: We solve the halting problem.
That's one way of interpreting it. But it does seem that what he felt was natural was to override methods marked as "do not override" and access members marked "private" or "protected".

Does your experience include creating a public binary API and shipping multiple versions of it? Just asking.
A very good question actually. How distributed is a spamming user base ? If it's just one IP, it might be a work of a drone from a marketing department.
I think the most interesting consequence of this idea is the realization that the origin of the idea alters its value.

Evidence that an idea is good can come in many forms, but it's rare that external evidence changes your mind unless it comes from someone you respect.
He put it in a way that was interesting. That even if individual mathematicians weren't motivated by practicality and more by interestingness, as a whole, mathematics is richer because of it, and will be a more complete body of knowledge to be able to address future practical problems.
The way I see it, ideas are important. It's just that you need hundreds of good ideas in order to get to the top. And they all have to build on each other, and you'll find that you have thousands of bad ideas that seem like good ideas at first and only turn out to be dead ends when you try them.

Really, what's execution other than all the ideas that you have after you've picked a direction?

That's why I'm skeptical of self-proclaimed "idea people". They tend to have one great idea and fixate upon it, not realizing that they've gotten maybe 1% of the way there, and need to think up 99 other great ideas before their one great idea is worthwhile.
Might also be worth checking the IPs see if they are listed in Spamhaus block list. If they are, then pretty good bet its organized spam.

http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/
Anyone used Moniker? I've heard good things.
You know, interestingly enough, I just thought that if you have rotating floors, you're creating angular momentum, which makes it hard to tilt the floors. I wonder if that also has a stabilizing effect on the building in response to earthquakes.
Sometimes one side is just plainly wrong.

The debate about evolution versus Intelligent design is an example.
there's also: Questioning the assumptions upon which an argument is being made. This isn't so much refuting an argument, central or otherwise. Rather it is exposing (potentially) flawed logic and/or uncovering fallacies or creative embellishments upon which a seemingly sound argument may rest.
Flawed, sure, but not useless. Lining up the countries side-by-side isn't very informative, but looking at the generation gaps within a single country can be.

For perspective, the title of the study this chart came from is "The Accelerating Decline in America's High-Skilled Workforce: Implications for Immigration Policy". The authors are looking at which countries are creating lots of new high-skilled workers, and which are heading into a deficit of high-skilled workers (Germany and U.S.). In general, education systems from different countries don't map very well onto each other, but on the issue of high-skilled immigration into the U.S., the unit of comparison is "education level that U.S. companies/politicians would consider high-skilled". So, of course it's flawed and U.S.-centric -- it's a chart about U.S. immigration policy.
they obviously undervalue the writers skill. frontend and backend require different skillsets, but the average person has no knowledge of what either one is really worth.
Entrecard is a startup from the kid who made that million dollar wiki gimmick I believe. From what I read it wouldnt surprise me if he was spamming news.yc himself
The field is called "epidemiology" or "biophysics", depending on whether you are studying the rate of brain cancers or the mechanism by which EMFs interact with tissue.

The study of interactions of radiation with biological materials is called radiobiology. Generally, the people who study these kinds of effects on populations are health physicists and epidemiologists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiobiology
Definitely Gandi (http://www.gandi.net/whowe/), I've been there for almost 10 years.

It's not too expensive and they have a very nice web interface to manage multiple domains (different edition modes, zone versioning system, free primary/secondary DNS).
They're also hosting and helping several OpenSource projects.
Most of the time in contests like these, the participants already know of the vulnerabilities in the OS that they can take advantage of. They work out the exploit code before the competition, which is why the MBA was able to go down in the first couple minutes of that round; the guy already knew what he was going to do. OSS is generally more secure not because it doesn't have vulnerabilities, but because known vulnerabilities are patched up more quickly. It's not about making linux look bad, it's about having to try to generate working code on the spot rather than being able to analyze and test it prior to the event.
My social map is totally decentralized but I want it back on my blog
Proof that the end is near
A good number of avionics software teams are moving from Ada to C and/or C++.
I spent a couple weeks moving all my domains off of GoDaddy last year. All the registrars I used ended up sucking even more. I then reluctantly moved them all back to GoDaddy. It was a painful experience I don't plan on repeating.
Telling Stories on Maps
You're applying logic to religion. It just doesn't work that way.
Have you or your son used the HP tablet with Linux?

A tablet seems nice, but not nice enough to justify using XP or Vista...
The people submitting the spam are entrecard affiliates -- you get entrecard credits (which I think, but am not sure are good for page views or maybe advertising credits) when you get people to sign up under your referral link.
XKCD: Convincing Pickup Line
It is hard to believe the author because he uses a referral id in his link to Namecheap without a disclosure:
"www.namecheap.com/?aid=88&rid=136544"

Having saying that, I don't know if Namecheap is better or worse than Godaddy.
I second that. Been using 1and1 for about 3 years now and have no complaints. They have good prices and their configuration interface is well designed and intuitive.
well maybe they did not innovate in the sense of creating something new (although we heard of stories that claim that a few British mathematical and scientific discoveries originated from Indians). But they are one of the leading countries in IT services. to me using someone else innovation to become a leader in that field, makes you as innovative as the creator. The point i am trying to make is " Education does not make one country better (economically, politically) than another".
What's the max display resolution a MacBook can handle when plugged into an external monitor?
Wireshark 1.0.0 Released
"Idea * Judgment * Ability * Determination * Luck = $$$"

FYI, there is a preexisting model from organizational behavior saying that success = ability * motivation * opportunity. I only mention it because there is some interesting OB research into the different components of the AMO framework, although I don't really know the names of any particularly insightful papers offhand.
My problem with Dynadot is this:

In order to get their bulk pricing, you have to prepay $500. And you may not ever get any of your $500 back ever again. So for me, with my half dozen or so domains, that means I have to decide that Dynadot will be my registrar for the next 9 years or so.

That's too much of a commitment for me.
Eh, I'm currently running with a $25 craigslisted sony trinitron 21" and an IBM thinkpad that I think I paid $200. Plus some old dell keyboard. Don't forget about the used market. The key is that I'm really only using it as a terminal into servers out there somewhere.

I consider myself a professional developer.
It might be a result of the Techcrunch exposure. I can just see someone starting to hack some system up ever since they saw a new social news site they hadn't heard of and therefore spammed.

Now is the time to be vigilant.
Namecheap will not steal your domain name if you do not purchase it right away. GoDady has been known to do this.

Namecheap also offers dynamic DNS, and a number of creature comforts that godady just does not have. I have been a long user of namecheap and i have not heard a single complaint from any one that i have recommend use the service. namecheap in my opinion is easier to recommend that dreamhost.
I really like dreamhost as a webhosting service, and I am sure they are honest as a domain registrar, but if you are looking purely in terms of domain registration and are handling the webhosting elsewhere, I'd say dyndns.org is one of the best. They have a great feature set for domain management.
I've used joker.com for the last 4-5 years. Free DNS, mail and url forwarding, etc., too.
Ask YC: any hackers in Japan?
I will be in Japan until the 12th of April, and I am wondering if we should have a hacker meetup? I will email you my itinerary if you send me a private message.
The idea-mountain metaphor seems to lose the plasticity of ideas. From my understanding, more often than not, ideas change during execution.

Mathematically speaking, the space of ideas is continuous (in many dimensions).
Yeah, I'm noticing a pretty even split between the MB/MBP vs ThinkPad. Guess that means you can't go wrong either way unless the type of work you'll be doing depends on an OS-specific feature.

For example: Consider what mobile platforms you will be developing for. If that includes iPhone, an MB/MBP will be essential (iPhone is probably not a market any of us want to ignore at this point).
shared graphics on the macbook might be a problem depending on your needs.
In high school debate, DH4:Counterargument is displayed all the time by novice debaters. The phenomenon on my team was taught and cautioned against as "two ships passing in the night." Imagine a debate: each case was strong and big and impressive but the debaters' responses to one another were off the mark. Their arguments never met and rebuttals hit upon phantom contentions as each debater misunderstood or misconstrued the essential points of the opposing case/debater like "two ships passing in the night."
I can't provide any information on the spammer(s), but I commend you and HN for keeping on top of stuff like this. Keep up the good work.
I'd like to know who you moved them to and then off again. (Either here or in the 'Favorite Registrars' thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=150561 )

I'm about to buy another domain, and am considering not going with GoDaddy (due to their annoying upsell spam and the myriad of horror stories)... So naming names is appreciated.
A Personal History of APL (1982)
Learn Python in 10 minutes
retailmenot.com
Natural selection is a great example for more than one reason: Darwin wasn't the very first to think it, but Origin of the Species is perhaps the most beautiful science ever written.
Extending Ruby’s RSS Parser
Random Records in Rails
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with Entrecard, it's just that referral marketing of any kind attracts the lowest type of people trying to make money on the internet.

It's actually pretty clever. http://entrecard.com/docs/doku.php for anyone curious to read about how it works.

Also some mashable coverage: http://mashable.com/2008/03/28/entrecard/
I've used joker.com too for a while now, pretty good. I also use dreamhost.
i read somewhere about kasparov vs deep blue, paraphrasing
"kasparov didn't win by exploring every moves (he won't have time), he won by ignoring the ones which don't work"

so maybe if ideas are treated as "spam", one needs to develop good filter around it
If you're open to different operating systems, and a student, it sounds like you could tolerate a not-so-premium setup if it came to that. I'm guessing you're not really a gamer, and probably not doing extreme graphics or video work. In that case, a Thinkpad or MBP might be overkill. Alternatives:

1. Look for cheaper Linux laptops from Dell or HP. I get the feeling that the laptop as we know it is going to change significantly within the next couple of years, at the very least with solid-state hard drives, so why bother with a top-of-the-line machine right now? And, you'll probably be making a lot more money once you're out of school, so you'll be tempted to splurge then anyway.

2. Get one of these newfangled ultra-portables like the Asus eeePC or Everex Cloudbook. (I've been eying the Cloudbook myself.) If this programming thing becomes a habit for you then you might also develop the habit of collecting computers. In that case you could have a "serious" (but still semi-cheap) desktop computer at home, with a decent-sized display and hard drive, do most of your work on it, and also use it as a server of some sort in your home. The ultra-portable would be for, ya know, laptop stuff.

(Disclaimer: I'm laughably frugal, and my company also supplies me with a real laptop -- a Thinkpad R61 -- which I like.)
Fanboys Continue To Boggle Minds
I've gotta say: I live in Boulder and I'm part of the startup world here and it's a lively bunch of folks. They didn't really touch on that in the article. Lots of talent, good funding sources, lots to do and overall a great place to do a startup. I thought the article captured the good and some of the bad (there's a reason we have bumper stickers around here that say 'Keep Boulder Weird'), but was pretty accurate overall. If you're looking into TechStars, you've got 3 days left to get your application in.
I use namecheap and have never had any problems. They're a reseller of eNom though, and eNom recently jacked the domain of a company that sold trips to Cuba for Europeans at the request of the US government. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/us/04bar.html?ex=136228680...
No, the IPs are all different. It seems to be a bunch of individuals submitting their own blogs. What's odd is they happened all at once.
I feel strongly the same way. That's why I think what you need for a startup is a kernel of idea generation. This kernel is in itself initially an idea, but the key function it has is to inspire quality after-ideas. I tend to have an initial idea, analyze it, and try to find some insight in it. If it works this insight, or way of looking at things, becomes an idea catalyst.
Erm, if I spam 300 blogs a day by "dropping my card" for 3 days in a row, I can buy a Penguin book.

http://entrecard.com/docs/doku.php?id=earning_credits

http://entrecard.com/shop/category/10/
I'm not sure that GDP per capita is the right measure for assessing correlations between average income and education, which is what I presume you're trying to get at. After all GDP per capita is often skewed by the very rich. Take for example some stats from the US in 2004:

GDP per capita: $39,934 (Source: http://www.econstats.com/weo/V015.htm)

Median income per household member: $23,535 (Source: http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032005/hhinc/new02_001.htm)

Obviously a major discrepancy there. The median income per householder is determined via a sample census survey and would more accurately reflect average income than GDP per capita, which is constructed by dividing GDP by the population. Probably of more interest would be median income per householders over 18 to exclude all the kids. Then you could check the correlations between income and education.

Notwithstanding, I'm not that convinced there would be a very strong correlation across countries, in part because of the multitude of other factors that would influence income. There are also other factors to consider regarding the construction of the statistics, such as purchasing price parity, the definitions each country has used for education level, etc. Trying to attain ceteris paribus (all things being equal) for this would be a nightmare.
We are definitely not the target audience for this site. A lot of internet marketers are from developing countries or kids.
Teach yourself programming in 10 years: http://norvig.com/21-days.html
XRDS-Simple Draft 1 released
PulverMedia heading to deadpool?
Registerfly? Kidding...

I use Dreamhost and eNom.
Harry Porter's Relay Computer
I'm convinced there needs to be a voting exception for PG essays and xkcd. Every single one of them will be posted here; it's not something that needs to be voted up.
More data usually beats better algorithms
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