sethg

33 ms·

271.
by sethg 16y ago
Well, yeah, it’s a legitimate fear, but they should have handled that fear by being ready to defend their testing system in court before the tests were administered, and having the courage of their convictions.
272.
by sethg 16y ago
It’s less-common knowledge that in Northern Ireland, Catholics score lower on IQ tests than Protestants.
273.
by sethg 16y ago
If I recall correctly, the fire department in question was afraid that if it promoted strictly based on the test, then at least one black firefighter who hadn’t been promoted would sue, and the department didn’t want to defend the test in c
274.
by sethg 16y ago
I took an IQ test in fifth grade. I will never forget one of the questions on the “general knowledge” section: “Who discovered America?” Aha, fifth-grade-me thought, a trick question! “The Indians,” I said confidently. The woman admin
275.
by sethg 16y ago
To be fair, the vast majority of people who live in a First World country and who have an interest in getting an O’Reilly ebook also have the means to easily pay for one—or to put it on their employer’s expense account.
276.
by sethg 16y ago
Early in his academic career, Schervish was a committed Democratic Socialist. But around 1990, he began interviewing wealthy people and decided that his Marxist instinct to criticize the rich was misguided. If Schervish had felt this way,
277.
by sethg 16y ago
I always got the impression that getting stuff on Wikipedia was a political minefield because you can never make a clear-cut argument like “after this patch was submitted, the code didn’t compile; therefore, the patch should be backed out
278.
by sethg 16y ago
But if it’s so blindingly obvious that a certain product is something that people need, then someone else would be making it already, right? It seems to me that the sweet spot would be something that, once a potential customer sees it, t
279.
by sethg 16y ago
Credit card “convenience checks” charge a 2–5% fee on top of the regular cash advance interest rates. Annualized, that’s still under 200%.
280.
by sethg 16y ago
If I needed $750 more than I had in the bank, and knew I could pay it all back in a month, I would put some of my expenses on plastic. Back when I was fresh out of school in a not-very-well-paying job, and had recently completed a debt ma
281.
by sethg 16y ago
OK, it’s got an Ethernet jack and a Web server on one end. What’s on the other end? If I were designing a clothes dryer or coffee machine and wanted to Internet-enable it, how would I hook up the signals from the control panel to the jack
282.
by sethg 16y ago
If you liked the Axis of Awesome’s four-chord medley, you’ll love the Pachelbel Rant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM
283.
by sethg 16y ago
I think most rich people want to believe that they are not merely rich people—they want to believe that they are working (if they work) and spending for a higher purpose than mere consumption. The article does not condemn the citizens of
284.
by sethg 16y ago
The tendency to degenerate into arguments over libertarianism predates Hacker News. Ron(?) Newman proposed it as “Newman’s Corollary to Godwin’s Law” over ten years ago.
285.
by sethg 16y ago
Aside from the problem of outright extortion, even the savviest financiers can underestimate low-probability risks (as the recent mortgage debacle shows). You would have cycles of price wars among insurers trying to attract customers by lo
286.
by sethg 16y ago
People who study negotiation have this concept called the “anchoring effect”—the first number that gets thrown out becomes very prominent in the other party’s mind and affects their view of the deal. If I’m on the “employee” side of the ne
287.
by sethg 16y ago
If the manager or owner are concerned about this possibility, then they can respond to your request for a raise by making a counteroffer like this: “We’ll give you a 2% raise now, and if you stay on through the end of the year, we’ll give y
288.
by sethg 16y ago
It’s not a question of getting the absolute minimum salary, but of getting less than the absolute maximum. If I recall correctly, the authors of Freakanomics discovered that when real-estate agents sell their own houses, they sell for a h
289.
by sethg 16y ago
I don't want the commitment a big raise would impose on me to stay indefinitely Why would that impose any commitment? If you’re not under contract, you have no obligation to stay. You can get a raise on Monday, negotiate a better deal w
290.
by sethg 16y ago
The two routes to that kind of arrangement would be to either organize your immediate co-workers into a union ( http://www.cwa-union.org/pages/how_to_organize_a_union ) or to get together with colleagues and form a contracting firm.
291.
by sethg 16y ago
I have found the salary.com Web site to be a helpful tool in setting expectations: if you actually cough up money for their report, you can fill in your location, job category, years of experience, company size, etc., and get back a report
292.
by sethg 16y ago
The last time I saw this discussion go around the SF blogosphere, people close to the industry said that very little of the cost of a book is actually tied up in the marginal cost of paper and shipping; most of it is overhead associated w
293.
by sethg 16y ago
A very wise person once said that nothing brings out the worst in people like divorce and probate.
294.
by sethg 16y ago
The “new currency” exception is very significant, because under our fractional-reserve banking system, banks have the power to create money. If you deposit $100 in a bank, the bank can immediately loan out $90 of it to borrowers (who may pu
295.
by sethg 16y ago
They’re obvious, but they’re not obviously right . All those assumptions that you mention above have to be tested . And every time you throw in another factor to consider, you need to test on a larger sample size to get a valid and reli
296.
by sethg 16y ago
Also: people who depend on behind-the-ear hearing aids do not get the benefit of these echoes, which means that, for example, it’s harder for them to distinguish the voice of someone talking to them from background noise or from echoes off
297.
by sethg 16y ago
Among the reasons why the sub-prime mortgage crisis has been Bad For America are: ¶ People who live in depressed areas who are underwater on their mortgages can’t move to someplace with better job prospects unless they abandon hope of recov
298.
by sethg 16y ago
“Sub-prime credit rating” ≠ “guaranteed to default”. If you look at the graph next to the article, the number of sub-prime auto loans being issued is not up to the level it was during 2005–2009. (Unfortunately the graph doesn’t go any fart
299.
by sethg 16y ago
“Either use Value Added Modeling or ignore all data” is a false dichotomy.
300.
by sethg 16y ago
My oldest son, in his first year of preschool, had a teacher who recognized that The Officially Prescribed Curriculum was not meeting his needs, and found alternative ways to engage him. Her contract was not renewed. The following year, m

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