• Secret businesses aimed to exploit vaccine fears, British ...
• Threats to Lawmakers Rarely Lead to Charges - NYTimes.com
  As the F.B.I. investigates the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona, a review of hundreds of cases involving threats to lawmakers from 2000 to 2009 demonstrates just how hard it is to discern the real threats from mere bluster.
• Sign languange version of Cee-Lo's "Fuck You"
• 241543903 - Google Search
  (tags: humor)
• On packaging
  use pip instead of easy_install, no eggs
  (tags: python)

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• 50 Cent tweets, tiny stock soars
• The Great Courses
  they film lectures from great teachers around the world. any chance i can get these on netflix?
• The Unsolved Mystery of the Notorious B.I.G. | Rolling Stone Music
  crooked dealings at the LAPD
• what is it like to be a hot girl? - reddit
  you have a skewed perception of the world and won't notice it

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• Internet start-ups: Another bubble? | The Economist
• Results of a 1995 study into cocaine use that was quashed by the USA
  The conclusions strongly conflicted with accepted paradigms, for example "that occasional cocaine use does not typically lead to severe or even minor physical or social problems ... a minority of people start using cocaine or related products, use casually for a short or long period, and suffer little or no negative consequences, even after years of use. ... Use of coca leaves appears to have no negative health effects and has positive, therapeutic, sacred and social functions for indigenous Andean populations."
• An anarchist history of the state (or the one book you should read this year) – Chris Blattman
  The link from ancient hill tribes to modern-day development is this: many of the poor who states and institutions aim to develop (notice I did not say “help develop”) exist in spaces and cultures perceived as primitive and waiting for advancement into something more modern. But many of these cultures and peoples formed and exist largely in opposition to states.

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• Get the Energy Sector off the Dole - Jeffrey Leonard
  Government statistics show that about 70 percent of all federal energy subsidies goes toward oil, natural gas, and coal. Fifteen percent goes to ethanol, the only renewable source of energy that consistently gets bipartisan support in Congress (think farm lobby and Iowa). Large hydro-power companies—TVA, Bonneville Power, and others—soak up another 10 percent. That leaves the greenest renewables—wind, solar, and geothermal—to subsist on the crumbs that are left.
• Why Our Best Officers Are Leaving - Magazine - The Atlantic
• The Services Used By Y Combinator Startups [Infographic] - ReadWriteCloud
• Picking Investments: Only Two Things Matter
• Immannuel Kant on Betting and Prediction Markets (short)

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• Unbeaten Ohio State Buckeyes are foul-phobic by design - Luke Winn - SI.com
  Lighty, who has fouled out just twice in his college career, now commits bad fouls so infrequently that he can remember each one. He described his worst of the year -- a play in the first half against South Carolina on Dec. 18, where he correctly identified what the Gamecocks were running from the scouting report ("I knew it, and I even called it out," he said) but failed to get in proper position to chase his man off a baseline double-screen. The ref caught Lighty trying a quick grab-move to keep pace. He was forced to watch it again on tape because Ohio State, as a policy, has its players review every foul they've committed.
• Retracted autism study an 'elaborate fraud,' British journal finds - CNN.com
  investigation finds vaccine study's author altered medical histories of all 12 of the patients in the original study. meanwhile, the non-vaccination rate in marin county is 7%

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• Fact and folklore in software engineering
  10x programming ability may be a myth, in the industry at least. My first reaction is "then why is everyone so desperate to hire?" Maybe a smaller group of developers that are well rounded.
• Be Very Afraid « Cheap Talk
  The airline would like to achieve the efficient allocation without leaving you this consumer’s surplus.  That is impossible in a spot-auction because the airline can never know exactly how much you are willing to pay and charge you that. But a hybrid pricing mechanism can implement the efficient allocation and capture all the surplus it generates.  And this hybrid pricing mechanism entails overbooking followed by a departure-day auction to sell back excess tickets.

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• How I Do Proofs
  handy flowchart
• YouTube - ABC Nightline - IDEO Shopping Cart
  ideo redesigns the shopping cart in 3 days. amazing. 8 minutes long
• A graduate school survival guide: "So long, and thanks for the Ph.D!"
  "We discovered that we could tell what performance group the interviewees belonged to within a minute or two by their attitudes toward people and politics. Individuals who were ranked low by their managers spoke of organizational politics as if it were poison. They were exceptionally annoyed by the people side of the business. They frequently stated they would rather be left alone to conduct their research untrammeled by human emotions. Top performers, in contrast, found a way to work within the political system. They hadn't exactly embraced politics. They didn't come off as glad-handling sales folks. These were professional scientists who were often top ranked in their field. They looked and talked liked scientists. The difference between them and those ranked at the bottom of the totem pole was clear. They had found a way to make peace with organizations, people, and politics. They climbed to the top of their field by mastering both hard things and soft and gushy people."
• 'I took my kids offline' | Life and style | The Guardian
• The Lie Guy - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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• Ramit Sethi’s surprising lessons from A/B testing | Random.AndrewWarner.com
  "I learned that I can eke out an extra 5-15% from improving the subject line…or 500% from creating a better offer. Finally, I learned that there are diminishing returns on A/B testing, but there are huge gains to be made from changes in strategy, products, and offers."
• Genetic Algorithm For Hello World « puremango.co.uk
  Really cool! also encouraging that the author shows how to implement it - you need some way to represent the problem output as a string/array of ints, and some way to measure fitness.
• The Psychology of People Against Profit, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty
  A look at a new paper called "Is Profit Evil?" - conclusion: "People apparently have little faith in the power of markets to create and reward value for society. Our participants associated greater levels of profit with social harm and less social value. Further, they saw greater profits as undeserved and at the expense of others. Though firms themselves were not seen as generally evil or devoid of value, profit was viewed as evil. Increasing firm profitability (or profit motive) greatly detracted from perceived social value... Even in one of the most market-oriented societies in human history, people do not believe in the invisible hand."
• In These Deserts: War Stories from Afghanistan.
  great story
• The Inequality That Matters - Tyler Cowen - The American Interest Magazine
  excellent - i wish tyler cowen would write more long form journalism

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