skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't realize going into it that the report would be that detailed. However, having opted in, I'm definitely impressed by what you get out of it.
Is that the landing page? If so, shouldn't it be focused upon the client needs?

Perhaps think about "Never Say [Opensource] When Selling a Web Design Project" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5570679

Sell to Staff/collaborators through dev channels e.g. GitHub e.g. http://37signals.com/ doesn't mention RoR etc.

Good luck :)
For anybody interested in running their own numbers, there is a wealth of demographic data on college admissions available called IPEDS from the National Center for Education Statistics.

http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/datacenter/DataFiles.aspx
Say No To The Marketplace Fairness Act
And once again, if the headline is in the form of a question, the answer is no.
>Which mainstream OS vendor can you imagine bringing an OS to the market, with an alternative systems programming language and being able to succeed at it?

If the language is good for this purpose, and the resulting OS is better, as in equally fast AND far more secure than the current ones (a marginal increase in security won't matter at all), then any big vendor.

If the OS is feature complete and can run current apps (even if recompiled) with a compatible system call API, then why not?
You don't get it - the parent's point is that your argument doesn't explain why Asians take a much bigger hit than whites.

"Asian applicants have 67% lower odds of admission than white applicants with comparable test scores."
A nice, if lengthy, article on that topic:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-...

TL;DR Asians are "the new Jews" and are discriminated (often implicitly) - for example they ace at high-school STEM competitions, yet they don't make that many undergrads as they should (with a notable exception of Caltech).
It's hip to hate Sublime because it can't do X that Emacs or Vim can.
There's a lot of criticism of ST by people who never actually used it or used it for a couple of minutes. Pathetic really.
This is exactly what I was thinking. Seems like a cost that will be recouped somewhere. Perhaps some startups dont mind that. I don't know enough to have an opinion on its merits. I would imagine some startups may not mind footing the legal bills if it means saving in some other way.
The press picked them up before they were actually ready to launch. Their search model was to segregate results into different categories and show all the categories at once, in sections of the page. When the traffic spike, the most popular categories went offline, leaving only the long-tail sections active. Most people never saw how the search would have looked when the software was finished and the servers beefed up.
Actually, NONE of the people in our dataset had zero friends. The x-axis starts at 1, not 0. The point is that resampling to remove the friendship paradox shows that there are many more people with single-digit friends than we expected.
Spaceport: a free ActionScript 3 mobile game framework
I'm surprised they didn't select any tasks that couldn't easily fit on a single machine (largest input set was <200GB). That said, if the scale up performance can be improved without compromising scale out, why not?
That's not true. They couldn't, for example, demand editorial constraints on the Harvard Crimson. Private organizations don't give up their rights, including their right to free association, just by accepting government dollars.
> And doormen and elevators are kinda necessary when you have a busy life.

I don't really get this part, though it's a common sentiment. Here in Copenhagen, most apartments don't have elevators. Many people are busy, but I have never heard someone complain that an elevator is the bottleneck that would let them relax more. What proportion of your day could possibly be spent on the stairs? It takes me maybe one minute to walk up the 5 flights of stairs to my apartment. It's good exercise, too.

It's an issue for people who have mobility problems, but it's not a time problem.
30 Times More Powerful and 1,000 Times Rechargeably Faster Li-ion
I have seen that video and it is a treasure of management advice. Other things:
1) When asked how he learnt to manage such a large company and aspects like finance, etc, he said (paraphrased): "as you do it, you just learn it". Makes starting and running a company sound more natural.
2) The other thing I remember he said: When sales guys get promoted to the level of CEO, they don't understand that their company runs because of a product and that is how they provide value to their customers, instead they just think of more sales channels, wider markets, etc. In doing so, they kill the entire process that created the company's product in the first place.
Well put pg. It isn't that the money was that material, it just felt wrong and petty that it was being done in the first place so we wanted to fix it. Just feels silly we didn't do it a lot sooner.
Can someone explain to me why you prefer working in a crowded, noisy cafe rather than in the comfort of your own home/the park/some other comfortable venue?

Whenever I went to Starbucks, the chairs were barely comfortable enough to sit on for ten minutes, there's no way I could sit there for hours.
import XMonad.Actions.SpawnOn

spawnOn "1:browser" "chromium-browser"
The current educational system utilizes SAT scores with a variety of other sources for determining acceptance. While there are other factors such as athleticism, social endeavors etc. SAT score is still often viewed as one of the key determining factors. It is of no doubt that Asians that apply to these top universities as a whole have higher SAT scores. However it does not say of their other qualities, those were perhaps the reasons why there was a lower acceptance rate for them.

In our current educational system, the only transparently comparable bar is the SAT score, while every other factor is more or less arbitrarily judgmental, e.g. can be manipulated. Asians learn that in order to become better, they'll at least put down efforts to increase the clearly visible bar to increase their chance. It is not to say that they will overlook the other factors, just since they aren't as apparent and obvious, they will make sure their SAT score does fare better.

One argument can be that because Asians put down more effort and time in their SAT (bookworms), then they will not be able to fare better in other metrics. I won't say that this doesn't make sense, it does, but it calls for generalization bias. Especially when a data set has been collected that speaks for a year's worth of group, I do not believe the general idea that Asian are less adept in other metrics is true.

Under this assumption, when we see data that SAT score (the only visible metric) is actually leveraged against a person's race, that is plain racism. Not saying racism is a bad thing, if schools determine that collectively as a whole they need diversity to strength the core values, racism is just one factor to play with to achieve their goals. The only problem that I do have with though is, with all the metrics you throw out there, the group of people that just naturally put down more effort to increase their chance gets punished, because of racism/diversity reasons.
What did you do with the code after you closed down? I'd be curious to see what you're doing with Lua. I wrote a behavioral analytics database (http://skydb.io/) in Go & C that uses LuaJIT as part of the low level query engine.

Are you working with event data? (It sounded like it where you mentioned time frames in a different comment) Maybe we're building something similar.
Write your own Android Authenticator
You probably should make a link to that page on ycombinator for discussion. Well... first cut it down a bit so that it is shorter. (we live in the age of tldr :-p). But I think it was a good read.
Just noticed this response from Braff’s AMA:

“You can’t really raise enough money on Kickstarter yet. There are some new sites starting that will eventually allow anyone and everyone to own a piece of a movie; invest in it like a stock. But you can imagine the amount of legal issues this raises. So look for it sometime around 3012.”

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/19uwm9/i_am_zach_braff...

What a difference a month (and a $5.7 million Veronica Mars Kickstarter) makes!
Pretty much, yeah. Closures can actually be a problem for memory deallocation in garbage collected languages. Someone I know was working on a common lisp app and eventually found some of their performance problems to be related to the amount of data held onto by closures.
I remember that guy!

I also want to know what he's up to.
We created this as a hackathon project and have cleaned it up a bit. Interested in feedback from the HN crowd!
I'm sure Facebook's Data Science team does a lot of interesting things internally. They do in fact have some interesting papers [0] and [1], though obviously with more of an 'academic' feel than the blog post.

[0]: http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.4503

[1]: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.4145 (edit)

Edit: they also have this FB page which has a steady stream of interesting stuff: https://www.facebook.com/data
I think your estimates are about right and you've just earned yourself a free hour by writing a thoughtful post.
When I got to Penn my freshman year I very quickly came to the very unscientific conclusion that the admissions office probably could have filled the entire freshman class with very smart Asian students who had better grades and test scores than me. I am black and was never a stellar student in high school but I had great test scores. I often felt that if I had been Asian or white I may not have been admitted.
Yes, I am stating my opinion, as are you.

Odd that you charge me with speaking out of turn while yourself presuming to understand my "worldview" and the thought process that led me to my conclusions. You're in my head now?

>He has a lot more backing to his opinion than you do.

And, I know my own "worldview" better than you do. Or would you like to explain my worldview to me? As well, I know better than you how I arrived at my own conclusion. It's simple common sense. What adult doesn't understand that a company profits by earning more than it spends?

I could be right or I could be wrong, but I will go with the rational conclusion.
What's the Asian to White ratio of qualified college applicants? i.e. are there more Whites or Asians who would be accepted based on factors other than their race?

If it's > 1, then obviously Asians will take a bigger hit, since they're the majority, that's the whole point of my comment.

If it's <= 1 though then yes, the situation is very interesting indeed.
All, since they're friends with the person who donated the data.
The accountant's job is to tell you how it is, not persuade you to fix it.
Well said. And don't forget that, for many people, there's a difference between understanding a basic concept (margins) and understanding its effect on you/your baby/your life. We humans do this as a matter of routine (smoking, alcohol, obesity, etc).
Different people like different work environments. No surprise here.

I like a gentle din of noise in the background, and I like the occasional chat with a barista or other patron. Sitting at home is quiet and lonely.
Stratalux Cloud Ops Whitepaper
Asians underperform? Please explain.
if this is a big enough concern, it may be best to just drop down a level of abstraction and run directly on AWS.
Meteor VoIP smart packages for Twilio and Plivo
In Manhattan, doorman buildings are much taller than 5 stories.
I moved to California to join Spaceport, and spent a year working on its compiler and build system. Although we’ve now been “acqhired” by Facebook, Spaceport continues to exist. I want to see it used, because it is extremely useful.

Happy to answer questions.
"But when you're fixing an abuse that's justified by all participants as being standard practice"

I don't feel (given what I know about this) that it's an "abuse" or though I can absolutely see what it is viewed this way. And of course the people who are charging it are going to justify it by saying "it's standard practice" because that is the easiest way to get beyond the objection and smooth things out.

People have certain ideas of what they find right and just and don't think rationally about what it really means relative to the entire transaction.

For example you could go to a restaurant where the steak dinner costs $30 but feel it is an abuse because they want $1.50 for a glass of tap water. Or they want to charge you to use the restroom. But if you go to an equivalent restaurant which charges $35 and gives you free tap water and bathroom you wouldn't think twice (merely focusing on whether you think you got value for the $35 meal).

The reason people have to rely on arguments of "standard practice" is because they are quick and easy and get by objections much easier then a lengthy discussion. It's a time saver.
"combined cohort/mentor structure"

I like your idea because it resonates with my theory about peer pressure and my theory about lack of motivation both being undiscussed issues. Perhaps your interpretation is more correct than mine.

There have been a large number of popular press studies about the apparent failure of MOOCs from an interaction interpretation. I'd like to see at least one from a leadership perspective (the lecturer is the obvious leader in a physical class.. who's the leader online? Is there one? Can more than 5% of the population lead themselves?), maybe one from a peer pressure perspective, maybe one looking at ancient apprenticeships vs presentations we have now in brick -n- mortar vs watching videos online of the presentations. I don't need another interpretation of social interaction as a fail.

One interesting anecdote is way back when MOOC marketing was gaining traction, in the very first original AI class, a coworker and I both took the class and then dropped it. We socially interacted quite a bit, at least as much as I did back in physical school, but we both dropped it. I ended up reading the entire book, very good intro to AI book and worth my time so I can't blame either social interaction or the quality of materials in this anecdote. Dropout rates vs physical interaction with fellow students would be an interesting study. (edited to add my hypothesis would be minimal correlation between physical real world study groups and dropout rate)
The code just sits on my private repo, for no particular reason. Sky sounds like where I would have gone if I had more interest. As it stands, all I was doing with Lua(JIT) was pass event data for the last X days to a script which processed them and returned the dashboard structure.

The problem with my use was that user the code might be doing absolutely anything, so parallelizing might have been from trivial to hard to impossible. The next step, as I saw it, would be to separate queries and processing in some sort of map/reduce paradigm, or a custom query DSL and normal Lua processing.

I was just building the MVP and waiting to see where customer feedback/needs took me. Nowhere, it turned out.
I've always wondered what happened if you lied, particularly if you had an ambiguous or misleading name.

(If you really wanted to manipulate the system, join/start the Kenya club at your high school or something, and claim to be deeply interested in exploring your African roots. Don't mention that they're from 150000 years ago and not 300 years ago. You could potentially even leave the race question blank, or write in that you find race a European-centric concept which doesn't reflect your humanity...)
Not particularly. Say you have a mortgage at 4.5% (which is doable these days with great credit). If inflation is 4% (the average rate of inflation from 1980 to 2000), then anything with a real rate of return of more than 0.5% is a better place to put your money than paying down your mortgage.
Are you planning to share some of that data in a reusable format (e.g. csv), not only as end-user plots (nice, BTW)?

It would be great to play with it a bit.
The only thing you need to get good at is selling…
Maybe they do, but this whole discussion is missing the point that going to an "elite" university is not an essential step in having a successful life and career. I quoted a bunch of this data in a previous thread that I'm too lazy to search for right now, but the gist is, you have approximately as good a chance of becoming CEO of an S&P 500 company if you go to the University of Wisconsin as if you go to Harvard. So even if your goals are at the extreme upper end of the spectrum, you aren't necessarily hurt by not going to an Ivy League school. A well known, well regarded State university puts you on pretty good footing as well.

None of this, of course, is meant to say that discrimination is good, or that I encourage it or anything like that. Personally, I think admissions should be completely race-blind. I'm just saying there's a bigger picture that we should look at as well. If you don't get into Stanford, Brown, Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Harvard or wherever, fine... go to Georgia Tech, University of Virginia, University of Wisconsin, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, Clemson, University of California at Irvine, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Texas, Pitt, Penn State, Miami, etc., etc., etc. You'll most likely do just fine.

Heck, as far as that goes, there are some public, State universities that are probably as well regarded as some Ivy's, at least in some people's eyes. Look at UCal-Berkely. They are one of the most famous, well known, and well regarded schools in the frickin' world. Or how about UIUC? Not exactly a shabby reputation there. Or UM-College Park? You could do worse...
Related question: will not making this move affect a firm's ability to get good deals? I don't know the answer but it's what the firms should ask themselves.
Reading the Ecomom story it reminds me of Zappos. That company too was losing a lot of money. It only sold to Amazon after their investors refused to put more money in.

The Ecomom story is pretty mind boggling from a sound business perspective, but then so is Zappos. And look how celebrated Tony Hsieh is. And guess who was also an investor in Ecomom?
Markpond: another bookmarking site
Ah, I guess it's the different culture, then. In Greece, we consider talking to strangers intruding. Not that it's impolite or anything, people just don't do it much.
Was there a board? From what I can tell it looks privately held with one majority shareholder.
Half-OT: any way to hack the integrated Facebook authenticator to allow logging in for multiple Facebook accounts? I need this for two distinct address books :(
Thanks!

Some of the plots use this:
http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/CommunityGraphP...

The underlying community detection uses:
http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/FindGraphCommun...

If you look under "Method", there are a bunch of different methods to use that I'm told correspond to various landmark papers in the field. If you know about community detection, you'll recognize which methods correspond to which papers, but if you don't, why do you care? At least, that's our philosophy for documentation, but I'm not sure I entirely agree with that philosophy.
Check out "From Good To Great" by Jim Collins. You'll find that the "most successful" organizations actually have a leader whose principal strength is their ability to find and empower the right people. These organizations have sustained, long-term growth that outlasts that one visionary.

Contrast with organizations like Chrysler, which under Lee Iacocca, became fantastically successful... Until he turned his gaze elsewhere and the organization of yes-men he built crumbled to the ground, unable to accomplish anything of their own volition.

Jobs appears to be an Iacocca-style leader. A great visionary with incredible personal willpower, who guided a company from obscurity to domination. And yet now that he's gone, you have to ask, who is left that has sufficient personal willpower and initiative to keep driving Apple's stock upward? Did Jobs' abrasive managerial tactics leave anyone with those qualities?

Those charismatic leaders who really shake things up also polish something else to a dull, boring gloss: other people.
I found this interesting. What I would love to have seen, however, is a probe into the dynamics. You did a nice abstraction over time as you measured property X as age was varied. I would have loved to have seen the manner in which topics and ideas spread over your network.

For instance: If an event occurred in New York, say, how long would it have taken to spread to San Francisco? If there were no progression, topic times would center around the same time. This would indicate that people were getting their information from national, not local sources (e.g. the evening news), then talking about it on facebook. On the other hand, if a local topic was spread on facebook alone, we should see some sort of progression.

It's possible that this progression could take more interesting forms besides geolocation, but that might require a more extensive network. A simple experiment would work like this: A few thousand people who are not friends but have a similar interest (say an interest in Elizabeth Warren) post independently a video of her. This particular esoteric interest is unlikely to be valued a priori by their friends, but perhaps they are compelled to repost the information. What's the threshold of "esotericness" such that it won't "go viral?" Is there a way to predict virality as a function of how popular it is to begin with? Is there no actual progression across the network, but rather a small bump in topic expression, until it is picked up by larger media sources at which point the entire network is inundated with people reposting Elizabeth Warren recaps from HuffPo et al?

The reason this is interesting is that it sheds insight into the role of social networks: are we fundamentally disposed toward central sources like the NYTimes, or is facebook a fundamental sharing mechanism? That is, do I post on facebook just to have my views expressed, validated, and challenged, so that they might change the world over a few years? Or do I post on facebook to have my views propagate across the world much more quickly?

Finally, a question: How did you estimate the power law? I know how difficult it is to do this (e.g. not linear regression on a log-log scale). Did you compare the power law fit to other, similar distributions, like lognormal? Preferential attachment is indeed a beautiful theoretical result, because it implies the existence of power law degree distributions. Unfortunately, many networks are not as well represented by power laws as by alternative distributions, which casts doubt on the preferential attachment hypothesis as is. (Also, many sampling methods give rise to fictive power laws). That said, a fat tail can still be interesting.

In any case, this is a beautiful piece of work.
Asians are the overrepresented group.
Man made structure the size of a 747 Airplane found at bottom of lake in Israel
Smart software; dumb hardware
I think you win that, with 54 words nobody needed to read.
I think you confuse the odds of a given exec being from Harvard vs. OSU with the odds that a Harvard student becomes an exec vs. that an OSU grad becomes an exec.

All things equal, if you want to be a leader (especially in finance), going to Harvard is a better choice than Ohio State.