skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What is the evidence that prep school graduates have a base acceptance rate at Harvard above 50 percent? That's not what the matriculation statistics at Exeter

http://www.exeter.edu/documents/Profile_2009_10_7(2).pdf

tend to suggest.
Adaptive Rock Paper Scissors
One way that race-based admission is different, especially at state universities, is a specific constitutional prohibition (the fourteenth amendment of the federal Constitution) against state action that doesn't provide equal protection of the laws on the basis of race.
In addition to whatever textbook you decide on you should read Bill Kent's "Data and Reality" to widen your awareness of the profound difficulties involved in stuffing messy reality into a collection of bits. See http://www.authorhouse.com/BookStore/ItemDetail.aspx?bookid=... and http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm.
I personally disagree with a bunch of the stuff you are recommending.
I work from home, so take this with a grain of salt, but two IT companies I worked for had fooseball tables, and i always hated those things.
Work isn't getting done/discussed over ping-pong. Ideas aren't getting shared while reading or naping, though I do agree that enabling napping at work isn't a bad idea, and having employees who are well read is also a good idea, I think doing this IN the office is a mistake.

Walls made of whiteboard, or painted with chalkboard, and don't forget to always have pens or chalk EVERYWHERE is a good idea.

Instead of spending money on reading rooms and ping-pong, why not focus on a culture of free-responsibility. The number of good things that have come out of meeting at a bar or over a coffee is of much more value than what you are getting over ping-pong.
Napping/reading are non-interactive, so I think that is a double loss.
Get your employees out for a bike ride or jog. I would rather have people that get out of the office while keeping their head in the game, than people who spend time in the office, but aren't getting any real work done.

Make the office the place for work, and enable your workers to leave the space and do other things but if you can, make sure that they understand the priority of these things is to refresh them for work, or to still get work done.
The legacy families aren't one group, pooling their resources, to agitate to keep this perk. Each family acts according to their own interests and at a time of their choosing. Moreover, a family may have made previous donations on the assumption that subsequent generations would get favorable treatment. Those donations can't be pulled back.

By contrast, if such admissions were found to be violating federal law, the government funds could be withheld en masse - current and future pledges all at once - if and until the policy is changed. That's a huge cudgel based on sound principles of punishment - immediate and severe.

Agreed, on your point about other advantages. To my mind that's exactly why schools should be less willing to throw favors to the already advantaged.
the deck of the bridge has just recently been connected over the valley below and is so high above the ground that you could fit the empire state building underneath it, and still have 360ft spare.

No, they're referring to the distance from the lowest point in the valley... so, yes, the plank over the well would be on-par with this Chinese innovation.
Those statistics show where the students actually go, not where they apply and are accepted. Why do you assume that a baseline admit rate of 50% would imply that 50% of prep-school alums go to Harvard, which is clearly a false implication?
Only if he used a rocket to lay the plank.
Some hardcore / research-level books are:

The "red book": Readings in Database Systems, which is a collection of basic papers from the field. This is used by DB programs in top schools (eg. Berkeley).

The "Jim Gray book": Transaction Processing. Look up Jim Gray to see why this may be worth looking into.
Watts, volts, amperes, size and capacity are all related. My point was a sapling and a 100 year old tree are not going to have different capacity, but they probably have about the same PH spread so they would have the same voltage. My guess is you are only going to be able to extract a small fraction of the energy you would get from burning the tree but you get to extract it over a long time period.
mindblowing! i could easily use this to optimize the appearance of the css in my websites... excellent work.
The solution is "just get started"?

Well ok, that sounds easy enough. I'l just tidy my coat out of the way and grab a coffee first...
Anyone else find it ironic that I just tagged it in my delicious to read it later?
The Great Slump of 1930, by John Maynard Keynes
Google admits breaking App Store rules
Using SSE is specifically one of the cases where writing something in assembly can make sense (and in fact, the only case where I've written things in asm for purely performance reasons).

Let's go back to the original statement:

I'd assume any intense math operations that happen inside a loop would be much faster.

That's what I was responding to. Just trasnlating the logic to asm won't make it fast. If you look at my earlier followup, I mentioned that if you could make assumptions about your code that the compiler can't know, then you're back in the land where asm optimizations can make sense. That seems to be what you're getting at with the rest of your points.
I was asking a sincere question. Why was THAT modded down?
I'm working on a site that does exactly this! It learns pretty well what you want to read (based on voting up/down on everything). It's mostly based on correlating your preferences with those of other people.

My site is http://newsbrane.com and you can try it if you like. I'd appreciate feedback; click 'send feedback' at the top of the page (or post here - I'll read it).

Lincoln
chk SO:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/96501/perks-for-new-progr...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/306708/must-haves-for-dev...
I went 20-5-10. Interesting algorithms, I could see it's "strategy." 3 of my losses came from me picking scissors three times in a row. And then I correctly deduced it would guess that I would switch to rock and thus play paper, so I clicked scissors a fourth time.

Will be curious to see how the statistics play out.

Would also be better to randomize the order of Rock - Paper - Scissors links as it's given to the user.
i agree with most of what your saying, including the reading/nap room.

however, i think there's something to be said about having a break room and such, when its done correctly. having infrequent, somewhat short but active breaks definitely do increase productivity.
timr, I'm not coercing them into anything and I don't have any illusions that I'm going to get a PhD for less than minimum wage. If they don't want to solve my core business problem, that's fine, all they have to do is not bid.

An ongoing relationship is a great thing when it's part of your core business competitiveness. But for some tasks, it's simply a matter of getting something that meets a spec and I don't see why outsourcing is not an acceptable solution for this.

I short, I don't know where your anger is coming from.
David Pogue: Blackberry storm downgraded to a depression
For me I was getting a lot of wins in a row and as soon as I got a loss I would switch strategies. That ended up working pretty well.
Looks quite useful and is something I'll be exploring to use for a project I've got in mind. It is a bit more expensive than I would have expected. I understand it's meant for commercial customers who can afford the cost, but had you described this to me I would have guessed half those prices as an upper limit.
Hey guys, I wrote something called Genetify that is designed to be a general-purpose, unobtrusive way to optimize any kind of content on a web page for any arbitrary goal. Check it out at http://demo.genetify.com .

Or read John Resig's (JQuery) nice intro: http://ejohn.org/blog/genetic-ab-testing-with-javascript/

I really do want to make this into an open-source project for everyone. There a lot of cool optimizations you could do with a web page once a goal has been defined. If you are interested, could you post something at least indicating your support on John's blog? I think it will be the de facto place to discuss the open-sourcing of Genetify.
Anyone know when/if they'll release this to the public?

I can't afford to spend the time creating a search engine for my site so it would be great to have a structural search engine. In particular, I'm very interested in this structural data approach - I really just need a way to handle searching "objects" and this seems like a great way to do it.
I guess I never saw the benefit for lenders. Banks use proven algorithms to determine investment risk and set appropriate interest rates/credit limits based on that. Whereas people on Prosper are investing knowing only a credit score and some debt ratios. It's not hard to guess which loan would have the more realistic interest rate. I guess for really high-quality debt, it could be a reasonably safe investment option but I don't see how the risky investments could really pay off.
Magic and the Brain: How Magicians "Trick" the Mind
would the atoms get concerned if they were conscious?
:help
Just to mention the same for Vim. :-)
IMHO the whole concept of legacy admissions (among other things) is distinctly un-American. The USA is all about hard work, perseverance, and talent. This is what has made America great, and it is only through this that America can remain this way.

More and more American society resembles the old European oligarchies of old, the one the people fought so hard to free themselves from. Patents of nobility are gone, but the aristocrats remain all the same.

It saddens me - I've known so many people who had so much raw talent, but never got the help they needed to really excel. I know people who got poor grades in school who could hack circles around me. Yet here I am in college, surrounded by a bunch of pompous idiots who are only here because mommy and daddy could afford to send them to the best tutors, and boost their marks so far beyond what normal, but talented folks get.

Many of the most talented developers I know never got the chance to go to a prestigious school, or even study CS at a formal level. Yet the people around me by and large can't hack their way out of a wet paper bag. The talented, truly obsessive hackers don't get any help from society, but the career-seekers who aren't the least interested in the code they write are. There's no justice.
How about Nigeria? :)
It's on the front of your computer (or by your laptop keyboard). Sometimes you need to hold it in for a couple seconds, just to show how focused you are.
Graphing calculator built into OS X
The 25% discount is much appreciated, although Amazon's discount on some of the same titles appear to be as high as 34%.
What's stopping people from just using mturk itself? I've found it pretty easy to use.
I think this is a terrible article. Paul Vixie has done nothing to fix this situation. He certainly does not deserve the fame of the article.

Other DNS servers like DJB-DNS and PowerDNS have implemented proper port randomization as part of their design a LONG time ago. As a result of that those servers are completely unaffected by this DNS exploit.

Vixie and his Bind crew ignored the whole thing for a long time until it blew up in their face. Now it it just an excuse to roll out the monster that is called DNSSEC of course. Great marketing.
F1 even works.
2009: CSS stylesheets become self-aware and independently perform evolution

Someone set us up the bomb.
ucan find books at http://downgate.blogspot.com
You're completely correct on your first point. One point that a lot of people miss about elite colleges is that their true clientele is an entrenched socioeconomic elite. The smart middle-class students are brought in to keep the U.S. upper-crust from falling into aristocratic irrelevance, but the future academics and scientists are definitively not the blue-blooded colleges' clientele. If they were, they wouldn't have to work so hard in high school to get in.

Harvard College (not to pick on Harvard; you can sub in any elite college) is relatively separate from the University, with quite disparate goals and values. The former's an "experience" and the latter is a leading research institution. They have almost nothing in common aside from shared resources. As for elite East Coast colleges, although admissions officials are well-intended, their job is to maintain a system that serves the WASP "old board", and the extracurricular component of admissions, especially legacy admissions, exists for this purpose.

If you think of Ivy League admissions as a reward for hard work in high school, the system's obviously unjust, because the rich kids play by a different set of rules. But if you recognize these colleges and their social purposes for what they are, it's still unfortunate, but not really an injustice worth getting pissed off about. In truth, the "social injustice" preventing middle-class students who supposedly "deserve" admission to Ivy League schools from getting in is extremely mild as far as social injustices go, given the very high quality (Ivy-comparable, sometimes better) of education available at the next 50 or so "runner up" colleges.

All this said, I've come to the conclusion that the brokenness of U.S. undergraduate admissions is probably (paradoxically) a good thing for American society. Many other countries, such as in the E.U., have much better, academics-only, admissions systems. (This is why foreign grad students are shocked by the mediocrity of average Ivy undergrads.) So the bulk of the brilliant minds are concentrated at a few colleges, unlike in the U.S., where they're spread out among a couple hundred. The result of this is that, in Europe, it ends up mattering a lot more where one went to college; whereas in the U.S., it's held to be fairly irrelevant after age 23.
This looks like digg. What is happening to this site?
Antidote for procrastination:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P785j15Tzk

( See also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9NgXIkyiwk&feature=relat... - works every time. Ps: 1972 )
He suggested making a list of the top personal bloggers. I'm not sure it's necessary. Sites like HN do a good job of aggregating individual posts.
Personal Branding and the Channels to Convey your Brand
As The Outlook For Holiday Sales Look Grim, Amazon and eBay Are On A Collision Course
WikiLeaks Calls for Help in Taking Whistle Blower Site to Next Level
Ha, I noticed that as well, overall the story was well put together and informative.
"suggesting that Yahoo BOSS Custom projects require a considerable amount of technical resources"

Maybe not so much.
Just look back on tasks you've completed with ease and figure out what worked for you in that instance. For you it might be different, for me it's usually:

- Eliminate external distractions - put in headphones and listen to music. Sometimes I stop for air guitaring though.

- Focus - use Timeboxing to separate times when you'll work and when you'll goof off

- Deal with the Adversion to "Hard" Tasks - I personally procrastinate least when I take a huge task, split it all up into a list, and then do the absolute easiest part first. It's all about inertia, if you view something as a single giant task, it's going to be much harder to get started.

Too often people procrastinate because they picture a task as the total effort involved in a task (and doing it all at once) -- well anyone in their right mind would never want to make all that effort at once! In reality though it's a combination of tiny bits of effort that gets a whole task completed.
Individurls: Design Your Own Popurls
The article's title is poorly chosen, it offers very little advice or insight into "how to kick the habit" beyond what most people already know.
I'll do it later...

Edit: I was reading this article while procrastinating taking my sister-in-law to the DMV. Meanwhile, she discovered that she had forgotten to bring her passport (for ID), and couldn't actually go today.

Hooray for procrastination! :D
Outside of the whiteboard walls, which can be functional, most "start-up style" stuff is fluff. A nap room? Seriously? Are you employing pre-schoolers?

I'm quite a big fan of the Spolsky approach myself, especially for programmers. That is:

* everyone gets an office.

* high quality chairs (they don't have to be herman millers though, in fact, if you can afford it, let employees pick their own on the basis of comfort)

* external large format monitors, multiple if desired

* get everyone a laptop, it's nice to have a single computer, instead of 2-3

* an open area for collaboration (can in fact be a boardroom, but doesn't have to be)

* an open area for lunch/low intensity times (not the same as the collaborative space, and not filled with "cool things" like ping pong, but the spirit remains. Reading, eating and general socialization goes on here).

I'm not a big fan of putting non-work stuff like ping-pong and nerf guns into offices not because I don't want people to have a bit of fun, but because I think people should spend that time "the fun time" outside of the office with their colleagues, other friends or family.

It's a work environment, not a "life" environment.
Get Windows 7's Best Features Right Now
SEC to startups - don't you dare innovate
God damn. That is disturbing. I need to get my shit together.

Thanks for posting those. :)
Reverse-Aging Brad Pitt using CG
I saw a documentary on the building of the bypass bridge near the Hoover dam. They used a helicopter to fly the cable over, had to wait for it to be dead calm as it was carrying near its max capacity and it still took like two hours for them to do it. I think they almost lost the chopper too.

Using a rocket is probably much more cost effective and probably more akin to how bridges used to be made. I mean look at the rope bridges the Mayan's made, some are way too wide for someone to easily throw a rope across, so they probably tied a guide rope to an arrow and fired it across.

You can probably transfer a heavier cable using a rocket than a helicopter, allowing the real work to commence earlier. I mean imagine how long it takes to drag increasingly thicker cables over a couple of kilometers of ravine.
This is not what the folks at Engine Yard told me. Between namecheap and Engine Yard I have more faith in Engine Yard's expertise though based on the moding of my comment and dcurtis's comment it looks like namecheap was the correct one here.

Snippet from a support email from Engine Yard regarding my questions of how important the order was since namecheap wouldn't let me specify an order per Engine Yard's instructions:

In the words of one of our engineers, it's importantish ;-)

Essentially d.ns.engineyard.com is the local primary, b.ns.engineyard.com is an offsite backup and e.ns.engineyard is a local backup. If you can't put them in that order don't worry to much about it, but if you can make d first that is preferable.
Vim mind share soaring: roundup of 10 vim articles, recent and older gems
The most useful article I saw on HN about this subject was Structured Procrastination (http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/).

I've found that structured procrastination is extremely helpful in "just getting started" and once you are rolling you aren't procrastinating any more.

The basic theory to sum up, is to have some that feels giant and important and impending to avoid which allows you to work on other stuff to avoid it. The trick is to feel pressured to avoid something that really doesn't matter so much, even though it appears to on the surface. It's total cognitive hacking.
oh, and they missed http://outside.in/ - but I'm biased. :-)

I think relevance is a hard problem to solve when it comes to news. You need to trust the community that filters your news for you and if it is an open community then that leads to all sorts of FAIL. Lots of exciting things happening in the area though.
Nobody knows http://jaanix.com
the french link doesn't work
Open source Touchless SDK
I really cant think of any complaints I have with flickr... it's my favorite web application only second to gmail.

Why would I switch to your service?
To look at your arguments:

I find flickr extremely easy to use (even my parents enjoy it).

I have never found it to be slow... in fact I am suprised how fast uploading can be at times.

I dont see any ads on my flickr page...?

Offensive material? hmm I guess its there, but I dont look for it so why is that important?

-

But I do love the ease of things like uploading from desktop apps (fspot). Easy to title, organize, and add descriptions. Easy to order prints...

I think you do have some benefits, but your description is not convincing me. Is it like flickr without the social networking part?
I agree on the 'work environment, not a life environment', but I'm also trying to consider that a few minutes of diversion are inevitable, so people are either going to browse the web or get up and do something better. I could definitely see myself using a 15-minute break to play ping-pong with a co-worker, and then going back to work. What's the harm in that?
And only if his well diameter is some 1+ km across.
" it has to inspire confidence. Fail, fail, and fail."

Have you bee to any Ruby conferences? All well executed, modulo the usual small crap that can't be avoided. David, Rich, Chad, et al do a very good, and often thankless, job.

" I wouldn't entrust my $$$ to this group at this point."

Based on the Web page instead of events handled by the organization?

BTW, you did E-mail them to let them know about the problem, right?
They should try their AI on one of the rock-paper-scissor (rps) variants.

For example, this guy has developed rps-25 versus the traditional rps-3:

http://www.umop.com/rps25.htm
If you use Firefox you can get results from the TechCrunch Network each time you search on Google by downloading this search extension.

http://www.webmynd.com/html/techcrunch.html

The latest version of the WebMynd extension lets you personalize your Google searches with the information sources that you most value. So we've set up a version that shows TechCrunch results by default, but you can also get results from Hacker News, YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia and many others (including YC startups).
heh, i got plenty of time, downloading safari via modem... but i guess email is a much more convenient medium than public bashing, so sry if i have started it that way. as i tried to point out, your ideas are a good solution given the environment you describe, but your proposal was missing some elementary thing, at least for me (not speaking for any other potentials here), and you might agree that if you were mainly looking for a cofounder rather than coworkers there should be some additional benefits, less you-centered, which is independent from any further necessary agreements you are definitely allowed to define on the nature of the venture itself. i however never doubted your business skills and you know i do know your professional (coding) skills. so pls rewrite and repost the thing, first draft rejected :p
So you experienced the sub-prime crisis in microcosm ;)
Disclaimer: I work for the Yahoo! Developer Network

Right now you can use BOSS to get regular web search results and mix them in with you own results on your side.

I'm not sure about when vertical search will be available though. I'll follow up with some people here. I'm happy to email people who are interested when I have an update. You can email me at croucher@yarrhoo-inc.com once you fix the obviously silly pirate reference.
To the article's credit, I didn't know that I might be able to cure my procrastination by using DNA antisense to partially shut down my rhinal cortex's dopamine receptors.
This seems pretty innovative, but how do they stop the rockets when they get to the other side? Seems like a very dangerous method.
Joel on Software: Exploding Offer Season