It is, by design, a black box process.

Colleges live and die by who they admit. The elite admission process is designed to give them the largest selection pool possible and total control over who gets in out of it. They hold all cards and will never give that up.

There are great advantages to this. If you need 5 viola players one year. You can take 5 viola players. No sweat. Those five kids will never find out that's why they got in, but that might have been the case. Certainly, these are awesome kids. But in a pool of 12,000 awesome kids, sometimes the viola swings the committee's vote.

If you need some kids from Western Michigan, you can take some kids from Western Michigan. Maybe there's a donor there. Or an influential alum who's mad that no one from that part of the state has been admitted in years. Who knows? These kids are jokingly called "area adds." Again, these are great kids. But their point of origin and perspective on it might just be the thing that swings the vote in a sea of 12,000 awesome kids. I'm fairly certain that's why I was admitted and I only think this because I spent two years admitting thousands of kids. I was a strong applicant able to talk interestingly about my origins. My grades and scores sure didn't show the firepower that the kids out east had, but they've gotta take someone from podunk Michigan now and then.

The top colleges are skeptical of all the standardized tests and most of the high school curriculums. This is both because of arrogance but also because they have data that the public doesn't. Every year we'd get a very sophisticated, confidential briefing from the folks at one of the big companies that showed the latest trends in their data. This was always somewhat shocking and fascinating, too. I can't say much about it other than this: the kids you think would do well on the tests do incredibly well. The kids you think will do badly, do very, very badly. Across the board. Everywhere. No matter what.

The things that I couldn't handle, personally, were the minority admissions and the elite prep school admissions. This is not because anything particularly underhanded or amoral or unethical was happening, but because the debates and arguments about how these cases should be handled simply required intellectual bandwidth that I didn't have. I couldn't plot a course that would carry me through how to deal with these kids and didn't much feel like making the effort it seemed I'd have to make to do so. There were times when it just seemed so unfair to admit a student with crummy grades and crummy test scores (relative to our applicant pool) because of her racial background. But there were other times when I was so impressed by other qualities in a student's application that I fought for them harder than anyone.

I visited some scary high schools in Philadelphia one year and met a kid who'd been corresponding with the foremost authority on Bram Stoker's Dracula via e-mail, on his own. I told him I wrote my senior thesis about the novel and his face lit up. I think mine did a bit, too. It's not often you get to talk about your specialty with someone else.

This was an African American student at an inner city school. All the teachers had been telling me all day that he was "the one" I needed to talk to, because it was so ridiculously apparent to them that he was sincerely, legitimately, maybe desperately trying to transcend his circumstances. And now he's able to talk about the plot structure of Dracula with someone.

Sure enough, his credentials were average for the applicant pool, but he was as easy a case as any. To speak to the audience here, he was hacking his social circumstances and we were interested in that.

So yes, it's very byzantine. It's a mess. You'd read applications for 7 days a week for 4 months all winter, annotating them, scribbling in the margins, knowing that very, very few of these kids were getting in.

Then you block out a whole month of sitting around a table eating catered food, sweeping across whole states worth of applicants in 15-hour days, debating, discussing, arguing, fighting over kid after kid after kid in committees of 5-6 people. I always enjoyed that part, but we had one officer who would cry at some point almost every day during committee. She believed we were slamming the door on a lot of these kids.

Personally, I believe they'll do fine wherever they end up if they/re as good as they say are. It'd be great to dump a bunch of resources on them so they can live "the life" for 4 years, but you can't celebrate every kid.

P.S. While I've got the floor and your ears about college admissions, I run the web's only independent directory of College Admissions Consultants at http://CollegeConsultantReviews.com. I created this many moons ago and there's a lot of interest in it from consultants who find it appearing for searches for their names. I think there's a business in there somewhere but don't have the time or technical skills to build the killer directory site that would be needed. Hit me up if you're interested.

more importantly, digg's on the home page of hacker news.

I wonder if the government realizes how much damage they're doing to the country's reputation by ensuring that when the rest of the world thinks of the words "Australia" and "Internet," the next word that follows in most people's minds is "censorship." They're practically marketing themselves as a backwater, in the same way Kansas does every time they try to outlaw evolution.

I interpreted this title as meaning that HN was on the front page of Digg, and nearly had a heart attack.

I was an admissions officer at Princeton 4 years ago when this came out. It caused a bit of a stir in the office.

Here's the best bit, in my opinion:

"But a selective school is not a hospital, and those it turns away are not sick. Élite schools, like any luxury brand, are an aesthetic experience—an exquisitely constructed fantasy of what it means to belong to an élite —and they have always been mindful of what must be done to maintain that experience."

One more thing. And this is the idea that helped explain how this stuff worked.

If a school's admitting X kids, you have to completely forget about that number. That number is meaningless. There's a certain percentage of X that's just spoken for. There are kids you have to admit to keep the school running and to meet all its institutional needs. Once you figure out how many kids that is, subtract that from the number of kids you're supposedly admitting. THAT number is your actual class size, the number of kids who get admitted by the full process, being pitted against one another.

I found my job made a lot more sense once I told myself I was working to admit X-Y kids rather than just X kids. So when you hear about how low the admission rates are, realize that in reality, they're significantly lower due to so many spots being claimed in each class by legacies, minorities, athletes, geniuses, politicians kids, potential big donors etc. These kids don't face the same process as everyone else.

Title is misleading: it made me think Joswiak had specifically mentioned Wundrbar. A somewhat more accurate title would be: Wundrbar's experience with the iPhone app approval process.

I wish people wouldn't make these sorts of arguments, because they're short-term ones, and don't get the real point across. Whether it technically won't work, or whether it will slow down the internet aren't the real issues, because someday, it technically will work and won't slow down the internet.

The real argument to make is that this is wrong because censorship is wrong, and because this is the thin end of the wedge of tyranny. It always starts with child porn or terrorism, because everyone hates terrorists and pedophiles. Once the government gets the capability, they just start taking more and more. Even this article talks about blocking anti-abortion websites. Abortion is one of the most important social issues today, and they're saying that we can't argue against the government position on the internet? How will we ever make progress as a society if we can't talk about anything different than what we are doing today?

I've led agile teams for the past three years where there has always been some pairing and some solo work. I'm sorry I can't offer statistical data, only my anecdotal observations:

* Pairing is particularly useful when breaking new ground.

* Pairing is good for knowledge sharing.

* Pairing is good for quality.

* One pair is slower than two solo developers.

* Based on the last 3 years I don't buy the idea that long-term pace is higher because we'll have less technical debt due to pairing.

* Improved quality may not be worth the lower overall pace

* You hired professional developers - let them work the way they think is best or find new developers i.e. respect their preferences for pairing or going solo.