skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Student loans are some of the least-risky loans to give

You can't shed student loans through bankruptcy, which is another big problem in the same vein driving up costs.

> there is a thriving private market for non-government guaranteed student loans

To my understanding this is not the case. The market is dominated by government backed loans. Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm pretty sure "peripheral" is a better choice of word than "thriving".

> Today universities are centers for research and have much broader educational missions.

This really doesn't address the issue. It should cost the same in real dollars to graduate an English major as it did 60 years ago. Realistically, it should cost less due to economies of scale and technology. Instead it's many times as expensive.
Absolutely. Imagine the backlash in a "vi is better than emacs" thread.
That sounds really clever what you have built there.
He said in the part about why VC's declined that several VCs said they didn't want to fund a consulting company, and he answered that 80% of their revenue for the last few years has come from their self-service SaaS product, not consulting.
Ask HN: Y Combinator-esque program in Chicago
Do any startup incubators or similar things to Y Combinator exist in Chicago?
Maybe I'm getting older, but I much prefer a font size larger than 10-12pt.
Simply Amazing! Not that I don't like the iPhone but wouldn't it be cool to have a controllers that can do this for all kinds of vehicles and suchlike? I guess AR might be a boon to the remote control industry.
I wasn't aware of those options at all when I first read about S3. Definitely worth reading for any S3 user.
I would bet then either the rumors are not true or it's more nuanced than we know. Apple seems to produce good software quickly. How would that be possible with a company full of miserable developers? We don't hear much, or anything, about big employee churn rates at Apple either.
There's a fuzzy line. I think it's ok (or at least undetectable) if the voters are genuine HN users. There are limits to what they'll upvote, unless they genuinely like it. Whereas it's not ok to email a bunch of people and tell them to create HN accounts for the purpose of upvoting your post; that's basically sockpuppets by proxy. The threshold is somewhere between these two cases.

There is a lot of code for detecting voting rings, and it itself embodies varying levels of punishment (ranging from votes not affecting the position on the page, to votes not affecting the score, to the post getting flagged to be killed) depending on how abusive a vote seems. So far things seem to be under control, probably because the way I decide when to add more countermeasures is when I notice lame posts doing suspiciously well on the frontpage.
When I see 'Dragonfly' on HN, I think of DragonflyBSD.

http://www.dragonflybsd.org/

Did you even Google the name?
For the longest time I've heard that "Lisp is awesome", but no reasons why and when I've asked why, the answer is usually, "you have to try it to see it"

This article is a pretty nice down to earth point by point explanation why list is so cool.
My question is: is that it ?
lambdas, data is code, dynamic programing.. I mean those features are cool, but could someone post some more clear examples of why lisp is awesome?
> Yale and the like were the only real universities in the country

That is not true. The many colleges originally founded on agricultural science curricula were started from the 1860s onward. Students were middle class. They were very cheap.
The word "troll" used to mean something very specific: A person who would post opinions that he or she didn't actually hold, but which were very likely to result in comical outrage from others.

The modern meaning seems to have drifted towards "someone who disagrees with me" :(

In any case, I don't care too much about making up peoples' minds for them. A great deal has already been written about how dynamic scope is a Bad Thing. I'd just like people to be aware of that before diving into newLisp.
Not true. This press release may say that, but earlier accounts disagree:

"This matter now appears worse than originally suspected as the dataset also contains a table where RockYou have stored user credentials for social networks and other partner sites."

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/14/rockyou-hack-security-m...

Also, consider RockYou's initial statement, in which they would only say that no Facebook accounts were compromised:

"RockYou confirms that no application accounts on Facebook were impacted by this hack and that most of the accounts affected were for earlier applications (including slideshow, glitter text, fun notes) that are no longer formally supported by the company."

But you're right about them storing the internal passwords in clear text, which I did not know. That is absurdly dumb.
> Indeed, who would have ever thought that one's text editor could be a source of joy or entertainment?

Emacs users, of course:-)

I'm always discovering new, cool useful, and at times just weird things in emacs.
Yes. The word Dragonfly is used to describe many things, have you Googled it? It's used by so many companies and projects that qualifying it (DragonflyBSD, Dragonfly Web Framework, etc.) is practically a requirement.

Why Dragonfly? Because newLISP's clever logo is a Dragonfly made out of parenthesis:

http://www.newlisp.org/index.cgi?page=Art
I too would love an Ask HN page, even if its hidden like "active".
You're probably being facetious, but I suspect that University of Phoenix and similar programs are, as an idea, higher education done right. My bet is the for-profit colleges will give establishment education a serious run for their money in coming years.
I'm very glad the author is talking about his concern in a calm and reasoned manner, and focuses on his specific issue with reasonable clarity, rather than being sensationalist and conflating several issues together.

The specifics of the case aside, it is sort of troubling that a private company can make a decision on how to enforce a law entirely unrelated to its operations. I would have no problem with Blizzard being compelled to release private information (given due process of law). I would have no problem with them being bound not to release the information, by a privacy policy or something. The fact that they can elect to comply or not, based on their own whims, is somewhat troubling. At the least, I would like them to have a explicit and specific policy of when they will comply.

Fortunately, this is a rather strange edge case based on jurisdictions, and it's unlikely to come up in the future as awareness about this case makes people use proxies (or stop playing). But the principle should still be resolved.
For the web, I strongly agree. I like to site back, a few feet away from my monitor, when the font is 12pt or any less I have to lean in.

13-14pt are nice, and there a bunch of sites with body copy set in 15pt+.

It's easier to create a visual grid with smaller font blocks tho. But.. that just benefits looks.
A few observations based on having dealt with countless startups over the years from a legal perspective and otherwise:

1. Officers and directors owe a fiduciary duty to their companies to perform their duties in the best interests of the company and its shareholders. Divulging company confidential information such as finances easily could be construed as a breach of such duties. Thus, in any company having shareholders besides the founders, public disclosure is a step to be taken only with caution. Whatever is happy and upbeat today might be otherwise tomorrow and shareholders may be only too keen to second-guess management if they think some disclosure ultimately left the company vulnerable (e.g., by helping a competitor).

2. You can't ultimately raise money for your company without making disclosure of financial information to prospective investors and a company would, in my view, have potential liability risks from legacy public disclosures that might have been made before the funding itself. What if such disclosures were inaccurate, as they would be if tainted by puffing or by any other depiction of the company's situation that appeared to be accurate on the surface but was in fact misleading. In such a case, what is to prevent an investor from claiming to have relied in a material way on such information to his detriment?

There may be other legal risks as well. There certainly are business risks: giving competitors useful information on where to target their resources based on your numbers; giving adversaries in a lawsuit added leverage in their settlement negotiations with your company; giving potential vultures ammunition for when to close in for the kill in an acquisition (e.g., you disclose "happy numbers" in a couple of good years and then go silent when you get overextended as a company and become vulnerable).

In general, one of the great advantages of being a closely-held company is the privilege of keeping the financial information within a very tight-knit group inside the company. To give that up gratuitously will in most cases be a big mistake. Of course, it may make sense for some founder groups to opt for such disclosure for some of the reasons cited in the post and in this thread. But this should be the rare exception and not the rule.
This is really funny maybe U.S. infrastructure decision makers should buy european technology, because a simple combination of sensors(temperature and or light)/heating coils would solve all of these problems pretty easily.
Business Bureaus top 10 Complaints 2009 | My Complaint
The first YC clone of all was in Chicago, actually. I think it's called Illinois Ventures 10. I'm not sure if it's still running. The site is still up:

http://www.iventures10.com/
Anyone else find it a little ironic that the URL contains tracking information about both Feedburner (a Google property) and Google Reader?
See the HN-famous books "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs," "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming," and "On Lisp."

The claim is that Lisp is a language at a higher level of abstraction. You will have to study hard to be able to appreciate that level, but it cannot be explained in another way.

Imagine explaining Calculus to a high school Physics student. You're likely to get back: "But I can find the acceleration of an object by using normal algebra and subtracting its position at two different times!" Calculus is hard, its benefits are not clearly better than approximation or high school algebra until you reach a level at which you brain thinks of Calculus as fundamental and sees the old equations as merely derived, less-powerful versions.

Why would you expect a mind-expanding language to be any easier to explain?
Got it, and checking it out. Thanks!
I've become utterly reliant on Readability (http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/) recently. Too many web sites have tiny tiny text, or worse: tiny tiny grey text on a white background. Quick click on the Readability bookmarklet and it's all sorted.
This might be a bit off topic, but since we're talking about functional languages...

I've done a very small amount of functional programming (I did the first 5 or so problems from project Euler in Haskell, for example, just to see what Haskell was like), and there's one specific thing I was wondering about. First, let me give you some example psuedo-code just to describe the situation:

if function_call(value) == some_value_I_want_or_something ? return function_call(value); else return 0;

Ok, that's not any particular language or anything, but I think it'll serve to get my query across.

So in the above code, I want to do something like check the result of a function call, and then if that value is the one I want, return the result of that function call. Otherwise, return 0 (you could do whatever here, but I just made it simple...).

My question is this: do most functional languages do some sort of optimization to avoid basically calling the function twice, since in a purely functional language, functions shouldn't have side affects, so calling a function multiple times with the same input should yield the same output? In other words, does the runtime/compiler/whatever say "I just ran function_call(value) and got a result, and since I don't allow side affects, anytime from here on out that I see function_call(value), I'm just going to assume the result is the same."?

Maybe it's because I'm very inexperienced with functional languages, but I find that I run into that kind of situation often enough, and I always think "Is this going to be really slow because I'm basically calling this function twice even though the result is going to be the same?".

I'm guessing that this may vary language to language; as I understand it, for example, Lisp is "functional", but not purely so, and doesn't really enforce the whole "no side-effects" thing, so it would have to run the function twice, but I could be mistaken.
Nexus One uses a two-way slider to answer calls -- left-to-right to answer, right-to-left to send to voice mail.

I found it terrible. Unintuitive, and hard to use even when you understand what it's doing.
This one is at the University of Illinois 2 hours outside of the city. I was wondering if they had done one in Chicago.
This has been around for years. It's called Air Hockey.
For what it's worth, Windows can do any arbitrary sequence of file operations atomically, using transactional NTFS.
Ok, thanks. So how about a group of people that collude on a back channel in order to categorically boost their posts/comments and flag others?

I know that it is annoying to have to define this but apparently it needs to be spelled out.

I've found that it is very easy to detect this kind of stuff by simply monitoring a post in the first few minutes after it goes live, anything that gets 3 or more upvotes in the first ten minutes but sinks off the homepage is a good candidate, 3 or more upvotes in the first 3 minutes is more or less a guarantee of having people that game the system.
Amazon needs a mysql replication/snapshot service
When I was in D.C. for the inauguration last January I discovered the fatal incompatibility of iPhone's touchscreen with gloves. A stylus would have been handy.
Remember, the less people you tell, the more likely you are to actually get the discount -- its limited to only 1k people.
Sorry, by "troll" I meant someone who spreads misinformation, whether deliberately or unknowingly through ignorance. Perhaps I'm misusing the word, if so, my apologies.

A great deal has already been written about how dynamic scope is a Bad Thing.

What most people don't like about dynamic scope has to do with its use in compiled languages. newLISP isn't compiled and so many of those criticisms aren't applicable.

Dynamic scope because makes newLISP fast (lexical scope adds a great deal of overhead). newLISP also doesn't need lexical scope because it has ways of doing lexical scope on a need-to-use basis (see the 'letex' and 'expand' functions). Most of the time you don't need to worry about it, and oftentimes dynamic scope is a nice thing to have, too.

So please, do dive into the issue of scope, it's an important one, but do so fully informed about it. At least with regards to newLISP, it's certainly not a show stopper.
20 Most Common Dog Health Problems
i'm sure they will, they probably just haven't had the time to produce and sell a solution yet. it hasn't been long since they discovered the problem.
The Death of the Homepage
I don't get it. Looking at Sequoia's internet portfolio the majority of the companies listed have founders > 30. They're involved in other sectors, so maybe Douglas was talking about one of those?
Would you still have the same trepidation if the data were generally anonymized? I don't think there's a way to say that it would ever be actually anonymous, but it would prevent casual browsing of someone's voting history that way.
Twitter / readitlater's Favorites
The issue was already discovered a month ago and it's not 'consequences' but one single consequence.
Also the statement

> None of the proposed solutions are foolproof

is just simply wrong. Traffic lights will be upgraded with little heating systems (coil/wires) and everything will be fine.
I/o Ventures – A Work/Cafe Incubator Launches In San Francisco
I feel as if the trend in type size for body text is shifting towards larger text. I just see it happening all over the internet on websites I visit. A few years ago, 10-12 pt used to be the norm, but now I often see 14pt being used.
when i read this, i involuntarily started every one of his answers with a haughty HA!
What I consider more critical than features geared toward devs is that TextMate works as a text editor. I've been using TextMate mostly happily for years, and half of me wants to tell Allan to keep on doing what he's doing if he thinks he will get a better TM 2.0 out of it.

The other half of me is pissed off that 1.x has issues that haven't been fixed because 2.x was supposed to fix it, and while I know I don't have a right to bitch and moan and demand this, it's still frustrating. Like how non-fixed-width text does not display correctly (in this text editor). Allan had a blog post back in 2006 about how to fake CJK support and promised 2.0's ground-up rewrite with Core Text was going to solve those issues. 2006. It was also part of a series of posts about how his app was going to go Leopard-only back then, and I'm now just sitting here wondering if I'm seeing a reenaction of Duke Nukem Forever where he's doing re-re-rewrites of 2.0 because of Leopard and now Snow Leopard and...
There is a good point in the comments that isn't made in the article. Unlike a traffic light outage due to power failure, the ice buildup may only affect one of the signals, so the conventional rule to treat a dark traffic signal as a four way stop fails. One person may see a green light, while another driver on a perpendicular course stops at the affected light, but then enters the intersection because he expects the other driver to stop.
There are voting systems which attempt to detect cliques or rigged voting. These are called "sybil attacks." There is a good deal of academic literature that you can find on the subject, and attempts to reduce the weight of en masse voting by tying it to a probability distribution.

I wrote a diary on this subject with some links if you're interested: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/12/8/01628/8328
I only up vote a friends article if I like it enough to submit it myself (not just normally vote for it). I think that should be the test.
Here's the part where we start redefining words to prolong the argument. They're either "hemorraging money" or they're "profitable". They can't be both.
For one of the (few) stories I've submitted, I asked friends to take a look and upvote the story if they found it interesting - not all of them did.

I felt that approach was okay because I routinely recommend my friends to stuff I find interesting and, since I posted the story here, I obviously thought it was interesting.

The votes I got were still based on merit, though, even if I did generate a little bit of extra attention trying to get those votes.

That said, this is a really hard problem because it goes against the way humans operate. We learn to trust or distrust certain sources and that affects the way we view information we get from them - it simply takes too much time to evaluate the trustworthiness of everything we encounter.

I don't have any specific suggestions (although I'll be thinking about it), but maybe a system that operated with that in mind would have better success even as it grew in popularity.
As far as I know, the rationale for placing bullets in the margin is the same as the one for hanging punctuation: we've trained our eyes to return to the beginning of the line and breaking up that rhythm forces you to work a little harder when reading.

That said, sometimes it can be worth it to sacrifice ease of consumption for the extra hierarchical boost you can give an element with a more distinct separation from surrounding copy.

Also, with client-side rendering on the web, I think many of the "rules" of typography just don't apply in the same way that they do to book design, etc.

The post was a good beginner's guide to typography though!
That's the question I'm trying to answer. I see the answer as having two parts:

1. More rigorously define what "improve" means. Beliefs about what an ideal world would be varies drastically between people and cultures. To avoid the "colonize the savages / white man's burden" problem, we need a framework for discussing and evaluating goodness in a more rigorous way, especially one that is viewer independent, cultureless, and timeless. In the 14th century, people lit dogs and cats on fire for amusement. This sort of thing would be greeted with horror by many people today. I wonder what we're doing now that people from the future will view with similar disgust.

2. Identify the behaviors / beliefs / etc that prevent such a world from existing now. It seems likely to me that this will involve formulating a scientifically falsifiable model for how people adopt and change beliefs and behaviors. It's not clear how much precision will be attainable for a model this. It could be that we are only ever able to understand very generally which stimuli or environmental conditions will give a higher probability of shifting individuals towards certain behaviors and traits (eg, empowered analytical altruism). We can then identify the levers that cause this shift to occur, eg altering what children are taught at school.

In a nutshell:

1. [if possible] More rigorously define what good world(s) would look like.

2. [if possible] Figure out a model for belief and behavior selection that can be applied to causing / raising people to come to adopt behaviors and beliefs that bring about this better world.
...and his example is the Mozilla rewrite, which was wildly successful!
This doesn't seem to have any relation to the "X Prize" as run by http://www.xprize.org/
You should never enter an intersection "expecting" another driver to stop under those kind of circumstances. After watching the driving abilities of the average American, I would actually wait at the intersection until no cars are in sight to continue on.
The description in the article makes both look ugly, because there isn't uniform line height. This might at least provide a slightly better visual comparison:

This is a paragraph of text, and it
continues onto the second line here.

- This is one bullet
- This is a second bullet
- This is a third, longer bullet.

And it ends with a final paragraph.

-----------------------------------

This is a paragraph of text, and it
continues onto the second line here.

- This is one bullet
- This is a second bullet
- This is a third, longer bullet.

And it ends with a final paragraph.
okay, shouldn't take too much effort. I'll probably put it up friday.
I don't like the idea of doing this, but as others have pointed out, there are many many submissions that never make the front page, and in many cases I don't believe it's because they lack merit. I've seen times where the same information was posted several times before one of the submissions hit the front page. I've attempted submissions about 3-5 times, and pretty much gave up on submitting after watching those submissions fall from the front page of the new threads in a matter of about an hour. It very well could be that the quality wasn't there in what I tried to submit, but, like others have said, a lot slips through the cracks until it hits the front page.
> If you host sensitive or private data on your S3 account, you wouldn’t want anyone to find it with a simple Google search query. To prevent search engines from indexing your bucket, place a file named robots.txt in the bucket.

Wow - this is a security blog? If you host sensitive data, don't make it publicly readable at all. Documenting its existence in a world-readable robots.txt is a recipe for disaster.