skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suspect that Peter Schiff is closer to the mark.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIcfMMVcYZg#t=1m30s

His hypothesis is that increasing the capacity of students to pay (to almost arbitrarily high levels) by providing government guarantees of student loans allows allows schools to charge ridiculously high tuition. To some extent, this is correct, and there is no reason for the people involved not to want to increase tuitions. For the school, higher tuition will mean the school can improve itself and become more attractive to students. For the lenders, higher tuition means more loans returning 5% or more for which the government assumes all the risk.

It isn't entirely accurate to say "the government assumes all the risk" either. Student debts are the most toxic debts around, and cannot be thrown off in bankruptcy. If you refuse to pay, the government is authorized to garnish your wages or raid your savings.

This isn't to say that Schiff's hypothesis explains the entirety of the increase in the cost of tuition, but I think that it plays a much larger role than what is discussed in the article.
I don't know why people keep bringing up the level of taxes

Because it wouldn't be profitable if people looked at service levels instead of an artificial number that made them think they were getting something other than the short end of every stick in their vicinity?
I think some of it is simply a lag in market adjustment: older managers/corporate culture tend to have pre-internet habits about hiring like the assumption that recruiters are necessary to find good candidates and frequently the system is structured in a way which complicates getting people without going through a recruiter.

The root problem is that many places don't measure performance and so you get the same problems which are endemic in marketing where successes are credited to people but failures are seen as systemic. At the last few places, our recruiters literally failed to provide a single qualified candidate (or even strong resume) but this was usually excused as a tough market - and while good people are always in short supply, taking the 30% cut which normally goes to the recruiter and giving it to the person would certainly help.
Space travel is utter bilge.
- Dr. Richard van der Reit Wooley, Astronomer Royal, space advisor to the British government, 1956. (Sputnik orbited the earth the following year.)

IIRC, this is a misquote. The original was something like "All this talk of space travel is utter bilge. It would cost as much as a major war to put a man on the Moon." Which was more or less correct.
Luatex is the successor implementation to Pdftex, and it works very well: Context Mk.4 is written as a mixture of Tex and Lua, and is a much cleaner code base than Latex2e.

Pdftex is currently the standard Tex engine for the two main Tex distributions, Texlive and Miktex.
It's very important to be both. One needs to be aware of the breadth of knowledge. One also needs to be aware of how deep knowledge in one small area can go. Being an expert in a few things with broad familiarity in other fields is the only practical way to accomplish this.
I have very little hope that IE 9 will change anything about the IE problem. What we need is continuous releases of IE like we see it with other browsers. I don't see anything in Ms's behavior that indicates that that's what will be happening once IE 9 is released. It will probably take years until we see IE 10 and updates to IE 9 will only be minor bug fixes.

Some of the posts here show that people think that Microsoft loses it's dominance if they don't deliver a better browser. It's in Microsoft's best interest to have the average user use the worst browser possible. Yes, it's true Microsoft has missed out on the Internet. But by providing users with a great browser doesn't make this problem smaller, it make sit bigger. For example Google Docs and GMail become more of an alternative to Outlook and Office, if you have a good browser. That's not in Microsoft's interest. So the bets strategy for Microsoft is to release a browser that's only as good as necessary to keep the majority of users from moving away from it, but at the same time makes web development as hard as possible. As someone else here pointed out. MS implemented all the big prominent buzz wordy stuff like Canvas, rounded corners, etc. All the features even non-developers might have heard about and will make them think they are using a great modern browser that has all the awesome flashy stuff they read about. However, many things that actually would help taking web development to a next level like web sockets, workers and esp. the app cache aren't there. I am pretty sure MS could have implemented that stuff if hey had really wanted to, but that would have supported the Internet, in which MS is very little invested, too much and weakened their Desktop apps even more. So nothing will be happening until everyone's unhappiness with MS's IE effort has reached a critical point again and even then we will only get a minimum of what MS thinks they have to give us to please the crowd.
That is entirely plausible, though - the same reason house prices went through the roof.
Also: technologies come and go, which means that, if you're invested too much in a specific niche, you might find yourself "useless" some day.

Be familiar with underlying principles. Those don't go out of style.
I can't believe no one has mentioned Appcelerator Titanium yet (http://appcelerator.com). Titanium allows you to create Android applications in JavaScript. Even though its not python, for all the Java haters (and there are plenty) its drastically easier than creating an app in Java. Plus, its significantly faster than using a WebView (a la PhoneGap).

With Titanium you get access to all the native controls, maps, audio/video, camera, Facebook, and a _ton_ of other stuff. You can check out their Github profile for more info: http://github.com/appcelerator/titanium_mobile. Beyond the basic UI stuff, Don Thorp and his excellent Android develops have recently added the ability to use Android.R resources, intents, activities, services, notifications, and other advanced API's that you'd be hard pressed to find in an app developed via PhoneGap. Not only is it free, but you can use the same codebase (with some changes) to create an iOS (iPad or iPhone) app.

Unlike Mono Droid/Mono Touch, Titanium is 100% free.
No love for ImageMagick "montage"?

http://www.imagemagick.org/script/montage.php

http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/montage
Borders vs Barnes & Noble
You probably meant to send this to "Ask Slashdot".

It's a little beneath even Reddit stuff.
Real World Debate for Recruiters: GPA vs. Experience
I don't notice any lag in Opera 11
And that is just the first half of the quote. It goes on:

Also, mathematics may predict things which don't exist, or are impossible in nature.

As a former experimental physicist I can't help but notice how true this is. ;)
Isn't it up to the platform to give web applications the "native" look and feel, though? If an application is just standard HTML controls, it can't be difficult for (eg) iOS to make them look like iOS controls, surely?

If mobile webkit is as "buggy and inconsistent" as you describe, than I'd rather see that fixed than have developers write for a completely different language/API for each platform they want to target.

HTML/CSS/JS are open standards and supported relatively consistently across desktop operating systems and mobile devices. I just think it makes a lot more sense for each platform to expand that when they need to, rather than reinvent the wheel with, for example, their own button API every time.
Scenario: Unbeknownst to the FBI, programmers at the companies they hired to write the backdoors and other programmers at companies they hire to audit the backdoor writers are members of Anonymous, who then conspire to put secret pet doors in the backdoors. In the meantime, /b/ has fun with memes involving 'backdoor' and even prime numbers.
Social Network for BlackBerry
Hi to all, with my friend, I have designed and are building a social for Blackberry ... The project stems from two basic ideas:

1) Now I am in Warsaw from Italy and wanted to know what were the best players / best rates for my BB but there is no national forum in addition to an international meeting point;
2) Using the messaging system through the PIN you can create a communication system usable and beautiful, we wanted to meet girls with BlackBerry: D

You think we should focus on what aspect, what we should implement as soon as possible? May I hope to release the first beta on calls, and a public beta in June
Why is machine learning not more widely used for medical diagnosis?
Why the hell would you assume "all brainwashed"? People under a dictatorship pretend to like the regime out of fear.

You'd always hear stories about this guy who said X in front of person A, and the next day he was taken "down there", and the idea is: be careful of A, he's an agent. But also: be careful of any stranger, you never know who's gonna report you to the authorities if you say the wrong thing.

Basically, under a dictatorship, the safe thing to do is pretend you're ok with the regime, as long as you don't know who you're talking to.
Emulating textmode in javascript (porting a snake game from pascal to js)
This seems to be a much better explanation than the article provides, which seems to be along the lines of "the smart people teaching in college must be paid a lot."

The answer to the question posed by the headline is: It isn't. The correct question would be "Why does College cost so much IN THE US?," which implies there's a fundamental difference between the higher education system of the United States vs. that of a large part of the world.

You COULD claim that professors in other countries are being paid ridiculously low wages, but this sounds far fetched. A much more convincing explanation, in my opinion, would involve the difference in the way the economy of higher education works in the US versus other parts of the world.
I'm not an Android dev so I'm not positive, but can't you already do that with Android's WebView pointing to local apk assets and Java -> JS bindings to control the API? You don't totally escape Java, but it looks like you can really reduce it.
How to redesign your Facebook profile
Is 'cd $OLDPWD' any different from 'cd -' ?
This is great fodder for thinking about how I'm going to explain my average-ish GPA on law school apps.
No need to switch to an inferior editor. ;-)

Vim has this functionality built right in:
http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/pi_netrw.html#netrw

However, as said above, for me Tramp/netrw are kludges that tend to add more problems than they solve. A real solution can't be constrained to a particular editor.
Escher Waterfall Machine Solved
Seems like the complexity of the client-side code comes from rendering the DOM tree based on the CSS and constraints of the drawing area, hardware, etc. So yeah, just manipulating the tree would seem to be pretty fast.

Of course, it's being compared to spitting out an arbitrary stream of characters to the client without the need to parse HTML on the server side, which is probably faster. Years of experience with the string rendering approach tells us it's definitely more error prone. For example it's impossible to tell whether the character stream is well formed HTML without traversing all the code paths.
I read the thing and didn't understand the word of what the author is trying to say. Maybe I am fumbled up in vocabulary or something. Anyways, if any random person were to ask this to me I would definitely go for "good grades if you want to lead a happy peaceful life and smarts if you want to live like hell but have a shot at being happy as heaven".
From what I understand about the German education system , significant features of US education are missing [I cannot speak to the others] - primarily a pursuit of universal access to higher education and the opportunity for second, third, and fourth chances at a college degree.

To put access in perspective, University of Phoenix has 400,000 students - the entire German higher education system issues about the same number of Abitur each year. In the US more than half the population [55%] has some college compared to 22% of the German population with post-secondary education. The percentage of the US population with Masters and PHD is almost as large [10.5%] as the percentage of German population with any type of University degree [13.6%].

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_U...

http://www.destatis.de/jetspeed/portal/cms/Sites/destatis/In...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abitur
or you could just put some paths on your cdpath and enable autocd.
Yes! Here's what I want in a modern successor to LaTeX:

- Default output is PDF (DVI is a port on my computer :) )

- Optional DOC/DOCX output (even if it supports just a subset of the program's capabilities)

- Bibliography management built-in (no separate ancient BibTeX)

- Command-line searching and importing from Pubmed / Google Scholar / etc. built-in

- Bibliography styles can be created/edited by normal humans

- Syntax closer to Markdown or reStructuredText, to enhance readability of source file (and maybe shrink the learning curve)

- Program is smaller than 1.6 GB (the size of the default MacTeX distro).

I've played with writing something like this for a while (in Python). The hardest part for me has been dealing with bibliography data - there's always one more weird Pubmed record that breaks my XML parser. Makes me really appreciate Knuth/Lamport/Patashnik and their successors.
remember that HN readers tend to be

user:	RiderOfGiraffes
created: 822 days ago
karma:	18098
How do you spoof TCP connections?
Everything that is provably correct becomes mathematics. Of course physical laws are never provably correct.
Déjà vu - NeXTSTEP vs OS X
I prefer Context (built on top of Luatex the same way that Latex 2e is built on top of Tex 3) to Latex, because it allows a much cleaner separation of content from styling, but I think what you say is unfair.

Adding images to Latex documents is straightforward using the core libraries graphicx and putting \includegraphics{FILENAME} at the place you want the graphic. Adjusting placement to left, right, overhand, etc., is done using Tex primitives. It's true that using Tex , Latex and the main Latex packages correctly is not straightforward and that until you have mastered them, you can get into difficulties, but that is also true of Word.

The difference is that it takes longer learn how to produce any sort of ugly document in Latex than in Word, and longer to produce beautiful documents in Word than in Latex.
While there are some stupid people who get straight A's, there are probably a lot more that are really bright. From pg to Zuck to Gates to Feynman to Knuth (I actually don't know their GPAs, but their acceptances to the top schools means they probably had good grades).

I know what I might say will be unpopular, but what I've seen most of my life is subpar mediocre students will argue that grades mean nothing. They argue they could get straight A's if they cared to, but it's too boring, or whatever. And not surprisingly none of the ones that I grew up with are now what one would call a "professional success". None have started companies or done anything that would published in even a trade magazine/journal. In fact, of all the people I knew in high school who have been chronically unemployed, they all fit in this bucket.

With that said, they may have all figured out that things like jobs and startups are a fool's racket. And being able to dedicate more time to just having fun, whether it is sleeping around, XBox, being in a band, or playing basketball.
I have quite a few ML-loving friends who might be into this...
From a quick look through, the current type system and semantics seems to have more in common with an ML dialect than Haskell (though its syntax and long term intended type system style does resemble haskell's more closely)
We're also a Winnipeg based startup located out of the NRC on Ellice. If you happen to be using or interested in Ruby one of our guys runs the Ruby User Group out of our office once a month. The next one is this coming Thursday.

If that's not up your alley, we can also be found in several watering holes on Osborne, feel free to send me an e-mail, kerry -at- styckyd _ com.
As another Winnipegger, I had no idea companies like this existed in our city. Maybe I'm the isolated one, but how can we spread the word about things going on in the area?
> [...] and the opportunity for second, third, and
> fourth chances at a college degree.

Can you clarify what you mean by that?
I have the impression that Texmacs has about as much momentum behind it as Gnu Hurd.
I thought this video was excellent because of just that. The subjects' reactions and the little nuances tell so much. I find it fascinating that the NKorean censors gave so much freedom to the film crew and the students, to showcase their life.

For example, I thought it was really cute to see the male and female protaganist quite close to one another. Could they be dating? Or is it all just acting?

The varied emotions seen in this documentary is a refreshing break from all the straight-face, cautious, camera-shy interviewees from the other films by foreign crews in NKorea.
Good university, and way better than 90% of what the American HE market has to offer. Unless, of course, you value the electives system a lot.
Sometimes you are glad that they were wrong and sometimes you are sad that they were not right.

Automobiles will start to decline almost as soon as the last shot is fired in World War II. The name of Igor Sikorsky will be as well known as Henry Ford's, for his helicopter will all but replace the horseless carriage as the new means of popular transportation. Instead of a car in every garage, there will be a helicopter.... These 'copters' will be so safe and will cost so little to produce that small models will be made for teenage youngsters. These tiny 'copters, when school lets out, will fill the sky as the bicycles of our youth filled the prewar roads.
I think so: shorter is often better. I have read 6 technical books in the last 6 weeks (4 were free from the publishers, which was really nice). One of these books would have been excellent if it was shorter: the author would make a good point and then repeat the same thing one or twice in the next dozen or so pages. I think that author was not well supported by his technical editor and editors. A good 400 page book could have been edited down to an excellent 200+ page book.
First you are comparing the percentage of the US population over 25 with the German population 15 and over.

Also, I'm not sure how you came up with the 13.6% or the 22% figure.
This just shows how difficult prediction is. For every one of these, there is an equally wrong wildly positive prediction.

A few of those are included, like von Neumann's "nuclear power will make energy free!" prediction.

The future will surprise. It will surprise us by what is possible, and by what isn't.
Speaking as a Torontonian who visits "The 'Peg" from time to time, I vouch for the assertion that Winnipeg is the Icy Centre of Canada. It also has a great orchestra and a vibrant arts community overall. Good luck!!
I think that it is one of the driving factors, and that the experience of the housing bubble confirms it. I live in sleepy Albany, NY, which as a state capital and small city it is a pretty stable place. No boom-bust cycles at all -- it's always "ok" in the region as a whole.

House prices that were stable from the mid 80's to 1999 suddenly went mad, up to the median income in the area for the legions of state workers. If you tried to buy a $200k house, there would be a bidding war minutes after the sign went up... but not much above $250k.
If people meet the minimum, then it's a success. If they're substantially above average, that's a nice bonus, but not enough to justify risking a bad hire.
Show HN: Redesign any website with the new jMockups Website to Mockup Converter
One "rock to look under" is the misapplication of scientific theory or a common misunderstanding of basic principles.

(See: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html)

One famous example is Professor Joseph Le Conte's mistaken engineering analysis demonstrating the impossibility of flight. (See below.)

Another common example is the use of the Halting Problem to rule out the entire notion of tools for detecting bugs in software. (Yes, I've had professors tell me this flat-out.) The Halting Problem doesn't rule out such programs, it only demonstrates that they can't be perfect. To date, there are lots of tools that do an imperfect but still valuable job, to the point where people can even charge for them.

http://www.microquill.com/heapagent/ha_comp.htm

A major area where basic principles are misunderstood is in security. It's a truism that no security is perfect. However, it doesn't follow that no one is able to do online banking without instantly being hacked and robbed. Yet many who find the previous idea ridiculous also think that all "DRM doesn't work." That's simply not true. While it's true that all DRM can eventually be broken, it's not true that all of it instantly evaporates on contact with the internet. Breaking DRM involves a certain cost. If enough people are "willing to pay" the cost, then it will be broken. This is almost always true for big-budget hollywood movies. It's certainly not true for all digital content.

---- Professor Joseph Le Conte's mistaken engineering analysis

Put these three indisputable facts together:

One: There is a low limit of weight, certainly not much beyond 50 pounds, beyond which it is impossible for an animal to fly. Nature has reached this limit, and with her utmost effort has failed to pass it.

Two: The animal machine is far more effective than any we can hope to make.; therefore the limit of the weight of a successful flying machine can not be more than fifty pounds.

Three: The weight of any machine constructed for flying, including fuel and engineer, cannot be less than three or four hundred pounds.
Is it not demonstrated that a true flying machine, self-raising, self-sustaining, self-propelling, is physically impossible?

— Joseph Le Conte, Professor of Natural History at the University of California, Popular Science Monthly, November 1888
Computers in the future may...perhaps only weigh 1.5 tons.

That's hardly a howler is it?! I see nothing suggesting that 1.5 tons is the endpoint or that we'll be using heavy computers in The Year 2000.

Will those people suggesting we'd one day have a supercomputer in our pockets be laughed at when we have microscopic omniputers floating around our then-useless brains?
You really want your typical driver flying around in a helicopter?

I think this is the reason we don't have flying cars. We could build them. We could do a lot of things. But nobody really wants them, given the danger they would pose. (Energy constraints are probably another reason, but secondary. There are flying car prototypes that get MPG numbers comparable to SUVs.)
When I read someone saying 'many places are fine', that seems to directly imply that most places are not. This isn't a counterargument. Is he actually wrong? He's certainly getting downvoted a lot and I hope it's not just because someone didn't like the wording.
Most Contacted HBGary Emails and Domains
The article links to this other article which I find to be a better summary of the book and answer to the question:

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/10/19/feldman
Funny, earlier on HN was a headline that said to praise your children for their effort and NOT their intelligence.

Grades are a sign of effort. Effort wins most of the time.

What really surprises me about the wildly successful people I meet is that most of them aren't brilliant. But all of them work their asses off. Non-stop. I haven't met one who was brilliant and had a good work/life balance. Unsurprisingly, these habits often (but not always!) start early... Most of these successful people went to great schools and got great grades.
Business Is Booming