medearis

Infant mortality rates are not a fair metric for comparison because the point of viability is significantly earlier in the US that in most other countries in the world. When adjusted, US infant mortality rates are some of the best in the world. The US is also one of the best in terms of experimental treatments, emergency room care, cutting edge surgery techniques and specialty care for diseases such as cancer. The downside is that care is generally more costly in the US, but there is a reason why the wealthy individuals in many other countries come to the US when they need heart surgery etc. The challenge of reform will by to preserve the really innovative and successful aspects of the US health care system, while expanding coverage affordably.

I think you're contradicting yourself when you argue that economics is not a science and yet also argue that central tenets of modern econ have been "proven wrong." By what means are you claiming they have been "proven" wrong if not scientifically?

I think he was using "techno" as an umbrella term for electronic music. Lets be honest -- techno, trance, electro, progressive etc. it's all ultimately pretty much the same thing.

If GM's value speculative then Telsa's valuation is completely pulled out of thin air. Just a few months ago Tesla was actually losing money on every car they sold. Now they're asking for government money to stay afloat and promising a 50k sedan for the masses. Let me get this straight... at the moment, they cant build a miata sized roadster with a sparse interior on an existing platform for less than 90k, but in 2 years they're going to have a profitable full-sized sedan to go up against cars like the Lexus GS, BMW 5 and Mercedes E selling for half that?

I love Tesla, but if I had to place my bets, I'd think it more likely that you'll be able to buy a Corvette in 10 years than a Tesla roadster.

His primary example of how Google is big and evil is actually an industry-wide problem, The issue of internet royalties for musicians has been contentions, largely because most internet radio sites aren't making very much money in the first place. Pandora, for instance, has revenues of only about 25 million, 75% of which is going to music labels. An increase in royalty fees would put most companies with a similar business model out of business. Just because Google makes a lot of money on search doesn't mean that they should have to pay above market royalty fees for youtube plays. The real issue is that music just isn't worth all that much to internet consumers at the moment. The days of paying 20 bucks for a CD are over. So, until someone comes up with a better monetization model for online music, I don't see the royalty fees going up.

No -- you didn't say anything about education level, which is tangential to GPA. What you said is "judging on the basis of GPA alone is class discrimination. Poor people don't stand a fighting chance." In other words, if you're poor, you don't stand a chance of (i.e. are prevented from) being able to achieve a high GPA. My experience says differently.

I've read one of Gladwell's other books, and I think he makes the same mistake you are making. A correlation does not necessarily imply "discrimination" or that the odds can't be overcome. For instance, women have higher GPAs than men, on average. That doesn't mean that using GPA as an indicator of performance discriminates against males. It might mean that males might need to work harder or do something a bit differently in order to get the same GPA.

In the end, my admittedly subjective take is that the biggest factor is individual motivation. We all have our setbacks and obstacles to overcome, but that's just the craps of life. I can verify, however, that it is indeed possible to go from moving out of your house at 16 with no money to graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford (not me, but someone very close to me). Difficult, yes... but it shows that there is almost always a "fighting chance."

You've gotta be kidding me. Being poor prevents you from having a high GPA?

I really appreciated your write up as a primer on git. Thanks for writing it. One issue I have with it, though, is that the part focusing on Pushing and Fast Forward Merges is either vague or incorrect and led me down some confusing paths. I'm specifically referring to the part where you claim "one common problem is when you do development on a branch and the branch changes on the remote repository as well... if you pull master from the remote repository, you will get a warning, and if you force the pull to go through, you will lose commit "

First off, a fetch will never result in a fast forward, since it is just modifying remote references, not merging local references. If you fetch in this scenario, it will not cause an error or you to lose your commit. It just updates the remote reference. You can then merge, resolve any conflicts and you're set. Doing a pull is just doing these two steps as one -- i.e. a pull = fetch + merge. After merging, you can push back.

I particularly agree with this point -- "students need to be exposed to the tools to construct large-scale reliable programs..." The individual technical component is only half the story. Real "software engineering" involves developing software which can be understood by others, expanded and scaled, which I have found to be just as hard as nitty-gritty pointer math.

I don't see any "hard barriers" but a lot of soft issues that will take time to overcome. As of now, there isn't even a uniform event handling framework in JS. So, first, we'd need a good generic 3d framework. Next, we'd need a significant speedup in performance across the major browsers. If OpenGL is a model, there would probably have to be some graphics-specific optimizations made, which might be difficult to get everyone on board for. Third, I'd either need to buy a new computer or JS would need gpu access, because ATM this site brought my relatively face computer to a grinding halt... and I don't think I'm going to have money for a new comp for at least a year or two :).

There's also a security reason for attributes to be enclosed in quotes when we're talking about dynamic webpages. Avery's permissive parser might parse the page "correctly," including an additional maliciously injected attribute like onclick=sendcookie(), which wouldn't have been possible otherwise.

Agreed. Very cool: http://gyu.que.jp/jscloth/parpevision.js

Even on my relatively beefy comp, though, the miku animation was enough to get my fan going full blast. Papervision otoh has the potential to build a real, high-quality, 3d game. I don't see JS getting there any time soon, but nevertheless an interesting proof of concept.

I think that most people's interest (including mine) in doing YCombinator or TechStars is not really the funding. It seems that you'd be much better off in this case just saving the 6 or 8k yourself. Rather, the network and guidance in getting your idea off the ground seems to be the real value.

I don't really get these things... why code all night when you could just as easily code all day without entirely throwing off your biorhythms and feeling like crap the next day? It seems to me that I'd be a lot more productive when I didn't feel like burying my forehead in the desk (see 9:15 AM).

Prestige may be part of the equation to the extent that prestige is a proxy for the quality of education and research that you'll find at a given university.

That said, I chose my school based on a lot more than the limited metric implied by the author. College (and grad school...) is about more than just the job you get after graduation. I've met so many incredible people and had so many awesome experiences here... to simplify it to a "game" measured in terms of post-grad salary is ridiculous.

I particularly agree with your point about caffeine and stimulants. I've found that I very rarely do my best work when I'm all hyped up. Yes, sometimes you have to stay up to finish that last really cool feature or whatever... but most of the time when I go too long I just end up writing bad code that needs to be rewritten the next day anyways.

Though an interesting data point in terms of specific numbers, I also am not very surprised that VCs are losing money at the moment. What I did find somewhat refreshing was the fairly limited discussion of how this is an indicator that venture capital is dead and Silicon Valley innovation has come to a grinding fault. I think the days of needing millions of dollars to build a web app might be over. I think its possible to start a company with less capital now. But... there are still plenty of capital-intensive and innovative companies for VCs to invest in for the big payoff.

There are a number of other interesting (though perhaps dubiously supported) similar arguments (including this one) in his book freakonomics.

You are missing a critical caveat about these statistics:

"*Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs."

In countries like China and India, PDA's and smart phones are the only computing device in the home for a large segment of the population. My guess is that the percentage on the internet is much higher when this is taken into account. As emerging economies like China and India build a larger middle class with more disposable income, more people will buy "traditional" computers and possibly wired internet as well. Though, I also wouldn't be surprised if the majority of China's internet remains via wireless -- from what I've seen, China may actually have a better wireless infrastructure than the U.S.

I've lived in Palo Alto most of my life and wouldn't want to live anywhere else. You can walk around the main parts of the city and it has somewhat of a community feeling while also being a major hub for tech and innovation.

You're right -- the teleportation aspect should almost be secondary. I think the reason the article got stuck with this headline is that it attracts eyeballs (hey, it got me interested).

The more "hacker" relevant section is the surprisingly accurate section on quantum computing. If such a computer could be built, it would mean a breakdown of pretty much all current crypto algorithms.

What/Who is DreamIT? Is anyone familiar with these folks?

I couldn't really find much in what he had to say about WHY it is a "scam." The linked article requires registration and is cut off before it starts explaining why "this approach is misguided."

While carbon trading may not be a solution for global warming, it is one of the few models we have for using market incentives to curb carbon emissions in the short term.

It really doesn't look to me like megaupload worked too hard on their captcha. In the general case, this is apparently a difficult problem because of the character segmentation step. So, my guess is that if megaupload did something to decrease the distinction between characters (script letters, for example), the feasibility of a javascript implementation would break down.

Free apps have a lot fewer hoops that you have to jump through, so you can publish almost immediately.

As far as the article goes, I think the main point has been obvious for some time. Apple knew that these sorts of apps would be popular and initially blocked a number of the more crude ones. When they stared allowing the fart apps etc., the flood gates really broke open. The same happened with facebook apps. Whenever you have such an open platform with the potential to reach a wide audience, you're going to have a wide range of "success" stories.

"Microsoft announced today that it will be laying off up to 5,000 people over the next 18 months... Microsoft also says that it will continue to hire..."

I don't know what percentage of those are developers, but my guess is that it will include a significant percentage. Does anyone else see a problem with this approach to hiring? To me, it seems to reflect a lot of the negative aspects of the "career" software engineer. After a few years on the payrolls of mega-corp, you get replaced by someone younger, cheaper and with more recent knowledge. Perhaps it's inevitable with a competitive labor market... just kinda sucks if you ask me.

I've met several startup founders who say the best candidates are the ones who get into top technical Ph.D. programs and then drop out to join startups. Even in technical fields, it seems that the value of the Ph.D. is sometimes not in the specific knowledge gained, but in their value as an indication of merit... i.e. few Ph.D. grads go on to work on their thesis.

I also second the comment about Ph.D's in the humanities -- for the most part, they are a set up for a job in academia.

Awesome, yes, but I'm not really sure I'd consider this "hacking." We're about to have thousands of 13-year-olds running around changing road signs to references to bodily functions.

Obviously, tech spending declines in a recession. What I thought was interesting was the discussion of all the variables that go into these predictions -- so many that I can understand why these predictions are often so far off.

Strength of the dollar, energy prices, Obama's stimulus package... Though my gut-instinct feelings on the first 2 are not particularly good, who really knows? And, of course, the biggest variable and most unknown is how people will "feel" about the economy in a year.

I've got a mid-high end HP notebook, which I've run with some permutation of XP, Vista and Ubuntu for the last year. Its treated me fairly well as far as being rugged, with a nice big monitor. It is a bit heavy....

What sorts of stuff are you running? My experience with high-end notebooks these days is that they can run basically anything -- fairly high end games, as many desktop apps as you can download, even Matlab runs pretty well on my laptop. So long as you aren't hosting a serious website or doing some crazy data analytics AI stuff, I think you're fine.