Raplh

If you want to kill the thread I can live with that. Or perhaps this is the answer to the social experiment you implicitly performed.

Perhaps Tara could write her own wikipedia entry. Or is she too shy for that?

I have worked for a university which, under budget pressure, allocated for < 1% average annual raise, but STILL put all the effort into review to spread it out so some got .7%, some got .8% and so on. What I remarked from this was: all the pain and anxiety with none of the benefit.

More recently, the company I work for seems to have moved away from an emphasis on raises and towards an emphasis on bonuses. Somehow for me this is psychologically infinitely superior. I actually can't remember the time series of my bonuses. I suppose if the company was stupid, it would report my bonus as "your bonus is 20% lower than last time" or "your bonus is 30% higher than last time." But they just report the amount. Contrast that with salary changes, which in my experience have always been reported to the employee as a percent change, just in case the employee was not thinking that way anyway.

What these guys are doing appeals to me very much. The real changes in salary come from moving up and down the ranks, which is a public process even though not transparetly linke to salary changes generally. A super simple salary system is very appealing to me. Give me my feedback in significant (>1% effects) chunks, and keep me from doing the equivalent of staring at 16 indistinguishable brands of soap wondering how they picked Tide for me.

On the idea that problems which seem solved to some people are far from solved, indeed. Of course.

I suspect, however, that the idea that there has ever been some kind of consensus that all problems in software were solved, or all problems in Physics were solved, is BS. Fun BS because it is always fun to ascribe a single personality to a large group, and then point out the foolish inconsistencies or limitations to what "they" say as though they were a singular personal pronoun.

As stupid as Google's customer service, and their interpretation of the word "deleted" is, it is pretty obviously not intentional. My reasoning is: it adds virtually nothing to Google's income.

If these had not been turned on, the next higher bidder would have gotten those clicks. Presumably this is "dutch auction" -ish pricing, so the high bids on these CPCs only got a high charge per click if there were other high bids out there?

I think there must be a basic law of nature that when you have a monopoly you get stupid.

Perhaps the only way for Google to "not be evil" is to cut itself in half and have the two new companies compete with each other.

News release announcing google, apple, and microsoft were teaming up to "redefine the desktop," developing new hardware, operating system, and user interface to give you "all the functionality of a portable device, but without the fear of losing it."

My tendency was to react the way you do. Upon years of reflection and experience, I concluded I was being a snob, and that there was very little information I could use in those errors.

Despite my own genetic predisposition towards words (kiss me, I'm half Irish) it was not until the advent of spell checkers that I discovered I had been writing "signifigant" all my life. And I am/was a snob about this stuff!

I still identify strongly with the more articulate, but I actually think this works against my B.S. detector rather than in favor of it. The amount of B.S. emitted by the verbally competent is almost certainly reams more than by the verbally challenged. IMHO

This is not a story about 2nd rate thinking or a mediocre or bad software product. When a freshmen flunks a semester because he got a new video game, it is not because the video game's designers were 2nd rate.

And Wall Street attracts people seemingly as smart as you would ever want to be. Read Roger Lowenstein's "When Genius Failed" about how a coupla Nobel Prize winners in econ started a hedge fund (Long Term Capital Management) which blew up spectacularly in 1997. Other smart people knew what they were doing wrong, but that didn't matter to the people who saw how much money they were making over the few years they survived.

If the pool collapses with his kids in it, they might be killed. That plus the issue with damage to neighbors seems to provide a valid government interest to me.

No just give someone $15 to do your resume for you in Latex.

Hacking personality. Welcome to cyberpunk, what made you think it was all fiction?

Eventually the artificial line between "medical" and "I feel like it" will need to be addressed. On the other hand, the world is probably rich enough to support the kind of experimentation described here "in the noise."

Personally, I expect or rather hope for a drug that will truly help me lose weight with minimal danger and minimal side effects. I eat too much, almost enough to qualify for "the biggest loser," but not quite at that level. (If I lost 100 pounds I'd be thin but OK, they routinely lose 100 pounds or more and are still zaftig, plus they are shorter than me.)

I'd say as long as I wait for the right drug to lose weight, I can't fault those who have found it to talk to more girls at parties. Its probably healthier than becoming a rock star or carrying around cocaine all the time anyway.

The good news is that an Indian student from an American college has a much easier time getting in to good American graduate programs (with 100% aid) then an Indian student from an IIT. This was definitely true at University of Rochester EE Dept when I was on the admissions committe, and I would be surprised if it were not somewhat generally true. In the sense of getting in to an American graduate program, you are "hacking the system" by going to American undergrad. (Of course, you are hacking it for an Indian admit. Americans get that advantage for free, which in pg essay lingo is a form of corruption).

Caltech and Swarthmore (conflict of interest notice: I have degrees from both) are luxury brands with good success (as brands measured by endowment). They are quite different from the ivies as described by Gladwell.

I was always surprised that Caltech had the highest SATs of entering students: surely Harvard, Princeton, etc. had the ability to outdraw Caltech. Now I understand it: highest SATs is part of Caltech's luxury brand but not that of the ivies, just as high (er) performance is BMW but not Mercedes, or Lamborghini but not Rolls Royce.

Another feature of Admissions that Gladwell doesn't mention in this article is one I discovered when reviewing 400 applicants a year for perhaps 15 spots in the Electrical Engineering PhD program at University of Rochester. Your job is to create a great department, NOT to find the 15 most deserving of the 400. My own evolution on the graduate admissions committee was from poring over the details of hundreds of applications, to using numerical screens to bring myself down to perhaps 60 that I would look at in some details. One of the great things about having so many applicants is I could afford to be wrong about some of my filter metrics. Perhaps limiting myself to 4 or 5 universities in China (for Chinese applicants) was not necessary, but having done so I still had 10X as many good applicants as we could admit.

Is interpreting the admissions job as creating a great university rather than "fairly" picking the top applicants a feature or a bug? On reflection, I think it is clearly a feature. If you were hiring for a startup you would instantly recognize this approach to your selection process as the only one that vaguely made sense. Why would it be different when trying to create quality at older bigger places? But the kicker that makes it a sure thing as the right policy is this: it is IMPOSSIBLE to identify the best few % of a large pool of excellent applicants. When of two policy choices, one is impossible, it is likely it is not the optimum.

I can see in Itunes how I can listen to the 4 most recent episodes on my iPod. But I can't after a few minutes figure out if, or how, I can listen to the archived tapes including the "lost google tapes."

This is either an "oh on, I am an imposter on HN" post. OR it is a comment pointing out a difficulty with the UI.

In either case, I'd sure rather listen to this on my iPod than my laptop!

In my first year of graduate school, I was wondering "HOW can I do something creative?" It seemed an impossible problem. How do you come up with something which would startle you with its newness if somebody else showed it to you as something they came up with?

The solution I hit upon which moved me forward was this: research problems are homework problems. You could give me a homework problem I had never solved before, and I would work diligently on it. I was not deterred by the fact that I had never answered this homework problem before because I knew SOMEBODY had answered this homework problem before.

A Research Problem was just a Homework Problem asked for the first time. BEFORE the first person to do it had ever done it. With this attitude, I was able to work on a problem with the artificial belief that OF COURSE it could be done, and so I should stick to it until I had done it. The belief was artificial because, in the case of a research problem, it had NOT been done before.

Once I got used to working on research problems it was totally better than homework. No longer was I interested in homework, but only in these incredible investigations that hadn't been done before.

I should add that I wouldn't have even vaguely understood the questions if I wasn't on a daily basis exposed to great research.