skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This rationalization of essays is long in coming, because in truth the mythical status they're given is because they give students (and parents, and people selling services to parents) the impression that even in late junior year something can be done to significantly increase their chances of admission into the university of their choice.

This is, largely, bunk: essays are weighted extremely modestly relative to grades, test scores, and race. For example, on the University of Michigan point system, where 100 points were needed for an admit, the difference between a 3.2 and 3.6 average was worth 8 points, the difference between a 21 and a 22 on the SAT was worth 4 points, the difference between black and white was worth 20 points, and the difference between the best essay they read every year and the worst was worth... 1 point.

http://www.umich.edu/~mrev/archives/1999/summer/chart.htm

University of Michigan is distinguished from more selective universities more in that they had the misfortune to standardize and actually write down their admissions criteria rather than in having vastly different mixes than, e.g., MIT.
I'm a MySQL DBA, I occasionally work on a database that hosts a few large Drupal sites. While I disagree that Drupal simply sucks and that you'd be better off hacking your own homebrew CMS in rails, the author does make some valid points.

Drupal does indeed store logs in the database, in a table called 'watchdog'. One problem I've run into is that if a popular page generates a bunch of warnings, there ends up being a pretty heavy write load on this table. It doesn't help matters that it's usually a MyISAM table, which means that all these writes stack up when the table gets locked, say when Drupal wants to do prune old entries. I've seen this nearly exhaust all the available MySQL threads. I think there is a module that you can use to stop this behavior. Alternately you can alter the table to use the BLACKHOLE engine.

One thing the author didn't mention, is that Drupal's content search is really bad. In order to perform multiple keyword searches it ends up generating these massive queries that join tens of search index tables. These queries can kill the MySQL join optimizer which can ultimately bring your MySQL server down.

http://drupal.org/node/514366

While this bug has been fixed, the search queries are still gnarly and slow. If you're planning on running a Drupal site with a lot of content you'll definitely want to investigate an alternate search system, perhaps using something like Sphinx or Lucene.
Funny how there wasn't an illegal alien problem up through the 60s. Wonder how they managed that if it's impossible.

People's attempt make this about a physical wall is absurd. It's not about a wall. It's about many measures. Also, it is rather easy to prove that someone is an illegal alien. Hey, Japan makes foreigners carry an alien registration card and if you can't produce one you might find yourself on a flight out of the country. Not that I recommend this approach, but it's quite ridiculous to assert it's impossible.
>Nobody in their right mind would claim that African Americans are getting the same chances today, on average, that Caucasians are getting; but none the less changing the laws meant a great deal.

What do you mean by this?
Property taxes in Spain vary but are typically in the range of 5% to 8% depending on where you buy the property and the ages of the buyer; way less than 16% which is the VAT ('IVA') rate.
What "lending over the past 5 years" are you referring to? Microfinance?

Or are you talking about credit card debt in the first world? In the US, the only consequence for failing to pay your debts [1] is an inability to get further credit.

[1] Child support debt excluded. You go to jail if you can't pay that.
Maybe I'm missing something but is this really a common use case? Wanting to store 100mb DB dumps in version control? I'm not sure VCS is the best for pure backup needs.
My advice is for you to find something you need writing, but is new, this way you are not competing with Shakespeare, Cervantes, or Stefan Sweiz (man, they had been good writers out there).

Find something you are unique and good and follow that, books that could help you:
"Rich dad,poor dad" "think and grow rich". Is not about being rich, is about changing your internal way of thinking you get used to think from a life with your parents, family, work...

Good luck
I spent some time with Drupal a while back and stubbed my toe on each of these points. My favourite pet peeve was the fact that Drupal was repeatedly upgraded in a manner that broke existing sites, and required users to do hairy manual SQL and theme changes. If you're marketing a CMS to a not-so-sophisticated audience (which is basically who CMSes are aimed at), then an essential part of the upgrade process is the creation of tools to perform the upgrade without having the entire site in pieces on the garage floor.
Okay, so what do their bong letters look like now? I've got one from the 1991 recession that's pretty nice. Let's compare!
For sites less than, say, 30 pages - I recommend Wordpress over Drupal. It's easier to use, configure, and works just fine for a small business site. Even with multiple levels of navigation, WP gets the job done.
Really? Heh traditional torrent/p2p sources (say everything but usenet) tend to have a lot of trouble finding particular books.
We can take it to the streets. You may think I'm kidding; I'm not. http://twitpic.com/k8qjl (Banksy street art: "change")
Two New Apps Superimpose Wikipedia Over Your iPhone Camera View of the World
A CMS requiring a slew of third-party mods before it can be usable is useless to someone who can code a custom Rails CMS in a day or two. (Hint, hint. Build it in Rails.)

Seriously, this is #1 story in HN? Hint, hint: you will not build a production quality CMS in a day or two, nor a month or two. Not with Rails, not with pixie dust. And if you will take the time to build something comparable to Drupal, it will inevitably have its own design flaws and learning curve and people will blog on how you suck.

Instead of "X sucks" posts, how about writing about viable alternatives to X? A post about a quality replacement for Drupal would be much more interesting.
My sincerest condolences to friends, family, and all those that knew this young man. Both as a programmer and a father I find this heart breaking.
I in general like drupal decently but highly agree with the learning curve complaint. My biggest complaint which was left out of the article is the abysmal documentation. I'm sure I could find every thing I needed to know in the site, but the search functionality SUCKS and is incredibly frustrating. This contributes to the steep learning curve and was almost enough to get me to give up on Drupal.
Seasonal Flu Shots Double Risk of Getting Swine Flu, Says New Study
Gmail Messages with Enhanced Content
definitly not a news. but clearly hacking material. im always amazed with the amount of quality stuff delivered for free by google
Perhaps the essay is no longer the genuine gauge of ability that it once was.

"The hand-wringing that went along with the long essay, which has become the icon of the college application, has spawned a cottage industry of consultants, companies that edit students’ essays, and overnight camps where students can seek help."
I have a friend in the Navy. He has some problems, but he can't see anyone about it because if he does, he's taken off of active duty. Essentially, he loses his job.

Also, I have been asked on several applications for various things whether I've ever seen a mental health professional. One can lie, but...

And of course, there's a number of people whose real problem isn't depression, but wanting attention. The real depressives I know are the people least likely to seek help.
Virtual Goods For Good Causes
Create iPhone Bootable USB Disk
Having a bootable USB disk drive comes in handy, and what else can be better then to have your bootable computer rescue kit or favorite linux distro right with you on your iPhone, as my previous post shared how you can make your iPhone work as a mass storage device somebody used USB Drive creatively making it work as a bootable disk drive which lets you use iPhone as a bootable computer rescue kit, launch Windows setup, and use other bootable USB distros/live cd's.
Hint, hint: you will not build a production quality CMS in a day or two, nor a month or two. Not with Rails, not with pixie dust.

This is absolutely true. The core of my Rails site, prior to adding the web application, was essentially a gussied-up single-purpose CMS. It is not publicly accessible, supports one fairly easy editing workflow, doesn't have to worry about e.g. HTML input, would be very insecure if my freelancers were of a mind to destroy me, and very, very uncustomizable as compared to e.g. Wordpress or any site you could cobble together from Drupal plugins.

Even with all that, the CMS portion of my site would take me probably about a week to build from scratch. There's just a lot more to it than the 15 minute build-a-blog video.
Japan did a big immigration enforcement round up last year as the economy slowed and shipped a lot of people out. They seem ok.
Nothing to say here, except that fortunately most people still know the difference between right and wrong and will never accept as normal the disgusting proposals above. I suspect most people deep down do not want such a society full of moral relativism.
That may have been necessary to get multi-user screen to work with two different users, but you shouldn't have to do that to make it work with two instances of the same user.

Depending on your distro and how screen is packaged, it might just work out of the box.
try ed2k/kad. torrents are not for old or rare stuff.
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=731412

I thought there were more items submitted at about the same time, but I haven't been able to find them.

It is very clever.
Start here: http://clojure.org
Many public sector jobs have a market rate barely above minimum wage [1], but actually cost far more thanks to public sector unions.

I don't know about California, but I know that NYC MTA garbage collectors (job: taking garbage out of the subway) make about $50-60k and gets to retire after 20 years of work.

[1] Very few people, even highly unskilled workers, earn minimum wage. Market rate tends to be higher.

[edit: to clarify, by "taking garbage out of the subway", I mean taking the trash bags out of the garbage cans and bringing them to the dumpster, sweeping, picking up refuse, etc. In the private sector, this does not cost $50-60k. I'm not talking about track work.]
I think the post speaks much more generally to why CMS's suck in general. I've developed sites using Drupal and reviewed many many others when I was deciding what to use.

Most of the weaknesses of Drupal are shared by all other CMS's. The author's alternative is to custom code a solution using Rails. (or some other framework)

That way, you don't have to worry about all the cruft that goes into a CMS codebase to make it flexible and support everyone's needs.

All that said, I still don't think Drupal sucks. It can definitely be frustrating to use and configure, but in a situation where you need to have laypeople or relative laypeople making changes to a site and its functionality, beyond merely adding and editing content, its the best option.
Is Joomla a viable alternative here?
It would be a lot more useful if they clearly showed on that page what limitation these API are coming with. For example, do they have 1000 calls per day per IP, do they some guarantees the same API will be there tomorrow, do they are limiting API calls per API user, etc.

I would really liked it if I could pay Google to use the APIs, the same way I pay Amazon for their APIs. Let's say - 1$/N thousands calls or something.
"Distributed for peer review last week," means not yet peer-reviewed. The statement in the article headline is doubted by most immunologists and is not reliably verified.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

Earlier commentary from the Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy:

http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/influenza/swineflu/...

"So far, 'Investigators in other countries have looked at their own data and whether they could find similar observations, and none of the other countries have been able to find anything like that,' Kieny added. She said the findings could be real or could be the result of a study bias or other methodologic problems."
In the presence of the choice to go bankrupt, if one freely choose to go nuts working to pay off your debt which you freely entered into, that's a choice that should be respected.

That's two more "freely"s than the people we're talking about get, and I think it rather takes it out of the same domain altogether. In some sense I am a "wage slave" working for the man, but I freely chose it, and even suggesting that this is anything like actual slavery is unproductive at best (and probably offensive).

I know hatin' on the capitalist system is fun and all, but it's been a while in the places where the bad lending occurred where it is actual slavery.
Well, it's not common, but I have this problem. The particular sort of data I process involves doing processing across gigabytes of data daily. I want to be able to store somewhat reasonable sample sets as fixtures for the purposes of using in my unit tests.

We're currently using perforce company wide, but I use git and git p4. I keep trying to convince people that perforce has a shitty workflow though, but the large file support is why it's still gotten a pass.
I'm not sure I understood his article, but I think he wanted the ability to monitor or back out of changes, not just backup. I don't really see why he wants to do it the way he was writing about though. Isn't that capability an inherent part of database management systems?
I experience something similar, but not to the same extent. Nevertheless, hopefully this will be helpful.

I have a desire to succeed, to invent, to solve highly difficult problems, much like you, and it becomes an obsession. And, too, this coincide with an over-estimation of my ability to perform such. I believe this is so I will continue to try to solve such lofty problems.

But eventually the steam which powered that over-estimation runs out. And then I hate, because of my lack of success, myself to the same extent as I over-estimated myself. And this is no way to live. And this whole process comes down to one thing: my initial desire to succeed, to solve such difficult problems.

The more I look at my thoughts, where they came from, I realise this desire to succeed comes from my belief others will only value me if I succeed in such a way. When I imagine solving such problems, I always imagine other people, telling other people I've done this, and gaining their approval.

I have only a vague idea when I started to believe that I would only be a valued human being if I solve these problems that no-one else has. But this is where my bipolar cycle started. And it will only end when I remove this pernicious idea from my mind, which will require a lot of introspection.
The audacity of free
Why not? I'm not intending to be malicious or smart-alecky here.
In fact, my Drupal clients are so confused by the
interface that they still send me content and ask me
to input it for them.

This is standard. Regardless of how cool your CMS is, if you're a small software company and have clients on a CMS it is a small matter of time before they will get to the point that they time-and-materials CMS updates back to you.
if you want to achieve 6 & 8 now, sign up for http://kiva.org anonymously and lend money to entrepreneurs.
Thanks, good thoughts.
Most of the coding I've done in the last 2-3 years have been in my own projects, and it certainly helps when you're your own customer.

I've also done lots of typical web stuff and once you've coded 5-10 html/logic/SQL-projects you start seeing the similarities and it's easier to go straight to code.

If there's anything I put any significant time into before coding that would be the data model. It's hard to change built in restrictions.
Slippery slope, HN. 25 points for a rant about a CMS.
That is a question better asked elsewhere, not HN. CMSses in general, and PHP ones in particular, are mundane topics that shouldn't be brought up in HN unless they advance the state of the 'art' of content management in some manner.
Those numbers would only be a fair comparison if they exclude military spending and entitlements. A air force base in Kansas or a submarine purchased from Misisippi is (in principle) defending the entire US.

Also, federal entitlements follow the person, not the state, and can't be counted against states. Simple example: a person works in CA (paying taxes) and then retires someplace cheaper like AZ (receiving taxes).

Maybe CA does subsidize the south. But the tax foundation numbers don't prove much, one way or the other.
"“Working harder” is a poor strategy which your competitors can trivially replicate."

Actually, working longer hours can ultimately lead exhaustion and burn-out, which leads to poorer quality work, less productivity per unit of time...etc. And, no, not everyone can replicate it. Some people don't have the physical energy and basic health to do that.

(Obviously, I am in the "work smarter" camp. :-) )
I dont know but your advice does not appeal to me, I mean clojure just doesnt cut it. And i dont wanna go into the hassel of anything java (it ate up my master high school end project, I rewrote it in ruby then). What about haskell I know its not totall Lisp but seems better than clojure
I used 99designs.
If it was per capita it would also be total.
Dries Buytaert wrote the first version of Drupal circa 2000, with the almost brand new language PHP whose first real version as we know it (PHP 3.0) was released in 1998. In 2003, Brendan Eich (JavaScript) author helped spin out the Mozilla Foundation.

Take your hat and salute these pioneer programmers, who actually enabled millions of websites to be established at Z E R O cost! Their code has become legacy in the correct meaning of the world and as any legacy_code has limitations and problems.

If the author was around at the time, he could by now be able to modify Drupal within minutes than days and would have used the sexiest language of the day PHP!

A challenge for the article author, release your two day RoR CMS as an open source project and if it can offer 50% of the functionality of Drupal and its various popular modules I will donate $ 2000 to the non-profit you establish to promote it!
Yet adding more database disk capacity will cost you a fortune for anything more that 0.5GB...
http://coroflot.com can be a great resource. Also, if you are near an art school you can find a lot of great/affordable talent there.
For icons just do a search on google for icon libraries. Some are free and some others are cheap for what you get.

Do not pay for custom icon design unless you absolutely need to.

For site design your best bet is to look at CSS galleries. Tons of designers put their portfolios up there.

Also check out deviantart.com for a huge selection of freelance art.

Be forwarned that good designers are usually very busy and/or very expensive. A lot of overseas designers are pretty decent and a little cheaper (Asia/Eastern Europe). In 10 years as a programmer Ive had better luck finding top coders than top designers.
They are fundamentally different languages. Clojure is dynamically typed, Haskell is statically typed (despite its great type inference). Clojure is relatively small and simple to learn, Haskell is larger and far more complex (it introduces many new concepts). Clojure is based on the JVM, Haskell is not, but it's backed up by many researchers who publish libraries on Hackage. Different strokes, really.
One test of having an ethical business is, "Would my customers still use my services if they were fully informed?" Cash4Gold does not meet this test. If everyone knew what we all know, no one would use Cash4Gold. They prey on people's ignorance in a way that your grocer, your electrician, your website authors don't. If you found out your mechanic was quoting you twice as many shop-hours as is standard for the industry, which is basically exactly what Cash4Gold does, you would think he's scamming you. You wouldn't say, "Well, people should know that there are other mechanics out there that charge less." A mechanic has expertise in a particular field, just as the operators of Cash4gold have expertise in the gold sector.

Are people stupid? Yes. Does that absolve you of guilt when you aren't giving them a fair deal? No.
How is enforcing existing laws against a group which is predominantly white a "racially motivated witch-hunt"?

You are also horribly misusing the term "witch hunt". The problem with a witch-hunt is that witches don't exist. Anyone you catch in a witch-hunt is innocent. By contrast, rounding up illegals is highly likely to catch a bunch of existing criminals and will probably have a low false positive rate.
Joomla isn't nearly as extensible as Drupal. If you're just trying to put up a few pages and call it a day, it's great, but Drupal can handle practically everything. I use it to mock up web sites because I can't program: It's possible to use Drupal to create a functioning beta of a fairly complex site without writing a line of code. It's slow and results in lots of bugs, but it works.
Essays were originally instituted to give admissions staffs an excuse to keep out Jews and other minorities.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/10/10/051010crat_atlar...

"The difficult part was coming up with a way of keeping Jews out, because as a group they were academically superior to everyone else. Lowell’s [Harvard prez, mid-20s] first idea - a quota limiting Jews to fifteen per cent of the student body - was roundly criticized. Lowell tried restricting the number of scholarships given to Jewish students, and made an effort to bring in students from public schools in the West, where there were fewer Jews. Neither strategy worked. Finally, Lowell-and his counterparts at Yale and Princeton-realized that if a definition of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of student, the solution was to change the definition of merit....

...The admissions office at Harvard became much more interested in the details of an applicant’s personal life. Lowell told his admissions officers to elicit information about the "character" of candidates from "persons who know the applicants well," and so the letter of reference became mandatory. Harvard started asking applicants to provide a photograph. Candidates had to write personal essays, demonstrating their aptitude for leadership, and list their extracurricular activities. "Starting in the fall of 1922," Karabel writes, "applicants were required to answer questions on ‘Race and Color,’ ‘Religious Preference,’ ‘Maiden Name of Mother,’ ‘Birthplace of Father,’ and ‘What change, if any, has been made since birth in your own name or that of your father? (Explain fully).’ "

As a Princeton admission officer for 2 years, I read probably 5,000 essays. A few were memorable. Most were forgotten as soon as I finished scribbling out my summary. The point of the essay was to write something that would leave a mark on my brain so I might take an interest in your application later around the committee table during deliberations. Some kids were great at this, others not so much.

That said, I don't recall admitting a single student based on the strength of their essays. They were there to add flavor and color. If you didn't have "the credentials" you weren't going to write your way around it.
No Python