skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I should probably add some more detail to the story:

1)I have a place confirmed at a good college, Im considering if I should take it
2)I have a multitude of job offers although I have one in particular earmarked as favourite
3)Through spending so much time working with startups/government/media in London, I have built up a great network of contacts already - unfortunately, I'd be unable to to the same thing at college
4)As one commenter pointed out - the startup is very time intensive and will need funding and someone to work on it full time in the near future
5)In reply to another comment, I do have a precise vision of exactly where I want to be. Being a 'successful entrepreneur' can mean a hundred different things to a hundred different people.
6)I dont fear failure if there is a possibility of success - I do however believe that taking such a massive risk is stupidity if there is NO chance of success. My blog post also acts as a way for me to 'test the waters' as it were to find out if success if possible.
I spent far less than $80k to get my degree from a big state school in the US, so this doesn't necessarily apply to the OP's situation if indeed that's the minimum they'd end up spending in the UK.

But I have to disagree with you that it's a "gigantic blatant lie." Perhaps it's overly optimistic regarding the quality of education one would get for $80k, but it's not a lie. Sure, you can get very well-rounded by reading books on your own but there's a tremendous amount of value to be gotten from going to college too, maybe even a different kind of value, or for a different person.

I took a fair amount of higher level math in college and I really don't think I would have had the same experience studying that stuff on my own. I'm sure there are people who can read abstract algebra, analysis, and geometry textbooks on their own and get 100% of the understanding a good professor would try to impart during lectures, but I bet they are rare. In 16-18-yr olds, probably quite rare.

Regarding liberal arts courses, I had the opportunity to study Japanese literature and film with some really great professors, and that's something I could have obviously done on my own (watch movies, read books, write critical papers and mull over them by myself). But it's not the same. Maybe not better, maybe not worse, but I disagree with your assumption that self-study is a drop in replacement for college.

"Doing a startup" probably offers a great deal of opportunities for personal growth and well-roundedness, but I really don't think it's going to be the same as studying things like upper division math, compilers, the French new wave in depth at a decent university class.

I completely agree that college is totally over-priced. At $80k, my arguments start to look a little flimsy. But as a blanket statement, I have to disagree with you that the idea that "college offers value to someone wanting to be well-rounded" is a blatant lie. Also, your tone was a bit shrill.
You think you have enough karma, your wife assures you it's not an issue but really she's sneaking a peak at the guy next door with those few extra points ... in studies 95% of women said online karma scores were as important to them as looks.

Be the man you always wanted to be.

But wait, that's not all ...

Send the money know and get an authenticate certified "Mighty Man of HackerNews Award", hurry awards are limited! Awards independently valued at $250 USD, that's right, you'd have to be an idiot to miss out on an offer like this. Act now!
Texas Free Online Newspapers
Why would we need to convince you? It's not like you should feel an obligation that you have to. It might be that open source simply is not for you.

A big part of it for me is the social aspect:

I enjoy sharing my code with others, improving other people's code, and of course using code that is already available so that I don't have to write it myself. But also seeing what other people manage to do with my code is fun.

Another thing that I like about open source is that everything is flexible. If something doesn't work the way I want (or can work productively with), I can fork it and and change it.

Also: If you don't intend to sell some program or library, and you think it can be useful to other people, why not make it open source? That doesn't give you the obligation to support it or write extensive documentation.
Single file: https://www.readability.com/articles/bjccjm5f
How long is your college place good? Can you work for a year or two, save money and then still take it or do you have to reapply?
PC fans are designed to spin for a long time with very little friction and no maintenance. Their internal components are designed with this in mind. Spinning them rapidly with compressed air introduces all kinds of forces they were never designed for. Depending on the quality of the fan, I've seen them fail immediately, or shortly after having been blown like a turbine. Others seem unaffected and run fine for years. It's best to err on the side of safety. A dead CPU heatsink fan can mean dead CPU in short order.
Fellow UK resident here.

The political reasoning behind the hike in fees is to make young people think harder about whether a university degree is actually going to be useful to them in their career. It's fairly clear that vocational courses would benefit some people a lot more than theoretical/academic courses, and society would benefit from this too.

At the moment young people tend to go to university by default, and there were (until recently) frequent stories about universities offering nonsense degrees just so they can claim funding from the government. I can't blame the those students who, in the past, went to university for 3 years just to learn how to be independent, make some friends and party. I don't think they'll do it if the privilege costs them several thousand pounds.

However, our current government in the UK has signalled a change - there is a feeling that making university easy to go to has manipulated unemployment figures downwards and has not really had the desired effect that you might expect from higher education. Historically, university attendance was much lower - not because of a lack of "fairness" in society but because society accepted that only the brightest and most motivated went to such a place.

I'd prefer it if young people didn't have to pay money to go to university but it's in society's interest that those who do go are recognised as having gone there for the right reasons and are qualified to do something productive. If there's a price attached to a degree then universities will (presumably) try harder to ensure that the value they provide is comparable with the fees charged by other universities.

To the original poster I would say this: If you think you're smart then you might as well stick it out and get a degree, especially if you think you have a chance of going to a top UK university. You will find it very difficult to get a degree later in life when you have more responsibilities. Degrees are still cheap in the UK compared to the USA (especially if you think you will one day earn an above-average salary).
Scottish students don't pay any fees for attending any UK University.

NB I am Scottish, I didn't pay any fees when I went to University in the 80s but I still can't justify this current policy.
M-x delete-region
IMHO, a subscription for music is completely worthless.

If spotify had for example a 10 year lifespan, that's £600 I'd have spent in subscription fees (minus potential inflation) for something I can no longer use at the end of the day.

I'd rather spend £600 over the time on CDs which I can do what I like with, including ripping to whatever media device and format is currently fashionable. That's 60 good albums potentially which will last until you die.

The value proposition is just silly on the risk basis. That's why they will die.

[addendum] I use spotify to find music I want to buy - that's the sweet spot.
Hmmm, that's very much what I gather is the philosophy of of MIT's new "CS1" (http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...) which is very different from its groundbreaking 6.001 back in the early '80s. It's gluing together Python libraries to get robots to do difficult things (e.g. differential equations are required, at least in the early version of the course).
Eggbot
Someone is selling a kit now:

http://evilmadscience.com/productsmenu/tinykitlist/171-egg-bot
First, the author is 16 years old. It matters. Yes, college is, all things being equal, a great venue to encounter a lot of opportunities to expand one's base of knowledge and depth of character.

Second, he lives in the UK. College won't run him American prices.

Third, I truly think it's irresponsible to advise to the general populace that they skip college. Going to college need not be a headlong dive into staggering debt. There are options to afford yourself an education without breaking yourself. The "$80,000" scenario for a bachelors degree is the worst-case one, "one of those things that is [almost totally] false but which everyone repeats anyway."

I'm not sure I necessarily agree that liberal arts courses is a worthwhile time investment, though. But college isn't the waste of time you're trying to make it out to be.
No mention of Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time"?
The back issue package and having it formatted for kindle is great. Hadn't looked into it much since the first issue but having the 10 of them on the kindle to read on the go or just away from the comp will be great.
As far as I know about a year or two. The problem I'd have with that is the fact that I probably wouldn't be able to fund going back to college - taking a break for a few years would set me back about another $20,000
This thread is hilarious.

The Universal Principles of Design (among other places) talks about the 80/20 rule — but Emacs is so powerful and customizable that no two people ever agree on which 20% is the most important!
Even though setup is messy, you might want to also consider auto-complete/yas instead of dynamic-abrevs
That's too bad. I should have mentioned that this has only been tested on iOS.
I am struggling to give a good answer to this since some minutes...

There is no special trick. I just realized that it makes no sense to worry about stuff I can not influence. And that if I have bad mood without obvious reason.. I could have good mood without obvious reason as well.

I have no step by step instruction. It is just a decision you have to make for yourself.

Focus on the good things instead on the bad. No matter how big you fuck up, chances are very high that you are still better off than most people on this planet.
Reviews Of The BlackBerry PlayBook Are Unbelievably Bad
Remembering the Real Ayn Rand
Also, let's clarify something -- when Josh says 'college,' he doesn't mean university, as per the American definition of that term, he means Sixth Form: British secondary education from the ages of 16-18, before heading to university.
I am a co-founder of a retail business. We initially had a 50/25/25 split, which then became a 50/50 split after someone decided to leave the biz. Then we gave a manager similar equity (with vesting) to end up 50/40/10.
I prefer points on comments. I commented about this elsewhere:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2444555

A couple reasons. If I am not totally familiar with whatever the original post is talking about, often the top rated couple of comments give me some good insight or jumping off points to look into it further. Again if this is something that is new to me, it gives me a hint that the poster(s) of these comments know what they are talking about as opposed to a comment rated at -3 which seems ordinary to me but maybe has a hidden agenda I have not seen. (An example of this could be a comment saying--and let's pretend I know nothing about domain registrars--"I recommend GoDaddy because they respect wildlife on a corporate level and have family friendly advertising." I know that is a crock but if it were about a Rails hosting company or a feature of node.js I would not.)

I respect the HN community and have learned a lot here. I generally trust their judgement and I have found if a comment is rated highly, it most likely adds a lot of value to the discussion. (Unlike on reddit where the top couple comments may be a clever joke or inside reference to the community--but that is okay because I read the two sites for different purposes.)

Sometimes I disagree with the highest rated comment(s) and sometimes those comments have a bunch of replies from other HNers stating their agreement. I then see my opinion is in a minority and maybe I re-examine it or stand firm and make a comment to the contrary.
Basically it is a nice guide in my perusal of this site. It is not absolute but I like to use it as a reference.
I second this!

I also, wanted to start a business, just a few days before my freshman year started. Even so, I never felt that I had enough time for a company next to my studies and research* I would go to college again. There are just so many products I wouldn't even think of, let alone having the toolset to build them, had I not gone to school.

*Some of my friends did and still graduated. But most of them didn't do research, also. And I think university is, first of all, still about research.
M-x delete-region by default (although you can bind it to anything).

I use emacs every day, and don't think I've ever used it though. Just put the stuff you want to delete in the kill ring.

Why don't you want stuff in the kill ring? It takes some getting used to, but I've found it's generally a good thing. You can always yank back previous items in the ring with M-y too, so it isn't like your OS clipboard where 'cutting' something else means you lose access to the previous item on the clipboard.
It looks nicer than most of the Twitter apps out there, but I don't think I'm leaving Echofon yet. I love the desktop/iPhone/iPad sync, built-in push notifications and muting capabilities.

(I know there's Boxcar, but I've seen friends have trouble unsubscribing from Boxcar effectively, that's a bit worrisome to me however fringe case it may be.)
Matt, its not so much the price Im worried about, If I had to, I would make that much to fund my education, the thing I worry about is he value college brings. Would I be 'wasting' 2 years for all intents and purposes when I could be applying my time elsewhere?
Unless you do disbursements based on equity.

I don't take a salary, but do take my share of the profits. It is a retail business with multiple locations.
Captivating. Understanding something by answering questions on your own (even if guided) always feels more like true understanding. But what happens when we come to a point that requires mental leap beyond what a student can do? Is there a set of problems, or a set of students that are more suitable for Socratic method (3rd graders seem to do just fine at it)? Or is there a set of teachers that are more adept to teaching this way? Please give your answers through questions only.
Is Minecraft Voxel? I thought it was real (if blocky) 3D?
Correct, thanks for clarifying that david, I should've mentioned it in the original post
Why has this been downvoted? The game is free software, yet the (temporary) homepage has no link to the sources.

This is a most relevant question in a "Hacker News" site.
I agree, I was describing the best case scenario, which, however, does happen. I think R, SciPy, and emacs are great examples of projects that benefit by accruing contributions from power users.
Video: Usability Test by Steve Krug
Sorry, but this is why those silly disclaimers continue to propagate. They are nothing but noise in most cases. An exception might be tax advice disclosures.
I'll add a couple of points with no clear plan and trying not to lead you too much.

First, it's not education or work. You can get a job and have a day in college or get a part time job and do a part-time college course. You can do "distance learning" eg with the Open University and do a full time job. You can go to Uni and fit in some work around it (again varies with course and type of work).

You can get start up grants when you're young, eg from Princes Trust.

Consider taking a job for a year and then reassess your situation. Will going to college genuinely further your career (depends on the field IMO)?

When you leave full time education you'll have to declare your earnings to HMRC even if they don't reach the lower earnings limit, this will effect the household income if you still live with your parents and could affect whatever housing benefit and income support they have. I'm not an expert on such things (it can get very complicated) but it will be a factor if you're earning and stay at home.

Don't forget to concentrate on your exams!!
Except the problem with a 50/50 split is that it's rigid and you both need to be contributing equally all the time, which will never, ever be the case.

I guess I'm just a little unclear on how you can define clearly what a "60/40" workload split looks like when they might not even be the same type of work.

That's one of the advantages. It's fluid. 60/40 isn't measurable, but if you know you're providing more value than the other founder, it's going to be close enough unless the other one stops working entirely.
Rescue on Fractalus had one of the most genuinely terrifying game moments of my 'career'. I won't spoil it here, but you can probably guess what it was from the wikipedia page.
Dr. Michio Kaku: Fukushima a "Ticking Time Bomb"
Wow he's smug. He shouldn't be doing any promotion.

It's a weird issue, why is it only Blackberry? Everything does something or other securely, even my dumbphone has an entire list of CAs, and as far as I know can be used in those countries.
It's a 3D approximation of Voxels...
The algorithm for doing this is currently written in php which makes it unable to port it easily.
It's easy for HN to see that the XOR patent is obvious, and not just in hindsight. Convincing a court is not so easy. The solution is not to get rid of quote-unquote bad software patents, but to adhere to the Supreme Court precedents that make software per se non-statutory. Any patent whose novelty and non-obviousness is claimed only in software should rightly be invalid.
But note that the movie came out October 1st of last year, so it could not influence the first of the three Stanford "quarters" in this academic year (summer is the 4th quarter). It very well might have had a effect but in the previous academic year they'd already almost returned to their previous enrollment peak. Plus it can't explain the sharp mid or high 70s% increase in their "CS3" course CS107, since anyone inspired by the movie would right now at best be taking the 2nd course in their sequence.
Works perfectly on an iPad but doesn't feel intuitive at all.
A trip to planet Mars
Rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto | Congregation Shuva Israel
Rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto: Congregation Shuva Israel | Worldwide Torah, Hesed, Yehivot, Zedaka.
Anyone can send me a invite?
Because sometimes I want to cut A, delete B, paste A where B used to be, and it's irritating to have to have that extra M-y in there.

Perhaps I should instead write a new command to kill a region, but then swap the last two things in the kill ring. That's actually a good idea...
While I appreciate the idea of logarithmic scales and other advanced formulas for accumulating points, how about a simple threshold for displaying the points on each comment? For instance, no points are displayed until a comment is +5 or -2?
Twitter Turned Down A $10 Billion Offer From Google
If you take point 2) - the job offer - you could save lots of money with your lean lifestyle, no?
Or you find a big investor, found a limited and pay yourself a salary of which you save some money for school.
Of course all that is easier said than done.

If 'college' in the UK (where do I find info?) is similar to the "Kollegstufe" in Germany, specifically Bavaria, I would very much recommend it. We were allowed to choose majors, stop taking some courses, attendance wasn't always required, lots of free time and still a great and demanding liberal arts education. It was ten times more fun and effective then all the years before.
Or post it on Github? Only further awesomeness could result.
I'm a paid subscriber and I'd like to correct what I think may be a faulty assumption (which may be due to poor wording in the original article).

Spotify does more than let you listen to the radio - they have a large catalogue of music that you can search through and play at whim.

You can also save music to your mobile device and listen to it later. If you want, you can go to a friend's house, login to Spotify on your account and then listen to your music there.

http://www.spotify.com/uk/about/features/

All this for just £10 a month! For all intents and purposes, Spotify is "all-you-can-eat" for the needs of most people. I wish they'd improve the range of tracks they have but that's somewhat beyond their control - this will always happen until the market tips enough to get certain old-world businesses on board.

Before this comment runs the risk of sounding like a hagiography, I should point out that the features for creating and sharing playlists are fairly limited and the client software is fairly basic (at least on OSX, which is the only version I've used).

Edit: Beaten to the punch by ladon86 by a couple of minutes. I should learn to type faster, or perhaps just use fewer words :-)
Would such a thing hold up in court?
Also - Just as a side note - Please share this post. I would like to get as wide a set of opinions as possible so I can assess the general consensus of opinion cross-industry in a few days. Thanks, J
That would be awesome to have in our school.

All the apps people are making here seem to be confined to course scheduling (whether something conflicts, etc.) or courses we need to graduate. They haven't actually gone into the realm of recommending possible courses we'd be willing to take.

As the article mentions, the schools have all these data they're not using. They can probably predict which students would succeed in courses (they have access to grades), know which similar courses students may be interested in (cross-reference with previous courses taken and see what others have taken with a similar plate) and even "learn" the scheduling habits of the student (see the previous class times the person usually chose for clases - i.e. a morning person scheduling all classes in the morning or someone scheduling all classes at night).

As long as we still have a choice (to accept or reject the recommendation), something like this would be useful (another resource to inform our decisions).
Nice on desktop safari.
IMHO it is easier because the type system in Java has extra restrictions that the bytecode doesn't have -- for example in bytecode there is no notion of checked exceptions, and variables themselves don't have types, you only need to know the interface of the implicit parameter when calling a method, but not until the call-site.

And what you gain by not learning to output bytecode, you lose by writing supporting libs.

And the example in the article is too simple. Yes you can translate Scheme to Java easily, until you need to do I/O, or until you need to optimize it such that you could use it for real work. I also don't see any mention of continuations, which are surely part of the Scheme standard, or am I wrong?
So, for £40 you want the ability to download every piece of music ever released and own it for ever? Once you've spent your first month downloading everything you've ever wanted, what's the incentive to re-up your subscription the following month? Are you really going to pay that subsequent fee to download a few new releases?

Not sure your model works.