skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The standards are being lowered for several reasons. One is that the university gets paid per student they graduate (in most countries in Western Europe that I know about). Another is that politicians feel they need to raise the % of people with degrees in their region/country so they pressure universities to 'accommodate' students as much as possible. Couple this with top positions in universities increasingly being given to non-academics, but rather bureaucrat politicians who get these positions as a reward for years of service to their party and in these roles fill the last few years until their retirement with a cushy, well paid job in which they mostly try to run the university as a company (not being hindered by the fact that they know nothing about actually running a business), and you get every lower academic standards.

And then finally, and this may not be the majority of cases but I've seen this happen from very close myself, a part of the problem is the many exchange students who come from developing countries and pay big bucks for their studies. These people have sometimes scraped together everything they and their extended families have to go to the West. If they fail their program, to them it feels like they might as well have been executed on the spot. There's no way they can go back to their countries without a degree. I've seen people on the brink of suicide over the thought of failing exams and having to go back (yes, other ('native') students also get exam anxiety, I'm not dismissing those).

So imagine being a professor and having to grade a thesis of a guy that is only a few years younger than you are (these students often come after several years of working and saving), with a wife and a family to support. You know he doesn't live up to the standards of the program. You also know that everybody else knows (academics at universities in the area) so nobody's going to give him a postdoc anyway. So there's no real harm in giving him the degree, at least not until 'the work gets out' and all diplomas devaluated. The student will most likely be going back to where he came from, where he's going to be welcomed as a genius and offered a cushy government or consulting job. All in all, there he's still going to be quite good, at least compared to the other people at the places that would hire him (yes there are very bright Indian, Chinese etc. students who are just as good as any Western student, I'm not disparaging Asians in general - I'm talking about this specific subset of 'academic refugee students').

And then consider that if you fail this guy, you know you're basically doing the equivalent of a 'thumbs down' in a Roman amphitheater. That's a tough decision to make. I know, this sort of factors shouldn't come into play, but that's easy to say from behind a desk far far away from this situation. I've seen people seriously struggle with this dilemma, and I've seen choices being made in both directions. It's heart wrenching, and it makes people think several times before accepting a next student who may turn out this way.
I could argue with the detail in the math and the actual calculations made, but the point is the important bit.

You need to compute and track when you'll run out of cash, and how fast you're running out of cash.

You need to focus on doing stuff that makes you run out of cash more slowly, preferably negatively.

What gets measured, gets managed:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1667248

I've recently started to apply this explicitly to my email backlogs and my filing backlogs. Both are improving rapidly, and I'm looking to see what else needs to come on board. Maybe it will only last while it's novel, but it's working for now, I'll surf the wave.
Lessons Learned
Business plans are the leading cause of startup death.

Interesting.
>which is, America, which thought world about free market

What? They may have taught the world about debt but certainly not free market. Adam Smith wasn't even American.
Same reasoning applies.
"Hendriff" ?
It may not have quite the same effect but

:au FocusLost * :wa

should autosave when you switch to the browser without requiring keypresses.
I think self censoring is largely a positive - it means people will actually take the time to think through their post, rather than just responding emotively. Whilst I'm sure there are times that valuable comments are lost because people are too cautious, I think the overall effect on signal-to-noise ratio is hugely, hugely beneficial.
Amazingly Linux and other Unixes (yeah, OSX too) "get" time quite well. Maybe Apple over-optimized iOS?
Maybe I could rephrase the question: "What would be the most memorable thing YOU could do with $8000?"

The things he dreamed about as a child are likely to be petty and unmemorable given his limited exposure to the possibilities.
There should be a separate post for remote/freelance jobs. All the jobs posted here are in the US, and I'm sure there's plenty of talented foreigners lurking on HN.
I'm questioning the fact that these experts (doctors? sociologists?) just scored which drugs they found more dangerous. For starters, effects in the individual and in the community belongs to two completely different areas of expertise.
People tend to think of India as one single entity, which is a mistake.

As a South Indian, there are not many things common between me and a Pakistani.
"Rough estimate"

It's likely that whatever Quantcast uses as a measure is what's changing rather than the actual traffic.
In fact, 67 percent of developers polled by Evans Data Corp reported that they spend some time developing open source software while at their primary job. This means that some portion of the salary paid to the developer is allocated to work not related to their job.

This means nothing of the sort. The vast majority of those developers are working on open source software that is used by their company with the full backing of their managers. Sure, it's a cost to the company -- open source software is not free. But to imply that this is somehow stolen from the company is just egregious.

I'm sure most ycombinator companies are doing the same thing. It's hard to be ramen profitable if you're paying $100K to Oracle for a database license. Much cheaper to have 10% of a developer tweaking rails plugins...
China prospered without India's dummy democracy and casteism.
Indians are brainwashed to believe that (casting a vote in elections == democracy) and a solution to all problems.
Weird Science shocks its brain into an acid trip
I've had some sleep issues and errors being thrown by UserEventAgent about SCNetworkSignatureCopyActiveIdentifiers returning nil both of which seem to be caused by Transmission, but otherwise it's behaving fine. (13" Air)

I do wish this platform had better diagnostic tools.
My argument is that it is difficult for casual observers to assess each individual project, so we as a group outsource this job to an accredited agency, who verifies that a set of projects has been completed that match a pre-defined standard.

When I go to a doctor's office, I don't really always have time to investigate in detail the various projects he undertook.

What's at stake here is that the agency tasked with upholding the standard (the U of Manitoba) seems to have slackened the agreed-upon standard for the sets of projects involved to reach the level of "PhD in Mathematics".
Part of me would like to feel for the student who may have a genuine illness, but the other part of me that has a doctorate knows that it was very, very hard and I totally lost it in my second year and went off around the US for 6 weeks to get my head clear.

The bottom line is that a doctorate is not an easy thing to get, it's stressful and some people probably can't take the stress.
Gawker Media envisioning 1 Billion monthly pageviews & new look in Jan
In a couple of years, you should see the same blog post with a different title "Designs that are so 2010"
For that matter, why not make a site for attractive people who have horrifically ugly personalities. There's far more of them.
Redbox eyes Internet video delivery with longing
There are actually two different apps on that list with the name Iceberg, and neither uses iceberg.com.
Dup, third time over, more comments here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1856327
98% revenue for Indian IT companies comes through selling consulting to US customers.

Selling software != Selling consulting
I use Goal Mapping:

http://www.petermichaud.com/essays/stop-planning-right-start...

http://www.petermichaud.com/software/goal-mapping-alpha/comm...
1. Go to a bar and buy everyone a round of drink and another and another till either you or someone else collapse.

2. Give it to someone needy or Sponsor a kid

3. Find a startup/non profit which works in an area which resonates with his grandmom's interests and invest in them
Facebook's NEW groups feature solves this (the old one didn't):

http://facebook.com/groups/
Luakit is a configurable, micro-browser framework based on WebKit and GTK+
Hey Joe. Yours was the top-rated comment at the deadline so I'm trying to pull out a plan for what we fix, in what order.

The "recently used documents" seems like the most specific bug / fix that we might be able to get done first.

However, am I right in thinking that what you are seeking is essentially this:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/openoffice/+bug/66933

If so, it looks like it has been fixed (or am I misreading the bug)?
Dealing with the high quantity of scientific error in medicine
Good effort though.

The budget was $5.2 billion. I wonder what the cost of an equivalent government program would have been.
Repeat the mantra: Make it easy for people to give you money.
Nike Dunk High Back to the Future II Custom
The problem here is that Amazon/Rackspace/other VM infrastructure providers actually do market them as application platforms, not platforms to run VMs.

Nobody really cares that you have OS underneath all this, all people want to do is run some application on top of it. So all educational materials etc. instruct you to use VM as a foundation to run single app, not use it as a traditional server with multitude of services.

The end result is the same, except with EC2 et al you have to deal with traditional sysadmin tasks yourself.
Agreed they work a lot of crazy weeks, but it is not variable. When deals are getting close and it is crunch time, hours get crazy.

My friend says that when he hires, his first thought to himself is "Can we work with this guy at 2am with a deadline tomorrow?".
Try this: Ask any of the 500 people who have visited your site today to tell you the name of that Linux flavor for Guitar players. I'd be surprised if a single one got it right first try.

Now imagine it was called "Hendrux - a GNU/Linux distro for recording musicians". Pretty much all of us would be able to repeat that back to you (though a few might misspell the name).

Names have value. They send messages. GNUGuitarINUX sends the message that "The author thought this was a good name, so chances are the project itself will be every bit as opaque. Best stay away unless you have a lot of time to spend getting it working."
Bootstrap your way to stardom. Its not like you won't survive if you do not get funding.
I am in USA and my alarm actually went off an hour EARLY today (iPhone 4 iOS 4.1). My alarm was set for 7:34am and my alarm went off at 6:34am. I reset my alarm for 8:30am and it went off at 7:30am. I assumed it was some weird daylight savings bug.

anyone else in the US have this issue?
prettyintolerable.com
I'm running through digging out a plan of action - this was the 2nd in the list at the chosen moment in time. I don't know what specific action we could take with the HTML5 idea within the budget - do you have any ideas?
> Not likely. To be fair, if I was to name and shame I may as well pack my bags and leave the country.

Of course, perfectly understandable.

> All I'll say is that these are red-brick Uni's in the UK.

Which are the 'redbrick' ones? Are they the ones which used to be polytechnics, or Oxbridge, or the ones in between like Bath and Glasgow?
hike the appalachain trail.

buy a RTW (round the world) ticket.

buy some christmas gifts for kids in need.
Preparing to Lose the TV Remote for Good
I don't claim to know all of their economy, I am just stating what I know. Additionally it was months ago, not years ago.

Reports estimating numbers in 2025 also doesn't represent what is going on there now.

Additionally 12k-17k per year isn't enough to afford much in their urban areas. They wouldn't be able to afford to go out for coffee and meals regularly let alone own an apartment in the city or a car.
Not to be a dick about it, but: http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/11/1/new-macbook-airs-ridden-bug...

Infallibility is a dangerous, if not deadly, attribute one could give any system.

I hope people should understand my point: I'm going to use the Canadian Health Care system as an example.

If you've watched Sicko (Michael Moore), you'd be under the impression that our Health Care system is tits. There are no wait times, everyone gets the transplant they deserve and we have a government that cares about its people first and foremost. Sadly, this is not quite the case.

Canadians believe that we have a great health care system, despite continual cutbacks, ten minute appointments, still a mostly paper-based family patient system, drug coverage cuts and some of the longest wait times in the world for cancer treatment. We slip down the "global list" quite often: http://www.photius.com/rankings/healthranks.html, http://www.thestar.com/article/526494

When our politicians are under budget pressure, it's our once grand Health Care System that sees cuts. No one is watching our precious Health Care System at the ground level.

There will be Canadians to defend it and offer it extreme fandom, ignoring the obvious decay. Not because we're specifically ignorant, but because a great Health Care system is part of our identity. We are not concentrating as to why we identify with it, just that we once did so we should always do so.

In the same way, Apple and Apple products can be apart of one's identity. With extreme fandom, Apple is less concerned about negative feedback. As an example of that, one could say that Apple was completely unprepared for the iPhone4 AntennaGate issue - even ignoring internal advisories about it's potential reception problems.

I hope to convey that, if you love a system, be more critical than you would be otherwise.
the graph says "non-work-related open-source projects"
I've spent 10 minutes on this trying to work out what they would actually do for me. I strongly suspect I'd find it useful, and perhaps I'd even pay money for it, but I can't work out what they do, or what pain they take away.

Suggestion to anyone reading this: If you have something to sell, especially if it's new, or market disrupting, a well-chosen example case is invaluable. A clear description of my problem that you claim to solve is just as good, if not better. At least it shows that you know what you're trying to do for me.
I don't think Quantcast makes that big errors while measuring high-trafficked web site.

There should be another explanation. Either Yale is losing popularity, or students prefer to use other web resources while learning about Yale (e.g. Facebook).
There's a contextual problem that's been around for 50 years that FB is just making worse.

Human communications depend largely on context. We weren't made to blurt out every one of our feelings and observations to the community at large. Instead, we share this piece of information with this person, ask this other person for advice, listen in on these other folks when they talk about X, etc.

The is the natural way of being human -- to use a phrase from the movie, it's the social experience.

Every technical solution I've seen so far fails to include this contextual nature of communication. It's too much of a pain for folks to pick certain people for certain kinds of talk, and it's all so much a pain in the ass (compared with the old way of physically moving from one group to another)

Oddly enough, this was first noticed with TV back in the 1950s. Up until then, conversations were small and cliquish -- the natural order. TV brought in the idea of "universal" communicating in a way that radio, plays, or newspapers didn't. Suddenly everybody in the family was in the room when Lucy got pregnant, or when Opie killed the bird with the slingshot.

Of course, nobody bothered much complaining back then, because, after all, back in the 1950s what kind of radical information was going to be on TV? And nobody complained (much) when TV got into a lot more controversial issues in the last couple of decades.

But now it's not TV -- it's us. It's our lives, our pregnancies, our sorrows, etc.

I think people need the contextual nature of communication -- it makes society function. But I don't see any technology solution on the horizon that easily and naturally facilitates this. And yes, if it happens it might just be the next FB killer. But that's a big "if". Lots of folks have went down the road of trying to add context, including FB itself, and so far nobody has been successful.
Amazon's 3G Kindle Leaps China's Great Wall of Censorship
Definitely. My wife and I both find socializing with large groups of people to be exhausting. The amount of social cues, body language, personal spaces, etc. to follow scales exponentially with the number of people, unless/until they split into smaller groups.
My guess is a not insignificant chunk of that 50% is people being willing to stay in an unhappy marriage because the social, legal,and financial consequences of divorce are so destructive.
Viagra Spam King Pleads Innocence
Thanks for this idea - this was 3rd in the list at the specified time. It looks like it's possible we will get to this one - but it seems like it is somewhat tricky (since it's been around for ~5 years). Any devs out there familiar with this part of the system who might be able to contribute a fix / idea (given budget!)?
IT graduates still find it hardest to get jobs
The Four Projects
Well, you shouldn't rule out funding options.

It's up to you to do the math. If you stay on the bootstrap path, you own 100% of the company, and have a slower development schedule.

If you take financing, you give up some ownership in exchange for acceleration.

For most people looking at funding there is still a lot of "mystery". Can the team build the product? If they build it, will the users come? And so on. This leads to valuations that are highly speculative (lot's of risk involved), and funding terms that reflect this.

For your case, much of the mystery has been removed. This also reduces the possibilities of crazy-high valuations, but also gives you a lot more power in the negotiations.

My guess would be you might not be the traditional VC big investment big speculation kind of deal, but might look attractive to the lower-end of some of the super-angel sized deals. If your math is good, you could represent a good medium-risk investment.

If you really "only" need $500k and you've got $200K of profit, I would tend to think you could investigate debt financing instead of equity financing. Silicon Valley Bank might be one outfit worth talking to about this.
Whenever I walk into a hole-in-the-wall shop here in China on a weekday, the PC screens are alight with share trading graphs. As they said 10 years ago in the US, "when the taxi drivers are giving share tips, it's time to get out." Both the Chinese housing and stock markets could blow at anytime, and the Chinese don't have the institutional memory to deal with it.
Celebrity Bad Hair Days
These celebrities look really untidy and broke when you take a look at their hairstyles
Ask HN: How do you balance coding and UI/UX work?
Hi,

Ryan from 37 signals mentions a very important point in his talk ( http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2608-ryans-talk-at-future-of-web-apps-2010-london) about developers creating UI that look like a visual manifestation of the database schemas.

I have also been thinking about this for a while as I juggle both development and UX work. To develop really usable screens, you have to wear the UI/UX hat and think from the user's perspective. May be you need to drop some not so often needed fields from a form or highlight some information on a page.

Typically I have to step away from code once in a while to look at things from a user's perspective. If you are a doing both coding and UI/UX work, how do you make this switch? Do you keep separate days for coding and UI/UX or you have a process that you follow. I would love to know what works well for hackers here.

Thanks,
Prateek
The russians also had one party rule with 5, 10, and 50 year plans and how did that turn out? More dissenters dead and disappeared than all world wars combined. Grand projects rusting away in former soviet blocs. And the supposed efficiency comes at the price of peoples lives and property. I can assure you the people living around the Olympic village weren't delighted to be kicked out of their homes. I'm not saying. So when you make the rules and can apply them as you please damn right its easy to be efficient.

I don't know how you can find my generalization offensive but not your own. Chinatowns exists because they are a net positive how? Yet Indians, Malays, Japanese, and Koreans don't need them. I've been only to the C-Towns on the east coast, and lived in one. And it is the rich chinese exploiting the poor. You don't hear about white, blacks, indians, or any other nationalities exploiting immigrants in chinatown. It took NYCPD a decade and a half to crack the triads in NYC C-Town and they are still exert a lot of influence.

As to asian american bias this argument is weak since out of all emigrants (except europeans) Asians face the lowest amount of overall discrimination. Americans don't trust the chinese-americans to run the country (due to that same insular community being perceived as unloyal) but they trust them more than they do africans or african americans to do business with according to this study http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=93457. I've never met a taxi driver that says he won't pick up chinese or wouldn't stop in chinatown.

If I did move to China I wouldn't restrict myself to english enclaves, working for english businesses and only befriending english speaking people. But I'm not your typical american either.
This is our instinct, but are we selling ourselves short? SaaS loves $$ to grow fast.
> If someone likes centralized over distributed, Subversion should beat both Git and Mercurial.

Personally I think you can do centralized better with Git and Mercurial then you can with Subversion. You just have to add some hooks to enforce it.
Cool, I'm totally going to make one of this for my startup.

Of course it might be a little pointless since we're already out of money ...
GPS Tracking for Foolish Drive in India
Hey guys, I am far from technically adept.In September of 2011 I am driving a 7 horsepower auto-rickshaw over the Himalayas of Nepal and across India to raise money for charity.

I was hoping that you could suggest equipment and software that would allow me to transmit my location to people in the US and UK who would want to follow the journey.
www.teamveerasway.com
As an outside observer Google appears to slow down on the development of new projects very noticeably. Why hasn't Google Docs been evolving at the rate a company with the resources of Google can afford?
FoundationDB is a Washington, DC Metro Area database software startup, which was founded by engineers with a prior >$50MM exit in the data analytics space. We are working on a distributed database with ACID transactions.

We're looking for self-motivated, smart software engineers who have a history of (either personally or professionally) working on or managing interesting and challenging development projects. Specific skills of interest include: Systems programming, C++, engineering for high performance, asynchronous/distributed programming, data structures.

The positions we're hiring for are in the DC Metro Area (McLean / Tysons Corner).

If you're interested, please contact us at:

info at foundationdb dot com