skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The biggest point in this stands out as follows: The gatekeepers of "Merit" rely on <Hueristics> for selection. They do this precisely because they do not know actual merit. Cue: Irony. Applications to top-tier selective Universities, for example, are read for ~20 minutes. The reason they do not know actual merit, is a fundamental issue: Bounded Rationality.

The costs (in time, money, and brain damage) associated with "factual" merit testing would be rediculous/uneconomic. We can verify this somewhat orthogonally, by looking at a couple different similar selection processees. eg. Job interviews. Same problem, same solution. 20 min resume screens. Next, we can compare a resource-unconstrained organization: How does it recruit top 1-5%'er? (special forces, test-pilots, and astronauts, etc): long, exhaustive, actual-failure-mode testing. No 20 minute skims.

If every job or educational credential was allocated in this manner (and you'd have to assume access to the test and test prep), it would be a more interesting test of "Merit". As a second best, it would be interesting if schools actually failed out their weakest students (ie, proving that only the best had a credential). But that is not how the world works. Merit is, rather, a politically correct (and practically expedient) heuristic for preferential treatment. And that is the main point of this post, I believe.

The fair debate, of course, is on the resolution and applicability of filters under various contexts. And if they are inefficient, are they remdiably so?. &tc.
I'm an idiot.

Send an email to orangethirty@nuuton.com
Quoth Wikipedia:

the term [was] originally coined by Michael Young in 1958, who critically defined it as a system where "merit is equated with intelligence-plus-effort, its possessors are identified at an early age and selected for appropriate intensive education, and there is an obsession with quantification, test-scoring, and qualifications."

Essentially, the predictions become reality through confirmation bias, rather than any real measure of ability. This seems relevant to every existing 'meritocracy', such as academic tenure.
How come? b) seems correct in my book.
Just out of interest, but when is the acceptable answer to this question "No"?
Show HN: FanUp.TV - A new SC2 streaming experience
Hey HN. My buddy Everest and I have been working on creating a new streaming experience we're calling FanUp and it's finally time to share it. Take a look for yourself: www.FanUp.tv

We're both avid SCII players and huge fans of the e-sports scene. While watching streams we realized that the actual video portion of the stream was quite advanced, but the companion information wasn't. Chat is so 1992! We set out to better connect the streamer to his fans, and with v.1 we feel we've taken a step in the right direction.

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It's not just the "ghetto" that votes Democratic - those suburbs are a major factor in the leftward swing of Virginia and Maryland over the last decade.
Ok, but isn't it in the interest of all software employers to use their political power to create more capable developers? This is simple economics; I'm not even touching ethics or justice here. And isn't it the immediate interest of current developers to maintain their value by blocking others from entering this profession? Sometimes we adhere to hidden interests without even realizing. Let us first open our eyes to how society works and how we may, inadvertantly, keep others down.
Now I think you are attacking the point directly. I can't speak for the author but it seems to me that the person does believe this. viz "it’s a pretty fucking easy job..." etc [1]

___________

[1] The whole context is as follows:

If there’s one thing I’ve learned after thirty-three years of being alive, it’s that if you see middle-class white boys flocking in droves to a particular career path, it’s a pretty fucking easy job and you should try and get yourself one like that.

I guess that’s a little mean. Sorry, middle-class white boys. I’m not calling you dumb. I’m calling you soft.
You're dancing around the point of the article, which is that what most people here consider a programming/technical meritocracy is a corrupt meritocracy. Most people who can program, can do so because of their background, not because of some innate quality.
I submitted the following link the other day and was disappointed it didn't get a single upvote. Hopefully more people will see it now. Seems relevant given the topic at hand. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-11/food-sickens-millio...
The notion that competition is a click away is ridiculous when you look at all the infrastructure Google builds to make any algorithm work at scale. Its no different then saying, "Building a better Operating System is just a program away." Google is the de-facto standard and that gives it a huge amount of power, just like Microsoft on the desktop.
Honestly, there are so many studies with conflicting results that I feel like it's hard to tell to what extent there may or may not be a sex based difference in math aptitude. However, I feel like we can't throw out the possibility of it having an effect just because it's politically incorrect. It's bad science to assume you know the results before even doing the experiment.

Sex based differences (and/or similarities) are really fascinating to me. I wish they weren't so politicized.
If the vast majority of people applying for programming jobs can't solve it, then it qualifies as hard by definition.
Serverbeach is the idiot in this situation. So incompetent.
This is an amazing data visualization for historic data. Very interesting to see how the states shifted over time. California was solidly GOP before Clinton, how did they lose to Democrat afterward?
"I wish we'd get over this ridiculous assumption that we must hold people to a higher standard based on who they are."

I agree that it would be nice, jspthrowaway. Unfortunately you, Emmett (whom I've met in person), and I are not representative of all investors, employees, user, or customers.

Emmett quoted me incorrectly, and made questionable use of the downvote button (which comes with great responsibility, especially if you are a YC partner like he is). To his credit he probably went back to work and forgot about this thread.
Those aren't any better: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-11/food-sickens-millio...
you are right and yes, it search the title and content.
There is truthiness to what you say, thank you for embiggening the conversation.
> The agricultural industry needs to find new ways to make food more affordable or more efficiently.

Why? We already have plenty of food. If anything, we have too much food.
NFL Jerseys
Early Amazon: Auctions
Great idea and nice design. If anything, I can find it useful as a starting point. But it would be good to put some requirements behind the designs. Meaning here is what was required designed to allow us expand this or that direction, etc.
Perhaps, but unless my personal definition of meritocracy is quite off (definitely possible), the general perception of a meritocracy - now - in the IT/CS terms that are being considered, is that we are talking about raw practically verifiable ability rather than academic qualifications. Or even certifications - which are a somewhat distinct category that IMO, are a bit more subject to corruption. Pay enough and you get the cert...

But I concede the point that the original definition can lead to a serious bias towards rewarding the certificate of accomplishment itself rather than any real accomplishments of themself.
On one hand, you're right. On the other...

Well, "representation" is not quite what it sounds like. A representative is, by his office, held to a higher (and different) standard than non-elected non-officials. That's why you can say "I wish these people had never been elected".

Effectively, what you're describing here is analogous to a tolerance of intolerance, whereas actual tolerance requires an intolerance of intolerance. The relevant quotation, rather than being "I disagree with what you say, but I would die to defend your right to say it", is instead, "All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others."
I guess that’s a little mean. Sorry, middle-class white boys. I’m not calling you dumb. I’m calling you soft.

That's really inflammatory. I'd be pretty mad if that were directed at me, not inspired to consider the guy's point (if he even had one).

I, for one, am grateful for all the magnificent things that hacker culture has brought to society. My life would be much more difficult without them. And actually, one of the things I love most about hacker culture is how open access it is. You do need a computer, but you don't need a $200,000 degree. Compare the cost of a computer and maybe some overdue library fines (minimum needs for becoming a proficient coder--maybe along with some coffee funds) vs. becoming a doctor. A lot of people can't afford 8+ years of expensive education, but a desktop or laptop is much more likely to be within reach.

I like the word meritocracy, even if the roots are satirical. As a society, we should help the people who are most suited and most interested in a certain thing become the people best trained in and responsible for working in that field. Anything else is just poor and inefficient allocation of labor capital. Do you want someone who could be a genius physicist working at target? Do you want your starbucks cashier to be performing open heart surgery on you?
Amid Layoff Rumors, PayPal’s Mok Oh Out as Chief Scientist
Thanks for the kind words. We've worked hard to be transparent through the whole process, and we're grateful that things look to be going so well right now, but man, I would have rather spent a year of my life doing something more awesome than undoing some chaos :p I think the other core volunteers and employees would agree.
"I'm pretty sure that the RIAA has never stated that file-sharers are bad for the music industry"

I'm pretty sure it has. It also sues them as individuals for large sums of money, so if it didn't state exactly that then it would have a very hard time making an argument in court.
I wasn't asking so that I could judge him; I was asking so that I could better understand his situation.
It's a niche definition that was long since co-opted to describe how people should be promoted. It now roughly means selection based on some manner of successful execution, as opposed to personality, or personal relation.

The problem with using "the original definition", is that the rant is now against something that was not the original conversation. Which is fine if the author wants to rant about cronyism ("the original definition"), but not about selection based on observable skill or success (what everyone is talking about lately).
How is Google's promotion of their own services in the search engine different than Microsoft including IE in Windows? Microsoft didn't prevent you from installing other browsers - they got into trouble simply for including a free browser.
As far as I can tell, ServerBeach did follow the law. And 'farms' response elsewhere in this thread suggests WPMU manages their own servers, so there may not have been any way for ServerBeach to take down a single blog/post/subdomain.
I use Fnordmetric - Ruby/Redis dashboard. Works great.
... trust most people saw the logical flaw - the author is assuming that the ability to program is currently evenly distributed.

I don't see anything from the author which can be construed as the statement, "ability, is at present, evenly distributed." If you withdraw that stipulation, what you have is:

4. Ergo, opportunities to become a computer programmer [e.g. education] are not distributed according to merit [e.g. by identifying and cultivating potential in individuals.]

Which is entirely defensible as a conclusion.
I got this same email today from Newark/element14. My order, which I placed about a week ago, still says they won't be shipping until Nov 1st though.
Why developers aren't interested in your startup
Honestly, I'd really rather the crazy social justice warriors stay on their infernally poorly constructed home base of tumblr. I find them really annoying.

(Surf around for 20 minutes there and you'll see what I mean. Age is a "social construct"? Come on. And no, you are not "transabled" or "transethnic" or whatever's in style this week.)

I do agree that the rise of programmers as they become rich and enter a new social group has created a very interesting class of people that I believe merits further study. Still, denigrating the efforts of intelligent people who have impacted society in a positive way just doesn't seem like sound strategy to me if you're trying to raise awareness of something.
Try clicking a state, then arrow-key up and down.
Yeah, I know cities tend to vote liberal, but DC has always seemed extreme to me, even accounting for that. I mean, I don't have data for how big cities vote in general, but I thought it was something like 70% liberal. A solid majority and dissenters.

But DC voted 93% Democrat in 2008. 93! That's not a majority. That's a consensus.
Rough cost for transit from top providers:
US $1-5
EU $5-20
AP $20-40
Africa/china/india/mid east/etc $$$$-go eff yourself

Prices are from someone like L3, qwest, ntt, telephonica. Assuming youre buying 10s or 100s of gb. Don't forget to factor in a couple routers, a bunch of 10gig optics, line cards, maybe some local loops, PMs legal & accounting staff, a bunch of NEs to run it.
Good thing, then absolutely nobody is dying of hunger on this planet, and absolutely no one will buy more seafood if it becomes cheaper.

Let's leave aside the recycling for a moment.

Some people on this planet (without internet access, and thus not on HN unfortunately) might disagree with the "too much food" statement.

(EDIT: Yes I know, distribution is the #1 problem, but lowering prices and increasing productivity is a favorable factor.)
There's a fallacy at work here that is difficult to point out without being accused of bias, but I'll try anyway. It's that in order for a profession to be considered completely fair with regard to race and gender issues, the makeup of people in that profession must exactly reflect the proportion of people in the general population.

I would argue that this is a sufficient condition, but not a necessary one. Yes, for example, if it did happen to be the case that 50% of programmers were women and 50% of the general population were women, you could say there was no gender bias. But, I don't think that forcing a 50% ratio of women is the right way to go about eliminating the gender bias in the programming profession. It's also possible that there could be no bias, but the proportions would still not be equivalent to those in the general population for other, unrelated, reasons.

I'm not trying to pretend that such biases don't exist. I know they do. It's important that we go about eliminating them. It's also important that we do so by eliminating their causes, not by trying to artificially create scenarios that are coincident with a solution.

It's like, a symptom of the measles is having red dots all over your skin, and the proposed solution here is to cover them up with makeup.
It would be awesome if this could somehow incorporate relative positions of the parties over time, perhaps by 'waving' the center line left-right as well. For example it could be argued that republicans during Nixon's time were closer to middle of the road democrats of today in terms of overall platform.
HAHA! THERE IT IS! I've "surfed around" those discussions IRL, and believe me, the ignorance comes on strong from both directions.

(By "there it is" I'm talking about the assumption that "the social justice community" is mainly represented by a handful of Tumblogs, and dismissing decades upon decades of serious academic research as "poorly constructed", although you might have just been dissing Tumblr. Not to insult you, it's just a lack of knowledge on both sides.)
Saldo de afore banamex
La fore de banamex
I'll have to give up here. My personal experience is therefore colliding with forum experience, and my anecdotal evidence should never be given too much sway if so.

It's a tricky dilemma trying to work out whether background affects peoples ability to learn rather than their ability to do. An -innate- quality wasn't what I was trying to get at in saying that some people are better at their jobs than others, but I can certainly see the implications. I'll have to think about it...

If it helps, my background is from a UK perspective, so a lot of the biases may not be all that similar cross-culture.
Windows was a de facto standard on the desktop because it was the de facto developer platform and so it was the only choice for a reasonable consumer experience. Search on the other hand is user facing, and as Microsoft keeps telling us search engines are basically the same. Oh, and they're all free.
That is new information for me. Anyone have any insight on why it would be the case?
It is hard, only in the sense that programming anything is hard, if you don't know how to program. If you can program at all, you can solve it. It definitely wouldn't qualify as 'famously hard'. Things that achieve fame for being hard are usually very very difficult indeed. If anything, in the narrow circles in which it has any fame at all, it is famously easy.
It's not every kind of animal waste - it's only waste containing neuronal proteins, like the spine, the brain.

So it was banned.
Can you help me collect keystroke data for a Uni project?
The Trader who Destroyed Barings Bank
To address your update, since it's after the edit window for my initial response:

Downloading used to me what I'd do to check out new music after getting recommendations (because I don't have the patience to listen to the radio, where there are a bunch of commercials plus songs I don't like). Sometime in the last few years I stopped because I noticed I could find stuff from almost all the artists I was being recommended on Youtube and the like, and it was a quicker way to do on-demand listening of them than downloading a whole album. The difference in our workflows is that I want to evaluate new stuff more immediately. I'm fairly impatient, and I'm also personally not a big fan of cross-artist radio-style random shuffle.

As for private trackers, I just don't care enough about music these days to go seek those out or worry about an upload ratio (I got kicked off of one about seven years ago for that reason, since I downloaded a bunch after joining as was catching up too slowly for their tastes...).
Although Mercury in this instance is extremely insignificant, technically the earth orbits the center of gravity of the Sun and Mercury. Actually, the center of gravity of the Solar system as a whole, but I'm just going along with the GP.
rackspacecloud - no AOF only BGSAVEs currently my save frequency is:

save 1900 1
save 1300 10
save 160 10000

Perhaps there's a better way for me to tune this? Most of the data I store in redis is temporal so I don't mind losing it, but I do store stats for usage of features for reporting in my admin dashboard similar to how this article describes and that stuff i would like to keep around but if i lost a few hours or even a day i'm not going to lose sleep.

I should add, I also use redis to handle some pretty large calculations... zrange's for distance calculations intersections and so on... I did some benchmarking and found that at least in ruby (1.9.3), this was more efficient to load up redis for the sets and sorting, fewer GC hits and faster sorting intersecting... I'm thinking it might be good if for these one off frequent compute tasks, I run on a redis instance that has no save, especially considering I expire/delete the keys immediately after running my calculations.
Those incentives are there, but the linked post isn't about that, nor is it a particularly useful starting point for that discussion.
Population boom in the urban areas of LA, SF, etc.
I'm quite the opposite then, I dream of getting into Waterloo. I'd like to stay in Canada (I'm an international student) and Waterloo has one of the best tech scenes in Canada.
As another data point -- I run Dreamwidth Studios (http://dreamwidth.org) and we host on ServerBeach. We received a DMCA notice a few weeks back that had the same notice, almost, ours said:

Dear Mark Smith:

We have received a valid claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,
codified at 17 U.S.C. 512 (the "DMCA"), that materials on your web server hosted
at ServerBeach may violate the copyright interests of the party filing the
complaint.

In accordance with the DMCA, we hereby inform you that your web server has
been or within the next 24 hours will be, disabled to the extent necessary to
comply with the DMCA.

Your web site will remain disabled unless we receive a valid
counter-notification from you.

Note that it says that it could have already happened, and it's immediately hostile. Also, this notice DID NOT CONTAIN THE NOTIFICATION. I was concerned, as Dreamwidth has a fully functional DMCA policy and we pay people to manage DMCA complaints. We have a good team, fast turnaround, and obey the law.

I got on the phone with ServerBeach, and they flat out REFUSED to show me the DMCA notice. They said that it was a privacy issue, they could not show me the DMCA that was filed against my company. The notification they sent me included a random URL on my site -- but didn't tell me what content was actually infringing.

I was told I had no choice but to take down content that was NOT infringing -- overbroadly censoring my user, HOPING that was enough to pacify the ServerBeach AUP team. I was not about to risk my business (we pay ~$8,000/month to ServerBeach) over one user's content.

But honestly -- that's a terrible position to be in. We're a site that believes strongly in fair use and transformative works. We have worked hard to fight for our users -- but if our host is fighting us... there's precious little we can do about the situation.

So -- be wary of ServerBeach. It seems that lately their AUP team has gone off the deep end and they're throwing customers under the bus. I wish I knew why.
Dance for Kinect-equipped vending machine, get free Coca Cola
Yes, I didn't mean to imply that was the exact case here... rather another often-related problem.

This case is bad enough, in that even a relatively well-considered notice, and a default reaction, can crudely impair a lot of other legitimate publishing.

It's not clear to me, though, whether Pearson tried contacting the Edublogs administrators first, or just skipped to the ISP. (I'm also not sure if http://edublogs.org/abuse/ existed before the incident -- but even if not, DMCA practice should require an attempt to contact the narrowest service-providers first, and only move 'upstream' if that doesn't generate either action or a counternotification.)
Brian Aldiss referenced a similar kind of system in his Helliconia science fiction trilogy, where a planet orbited a small sun, which in turn orbited a much larger sun in a much longer orbit.

Ironically, truth turns out to be stranger than fiction, seeing as this two binary systems are involved.