skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>unfounded prejudice is unstable in a competitive market for labor.

Only with perfect information. In the absence of straightforward tests to evaluate job applicant quality, discrimination can unfortunately be a stable and rational strategy (albeit morally wrong and illegal). Because of information asymmetries, the employer can use race as a signal to infer lower quality. By rejecting minority candidates, the average quality of their applicant pool increases.

See page 494 of this paper for which George Akerlof won the Nobel Prize:
http://web.usal.es/~emmam/Docencia/Modelizacion/papers/The%2...

Agreed that banning IQ tests may be misguided, as you point out the solution is to add more information to the market.
Faster is better.
I actually don’t use Stack Overflow as a contributor for precisely the same reason: I created my account with an OpenID, the provider is no longer around, and now I can’t log in nor fix it.
Amazon was only new books in the beginning. Once you get a market started, you can add other products. But for used cars my imagination is only good enough to see another ebay as it's extension.
You could figure out an IQ score using multiple regression on questions you are allowed to ask quite accurately.

IQ correlates highly with SAT score and GPA, so you could probably get 85% of the way there with just those two variables.
Has Bezos Really Found the Apollo 11 Engines?
Top left corner saying "nee" verified in Baltimore, Boston and in Frankfurt, Germany
That is perhaps a better answer than the one I gave.

Without said guidance, I ended up created multiple views to represent the same area on the page instead of using subtemplates.

Same thing with Collections -- on my first try at something serious, I ended up with multiple collections to represent the same data set, but in different states.

Perhaps, for people who have been working extensively with Javascript before Backbone, this comes more intuitively, but for me, it's been a pretty painstaking process.

In addition to that, conflicting guidance from the various unofficial docs, without explanation of why they did something differently, led me to wondering which way made sense, and it generally wasn't until well after implementation that I realized I'd done it the wrong way.
NASA puts nanotechnology swarm patents up for auction
+1

great info, thanks
why can't he just order his tacos and have them delivered by helicopter like everyone else? [e.g.](http://www.pcworld.com/article/252412/tacocopter_delivers_ta... "recently posted to HN")
The world’s slowest Linux PC
The hardest part of open source: documentation
No, it doesn't. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.koushikdut...
Thanks for the red robin tip!
Not quite; you don't want to minimize the worst case, but the expected case. That comes from maximizing the entropy of the result set ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory) ).

To calculate this, take the sum of -p * log(p) for all patterns of the guessed letter, where p is the proportion of words in the candidate set that have this pattern.
Congrats on the income. It's nothing to scoff at.

But what that means is someone else is able to monetize your traffic better than you. Someone is willing to pay 10 cents (or whatever) for your visitor and presumably they make more than 10 cents from that person to make it worthwhile.

So you need to reduce your ad income by increasing your own conversion rate. A/B testing. Find out what terms people who come to your site are searching. Find out what terms you are ranking well in Google for.

High ad revenue means lost opportunity IMHO.
its all across the world, confirmations from Boston, Baltimore and Frankfurt(germany)

ScreenCap:
http://i.imgur.com/oeNai.png
For anyone wanting to try this on OS X Lion, I believe you have to install googlecl with Python gdata 2.0.14 [1] or you'll see something like the following after running "google docs <cmd>"

File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/googlecl-0.9.13-py2.7.egg/googlecl/docs/client.py", line 55, in DocsClientCL
DOCLIST_FEED_URI = gdata.docs.client.DOCLIST_FEED_URI

This started to look like a rabbit hole so I gave up there.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/issues/detail?id=468
The Spine documentation is fantastic.

http://spinejs.com/
Under the Human Capital approach, learning via books or free/cheap online courses has the same effect as learning at the most expensive school.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital

Under the Signalling Theory approach, going to an expensive university is a stronger "signal" to prospective employers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory

These 2 show wildly different results when you consider the difference between forgetting a subject and failing the subject. You may know just as much as another person, but the one of you that passes some hurdle signals to prospective employers that the hurdle passer is the better candidate. This is because hiring a person is trying to predict future behavior/success with limited information, and many people use signals as heuristics.
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/02/the_career_cons....

One dissertation that described some of these differences is called "Hiring and inequality in elite professional service firms". An interesting read, and it explains some of the "unfairness" of employers using signalling instead of the human capital model.
http://books.google.com/books/about/Hiring_and_inequality_in...
Screen Rage is the New Road Rage
> Well, I would have gotten more sleep!

Do you really think so? You'd probably just put the same amount of time in, but would have gotten farther!
Note also that the methods of 60 years ago (a) discovered Gwen's ability, (b) promoted her to a commensurate position, (c) gave a productive citizen a genuine sense of achievement and accomplishment. All in a period which was universally racist and sexist by today's progressive standards.

Now? Gwen's intelligence would probably also be detected, if by less straightforward and reliable methods. Because her African X chromosomes confer not one but two Diversity Points (tm), every institution she came in contact with would have a strong bureaucratic incentive to promote her not only to her actual abilities - but beyond them.

As a result, she'd be very likely to end up placed in a position where rather than leading enterprise IT projects, she was competing with (say) top-notch particle physicists. Lacking (like almost all of us) the mental horsepower to perform at this level, she would constantly feel like a fraud, and her colleagues would constantly suspect her of being a fraud. A suspicion which would be correct, though you couldn't really say it was her fault.

Lesson: be careful about hating on the past. Often the past looks pretty retarded by the standards of the present. Often the converse is the case as well.
I wish him well. A while back I read "Floppy Disks: Its Too Late" [1] when it was posted on HN and decided that I would finally get round to pulling the data off some old (mid to late eighties) 5.25" Appple II and DOS 2.1 disks I had sat in a drawer.

After buying a 5.25" drive (from ebay), acquiring a PC (from the dump, literally) that was old enough to have a drive controller that could talk to the drive, and tracking down old software for reading Apple disks on a PC, I found that the bits had just faded away and all the disks were unreadable.

Time and money (and luck) can't beat entropy. It wasn't even much fun.

[1] http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3191
ProBizniz - Blog - Online geld verdienen van thuis uit
What if you could edit all your files in dropbox' html interface? What if it was easy to do, and kept the simplicity they've become known for?

Then your OS would be a commodity, and Dropbox would be what provided the value. Seamless editing of documents across devices, no matter where you are or what sort of device you're working on.

That's a pretty good endgame for dropbox.
If you count the deaths from famine, industrialization and so on you might as well count deaths from privatization: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...
What makes you think there is a connection between your old salary and what you can make as the founder of a new company?

That's not how it works.
Google Has Profited Four Times More From iPhone Than Android
I don't understand the data rate changes. Anyone?
By the way, if you like convex polyhedra, but don't feel like being bound to 2 or 3 dimensions, you should have a look into mathematical optimization. Most of it centres around finding, in effect, the southern-most point of high dimensional convex polyhedra.
Thank you. You're awesome.
"Wal-Mart didn't invent anything new..."

Whoa! Wal-Mart revolutionized the supply chain. And Wal-Mart also started with a revolutionary idea: We can make stores in rural areas so people don't have to drive to the big city to shop. Every other chain considered those same rural areas unprofitable. It turned out to be a gold mine.

There are several books out there about how revolutionary Wal-Mart has been. I suggest you read one before assuming that Wal-Mart "didn't invent anything new"!
I dont think PG's essay had anything to do with his investment thesis or rather its the not the most important thing he looks for.

The ideas he backs are basically about the team.
If you're considering a redesign, I'd highly suggest http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/projects/
Congratulations! Your age might give you trouble--people will feel embarrassed to work for such young people, and people in general might not take you seriously. Good luck!
It can send a powerful message that the team is not responsible for producing the software.

Could you elaborate? I have a hard time imagining how spending a few minutes describing your progress and your immediate plans could possibly give you the feeling that you're no longer responsible for what you're working on. It seems to me that not ever being asked about what you're doing would powerfully convey that message.
Social Media Blasphemy
I used Timeline to present my CV
in the state of California it is illegal to give a black child an IQ test even when administered by a school psychologist as part of a professional assessment

The issue is that IQ tests were found to be culturally biased against black students and therefore responsibly for placing those students on special-ed tracks that were not appropriate. See: http://www.rcselpa.org/docs/policies/Section%20III%20Evaluat...

This abstract indicates that black students seeking placement into gifted classes are exempted from the ban: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/93/1/31.abstra...
458. Generally been pair programming but always consider stack for advice. I'd be interested in setting time to helping others there.
Fexl version b24 released
My point is that there's a difference between passively observing something multiple times and remembering precise secondary details about the instances when you observed the thing. I remember seeing lots of silver cars quite well, but I don't remember any specific details about the cars — and remembering the make and model of a car is a lot easier than remembering the URL of a Hacker News posting.

At any rate, I just don't see why it would be useful for him to have specific examples in mind. What is the point in asking for that?
Nothing is stopping browsers from supporting http 1.1 and SPDY at the same time. SPDY doesnt "force" anyone to support it. You just sound like the anti-change crowd to me. Irrelevant.
It's great! Just got off a vegetarian-spree. Gonna go back to claiming those free burgers :)
Don't really have to much add except that I love StackOverflow. It's been helpful so many times.
Interesting. Do you have pointers to some background material? I'd like to see what made cooling more efficient. Thanks!
"unfounded prejudice is unstable in a competitive market for labor."

Did you ever see that study in France where they submitted the same exact resumes with Christian names and Arab names? I'll let you guess as to the results.
I'm glad to see people being more frank about this. As more people like you come forward, hopefully the stigma around it will fade. I've admitted it when appropriate, but been very hesitant to do so, even though I think the experience was incredibly valuable and shaped who I am.
True, but there's also the fact we don't know the whole human genome - only about 98% of it.
Does it work with Readability?
Don't write plumbing code for your startup
Knight News Challenge - Cont3nt.com lets you sell media in real-time via Twitter
That's because in the past, the IQ tests were not fair, objective and colour-blind, but were set up in such a way as to bias against poorer people (which will be mostly black in the USA).

Is this a conspiracy theory? It sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory to me. Just sayin'.

Conspiracies do happen. However, when you're trying to persuade me of a conspiracy theory, the burden of proof is high. I expect links - lots of them - and good ones. Try to avoid linking to frauds:

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/06/did_stephen_jay_gould_f...

FYI, the most accurate IQ tests available at this time were Raven's matrices:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravens_Progressive_Matrices

I think these have lost some reliability because of a training effect from the general popularity of cognitive brainteasers (probably the cause of the Flynn effect). However, it would be interesting to hear someone explain how they were designed by racists to be racist. (Wikipedia tells me they were originally the Coloured Progressive Matrices, which does sound mighty suspicious...)
Actually, the other thread of discussion throughout the week is that IETF attendees at the Concorde Lafayette hotel have been regularly having their rooms burgled. The hotel has not been proactive responding to it, and arguably has been turning a blind eye.

So, more like lumps of coal.
I'm not sure, maybe you have a different definition of 'frighteningly ambitious' to me. What is the largest possible outcome from making it slightly easier or cheaper to repair your car? It saves a few million Americans a few hundred dollars?

My definition would be more like: sending ordinary people into space; making a mass-production electric vehicle; cheap solar power; curing flu/the common cold; inventing a new type of computing device; replacing huge incumbent companies (telcos, oil); reducing home electricity usage by >50%; inventing a new human-computer interface. Etc.
The simplest way I know of to do that is by a weighted linear combination. Both information gain and risk are quantifiable; one in bits and the other in probability (or log-odds which is also bits). Then the problem reduces to finding appropriate weights, which can be done with your favorite n-dimensional search algorithm.

It may also be useful to consider how many remaining incorrect guesses there are in the game.
what's more speculative, and what's safer than stocks? If you're looking for low volatility, bonds are often touted as 'safer' - but look at how safe they've been over the last decade.

There's a risk/reward balance in every asset, I don't think ruling out stocks based on the perception that they're risky is necessarily wise.
So, in essence, black people today are "likely" incompetent at their jobs because of affirmative action?

That seems to be what you're writing. And it doesn't look good.
Ask HN: Best Kickstarter Incentive for App Store?
Hi, my partner and I have several apps in progress for the Mac and iOS app stores, and we have decided to raise funds. Apple only provides 50 promo codes for each version of an app:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2008/12/app-store-lessons-creating-and-redeeming-promo-codes.ars

So my question is, what if more than 50 people donate and we run out of promo codes?

We have considered writing our own redemption system where we can enable custom codes from a central server, but this just seems way beyond the scope of what should be necessary.

Another option is to update the version of the app, say every 2 weeks or a month, and give out a new round of promo codes, sorted by highest donor descending.

A final option is to limit promo codes to the first 50 highest bidders and the rest of the donors would only get esteem for their trouble.

If anyone has experience with this, advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks!
> Not quite; you don't want to minimize the worst case, but the expected case.

That depends on your opponent. In game theory you often assume that your opponent plays against you and as good as they can, so you'd go with the worst case.
Cooling costs often double your direct energy costs. (Your paying for energy, capital costs, and maintenance on the cooling side.) Your also paying for floor space, network conductivity, and manpower.
If reconfiguring a huge chunk of the automotive industry seems unambitious to you, and the only thing that will truly impress you is orbital death rays and zero point energy, there's not a whole lot for us to discuss.

This is a silly argument. It will always be possible to name something more ambitious for a startup to do. What, you're only taking tourists into suborbital space? A truly ambitious startup would build MOON BASES.
When I hire someone, I typically only get access to their resume. If I wanted to try to reduce my own signal-based-bias and apply the Human Capital theory, should I instead ask for their transcript, and perhaps have someone else remove the name of the institution before I see the transcript?
Rocket surgery is a field I dearly want to see created. :-D
Lots of good stuff there. But I take offense to the notion that all porn is directed at women. In fact the small minority is. Most of publishing is directed at women's fantasies - romance novels principal among them.

Because women like their porn as language, and men as pictures, does not prove men invented porn, or benefit more by it, or anything really.
hah, very true; I may have graduated and still have been programming today.
Apple's 3D camera concept would capture & recreate images
Well I just discovered while reading this article that Readability does the autopaging on its own ;)
ReTweet to/from Facebook
We’ve dropped the www.
Is this a conspiracy theory?

At the risk of dragging this thread back onto the topic of the story...

The story describes a number of people who put obstacles in Gwen’s way. None of them are described as being malicious, none of them got together and “conspired.” Some of them genuinely thought they were acting in Gwen’s best interests.

So if someone says that IQ tests were set up in such a way as to create bias, perhaps we can believe that yes they were biased, and possibly deliberately so, without thinking about conspiracies or racism, just people attempting to do what they thought at the time was in everyone’s best interests.
This is sortof the equivalent of a 400lbs person losing 100lbs. They're still still on deaths door.
I don't think you understand the "newbie" problem, as it has nothing to do with reputation and everything to do with real-world knowledge. Until you've proven that you have a little bit of knowledge (and not just arrogantly asserted it) you don't get to vote. If anyone could vote immediately then every post that got linked on reddit would have 250,000 useless upvotes.
FLA finds serious labor law violations at Foxconn
The referrer log about 1/3 of the way down is really interesting. He needed to create most of the demand himself, it didn't happen organically through Kickstarter.

This is a great overview of what it takes to do a successful Kickstarter. Nice catch.
To piggy back off the restaurant genome project idea, it would be great if food allergies and restrictions were incorporated as well. My girlfriend is gluten free so we don't often eat out (or explore) because most restaurants can't accommodate her needs.
Writing this on my iPad, so apologies for being terse.

1. Top half is really busy. Ads above and below header image are way too distracting, so the name of the site isn't immediately evident.

2. Ad right above navigation bar is confusing and makes me think the nav bar is part of it.

3. Titles and images aren't arranged right. I thought the title to the article of the main image was the one to the right.

4. Trim down on those lists of breaking and local news stories and bring some of the other categorical content up. Sports/photos/videos/etc are way down below.

5. The 3 column structure is too cluttered. Either give it more white space, or cut it down to 2 with the sidebar composed of mini-sections. Right now the main story does not stand out.

6. Reduce overall number of stories on each page. My eyes are darting all over.

7. Ajax, gradients, rounded corners, openid, CSS4, node.js.
It's not a conspiracy theory.

>However, it would be interesting to hear someone explain how they were designed by racists to be racist.

No one in this thread has claimed this. Stop trying to invent a polemic.

It just turns out that whatever IQ does measure correlates heavily with income and where you were born which in turn correlates with race.
But an X for Y beachhead doesn't make the current idea scalable. Perhaps it's a beachhead for the founder to get a reputation so maybe one day he can try a scalable idea, either in the current company or some future one. But it doesn't mean the pivot will be related to the current X for Y.

It worked out for Microsoft. But somewhat contradictory to this scenario Paul Graham also said to start chipping at the ambitious idea because starting companies is hard anyway.

So looking at seemingly dull ideas of YC, is there some way for them to scale without pivoting as far as Microsoft did?
We have the raw data on the actual DNA for several people which is what you need to make a copy. What we don't know is what the data means and what all the mutations are in the wild. Which is what you want to know if we are going to start making changes.
HackThisSite Basic Missions 01 Solution
Yep, it's been a bit of a hobby of mine for the last year or so. I wish I'd started 10 years ago - compound interest is great, and the sooner you get into it, the greater your time multiple.

Index funds are an easy, conservative, way to get it. They also require the least time. Vanguard seems to make the best products here - money in VTI, VWO and BND will give you a nice balanced portfolio.

But you can beat the market - the key is that you must be patient, not swayed by opinion, or market trends, and spend a lot of time looking into business fundamentals.

I'd advise staying pretty liquid in the short term. It looks likely that there'll be another large correction in the short term as we see another wave of potential sovereign defaults. When everyone is panicking is the best time to buy.
I've always felt that reputation is an imperfect proxy for how helpful you've been, which is the important thing in the end. That screen shot is a much more direct measure - you should be proud of it!
Identity theft is called that by banks to try and distract attention from the fact that they have fallen victim to fraud and are trying to pass the consequences onto their customers. And it's mostly worked. Words have power.

.
There are more and more entry-level questions now, I think StackOverflow really need to provide some more advanced filters to help moderate one's question list.
Effective examples of startup commercials
We've been told countless times that the only thing VC's will fund is ideas that are already being done. The reason's given are so when the entire niche fails they can point and say "see, everyone else failed, its not our fault." The reason nothing innovative is ever done is because no one is willing to take the risks.