skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems to me though that if they weren't paroled into the country, wouldn't that just create a pressure at the actual immigration points to turn people away? If I were an immigrant who wasn't legally here, I'd much rather be subject to some parole system and be admitted than just turned away.
Ask HN: Behind every great fortune lies a great crime?
"Balzac was on to something 200 years ago, but to be fair to modern day multi-millionaires, the only real way to accumulate wealth prior to the 18th century was to steal it, or tax it,"

Will we ever go back to the economy where the only real way to accumulate wealth will be to steal it or tax it?
48 of 48
I don't know anything about acidophilus but it certainly has a very, very large genetic component.

1. White/Caucasians do still have ADD sure but its definitely lower than h-gs. Just so story explanation: more fragmented government together with a crop package that didn't support the same kind of population density as rice, and hence a smaller government/military class meant there were still benefits to ADD, just at lower frequencies than as hunter-gatherers. Frequency dependent selection like psychopathy or morphs generally.

2. AIUI East Asian means Chinese, Japanese and Korean, Vietnamese if you're really pushing it. The important bit is rice farming, with long histories of stable government, occasionally interupted bx war-is-hell but not really disrupting the system. The North Chinese are wheat farmers and relatively genetically distinct from their brethren. They, and the Mongols do almost certainly have higher levels of ADD but I'd bet against it being higher, even as high as amonp Europeans. Even taking the Mongols as East Asian they're a rounding error if you're counting .ch,.jp and .kr
"Balzac was on to something 200 years ago, but to be fair to modern day multi-millionaires, the only real way to accumulate wealth prior to the 18th century was to steal it, or tax it,"

Will we ever go back to the economy where the only way to accumulate wealth is to steal it or tax it?
Teachers have degree requirements for licensing. I am sure there are others.
The sad fact is that a tiny tiny percentage of those who grow up in poverty are able to push out of it.

Actually, 42% of children in the US born in the bottom quintile are most likely to stay there, and another 42% move up to the second and middle quintile. This means that 16% end up in the 4th and 5th quintile. Hardly a "tiny, tiny percentage".

Source: http://www.economicmobility.org/assets/pdfs/EMP_Across_Gener...
Haha...I love the irony of seeing this comment on HN, where the average employed reader probably makes double the median US household income and many of the rest are entrepreneurs trying to make millions in a few short years of hard work.
Let's say you're right for a second...is this at all abnormal? Has there ever been a clear separation between political power and wealth? Seems like the two generally go hand-in-hand, and I hardly think you can blame that on the university system. I think it's just part of human nature.
I find most news coverage to be lacking incisive commentary, regardless of the source#. Personalities in that news coverage aren't relevant, and paying attention to personal dramas (especially in cases like this - a simple misunderstanding largely caused by the medium) is even less important.

I think the way to make today's tech bloggers better is to pay attention to the stories and reporting that matters. Besides voting with our clicks, there is little else we can do to influence the market.

# edit: I think this means news is largely fungible. That's why there are so many social filters like twitter and tumblr and HN. Your peers voting on content is a better way to filter than tracking a reputable source.
A distressingly large percentage of them want to go join a financial consulting firm or hedge fund and make as much money as they can right out of school.

Why is this distressing?

Few people really want a true "classless society". I'd assume that few of the founders on HN plan on donating 100% of all income they earn above the median level.
I wish you had clarified this earlier, as it's a drastically different argument than what you seemed to be making.
This was probably the best article on the topic. http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displayStory.cfm...

Posted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=645478
Early 90s news broadcast about "Internet"
You're getting plutocracy backwards. A plutocracy is a system where being rich gets you political power/influence.

For example, a millionaire can bribe an official or use his campaign/PAC contributions to convince them to do what he wants.

People getting rich because of political power is totally separate and will pretty much always happen because they get more famous and respected due to their power.

In short, plutocracy means money gets you political power, not vice versa.
Another read (though, it discusses the "Talent Scouts" -- not just Moritz):
http://www.sequoiacap.com/news/the-secrets-of-the-talent-sco...
I think I was punished enough for that!

Hope there's no hard feelings anyway, I certainly didn't intend it as some kind of attack. It can be hard to get honest feedback that hasn't been softened by politeness, so I attempt to provide it, even at the risk of being seen as a prick.

The rebuttals were instructive, by the way. One person chided me thus:

"You could try couching it in some politeness"

And I suppose it is easy enough for me to do that. I am usually extremely polite. But is that really what you want? "Polite feedback only?" If that's what you want, ask your Mom.

Despite what you might think, I do try to be honest and, more importantly, useful. My actual, real-life reaction to that company name was visceral - I really hated it. I tried to get that across; it was pretty late, and I was somewhat drunk (hehe), maybe I dialed up the harshness a little too high but reading it again I don't think I was that far off the mark. And certainly better than misrepresenting myself for the sake of protecting feelings.

Obviously there is a balance to be found between worthless feelgood encouragement and worthless destructive "that sucks" snark. Perhaps in this instance I went too far to the latter. But at the same time, look at the whole thread. No-one else even mentioned the name. Was it because they all love it? Or because something so fundamental is off-limits?

It cost me 20 mod points or something to get that point across, not that I care about that, but still - now you know that some people think the name sucks and it might be a problem. I am satisfied with the outcome.

Do you really want everyone to be following the principle "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all"?
MIlf Movies
Watch Milf Movies
I don't know why everyone constantly brings up Sokal without also mentioning the Bogdonav Affair: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair . Seems like the pot calling the kettle black.
Having lived in both the US and the UK, I'd observe that the prestige of one's university counts for MUCH more in the UK. To an American it is unbelieveable how much Brits focus on where they went to school (at all levels) rather than their abilities--and they are correct to do so, because other Brits use schools and universities as vital credentials. It's an aspect of the class system in the UK which doesn't exist in the same way in the US (note also the discussion of "working class background" versus "upper middle class culture"--not at all the same in the US). Someone from the UK might well obsess about a degree from an elite university, but in the US any good degree gets you over the threshold and able to compete on equal terms.
Yeah, right.

California's problem is that we keep on spending money like it's flowing in like water, yet the flow was greatly reduced 30 years ago with the passage of proposition 13. Instead of trying to live within our means, we voted people into office who either wanted to spend more, xor reduce taxes and then we made the problem much worse by passing a slew of costly initiatives without being willing to raise the money to fund them fully. So here we are. The governor screwed us, the state senate and legislature screwed us, but ultimately, we screwed ourselves, and now we're going to have to pay for it.

As someone who lived most of my 38 years in this state, went to UC, and has the joy of living in one of the most beautiful places on earth, it makes me profoundly sad to see what we have done to ourselves.
I usually try not to compare myself to others too much (too many variables in life experiences make such comparisons difficult anyway). But if anything, I feel superior for having accomplished what I have with graduating from a "no-name-brand" school.
hixn36, I think that's the right way to look at the problem. If people are getting paroled because we just need more information about them, then that seems sensible. If it's just a matter of resource constraints, though, there are probably some sensible reforms.

The trickier problem though is just what do we do with bad people that nobody wants. If we don't want to admit them and no one else will take them, can we then indefinitely detain them or are we obligated by some common sympathy to eventually let them in? I'm not sure but I'm inclined towards the latter.

If that's the case then we lose nothing by granting potential parolees legal alien status.
Well, look at the comments. Things get a little deeper there.
Read your link and the article- the quote about the sexism of E=MC^2 is the real thing.
I think I know the answer to this question, but out of curiosity, what argument did I seem to be making?
Well, for fun I did a rough calculation of the number being emitted from the sun every second, based upon the wikipedia figure that 65 billion or so strike every centimetre of the earth (facing the sun) every second. Obviously it is wildly inaccurate but the result was

1.82804300229627e+38

as an int that is

182,804,300,229,626,770,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

neutrinos per second from the Sun.

I left in the spurious significant digits because they kind of help ram home how large a number it really is ..
I've been wondering about the Russell Paradox...

S = the set of all sets not members of themselves
x = 1 / 0

Isn't the problem for x the same as for S? Not all mathematical expressions are well-defined, and likewise for all "set expressions".

Aside: There was a wonderful quote in Jaynes' Logic of Science, decrying the kind of airy mathematics that Chaitin is doing...

Should one design a bridge using theory involving infinite sets or the axiom of choice? Might not the bridge collapse?
Lasting Young Network -
I wasn't saying the university system caused it in the first place. I'm just saying it's a part of it now.

Has there ever been a clear separation? No, not recently.
I was recently re-reading the "regrets" pamphlet by n+1 magazine (link at bottom) where the premise was to get a round-table discussion of some "intellectuals" and ask them what they regret about their education in order to provide a guide for current students in ideas of "literature, philosophy, and thought."

Some of the participants went to the Ivy League, but all of them went to highly respectable schools. There were a few points that I'd like to share.

Quite a few of the participants had a feeling like they screwed up big time in choices in their education. Not necessarily about the choice of school, but in, for example, choosing the English department instead of Literature and end up studying Theory rather than readings and after a few years they found out they missed out on Anna Karenina in favor of Foucault. This was to the extent that some of them claimed to go to masters school to make up for what they didn't do as an undergraduate, and regretted that too.

Another idea that they quickly agreed on is that the very nature of a regret is to notice what choices you should have made, and clearly it is too late to do anything about it. Yet, some of the participants were reluctant to even call them regrets. How can you call your life a regret? This is a group of people where there was no question that reading the right book at the right time would (and did) change their life, and it really wasn't a question of "for better or worse", but they would learn their lessons and are the better for it.

I suppose I'm talking about making decisions, reflecting on those decisions over time (sometimes it takes years, decades even), and then gaining a modicum of wisdom.

Feeling inferior would seem to me a common sentiment. Hasn't everyone had this feeling before? You feel like you missed out on something you may have not known existed until you had the years to figure out it was even there. Yet, I don't think you should deny yourself the line of thought that this would take you down, and it may take a long time, but I think you need to turn these feelings around to find a genuine calling/relaxedness of what you are here to do.

No affiliation with the publishers, but I highly recommend the $9 "What We Should Have Known: Two Discussions" (aka regrets) pamphlet: http://www.nplusonemag.com/pamphlet-two. It is well worth the money, especially if you are in the situation where you think you might be ready to hear their advice.
hrm, seems to me it could be a well played PR stunt. A Biggie vs. 2Pac or Microsoft vs. Google type competition. Probably not but there is probability that it is. If not they could use that for what it is worth.
that was a good discussion, thank you.
This is what happens with celebrities in general..they are "one of a kind" but they are not tackling any big problem. Arrington does pretty mundane stuff but he is standing on a tall pedestal .. It is that celebrity virus which corrupts the soul.. Fans are most forgiving so those who like arrington will be surprised by his humility here ..those who think he is getting undue credit will find it disturbing "how can he get away with this by just lip service"..I would say wise thing to do is just don't pay attention to it thinking it is like one of those Paris Hilton thing you should not relate to or analyze..
To be fair: it wasn't as easy, quick, or high fidelity to tape music as it currently is with ripping or pirating.

Not that I think either of those will "kill music"... it just kind of bothers me when people make the comparison as if it's an exact analog (ha!).
This wasn't addressed to me, but I'd say it's distressing because the financial sector has been artificially stimulated by the government for decades. Resources which would have been directed to more productive uses were instead sent to finance. Who knows how much we've lost because some smart people were screwing around on Wall Street instead of doing something more useful?
Well, I choose public rather then Ivy, but it's not far behind. I generally feel better because I choose to get a similar education without going massively into debt. I figured I'd be going for a masters, at which point it wouldn't matter.

At some point in time, I'm still thinking about getting a masters ... but Penn State would be a lot easier to get a company to pay for.
I'm not sure about the 'citizen democracy' part... Did citizen democracy come up with the crazy electricity market system?

(I'm not familiar enough with California - But if it did, you got what you deserved :-))
California has some of the highest tax rates in the nation and is 48th in the nation in terms of business tax competitiveness.

http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/bp58.pdf
Children come into this world innocent. They don't know what to admire or even what inspiration is. If our society valued education and encouraged reading books and learning and building the mind, then that's what children would do.

More than anything, children want to be loved, accepted, and encouraged. They'll do anything you ask if you love them for doing it. They don't know anything else.
It's never too late! I went back to college and got a degree in Computer Science when I was 35.
It isn't exactly ideal in the US, but I can confirm that in the UK (and in almost all other countries, really) even more emphasis is placed on credentials.
> California's emphasis on citizen democracy

Yeah, but there are much better ways to do it. I'd recommend a substantial decrease in the Citizen / Legislator ratio. That gives regular citizens greater access to their legislature, while giving its members the power and responsibility necessary for them to invest themselves in its decisions, and make a more direct case to the constituency for the more responsible policy decisions.

For example New Hampshire has

* 400 representatives for

* 1.3 million people, or roughly

* 3,000 constituents/legislator (illustrated: http://www.biblebaptistchurchmoldova.com/evangelism/images/m...)

Meanwhile, California has only

* 80 representatives for

* 38 million people, or roughly

* 475,000 constituents/legislator (illustrated: http://kashmirwatch.com/postnews/data/upimages/eidgah22aug2....)

New Hampshire citizens have over 150x the access to their state representatives, and those 400 legislators have 5 times the personal experience with laws and regulation to bring to the table.

Now you may say it's crazy to suggest that California should have 12,000 state legislators, but I disagree. The practicalities which have capped large-scale decision-making have largely been wiped away with the invention of modern electronic communication. And having those 12,000 means you could keep them in their home neighborhoods, rather than call them out to Albany. This way there's always someone within a reasonable distance that you can speak to directly.

Interestingly, with the position California is in, I'd think this idea (or a more moderate version of it, say 2,000 legislators) might have a chance at making it. That is, if people make a serious push for it in the new constitution.
I am generally aware and wary of the hackerish tendency to deride mightily any intellectual undertaking or material that doesn't triumph, confirm, or conform to their strictly rationalist view of the world and its every corner. I find it boorish and stifling. More to the point, I have some incredibly intelligent friends who have spent a good amount of time with Deconstruction (not identical with Pomo, of course) and have found things of great value to them.

Which is why I am desperate, really, for someone to step in and demonstrate the worth of someone like Jacques Derrida, or more dangerously, Lacan or Boudrillard. B-d, for instance, had a bunch of cool ideas, about simulacra and maps and territory and the Gulf War. I've witnessed them, if only in aphoristic form. So how is it that a community that's at least capable of putting out a good handful of really modern, interesting notions can apparently be so firmly up to its knees in bullshit? I think it's unworth us to dismiss this entire wing of 20th-C thought altogether. But when you start trudging through the ludicrous, depressing gibberish that is on display here, it's hard not to. Can everybody have truly been absolute frauds? How am I to reconcile the two attestations of Baudrillard: obvious falsehood and farce on the one hand, and demonstrable cleverness and insight on the other?
As a non-American, it seems strange to me that such a successful centre of innovation -- the bay area -- can survive within what is, from all reports, an utterly dysfunctional state. Can someone here with more understanding of US politics explain how this is possible?
I was more thinking of the property tax caps (which may not have been such a good idea, but are hard to change) and the fact that you can get just about any old BS onto the ballot with 500,000 signatures, which you can collect for 1-2 million. Meantime, it takes 2/3 of the legislature to pass a budget and it's been late something like 17 out of the past 18 years. I do approve of the idea of ballot initiatives, but between one thing and another it's made our state terribly unwieldy to govern.
Clearance mobile phones - Attractive offers with advanced handsets
I love this story. Very inspiring and it gives me hope that perhaps the education system in this country can still be fixed through innovation, hard work, and the investment of people who care more about results and making a difference than they care about how much they care (or how much they appear to care, but I digress).

I feel like most of the people on this site who think that the university system is obsolete and who think that college is overrated don't understand how privileged their perspective is. If you grew up middle class and came from a family where most people went to college, or even just a family where going to college wasn't looked down upon, then yeah, there are a lot of other paths that could work out just as well for you, from traveling to starting a company to self-learning to joining the military. Whatever. But severely underprivileged kids don't skip college because of their other options and because they think it's not the best way to learn. They skip it because the idea of college is foreign to the point of being laughable. Because bettering oneself hasn't been taught. Because education isn't valued. Sadly, for some people in these subcultures, higher education is not only ignored, but viewed with suspicion or even scorn.

The entire trajectory of these kids lives will be changed forever because they earned the right to go to college. The mere fact that the education system in this country enables that means that we're still doing something right.
Well buddy, it is MVC according to the documentation, and the Twitter example itself uses the file AboutController.php. That's reason enough for me to give it that label.

It may not be good mvc, or even a good framework. Of course, whether it's MVC or not has nothing to do with the point I was making: that websites should tell the visitor clearly what the website is about.
There's been a lot of hating on higher education around here lately, so I'll take the contrarian position. Before I get started, I will say that higher education costs way too much. Our students should not be $100,000 in debt when they graduate.

However, I do believe education has a value. I have been a coder for a long time now and I've seen lots of coders. I survived the dotbomb in '00 and never got laid off. Meanwhile, I saw biz school grads and history majors and other nontechnical degree holders lose job after job. They failed certification exams and wrote really bad code.

These individuals would say things like, "You don't need computer science training, it's easy to learn on the job -- everyone should get a business degree." I had to maintain their code, so I know the truth in their words, or lack there of.

When I got my degree, we learned assembly language on sparcs. We learned verilog and built virtual CPUs. We built digital circuits out of AND and OR gates. We had labs and projects and very hard problems to solve. We gained an intimate understanding of the machine you won't get learning PHP on your own or Ruby on Rails from blogs on the net.

Most importantly, we were taught how to think. I've seen the kids coming out of college today. I see their code. I see what they admire in an app. I talk to their professors and hear their dismay that maybe one kid in their class "gets code."

In a large part, college is a test of commitment. It is a filter for dedication. If you don't believe enough in your future to take advantage of an education... of an opportunity to learn, then what good are you to a business that has to learn how to navigate these difficult economic waters?
Hmm. Would Herbert have lauded the school if it had been a voucher funded private school? As far as I know, Herbert strenuously opposes school vouchers.