skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> A meritocracy is a system for centralizing authority in the hands of those who already have it, and ensuring that authority is only distributed to others like them or those who aren’t but are willing to play by their rules.

So the whole argument seems to be centered around this idea, but it seems horribly flawed.

Let's assume for the moment that this theory is true. There really is an implicit homogeneous conspiracy that's in charge of distributing "merit", and they only give it to people who are "like" the existing members. Even if that's true, why in the world would you assume that this conspiracy is defining similarity by skin color or sex?

It's very easy for somebody whose self-identity is defined by a certain characteristic to assume that others see the world the same way. That since I define myself primarily by being an X and secondarily by being a Y, others are treating me primarily as a member of groups X and Y. Which is clearly absurd since there are so many ways to categorize people, and since people are perfectly capable of building an identity around each of them. It could well be religion, sexual orientation, nationality, language, politics, age, occupation, school, sports team, a hobby, etc. And many of these categories have fractal complexity.

AFAIK, my sense of identity isn't really tied up in race or gender. So why would I as an extremely prejudiced gatekeeper of meritocracy make decisions based on whether somebody is male of female, rather than whether they're a Java programmer (eew) or a CL hacker (yay!).
Overheating too, I guess.
If they weren't similar, then it would behoove them to become more so, lest the other party move to sway undecided voters.

Plurality voting ensures that there are two major parties, and that they are as similar as possible without ceding ground to third parties.
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>It's that they're the same _where it matters_.

Quite frankly, that's bullshit. Romney/Ryan advocate a rollback of my rights and continued (or furthered) discrimination against me. That's only one small social issue that they differ on and they differ on policies that involve much more substantive issues.

Maybe you're privileged or fortunate enough to not be affected by tax rates, women's rights legislation, gay rights issues, and more, but many of us aren't. Those issues matter and that's why some support Romney and some support Obama.
I would agree with you. I have been with them for 20 years and I have never had one problem with them. They even let me off with some overdue charges (which were my fault) when I asked them nicely.
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Why? If you want PR, you can have that with a presidential system. See Brazil as an example. Americans have had presidential systems since before the country was founded (the colonial governments), have enjoyed virtually unparalleled stability with them, and show no eagerness to abandon them.

In fact, the UK, one of the oldest parliamentary democracies in the world and the originator of the "Westminster System" used in most Anglophone countries, moved towards presidentialism with the Local Government Act 2003 that allowed directly-elected mayors, such as London's colorful Boris Johnson.
As others have said, this gradient of weight loss is a terrible idea.

More generally, though, it seems that there are enough people doing diets that instead of reading articles about how someone thinks that they're going to lose weight, we could just wait for someone to actually lose a lot of weight, and then read a post that talks about how they did it, no?
That reminds me of when I was first learning to program. I wondered for an embarrasingly long time what the hell 'foo' meant. I knew it must be something really important as it was absolutely everywhere.
Good god. I can't believe I missed that. Thanks. I'll make sure that gets fixed.
In the US, my order from Newark took about two weeks to arrive. My order from Allied took about 3 months to ship, currently waiting for arrival (apparently I just missed the 512MB cutoff by a day).
In a world where no-one uses excrement as food: One other source of contamination is runoff from local crop fields that use raw manure.

I agree gently with SamonellaEater. Food is not sterile, and some foods need to be carefully prepared, or the eater needs to be aware of and consent to the risks. But still, I'd like it if people could start with clean food and keep it that way, rather than start with something covered in fresh poo.
Ok, sorry, 9 days. You're name was green. My question still stands. I still can't imagine a situation where this would be the correct action.
Could someone explain how that site works?

Are the amateur astronomers mentioned in the article user of planethunters.org who just happen to have been served the right pictures to work on? Is this Mechanical Turk type work or does it require serious scientific effort?
I just added it to the question itself. Copy pasted here:

Shoutt is a location-based app. It is a platform to share information with those around you. We're bringing the act of shoutting to the phone - when you shout only the people around you can hear you. This works as a great way to share information with students around you and thus helps connect hyperlocal communities. It can be used to connect places as small as a dorm or a department to as large as the entire campus/city - the distance is decided by the shoutter. Also, unlike other networks there are no friends or followers and is focused primarily on the shared information.

Shoutt can be applied to a wide range of scenarios -- Announcements (events, publicize, news), Collaboration (homework, study groups, hobbies), Marketplace (buy/sell, recruiting for orgs, help), Random chatter (updates, celebrating Cardinal victories) and Asks (ride shares, Freshmen questions).
Sure, I didn't mean to imply that those aren't real businesses. I just meant to imply that in the "startup world", a lot of these businesses are totally overlooked because they aren't doing the minimum viable product lean startup thing.

I don't dismiss those businesses at all, I think there are a lot of great opportunities in arbitrage based businesses, but a lot of startups ignore the opportunities that aren't the next big mobile/social thing.
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Interesting write-up. I wonder if the OP would bother with listing on Amazon next time?
No, go ahead. I'd love to see how you justify mob rule.
I wouldn't consider those really substantive compared to drawback of the military-industrial complex, radical increase in nasa/science funding, full free national health-care (including dentistry), overhaul of the education system (along the lines advocated by khan academy), ending the drug war, ending corporate welfare (and maybe even corporate personhood), and probably other major ones I can't think of right now.
Yeah, that is a good point. I had this idea that it most ethical questions are to do with other people.

Like stonemetal alluded to, in a pretty esoteric sense you are harming yourself by bringing yourself into disrepute.. but that is just quibbling. Also I guess the 'scientific' method employed in marking papers is as a proof which you have not given. Though you may have done the groundwork it does not automatically follow that you are able to reliably produce the required results. You may also then be bringing the school into disrepute... but, probably not the central issue here.

I don't agree that EA's reward is diminished UNLESS people who would have otherwise bought these games did not (which I would then absolutely regard as stealing) and ASIDE from the very real argument about server time (which I would argue is a separate instance of theft).

I don't think the social contract argument holds much beyond the idea of patronage ie. I have a duty to support the content producer, but no such duty to allow him to profit. That is arbitrage, I may find it worth my while to allow it, but I have no duty to support it. In abstract Kant-ian terms (thanks for the link, jogged my memory of all those philosophy subjects I studied way back when) if all the world rejected arbitrage people would only make things that were really valued (in real terms, some over-production allows for innovation of course.. things are never so simple).

In fact, in the OP, he mentioned that on some boards people were justifying their actions by saying that they were taking back some of the money EA had taken from them over the years. This could be read as taking back the profits, or the arbitrage, which they no longer felt were justified given EA's continued mistreatment of their custom. (or, of course could be read as a petty way to make themselves feel ok about stealing).
Hard to get a sense of anything here. For the younger generation I guess.
Not more expensive, more difficult to source. IME - mid level sys admin/eng job code will get 10-20% less compensation than an SDE. A principle level SEs comp will also top out before an SDE.

For junior or mid level SE I've seen about 10% of candidates meet the hiring bar. SDEs I've had less involvement, but I'd hazard 20% get an offer where I've been.

The other problem is the pipeline. Colleges keep
Pumping out SDE candidates from comp sci and maths. These junior SDEs will also have a reasonably consistent skill set and experience. There are (effectively) no colleges or curriculum creating new SEs. The incoming candidates also vary widely in their depth and breadth of relevant knowledge. Pretty sure that contributes to the higher negative signal.
Yes, in Islamic countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workweek_and_weekend#Thursday.E...
You can specify a folder you want to place the Dropbox folder in, but you can't choose a directory you want to act as your Dropbox folder. I'd like my Documents folder to act as my Dropbox folder.

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough.
I htink a solution might be to have to pay a fee that is proportional to the scope of the dmca take down request?
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This would never fly in the USA - homework is part of the educational ideology here, facts or no facts supporting homework.

I'm fascinated that a head of state would be able to propose this. It really would be tantamount to insurrection to propose this in the USA.
I explicitly worded it that way in an effort to avoid turning this into a political debate...
More info:

- Many in the DC metro area are also employed by the military or employed by proxy (i.e. working for a contractor like Boing/Lockheed/Caci/etc.).

- The military is a part of the government.

- The republican party is firmly behind the military.

Unsurprisingly the outlying suburbs of the DC metro area are lean republican[1].

Looks like everyone is voting for their own interests here.

[1] http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/elections/Multiyear3.gif
I've never used SQL triggers. We host our Postgres database with Heroku. As a result, I think I've ruled out database level solutions.

On a related note, it feels good to know that everything our app needs to run is in the code base. Back in my C# days, I remember relying on stored procedures that were configured manually at the database level. Rails fights that with migrations and the callback chain too, so I guess that thinking has sunk in for me.

Thanks for the comment.
Those issues affect me every, single day in a tangible primary fashion. The other problems, yes, are frustrating. Romney and Obama differ on how the feel towards funding that military industrial complex, and in a telling way given what you're discussing and the nature of the industrial complex.

As for national health-care, education, science, etc, they very noticeably and very starkly differ as well.

... I feel like you just supported what I was saying. My second post was simply an example of how they differ in meaningful ways.
"I always suggest that people chose a diet or work out routine, but not both."

Yikes. That's bad advice in my opinion. People don't actually want to lose weight, they want to be healthier and look better. They would be very happy to gain muscle and lose fat, even if the measurement on the scale goes up because they would look less fat.

Also, it's way easier to lose weight when you are also working out.

Just because it's hard to measure body fat percentage and easy to measure weight doesn't mean you should do something that is actively against your real goal just because it makes the one number that's easy to measure go down.

I agree that starting an intense workout routine and an intense diet at the same time is a horrible idea. But that's why you start it gradually, from every moment moving forward you will be closer to your goal than doing just one or the other.

This is, of course, entirely predicated on the assumption that people can be taught the difference between losing weight and losing fat ... but I have to believe that people are smart enough that this is a simple thing to teach.
> DC has the highest ghetto per capita in the world.

Do you have a source for that?
I would. There really wasn't much 'bother' to speak of once I understood how it worked. And even though it wasn't as fruitful as other efforts, many small returns add up quickly.
I was very disappointed to find no advice on hats, badgers or zombies.
Lost me with that dig on Alexis. Absolutely lost me. Shame, great article in my opinion.
Also razor from emc/puppet. IMO a large scale cobbler config takes a bunch of work to get right. the provisioning and host management space is just starting to catch on to APIs and SOA. You're going to spend lots of time rolling your own apis, libs, services, and integration.
It's possible that is a factor, but DC is >50% black, so it wouldn't be surprising to see a huge majority for Obama in 2008.
Fair cop.. I was just trying to be inclusive ;)

Point I was trying to make is the militancy is an end in itself and the belief structures are simply bent to serve it.. in refutation of the idea that militancy in the muslim world is peculiarly religious.

They find religious justifications for operational killings in order not to abandon their religion, not because their religion demands it. US forces just abandon religion when it suits them and call themselves a secular nation. The British made themselves a whole new religion answerable to the head of state. These are all just ways of twisting religion to serve power.
The question isn't if the dropout rate of minorities is higher, the question is, do more minorities graduate than if there wasn't AA? If so, then AA is having some positive effect.

I'm all for fixing problems at the local level, but the problems are huge. On a micro level, within school districts there are issues of gerrymandering and even absent gerrymandering there is a terrible positive feedback loop where properties within the boundaries of good schools increase in value, putting them out-of-reach of lower income families.

Also, consider the range of things the child of an engineer is exposed to regularly by the age of 7 to the range of things the child of someone working 60 hours a week in a non-skilled service industry job.

The obviously wrong on so many levels solution would be to shuffle all children to random parents in. That would give you true equality of opportunity. Things like big brother/sister and other mentorship programs fix this in a more sane manner, and I can recommend those to anyone on HN who wants to make a difference.
It's on the high end, but I think around 80-90% Democratic for an urban core is fairly common. It's hard to get exact numbers because it depends on where lines are drawn. For example, Cook County (where Chicago is located) "only" voted 76% Obama, but it includes a number of suburban areas, and would be >80% if you pruned them.

Here are the next-most-Democratic cities I came across in some spot-checking, with NYC boroughs broken out b/c they're separate counties: 89% Bronx (NYC), 86% Manhattan (NYC), 84% San Francisco, 80% Brooklyn (NYC), 79% Boston, 79% Alameda County (East Bay), 77% Portland.

Silicon Valley is closer to the 70-ish you're thinking of, but it includes a number of quite suburban areas. Obama won 74% in San Mateo County, and 70% in San Jose County. LA County is about the same (70%), as is Fulton County (Atlanta).
I should be able to start creating a pattern without having to register. Ask me for that if I want to save.
If you run online communities it's important to understand troll mentality.

For many of us, it's beyond our thinking.
I think I've encountered a similar app in the past that was working with Twitter API to do something similar (don't even remember who they are). Irrelevant to the point anyway.

Anyway, here's my initial thoughts and PLEASE take it with a massive grain of salt as I don't speak for everyone else...

This idea seems way more appealing to businesses than it would to users i.e. I need to hire a ton of Stanford students, announce job posts, etc... When I was in college, the marketplace argument sounds great in theory but eBay, half.com, and craigslist are not too far away (plus rentals online now that removes reselling problems). If I want to resell, I want to get mass market reach, not just local (whatever is best).

I can also see this as a potential app that rings up too much spam, too many announcements (shouts). I can't find an immediate need for why I would want to make announcements so often and more so, I can't find a reason why I would engage in the app frequently because of such. I can see some power users that may want to do so (for things you've listed), but on a whole, I can't speak for others but I don't see a strong compelling reason why I would want to "shout" anything generally. Particularly to such a niche demographic (unless again, I was a business or something similar in nature where I have a reason to pitch to users, but this doesn't provide a good reason for why users would want to engage).

On the surface, I don't seem to have a problem this app is trying to create a solution for, and there is no strong compelling reason on why (even after the pitch) I would want to use it or continue to engage frequently enough (daily active).
Slight off-topic aside: What do you mean by ML algorithm? ML the language, or something else?
relevant > http://www.businessinsider.com/state-of-internet-slides-2012...
My reading of that is that the author would reject both of those. My personal thoughts (as you can probably tell from my other comments on this thread) are that we are much closer to having an objective test than equal preparation.
The big risk isn't 3rd parties, it's just not voting, as about half of our citizens decide to do. And for example, it's hard to see the Republican party try to capture undecided voters with more centrist policies without pissing off the right-wing portion of their party, who won't go vote for the green party, but will instead:

1) Not vote
2) Start something like the Tea Party
3) Toss the incumbents out because they weren't extreme enough

This is happening on the left as well; we're becoming way more partisan as a country, and slowly but surely removing all the moderates from Congress.
Can't see any reason to continue the conversation after that dickish reply.
The GP didn't say that they're the same, just that they're in the hands of corporations. Now that may or may not be true, but I think it's obvious that a two party state is very sub-optimal.
We definitely could have done this in Postgres.

Our API is a Rails project and though we do a lot of work that's "off the rails," so to speak, we do try to follow a convention where possible. A convention that's worked well for us is to use Postgres only for database-backed models in the app. So when it came time to solve this problem, Redis seemed like a good choice.

Map/reduce isn't an option here. First, it's too slow. Second, it's asynchronous by nature, which doesn't work well when trying to load a webpage. We did consider using it in the background, however, to generate the counter-caches.

Thanks for reading!
This isn't a political statement, just that hackers should investigate how to hack the system into that form.

Haha...I love this.

The only way to do government is full-blown communism, with a little genocide mixed in for good measure. This isn't a political statement, but someone should figure out how to make this happen.

Of course it's a political statement!
To be fair, we may have over-engineered this solution. I've been doing some work with compound indexes with Mongo and they seem to be performing really well. Maybe I'll have to write a guest post for MongoHQ too ;)

Appreciate the time and thoughtful response.
Yeah i'll be keeping my Zune pass as long as i can. I like keeping 10 songs a month.
I feel the same way :(
What seemed unreasonable or inaccurate about it to you?
So what needs to be done in Rust? It seems like a pretty interesting language, and I have some free time coming up. What kinds of things would people like to see?
It is Halal. /end fatwa
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Bigger landslide in 1984[1]...

Cheating there too?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elec...
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Somebody decides how to measure merit and certifies who has it. Then you have regulatory capture[1].

That's why you have all the white guys deciding who will be doctors, business executives, lawyers, engineers, etc. And people like people they can relate to, no individual maliciousness or racism needed. It's inherent in the system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
Because they use MongoDB and as the usage of it increases, we'll see more and more people continue to "discover" ways to do things RDBMS' solved in the 80s.

Just like this also has nothing intrinsically to do with Redis and could be any regular ole key-value store.
The monday morning quarterback is a staple of the genre. This is the "pre-game" version. =D No different, I suppose, a NY times Op Ed on XYZ political policy. They are written to "influence" the lower members of the power structure who surface ideas, not directly to the decisionmakers. Decisionmakers (in general) are too busy doing other stuff.
I pinged the guys over at RedisToGo to get you some more clarity on the pricing.

Speaking for ourselves, we've historically preferred to have someone else manage our infrastructure. Setting up Redis is fairly trivial, I agree. However, setting up a secure machine out on the internet and making sure it's always there is less trivial. Rather than juggle an ops/engineer role, we just double down on engineering. I'm sure at some point this may need to change. Hopefully, when that day comes we can afford a sysadmin!
Pretty cool idea, might burn off some of the sugar in that Coke before you drink it too.
Usually if its something I'm not excited about coding I warm up with a sudoku. Other than that I sit down and immediately start working without a thought.