skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The difference is, Japan is openly and honestly racist about the process. You can tell whether or not someone looks Japanese really easily, and there's almost no such thing as a naturalized Japanese. If you see a white dude in Japan, you can be damn sure he's not Japanese.

But a Japanese-looking dude in the United States might be an American citizen, or he might not be. The same is true of Mexican-looking people, black people, and even white people. A white dude with a funny English accent might be an immigrant, or he might be the second coming of William F. Buckley.
My application essay was not even remotely close to the 500 word number. The MIT application had an option where you could ignore their essay questions and just choose one of your own, so I basically made my Q/A a long-form joke. That was about 12 years ago.

A friend and classmate of mine at MIT went on to work for the admissions office for a few years, during part of which time we were roommates. The two things I learned from this were that the amount of work that went into reading the applications was astonishing, and that even an incredible essay submission couldn't save you if the admissions staff were convinced that you just weren't academically strong enough to make it through the school.

This leads me to believe that the changes weren't just to "remove the larger-than-life quality" of the essay. Rather, they were probably introduced to make it easier and faster for admissions staff to get the information they need about an applicant and simultaneously (as the article implies) to probe specific parts of the applicants' backgrounds.

It seems like a very logical change to me. I've always thought that the college interview was a far better way to go than the essay---when a person is given infinite time to prepare an answer they can mask a lot of deficiencies in areas that are extremely useful, e.g., thinking on your feet, dealing with other people, et cetera.
Xkcd blog: Physics for Entertainment book
Well, the non-common use cases are mostly the ones that are harder to solve.

I don't have to do much with databases, but a lot with multimedia and large files for which you want some version control are rather common there. And it's more tricky because it's not text-based but binary and because you usually don't want every change to be a new version but only save very specific versions and otherwise changes should just replace the last version. Actually I haven't found yet a way to do that with mercurial which I use otherwise. So for now I just mix: Really large files are kept outside hg and saved and versioned by hand which means I have to distribute them additional to hg export when copying the project around. And for smaller files I just create new versions on each change even though I don't like it and would mostly prefer to just replace old versions. Unfortunately that is not the problem solved in this article.

What I would need would be a version control system that allows me to tag files so that those files are just replacing previous revisions on a commit (maybe still noting all the times they got updated) unless I specifically tag them as "new version".
We remote pair all the time with Skype, VNC, then whatever editor the typist is most comfortable in (in our company always emacs). It works really well long as no one is having a bad net connection day.
Business idea: A service that lets you read, process, and manage applications digitally that doesn't suck.
Doesn't the fact that Cash4Gold tells potential customers that other sites might give them higher prices inform them?
I definitely approve of Banksy but you have to admit that graffiti street art doesn't change much. The big corporations are just going to laugh, say "how cute", and then pressure the local government to destroy the graffiti art because it is vandalism. Many of Banksy's art pieces have been removed in that very manner.
Mine are actually more dramatic and I consider it a partial form of duality. This is because I can sense what I am doing but it seems almost a third person view. When I am working feverishly on a math problem (which are not very advanced compaired to what people on HN work on but I keep evolving) it is common for my mother to find papers all over my room and books thrown out of the window just out of spite. But all this seems to be done by some other person almost a friend of mine who I can talk to. There were times when I requested myself to come out of those phases so I can go into parties and enjoy (I consider myself different for that).Its super natural to me thats why I am spiritual but not religious. I find spirituality in maths and (my recent discovery) electronics in ways even I dont understand sometimes.
But what I am proud of is that I have been able to keep it as a alternate identity. Quite separate from my public self. Only people very close to me (or those whom I have ranted to) know I am capable of doing such stuff. To others I am just the sweet boy next door, average in studies, looks, but everyone knows just out of spite that I can make it big.
But sometimes I get confused as to which is my secret identity and which is the super hero/villain one.The boy next door who pleases everyone or the mad scientist with skeletons in the closet
So what you're saying is that eventually that clients will get so fed-up with using the CMS that they'll start paying you to make the updates? IMO this is a very bad plan that can easily backfire. You might soon find those clients time-and-materials all their work to a company other than yours.

The whole points of a CMS (for my clients) is to make it easy for them to make changes to their site without involving me. If the CMS is broken (and I've never used Drupal so I have no opinion of it), then it's time to use a different one.
Ask HN: iPhone optimized HN site?
Find myself checking in from my iPhone quite a bit. Im wondering if an iPhone optimized HN site exist.
One point, garbage collection is a risky job and there is a substantial risk premium built into the salary.
Reminds me of a recent article in BoingBoing, about some Arabic city (Dubai?) where people have to build skyscrapers to pay their way out of poverty, and they have to drink almost-salty water instead of fresh water, in bunks, etc.

Ah Google found it on the first query 'dubai slavery salty water':

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-har...
If you read the whole article, you'll see that in fact, the burgers were so contaminated with e-coli that they could have easily caused infection simply through contact with surfaces in the kitchen. In an experiment with a similar strain, scientists found that even after washing a cutting board with soap, it was still contaminated with e-coli, and when they wiped it with a towel, that got contaminated too.

To make matters worse, in a warm kitchen, e-coli will double once every 45 minutes.

In other words, once you've got one of these little biological weapons in your kitchen, if you're not wearing a hazmat suit and handling it like it's an ebola sample, you could get infected.
There's a movie about modern slavery (haven't seen it, don't know the quality) titled "Call and Response."

If you're in the Silicon Valley a group showed the movie at the Red Rock Coffeehouse in Mountain View on September 19, 2009. I'm not sure when the next showing is ... if you're interested contact the Red Rock or more likely the Highway Community (http://www.highway.org).
Internet Archive: Universal Library
The publishing industry and the music industry is very very different. But if the publishing industry does not lead (or at least keep up) with the evolution of the market they will become marginalized. Just like the "little plastic disc" industry is today. They really need to make the e-book "market" mature before e-books become more popular than psychical books.
"Me me me" made us one of the richest countries in the world. In a bad recession, our unemployment is about as bad as most of the "we" countries. We are still far richer.

The fact that we have booms and busts (and are currently in a bust) is not evidence that our system doesn't work.
Back from the suburbs to run a patch of Somalia
Cool. What I'd really love is to be able to go to Amazon (or something) and pay to have a PDF download. I'd even pay retail if it meant I get the PDF now and the physical in the mail (though living in AU I don't think Amazon sell us books physically but you get the idea).
Yes, the title is unfortunate, in part because it is incorrect. To see that it is incorrect, one needs to define the slave consistently.

Modern slavery is an important issue (for humans in general, leaving aside its relevance to HN). When the word is misused, the issue may be trivialized, and I think it would work against solving the slavery problem.
[Assuming you want to write books here, not magazines or technical writing]

Most writers start writing and sell their first manuscripts or non-fiction projects while working at another job. Another large group are stay at home moms, which is really no different because they're still working writing around a time-consuming job.

Set aside 1-2 hours per day for a year. At the end of the year you should have a complete, revised manuscript and be able to start querying agents. Very few writers sell their first manuscript, so expect to have to go through the process at least a couple of times.

I would not recommend quitting your job to write full time. That puts too much pressure on you too fast. Once you're comfortable writing frequently you can consider leaving the industry for a year if you can afford to, but don't expect that quitting your job will help you overcome procrastination.
Its very similar to what you can do with Microsofts Photosynth, just on a greater scale. MS lets you upload a couple hundred pictures, which is enough for a similar 3D dot model for a single building.
When I used to work in the field of small software consulting, I saw a pattern repeat a few times. During the tender phase customers would place a high value on having a CMS. Repeatedly situations developed where - once they'd been live for a year and their orgtree had changed - they found the prospect of maintaining their website themselves to be cumbersome, and found it easier to send changes to us.

Only one customer was different, and they were the exact opposite. It didn't want to pay for a CMS (this is ten years ago when there weren't dozens of generic free software CMS), had little clue about how their website fitted together, wouldn't participate in designs, yet insisted on having complete control over their site. Perhaps a throw-together offering on something like drupal would have been good for them.
Wow I feel like this is describing me verbatim, and then feel self-centred as though I don't deserve this description.
I've been called for two different cases of compromised Joomla installations. In one case, the 1.0 to 1.5 upgrade process was completely broken; I couldn't get it to work without hacking up the upgrade script.

I didn't play around with it long enough to remember anything about its file or database architecture. But, I think if I were going to develop a CMS, I would want to make it easy to patch and upgrade, and I would want to make sure that it was somewhat secure.
First, it's not a bad idea to find a project you can work on with another person or two - a lot of the BBM character weaknesses are consequences of being independent even when it's a net loss. In some sense, this is an echoed in some Lisp systems that try to be Lisp "all the way down", rather than inter-operating with existing systems. Rewriting an entire software stack can be pretty quixotic, and at the very least distracts from whatever you set out to do initially.

If you want to learn Lisp (and I'm not sure - I may hear a hint of sarcasm), the book _The Little Schemer_ (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTLS/) is a good starting point. It's a quick read, and will walk you through several of the big ideas in a (somewhat minimalistic) dialect of Lisp called Scheme. Whether you'd be happier using Scheme, Common Lisp, or some other Lisp dialect in the long run is hard to say, but you can get through that book in a weekend, and the main ideas it covers will apply to all Lisps. (You might find the style excessively cute, but it's short.)

_SICP_ (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/) is absolutely worth reading as well, but really working through it will take much longer. It too uses Scheme, but covers several big ideas in programming that transcend specific languages. (I recommend _The Art of Prolog_ for the same reason.)
According to the article the bacteria can also contaminate surfaces in the kitchen. For instance, if you form hamburger patties on a cutting board, even if you wash the board with soap and water, there may still be live bacteria capable of infecting you on it.

For that reason, they recommend you also wash kitchen surfaces with a dilute bleach solution.
Speaking more seriously, I'm pretty certain the expansion of the middle class was due to strong white labor unions and Fordism as a cultural subtype within Modernism.

This entailed many things, with which the top tax bracket had little to no relevance.
Wow I understand almost everything you describe (except attempted suicide, I think I'd feel too selfish doing that and then feel bad for feeling that way. Instead I tend to go destructive on my life severing all avenues of success or potential pleausre), but I would never refer to myself as bipolar.

Also I appreciate your skiing example. I'm forever seeing how real life translates into some abstract problem or representation and feeling kinda weird about that. Or dreaming all night in code, symbols or (recently due to related work) music to try and solve a problem and waking up exhausted but with an answer.
Then he is incorrect.

Modern slavery is an important problem, it should not be trivialized. Trivialized is not the right word; I am looking for an English word... when one misapplies a word and thus presents the situation direr than it is, diluting the meaning of the word. Like what happens with the word "Nazi" in modern American English usage (soup nazi etc). However nazis are almost gone and slavery is not. And rigging the numbers does not help.
I use Drupal. Drupal was the only option for me when I started Windy Citizen. Drupal gets a qualified thumbs up from me.

That said, it does "suck" in many ways. For example: http://drupal.org/node/65922

I build WindyCitizen in Drupal 5 because when I started, 18 months ago, Drupal 6 was still just a baby release and most major modules hadn't yet been upgraded.

I'm now at the point where I need to upgrade the service to D6 to continue getting new releases of modules I'm using. Unfortunately, upgrading a 70+ module Drupal site is a major undertaking that appears to require a team of developers. One to follow the instructions and another to clean up and troubleshoot the exploding messes that result from following said instructions. I put myself in this position by choosing Drupal, but having to raise money to hire people to help upgrade your site is not my idea of a good time.
Tips For Wordpress Secure Blogs
I've got extensive experience with both Joomla and Wordpress and there are things I don't like about either of these - still haven't found anything better in recent years.

Anybody know of some easy to use alternatives that have - so far - managed to stay under the radar?
Out of the Darkness Community Walks
What He Said.

(I am a full-time novelist. I had to do other stuff for close to 20 years first, though. It's not a bed of roses, and it takes lots of practice and experience -- and knock-backs -- before you get anywhere. Oh, and it's badly paid and the hours are long! Frankly, if you're _lucky_ it's a lot like running your own one-person start-up, only without the break-out potential. And if you're not lucky, it sucks.)
whistles loudly

YC haet you. :P
A lot of schools use http://www.applyyourself.com/
The synchronous lateral excitation of markets (or pseudo-wobbles)
Or perhaps not using MySQL. Table locks indeed, this is 2009!
The posts starts by making the point that Python is not a calculator, and goes downhill from there, vaguely circling around the point that Python is not Ruby.

Thanks for trolling. Happy Sunday!
The delivery's a bit harsh but they're making very good points there. I especially find the self always as a first argument a majoy WTF
Depending on your needs it may be. The NanoHub project has made good use of Joomla for scientific community websites with extensive integration of resources: http://nanohub.org/about/hubzero http://hubzero.org/
The difference so far though seems to be that I don't know anyone who reads pirated e-books, but I know lots of people who listen to pirated music. There is no suitable mp3 player equivalent for books yet.
Yes, but legal maneuverings are incredibly sensitive things, and anything officially entered into the public record becomes evidence. It's generally not a matter of silently capitulating, but if you want to fight back and have any hope of winning, you have to play by the rules.

I'm in exactly the same situation and it's incredibly frustrating, but the alternative is to open your mouth and potentially undermine your legal defense. About the best you can do is to fight the lawsuit to the best of your abilities, but that unfortunately requires that you route all public communication through your lawyers.
The point is that patent trolls are pure IP companies that don't actually do anything; they can't possibly be infringing one of your patents because they have no products. That's why they're so much worse to deal with than other companies who could be counter-sued for infringement of your patents, or for theft of trade secrets, or for something else similar.

With patent trolls maybe you could counter-sue for tortious interference, but that's a pretty hard one to make stick, or you could get a judgment rendered that requires them to pay your fees if the suit is totally ludicrous, but I'm not sure I've ever heard of that happening in any kind of patent lawsuit.
Everyone tries to work a smart as they can. You can't get an advantage over your competitors by working smarter if they're smarter than you are.

If you truly believe that working harder, while still working as smart as you can, doesn't significantly aid your efforts, you're simply deluding yourself, and self-delusion always leads to suboptimal results.

The public record is rife with minutely detailed cases of hard work leading to out-sized success. Hard work by people who were already working very smart, as smart as they could.

Yes, other people can work really hard, too, and so it can be an unwinnable race. Sadly (perhaps), that's life. That doesn't change the fact that working harder is under your control, being smarter isn't.

Yes, some people get burned out. Yes, taking a break can help some people find insights they wouldn't have otherwise. However, some people don't get burned out. If you don't realize this, you're fooling yourself.

Bobby Fischer is the only American to be world chess champion. Read about the complete immersion in chess that was required to achieve this.

It takes 10,000 hours of directed practice (directed practice means "working smarter") to become an expert at something. No amount of working smarter makes the 10,000 hours go away.
I first met Dan at the little breakfast YC held for our newly-admitted class, right after interviews in May of 2008. I was so impressed with the strength of Dan's ideas, his natural charisma, and how much of a hustler he was. I still tell friends the stories I heard from him that day about how he worked the system in ways that I don't think even Dan would feel comfortable with me saying here. Dan worked all the angles, especially the ones that you and I would never even consider. He took crazy risks, often came out on top, and had a shit-eating grin the whole way. Dan was awesome. Throughout the summer, Dan and I would talk regularly about our companies, strategies, and how it was going. He had the rare mix of smart, incisive questions, and an easygoing manner that made everyone relax and smile. Jessica would always scold Dan and Tom for drinking too much beer in front of the speakers, and Dan would always charm his way out. Everyone was in stitches for his demo day presentations too. I remember hearing PG brag about feeling like he could just leave the TicketStumblers alone and they'd come up with something awesome without his help.

Dan was an amazing guy, and I only saw a tiny fraction of his light. The world needs more Dans.
I'm holding out for these :

http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/09/16/ARMCortexA9SMPDe...
Interesting post, but I wonder if even when you are working smart, sustained intense effort isn't sometimes worth it. The late Randy Pausch, in a lecture on Time Management mentions the importance of working smart but also refers to the years he worked late into the night working on his research.

I suspect regularity/ sustaining effort maybe the key. Work a solid 8 hours a day every day without fail for a few years might be a "harder" thing to undertake than a couple of months worth of eighty hour work weeks. You still use metrics to optinmize what you are working on of course, though it maybe harder for something like a research effort or a PhD thesis to get meaningful metrics.
Haven’t I been using C++ for ages and now is blinded with metaprogramming & PR?

English must not be the first language of the author. Either that or they are ignorant.

Not sure which I should assume, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of doubt. ;)
I don't have statistics, but in "Cities and the Wealth of Nations" Jane Jacobs argued that what really happens in modern times is that cities end up subsidizing rural areas. So more urbanized areas would "subsidize" those less so.
This system is exactly how pragprog.com works.

You can even purchase a PDF/book combo before the book is completed and have access to a (constantly updated) beta version of the PDF. When the book is completed, the PDF is finalised and the book itself is mailed to you.
Unfortunately, while drupal ostensibly supports other database backends, the reality is that it doesn't support other database backends.
True that, but I thought I'd also note that floats are represented as compactly as possible starting in 3.1.1.

> Issue #1580: On most platforms, use a 'short' float repr: for a finite float x, repr(x) now outputs a string based on the shortest sequence of decimal digits that rounds to x. Previous behaviour was to output 17 significant digits and then strip trailing zeros. Another minor difference is that the new repr switches to exponential notation at 1e16 instead of the previous 1e17; this avoids misleading output in some cases.
Counter-example: Jeff Hawkins founded Palm to later do neuroscience.
These discussions around CMSs are totally alien for me. I have been using Plone for all sorts of sites and, while there is no learning curve at all (it's a completely vertical climb) it does a lot out of the box. I almost never considered using anything else.

And, as my wife discovered the hard way a couple weeks ago, and unlike SharePoint (a monstrosity that is often sold as a CMS), it has a very comprehensive undo facility (one I have used countless times).
I think this article contains some very valuable points about why "free" does not always mean good. It encourages startups and others to not offer their services free from the start, but rather to charge to ensure that their clients are serious.