I've run into a curious error while cloning Ubuntu VM hard drives. After cloning, the network card no longer works. However, if I clone the VM completely (including the mac address), there is no problem. The reason for this is that Ubuntu, upon installation, stores the mac address of the …

A fairly recent trend in discussions of obesity is to focus on weight stability. Weight stability is a phenomenon by which a human maintains roughly the same bodyweight over a long period of time. Karl Smith recently brought it up, for example:

...its hard to square [theories of obesity based …

Eric Ries over at TechCrunch recently wrote an article discussing racism/sexism in Silicon Valley and the technology industry. The article discusses differences in aptitude between men and women, and attempts to downplay them as the cause of a lack of women in technology (and at YC-funded companies, specifically):

Could …

Recently, Bryan Caplan criticized the ZMP theory of unemployment on the following grounds:

Most economists aren't entrepreneurs. The fact that we can't think of a productive job for a low-skilled worker is weak evidence for ZMP. But if even ivory tower economists can think of productive jobs for low-skilled workers …

Many people have commented on the fact that, after adjusting for chained CPI, median income has not risen significantly since the 1970's. Tyler Cowen points to this as evidence for his theory of the "Great Stagnation", which purports that the economy has grown more slowly during the latter parts of …

Goal: count the number of books in the library.

Map: You count up shelf #1, I count up shelf #2.

(The more people we get, the faster this part goes. )

Reduce: We all get together and add up our individual counts.

It's a fairly pervasive myth within the US that the poor work very hard at unpleasant jobs. But this is nothing but a myth - according to the BLS report A profile of the working poor, 2009, as of 2009, only 24% of people below the poverty line were in the …

High heels were invented in the near east around the year 900 with the very practical purpose of making it easier for a man riding a horse to keep his foot in the stirrup. This was crucial for the Persian cavalry, all of whom wore heels. This is the same …

I recently ran into the following error when trying to copy data from a local Hadoop cluster into Amazon S3:

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$ hadoop distcp -i / s3n://USERID:SECRETKEY@BUCKETNAME/
11/04/13 07:15:31 INFO tools.DistCp: srcPaths=[/]
11 …

I recently saw a post on the Freakonomics blog in which Justin Wolfers harshly criticized John Taylor's blog post which reported a strong correlation between investment and unemployment:

The criticism raised by Wolfers is that Taylor only looked at data from the 1990's. This is a very fair criticism. Taylor …