How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang
In 2000, economist Steven Levitt and sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh published an article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics about the internal wage structure of a Chicago drug gang. This piece wou...
Hasnain says:
"With a constant supply of new low-level drug sellers entering the market and ready to be exploited, drug lords can become increasingly rich without needing to distribute their wealth towards the bottom. You have an expanding mass of rank-and-file “outsiders” ready to forgo income for future wealth, and a small core of “insiders” securing incomes largely at the expense of the mass. We can call it a winner-take-all market."
Just swap "low-level drug sellers" with "fresh PhDs", and "drug lords" with "tenured faculty" and it's still true.
Posted on 2013-12-01T02:21:51+0000
Newegg trial: Crypto legend takes the stand, goes for knockout patent punch
Newegg makes a big bet, as its trial against "patent troll" TQP wraps up Monday.
Hasnain says:
"We've heard a good bit in this courtroom about public key encryption," said Albright. "Are you familiar with that?
"Yes, I am," said Diffie, in what surely qualified as the biggest understatement of the trial.
"And how is it that you're familiar with public key encryption?"
"I invented it."
Posted on 2013-11-25T17:33:25+0000
Core algorithms deployed
E.g., in "algorithm X is useful for image processing" the term "image processing" is not specific enough; in "Google search uses graph algorithms" the term "graph algorithms" is not specific enough.
Hasnain says:
This is cool. List of data structures/algorithms used in the linux kernel.
Posted on 2013-11-24T20:20:06+0000
TV Is Dying, And Here Are The Stats That Prove It
The TV business is having its worst year ever...
Hasnain has not yet written a summary for this.
Posted on 2013-11-24T20:16:31+0000
What It's Like to Fail
Between 2007 and 2011, 5 million American families lost their homes. Some found alternative housing, but not all of them. Many families broke apart. Mine was one of them. And I was one of the people who ended up homeless. This is not the story of 5 million American families. This is just my story.
Hasnain says:
Our family faced the same economic forces that hurt many families, but I don’t blame the banks or politicians or anyone else for what happened to us. I made a thousand decisions, large and small, that seemed reasonable at the time but cumulatively led to our situation. It is tempting to blame external forces for the disasters that befall us, but as Shakespeare wrote in “Julius Ceasar,” the fault for what happens to us “is not in our stars but in ourselves.”
Posted on 2013-11-18T21:13:49+0000
Winning at Candy Crush - Stavros' Stuff
The Candy Crush Saga sagaI find Flash games on Facebook great fun. Not playing them, of course, that’s boring. As you may remember from my previous post, “winning at Puzzle Adventures“, I like to take a look into their guts and figure out how they work, and whether or not I can get insane scores wit...
How much money do the top technology companies make per second?
We dive into the quarterly revenue earning announcements of the biggest technology companies in the world and then extract a per second amount.
THE GREAT IVY LEAGUE NUDE POSTURE PHOTO SCANDAL - New York Times
ONE AFTERNOON IN THE LATE 1970's, deep in the labyrinthine interior of a massive Gothic tower in New Haven, an unsuspecting employee of Yale University opened a long-locked room in the Payne Whitney
Bill Gates: Here's My Plan to Improve Our World — And How You Can Help | Wired Business | Wired.com
Bill Gates on how innovation is the key to a brighter future, and how we're only just getting started.
Hasnain says:
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/11/bill-gates-wired-essay/
Posted on 2013-11-13T01:57:00+0000
Sprite Lamp
Sprite Lamp - Dynamic lighting for 2D art