skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Okay, let's be clear on something. The US higher education system remains the top higher education system in the world. This is relatively undisputed.

There are pieces of it that are broken, but the assumption that some new better system will inevitably and miraculously emerge if only we had the political will to smash what we have to pieces is silly.

I'm for reform, I'm not for blindly destroying something we have and simply crossing my fingers in hope that it becomes better that way. If you're concerned about how education runs, feel free to propose a new system, but don't simply assume that if we smash it with a sledge hammer something better will emerge. Frankly the only thing that's likely to result in is ensuring the US lose its superpower status permanently. (I think people often forget just how much of our military advantage is predicated on a research infrastructure that involves US universities. Universities here do a hell of a lot more than just teach students. Frankly anyone who supports our military needs to consider that our existing system of universities critical to its success. Smashing this system is as reckless as proposing to simply cut funding to the military and then expecting them go to fight China or take over the middle east or whatever.)
Thats very informative. Thanks.
Very informative article. Seems a lot of startup advice sites will gladly tell you to quit your job, but this is a great explanation of how exactly that works out.
2 to 5 times more battery plus no cell radios?
The value in Google Apps is that you can integrate with Google's services.

And apparently they are going to great lengths, like in GMail where you can add your own contextual objects (like they did with GMaps).

But this is only for companies that are willing to switch to Google Apps.
I don't think that it would be someone (or something) traveling back from the future to sabotage the LHC. Rather, it's possible that the LHC, if fully operational, would destroy the universe, and we just happen to live in one of many universes in which hardware failures and birds dropping baguettes have prevented it from doing so.
I'd love to hear comments and replies rather than simply seeing your downvotes or your upvotes.
Cyclestreets does directions, and is built on the same OpenStreetMap data:

http://www.cyclestreets.net/

UK-only currently, but seems much more advanced than the Google offering. It suggests three routes depending on your preference for speed or peacefulness and I like the little diagram that shows you how hilly the chosen route is.
I have calculated that I will be 40 before my student loan will be paid off... I've been paying it since 2003
I would agree and I wish the world was like that. All I can say is: don't ever go near a "right to work" state.
http://www.patspapers.com/blog/item/what_if_everybody_flushe...
If you have to know, I accidentally downvoted you.

I was torn between downvoting, commenting and ignoring you, and I clicked before I thought it through.

Giving money directly to the schools is not even wrong. Costs are totally out of control as it is. But you are correct that we have a great university system, so I figure you're at least hitting on something and are best left to your own devices.

Sorry for the downvote. No conspiracy was afoot.
Sorry for the mistaken assumption. I've edited the post to just be a kind reminder to others that I would appreciate replies to accompany votes. :)

To clarify: I completely agree costs are out of control. I just don't agree the solution is simply to defund it.
Sadly this doesn't answer my question of who I should go with?

I will probably go AWS just because of the obvious simplicity of scale, but their pricing is complex enough to make me wonder if it will end up costing me way more than I'd like.

RackspaceCloud is a possibility, but I really dislike the nominal amount of RAM I get for the same money as AWS Small server. But then again AWS might pinch me on ElasticBlock storage.

Anyone?
It helps that C is designed to have an almost one to one mapping between its native operators and machine operations and addressing modes.

For example, the pre and post increment operators are expressions with side effects, can be confusing and can provoke undefined behaviour with ease. Having two variants also seems redundant. But the two variants may have different optimal translations to underlying CPU addressing modes, while leaving the pre or post modified value in a register is often a side-effect of the CPU translation. If the language only permitted ++ as a statement, the usefulness of side-effect would be lost.

It's a cliche that C is little more than portable assembler, but at a design level there's a lot of truth to it. The length of the assembly translation of C code is usually pretty directly proportional to the source code token length. In more expressive languages with more powerful abstractions, that's frequently not the case.
I was saying only that the fact that Plants vs Zombies is 2D doesn't necessarily mean it consumes less resources. Nothing more.
I am your humble servant
It feels a bit like Google Wave but for use in your own application.

However, I have no idea if I'm right.
You can get cycling direction using http://maps.cloudmade.com, which uses OpenStreetMap data, just like OpenCycleMap.
Rip, Mix, Burn implies ripping the CD (and burning your "mixtape" to a 70 minute, 700MB of uncompressed WAV, physical disc which dates it nicely).

I thought it was only out of touch RIAA executives that interpreted "Rip" to mean "Rip-off".

You could get technical and point out that making mix-tapes or CDs is illegal in the UK and some other countries, or suggest that people could rip borrowed CDs, but it's plainly wrong historically to interpret the intention of this slogan as being the promotion of mass online piracy of the post-napster type.
For the Afflicted, a Little Black Box to Jog Failing Memory
Virtual Hosting With vsftpd And MySQL On Debian Lenny
there is no news here, I've had a desktop wallpaper for at least 6 months now ;)
History is always viewed through the lens of the person retelling it. Very few historical accounts are immune from the flourish of an author or historian eager to leave their view on the way things happened.

Strictly speaking, it doesn't matter if Saving Private Ryan was fiction, it depicts the reality of war quite well. The accuracy of dress, vehicles, weapons and command structures is enough to make it a useful film, even if the story is complete fiction.
How to Choose Right CSS Frameworks
Especially relevant, as I have to tell my boss exactly this today!
I'm itching to find out what the modelling tools are like. At this point I doubt they would gel with many 3D artists. Programmer designed interfaces for creative tools are generally a pretty ropey affair.

However, I'm certainly willing to attempt to do battle with the uncanny valley if they let me.
The decreased program quality part seems to be skimmed over.

Some numbers: students pay $19,869.5 per term (http://www.nyu.edu/bursar/tuition.fees/rates09/ugcas.html). If each student takes 6 classes (between 18 and 24 credits), a class of 30 students pays $99,347.5 for one course.

Another number: a typical PTL in math gets $4-6,000 per class. Presumably the cost of a PTL in a less marketable subject is lower.

Unless rent for a classroom + admin overhead adds up to about $90,000/semester, there is plenty of waste to be cut.

Specific examples of waste: the climbing wall, counseling services, latino center, anime club, gym, soccer team, korean formal ball, resident assistants, multiple offices of affirmative action [1]. (These all exist at universities I've attended or worked for.)

Educational institutions that just react to market forces are bad educational institutions. Market forces result in grade inflation and low graduation standards, something I think most people agree are extremely unfortunate trends.

Come up with uniform standards, and separate the tasks of education and evaluation. Problem solved.

[1] If a university has three offices of AA, that's either 2 or 3 too many (depending on your views on AA).
I've used GoGrid, AWS, Rackspace Cloud, and Softlayers offering. Though the last two with only one or two servers.

I've written a fair bit about them on my blog which is in my profile. Though the last update is more about a move to GoGrid and now that AWS has west coast servers we're starting to migrate back.

For overall experience my favourite setup is AWS with scalr.net as a front end. I've used the Amazon interfaces and I just don't find them as nice to use.

As for cost it depends on what you do but in my case its pretty similar across the board for the servers if you prepay(AWS reserved, GoGrid plans). EBS has never been much of an issue cost wise for us either and we had a fair bit of space on there.

One pro for Gogrid at the moment though is the ability to order dedicated servers through the cloud interface. We upgraded to a dedicated server once every attempt to keep latency down on our load balancers failed.

If you have any specific questions feel free to email me or for more general ones ask here.
The many voices of the web
"Academic research in these areas is almost redundant by the time it is published given the pace of technological change ... "

This seems indicative of the rapidly increasing rate of technological change. I think we are just starting to see the effects of millions of independent blogs and the rapid, community bubbling up, of posts with interesting insight.

For me, it's hard to ignore the premise of the singularity proponents.
In fairness, the DS' CPU runs at only 67MHz (DSi: 133) and has access to only 4MB RAM (DSi: 16MB); the GPU pales in comparison to the iPhone's. We're talking around an order of magnitude difference; the physical dimensions are also larger than an iPhone although it's hard to say if the extra space is mostly taken up by the second screen and the hinge mechanism.

The PSP is somewhat larger than an iPhone and also less powerful.

I also suspect the iPhone has been optimised for standby and audio playback battery consumption, not necessarily for max CPU/GPU utilisation and active screen.
I wonder if this advice is informed by the author's experience in the UK. In the Northern California software/tech industry, 2 weeks notice is the standard courtesy. It's also, I've found, widely accepted that having someone who doesn't want to be there can be corrosive to team dynamics so both employer and employee have an interest in aiming for the minimum time needed for an orderly hand-off. That tends to be two weeks or less.
I had already started paying some of my loans when I finished undergraduate school in 1993. I started repaying the rest of them when I finished graduate school in 1996. I finished paying them around 2004. During my undergraduate years I was in an internship program, so over five years of school I had two years of fulltime work. And in grad school I was given a stipend and free tuition. This helped me (a) not borrow as much, and (b) have income to pay down my loans as quickly as I could.

I remember producing paydown charts in the early 90s and thinking it'd take forever to pay my loans off, but I planned the amounts I wanted to pay each month (more than the minimum whenever I could) and it got done. My rising income over the years helped more than I could have predicted when I started.
Demand for Lithium Is Poised to Take Off
I guess he's talking about kids in developing countries...

The point he is making is clear, however, it doesn't take THAT long to develop some fundamental computer-related skills. I feel worse for old people.

TB
Ask HN: What's the best way to acquire cheap computing power for uni projects?
I'm in a pickle with my MSc Computer Science project as I've been a little more ambitious than I perhaps should've been and am looking to examine reporting of semi-structured data from ECM systems (notably SharePoint) using Oracle and possibly Cassandra (compare and contrast a traditional RDBMS extended for Xml against a object store built for semi-structured data).

The ECM system is going to require several virtual servers to implement, and a few more will be allocated to both Oracle and Cassandra. I'm looking for a cost-effective way of running multiple (in the order of 6) virtual servers concurrently.

The university department does not appear to have spare capacity available for my use (it's a lot of hardware dedicated to a single student) and I've examined cloud based solutions such as Amazon AWS, Azure, etc but the cost of running a mix of Windows and Linux servers for 4 to 6 months on the cloud is extremely prohibitive.

I'm now of the opinion that it's best to build a system at home, but I don't really want to have multiple cheap workstations heating up the front room. I could build my own system, but paying full retail price on parts makes it more expensive than buying an off-the-shelf workstation so I'm now looking at workstations that could take 12GB to 16GB of RAM. Yet none of the workstations I've found come out cheap enough to be ramen affordable... they're bordering on lobster. Systems like the Lenovo D20, Sun Ultra 27 and the Apple Mac Pro look appropriate but costly when kitted out with enough RAM and disk to do the job.

So my questions are:

If you needed to run 6 x 2GB RAM servers for 6 months on the cheap, how would you approach it?

If I end up going down the workstation route are there established ways for post-grad students to get hardware for their projects at silly-low prices? (I've failed to find any obvious ways to obtain more than a very small student discount as the corp websites unfortunately don't appear to have a "Are you a post-grad student looking for a huge discount?" link).

For info, I'm based in London, UK... so prices I'm looking at are all GBP which pushes the cost up a bit.
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The government is merely the enabler here. The other part is the unshakable belief by most Americans that four years at a private liberal arts college is worth $200K.
Perhaps "they" could see how higher education is funded in other countries. I finished a decent four year software engineering degree a few years ago here in Australia and it set me back around AU$18k. That debt is CPI indexed (I think) and paid for by a levy on top of my income tax. The rest of the cost was covered by the government.

The system isn't perfect (and one of many issues is unis compromising difficulty/quality for full fee paying overseas students), but I'm pretty happy with it and paid off my debt easily enough.

I assume some other countries do a better job again.
Transitioning From One Job To Another
Attempt to clone Emacs' repository (http://savannah.gnu.org/bzr/?group=emacs) sometime and you'll understand he's being very informative.
There's an amazing amount of heat, but little light on this, particularly regarding exactly what impact the legislation threatened to have on costs, labor, etc. for Amz, affiliates (exactly what is that? someone selling via Amz Marketplace?), and customers.

Huffington offers:

"The bill, which was part of a package of tax measures aimed at increasing revenue, originally sought to create a nexus between the state and on-line retailers based on their ties to local affiliate websites, which link to products. The bill was ultimately altered due largely to fears that retailers like Amazon would simply cut ties to Colorado companies that make money by referring buyers."

"The final bill, which was signed into law in February, instead required large online retailers to start collecting sales taxes or provide a summary of people's web purchases in the state, leaving affiliates out of the equation. This created an economic nexus without making local affiliates a scapegoat for paying local sales taxes." --http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/08/amazon-reacts-to-co...

...but Huff doesn't cite sources. Anyone find a better analysis by a dispassionate legal/financial source?
"Come up with uniform standards, and separate the tasks of education and evaluation. Problem solved."

In the UK, people used to "read" for a subject. Then they would take their exams. I'm not sure that system really worked though.
if corporations support this notion with inflated salaries the circle is complete. this is where the notion is slowly changing, and it will take years to trickle down to the other systems.
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Can you please share the photo of this. I want to make one too. thx.
Is the US education system the best in the world?

Or is the US credentialing system, or perhaps academic research system the best in the world? I don't see a compelling reason why controlling costs on the education side would harm the credentialing and research parts of the system.
We have this system in several states in the US, it does quite well. Unfortunately states are defunding their systems right now because of lower revenues and so tuition prices at public universities are beginning to rise at unfortunate rates. I'm all for reinvesting in our public education systems. Unfortunately, this particular video advocates simply cutting funding without actually providing any funds to universities.

My alternative plan is much closer to what you're saying than what the video's plan was. You don't actually seem to disagree with me at all. I'm curious where you got the impression you did.
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The US higher education system remains the top higher education system in the world. This is relatively undisputed.

I won't dispute this either. But to say that students who go looking for quality can find more quality in the United States haphazard nonsystem of higher education than they can in other countries is not the same as saying that United States higher education delivers good value for money. Higher education in the United States also absorbs astounding amounts of money.

Many economists of education (I will mention Mark Blaug, but you could find others) point out that if we must talk about public subsidies for schooling, the place to put them is in the K-12 system with its presumably compulsory attendance, rather than in the higher education sector. Public subsidy of higher education tends to operate as a transfer of funds to the less able rich (who can afford to take time off from the labor force to attend college) at the expense of the more (academically) able poor, who still find it difficult even to be admitted to college, much less to complete it.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_27/b3840045_...

http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffp0621.pdf

http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ff0615S.pdf

http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Education/carnrose.pdf

http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Education/kahlenberg-affacti...

http://harvardmagazine.com/2005/05/a-thumb-on-the-scale.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200511/financial-aid-leveragi...

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=510012

http://www.equaleducation.org/commentary.asp?opedid=1240

http://www.jkcf.org/assets/files/0000/0084/Achievement_Trap....

http://www.reason.com/news/show/123910.html

Transnational comparisons (yes, including with China) tend to show that the most successful strategy for national strength is to devote the most public funding to broad educational programs for the early years, and to allow much support of higher education by the students in higher education, relying on their savings, their current income, private charity (including discounts from the colleges), and their creditworthiness. Countries with higher education funded largely by private funds actually have greater participation in higher education that reaches a broader segment of the population.
Useful, yes - but few people will watch it that way. Nobody goes to see that movie just to see a realistically looking uniform.
Or I could stick to the launchpad mirror[1] which is extremely fast. savannah uses dumb http for bzr[2] and hence it is slow.
I have been using the launchpad mirror for some time now.

[1] https://launchpad.net/emacs

[2] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/121222
The problem is that the opposite system - publically funded high education has even deeper flaws.

Many students choose completely useless programs (straight to unemployment), students don't fell entitled to criticize anything, and of course the universities don't treat them like paying customers.
How to move Ubuntu Lucid's Gnome buttons to the right
The video advocates cutting professors salaries in half. The guy actually says that. If you don't see how that could impact a university's research operations then... I'm not sure how we can really agree on anything. :)

The education parts of the university and the research parts of the university are not staffed separately. In a research university the people who do research are some of the same people who design lesson plans. The idea is that this enhances a student's educational experience.

I agree though, that tuition is indeed too high. But I'm willing to stand by the assertion that our education system is the best in the world too, not just our research system. This is even more true when it comes to our graduate programs.
I have doubts that the guy would manage to single-handedly publish any piece of legislation. So while there is some economical talk, it's actually more towards a political fund gathering talk.
The Hacker's nightmare unfolding on GPF - we've all been there.
News just in: people who haven't learned how to do something can't do that thing. Film at eleven.
Godspeed, jonnycowboy, godspeed!
If I recall, our private (and many top public) institutions are fairly well supported by private funds. That's an extremely important part of how universities get funded and I'm for that.

I agree with you on another point, I am not convinced we provide good value to most students for their money. I think fees and tuition is too high.

I do not think the solution to that is simply smashing the universities with a hammer, which is what this guy in the video proposes.
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Well, RRW says (http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/03/new-state-law-bump...):

"Online retailer Amazon has ended all Colorado-based affiliate accounts after a new law passed by the state's legislature would have forced them to collect and pay state sales taxes. The law, HB 10-1193, states that any affiliate marketer making more than $10,000 for a retailer is declared a legal agent, and a state presence, of that company. Rather than be forced to pay the state taxes, Amazon has instead side-stepped the law by closing its doors to all affiliates based in Colorado."

...though I think they're sloppy, too, speaking of Amazon being "forced to pay the state taxes" - when they seemingly would have to begin to collect sales taxes from customers, which could mean:
• Figuring out the tax rate (which varies by city, county, etc) for each customer.
• Charge a differential price to customers depending on the state/co/city of residence.
• Either increase the charge to customer's CC or cut Amazon (or it's affiliate's) net on a sale.
• Send on the $ to state gov.

Sounds to me like they just don't want hassle and cost of programming, processing etc.

Note another effect: When I buy a $2500 laptop from Apple online, I have consider the cost of where I want it shipped. If it goes to my office in town, I pay ~3% more sales tax than if I they ship to my out-in-county home.

If Apple can handle all that, so can Amazon, but if this is what the CO law will impose on national online retailers it will mean lots more issues for both customer and seller to weigh and start handling immediately.

Maybe it's equitable, but I sure wouldn't like to have to have all my business's billing software rewritten overnight.
My day job wanted nine months. We compromised on four. Salaryman life, banzai.