skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People claim this is a huge problem, and at this point I suppose it is, but it was not always so. The government should get out of the business of giving and guaranteeing education loans and this debt should be disposable in bankruptcy. The problem would go away very quickly. Lenders would have to take a close look at the borrower, their academic record, their major, career prospects, etc. before making these loans. Which is how it should be in the first place. Of course there will those that whine about access to higher education, but I think that argument has already failed spectacularly. We are witnessing first hand that higher education is not for everybody and for many degree programs has zero bearing on future financial success.
Am glad to hear that, I'd actually agree with you, but many wouldn't because of that thin layer of 'we didn't technically use the military to accomplish this', but rather the global financial system, even if the outcome is basically the same
> The effect of making these loans exempt from bankruptcy just inflates their value which puts colleges into a position where they can inflate their fees - safe in the knowledge that banks will lend practically anything and students have very little choice.

While this is (was?) especially true for student loans, it applies to all loans - their availability increases prices, because there's more cash in the market. Forcing people to take loans, to the benefit of lenders.
Can you elaborate or are you just asking questions you know the answer to already?
I did not say it did.
I agree about being too scared to do business with Google. FWIW, I have a project that monitors an AWS S3 hosted web site every minute and takes it down if the charges exceed a quota. It ends up costing me 44 cents a month to run it as a lambda function but I think of it as insurance. Pull requests are welcome from whoever understands Terraform better than me because I couldn't figure out how to automate everything about the deployment.

https://github.com/gueststar/s3quota
If it was a common practice for college graduates to declare bankruptcy in this manner then landlords would take that into consideration. But of course, if it were a common practice it would also promptly be banned and we would be back in the same place we are now.
> First, the government is the lender for almost all student loans.

The protections for student loans predate the federal government excluding other lenders from federally subsidized loans; they existed when most student loans were from private lenders, both inside and outside the federally-subsidized loan programs.

> Second, the government makes loans almost without assessing creditworthiness.

It basically does so inversely to creditworthiness, since federal loans require applying for general student aid, and need-based aid is given on factors that correlate inversely with creditworthiness.

> Third, the government has an income based repayment system for student loans.

The government's contacted servicer for such loans actively (and even deceptively) steers borrowers away from such plans and into temporary deferments; this was a point being actively pursued prior to an openly borrower-hostile administration taking office.
I store most digitised documents as .PDFs.

Very often you can obtain original .PDFs from companies by downloading from websites, as well as (or instead of) the paper documentation they send you.

For local scanning, I use a HP MFP. If I need to scan individual pages, I can then merge those, if necessary, with a 'merge.pdf' type of software utility.

Store the scanned/downloaded documents in some type of tree-structured directory format. This greatly reduces the time taken to find a specific document.

I keep financial documents separate from other documents. Financial documents are also segregated into separate tax-year 'trees'.

Documents are backed-up month by month, and also daily. The monthly back-ups are stored indefinitely, and separately from the daily back-ups which are deleted in reverse chronological 'exponential' order.

Daily-backups remaining at the moment. Day 0000 was back on 23rd June 2012. Last word is server name. Note how there are more recent backups than earlier backups:

0000-120623nullius
1024-150401nullius
2048-180131centrepoint
2304-181014centrepoint
2560-190627centrepoint
2688-191102centrepoint
2720-191204centrepoint
2736-191220centrepoint
2752-200105centrepoint
2756-200109centrepoint
2758-200111centrepoint
2759-200112centrepoint
2760-200113centrepoint
> But there will be times (though I haven't experienced it myself), where something unexpectedly breaks, and it'll be hard to recover unless you know what your doing...

The thing is, my experience with Ubuntu is that there will be times when something unexpectedly breaks, and because of the added complexity, it will be nearly impossible to recover even if you know what you're doing.
It's entirely possible, given the fallibility of both huamsn and human systems, that the claim "all the final candidates were equally well qualified" is not true.

That doesn't change the original definition of AA. Neither does a demonstration that any specific institution does things differently.

If you want to change your claim to "the first sentence precisely matches what Harvard does for undergrad admissions", I'm not going to disagree with you. But that's a very different claim than the one you made.
I'm curious if you or someone else could explain exactly how "reader view" gets around paywall and login walls. This feature for me has become invaluable.
10 years, not 7. The Gov't will most certainly appeal this ruling all the way to the Supreme Court - - they and their corporate bogeemen have too much to loose.
The thread I was replying to started with the claim that this law couldn't stand because it would utterly destroy the economy.

The response was that "law doesn't work that way"

If it is true that this judge's ruling implies the destruction of the economy (which is a claim whose truth value I am not offering an opinion here), then it is the case that Congress' powers exist specifically for the purpose of making "law work that way" -- that is, changing the law when it is discovered that the law is destructive
>Real wages already have productivity and inflation factored in

What source are you using that adjusts for productivity when reporting real wages? Real is defined as inflation adjusted only.

>Assuming you use the example rich demographic I gave, what would be an example scenario that systemically breaks the 1:1 ratio?

>Say if you are really rich, your personal consumer basket that defines your personal purchasing power (and your personal inflation) will be dominated by expensive luxury items and investments while regular food/medical price increases will not impact you at all because they are a small part of the basket. However if your "demographic" (that has similar personal consumer basket) wage increases there is nothing to stop the price increase on such goods.

You're assuming perfectly inelastic supply, among other things. If there's elasticity, then additional money will result in some additional supply of luxury goods and greater quantity demanded.

Also, investments != purchases. Investments are a decision to defer consumption to the future.
And roughly 75% of that is from East Asia, so that's why people are talking about concentrating on the rivers and promoting recycling/new materials in those areas.
Unfortunately, the sqlite3 python interface doesn't expose Sqlite's extended error info so that you could see what's happening.

https://bugs.python.org/issue16379

There an uncommitted patch to get the extended error in this other, related issue: https://bugs.python.org/issue24139

Or maybe just try cffi or ctypes in python to call sqlite3_errcode(), sqlite3_extended_errcode() and sqlite3_errmsg(). The incantation to find an already linked sqlite3 lib:

import ctypes

import ctypes.util

sqlite = ctypes.CDLL(ctypes.util.find_library('sqlite3'))
> Therapy won't actually solve the problem, in any case.

This is a very prejudicial and uninformed comment about therapy. It's damaging when people has such judgments, because it stigmatizes the role and working of therapy, preventing people in need to actually approach it. In my personal opinion, people who think they're too macho to support therapy, are actually good candidates for it.

> Therapy doesn't magically procure a wife

The term "magically" is out of context. Theraphy is not a black and white phenomenon. It can be thought like a mitigation whose aim is to lower the patients' psychological barriers so that they can live a regular life.

If a person has, say, a very strong social anxiety that prevents them to meet women (incel typically have), therapy can teach them handle it so that they're able to socialize (and many people who socialize end up with a partner, so yes, it "magically" procures a wife).
Well you won’t switch your major if your loan depends on it.

Someone else is lending you the money, they can add any strings they want.

Banks deny mortgages for problems with homes all the time. You aren’t able to swap in a different house after the bank approves it.
> but allow lenders to differentiate with rates on the basis of area of degree earned

This makes little sense in the current system, where many students don't even declare a major for their first year (or two, sometimes). They'd be halfway through college by the time they were able to know which degree they'll earn.

Intended major is just as bad of a metric. I think we all know many people who intended to go into one major and ended up in another.
The government could repossess your degree by making it illegal to tell people you have it. Since the vast majority of the value of the degree is as a signal to potential employers, repossessing would maybe kind of work?

(Still half jokingly)
Anonymous from whom? Anonymous from the government? Maybe I agree. Anonymous from anyone who is curious (or nosy, depending on your feelings about privacy)? I think it's none of your or any reporters' business how many shares of AAPL I own.
@dang - dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22024522 but it wasn't caught on submission
Steve Wozniak Debunks One of Apple's Biggest Myths (2014)
Nihilism and throwing your hands up and giving up won't help anything.
(Clarification: I'm talking about the US loan program)

> Student loan terms (private and public) are blind to neither of these factors.

They are negatively blind, in that I cannot charge someone with family wealth in excess of $1M a lower rate than someone with negative family wealth. Correct me if I'm wrong.

> Lenders outside of the federally guaranteed system

I'm limiting these statements to the federal loan system, because that where a huge chunk of debt is created.

> The only lender inside the federally-guaranteed system is the federal government itself

Apparently this was changed in 2010? Prior to that, this was absolutely not the case via FFELs [1].

> and it is also not blind to the factors you suggest it should remain blind to, since both are factors already

See clarification about positive vs negative blinding.

> Further any argument for major sensitivity is a much stronger argument for much additional weighting by institution, since all the market factors that apply to majors also apply to institutions.

Not intrinsically. The problem with allowing rate sensitivity is making it outcome-sensitive while avoiding it becoming pre-existing wealth-sensitive.

I think everyone would feel it's unfair if Harvard loans charged 2% interest, while Community College loans charged 25%, because the acceptance demographics and underlying default rates supported that difference.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Family_Education_Loa...
Can we stop calling it "free"? It is never free unless everyone is doing the work for $0. If people are still being paid, then someone is paying. I'm fine with the idea of socially investing in future generations, but it's an investment, not "free stuff."
Just wondering if it’s a minor legal curiosity or does it mean a large portion of student debt will now be discharged?
+1 This is where I’ve learned proper bash. People always compliment my bash skills, but the only thing I do is sticking to the wooledge wiki’s rules + using the unofficial bash strict mode (http://redsymbol.net/articles/unofficial-bash-strict-mode/).
Contradictively, in the software engineering environment I'm working at, engineers who thrive are those who are open minded and capable of thinking out of the box: the jack-of-all-trades-and-master-of-something, the artist-artisan, the orator-motivator, the metaphor-generator, the occult, the physicist, the photographer, the producer-psycholog, the gunpla-mad-scientist, etc.

The rest follows.

Some engineers are close minded because of upbringing, culture, and previous education. They simply didn't experience enough or experienced more than what they could receive at a time, inducing trauma.

Encouragement can unlock it, sometimes with shock therapy. Current environment boost one's change as long as it can hold against negative traits and influence of someone's close mindedness.

It's a game of influence and infection in a closed scope.
To stave off some confusion, Bao was originally two things: 1) a custom tree hashing mode based on BLAKE2, and 2) an encoding format and verified streaming implementation for that tree hash. The first half grew into BLAKE3, which we announced on January 9. The Bao project itself is now focused on the second half, with the internal tree hash defined to be BLAKE3.
I currently live in a monorepo that has pretty good CI and test coverage. That means that I know every time I have work to do because something changed (because the tests go red). That's great. But I still have to do the work every time someone changes anything that affects me
Students are blindingly taking on debt that they won’t have any reasonable path of repaying. The government — and by extension the taxpayer — is underwriting loans that are manifestly toxic.

So if neither the student or the taxpayer is coming out ahead, who is? The pain in loan reform should fall on those who benefited from the loans.
> If there is no "approved" method for creating Linux drivers under licenses other than the GPL, that seems like a major problem that Linux should be working to address.

It's a feature, not a bug. Linux is intentionally hostile to binary-blob drivers. Torvalds described his decision to go with the GPLv2 licence as the best thing I ever did. [0]

This licensing decision sets Linux apart from BSD, and is probably the reason Linux has taken over the world. It's not that Linux is technically superior to FreeBSD or OpenSolaris.

> Expecting all Linux drivers to be GPL-licensed is unrealistic and just leads to crappy user experiences

'Unrealistic'? Again, Linux took over the world!

As for nVidia's proprietary graphics drivers, they're an unusual case. To quote Linus: I personally believe that some modules may be considered to not be derived works simply because they weren't designed for Linux and don't depend on any special Linux behaviour [1]

> Why are all drivers expected to use the GPL?

Because of the 'derived works' concept.

The GPL wasn't intended to overreach to the point that a GPL web server would require that only GPL-compatible web browsers could connect to it, but it was intended to block the creation of a non-free fork of a GPL codebase. There are edge-cases, as there are with everything, such as the nVidia driver situation I mentioned above.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_Linux&...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Linux_kernel&oldi...
Are you arguing that things are better or worse than they used to be? And in either case how does it relate to my comment. Genuinely can’t tell.
A lot of web stacks optimize for concurrency. Based on 2GB memory, which ends up being ~25MB per request (which for me is extremely high), I don't see it as being unrealistic. Especially for the use case I'm considering. Typically the only reason these boxes exist is to allow a web browser to gain access to data in a database, so most of the 1000ms per request wouldn't be spent in CPU, it will be spent waiting for the database to return a response.
> Well you won’t switch your major if your loan depends on it.

I'm not sure what this has to do with anything I said.

If you're referring to my second statement, I met many people in school who intended to go into engineering or computer science or medicine and had to change their career path once it was clear they weren't going to make it through the first year of introductory classes. I doubt I was alone in seeing that happen.
That way, it will never be rewritten again; because nobody will be able to read it.

Edit: Getting some downvotes, so to clarify, I am indeed saying that concerting something from Python to Perl has a high likelihood of making it for less maintainable. I get that people can write good perl. As someone who has had to maintain perl in the past; the fact is that it's far more common for the end result to be horrible perl. I have some issues with Python, but it is FAR more maintainable than perl.
I see that one would have to quote space-containing identifiers with parens. I think this strikes a good balance.
> The reason is so that these loans are low risk (no risk?) to those providing the loans.

They aren't, particularly; they are low risk to those buying the loans, not to the issuer (even with the difficulty on discharging them) who is, after all, the guarantor.

Well, except in the sense that the issuer can literally just fiat dollars into existence whenever it chooses, so essentially all dollar-
denominated debt is zero-risk.
I had one like that, years ago, in a 2.3 to 2.7 environment update. Had to just update a few lines. But, we knew to watch for it in test, cause we knew of the update. We test our she'll scripts too, when the env changes. Anecdotally the Py is slightly more touchy than Bash
I do wonder how genetic variation is maintained when you have common lineage like this.
Fighting against unemployment means you are creating unnecessary jobs. It's creating an army of disposable, obedient, consenting slaves.

Think about fast food and the damage it's doing. All this money, metals and resources and all those people could be paid to deliver better healthcare, educate people, etc while people could just prepare their own food instead.

I can't count the times I was called either a communist, a moocher, a parasite, an euro-something, etc I'm so jaded from this subject. Sometimes I'm scared that the government might try and find new tricks or excuse to not give me welfare, because I'm certain the public opinion would not have any trouble in seeing me homeless.

Misguided economic policies stem from some form of cultural, subjective ideology. I still have to be convinced why it's the government's role to push people to go back to work, instead of just giving them the bare minimum so they can eat and find shelter. The amount of money you need for welfare is ridiculously low compared to the advantage it allows. We're just scared of moochers and people having free time.

And even if I'm wrong, it's not like governments will force people to work or continue to let large-scale homelessness happen. The idea of everyone-for-himself is completely the opposite of our species: we're a social society, and civilization needs to help everyone because it's in the interest of all countries. Until we're able to question the "we need workers for civilization to function" meme, nothing will improve.

I cannot count how many times I rant about this. I can already hear the pedantic, rational people explaining how I'm stealing their taxes.
I can see how the Buckminster Fuller quote might feel ideologically baity to some people (I guess? to me it just reads like Bucky being Bucky), but your comment went straight to boilerplate talking points. You even made it to all the way to atrocity and slavery. That's a huge step down—a whole staircase, actually—so I don't think your argument about equivalents works here.
"I feel really sad that IPv6 is so slow to be adopted."

IPv4 fixed addresses are a service, and their scarcity made them even more costly, so I don't see how IPv6 is becoming widely adopted anytime soon: it's conflict of interests plain and simple.
>Potential college students are 18-ish years old, hardly old enough to have enough mental composure to make the "no" choice in a country that bombards them with the message that going to an elite college is the ultimate goal.

Are you saying 18 year olds aren't adults?

I was a 17-turned-18 year old who chose a college that was inexpensive. Of course, I also didn't get _into_ an elite college, much like the 80-95% of folks that apply. I'd ask for more sympathy for the 80-95% of us before we infantilize the 1%.
I think the author made enough money off co-founding Redgate Software that he probably doesn't need a few dollars off you.

I read it when it first came out. Its very good. Pricing is a surprisingly interesting and deep subject that is heavily intertwined with microeconomics and psychology.
I suspect that what you'd find is both slightly fewer houses available for rent and more disorganized, part-time, hobbyist landlords in the market. I believe both of these factors would tend to harm renters.

I lived in houses rented by these part-timers and they were pretty haphazardly managed compared to the [fewer] times I lived in clearly corporate-owned and managed properties.
Although this article seems to focus on software engineers, the "narrow-mindedness" aspect, reminds me of the book "Engineers of Jihad". The book gathers data about how there seems to be a disproportinate amount of natural science degerees in extremists groups and states as one reason a hierarchy-seeking mindset amongst engineers.

Of course, it is questionable, whether they understand complex systems better than anyone lese or are just more confident they do.

In my experience with software I've witnessed all forms of extremism. My non-software days are gone too long to remember if the extremism cohort was smaller there. But one thing I can say for sure: If a (software) engineer is radicalized, he is much more conversed and harder to argue with. In other words: better shielded from reason.
Can't you see this article is a paid advertisement for Google Cloud? Just like those 1 hour long videos on youtube - where they show how pilots fly an airplane of a specific company and how well is al organized or a 1 hour long video of a german car factory.

Just reading this line makes you suspicious:
"I have built hundreds of side projects over the years "

really? Hundreds?

And then below:

"I am yet to have a side project go ‘viral’"

Out of hundreds of projects over the years, none of them went viral?

And if you look at his "blog" you will see it has 3 entries in total: https://alexolivier.me/
Duckduckgo has seen some pretty strong growth [0]. Given that this is merely an option (most people won't change from the default, or will pick Google out of familiarity), I'd be interested to see how much of an effect this will have on their numbers.

I think a secondary issue Duckduckgo and other competitors have to contend with is the idea that nothing other than Google is worth the time of day. I know every thread on HN has people queuing up to say how DDG results aren't as good as Google results (or to say how they switched a while ago and DDG is good enough for their needs), but from a user perspective we can see a much more level playing field in Google vs DDG et al (2020) as opposed to Google vs Altavista et al (1998).

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/traffic
Experts have no idea if banning dollar stores will improve the diet of people in the neighborhood, no idea if even if it improves diet that will lead to measureable health outcomes. And even if it leads to measurable effects that those effects are large enough to be worth the inconvenience of not being able to go to a dollar store.

Researchers don't know if even one of those causal links is real, much less all of them.