skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know why wealth is correlated with test scores scientifically, but my theory is that:

1. The children of parents who are rich are likely to have parents who are university professors or successful business men

2. The children of wealthier parents have more free time to concentrate on their school, instead of helping around the house

3. The parents who are wealthier are generally more ambitious, and make their children study

4. The children from richer families have access to after-school lessons, better books

5. The children of wealthier parents are more likely to have someone who takes care of them all the time, while those from poorer families probably have parents who are working all the time

6. Diet of course

The scholarship comes from the school. The school is pretty big and tries to give a lot back to the community. So there is always an attempt to help whatever students require help. The poorest children get educated for free, but this particular program is there to help those who are perhaps in the lower 3rd income class, but show strong potential.
They store information per logged in user but are they performing some type of lookup information for every single AJAX request? I opened up a chat box and 7 HTTP requests fired off. I have no clue what these are for, but are each one of those validated and could they be quickly? During typical gmail usage several requests are fired off in the background for simple and seemingly trivial user actions like the one mentioned above.

EDIT: ...and after I was done typing the message above I returned to gmail and 15+ more requests has been fired off without me doing anything. The message took well under a minute to type. Seems like a lot of validation would have to be done.
Horseshit. People only say that kind of thing to rationalize supporting everything someone does, even when that someone is a liar. Maybe FDR was lying, maybe he wasn't. Maybe he secretly changed his mind without telling anybody. Then, of course, you have to admit that the wrong guy won in 1932, since what FDR ended up doing was more of what Hoover did: public works, bank bailouts, and more government intervention in the economy.

As to whether he did a good job or not, the fact that he was reelected three times seems to indicate that he didn't do too badly.

1972. 2004. Do you have actual political beliefs, or do you just assume that the average voter defines the morally correct view? Since the FDR who ran for office in 1932 has basically nothing to do with the FDR who rant the country thereafter, you have a lot of 'splainin to do. Somehow, the voters were right to 1) vote for the guy who promised to reverse Hoover's policies, and 2) vote for the guy who then changed his mind and continued them. Meanwhile, FDR was right to 1) do exactly what Hoover didn't, and then 2) do exactly what Hoover did.

I don't think there's even a name for beliefs this ludicrous.
You know, you may have a point there. If one makes a test that involves something like who is the quickest to figure out how to use some program like excel, this may not correlate to income, assuming that none of the children has previous experience with excel. But on the other hand, it may still correlate with income.

It's just a waste to give a scholarship to children of extremely wealthy people when there are people struggling to put their children through school.

Ideally, what one would like to do is make a test, then just eliminate all the children from wealthy homes, and then give the scholarship to the top of the list. But that would cause resentment if everyone took the same test.

Also, remember, it's just 2 students from a class of 30.
I certainly like the idea. All that one has to do is now somehow combine it with a social factor where we can filter children without hurting their feelings.

I.e, a student from a wealthy family who scores high deserves special attention, but giving a scholarship does not help the student, because the family can afford the tuition anyways.
Sounds good to me, although of course you'd want to either limit the noprocrast lock-out time or allow a "let me in an hour from now" override to prevent permanent lock-outs.

Or, if your concern is simply that YC-funded companies aren't getting work done, you could just lock them out for a couple of hours in the middle of the day. I wouldn't complain about that. :-)
If you can't find people at college that care about what you care about, then you need to transfer right away.

It doesn't get any better once you graduate.
1.Develop an exam that determines a minimum or base ability to take some advantage of the opportunities provided by the scholarship. Randomly select from the pool of students who pass this test.

Or

2. Split the scholarships in half. Half are awarded purely based on ordered rank for scores on an exam. Half are awarded randomly.

I think you need some type of random element to ensure that those who are merely disadvantaged by income or who are later bloomers for their age can be awarded scholarships. The random nature would also eliminate the subjective nature of teacher assessments.

That said, maybe I'm being overly influenced by having just read Outlier by Gladwell. Flawed as I think the book is, it did have some good nuggets.
This is what it means to sell stock. Instead of "installments that'd grant the purchaser the tiny stake", say "shares". Instead of democratic options, let shareholders elect a board of directors. The main issue is that, in the US, the SEC regulates who you can sell to, what you can say to them, etc.; and forces you to give up regular, audited financial statements after a while.
Pay attention when public researchers say "if I had enough money, I think I could...", and you'll probably get a good sense of what the more advanced government agencies have access to.

As far as encryption goes, I'd say that AES-128 is probably safe from offline decryption by the NSA right now, but I wouldn't trust it to be secure ten years from now, or to be secure against active attack right now. I doubt the NSA can find pre-images for SHA256, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had found collisions. I doubt the NSA can factor 2048-bit semiprimes, but I'd be shocked if they couldn't factor 1024-bit semiprimes.
Perhaps a tech scholarship is the wrong tool in this situation? What would it, invested in a corresponding number of xo's, or in a technology teachers program, give you instead?
This was discussed yesterday, actually: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=372091

And many times before that: http://searchyc.com/SEC+regulation?sort=by_date
Ah yes, sorry — the "1500 students" part slipped my mind when writing my message!

Really unsure to be honest…its an extremely tricky situation!
Nexenta: Take Ubuntu, unplug Linux kernel, and plug in OpenSolaris kernel
A list of shares to purchase, and who to borrow the money from to buy them.
Grow some self-controlling balls.

Alternatively, only read articles that look interesting in a once-every-24-hour RSS grab and don't otherwise visit the site. Works for me.
Somehow get /ɯoɔ˙ǝlʇıʇdılɟ//:dʇʇɥ to direct to your site.
It's a cool idea, but I will be reluctant to use it. Sole reason being, the method they select personnas to do usability testing isn't transparent and I'm not sure how much useful feedback will be from those personnas.
Increasing the alphabet for passwords doesn't really make your password stronger than if you would just increase it's length by a character or two, or better yet three or four. But, given that I can't imagine too many password crackers checking for more than a couple common extended characters, it's probably not that bad. Still doesn't excuse passwords like pɹoʍssɐd though.
Murray Gell-Mann: Beauty and truth in physics
I don't know what would be going through the mind of someone that thinks that Enums should be modeled by using separate tables (i.e. one table for males, one for females; modeling the enum Gender = Male | Female), so I am not even going to talk about those. I am going to jump right to a model that won't make people cry.

I didn't see anywhere in the original article that models "gender = male | female" as two additional tables. There is a schema variant that uses a single additional table "genders", with foreign keys pointing into that table from the "humans" table. That seems like quite a plausible choice for modeling an enum in a normalized fashion, and it provides a clean way to handle when the set of enum choices changes (that is, new choices can be added trivially, and data integrity is automatically checked when options are removed). It's not the most efficient or concise representation, of course, but those are not the only criteria when choosing a data model.
People only say that kind of thing to rationalize supporting everything someone does, even when that someone is a liar.

Why on Earth do you think I would need to rationalize supporting everything president Roosevelt did? I wasn't even born then.

Do you have actual political beliefs, or do you just assume that the average voter defines the morally correct view?

I don't particularly care about the "morally correct" view, I do assume however that voters have some sense of their own well being, and if they feel things are getting worse they will more likely vote for change. That's why democracy works.
I first read this as "The Penis of Efficiency" and almost spit out my beer.
Use your own mind and explore. And above all, just don't settle and always raise the bar.
These presentations just make me want to move to Sweden.

The data says it's a very "good" country, and it has people like this guy living / growing up there.
Not only it scalable as it is the only solution.

See "Good Patterns & procedures to prevent CSRF":
http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Reviewing_code_for_Cross-Site...
I strongly disagee with josefresco. I have a 5 year old "startup" with 6 full time remote workers -- 3 developers. It works great.

If an employee isn't caring about his work, it doesn't matter if he is local or remote. Hiring smart, passionate people is the most important factor.
FDR's policies lengthened the Great Depression by 7 years.

http://www.newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/FDR-s-Policies-Prol...

Then again, Joe Biden thought that FDR gave a presidential address by TV in 29 to reassure the country.
Some of us legitimately have nothing better to do. Us college students can only spend so much time per day learning, at some point your brain needs to rest.
I try hard to avoid judging people by their tastes.

I try to judge films by how I react to them, but this is difficult to do if at the same time I'm asking myself how others will react to my opinion of the film.

There are films I don't want to see and books I don't want to read because I heard statements like yours which I know would cloud my judgment and spoil my enjoyment.

Luckily, I already saw and liked enough of the films you dismiss to be able to safely ignore your condemnation of those I haven't seen yet.
http://www.fliptext.org/ has been alive for years.
Time to reinstall Verdana.
... "Here's Tom with the weather."
Not to nitpick, but you may yourself have missed the fact that ambition does not always translate to a high income. This is especially true in a third world country where a good percentage of rich people get to be that way by simply stealing money from the government
For those of you with the two chicks plan, I think I've found your wingman.
Every proverb is unequivocally unique.
Yeah, I also wish it was possible to imagine what you want and instantly create a perfect version of it.
JQuery Timecloud
Proposed regulation of "crucial" US institutions
Prototype - Lessons of Survival, From the Dot-Com Attic
> Though I have read that some equatins regarding sub atomic particles were "too difficult to solve" before, I never had read a good explanation why.

Solution to the equations of quantum field theory can be formally expressed using what's called a perturbation expansion. This is similar to using a power series expansion to solve an algebraic or differential equation. In a rough way of looking at things, higher order terms in the expansion correspond to particle interactions with more "stuff" involved. This equivalence is what Feynman diagrams represent.

In the case of electromagnetism, this technique is very effective. The term corresponding to a single photon exchange is 137 times larger than the term corresponding to two photons, and so on. As a result, perturbation theory works very well for these calculations.

However, for nuclear forces in a proton or neutron, all the terms are about the same size. You can't cut off the expansion and get a meaningful estimate. In the Feynman diagram view, this is saying that you can't think of it as just exchanges of small numbers of gluons, rather, you'd need to consider huge number of particles and diagrams of extreme complexity. This is the sense in which the equations are "too difficult to solve". You need to do something totally different from perturbation theory to get a solution. Lattice computations, as described in the article, are the best alternative technique we have available at this point.
http://github.com/timriley/campfire-bot/tree/master
Which kids did you like the best? Best being defined as which do you think would make the best use of the scholarship both for themselves and their family, and for their peers and country?

This method is as good as any. I know you want to make the best decision possible, but this is one of those situations where you just have to go with your gut and to a large degree throw the numbers out the window.
I agree with everything you said, except about Lester.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't he completely give up providing for his daughter, and then try to have sex with her ( ? 16 : 17) year old friend?

Part of being mature is living up to one's promises and responsibilities. Also, not being a creepy old dude and trying to nail 16 year olds.
lame, it doesn't do CAPS
Well it's only a hundred pages. Short for a book.
Hmm. Or I could make people donate to a charity...
See, this is why I post pseudonymously.
Sex can’t sell on the iPhone: Wallpaper Universe pulled from App Store
Speaking as someone who was a beneficiary of several talent/need based scholarships, I'd like to suggest a slight refactoring of your problem. Allow me to invoke Gladwell. Think of this as trying to help someone get their 10,000 hours in to become an expert.

I was lucky in that I received scholarships to 'be' at a prestigious schools or programs, but always had to work at jobs much more than my peers not only because of my family's need, but also because of my family's attitudes about what children were for. The wealthy kids' families had a much different idea of how to raise a child than my family did and they had a different understanding of the types of resources beyond the financial that kids need to be successful.

Just because I had received a scholarship to excellent schools did not release me from the expectation that I needed to contribute financially to my parents' well-being while I was in high school and college. In fact, it increased their expectations.

The pressure was intense. I knew that the only way for me to get out and to stay out was to do well academically, but relinquishing duty was anathema. The schools where I went were hard, with heavy academic workloads, and having to work around 35-40 hours a week through high school and college and keep strong academic standing extremely stressful and time consuming. Very difficult to get the 10,000 hours in when you're asking people if they want fries with that.

Kids need time.

If it's as all possible, interview the families of the most likely candidates. Look for red flags. Will the parents be able to afford or allow the child to actually reap the benefits you're offering? If they can't afford it, are they willing to give the child extra time to pursue academics more seriously or are they likely to consume their young?

When you do give out the scholarship, please spend time with the family to help them structure the student's life so they can properly take advantage of what you're giving them.
>I am doing a project with some friends in college and we had about a 6 hour discussion last night of all the possible use cases and "what if's."

Take what I'm saying as being from someone that that tends to have these discussions all by himself, usually instead of sleeping...

You just wasted 6 * <number of people> hours and have not moved forward with your project at all. You should have just sat around playing x-box, to be honest.

While making sure that you all have a shared short term goal is important, and that every step forward is towards that goal, trying to plan out every what if situation is a futile exercise that can be extended indefinitely.

Deal with "what if's" when you see them over the immediate horizon, not before you even start your project. You will not encounter 90% of them, and most of the ones you do encounter won't fall into any category you're dreaming up now.

Figure out an end state, agree on a short term goal and get to work. Deal with things as they occur.
The Online Search Party - A Way to Share the Load
Ask HN: What's the platform of the future?
For desktop applications, do you think it's going to be Java, .NET or something else? And for web applications?
Yeah, I agree there. You should only start a startup in college if you can't help it.
Don't do anything you wouldn't be proud to show your (theoretical, future) children.
I'm pretty sure this would just subconsciously train me to procrastinate elsewhere. At least when procrastinating on HN there's a chance I'll learn something about programming or business.

I find this idea and noprocrast a tad bizarre. HN has a simple goal (sharing info of interest to hackers), which thanks to focused design it does pretty well. Fixing my brain is feature creep, and should be well outside it's scope.
I am more interested in why they got this special dispensation...
reddit did something like this. In the end, due to the frameset, the URL for bookmarking would be hidden and make bookmarking with delicious or your browser cumbersome. Though it does give you the ability to participate in the community more. I like the bookmarklet idea as it would preserve the URL and the original layout of the page as well and it fits well into the model of opening all of the articles you are interested in reading in new tabs and then upvote/comment as you see fit without intruding on the article.
It's arguably an obsolete rule. Employees with vested options are not the sort of stockholders regulators had in mind when they created this rule.
Using persistent RSS search in Twitter to generate qualified sales leads
I generally agree with the article, though I find it a little disingenuous coming from Gizmodo. I mean, these are the guys that are feeding the fire and lambasting companies for holding products back to fix buggy software/hardware. It's partially because of blogs like Gizmodo that there is such a rush to market.
Wired magazine is 56.2% fullpage ads
It's illegal to even make the offer in the US unless your investors are "qualified" (an SEC definition covering net worth and income that is a proxy for their risk capacity). Employees are considered insiders and exempt from the "qualified investor" requirement. Read up on the Securities Exchange Act of 1933 (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securities_Exchange_Act_of_1933 ).
based on that facebook story yesterday, once you hit 500 investors, you pretty much get considered a public company, with all the extra strings attached.

Why don't you try finding angels to invest? If you are working on algos that can be patented you should have no trouble finding investors.

And if you are looking to raise 100K, and can't find any big time investors, you can always get some credit cards to eat the cost. Surely you get plenty of those offers from capital one etc for 30K @ 0% apr til Nov 2009. Granted you have to be pretty sure of your idea to go into debt, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.

And if credit cards don't work for you, you can always try raising the cash using those micro loans services.
You could incentivize an increase in performance rather than performance per se. Broadly said, I know, but you know more about this than I do, you'll figure out how to do it better.
The Science of the Future of War
you can model type inheritance relationally. it's completely orthogonal.
Google SearchWiki Vanishes
I've noticed the NYT has many more ads than it used to. My instincts tell me this is the death spasm of print. It means things are worse for the print media than even their current revenues suggest, because falling ad prices have been concealed by selling more ads. But they're going to run out of room for that soon.
The rise and flourishing of Agile
Compiler Structure
How Google Plans to Take Over TV
On Hair Color in France (by Leslie Lamport)
...not a single entrepreneur received venture capital funding by submitting a business plan “over the transom.” By contrast, about 5 percent of entrepreneurs who knew the venture capitalist or gained a personal introduction received funding

Another data point for 'It's not what you know, but who you know.'

Many of the companies that survived the dot-com bust did so by ignoring the prevailing “Get Big Fast” business model, Mr. Kirsch explains. Get Big Fast said that an Internet company should identify a market early and grow as quickly as possible, to shut out all competitors.

So that means that most of those that survived were not VC-backed.
Why I love the US auto industry
High Availability MySQL
They offer a white label program:

Can our usability firm get a white label version of your service?

Yes, you can resell it to your clients with your logo (not UserTesting.com) so you can use your brand and set your pricing. Email us at resellerusertesting.com and we'll get you started.
I remember reading a similar article about the airline industry.

Despite great improvements in technology, fleet size and a greater diversity of airlines delays just get more frequent and more severe. Why? Because there is no longer any leeway in the system for error. Each flight is turned around and sent out in such minimal time that if it is late for any reason the problem cascades on to the next flight. And the whole system is so well coordinated that there is never any airplane just sitting around to make up for a problem. So the whole system, though more efficient is more fragile. And ironically, being more fragile, actually ends up making it less efficient.

Of course, as an engineer I simply say that you need to make the robustness part of your design goals to begin with and then design the system to meet that while being maximally efficient.
Google Powered BitTorrent Seach Engines
One word: L'Oréal.
Stealing via corruption takes ambition, too. Misdirected and unethical ambition, but ambition nonetheless.
I remember seeing this on Reddit or Digg some time ago (maybe one or two years ago) and was hoping I would eventually hear something about it again.

The one deterrent I can see to adoption is that police might not like it. No longer would they be able to shoot someone's tires out or put spikes out on a road to slow them down.
Use a long, challenging, tedious, or better yet, puzzle-based, task to measure persistence. Award the most persistent students the scholarship.
Desktop is dying. JavaScript on Jets.

http://blog.appjet.com/2008/11/18/whats-next-for-appjet/
Basically Stephen Covey’s time management matrix applied on emails.
Some of the characters look a little bit funky (I understand the look is not the point but still pretty cool). For example, 'b' just turns into a 'q'.

Try 'a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z'

Also, textarea's on all of my web pages are screwed up (in Firefox).
Africa is a big place. What country/city? (it might be the difference between saying a large school in the Americas vs. a large school of 1500 in Chicago)