skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not an American, but isn't it likely that a student who owns nothing, just out of college, can easily declare bankruptcy, get out of his student loans and lose nothing, and then start a life?
Yes and no. The lecture part can certainly be disrupted, but the most successful learning experiences I had in university were during face-to-face problem solving sessions with other classmates, small group discussion, and participating in a community of learners of a shared subject. There's also the challenges of learning that occurs through labs and other manipulation of the physical world that is hard to replicate online. I think you could see significant disruption in the lower-division, large-lecture classes, but upper-division classes, hands-on labs and small-group discussions and seminars will continue to benefit from physical proximity.
Considering the collateral against that student loan debt is nothing (hence them not being dischargeable in bankruptcy), I would think it's much worse than an increase in mortgage values. Of course, there have been other articles on the HN front page as recently as today talking about rising home costs as well.

America (and the world? I don't feel qualified to say that) has a very odd relationship with debt, and it's driving all sorts of weird societal behaviors, like taking $100k+ in debt to get a college degree. I don't forsee it ending well.
University is about signalling not education (for the most part). University administrators are a large part of the cost increase.
>But I've got off-site automatic backups, so I'll never pay the ransom.

That's irrelevant though if they can also get all your credentials, stuff in the Keychain et al -- as they apparently did with the Handbreak malware.
Except, you know...software engineer, IT, DevOps, Infosec, WebDev, etc.
Well, my point (and Pettis's) is that causality runs the other way: we have debt in the US because non-US entities (individuals, businesses, and governments) continue to invest money here. That investment results in spending in excess of production, i.e., debt.

It plays out in government spending, household debt, corporate debt, and the exact distribution is a function of internal dynamics. But the entire amounts must balance, and must balance with the US accruing more debt.
I'm hopeful that with official support this process will become smoother
full writeup here https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/lolas-s.... no idea if this is related or not but "slavename" is the same
wake up its showbiz to distract the sheeps. same old divide and conquer trick.

Putin is just playing his controlled opposition role for the NWO
banking cabal.
Why Putin was named Man of the Year 2015 in Israel? because he supports Syria?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evKgpSjzgBw

find out who financed the Bolshevic revolution, and benefit from cold war.
None of the Adobe core apps is Cloud based. They are ordinary programs that run natively and download on your machine --
they just have a subscription model that checks your license over the internet, and for that they called the suite "Creative Cloud".
Largely because of the perverse incentives to declare bankruptcy immediately upon graduation. Think about it: no major purchase on the horizon, such as a mortgage- why not just ditch the loan if it's only going to hurt your credit file temporarily?

Call it a slippery slope fallacy, but it's not fallacious when you realize we are rational beings (for the most part) and this loophole is attractive.
I did the exact same thing -- ask for a battery replacement a month after the warranty expired -- and they said yes. I think they basically have a silent recall situation on early 6Ps, regardless of warranty.
Ubuntu asking which Gnome extension they should ship
The problem still is someone thinking they're running your sandboxed application and not thinking too much about it and typing in the admin password to continue only to find that they installed some nasty malware.
Yeah, that's why I said "really". It's an hour outside the city ("30 minutes from Vancouver" my ass) and is a sad excuse for a zoo, especially given the price of admission.
>despite the fact that it regularly has internet access, wtf Adobe

There's Adobe's update etc. app that needs to run that checks for that, it's not the individual apps themselves.
I agree! His simple-but-not-too-simple model to explain international macro economics is really great, and happens to explain a lot of the dynamics of what we see these days.

It's appealing intellectually; I like small and simple models. I suppose if we see a major dislocation in the Chinese economy in the next 2-3 years, his model will be extra-confirmed. (That's a major point he makes on his blog.)
Verbling is hiring a VP of Sales
I'd say it's because of lobbyists for that industry. But these loans used to be all guaranteed the government. At least that changed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loans_in_the_United_St...

So now, I guess, lenders at least need to consider whether a student is a flight risk. If not, they'll eventually be able to collect, presumably.

We should have a marketplace where the normal incentives exist. Does an educational plan make sense? Does the student have aptitude and work ethic for the chosen career? Will there be a job waiting for this student when they graduate?

If bankruptcy were possible, these questions would be more important.
> I do not think we are anywhere close to a DIY subatomic particle detector

You've probably got one in your pocket already

https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.2895
Do you by chance have hard numbers about SHA2 with/without hardware instructions and BLAKE2 on a specific Intel CPU?

I've wondered about trade off between SHA256 vs BLAKE2. In the future there'll be no debate since more and more computers will have SHA instructions. But right now I'm wondering about the speedup of BLAKE2 vs SHA256 with hardware. On the other hand, many computers, especially servers don't have SHA2 instructions for the foreseeable future which will make BLAKE2 a very good option.
I self-identify as liberal and not progressive, for the most part, but I still consider myself to be on the left, not on the middle.

For the most part, my politics are similar to progressives - higher taxes, public healthcare, more expansive welfare (I support UBI), and social justice in general.

The reason why I don't consider myself a progressive is that I feel that the progressive ideology in US has largely abandoned the traditional concept of natural individual rights in pursuit of all these goals. You have people openly claiming that freedom of speech is not worth it if it gets in the way of criminalizing offensive speech, for example. Or how due process is an outdated notion that makes it hard to prosecute sexual harassment properly. Basically, the further left you go with progressives, the more individual rights are sacrificed to collective ones.

That, to me, is the line past which you can no longer meaningfully call yourself a liberal, since liberalism is all about individual rights, ultimately. Where left-wing and right-wing liberals differ is on the matter on how to best maximize those rights, and to what extent government regulation is advantageous or detrimental to that, especially on economic matters.

And, to some extent, on what those rights are, precisely - for example, I don't consider property rights to be fundamental natural rights (but then again, neither did Thomas Jefferson, and he sure wasn't left-wing!). Note, it doesn't mean that property is a bad idea - I think it's a social construct that is broadly useful, it's just not an absolute right (and hence taxation and wealth redistribution is not inherently an infringement on such).
I have a feeling Google customer support problems will only be fixed when they solve AI in the next few years.
I found this comment on Quora:

Through 1992, the top 50 colleges in the USA got together each year to collude on:
amount of tuition
base salary for assistant professors
preventing any bidding wars for applicants

Then the Federal government sued and put a stop to that.
However, by that point the tuition was way out of whack and the private elite colleges are still allowed to increase tuition at a rate that is above the inflation rate, therefore keeping tuition very high.

At the same time the endowments have increased to huge amounts.

Elite colleges are being run like corporations with the goal to maximize income and continually increase the endowment.

Therefore, tuition will continue to rise (as every college uses the elite private college tuition as their yardstick) until the Federal government sues and forces the elite colleges to reduce their endowment by using the money to reduce tuition.

Elite colleges will gobble up all the money that they are allowed to........

https://www.quora.com/Why-have-college-costs-increased-so-dr...

Gov intervention is probably needed.
I was with you until the end. What policy proposals do you think would realistically restore 5-6% growth?
What's the reason it was retracted? My vision is not so great (not being sarcastic sorry if it sounds as such).

http://oatext.com/pdf/JTS-3-186.pdf
http://oatext.com/pdf/JTS-3-187.pdf
Surprised why more Americans don't explore colleges in low tuition countries.
Yes there's dilution, but ~50% of the company being gone after a couple million dollars raised is not a good thing
> whatever dumb writer that knows nothing about my toolset

I consider Steve Yegge to be one of the smartest writers I've ever read on the subject of programming. You might disagree, but I would recommend looking for his previous writing (which I'm not sure is still available). You may find he has a better understanding of your toolset than you presume.

Or possibly not. I personally miss his rants.
The 4 Metrics That Really Matter for Your SaaS Startup
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Ok, I think I accept your point about distinguishing a symmetrical concept of "change" applied to asymmetrical things from a truly asymmetrical concept of change. That clarifies what I was getting at in my last paragraph. But I am still surprised to see it as a characterisation of the A vs. B debate[1]

So please help me check I am understanding the terms of that debate correctly.

(1) Even if it is not the way you explain it to students, do you accept my claim that A-theory considers time and change as being more fundamental than physics?

(2) If I further said "... as opposed to considering time change to be properties of the history of the universe", then would you accept the implied dichotomy?

[1] And I say the A-B is in turn not truly a debate reality of time, which was just an unfortunate framing by McTaggart.
> The problem is the career value of a degree has not diminished, it's a bit of a network effect really. Maybe people can get hired from Coursera certificates, I would certainly consider it if I was a hiring manager.

A university degree tells me three things a Coursera certificate doesn't:

1. A graduate have more breadth and depth in a given major. Standford's CS course includes math, physics, engineering, programming theory, data structures, algorithms, etc. (Just picked Stanford's program at random, not advocating they're perfect)

2. A graduate has exposure to multiple topics/subjects, and hopefully has some critical thinking skills. A Coursera cert doesn't do that.

3. Somebody graded them. It wasn't some massive online system.

Maybe other people don't care about these things, but as a former manager, I've found these qualities produce a better well rounded individual in the workplace. There are exceptions to the rule, of course, but that's my experience.

To your point: All these things can be replaced, but I'd argue micro-degrees don't do that.

I do hope this is solved: The price is crazy.

[1] http://csmajor.stanford.edu/Requirements.shtml
Maybe you could set up a cheap hybrid - get students together in one place to work together on MOOCs, and have some strict admission standards to ensure that the students are high quality. This would be a draw to high quality students, and help replace some of the signaling value of elite schools.
Well, I'm designing my own AI engine from scratch, not using any of the current machine learning techniques, i.e. Convolutional Neural Networks, etc. Right now the way my code works is that it uses cores to make the whole training faster, ans xeon's have lots of cores. If I could use GPU's I would, maybe I can and I just need to figure it out. For now the simplest thing to do to make it faster is to add more cores.

Now, you may think I'm crazy for designing something from scratch, I may be indeed, but how else can we discover/invent something totally new. I think I'm actually onto something given that the early results look quite promising.

I actually created a video demonstration of my AI Engine which you can find a link to it in my profile but I have done a crappy job of explaining the strengths of it [1]. Too much work, so little time.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHNdIuBJHTo
I should point out I'm conflating things a bit; there are transactions involving US dollars that never come home. For example, US dollar-denominated transactions between business entities; those dollars are simply recycled. They don't have a major effect on capital balance, as the dollars are simply a medium of exchange.

The larger effect, though, is money that actually gets deployed in the US. Again, that can happen via purchase of debt, purchase of equities (stocks, or even companies), purchase of assets (homes, etc), purchase of debt itself (buying up US consumers' credit card debt). Because the financial markets in the US are deep and liquid, it doesn't matter where those investments occur; they aren't distorting, because yield-seeking investors will (theoretically) respond to the reduced yield in the particular asset and invest elsewhere. In the meantime, the total flows must still balance, so that inflow results in debt somewhere in the economy.

Hope that helps...
>So the investigation goes on, even though last week it wasn't supposed to according to the same sources.

None of those sources once claimed the investigation would stop. Richard Nixon also fired people to TRY to stop the Watergate investigation.

Assuming there's any chance at all of collusion with Russia, Rosenstein would be an absolute idiot to not appoint special counsel. Even if there weren't the possibility of him facing prison time for his role in the firing of Comey, he'd have a REAL tough time finding a job again with his name attached to this debacle (again, assuming there actually is something to the Russia story).

As for the let him go - serious question, is English not your first language? Trump is asking him to "Let him go" as in drop the investigation into Flynn's ties to Russia, not "Let him go" as in fire Flynn. If you're reading the articles that should be obvious.

Again, I can only imagine the reason you're having a tough time making sense of the stories is because you haven't bothered to read them. You're either only reading headlines, or you're only reading conservative news sites that have done a VERY poor (or I guess technically good), and VERY intentional job of misrepresenting what the rest of the news world is reporting.
I believe there's a gaping hole because there is little demand.

Rabid radical idiots inflame passions, drive engagement, sharing, etc. Rationalism and thoughtfulness simply can't compete. It's too hard and complicated.

I've seen many websites go this way. Some choose to misrepresent issues to rile up their user base. I've stopped patronizing sites that I contributed to for over a decade as a result.

Always remember the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect:

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

― Michael Crichton
gov intervention in easy money in the form of student loans and tax-payer backed private student loans is what caused it to be begin with.
Yes, see http://www.erights.org/talks/polaris.pdf from 2006 for a design like that. (I'm pointing to how it linked piercing the sandbox to normal user interactions with system-provided file-save dialogs and such; their way of sandboxing Windows XP isn't very relevant now.)

Nowadays there's Sandstorm with a similar model for networked apps. https://sandstorm.io/how-it-works
Considering how effective his previous lawsuits have been, it might be a good way to claim malfeasance by a 3rd party (even if it isn't the one who might be blackmailing him).

A show of force is always satisfying for a big ego.
If it is worth it then why complain so much ?
"Free" meaning coercion via the state to fund other people's pursuits. Perhaps we should look at why costs are rising?
People need to seriously evaluate if it's really needed for them. I reject your notion that everyone, or even most people need a college degree. (I didn't, and I live quite comfortably thanks to tech with a 6 figure salary)

Part of the problem is exactly that we're subsidizing many people, forcing more scarcity and leading to higher prices. Using force to make someone else pay for my stuff isn't something I want to condone.
> Memories fade, but at this point I hazard a guess that even Google's own employees don't believe that their search doesn't favor them.

I am a former Google employee, and your guess is wrong, in my experience. Most I've interacted with on this topic correctly perceive Google search results as important to maintain as neutral, given the consequences for not doing so.

This thread started as discussing search engine ranking for .ai. A claim was then made that Google always prioritizes its own properties, and the person who made that claim discarded the context of search results. We're now talking about Google+ sidebars/shopping boxes, Android integrations, and so on -- that was not at all what I'm talking about. I'm specifically countering the notion that PageRank is manipulated to support Google properties. That's all.

I'm not here to defend Google. (I am actually quite negative on Google.) I'm arresting the claim that Google manipulates search results to promote its own properties, because that's just fake news. Sorry. I am aware the EU and others considered Google+ sidebars and Google Shopping boxes as manipulating results, but they are orthogonal and only manipulate results technically. There is absolutely no code in search that adds PageRank to a property simply because it is owned by Google, and the burden is on the person making that claim to back it up.
I'm playing around with a client-side js implementation of this at https://www.robosheets.com/

It's not production ready / launched yet, but it's getting there.

I'd be interested to finds (or really doesn't find) this useful :)
I'd still be using my Nexus 5 if all the antennas embedded in the back plate hadn't started losing their connections (no wireless charging, wifi and GPS signal are super-spotty).
>How does one realistically protect against these new attack vectors? It's all become so quick - the malware infects your machine, and seconds later your repos are cloned.

1) Don't install random crap off of the internet: only use the Mac App Store, with sandboxed apps and "System integrity protection" turned on.

2) If you absolutely need to have some non-MAS app, check the checksum, download the DMG, but let it rest, and only install it a month or so later, if no news of breach, malware etc has been announced.

3) Don't give a third party program root privileges -- don't give your credentials when a random program you've downloaded asks for them.

4) Have any sensitive data (e.g. work stuff, etc) on an encrypted .DMG volume or similar, that you only decrypt when you need to check something. Even if your mac is infected, they'll either get just an encrypted image of those, or wont be able to read it at all.

5) Install an application firewall, like Little Snitch.

6) Keep backups.
I agree with you 100%, but MOOCs aren't necessarily the only option for educational innovation. The idea of Minerva (students still live together, but the university moves around the world) sounds interesting to me, even though it is not at all less expensive. These sort of things were never technically possible until well after the university system became entrenched. Another option is internships or entrepreneurship, what the Thiel Fellowship encourages. Chris Olah is a employee of special note at Google Brain. He never finished college, and he had the smart idea to basically reinvent scientific publishing.
Judge Explores Boundaries of Authorship with Nods to 'Star Wars'
> Gov intervention is probably needed.

The government interventino has been the problem, as you just exposed.

Let people default on their student debt with 5 years of bad credit, and colleges will fix themselves.
For Android, just use it's UI toolkit. It'll work better than trying to shoehorn a 3rd party thing in.
Done! I added some GIFs that show the plugins at work.

How do they look?
Intentional talent drain. A tiny bit of anecdotal information from a talk given by a couple of Pixar artists was that if you were an artist, you could get paid 30% more in Southern California than at Pixar in Emeryville. Also talked to an engineer who left Pixar for Google. I think Bob Iger doesn't want an independent and powerful Pixar.
$600B additional student debt over 10 years sounded high to me, so I did the ballpark check.

$600B over 10 years is $60B/year.

There are about 20 million college students [1].

That means $3000 per student per year on average.

If loans are paid back over 10-20 years, this really says that students are borrowing $3000 more per year than they were 10-20 years ago.

The article suggested that borrowing was about $600B total, 10 years ago, so essentially it has doubled. FWIW, CPI inflation over the last 20 years is ~50%, the other 50% is either real increase in borrowing or due to the fact that college tuition rates have been increasing faster than inflation.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372
Most of my experience is from Python. Each time I use it I have to look at the docs for etree (a library that ships with Python). We would hit performance and feature support issues with etree and tried lxml but had binary compatibility issues between our environments.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python[1] (a popular reference for Python) recommends untangle[2] and xmltodict[3], neither of which I've used.

I feel like in other languages I've used had similar brittleness when dealing with xml. I might be biased because working with xml in an editor it's difficult to validate visually or grok in general when used in practice.

[1] http://python-guide-pt-br.readthedocs.io/en/latest/scenarios...

[2] https://untangle.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[3] https://github.com/martinblech/xmltodict
Workbox – JS libraries for PWAs