skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you're overestimating the annual cost of school. I know it doesn't cost $25k/yr for me to go. I pay around $6k/yr for tuition, plus another $1k or so for books. According to College Board [1], that's about $1k less than the average for a student going to a public school, in-state.

Your figure matches about what it costs to go to a private school, but, from my experience, public schools are also more likely to give scholarships [2]. Even still, no one is forced to go to a private school.

[1]: http://www.collegeboard.com/student/pay/add-it-up/4494.html

[2]: I went to a private school my first year. It was around $30k/yr, but I was also given a scholarship that cut that price to around $18k/yr. Most of the people I met on campus also received scholarships of some sort as well.
The Univ of California system adds a "professional fee" to certain graduate programs (MD, JD, MBA, etc) that expected to have higher earnings.
Makes you wonder what will happen next. Will a high placed Google exec resign out of principle? Will there be any public statements by people such as Vint Cerf about what they believe that conflict with other statements by google execs?

I'd be really interested to know where he stands, he seems to be a very ethical person.
This doesn't exactly answer your question, but this Bing-based live search is pretty awesome: http://www.istartedsomething.com/livesearch/
Wow, I started reading this without looking at the bottom to see what the proposed solution was. It turns out there is none.

Still, it was pretty interesting for the quick analysis of the various ways that an open source programming language's basic libraries are currently developed.
I have an idea. Apply for some job that you are totally unqualified for (most will seem this way). When you finally get the email from the hiring manager telling you that you're not qualified, start an email dialogue with her about how you applied to the job in order to meet the hiring manager. If she is impressed with your motivation and ingenuity, you may just wind up with an internship somewhere.
I graduated in 3.5 years and school cost 17k/year. Also, opportunity costs is not 25K because you still have basic cost of living either way and you can work in the summer.

So run those numbers assuming school costs of 15K, opportunity costs of 5k, 23K earnings differential, and student loan costs of 3.5% tax deductable.

PS: A friend of mine worked his way through school making 7.50$ an hour as a cook at without student loans. He worked 80hours a week in the summer and 40 hours a week during school and graduated in 4.5 years. He also lived in a trailer with his wife and child and got an internship his senior year at 13$ an hour it was a major pay raise.
$35 android based tablet makes an appearance on an Indian TV show
I switched from Google Reader to Friendfeed about two months ago. So far, it's a much better fit for me. It looks and feels like Twitter but you can add RSS feeds (using the "imaginary friends" feature). Like Twitter, there's no "unread items" counter, if you skip something it just drops off the page.
Email sent. Look for crgwbr [at] gmail [dot] com
My thoughts exactly...I'm sure he'll be carrying extra weight but I still don't see how this is possible given a certain terminal velocity, like you said.

*Edit...wikipedia says current world record is 614 mph set by Joseph Kittinger. He used the head down method in high altitude, less dense air. That's still not supersonic though.
Read the data and convert it to binary numbers.
Use teddy bears for encoding the data. Each teddy bear has another color which represents a sequence of numbers, e.g. yellow is 1010101011101, blue 10101011010101010101010 and so on. We have 16777216 color possibilites with the normal rgb or cmyk color mode. I believe that is more than enough to encode the data (altough I didn't check it).

Easy isn't it? ;)
I think you've done this backwards... problems that need solving tend to come with their own niche - the people who want the solution.

I actually intentionally worded it backwards from the usual as a minor form of headline bait, which failed. The app really should have broad appeal among people who frequent the web in general. That group of people is just too varied and spread out to help each other find links through Jellly. Hence the need to focus on a smaller, more closely knit group.

Not all apps fit the "solve a pain point" model that paid web applications go through. While pain killers are great money makers for sure, sometimes you don't know you'd want to use an app till you've tried it and see why it would be useful. These apps have a lower chance to succeed I guess, but they can be great when they do.

I know there's nobody dying to have this service. But Twitter comes to mind as another application that people thought was mostly useless. That is, until some of them used it (I know most people still think it's useless, but many obviously don't).

Advertising fits perfectly here, since the service is there for relevant links. The advertising would consist of relevant text links, similar to search ads. Mass adoption would be necessary for large profits, but I believe it's possible to break even much earlier, using advertising networks to start advertising early on.
Hey, you're the one who worked there :)

Personally, I value large chunks of the education I got in college, and think the majority of it had some value. I dunno how that value compares to the cost, and I've never seriously considered graduate school of any kind because the (tuition + lost earning) changes a bunch once you have a job.

I was mostly commenting that I thought a lot of the liberal arts education was just as valuable as the technology education, provided that I actually learned the tech so I could get a job. I learned a lot about music, literature and history that I'll have for my whole life, and that I really wouldn't have gotten off my duff to learn on my own.
7 years between point releases?
I would honestly love to do that, but with my current savings ($), I simply can't without a job lined up.
Vector Linux 6.0 “SOHO” Screenshots
Good point. Added the blurb to the blog, but couldn't find a quick way of adding a link. That might require theme customisation. (Or am I wrong?)
Lifetime earnings should be a better predictor than median salary at a given point in one's career given the point made upthread about unemployment being lower for college graduates.

Even if diploma-wielding programmers can command high salaries in boom times, they have a tougher time getting jobs when there are unemployed programmers with degrees applying for the same jobs during a recession.
So the lambda functions are implemented in a way that only really works with templates and you have to explicitly pass scope? I don't really write C++ "natively," but this seems awkward to me, particularly vis-a-vis Apple's implementation of blocks in C. Does it look better to anyone who has a better handle on the feel of idiomatic C++?
Sure, I've encountered lots of stupid opinions that don't make the least bit of sense in reality.

There's exactly one country in the world that just plain does not have taxes: Somalia.

It's a reasonable (but silly and immature) opinion to demand that the country slashes taxes in, say, half, without outlining the spending cuts. Demanding that they're slashed by 100% is just madness.
The Vietname video reminded me of chapter 2 of Ikaruga, my favorite video game stage and not a good model for urban traffic planners.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-zSi0xt9fY
This is exactly why I think this kind of article is appropriate for HN. If you know as an entrepreneur that you are operating in a closing window of opportunity before the big crash comes, how does this affect your startup decisionmaking? Are you building with the people on Flippa.com in mind or the fine folkds at the Long Now?
Webshell for node.js
Why did this get bad reviews when its the truth.
Plus, it's illegal is most places to work on "real work" if you're not getting paid.

The way this is phrased seems to imply that the person doing the work is doing something illegal. I believe that only the employer is violating the law in this case.

It's an important distinction: if you feel the arrangement is in your interest, the illegality is the employer's problem, not yours. That said, if you can actually produce working code, your time is valuable and you should not work for a for-profit business without appropriate compensation.
Seconded, plus if you do ever need to use Google, try http://scroogle.org or http://ixquick.com instead. Both anonymously scrape results from Google and don't keep records.
It may look like that today, but when you pitch investors you sell them on the team, the market and the vision. You paint a compelling picture of how you get from where you are today to somewhere incredibly exciting.
"My husband is a programmer; I have no idea what that means."
I'm curious to see the quality of Blekko search which is supposed to be launching soon...

http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/19/techcrunch-review-the-blekk...
The air's much thinner up there (99% of the atmosphere is below 20 miles up: http://www.albany.edu/faculty/rgk/atm101/structur.htm). Also important -- the 120 mph seems to be in a spreadeagle position.
http://gigablast.com/
Kittinger wasn't as high up, the extra height should give Baumgartner more time to build speed.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1593343

on the front page of Ask HN
Well said. This is exactly what I meant.
Aw man, I tried it in my browser, but of course it worked there. :(

Thanks for helping!
Copied from the other thread on this topic.

Vietnam: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mr5Gssaxl6g

Ikaruga: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-zSi0xt9fY
I agree that the housing/credit bubble is not an example of capitalism... rather, it's the result of central planning that is heavily influenced by the building trade, realtors, various social planners, etc.

The planners did not anticipate the self-reenforcing nature of the small price increases their machinations were causing, and before long boom, it burst and prices went down a lot.

Surely bubbles existed before central banking and affordable housing policies, but bad planning appears to make them bigger/worse than would otherwise be possible. It may also lead to greater average stability, who knows.

I think it's an interesting thought experiment to consider what would be a capitalist utopia. Literature is full of socialist style utopias, but it's harder to imagine one under capitalism.

If WalMart moves us further from such a utopia, what does the utopia look like? Is it mom 'n pop shops everywhere and extremely expensive search costs and high markup?

I find myself thinking that a capitalist utopia would have a high percentage of workers as freelancers and there would be lots of ongoing learning, and one might decide to change careers far later in life, etc.

To me Wal-Mart helps to usher in that era by freeing up lots of capital that was previously not all that productive (with a lot of fat added to the supply chain) which can now be used for other, higher, more utopian purposes.
Terminal velocity depends on the drag/friction from the air, at higher altitudes the air is thinner. So less drag and higher terminal velocity.

The current world record is ~600 mph.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_velocity#Examples
I think I'll be adding my demo to the home page soon, once I polish it. Otherwise, it can be pretty confusing.

There is probably going to be more than one way to use it, but the main way would be a browser extension. A web toolbar is also going to be there for people who don't like installing extensions, to get them started fast. You can see the demo of that (only shows you how you might browse through, had no functionality to add links): http://prettyobscure.jellly.com/

Let me know if it makes any more sense after trying the demo :)
That's a mistake to stop using your favorite tool just because you politically disagree with the company.
BTW, "Net neutrality" by itself is not necessarily a good thing. Enforcing "Net neutrality" requires government regulation, and government regulations tend to not end good.
this looks very nice, is it getting results just from Bing? Would be nice to get results from different search engines.
Thanks
2011 SXSW PanelPicker Voting Has Begun
Who at HN has a panel?
People walking on the edge of a 100' drop tend to walk very carefully. The end result of this sort of reasoning is a steel spike sticking out of the steering wheel in the place where the airbag sits now.
Who at HN has a panel? Please post yours!

Here's mine:

"Bootstrapped to Millions of Dollars in Profit"

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/7666

Featuring Carbonmade, Wufoo, Harvest, and HypeMachine
Please god - just one more bubble.
... Windows Phone 7 will be the easiest mobile platform to develop for
I hear rave reviews about the recently-revamped Hotmail, but haven't quite overcome my prejudice against the brand to try it.
I've been using Bing for search on both desktop and my iPhone, ever since it became an option in Safari. It's actually pretty good. At first I would flip back to Google pretty often when I doubted the quality of the Bing results, but the Google results were rarely better (subjectively) and were sometimes worse in such cases.
Are these lambdas going to be same as blocks on iOS?
Aren't you assuming it wouldn't be even worse with traffic controls? Developing countries deal with the rapid increase of car ownership leading to road capacity issues pretty quickly.
What is the ?t=mattc58 good for in the URL? Just curious.
Also, adding links to other blog posts responding/reacting to posts in what I'm reading.
I've been using them for a while now (gcc has support) and they're not awkward. The ability to specify scope is actually rather nice and most of the time you'll either leave the scope empty with [] or pass everything in by value [=] or reference [&]. The return type of the lambda function is also usually detectable by the compiler so you only need to specify it rarely.
That's funny because I have never gotten a single spam email on my fastmail account ever (and yes I do use it on a regular basis).
As mentioned in the article, Kittinger "only" jumped from 102,800 feet. Baumgartner will jump from 120,000. Also, Kittinger was in a "rocking chair" position, not head-down. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Kittinger)
Well, enforcing freedom and human rights also requires government regulation.
Cross posted from the blog's comments:

Stop calling them programmers. That's the first step to motivating them. Your job is not synonymous with the act; there is a lot more to application development than the actual writing of the code.
The terminal velocity is much higher in this case because the skydiver is assuming a position that minimizes drag and the air is much less dense at the altitudes in question. Additionally, the lower temperature reduces the speed of sound in a smaller but still significant degree.
How would this deal with ads? I'm supposing they'd want the ads on even the smallest screens. Would the publisher have to provide a range of different ad sizes?
quantity != quality
Have projects you can list on your resume. There's no rule that says only jobs can be listed on a resume!

Seconded heartily.

My resume's Projects section includes unpaid and paid creations. The Employment section then became mostly concerned with the roles and tasks I performed rather than the systems I created.

Once I reorganized my resume in this way, the whole thing suddenly made much more sense. I think it really works for you to have the recruiter/employer see so clearly that you actually Make Shit.
I can attest that the InDinero team has been super responsive to our small business.

In addition to the prompt & steady flow of email dialogue, Jessica has actually called us a few times to get feedback and they've already started implementing the features we've requested.

Just wanted to share another customer service related experience with them.

-We have absolutely no affiliation with InDinero or any of its employees.
A fun hack he put it to make a leaderboard of people who talk about DDG. It's at http://duckduckgo.com/spread.html.
5 Tips To Supercharge Your Call-To-Action Buttons
It's been almost a year since I switched to DuckDuckGo (http://www.cloudknow.com/2010/04/duckduckgo-as-my-primary-se...)

Heck, if Gabriel started charging users for the service, I would gladly pay him.
Do you have a different personality when you speak a different language?
Congrats to the founders. Great insight on really how Heroku can be beneficial.
sephr's law: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of sephr's law being mentioned approaches one."
Facebook Breaks With Google on Net Neutrality
Website Lets Students Gamble on Their Grades
Bing is fine for search most of the time, and the odd time when it isn't I revert to Google. The thing I don't have a replacement for is Google Calendar which is great. But: I don't like Google knowing exactly what I'm doing every day!
Reflecting on 3 Years At Facebook
Requiring the use of templates (or std::function) is how closures work in C++ already. The new lambda syntax is just a (much) easier way to create closures, so it suffers from some of the same problems. I've never found wrapping things in std::function to be much of a problem, though.

You can "explicitly" pass all variables in the containing scope with [=] or [&], so it's more of an optional annotation than a requirement.
A Magazine Meant for Mobile
Yeah, no one whose parents make less than $100k/yr pays more than $20k/yr, even at the pricey private liberal arts schools.
The Biggest Brands on Foursquare (and Facebook and Twitter)
Sailplane Launches Itself With Retractable Jet
I feel like there are insightful analogies to made here to net neutrality...
Student loans are a rip-off. The market is set up in such a way that to get jobs you have to have a degree, and to get a degree you have to borrow a bunch of money so that you can pay your way through school if your parents aren't wealthy enough.

The end result is that you'll be beholden to a bank for a good sized portion of your life (as if having a mortgage or rent isn't enough to hold you down).

Smart societies have free education, and their schools may not be always as good as those that you pay for with half of your life or so but they're adequate enough.

The main reason why education should be free is because education not being free creates an inequality between people born rich and people born poor, the poor will end up getting their education but pay for that with a significant portion of their time later on, the rich don't care.
All these links are awesome, any more?
Just to clarify: I have nothing against you and your team. Good luck to you and kudos!

It's just that I remember a time when starting a business meant creating a product, finding a market and people in that market willing to pay for your product.

I completely fail to see any of that in your case. But maybe building a feature for an existing product of a company in the idea of selling to that company IS a viable business model.

And maybe I am getting old...
The only thing keeping me on gmail right now is the spam filter, which seems to be the best on the planet. Can anyone recommend an alternative filter?

(been using DDG for search for about 6 months now, rarely if ever get better results on google)
That only proves that the test was poor, not the theory.
Again, it's not true. He's just converting the potential energy stored with the aid of a machine into kinetic energy.
Seconding this. DDG is awesome. The zero-click info is often very nice, I love the keyboard shortcuts (though there's a google keyboard shortcuts experiment), and !bang[1] is really awesome. There's a bunch of other occasionally-useful goodies[2]. It'll do disambiguation if you search something with many meanings (eg. Ruby). Infinite pagination.

I switched a month or 2 ago, and I've been very happy. And if I search for something and don't like the results, I hit / (the keyboard shortcut to select the text of the search box), hit right-arrow (to get my cursor to the end of the search box), add a "!g" to the end, and hit enter. And then I usually find that google's results are just as bad :)

1: http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

2: http://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html
I just passed the 3 year mark not too long ago, I wish I felt like that about my time where I am. What an experience that must be to come in at that time in Facebook and come from an amazing place such as Google too.
I'm not familiar with posterous. If you don't want to change your template, you could copy & paste the link/lead into each blog post as if they're press releases, which they might effectively be.
Driving to from Chicago to New York
Hey folks,

I'm driving solo from Chicago to New York on Sunday (about ~14 hr drive). I've done it a few times with my family, but never alone.

1. How do you keep yourself from going stir-crazy on long roadtrips? I can connect an iPhone or computer to my car's stereos.

2. Do you know any route-planning web sites that can tell you the ideal time to travel to avoid rush hours or other bad traffic times?
http://altavista.com/
Bruce Sterling talks about that here:
http://boingboing.net/2009/07/09/bruce-sterlings-clos.html
It's a great speech filled with nuggets about life in the coming decade but the parts related to this starts at about 36 minutes in.
Often, moral positions aren't based in reality; they're based on ideals.

Just because all current countries do thing one way does not mean that it's the best way; there isn't really a large variety of government/economic systems in use. Yes, there's variability, but essentially all of them are based in capitalism, and most governmental systems are either some form of western "liberal democracy" or monarchy. I personally find it tragic that there's no place left in the world to experiment with different ways of organizing governments; I always fear monoculture.

And even if you do move to other countries, sometimes, there's just no fit. This is a question I've given a lot of though to lately, and there's really no place that I could live where I'd consider the government to be truly moral. I'd simply be trading one kind of unhappiness for another, and while it might get _better_, it won't reach maximum.

> Demanding that they're slashed by 100% is just madness.

Even those who advocate such a thing consider it to be drastic, yes. Life wouldn't continue in the same way, but they have other solutions to those problems.
Any details on what you've heard good about it? It was so slow and poorly laid-out for me that I finally decided to trust Microsoft with my gmail address enough to let them forward my hotmail there.
AWS Python Developer Center
Hmm. I found this a little confusing.

> That's a mistake to stop using your favorite tool just because you politically disagree with the company

Why would you continue to support a company whose policies you no longer support (if that was the case)?

> "Net neutrality" by itself is not necessarily a good thing

Can you explain a bit here?

> Enforcing "Net neutrality" requires government regulation, and government regulations tend to not end good.

Almost any sort of "enforcing" requires government support for it to be legal. This includes property rights. So I am not sure what is the exact point here