skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>, and I'm not seeing any obvious point where it suddenly becomes more difficult to learn the skill.

In terms of pure theory, I can see what you're saying but a lot of STEM curriculum includes lab work that's hard to replicate for an auto-didactic.

For applied sciences like biology, electrical engineering, applied physics (not theoretical physics), the universities will have expensive equipment that students can use in their lab assignments. Biology students examine specimens in $20k microscopes, physics students schedule time on multi-million dollar particle accelerators, and engineering students working on high speeed GHz digital circuits can use $100k Agilent scopes. Some universities also have specialized and very expensive labs with robotics and virtual reality rooms.

The humanities graduate wanting to "reinvent" himself/herself as a "electrical engineer" can buy the same college books and watch hours of youtube videos about circuits but the lab work is really hard to replicate. That's not to say that there aren't a lot of self-taught electronics engineers out there... there are ... but most I've seen learned it first as children and added to their hobby and knowledge over a decade. That's a very different learning trajectory than a 30-something trying to self-study physics without a particle accelerator in his garage.

Also, the STEM students have access to professors and their professional networks into businesses. Their recommendations opens doors for internships. This is another form of "real-world" lab work to strengthen the acquired knowledge.

Computer programming is unique in that it's a STEM that self-learners can get very deep and practical in -- without expensive lab equipment.
I predict that in the future college will become so expensive that students of all abilities will rely more on online certificates to measure their ability and training. Employers will more slowly accept these credentials. If enough smart people don't go to college, the signaling ability of college will be broken and then the higher education market will collapse or radically reform itself.
In Australia, on a coast, deal with uni students all the time.
Open Source 409A
Well, us pirates also "win".

Buying DRMed software is a fool's errand. If I want to keep it without being chained to servers that will go away, I break the law. See https://xkcd.com/488/ : Piracy is the correct answer for DRM works.

Better yet, purchase non-DRM works.

EDIT: How odd. High karma on al these posts (and the last few days), and still rate-limited. Perhaps my popular opinions are a bit too ... controversial, especially with SaaS and API opinions?
Junkie jihadis and the narcotic ways of war
The elements of Euclid, with colored diagrams and symbols instead of letters
> The shift in downloadable music from proprietary and locked formats to mp3s that play anywhere

The MP3 codec is not free, yet (in the US, until 2018)
The caller may pass nil explicitly.
I think another way to study this would be to give free scholarships to half a group of random people and see if they earn more money than the other half of the random group.
There have been rumors that Google is planning a new, entirely separate messaging service, with bot integrations etc.

http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/22/google-is-reportedly-devel...
I could not disagree more thoroughly.

The fact that I've had the opportunity to learn about a broad range of domains in addition to my technical focus has allowed me to not only have a better understanding, appreciation, and direction in my interactions with the broader world, it lets me draw parallels between similar scenarios in distinct fields, learn from the experiences of others, see novel solutions to entirely distinct problems, and all in all have a more holistic view of <insert hand waving> Life.

I would not be the engineer I am today if I did not spend a portion of my time learning about "what native Americans lived in Virginia" (Would heavily recommend Ken Burns's "The West", speaking of similar topics, that man is a hero to the presentation of american history), and as such I'm a strong advocate for giving _everyone_ the opportunity to learn about things that may not have any direct benefit, not only because you don't know until you've tried (and benefits as I said can be very transitive) but also because learning in and of itself I see as very central to the human experience.
OECD expenditures on tertiary education per student in 2011: http://imgur.com/5brGGWw [1]

The U.S. is an outlier.

[1] Source: http://www.oecd.org/edu/EAG2014-Indicator%20B1%20(eng).pdf
If you don't work as hard you have time to go by bike whereever you want - your biking radius is anything with solid land.
Then they shouldn’t be surprised if they’re blocked.

If I operated a company in Liberland that had an onlineshop selling Crystal meth to customers in the US, my packages would also be intercepted.
I stopped reading these 'cypherpunk'-epilog lists a few years back. I'm still subscribed because of cross-postings. The amount of tinfoil-hattery is just unsustainable. And there's barely any interesting information for people working on real cryptography-, systems or engineering.
It must be possible for a computer to simply not have an adequate supply of randomness though, no? Sure, urandom will use hardware sources of randomness if they're available - but what if they're not?
"It's just a bit harder to get into, and a bit harder to get on-the-job training/mentorship."

Seems like you answered your own question.

Part of my point is that there really isn't a sharp dividing line between "college" and "self-education". If you're going to college and not also using it to do a lot of "self-education" you're really wasting your time, for instance. But programming seems to have a fairly solid track for moving from casual hobbyist to full-on professional that I don't witness in very many other disciplines.

Why not carefully pick which things you're going to use the "college" on, bearing in mind that there's also no magical "YOU SHALL STOP LEARNING NOW" barrier that gets thrown up on college graduation day?
The end of Moore's law is like commercial fusion power--always just around the corner but it never seems to get here.

It does seem like we should stop counting how many transistors fit in how much space. At this point, size isn't the limiting factor. Tracking either the cost of a unit of processing power or the total processing power of the planet would be more meaningful in benchmarking technological progress.
The 9.7 Pro and Air are nearly identical. The naming is unfortunate. If the 9.7 Air is v1 the 9.7 Pro should be v2 of the same name. But the product itself is the iPad, there's isn't a competing iPhone XXL. The Pro/Air is just a sub configuration on price and specs.
So are seeds and carrots. In reality, all root vegetables store a great deal of carbohydrates that us diabetics must watch out for.

I've been 'gotten' by carrots in a crock-pot beef. I miscounted and got waylaid by them.
> it's worth taking the article's observation that S&P has returned 7.8% and mentally drawing a line there too.

Unfortunately people aren't generally in the habit of handing out low-interest loans to recent high school graduates with no assets so they can invest in the S&P.

I mean this seriously. One of the bigger advantages of college as an investment is that you can get favorable interest rates on purchasing it. Though perhaps this advantage is minimized by the relatively poor tax treatment of college returns (ordinary income vs. capital gains).
Ask HN: How often you take Android device full file backup and store it on cloud?
The full file backup means the device folder structure is maintained when stored on cloud (for e.g. Google Drive).
Passive investing is popular when markets are good. And there wasn't any significant crisis since 2008-2009.

When markets make a downturn, passive investing is not a great idea.
I write all my documentation in either Confluence, MkDocs (Markdown) or Sphinx (Markdown & reStructuredText).

http://www.mkdocs.org/
http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/stable/index.html

Both MkDocs and Sphinx can deploy to ReadTheDocs.org which is very nice, especially when using Sphinx since it allows for PDF and ePUB downloads of the documentation as it's versioned.
Public Records Databases API for Larimer County CO
Nobody was like Steve Jobs. So if that's the complaint against Tim Cook, well, take a number. You could say the same thing about 7 billion other people.

Tim Cook has a few things over John Sculley.

A big difference is that Tim was at Apple for decades before taking over as CEO. He joined Apple in 1998 as an SVP, which means he was part of Steve Jobs' leadership team for the entirety of Apple's resurgence. The article says:

> Jobs obviously saved the company years later with the iMac, iPod, Macbook, iTunes, iPhone and iPad.

Tim Cook was part of the Apple leadership team for every single one of those products. There hasn't been a "Steve Jobs era" followed by a "Tim Cook era." There was a "Steve Jobs + Tim Cook era" and now it continues as a "Tim Cook era."

And other people too, of course. Ctrl-F in the article for "Ive"--no results. An article about the past and future of Apple that doesn't mention Jonathan Ive? Looks like another in a long line of "cult of personality" articles that ascribe all success--or failure--to a single person, the CEO.

There are many other differences from Sculley. Tim Cook has been Apple CEO before--this is his 2nd turn at it. He's a believer and defender of Apple's culture. He personally understands computer engineering. He has personal principles that he advocates for. Etc.

Apple has always had an ecosystem of second-guessers telling it what it should do differently. The greatest strength of Tim Cook as CEO is that he, like Jobs, doesn't listen to those folks.
> A typical BA takes 2 years

Do you mean 4 years? It's extremely rare for someone to get their Bachelor's in fewer than 4 years.
I was at the Berkshire meeting this past weekend, and Buffett gave a nice (if simplified) explanation of investing in index funds over active investment, as it pertains to hedge funds, hiring analysts, etc.

An excerpt from the transcript [0] follows:

What I’d like you to do is for a moment, imagine that in this room, you people own all of America. All the stocks in America are owned by this group. You are the Berkshire 18,000 (or whatever it is) that have somehow managed to accumulate all the wealth in the country. Let’s assume we just divide it down the middle. On one side, we put half the people…half of all the investment capital in the world, and that capital is what a certain presidential candidate might call ‘low energy’. In fact, they have no energy at all. They buy half of everything that exists in the investment world – 50 percent – everyone on this side. Now half of it is owned by these ‘low energy’ people. They don’t look at stock prices. They don’t turn on business channels. They don’t read the Wall Street Journal. They don’t do anything. They are a slovenly group that just sits for year after year, owning half of America’s business. What’s the result going to be? The result is going to be exactly average as all American business does because they own half of all of it. They have no expenses – nothing.

What’s going to happen with the other half? The other half are what we call the ‘hyperactives’. The hyperactives’ gross result is also going to be half, right? The whole has to be the sum of the parts. This group, by definition, can’t change from its half of the ultimate investment results. This half is going to have the same gross results. They’re going to have the same results as the ‘no energy’ people but they’re also going to have terrific expenses because they’re all going to be moving around, hiring hedge funds, hiring consultants, and paying lots of commissions, et cetera. As a group, that half has to do worse than this half does. The people who don’t do anything have to do better than the people that are trying to do better. It’s simple.

[0] https://www.biznews.com/global-investing/2016/05/02/berkshir...
True. I think that's an important device. A lot of people, including myself, don't like or need a huge screen.
Freejail: a Linux security sandbox
Typically, the text would read something like "Click to zoom."

Which is what rockets do.
Tech and Innovation Newsletter
That's true, but it's also true if you drop the "passive" part :)
I saw 3 on one elevator ride yesterday...
It's nuclear power from a remote reactor, and it isn't too cheap to meter but is heading that way.
Pinky: Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?

Brain: The same thing we do every night, Pinky - try to take over the world!

______

Currently, I'm not aware of anything that's not able to be done with QC qubits that not able to be done with classical binary computation.

If you wanted, you can download quantum computer simulator, write some QC'ish code, run the code, and you'll never write any code that won't resolve with crashing or taking forever, though it'd be faster on the 5 qubits though.
I don't know if I am wholly against DRM because I do like streaming services like Spotify for their convenience. I'm just tired of pirating things. And I do make money as a developer as a result of protected APIs/content.

Is this hypocritical?
But stored solar energy no longer undercuts coal for most of these storage technologies.

Pumped hydro is probably the best bet, but is very geography dependent. Adding transmission is a non-trivial investment.
We could call it....Scotland:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/f...

Disclosure: I am a beneficiary of Scotland's free university system, long ago.
Do you think it's possible that they accepted your ideas of infinity in a dogmatic sort of way, similar to how many young children accept god? I remember first having discussions with my father about infinity as young as 6, but I didn't really start exploring infinity for myself until my mid teens. It would be interesting to see how your kids thoughts change as they mature.
Who cares what other people do? What are you going to do? Are you incapable of leveraging from an intro course in Japanese into anything you want? If so, why do you think you're going to do any better in a formal environment either? It's not like they crack open your head and pour pure distilled knowledge into it while you passively sit back and just take it in.

Also, I think people are fundamentally missing the comparitive here. My claim is not that learning humanities is "easy". Nothing worth doing is easy. My contention is that it is easier to learn math, engineering, and science in school and study humanities on your own that to learn humanities in school and then try to break into math, engineering, and science on your own.

And as I watch the conversation flow here, bear in mind I do mean "math, engineering, and science" here and not just "programming". Which is easier to do on your own, learn Japanese from scratch enough to get a relevant job, or learn biochemistry from scratch enough to get a relevant job? (Note we're also discussing "learning Japanese" as an extreme in the humanities but I consider "biochemistry" an average sort of what I'm talking about.) And part of my "easier" also encompasses the fact that life is a lot easier when you have a job and a paycheck. Someone who actually has leisure time due to not working two-and-a-half jobs and who is much more relaxed about paying off their loans will find it easier to spend their leisure time learning things.
Likewise "To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure" [1].

[1]https://www.amazon.co.uk/Forgive-Design-Understanding-Failur...
There's one https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services/en-us/bing-imag...
I've been down on Hangouts due to it's bugginess but pretty much have to use it due to Project Fi. I they came out with something as rock solid as WhatsApp but with bots I would be on board again.
TN panels are usually horrible, as they have (in landscape mode) a very limited viewing angle up or down before colours start to shift or parts of the screen appear way darker than others.

IPS panels should work without a problem in both landscape and portrait mode.
> that everyone here would agree is dumb

Trigger warning: I don't agree. And I think your tone is a bit aggressive.
There remain significant markets where DRM improves ROI. There are countless others where it doesn't and the people involved are too stupid to see the writing on the wall. Regardless of the end game, the people playing the DRM game are making more money in a day than the EFF raises in a year.
Really great explication of the collapsing of responsibilities of mobile development. Remedies, as always, involve educating the client. Makes sense to me.
Yes, and it's scoped by either domain or (rarely used) types from the schema.org ontology. You can't use it to just search the web.
I see climate change denial as an example of a cargo cult.

I suspect that the majority of believers in all cargo cults don't independently come up with the same idea, someone will think of it and the rest will follow them. The followers were in a clientelist relationship with the leader and want that to continue and keep providing them with the cargo in future.

Maybe we need to look at the education of the kind of people who end up as our leaders.
Buying index funds in downturns provides more ling term value than buying the same index fund when markets are good.
I forget if it was Planet Money or Freakonomics, but there was a podcast about the ROI of learning a foreign language and according to the research they cited the only foreign language worth learning from a pure ROI perspective was English.
Wouldn't it be easier if they generated the dom elements via JS? That would imply that they're getting a JSON or something like, parsing it and creating the DOM.
Multitasking is actually kind of a problem – for kids and adults
Aurelia (http://aurelia.io) is the ONLY framework that I have seen where you DON'T see the framework when you look through the code. You see YOUR app and YOUR logic. To me this is incredibly important for the longevity and simplicity of your code base. Please people, do yourselves a favor and checkout Aurelia.
In 50 years the whole society will have realised the stupidity of DRMs in the early days of the Internet.

What we "need" to show how bad DRM are is the bankruptcy of something like Amazon or even Google, and look at the impact that will make if all of those servers were wiped.
Sotsukon: graduating from marriage in Japan
Yeah, I have been doing BJJ for 8 years and just got my black belt. Recently started kickboxing too. On the side I jog and lift weights and do a handful of other sports for fun. I think of it as "training" as opposed to "exercise".
Transporting electricity is not trivial.
I suspect BWM hopes it is. BMW sells to a lot of auto enthusiasts, i.e. people who willingly pay a premium above and beyond what is strictly needed for transportation. These people want their car, and BMW provides these people with that.

Meanwhile, a growing group of people recognize that the average car sits parked, taking up land and depreciating, 95% of the time, and are turning to services such as Lyft, Uber, and Car2go. Once the self-driving car is ready, these fleets will use that convenience to utilize their capital assets at a rate greater than 5%. They, and the consumers who no longer are forced to buy 95% more car than they need, will split the efficiency gains. That 95% under-utilization is the transportation provider's opportunity frontier.

On the flip side, the manufacturers are forced into another kind of game. That same opportunity frontier for Lyft-Autonomous is roughly related to the contraction in manufacturing that auto manufacturers will see. My guess is that every auto manufacturer is dreading the autonomous car, while simultaneously investing to have one.

So of course BMW wants to cast autonomous cars as far future sci-fi. My guess is that their estimation of their own autonomous capabilities is presented much more optimistically to shareholders.
I would like to see fMRI studies on how human experience the infinite or perhaps near infinite. There is an instinctual appeal of vastness (near infinite, perceptually infinite?) - mountains are climbed, sunsets into far away horizons over seemingly infinite oceans, skyscrapers are built and their height and subsequent view are valued,... - These are times when humans first experience vastness which may trigger pathways in the brain related to comprehending / thinking about the infinite. I would like to see is the parts of the brain associated with self-awareness are active during these experiences.
Working with Email Addresses (And Other Case-Insensitive Data) in PostgreSQL
Yes, it is.

Spotify is saying "You may download this, but this program under someone else's control will forcefully delete this data from your machine"

My machine is my own. If I wish to grant other users access to the machine or data on it, cool. That's my choice. If I buy a program to do a task, good. When your program starts taking orders from "nameless faceless someone else", we have problems.

Locked in APIs are just as much as a scourge. When you use them, you're locking yourself into an ecosystem that will go away. It's not a matter of if, but when. I'm less hesitant when these APIs used are standards compliant (where I can go 'down the street' and plug in their credential info)... But that's not where money is.

Lockin is where the money is. And I'll fight it tooth and nail. I already am doing the fight against bad IoT.
I said I am for safe spaces in general, though I feel they're being abused. What I decried was trigger warnings and the failing of the adults that brought up people that think they need a trigger warning.
Is DRM required for streaming services you describe to exist?
It makes sense. But it will most certainly scare away the small players.

But how many big big/entreprise clients do they have? If you have any insights how much of their massive profit comes from those 50 dollars WP plugins?