skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Doesn't matter.
The parents are responsible.
Even if they didn't sign for the loan or have any knowledge of it.

Next they'll be going broke and we'll have to wait for more handouts from the government. Feel the Bern! Thanks Obama!
I'm doing almost the exact same thing - but I'm moving from San Francisco to South America to learn spanish + work on my projects. 75k is definitely enough runway, but if you can move to a lower cost place it'll go even further
And not watching television is a very upper-class thing to do...
Apply HN: Hostable, Reskinnable, Domainable, Searchable, Forum Software
So while hacker news is used in very flexible ways (like this!) and the community is amazing I'm really really exhausted with how badly the actual software used to host it works.

I see a lot of opportunity around a piece of forum software integrated into a piece of crowd funding software. Wait, what? How the hell would this work?

So imagine we go completely meta and start thinking about how hacker news is being used today, what do we need:

1) Custom Tagging of thread titles (Apply HN, Show HN, customisable via the setup).

2) Works on mobile

3) Skinnable

4) Hosted/Can create your own DNS/Community/Rules/etc.

5) Conclusion mode - was there anything suggested/tagged as a conclusion?

6) Conclusion ordering mode - call for actions - you can turn you comment into an action point (maybe with a suggested cost against it).

7) Given a set of conclusion/actions a crowdfunding campaign could be started. We could for example all cough up to hire a lawyer to start a class action lawsuit or pay someone in our local area to organise with the local authority to fix a part of our area or we could get together and build a crazy piece of installation art.

8) Grouping of threads by tag and different tag types.

9) Not sure about money yet but I guess you could take a fee from any successful crowd funding.

10) Directory of Volunteer/Recommended Helpers/Past history of having done stuff!

11) Think about it like github issues for the real world!

12) Successful campaigns running through tools like this and a playbook for managing them.

13) Multiple post admins who have to agree/action stuff.

Name suggestions welcome, I have to go to bed now so please vote, sorry for the lack of further discussion! I will be on it tomorrow!
Education on the individual level just doesn't work. People are too dumb. (I had the pleasure of rereading this recently: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/07/stupider-than-you-real...) Those that aren't too dumb lack personal responsibility, which is a separate problem I fully agree is pretty big, so more education might fix that, but that's sort of something you can't learn from a book, and arguably the game of chicken at teaching responsibility by making it illegal to discharge student loans in bankruptcy has just made things worse.

The solutions I think have the best shot are those that involve authoritarian decrees one way or another (that is, going full free-market or going full nationalized colleges), but that requires a government with an actual interest in governing.
That and they wouldn't get classic BitTorrent compatibility in a web app.
I agree with this 100%. Student loan debt should not be treated specially. It should just be normal debt that you can discharge through bankruptcy.

At that point, the incentives of schools and the incentives of students would be aligned. Schools would not lend huge sums to students unless they had confidence that the education those students got was adequate to prepare them to repay. And the situation would fix itself. The fixed situation would probably have a lot fewer humanities students, and those students would have better job prospects since supply and demand would be aligned. Degrees would be shorter and less expensive, and overheads would be lower.
Folding bikes are already inexpensive. The main reason biking isn't more popular is that the infrastructure largely isn't there. Most bike infrastructure even in Seattle consists of sharrows or unprotected bike lanes. So building out better bike infrastructure would definitely help.
> Regardless of whether more education has any financial return.

Interestingly, this is a difficult problem to crack, because it is valuable to have the degree. In 2008, people without a college education were hit the hardest in terms of jobs lost; the jobs for college educated went to basically no growth, but didn't quite tip into job loss.

So if I'm a kid trying to make this decision, do I choose high debt with some chance of having a stable future or a cheap barrier to entry for a job that is likely to crap out as soon as the economy looks bad again?

> they have little to no understanding of—let alone, ironically, education—about personal finance

This is also important to me. Having lived with my parents until college (which I think is the norm), I don't think I would have really understood what it means to pay $500 or $1500 a month on my loans.
I gave a talk called "Barely Succeed - it's easier!" where I tried to make the case. There's a video version here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Vt8zqhHe_c], unfortunately I haven't transcribed it yet.
How Donald Trump's language works for him
We haven't explored an application for ortho hardware and I don't know that much about the space. But I'll certainly go out and learn more, and when I say me I mean I'll ask a guy who has been helping us who has his masters (w/thesis) in Orthopedic Biomedical Engineering. Hell maybe he can even us that as his topic for his Ph.D :D
Hello rayalez. I posted my idea for something similar moments ago!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11443376

I would love to chat about how you plan to monetise fictionhub. Any ideas yet?
Social mobility means that people who have talent and work hard can get to a higher class even if they were born in a lower class. It cannot possibly mean that the entire population is going to become college professors, while nobody does service jobs any more.
That strategy seems to work for Year 1, but what happens when (a) universities expand to cover this newly created demand, thus requiring larger budgets, (b) people enroll only to find out that the classes they are interested in are full?

To quote http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/05/the-upwa...

"When it comes to college, the central challenge for most Americans in the 21st century is not going; it’s finishing. Thirty-five million Americans now have some college experience but no degree. More Americans than live in Texas, in other words, have spent enough time at college to glimpse the promised land—but not enough to reap the financial bounty. Some are worse off than if they’d never enrolled at all, carrying tens of thousands of dollars in debt, not to mention the scar tissue of regret and self-doubt.

President Obama’s recent proposal to have the federal government and states pay for two years of community college is elegantly simple, and would surely prompt more students to enroll. But community college is already close to free for most low-income students, and still only 4 percent of all community-college students earn a two-year degree in two years. (Yes, 4 percent.) Money is just part of the problem."
Great questions. Thank you!

Right now it's distributed on the same host and your guess is right, that hasn't been developed yet. The replication is mirrored with a central dispatch so that if a node isn't available , the other two provide a quorum. Widely differing clocks would be an issue and will require a lot of thought. I've already appealed for help to some very smart people I know and might have to do so again.
No? Also, there's more than one kind of polymorphism.
But no safeguard against Andrew Jackson.
Here is a collection of graphs [1] I created some weeks ago. Keep in mind that the graphs are normalized, there are huge differences in absolute search volume, i.e. if you include Facebook in all graphs, most search terms become hardly distinguishable from the time axis.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/SGci58n.png
This seems too risky with their obstacles ahead.
"Contrariwise, a patient of mine – who is a white woman of almost my age – who is covered with tattoos, speaks with an Eastie accent, is over 200lbs, and wears spandex and bling and heavy make-up, gets screamed at by an ER nurse for med-seeking when she hadn't asked for medication at all, and just wanted an x-ray for an old bone-break she was frighted she had reinjured in a fall."

Fatties shouldn't expect medical professionals to bend over backwards to help them. They should be eating less and not being a burden on the rest of us.

Fact is, the "fat class" is really a class in America.
The predatory education system basically did the following:
- Find the most gullible segment of human population

- Lend them money with false advertising and without making sure they understand what a loan means

And now they want them to repay? Humans are not rational actors, certainly most aren't. No 18 year old knows the repercussions of a six-figure debt.
I am also 25 and have been working for my current employer for almost 2 years and its like I wrote this post myself. I feel exactly the same way you do only I have a side project that I am passionate about, but not enough runway to pursue it full time. It's hard to walk away from a steady income and easy to say you will work on your projects on the weekend but the real difficulty comes in evaluating how much you are losing by not investing your all in something you believe in. I am still trying to make that decision.
The authors family sought to raise their blue collar class to a higher one. I have for years thought of a non-profit that might do this by sponsoring children into music instrument lessons, horseback riding, and language lessons. Things that most (say 75% of people) cannot afford. This could be done in group lessons to save on cost.
I'm not trying to change your opinion (HN is not the place to change one you clearly hold very strongly), but as someone who lives in NYC and spent 4 years living in Seattle (I moved away in 2014), I will happily say that the article you posted has nearly no correlation to your earlier points about light rail, and that the NYC Subway is an amazing piece of (partially) publicly funded work that has shaped NYC and the surrounding region in innumerable positive ways.

There are about 1.7 billion rides taken on it every year with over 200 miles of track. It'd be an understatement to say that the city could not exist the way it does now without it - autonomous vehicles won't get the sheer number of people moved every morning and every night that the subway does. A full order of magnitude more people take the subway on a daily basis than there are taxi rides, all for a maximum of $2.75 regardless of how far they're traveling.

It might not be the best thing for Seattle (personally, I am a big proponent), but a blanket distaste for light rail is antithetical to what has proven fundamental for cities around the world.

As far as spending public money, there are already efficiency concerns (something that your article definitely demonstrates) - I'm curious how you think public money could help fund technology that fundamentally does not exist today? Is that not a higher risk for future technology?
> There is also a bike share system which is failing horribly primarily for this

The point of bike share is for casual cyclists or people who want to pair bike share with transit for the last mile (which is annoying to do with your own bike). It's a niche that's not really intended to compete with people owning their own bikes.

> the stations were spaced horribly around town and riders can not know with confidence that there will be a station near their destination to park.

Agreed. Apparently this is supposed to get better with the city taking over the program, because then they can pair the stations with transit stops better.

> Also, 8-9 months of the year Seattle is pretty miserable to bike in without the proper gear -- even with the proper gear it's very far from what I would call "appealing."

Seattle isn't really that rainy. It's actually less rainy than Munich, for example, and Munich has more than 4x the bike mode share as Seattle.
Except that attention span is a zero sum game.

Facebook's (et al) business model success is correlated with the amount of time you are under their umbrella.
> pagination gives the ability to "chunk" the content.

This is super super critical! Piece-mealing helps people remember the content better. It has a direct impact on the ability to recall and then apply those concepts later in life.

It is pertinent to mention here that web is no longer desktop only. It is there on mobile and tablets and people consume web on each differently at different times of the day. It will be very wrong to assume that our application interfaces do not have to evolve accordingly. And by that I mean a lot of hearsay from 2003 isn't valid anymore.

For example, it can be a real pain to read an essay on mobile that has reflowed into what one would call a thick "billing paper roll". You keep scrolling and scrolling and not even be at the middle of the article by the time you're done. In fact many people quit reading blogposts midway just after 2-3 downswipes and then they reopen it on their desktops.

For a book, it is simply out of question.
If I may be frank and please understand I am not trying to be rude .... use your genius ( building such robot requires some sort of genius ) to solve a real problem that will have an impact. If getting a haircut is a problem for you....shave your head, a $10 dollar rechargeable machine can help you do that and can last a lifetime.

Though, I am wondering what else this technology can be used for. Perhaps the only way to know is to build it.
Not having inheritance is also a pretty good way to deal with inheritance.
Good for you on posting so soon! Must be pretty scary but I'll be nice :)

Cool idea - I've always loved reading through the Hugo Awards each year to find new books, but I can never really trust that they're doing a great job. And sometimes Amazon does an even better job, recommending books like The Martian before anyone I knew had even heard of it.

What do you imagine 'Premium Content' being? And how do you think you can differentiate from what platforms like Amazon Kindle are doing?

You say your background is a game developer - care to expand a little? It seems like something like this would need lots of web development and payments integrations; when you say something like Steam, would this be primarily a website or a desktop app?

And would it let me get things in formats I can easily put on my Kindle/e-reader/iPad? Are those formats difficult to generate or pretty straightforward?
> Feds should cutoff loans for schools that don't get their students jobs

They tried that with for-profit schools, who were quick to report very high levels of employment (omitting under-employment, with gigs such as barista or part-time retail) and setting up temp agencies that hired people to do busywork for six months or so.

If their graduates are able to drive, they already pretty much have a job with Uber, for instance.
Social mobility should mean that, but doesn't in practice. Most job opportunities involving any kind of "knowledge work", or really most jobs that pay better than subsitence income, that don't formally require college degrees, still have them as a job requirement. Most people aren't goint to college because they want to be professors, they're going because they want to be able to get their foot in the door at firms that require at least a bachelor's degree.
We feel it's a pretty big problem. Are you familiar with Object Relational Mapping (ORM) in the database world? In the past, we coded our solutions direclty to the database technology (MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server). I think you'll find most modern solutions leverage an ORM to decouple the database. We are doing the same thing with APIs. Think Email, SMS, Push Notifications, Analytics, Payments, Object Storage and on and on. In each of these verticals there a re multiple providers/APIs that offer similar features. Then think about version to version migrations, mobile and IOT devices. The problem space is pretty big.
I would have agreed about specialization in older versions of MSSQL but they specifically made the HA sysadmin experience with AlwaysOn a cakewalk. I think any sysadmin with a decent amount of general experience could get it all figured out within 1-2 normal workdays (including your average interruptions).
I just wrote a simple script to check the gems:

https://gist.github.com/dcu/3c06e4ab0e98158c5742c4fd2b31523d
I think conversion changed, but I don't know. I don't do a very good job at tracking it.

My weird channels for acquisition are a variety of publicity stunts and Twitter drama. Something like IFTTT recently threatening to turn off their Pinboard channel is manna from heaven for me.
Who is going to pay for it? Who is going to care enough to archive digital artifacts?

The Internet Archive is having trouble with their task. Who is going to make sure Grandma's iPhoto album is archived?

Things can be put in a box and forgot about for 90 years. Files on digital media probably won't last that long.
"You can major in gameboy if you know how to bullshit."
They will never do that; the NT kernel has a strictly better design than any Unix. What they have built is a Wine-like compatibility shim for Linux binaries. This is a have your cake and eat it too move. Microsoft has noted well how Web devs have basically migrated en masse from Linux to the Mac, and want a piece of the action. The carrot will be running Visual Studio while keeping your Linux stack on your dev box.
Hey Andy, when I went shopping for forum software last year I discovered Discourse. Perhaps you could talk about how your forum would be better that it?
This is interesting. I have definitely seen a similar idea before, even down to the "six people" setup.

A quick search turned up:
https://www.smeeters.com/
http://www.sixr.com.au/
https://www.joingrouper.com/

It would be interesting to know how successful those services have been.
One, I don't know anyone who doesn't use non-secure WiFi networks & even if they don't, they typically still do without knowing, ergo., the 'attwifi' situation. Two, I've reviewed a number of VPN solutions over the years and they are far from perfect. Amongst some of my more notable findings:

1) Banner / update text delivered via HTTP to the client in a fully renderable state within the VPN client. Yeah, that was a fairly common issue many years ago and could be used to hijack the application UX to ask the user for things like their password.

2) Split tunneling. Some VPN providers will send HTTP traffic through the VPN while sending HTTPS traffic out the hostile leg of the VPN. This is cool and all until you use an application which doesn't properly validate the server public and then boom, a bad guy can get in the middle. Over the last half decade I've reported said flaw (failure to properly validate the server public) to over three dozen financial institutions, a couple anti-virus companies, and a major automotive manufacturer. It's real, it happens. Not to mention the Superfish and related situations.

Three, femtocells. Even if a bad actor can't get to someone's mobile computer (phone) via WiFi, they sure can by forcing it to negotiate a vulnerable cellular protocol and simply inject from there.
The Flaw at the Heart of Bimodal IT
Tutoring, Uber/Lyft, Amazon Flex, Online store, dog walk, day care... there are lot of things you can do.
I'm waiting for the next station to open at NE65th/Roosevelt, which will help further -- but there is already a building boom happening around there with new condos and such. And it's not open until something like 2021.

An east/west option that ran from Ballard, stopped in U-District, and continued to Bellevue and Redmond would be the bomb. Game-changing for recruiting -- imagine living in Ballard and working at Microsoft, or living in Redmond but working at Expedia (after they move.) And your commute not sucking the life out of you.
Apply HN: TemporalHealth Search and Aggreg. engine on millions of health records
(To quote Linus Torvalds “Talk is cheap show me the code”)
A working demo on 6 Million hospital visits: http://www.computationalhealthcare.com

Government agencies collect medical records on millions of patients for various purposes such as reimbursement, medical research, healthcare quality/delivery assessment. Even though these datasets are available to researchers and analysts, they are severely underutilized. Further due to security & privacy concerns, modern analytics tools cannot be directly used. We have developed a privacy preserving analytics platform. The platform uses aggregates statistics pre-computed in an exhaustive manner to enable exploratory analysis. By allowing researchers and physicians to search on these aggregate statistics using medical concepts (diagnosis, procedure & drugs), we can significantly reduce security & privacy concerns, while greatly enhancing benefits of these datasets. Given the enormous privacy concerns due to amount of information present in such datasets, we are deeply committed to transparency. We will Open Source core parts of platform for researchers. While we would prefer such system strong and useful enough for public use. In short term we aim for providing access to all practicing physicians and medical students in United States.

Consider a physician who discharged a patient with Sarcoidosis, within a week the patient went to an ED complaining severe headaches. The physician would be curious if any other patients have had suffered headaches following sarcoidosis and if she should admit him. Due to availability of 140 Million visits and 40 Million patients our system can provide useful guidance to the physician in spite Sarcoidosis being a rare disease.

We have the data. We have infrastructure. There is no real reason why it should not exist. Hence we have built it. We have a fully functional platform for research use. We have been working on this for 4 years and its my PhD thesis. Also applied to YC S16.
A webpack boilerplate for a production-ready marketing website
The Open Research Framework
Transit dollars would be very well spent in a place like Seattle, and Seattle voters are so hungry for transit investment that we will vote "yes" on almost any proposal to build more of it, even when it comes saddled with a lot of pointless suburban sprawl trains we don't actually care about. The problem is that the Washington State legislature refuses to allow cities to tax themselves for transit projects, and Seattle is therefore unable to build itself the transit network it needs.

No, it doesn't make any sense, but that's the political reality we're dealing with. It has to do with a rural/urban divide in the state legislature, and a resentment of Seattle's financial and cultural dominance.

The transit project described in the article may be centered on Seattle, but it is not a Seattle transit network: it is a regional project, and the region sprawls out across the entire eastern half of the Puget Sound - it's eighty miles long, from north to south, and 10-15 miles wide. It's not a city at all - it includes at least half a dozen different cities and a dozen smaller towns, plus all the suburbs between them, and a fair amount of rural land beyond the suburbs.

Sound Transit is only building Seattle transit by accident, tunneling their way through our city as a side effect of the "regional spine" they're trying to extend all the way through the Puget Sound region. Seattle is simply trying to make the best of it by pushing them as hard as we can to build something that resembles a proper subway system while they happen to be passing through. It's costing a fortune and taking forever, but it's better than nothing, which is what we are allowed to build on our own.
It would be easier to measure the photoreceptor response of the eye and mathematically extrapolate.