skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> A big problem is that at age 17, all of the adults are saying go to college & take out these loans. Guidance councilors, teachers, parents. The most compliant high schoolers will just do what they are told without thinking about it further.

> I imagine this will start changing. When I was a kid, that group of adults had the benefit of cheap degrees. Today, now that group of adults is us and we did not go to school cheap (personally I don't fall in to that category out of personal choice, but most of my friends do.)

This rings true for me. The main reason I even went to college was because I bought the story that "if you do well in school and get a college degree, you'll get a good job and be set up for success in life."

Yeah. That didn't quite work out as planned. I enjoyed school and the things I learned from my degree were cool, but I use literally 0% of it on the job now, and it doesn't even help get me interviews very often, because it doesn't have the magic letters "CS" in it. Thirty years ago, a bachelor's degree might have been a ticket to a decent professional job, but those days are long past.

I'm not sure what I would have done as an alternative plan, but I'm sure it would have been a hell of a lot cheaper. Not starting out behind a very expensive 8-ball could have possibly helped me a lot.
And people still say there's no higher education loan bubble.

I suppose it's the same logic that argues the U.S. Federal government can never become insolvent (as it's the world's reserve currency and can simply print money to pay off it's debts).
I can't think of anything that would be as valuable to society as engineering or medicine, say, and still wouldn't land you a remunerative position.

Anyway, that's an argument for taxpayer-supported universities, not for universities paid for by the students who choose to learn skills other people will find useful.
"behaviour sciences" sounds like they're looking at nudge-like approach to see if they can make more people repay, rather than just being clueless about the fact that unemployed people have no money.
Ain't the English language great when we can have multiple contractions such as "couldn't've"
"Be Nice". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11440627
Oh agreed, it's definitely not an experiment by any research standard. In that sense we're using the word metaphorically. But there's a place for ad hoc trial-and-error, and it's common to call that 'experimental' in colloquial English. YC has done such things in the past, e.g. for a batch or two it was possible to apply with just an idea. Nothing interesting came of that—other than that nothing interesting came of it—so it got phased out. This is an 'experiment' in the way that was.

It's popular on HN to suggest making YC (or startup investment generally) more science-like via controlled experiments, but that's hard to do at all and extremely hard to do well, and we're not set up for it. Maybe one day. But this is not that—it's just trying something new to see what happens.

As for whether interestingness is a goal in itself, on HN it is for sure. That value is hard-coded in the DNA of this place. And there's a well-established if not easily reproducible path from "huh, interesting" to "undeniably useful". That's the nature of the creative process and it's a space HN (and YC, in a different way) particularly like to inhabit.
How do you 'revoke' a degree?
Orbital Insight (http://www.orbitalinsight.com) | Palo Alto, CA | Full-time | On-site

Orbital Insight is a Geospatial Big Data company leveraging the rapidly growing availability of satellite, UAV, and other geospatial data sources. Our goal is to understand and characterize useful trends at global, regional, and hyper­local scales. Backed by top tier VCs, including Sequoia, Google Ventures, and Bloomberg Beta, we build products that have never existed before, and could not exist without the ongoing proliferation of rich geospatial data sources, computer vision & deep learning, and inexpensive cloud computing.

We are looking for:

Core / full-stack engineers: http://goo.gl/YgVoul

Computer vision / Deep learning engineers: http://goo.gl/C2oVpT

Data scientists: http://goo.gl/Tif9nS

Some press about us and the overall GIS ecosystem:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/23/stunn...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-07-08/satellite-...
Another great use case is Analytics. On a recent project we started out using Facebook Analytics, switched to Google (code change everywhere) then wanted to move to MixPanel (again lot of code change). Would be great if there was a single API that allowed me to change the backend API seamlessly. Essentially an abstraction layer.
PHP-CRUD-API now supports SQLite
Have you looked into the tax burden you'll face whenever the loans are completely forgiven? Just curious, it's something I was wondering about since I am in a similar position.
Interesting. To me that reads like I can reproduce the art as soon as any of the three points is true. In that case the exception in the third point wouldn't matter, because we already have permission by the first point. I wonder if lawyers have a specific way of reading it though..
Why not just upload node files to a server?
Kazionawhim- I would think that some jobs would not be a good fit. But some would make a great fit.
I'm a big fan of Facebook groups and the communities they foster. One of the best things about it is a relatively low barrier to entry: You click the "join" button. A lot of people already have Facebook accounts, and this familiarity with the service makes it simpler to use.

I'm wondering what kinds of features could convince communities to switch from their known quantity of Facebook groups over to this service?
I tried incognito - still did not work.

They don't like my IP :(

Even stories linked from Google News homepage don't work for me - I wanted to complain to google about why they even include them. But I guess it's just me.
Hacking apps that use Grails and data binding
Lessons from a Google App Engine SRE on how to serve over 100B requests per day
The issue is the outsize power that suburban districts have relative to population. Intra-Seattle light rail would clearly be best for the city, but Snohomish gets as much of a say as the city proper.

The U District stop is actually a great example of this. Farther west (e.g. near The Ave), there is much more transit access and substantially more walkable areas. But the priority seems to be getting suburbanites to Huskies games.

Disclaimer: That's not to say I dislike the extension. It's the first time Link has been useful for anything other than getting to the airport.
> Sure, but I'd wager that the rural folk would be fine if all the city dwellers disappeared, and that the opposite is not true.

As much as I like rural folks and like to spend time with them (and despise folks who look down on them), the farmer is just as reliant on the financiers who ensure a steady cash flow for the multinational which delivers him his fertiliser, his fuel, the parts for his tractor, his clothes, his food &c. &c. &c.

We're all interconnected.
Did you have EXIF data on your pictures? Similar location + even a single picture with an academic cap could easily provide enough information for categorization...
Don't use insecure WiFi networks, or if you do, use a VPN. That prevents you from getting these images injected by people sitting near you on the same network.

And don't visit web sites controlled by people who would do this, or linking to ad networks controlled by people who would do this. That's a little more out of your hands...
>If people do it for whatever reason, well clearly the are immoral, deficient somehow, their psychology needs to be studied by a special committee.

Yeah. There's also the marginal utility of money. The banks can piss away billions without really getting that hurt. Their debts are business agreements that can be broken under the profitable circumstances.

Student loan payments each month hurt people far more, yet defaulters are looked down on.

The solution is a mass debt strike, until there's a student loan bailout or other large concessions. Threatening to crash the economy further got the banks their trillions during the crisis, so why don't normal people team up and do the same?
It's just pretension.

No. Or maybe yes, but not in the condescending way you imply. The article is about "class", and stylistically, it's speaking to a particular class. If you are in that target class (or familiar with it), it reads very well. If you are not, well, that's the self-referential topic of the article.
Apply HN: linking past behavior to future behavior
This is halfway a discussion topic and an application. The application is based on a key insight that I think is worth discussing. I also sketched a potential company idea for it. The key insight can be commercially exploited in many forms.

Here is an issue I have: I can't reliably predict my future actions with my thoughts alone. There are many moments that I can, but there are too many moments that relying on my thoughts doesn't work and results in unplanned activities. A more reliable predictor is what I did in the recent past will be very likely what I will do in the recent future.

Hence the key insight is: behavior of an activity from the recent past predicts behavior for the same activity in the recent future.

=== COMPANY SKETCH: trialstudy.com ===

A striking example where this idea is not implemented is study choice assessments. Many people switch bachelor programs in The Netherlands because they find out after a couple of months that the experience is a complete mismatch of what they expected. And the thing is the experience of the topic itself can be felt within 2 to 4 weeks in a comprehensive fashion.

To solve this particular instance of the problem problem we could build a platform that measures to what extent you like MOOCs and your high school courses. It will then see to what extent this matches a particular program (e.g., psychology = applied math + facts + reports) and will let you inform to what extent you'd like a university program.

I called this specific application based on the key insight "trialstudy.com". In the Netherlands, only universities are providing 1 day trial studies which is the only competition. If you can demonstrate that high schoolers are better able to choose their study programs, then they will pay for it because it has a cost-saving effect for at least a wasted study year in most cases.

So about the key insight do you believe it to be true or false or something else?
Why Reddit’s CEO Invested in the Weed Startup Meadow
I wonder how chat bot commerce will change the need for something like this?
What should really be surprising about the Yelp thing is that Yelp didn't understand what would happen. A company that spends money to recruit and train a member of staff but doesn't pay them enough to stay in their job is just throwing money away.

That a company the size of Yelp can't see this really obvious situation arising is amazing. I'm surprised their HR people don't get fired over it.
I think there's a definite disparity between the key formative aspects of a soon-to-be successful startup, and the popular image that people will vote for. Nobody on HN as enough time or motivation to perform the gritty research on the market or the founders, which means the votes will tend towards flashy sounding concepts. As long as you guys only take this as a cheap and plentiful way of judging the 'wow' factor of these ideas, I think the Apply HN idea is great.
The End of Solitude
>My wife and I pull in just under $100k together, and we can't even (comfortably) afford a home.

You may not be able to afford a house in the area you want, but you can certainly afford a home. Here's one with a mortgage for $89/mo.

http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/207-1st-Ave-W-Gackle-ND-58...
> All it takes for someone to seed a file is to open a web page. Think about it.

That's a pretty big hurdle considering most regular torrent users don't even realize WebTorrent exists, and these users contribute the vast majority of the content available on BitTorrent.

Of course in the ideal world where WebTorrent has significant market share, this wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem. But I agree with lossolo that without interop with libtorrent at the very least (if not uTorrent as well), that ideal world is probably never going to come into existence.
That is a sad state of affairs, though I must say I have seen worse numbers back in India. Last time I talked with them, I was told that I was one of the 3 active accounts out of 20 granted ones that was repaying the loan.

That's 17 out of 20 in default - a massive 85%. Some of them were actually not in a situation where they could pay back the loan. Others didn't want to. This was the situation at that single bank branch. Don't want to imagine how large the total default amount must be.
Maybe OP was reffering to sexual violence...
mtmail- Yes there is a demand for that type of event, so this ties into that entertainment/experience genre.
No news about the status of the desktop bridge for UWP, a.k.a. Centennial. I wonder when more of us will get to play with it. But in the meantime, we can at least watch a video about it from this year's BUILD conference here:

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/bridges/deskto...
Sorry, "improve" is not in the list.
Nice idea guys! I would love to receive a "gifting experience" like this for a birthday or graduation. It definitely beats a dull card in the mail or even some piece of junk I will probably never use. Quick question: Any idea how you would turn this into a business? Would you take a percentage of the contributions? I think that would be a bit odd. Would you make the original "seedling" planter pay?
> I merely wonder why we're OK with nationalism like this, but not racism.

I'm not appealing to nationalism? "Russia" could be a stand-in for any controlled territory.

For example many businesses that trade online in the US attempt to exclude people from the Eastern District of Texas in their terms and conditions. Why? Because the courts there are very friendly to plaintiffs in patent cases and they'd prefer not to get sued in that jurisdiction.

That district is causing a negative externality to people outside of it, so they refuse to do business with it.
> There should be no need to click a button to advance

it's not as if a user doesn't need to do any manipulation
of any kind in order to scroll. with that being the case,
i don't see how clicking a button to "turn a page" is worse.

and as pagination gives the ability to "chunk" the content,
to avoid problems such as pictures split across the viewport,
i see pagination as a much smarter mechanism in many cases...

but a hybrid mode that enables both preferences is the best.

-bowerbird
I would think their parents would help in making that decision.
Craigslist.org
I saw taking out student loans as just another hurdle I had I cross. Same with taking the ACT and writing admissions essays.

I'm doing fine now and paying back my loans. But I wish I better understood APRs and monthly payments and what those numbers actually meant in context.
He's suggesting that people are refraining from paying off existing debts, not that they're accruing new ones with the hope or expectation that they'll be absolved.
Computer Created a ‘New Rembrandt’ After Analyzing Paintings
How will users trust your results, particularly in safety critical applications?

What are the main limitations of your approach?

How do you ensure that the parts you generate can actually be fabricated?

How do you plan to find your customers?
As an example of the "fancy tech" approach, check out Scumblr[0] from Netflix.

[0] https://github.com/Netflix/Scumblr
I am quitting my job. Is this a good idea?
Hi HN,
I am 25 years old and working as a programmer for 2 years now. I have a good amount of money saved up (>75 k cash) and I am planning on quitting my job and trying to figure out what to do next. I don't hate my job I make good money and I get to save a lot. But I don't love it either. I have a couple of ideas for startups and some random apps that could potentially make money and I am planning to quit in the coming months. I wanted to know from other people who have been in the same situation, what are the most common pitfalls? Is having 75k enough of a runway? If I fail how long is the average job search? What are some things I should know about before quitting? What are the most common reasons people fail?

Thanks!
"Lots of kids are..."

More like... lots of people are making up absurd statements based on their perception of a political candidate. I don't know of a single, single person who is supporting Bernie because they think he's going to post-defacto erase their college debt. Especially since that's not even something he's ever suggested.

But yeah, I'm sure "lots of kids" are holding out for that. You should've thrown in the swear word "millennials" for true effect.
Certainly agreed that the dollars going in and out of education don't make a lot of sense to me, but there are cheaper schools. If you don't feel the school is worth the money, go to a school that you do feel is worth the money.
How does this become basic income?
As someone who has been paying upwards of 20% or more of my monthly take home pay to student loans, I am surprised the figure of delinquent payers isn't higher. I count myself one of the lucky ones(CS degree, gainfully employed...) and I have college friends making close to minimum wage, with more students loans than I and struggling to make payments.

Who thought a $25,000/year(and rising) public university education was a good idea ?
GET THE BLANK ATM CARD AND BECOME RICH
We aren't necessarily giving advice, just choosing who to fund. It's hard to ask a group of developers for general feedback because it will be "here's how I would do your thing". Asking very specific questions might work though "our users are doing x and we want them to understand y, how do we make y intuitive".
We really need to educate students potentially starting college that they shouldn't major in something that pretty much has no chance of ever paying it back. This applies to most liberal arts programs.

A college education is a major investment. It's sad that culturally, our financial education is this poor.

I majored in a science and had all of my debts paid off within 5 years. I have friends that majored in things like history and still haven't paid their debts off after 10 years.

The popular thing to to is blame society, the university, or even high school teachers for recommending someone go to college. But, students need to take personal responsibility for taking out a loan and being unable to pay it back.

When this happens, we will have less students making foolish decisions.
Thanks for posting this up. Really enjoying Apply HN.

Few questions,more out of curiosity:

How is this different to something like mint.com?

Why are companies (sponsors) asking advisers to offer these services for less?

Why are fees shrinking in the industry?

Other companies are focused on 'employers' while yours is focused on the employee, which is great, how do you plan to sign up employers
Hi Fergal!

I didn't realize that the auto-allocation ever shipped, but I'm glad it finally did. Hopefully there was work done to empirically show that they solved a lot of the issues around time to convert and other messy parts of the data that killed earlier efforts, but I think everyone who knew about those was gone before you joined :)

There are very subtle issues with both frequentist and bayesian stats, which makes combining them sounds insane to me.

What are you up to these days?
Everything you say is essentially also valid for immigrants (perhaps now citizens) who haven't lost their accent.

While I agree this is not ideal, it's also built into human nature to use any/all hints to help generalize/categorize (likely because it determined survival in the past).
Ripple Aims to Put Every Transaction on One Ledger
Hear hear, same with a fancy wedding. Save the money for a house.
I think this is an interesting idea. I would be concerned that a lot of people give gifts as a way to sidestep having to actually express your feelings for somebody. That may be my introverted male perspective.
Great question,

So I foresee events going from a micro scale for private gatherings (ie: bbq's, bdays, game day viewings). Or they could rise in scale to things such as your first live gig as a band or a sporting tournament open to the public. There really is no size limitation.

However, dinner plans for two may not fall into what we had envisioned. But for example, if you plan on renting a place out for dinner to your closest friends/family, then that would make sense. Then you could set tags to the event to give people an idea of what type of dinner it'll be. This, along with tags on individuals, allows those considering the event to get an idea of what to expect in order to connect with people they relate to or connect with those who'll bring them out of their shell.

My ideal event would be a hamburger cook-off. Host one and I'll be the firs to attend.
> What happens if that API doesn’t work as well or costs too much? That Developer has to dig back into their code, remove dependencies, and recode their application in a process that takes time. Sometimes lots of time.

How would you address these objections regarding the risks of using Brightwork? (i.e. what if you guys go down, get too expensive, stop working, get acquihired, etc...)
I'd wager so since you own a book, not the content of the book. But the law is a funny thing.
Thanks so much for the feedback and thoughts. In a meeting and will respond to you in 30-45 mins.

And yes, serious about the project.
Targeting Senescent Cells: Possible Implications for Delaying Skin Aging
rkho- what's the market like for number of houses being demolished that would bring a steady stream of broadcasts and viewers to satisfy sponsors?
Answer: Some things like a house demo, which happens daily in the US would be more like a weekly event with a bit more marketing behind the event; where other jobs like lawn mowing would be classed into a daily segment.
Facebook is still living mostly off its network effects. It's still not King in many Foregn markets, and I'm not even counting China since they are explicitly blocked there. So they don't necessarily have product superiority, just network effects.
At least the coding bootcamps are subject to market pressures that keep tuition (and subject matter) within the realm of economic reality. The fact that guaranteed subsidized loans are not available for them is probably of massive benefit.
The reasoning here is simple:

If you think your loans are going to be forgiven, why not stop paying on them? In fact, it's stupid to keep paying them. If I still had student loans, I'd consider the same.

In all honesty, I doubt there's going to be a serious re-evaluation of these programs until the system breaks. There are many degrees that people here consider absurd but there is inertia and programs and efforts to make sure that those are the best protected.

Can you imagine the headlines if a university canceled the "women's studies" degree and shifted the money to something resembling vocational training?
The FDA does a fair bit of this already, both through their open API https://open.fda.gov/device/enforcement/ and through MAUDE https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfmaude/s...

Maybe I'm missing what you're doing on top of this?

What data leads to purchasing decisions - I don't know I follow the data you're looking to collect mapping to the initial application? For implants I've worked with, surgeon preference often plays a big role and cost. Surgeons keep up to date with journal articles, reports on failures, and compare notes with colleagues.