skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
providing access to everyone for something by nature devalues it. as we try to democratize and socialize the world we try to give everything away.

college is just another victim of this. no one wants to tell a parent that their new born child is ugly and no one wants to live in a world where we can't all hope to be anything.

the housing bubble was the result of parents telling their kids to buy homes, because that's the american dream.

if education is a bubble, if housing is a bubble, then the american dream might just be a bubble too.

maybe it's time we invent a new dream.

a long while a go we dreamed of working less. i feel like in a creative economy, one where the generation of creative ideas is of principal, maybe we need more time to be creative and to share.

i think largely as a whole we are at peak capitalism. capitalism seems to best fit when resources are expansive. i feel like in the next 20 years resources will be less scarce than in the previous 20, and that is a strong signal that we no longer need to focus on exploration and expansion as much as we do living within our means.
Then invent a new credential system and you will be plenty wealthy. i have heard people murmuring about one.
A more accurate statement would be "what Thiel isn't quoted about in this article is..."

Otherwise, very interesting points. :)
From the article: "But Thiel’s issues with education run even deeper. He thinks it’s fundamentally wrong for a society to pin people’s best hope for a better life on something that is by definition exclusionary. “If Harvard were really the best education, if it makes that much of a difference, why not franchise it so more people can attend? Why not create 100 Harvard affiliates?” he says. “It’s something about the scarcity and the status[...]”"

You're probably right on Harvard-as-a-filter, but Thiel has seen this.
> I know the following sentiment will not be popular here, but here I go anyway(bye bye karma).

Eesh.. please don't do that. It's not really 'baiting people to downvote you' per the comment guidelines, but baiting the contrarians to upvote you.
Calling the bounty in the headline ~$6,000 is disingenuous, too, because dumping the BTC into the market would drop the price significantly.

4 upvotes and no one actually bothered to check. Good job, Internet. Quite disingenuous.

I imported the data from Mt. Gox (main bitcoin exchange) into a spread sheet and calculated how much his $8500 BTC is worth if he sold it all right now: $5671.23
Thanks for the heads up. I just checked out upout, really cool idea and great UI.

To try to return the favor: on your about page, you link to /karma.html, instead of /karma.
The math comes out to about 17 months' subscription fees for a permanent license for each product. Hopefully at least some of those fees can go towards buying a full license in the future.
Thiel is wrong - education is valuable, college very much so.

But an English degree is not higher education, it is a fiction we created for those who want to go to college but can't hack it in the real world.

A STEM or a law degree will make you a lot of money.
YC Reject - We've been offered an investment to fund our Summer 2011 class
Sharing the "Harvard environment" with talented peers can be pleasant, horizon-expanding, and occasionally inspirational. In my experience, though, it doesn't often inspire young people to change the world. Instead, it introduces them to lucrative career options (e.g., investment banking) available mainly to Ivy League grads. Given the massive salary differential compared to virtually anything else one could choose, most go that route.
From the image caption: "It is puny compared to most silicon processors"

(The image appears to be an 8-bit ALU, larger than a man's thumb)

I'm not sure they're using the word "puny" correctly...
Some people are incredibly stupid when choosing project names, playing on cute third or fourth meanings of common words that have almost nothing to do with their projects or choosing names used by similar but unrelated projects, making it almost impossible to search for specific information. The "best" project name I have seen so far is "kiwi". Among others, there are two independent projects kiwi from different institutes in the Stanford CS department, the OpenSUSE build manager and an EU semantic web project (and of course loads of non computer related project of every kind from New Zealand). Gah.
Interesting device, but the presentation is making me crazy.

I've seen war correspondents look more chill when there's bullets flying.

If this device is going to ship in volume, Windows Phone 7 will sell about zero units.
While I approve of you guarding your privacy, you may want to be careful about doing this with domain names - many registrars require that the WHOIS information is up to date, and can theoretically take them back if it isn't. I'd imagine the same holds for domainsbyproxy and the like.
Stress and Aging: a Question of Attitude
New credential systems are created all the time. One we hear people talk about nowadays on HN is a GitHub repository. Another one is acceptance into YC.

All a credential is is something you've done in the past which implies your ability to do something in the future.

Graduating with a degree in Econ from Harvard implies that you might be a good consultant for McKinsey. Founding Facebook implies you might be a good founder for a future effort. Having a great GitHub project implies you might be a good programmer for some simliar tasks.
To be fair, you don't put light-bulbs less than 5/8" away from your head. Then again, they don't come with a manual that instructs us NOT to do that!
the reason why it's a bubble is also what keeps it afloat

Federally guaranteed student loans.

[1] http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/money-trail/2010/06/17/s...
> Thiel is wrong - education is valuable, college very much so.

Depending on your definition of "education", I agree with the first part of your statement. The second part of your statement I wholeheartedly disagree with. Education in general is a very valuable thing, but a classroom education is not the only one, and college can be valuable but is not necessarily so. I'm a high-school dropout, yet I've never regretted it for a second -- I have a good deal of education, but it comes from self-exploration and experimentation and it's shown itself to be quite valuable so far. My case is by no means the norm, but propping college up as the only path is pretty silly.
As far as I know radiation is not a problem and never was, I always heard that the problem was warming.
So, are there no alternatives to embedding a single private key across multiple hardware devices?
Moving Truck Rental | Cargo Vans | Moving Company | Truck Rentals 
Moving Truck Rental is your best truck rental company which provides one way truck rentals, cargo van rental & moving services at affordable price.
That sounds interesting. Do you have a(n online) source for this?

Although I think removing that sign would be considered violating the gag order.
Lightbulbs might not, but lamps usually come with stickers that tell you how far away they should be from other stuff (presumably including heads). At least the three Ikea lamps in my room.
Popular movie online riview
popular movie online riview
popular movie online riview, Online Stream Walking Wounded, the whole episode of the video.
movie,online,season,episode
I hate to be a killjoy but neither party ever asked why the e-mail address was changed resulting in the other one jumping in and saying "I never changed my email address, you changed yours!!"? And thus opening up an investigation as they show each other the emails from the past. Secondly, neither party ever asked "Was this the first time you posted an ad on craigslist?" and finally neither party ever said "I don't usually respond to ads on craigslist but..." (people say this out of insecurity not because they actually mean it, this is just to make themselves look good).

I know this because I use to do this all the time in college over skype , record long awkward conversations between distant aquaintences and roll on the floor laughing daiwa try to figure out who called whom and who they are. This was actually a lot of fun, it was an exercise in psychology, we would try to predict how crazy explosive weird conversations could get and see what happens based on people's personality profiles.

My point is that they would have to be really really stupid to not know that somebody else connected them...
"number of people in the world with an income per capita..." doesn't make sense.

Also, this is a terrible way to compare wealths of people. $12000 in Canada will buy you 6000 loaves of bread. In some countries, it might buy you 6000000 loaves of bread. (Numbers are made up, but you get the idea.)
Undocumented as in "we included it in our 'CSS3-compliant selector engine' but do not mention anywhere that it is not actually part of the CSS3 spec, just something we thought was cool".
Oh yeah. Sorry, I've been switching hemispheres too many times recently, and got confused by the seasons.
He's definitely seen it, but he misses it.

Let me start by saying that the standard of living has increased for everyone, but yet being poor still sucks. And it will continue to suck. Increasing you standard of living is no fun if everyone else's increases faster.

The reason you do things like college, YC, or even start a company, is generally to differentiate yourself with respect to standard of living (some people do this to make the world a better place, but those people are few enough that wlog we can ignore them).

You can't look at a system that is meant to create differentiations and then complain because it creates them. For better or worse, its doing what its meant to do. Even if you were to get rid of college altogether, you'd still have the issue persist. But now it would just shift to making into Thiel's Talented 20, or the Moritz 5, or YC, or TechStars -- each with a different level of repute (because at the end of the day, there is going to be differentiation between who is given nothing to start a company and those people that everyone wants to shove a million dollars in their pocket).

Unless we go to a socialist system, people will value metrics that differentiate people -- and ideally the differentiation should happen on someone else's dime. Today that dime is the student/parent/government. Maybe in the future it will be VCs, but trust me it will still happen as a VC as bright as Theil knows its not prudent to fund everyone at equal levels.
"Because I don't want my children to grow up in a world where someone would walk by them getting raped and ignore it. I would rather they grow up in a world where their father died to help someone."

Indeed. Nor would I want to live with a soul that knows it had ignored someone in such distress.

There is no doubt that a cowardly action might be safer under certain circumstances. But who wants to live like that?
Company Name: Tutorspree (YC W11)

Company Size (number of people employed): 3

Company URL: http://www.tutorspree.com

Position: Web Developer Internship

Contact Email: info@tutorspree.com

Skills Needed: PHP, MySQL, CSS/XHTML, jQuery
Your microwave pumps out quite a bit of non-ionizing radiation.
The First Deal: The Division of Founder Equity in New Ventures
Obviously I watched the video. My question was about the need to connect a mouse to a device that has a completely usable touch screen interface. Connecting the external display device via hdmi should not blank out the tablet and force the use of a mouse. Rather, one should be able to use the tablet's screen as the control interface.
Oops, my bad - one of my DNS mirrors was out of date. Thanks for the heads up...
you've clearly never had any dealings with recruitment agents
Google Modifies HTTP, Makes Chrome 50% Faster
Get a Google Voice number and it's free ;)
It's slow acting, but close to 100% lethal, and you don't die nicely.

IMHO, that's just about the most horrible combination imaginable.
Rand applies the label "SEO" quite liberally, and I think it does everyone involved a disservice. If you look to see which sites linked to your last post and pinged them the next time you post to let them know there's new content, is that SEO? If you research the topics your target market are interested in and then address them, is that SEO? If you contact bloggers and media about your new product and encourage them to write about you and link to you, is that SEO?

Maybe you call it that. But I think it's about optimizing for searchers as much or more than it's about optimizing for search engines. Whatever it is, it's valuable, and "White hat SEO" (aka "marketing") has an important place in the weapons chest of startups.
It wasn't working for someone else before (~7 hours ago, just got back from dinner and a meeting), but I had fixed it before I left.

Just tested; it's totally working now.
The Importance of Trust for Investment: Evidence from Venture Capital
> I don't think "cowardly" is the right way to put it.

Oh, is "apathetic" a more comfortable label ?

> The level of harassment you put up with is obscene, and that you continue to stick to your guns in the face of it is admirable. That said, it's not something that most people want in their lives.

That guy is getting harassed a lot because he is alone. I don't think the overloads up there have the courage to harass tens of thousands - do they ? Wide ranging support means less heroism will be required to get what people want. He is not fighting a personal battle, right ? It is better to fight smaller battles now and avoid the possibility of all out wars that we are seeing in Africa and the Middle-East.

> Dealing with the level of harassment you face imperils all of those goals. Unless someone is dedicated to a cause and willing to sacrifice a lot to serve it, it's unreasonable to ask them to invite that kind of drama into their lives.

So, that person won't even "want to meet or correspond with" them. Do they realize the stark contrast between Jake's priorities and theirs.
Company Name: Opzi
Location: SOMA, SF
Company URL: http://www.opzi.com
Position: (a) Software Engineer OR (b) Business Analyst

Skills Needed: (a) Ruby/JS, good all-around CS aptitude (our stack is Rails/Node), (b) Great writing ability and research skills, experience or strong interest in startups, marketing, and sales. Both positions paid and open to transition to full-time.

Contact: euwyn@opzi.com

You'll work closely with the founders and learn & contribute as part of a small team. This means real responsibilities and hard work, but also a unique opportunity to dive right into startup life. Join us as we continue on our mission to deliver better designed and engineered enterprise software.

ps. Any designers also feel free to get in touch.
I buy loaves of bread in Malta for seven cents a piece and then sell them at a profit for five cents a piece.
> he received an aerosoled version of the drug

If you are talking about threat from terrorism, then as an aerosol is the only effective way to distribute it.

and if you were doing that, even something simple like Sarin is an order of magnitude stronger than this stuff

the agents that were being produced during the cold war by third-world countries are again stronger than sarin and probably easy to make for a small group
This convinced me of the opposite actually. All his examples were something that people would love to blog about, except his hair medicine which he used as an example of something that is overrun by spam.

Get something to rank for Viagra or a penis pump using only white hat tactics, outline a good plan for doing so or conceded the point.
Precious Royal Crown in Photoshop
In this tutorial I’m going to make Royal Crown in Photoshop having some Precious Gems on it (we will be making those too). Some new techniques for you to learn in this tutorial. You will really love to practice it and hopefully you will enjoy it.
In light of the "mid-cycle" 5.5 update it's a pleasant surprise to see this one's a freebie. I've dreamed about this kind of thing pretty much since I first used the iPad.

Also eagerly awaiting some kind of update to Premiere that uses a touch device as a control surface for scrubbing through time, etc. Single-purpose hardware exists, of course, but it's expensive[r than a tablet I already own] and, just as annoyingly, takes up desk space!
Louis is remembering the wrong part of the PC vs Mac wars. Go back to Win2/3 vs Mac. The Mac looked much more like iOS then. Windows 3.11 is like Android now, and then Win95 is where it looks like Android is going. And then the 15 years after Win95 is what most people remember about Windows vs Mac.
And my phone doesn't pump out near enough energy to scare any sane person. Convert it all to thermal and it's still nothing to worry about in the slightest.
"I'd live my life much differently if I thought my brain would rot at age 50."

Not to get all Carpe Diem on you, but I'd suggest if this is true, you should probably re-evaluate your life. Whether your brain starts to rot at age 50, or you get hit by a bus in two weeks, you don't get to control how much time you have. You can only control what you do with that time.
Company Name: CloudCrowd (in SOMA SF)

Company Size (number of people employed): 17

Company URL: http://cloudcrowd.com

Position: a) Backend engineer b) Frontend engineer

Contact Email: abhi@cloudcrowd.com

Skills Needed: a) Ruby (on Rails), MySQL b) JavaScript and CSS

This is a paid internship with the intent that the intern may become a full time employee.
Wouldn't every school on the planet want to do this then? Why don't they?
Tera's Ultra Erotic Love Doll: Dolls: Realistic: myintimtoys.com
Buy Nike Dunks Hello Kitty Low/High Edition,Ladies Shoes For Sale
23andMe make clear that they do not assume that the genetic material belongs to you just because you are the account holder -- you can submit several samples under different names for family members, for instance.

It seems the simplest step to prevent 23AndMe being forced to give up your genetic data at some future dystopic point has already been taken: they already have no way of knowing if it's actually your data. You can take anyone's DNA and call it yours, or give anyone else's name to your own DNA.
LeBron James animated series debuts on YouTube
YC is a better example of a credential than a Github account. The function of credentials is to outsource decision making about quality: you have to actually read code to extract signal about a candidate from Github, a task which is expensive and beyond the capabilities of most investors and people with hiring authority. "YC alum", by comparison, tells you a lot about somebody in a sentence and doesn't require any work to understand - pg et al already did the vetting for you.

There probably exists a spectrum of opinions on whether the credential is useful because of the vetting or the experience of the actual program. Candidly, I think that YC probably has a value add in attendance. Higher education? Not generally, no. I have a $140,000 degree (two, technically) which basically certifies that at 18 years old I was smart enough to get into my university and then, for the next four years, I did not die or fail to sign my loan docs. I know I learned some things of value in those four years, but I could just as easily have written myself a course of study with zero commercial potential, and my degree would say the same thing in a language 99.998% of Americans can't even read anyway. (East Asian Studies degree written in... Latin?!
"And by the way, if after reading this you still wish to use a traditional password manager, I suggest that you put your passwords into a plain text file and encrypt it with GPG or use Password Safe."

Having recently had some significant trouble with a lost online banking password, I've been thinking about keeping all my passwords in an encrypted file stored in various places (I don't like the idea of using a password manager, because it's difficult to move it across platforms). Is this sensible from a security POV? Which is the best encryption to use and is there a standard *nix tool for it?
Sorting algorithms as dances
Yup. 10x more toxic than palytoxin.

And we inject it in ourselves voluntarily.

Humans are such funny creatures.
I can't imagine Ballmer telling the Office or Windows groups that their bonuses this year depend on how well Bing is doing

bad move
It was a long war and each of us remembers different parts. :) In what way does this dismiss the Mac's ability to get all the software you need even if the numbers are not perfect?
Drats...largely limited to NA and Europe.
He has a strong opinion and this will always generate a big debate. But what I like the most, is that by talking of the education bubble and creating an option for students (the 20 kids program with $100k), we're going to test his theory soon. If that works, how about some of the top education programs replicating his model?
You've acknowledged it's irrational, so making rational points in rebuttal is clearly a pointless exercise. Nevertheless...

If you are already worrying about "obvious" things, wouldn't it be better to know whether or not you have anything to worry about? For instance, if it turns out you have a below-average chance of heart disease, it might make you worry less about your weight. On the other hand, if you discovered that you were (like me) at elevated risk of developing diabetes, wouldn't that provide the extra motivation you need to limit your suger intake and further control your weight?

I can't see any situation where having less data would make things demonstrably better -- just more uncertain.
Posted this as a TechCrunch comment but wanted to cross-post here:

The challenge higher education is going to face is that the signaling mechanism that higher education provide (i.e. you were good enough to get into Harvard so you're good enough to work for Goldman Sachs) is going to become de-coupled from the institution's ability to impart knowledge on people. A few decades ago, most of what you needed to learn to be productive in society was best learned at a university. Today, most of the what you need to learn to be productive in society is best learned on your own, online, for free. There are exceptions but 99% of human knowledge is no longer locked up within a university.

Contrast that with the cost of higher education.To go to UCLA as an out-of-state student it now costs $50K/year (http://www.admissions.ucla.edu/prospect/budget.htm). And that's a public school. And it's rising 8% a year. So the cost of learning has plummeted to almost nothing and yet 18-22 year old kids are taking out six figure loans to "learn". This makes no sense and feels very unsustainable.

And here's what I think will change the game: alternative signaling and credentialing mechanisms. When universities no longer have a monopoly (or near-monopoly) on signaling/credentialing we'll witness a sea change. I'd offer that this is already starting to happen in certain parts of industry. Would you rather hire an engineer with a lot of GitHub followers, a great reputation on Stack Overflow and/or someone who is a Y Combinator alum or would you rather higher a Stanford or MIT grad? It's a bit of a toss-up for many people to answer that and given that the comparison is Stanford/MIT and not the 4,000 "lesser" schools, that says something.

This change won't happen overnight but Thiel is on the money here. Higher ed is a $500 billion industry in the U.S. alone and I think its value proposition has never been more questionable than it is today.
From who? That seems pretty important.
I plan to write a blog post about this later but I'm starting to think that the term "College Drop Out" has started to become more valuable than "College Graduate." This may not be completely true right now but in 5 years when today's 25 year olds are hiring, the term may possibly be more valuable.
If you live every day like it's your last then that precludes sensible things like retirement planning. On the other hand, if you know you're not going to be mentally capable of enjoying your retirement anyway, then now is the time to blow that cash.