skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bring on the civil suits. Looking forward to this school district being sued into the ground.
some of us go to college because we will learn things we could not or would not otherwise learn.

And some of us went to college because we had to prove to HR people that we know what we know with very expensive pieces of paper. I stopped going to college after I didn't attend classes or buy books for a semester, and got substantially the same grades. I didn't attend classes or buy books because I wasn't extracting value congruent to the time and money it cost to attend class. I ultimately made the decision to not go at all because the amount of money I was making running my business exceeded the amount I could make with a degree working for someone else.

Computer science is probably one of the easiest fields to learn without formal instruction because deliberate practice is so easy and information is so accessible. The absolute most I learned in a college course was in a digital logic course. After the first class, the professor, whom I had before, took me to his office, told me I wouldn't learn anything in the class, gave me an FPGA development board (similar to http://www.altera.com/products/devkits/altera/kit-cyc2-2C20N..., fpga, ethernet, usb, flash card reader), told me to read about Verilog, build something interesting, and to not attend class, he'd just give me a grade on whatever I built. I implemented a basic computer that would read and execute instructions off the memory card. Almost everything in computer science came together once I implemented jump instructions. I got almost nothing out of most classes, but an incredible amount out of that one. College is tedious if you already know a lot about a subject.

If I could go back and was really interested in learning, I would have moved close to a college, and paid professors for short duration one-on-one instruction and guidance, probably just an hour or two a week, with independent study. It would have been substantially less expensive and more effective. You can't get a degree that way, but you can learn. I find the pacing of college courses to be too slow, if I am interested in learning about a new subject now, I'll get course videos and speed them up a bit, and skip ahead liberally. I can usually get through a semesters worth of lectures in a day.
I can't speak to the validity of this graph, but my immediate response is to think of all of the other factors that go into getting a job. I know people with the personality and intelligence to get jobs they are unqualified for, quickly earn promotions, and never go a week or two without being employed. I also know people who cannot hold down a job painting doors.

College degrees are handed out like candy to anyone who pays enough money and jumps through enough hoops. Relying on education level as a signal of ability is ridiculous, and the existence of this graph shows why: we emphasize education for the sake of financial gain.

People who truly crave knowledge and training are lumped in with people who thrive on doing what they're told and avoiding independent thought. There is more to a person than their education level, and when it comes down to being truly valuable in a business, some of the motivations for education are probably a detriment.
(As Arrington writes in the comments, that’s a re-enactment, not a real conversation. I have seen people do that, though.)
You can find such people now and before the economic crisis. For the quote to be correct, the rate of employment among graduates before or during the crisis should be the same.

I am not saying that he is correct (I don't know, I don't have the stats). But your point is not valid evidence for this discussion.
I haven't ever commented on a blog but I was responding more to this:

> And I think the role of comments is to add value to the posts.

Which you have quoted there. The value shouldn't just be for authors it should be for everyone, HN comments can add value to posts as well as value to the posts' authors but choosing one over the other seems silly to me.

If he doesn't want comments to be valuable to the community (can't really think of a better word) who reads his blog then he could simply add a contact me to the bottom of the page like Mark Pilgrims blog posts show after a while.
Terence Tao explains the 2010 Fields medals
How To Think Like A Computer Scientist
Meh, 24 hours is too long to wait. By that time, I likely no longer care to read any comments on the subject, so they all go unread. I mean who is going to return to a blog post a day later just so they can read comments? Might as well just leave the comments off. Let's face it, the author is still working through his trauma from a time when he apparently left comments unmoderated and unrestricted and got burned, and this is his therapy. He's making his way back into the social, but he's taking baby steps.

Also, when you're boasting of feats like inventing blog comments, you might be slightly more prone to being trolled than your average blogger.
Whoops, forgot the "Show HN:" - my bad!
These guys are friends of mine. Before the rocket they built the worlds largest homemade submarine.

Homepage:http://www.uc3nautilus.dk/

Wikipedia:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC3_Nautilus

Images: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hobonerd/sets/72157604823470166...
Did you just subtract the values in the original chart from 100%? If so, that's not the actual employment level. Unemployment means seeking work but not finding it; it excludes everyone who is disabled, discouraged, or simply not looking for work (e.g. full-time moms).

The overall unemployment level in the U.S. is a little under 10%, but the employment level is somewhere around 65-70% (iirc). So 20-25% of the population is still unaccounted for in this figure. A chart breaking that down by education might be interesting, too.
I tried it, and it is much better. Thanks for the heads up.
You so lucked out with that professor. Amazing guy!
Yeah. Some of us like to go to university just for the joy of the experience, leaning new stuff, being surrounded by experts in the field.

Sadly these type of abstract advantages cannot be quantified and hence are always forgotten. If I took a degree for the money and not the interest then I would have chosen Economics or Management, not Physics! And what about those who chose foreign languages? Or literature? Etc...

Hopefully there's more than monetary advantages in going to uni.
"If you want to rebut a post, then you can create your own blog and post your rebuttal there."

Did he just ask commenters not to disagree with him?
Actually, in Massachusetts it's only illegal to secretly record a police officer. Openly recording a police officer, with your cell phone for instance, is fine, with several cases setting precedent.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010...

Of course, given the precedent here, it sounds likely that you will get arrested and your phone confiscated, and have to spend several months fighting your arrest in court. But there are several recent cases that were overturned because the recording was done openly with a cell phone, rather than secretly.

I can't speak to other states. It will vary by states, and in most cases, you may be arrested and your phone confiscated until you fight it in court. Have your local ACLU phone number handy.
Journalism at its best Microsoft gets no respect
It seems Environ is making a large-scale system whereas the system in the video is small-scale. As a small-scale system, it's a business opportunity for an individual in a developing country with lots of plastic waste - they could apply for a loan from Kiva to get started.
I'd be interested to know if it is really the amount of schooling that effects employability or if having less education is indicative of some other innate characteristic of a person. ie: low IQ or unmotivated etc...
Not sure how I’m fortunate enough to work on a project that lets me use TDD most of the time. meshes with but none of them [agilists] have any experience what companies whose survival depends on shipping software have to go through to organize huge code bases

He admits the benefits of TDD and the next paragraph turns on the proponents of TDD (which is not all there is to agile, but that's another story).

Every shop I've worked in, I've had to sell TDD, and every time it's been varying degrees of slog, and at the same time, we've been able to develop faster: random things weren't breaking since we had tests to catch things like that (and if things did break, we wrote more tests to catch that too); having developers leave or hiring new developers were less of a risk because there were examples of working code and because there were tests to buffer the learning curve; major refactors were less scary because end-results could still be validated even if a large part of under-the-hood had changed.

Sure you have to be sane - the one-off prototype doesn't need the same degree of TDD as the platform that's going to be around for 5 years, but you still need a way to validate your results. And yeah, sometimes the tests come after the code, but the tests still need to be there.
That's the library I was referring to as "gamelib" in the thread's text. The last update it got was in 13/04/04 (by Brent Silby) as per the docs in the download :)

Thanks for the link to the forum on the gamedev.net site. That sounds useful.
Because the alternative, that the parents of these students drummed up a flurry of Internet rumors over nothing, is impossible.
Why Subscriptions Are the Future of the Web
If someone is unemployed that can barely hold a keyboard without dropping it calling himself a software engineer is out of a job is counted it gets a lot harder though.

You can stick labels fairly easily on the various degrees, they may not mean much in terms of practical knowledge but they do put up a lower boundary that they had to cross. For auto-didacts you run the gamut all the way from incompetent bumbler to ace, and there is no foolproof way to separate those when looking at large groups but it will make a huge difference to the outcome of the study.

Especially in the IT sector there is a lot of "I am an 'x'" where X is anything from the set of recent buzzwords.

So I don't think you can make even that comparison in an easy and reliable way, what people call themselves may not be what they actually are.
What's conveniently left out of all the graphs and articles I've seen showing this....is whether they bothered to establish any causation.

Why shouldn't we just presume that people who have access to college also have better access to employment?
So would it make sense to buy a share of Berkshire-Hathaway?
> This is basically a spam filtering problem, and you're blaming the guy getting spammed.

Only the gripe displayed in the video (and #2 on his list) is a spam issue, and it's trivially fixed by disabling auditory alerts, which are not only generally useless but systematically annoying.

Let's check the other ones:

> It’s not a conversation until both sides are engaged.

Maybe it's not a conversation at all, and just an RFI or whatever. Furthermore, if you're not available set your status to one that matches instead of marking yourself as available at all time.

You can even default your status to "Not Available" or "Do Not Disturb". That way, people won't assume you're available... which is what you're saying by using the "Available" status.

Waiting for a SYN/ACK on IMs is entirely useless and highly counter-productive, you can ACK when you reply. In fact it's very annoying because I'm out taking a shit and instead of asking whatever you need and going on with your life as I come back and reply, you're either waiting in front of your screen for my ACK, or you're gone doing something else and by the time you come back I've ACKed and then I'm gone again, resetting the whole process.

If you want to converse, use VOIP.

> Don’t just jump right into a phone call. It’s polite to send a chat message first saying “online? time for a quick Skype call?” It’s annoying when the Skype phone starts ringing randomly.

it doesn't ring randomly, it rings when somebody calls, because they have something to tell you in person. Don't want to answer the call? Then don't

> And all I wanted was a little bit of quiet.

See again, use your status already, if you're not available say you aren't.

> Video calls are not a God given right. Just because you want to do video right now doesn’t mean I want to.

Settings > Video > Show that I have video to > no one.

> Don’t assume confidentiality.

That has nothing to etiquette, it only has to do with not being retarded.
> These guys are now part of the statistics shown on the graph.

Most likely they're in the negative space though, the part of the 'employed'.
Now I'm not too familiar with the Indian Penal Code and Law in general, but there have been instances of whistleblowers being silenced in the past one way or another if the spotlight or public movement momentum is slow to follow. The chances of this happening are more in certain parts of the country like Bihar and UP etc.

It's unfortunate but the situation is slowly improving as time goes by and connectivity and access of information improves.
“I think they're publications.”

Old-school thinking, alive and well.
I know some people think that blogs are conversations, but I don't. I think they're publications.

Why does there have to be a strict dichotomy between these two things? It's not uncommon to see conversations happen (very slowly) through traditional publications and everything posted online is, in a sense, published.
> disabled, discouraged, or simply not looking for work (e.g. full-time moms).

Ah ok, I wasn't aware of that distinction (I figured they'd been taken out). Still, the larger point stands, the difference looks huge when you look at this graph, but it is 'upside down', we're talking about the tops here, not about a base 0 reaching to 15%, but a base 0 reaching to 100% where this is the remnant between the tops and the maximum.

What you're saying is that the maximum should have been 80% or 75% instead of 100%.
Functional Koans (in Erlang, Clojure, F#, Scala)
Thanks to ericlavigne in the Ruby Koans thread for the link. I'm learning Clojure currently, and thought this deserved a submission.
The thought of going into space on something built in a shed has a definite appeal..
"Incidentally, doesn't HN run as a stoarray?"

This is the very first thing I thought of. The guy seems to have re-invented S-expressions in VB (or whatever ASP language that is). Data is code, code is data. Load it into memory, write it to a file. With 500 products, maybe even 1000 products, maybe even 10000, or more, this might work fine, in terms of performance, at least.

Now, my critique of the code is that there are no apparent abstractions, which means that it will be very difficult to change anything about the implementation later. All of the hard coded indices from 0 to 7 are very opaque and very brittle.

However, change those to JSON-ish dictionaries and add some slightly higher level abstractions, and you could get something that looks a little more like the interface to a MySQL database.

So what I find interesting about putting this as a WTF with no explanation is that the author just seems to assume that everyone should use a relational database for every problem without thinking about how good a fit it is for their specific problem. At least, without more explanation it's hard to tell what exactly the assumed critique is.
In short, stakeholders should always be concerned with the potential discontinuity of (especially high) performance. But it's rather like technical debt (or any other kind); something that should be managed rather than avoided at all cost.
Simplifying music theory via innovative user interface on iPad
I will never understand why people will want to use alert sounds in the first place. I'm happy I still retain most of my functional hearing after enabling alert sounds in Messenger inadvertently while wearing headphones.
Or you could add the following to your ~/.ssh/config instead:

Host protected_machine other_protected_machine
ProxyCommand /usr/bin/ssh gateway.example.com /bin/nc -w 3700 %h %p

(Assumes you have /bin/nc installed on your gateway.)
Don't bother blogging about it, do it, test it for a month or more, then blog about the results.
Just a caution: Circuit breakers (I'm assuming you mean the sort that are permanently mounted on a panel in the wall) are not intended for frequent use as a switch. They will wear out.
I don’t disagree with you about that, never said I did.
It is like the old sci-fi stories from the 1950's, when writers expected that in 2000 space travel would be as common as airplane flight. I think that more private, low budget efforts such as this one could drive expanded space travel development.

So far only huge commercial companies with billions of dollars have attempted such as thing, but that could change with projects such as this one. On the website it says that they plan to release as much of their designs as are allowed under export rules. It would be nice to see more home-brew projects. The danger of course, is that if this space launch fails and somebody dies it could be a Hindenburg for private, low budget space rockets.
"I'm a Computer Science senior right now, and sure, I could have learned all the stuff I learned from buying my own books, but I never would have."

One of the weird things about college or university is that it gives one social license to spend four years, or more, learning something as an adult.

If you were not enrolled in a university, but instead diligently reading books, solving problems, writing essays etc. for four years without being otherwise employed, people would find you eccentric at the very least. But once officially enrolled at an educational institution, society thinks it is not only perfectly fine to do the same things, but to take on large amounts of debt for the privilege of doing so.
You do understand that “due to a bug in Rakudo” means that this is a limitation of the implementation rather than the language, and that it will be fixed in due time – right?
Not innate, but social. A college degree is a very middle class, upper middle class thing to have. Not having a college degree is lower middle class, working class. It's faux pas to say "there's no unemployment crisis facing the upper middle class" though, so it's couched in cargo-cultish terms: "follow the early-adulthood formal-education rituals of the middle class and share in their good fortune".
The use case is that people are online, at their computer and see their Twitter client notify them of an interesting sound update while they were wasting away time, procrastinating or just plain looking for some diversion. They see an update from a source they trust and decide to click through to read it.

That's not a very far stretch. People read things from Twitter all the time, that's not the problem. The issue is they only read the most recent stuff river of news style and who knows how many people they follow?

Leo's Buzz to Twitter cross-poster should have had some kind of link tracking built into the URL to tell him if people were clicking on his updates.

Leo says he had 15 updates in 2 weeks not broadcast, but when you look at his usual posting style, it's all notifications about his recent shows (which I get via iTunes automatically) and (self confessed) pictures of food he's eating. That's not exactly quality material that people will click through to. Had he posted more appealing content, his lack of updates would have been a greater loss.
To me this is a very old school, closed off way of looking at things. Who are the comments for? Just the author? If so, why make them public at all? If they are for the readers, how many readers are going to come back 24 hours later to check out the comments?

The idea that if you disagree or have a lot to say you should create your own blog post is also a bit ridiculous. Is it OK in that case to leave a comment saying "I have responded to this on my blog here at xxxxxxx"? I mean, how is the context between the original post and the followup to be maintained or even seen by the original readers?

This just seems to be more of a throwback to old school print where the interconnectedness of ideas was severely limited. Unless you were aware of and read all publications on a subject you were likely to see the entire "conversation" on a subject.

I guess if you want to see a blog article as a publication that's your prerogative, but there is a reason print media is dieing out. We should be trying to increase the interconnectedness of ideas, not stifle it.
You state that you're building a tile based game without canvas/svg already, but is it a requirement to not use either canvas or svg?

If a canvas-based library is acceptable, I recommend Akihabara: http://www.kesiev.com/akihabara/
If you want to converse, use VOIP.

Why not "if you want to converse, go visit them"? Most of the time when I want to converse, I want to use text rather than deal with all the baggage of audio and trying to manage social context -- context which is mostly absent in text.
Why not try it? Go silent without mention and see what happens.
Term Paper Topics Selecting Method
Perhaps the selection of the topic is the most difficult part of the whole process in writing a term paper. But if you attack the problem methodically this is not a tough job as it seems. This short article gives you some ideas on selection of a topic for your term paper.
I like to observe people who are by themselves when I am out. It is probably because I feel awkward sometimes when I am out by myself.

For example, in a cafe or a in a park, a lot people who are by themselves fiddle with their cell phone, read a book or pretend to do something else. In other words, they perform an activity that they could be performing at home without having all these people around. Yet, they chose to go out and be among others. They don't talk to others, they don't even look at others in an obvious way, they seem to be pre-occupied and ignoring everyone, but on a certain level I think they are there more to be with others and whatever else they are doing is just a random activity they do so as not to look too weird staring at strangers.

(That probably means that I am the weird one staring at everyone...)
For me, the use of Twitter is:

1. I see X happening when I'm walking around (protesters, fireworks, concert, police barricades).
2. I search where I am in Tweetie.
3. I find out what's going on and, if I'm interested in it, might join.

Twitter is all about discovery. Not communication.
And among college graduates, there simply isn’t an economic crisis in the United States.

With a family member having a masters degree in education, and recently being laid off with about 700 other graduate degree holding teachers in an entire school district, I'm not buying this.
Incredible work. Absolutely beautiful. You additionally rock for having such clean JS allowing novice coders like myself to learn from your work. Thanks!
"American Indians" is the term used by the federal government

http://www.bia.gov/
> Why not "if you want to converse, go visit them"?

Because you can't hit a button and be at their doorstep. With skype, calling and texting have the same technical cost.
Akihabara is probably the most complete JS game lib, but man is it messy. It has clearly grown organically and is in need of a good refactoring.

CakeJS is a bit cleaner, it has a nice scene graph, but it's at a much lower level than Aki. There's none of the useful game basics like collision detection so you have to write those yourself. http://glimr.rubyforge.org/cake/canvas.html

Raphael is similar to Cake in scope but for SVG/VML instead of Canvas. http://raphaeljs.com/

Finally there's Processing.js, which is the javscript port of the Java library. http://processingjs.org/