skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the linked opinion piece below [1]:

A recent N.C.A.A. study determined that only about 20 of the 1,000 or so college sports programs in the nation were profitable.

The 30 largest universities in the country each routinely generate annual revenues exceeding $100 million from sports, but according to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, most of those revenues are spent covering operating expenses for the school’s athletic programs and paying tuition for their student-athletes. The majority of Division I colleges in the N.C.A.A. operate at a loss.

There is lots of money in college athletics. That money is not going to institutions to generate revenue for the institution at large. That money goes back to the athletic department and almost every college athletic program receives revenue in the form of student fees.

Here’s a quote from another piece [2]:

By far, the largest student fee is the last – the intercollegiate athletic fee – which can be upwards of 80% of the total fee amount at many institutions not in Power Five conferences.

Conventional wisdom says that intercollegiate athletics is a boon to colleges and universities; that it’s wildly profitable; attracts new students; enhances fundraising; and, boosts the university’s profile. Yet these are myths, often perpetuated by the media – and by the universities themselves.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/opinion/pay-college-athle...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ccap/2014/12/12/who-actually-fu...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/why-students-foot-the-...
Wish I had a RemindMe! bot on HN for comments like these.
It was ALWAYS A LIE. Duh... But hard work is not going to hurt.

The article is spot on: it is nearly impossible to succeed in your life with crapy education our "inner city" public schools offers.
And clarify that it's closer to the top, not the actual top.
Golang Server Side Components and Actions
Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but yes, they may have had all those things, and still had this bug, because cargo cult testing is not usually effective at finding bugs.
Both their one-sided blame story and yours are likely to be just as wrong.

There's no question that many people in systems analyst or architecture roles, that are divorced from the details of actual development, came up with flawed designs that were more work to implement and produced worse results. That was one of the antipatterns that Agile was a reaction to.

The problem with those roles is that they tended to be embedded in a waterfall architecture model, where system development involved some variety of requirements -> analysis, architecture & design -> development. The amount of interaction and iteration between those phases was often much lower than it should have been. There are many factors involved here. Simply having different teams for those functions is one of them, since that tends to reduce interaction between the phases.
My statement was, with few exceptions....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/why-students-foot-the-...
Texas A&M has over $220 million a year in revenue. Highly profitable.
It sounds like you’re advocating for a $4 minimum wage and a living situation that requires a vehicle, while only providing anecdata and opinion in attempt to contradict the very qualitative and well-studied benefits of social programs. Is that accurate?

I think it’s fair to say that quality of life can reach far and beyond the kind of conditions you’re describing, especially given the surplus of wealth that goes towards other government services. As a taxpayer with representation, I would prefer to see more of my dollars go toward raising the lowest standard, not rationalizing poverty for the sake of an impressive military.
Money laundering is my favorite curiosity. The amount of resources needed to keep control of something like that would be astronomical.

Might happen eventually if governments move to centralized digital currencies though.

I think it’s a crime that attracts folks of all kinds. It’s a good business, you don’t “hurt” anyone besides the government, very quiet, sex, money, etc. The bad shit is where the money comes from.
Agreed. The only time I've found a debugger useful is when the print statements aren't immediately giving clarity, and cognitive dissonance is settling in.
But coal plants use an absurd amount of coal and everything they don't burn ends up as ash.

And have you been close to a big coal plant? They're massive. A coal plant probably used more land than 200 turbines and unlike turbines the land is unusable.

Coal plants use many times their mass in coal during their lifetime. If you're looking at total materials needed over the lifetime of the plant, I wouldn't be surprised if coal was 100X higher than 200 turbines.
That's why I never used and will never use a password manager... You can't get more security by trusting more intermediaries with your passwords. When it comes to anything that matters, you want to trust as few intermediaries as possible.

The more entities have access to your passwords, the less secure you are. I can't believe I even have to say it, it seems so obvious.

Why not just remember your passwords? There is an infinite number of strategies and secret rules which you can use to easily remember your passwords.

Or for low-importance services, why not just use your browser's built-in password manager? You have to trust the browser maker anyway.
No, it is not.

You want to back up your comment with some actual convincing arguments that human memory is better than the plethora of tools 1password offers?

I know you won't because although it makes for a nice, witty comment on HN, it's such an absurd thing to actually consider at face value.

Truly random, unique passwords for each website. OTP support and backups. Sharing with audit trails for teams. Encrypted files. The list is long.
At the time we had them installed, both the federal government and Oregon had very generous subsidies.

We do have a loan to pay off the balance not covered by those subsidies, but the monthly payment on the loan is about $40 cheaper per month than our electric bill was prior to having them installed. So, even with the interest on the loan, we are paying significantly less for our monthly electric usage. Once the panels are paid off, our bill will just be $12/month.
Mention one great TV show that even remotely compares to Shakespeare. Maybe the Sopranos. Maybe. That's pretty much it.

There are great movies (I can't think of any released in the last 15 years though), worthy to be called Art and talked about for generations to come, but great TV? More like absolute brain rotting garbage that's contributing to our cultural degeneration and artistic suicide.

Mainstream Internet with the Facebooks and the Googles is not far behind.
Take your pills.
Yes. Hence the with few exceptions part of my comment. Also profit is revenue - expenses. A $220 million revenue doesn’t say anything about it’s profitability.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/why-students-foot-the-...
Wouldn't this be pretty easy to see through with a debugger?
I responded to someone else, but my response also fits here:

At the time we had them installed, both the federal government and Oregon had very generous subsidies.

We do have a loan to pay off the balance not covered by those subsidies, but the monthly payment on the loan is about $40 cheaper per month than our electric bill was prior to having them installed. So, even with the interest on the loan, we are paying significantly less for our monthly electric usage. Once the panels are paid off, our bill will just be $12/month.
But it's nearly a guarantee that not doing hard work is not going to get you to the top for those not born with money.

Whereas hard work will work for many.
It’s pretty clear that the DoD realizes how close they were to being forced to sell all that IP space off and wouldn’t have even been able to say “we’re using it” as it wasn’t routed.
When you go to an all-you-can-eat buffet, do you eat all you can, or just until you are full?
With interactive debuggers like python's pdb you can actively manipulate data, print it out, basically do whatever you need to do in a REPL. It is way more effective than adding print statements, rerunning your script, etc. That being said I typically use a combination of both: I use a print to get me to where I think the problem begins, then an interactive debugger (pdb.set_trace / breakpoint / etc) to drill down into the details.
That seems highly unlikely to ever happen unfortunately. Any mission able to land and take off from the surface of Mars for a return trip is likely going to be able to take its own soil samples
If you think the concept doesn't make sense, consider that you do not understand it.

Highly respected people whose entire careers is security will disagree with you. I'm not telling you to take an argument for authority, but maybe do some introspection about who is more likely to be correct there...

Edit: Parent comment edited out some really outrageous claims, so my reply no longer makes as much sense.
This is actual supporting data from a reliable source and should be up top.

So it appears fossil fuels take ten times more energy to run over a lifetime. Less than I expected but still bad
I've seen some sites using this pattern in order to blur together the ideas of signing up and signing in. You enter your email address and then you are either presented with your login method (Google / Microsoft / email), or else if you are brand new then you choose a method and go through a sign-up flow.

But there are other reasons too. Google does this, I'm guessing so that users who are tech-challenged can be able to just focus on one question at a time?

And then my bank does this questionable thing where they ask for my email first, then along with the password prompt, they show me a "security image" which is an image I chose when I made my account. I think the idea is that a phishing site would be less likely to know my security image, in which case I might realize something's up.
I don’t see how this follows. If you have one single-threaded server doing the job of 20 similarly specified servers running the distributed system, you could run every job twice, on two completely independent servers on two completely independent networks, and still be 10x as efficient unless both failed catastrophically during the same job. Or you could run three completely independent copies of the same job and still be at nearly 7x efficiency, etc. There is no need for any sort of “consistency mode” here. This is just brute force, without any synchronisation between servers or resumption of aborted jobs at all.
Ask HN: How to determine a business idea viability?
Hi HN.

I have an ill defined idea for a business. A marketplace type business. Connecting service providers with customers. There are some well-established competitors already, there's obviously money there and it's a growing market segment. I have the technical skills to make the website and build the actual thing.

So my question is how do I validate this idea of "making a platform" without making a whole marketplace-type site and marketing it? I don't have any unique ideas besides maybe a better UI/branding. I just don't want to waste my time making a site that has no chance of succeeding against established competitors. I'm not afraid to spend some money testing this, are there any services that could turn my two line business plan into a proper plan?

Any advice appreciated on the process of realizing an idea. Turning it into a business. Again, it's not something unique and companies are already doing it. So maybe I should start with the marketing then? Just kind of unsure on where to start.
Easy integration with browsers and so forth which significantly simplifies UX, especially for less sophisticated users. Built in password/passphrase generator. Mobile device support. Search and organization functions. The ability to store other kinds of secrets like ssh keys. TOTP support. I'm sure there's stuff I'm missing but those are a few things that spring to mind.

Personally, I use keepassxc + keepass2android + browser plugins + syncthing. The idea of storing my passwords in someone else's cloud gives me the heebie jeebies...
> No reserved "this" or "self" keyword to declare methods means that every type will have its own single letter self variable which you have to look up every time.

Python lacks a reserved keyword for this use, and I can count the ones not using “self” in instance methods and “cls” in class methods that I’ve encountered on the fingers of my left foot.

But, yeah, weak convention plus no keyword promotes needless chaos.
The Shame of College Sports (2011)
Interesting, you'd think they would have a more professional website.
Bitcoin Core Validation: Full Validation
I'm surprised/impressed that it can build an index and search it in 29 milliseconds. Pretty clever solution!
Presumably there could be a compensatory and punitive windfall from a lawsuit against the crowbar assailant. So even your somewhat colorful example works against the point you're trying to make.
Not sure what's wrong with that sentence. A CRT screen works via an electron gun (cathode) literally shooting an electron beam at the screen; then the screen emits even more electrons towards the viewer and the typical glow is experienced as a side effect of that.

The cells that "move along" nerves in the PNS to support neural development are Schwann cells that would not be considered "neurons", but that's a minor slip in terminology. The basics is entirely correct.
Yeah, probably best not to be too concerned about imaginary internet points.
His point is still valid, he just used the wrong technical terms. He's a writer, not a scientist.

He's writing about how these things impact human life, and details like this don't really matter at that level.
There's some wilful misattribution or straw-manning by the Guardian here.

'Hard work is an essential ingredient in success' is much more consistent with common beliefs, and it's more or less true.

Nobody is saying 'Just work hard and you will achieve the highest ranks of society'.

It's a 'lie' that anyone actually says that, hence the straw man.

The Guardian however, doesn't really want this to be true, and so like most ideological papers, they shift the goalposts of their supposed ideological opponents and misattribute the logic.

The flaw is right here:

"I have come to understand that the systems that underpin the top professions in Britain are set up to serve only a certain section of society: they’re readily identifiable by privileged backgrounds, particular schools and accents."

Yes, of course, British people, of all people know that.

They've known that for 1000 years.

But saying that 'the top corridors of power are hard to achieve' is a fundamentally different thing then (direct quote): “if you work hard you will get on”.

"If you work hard you will get on" is not "If you work hard you will achieve the top ranks of society".

Finally, there's a woeful lack of gratitude in the author's premise, that he, as an immigrant somehow deserves one of the most choice spots among 60 million residents 'because he worked hard'.

Ironically, as a 'extremely poor immigrant son of a single mother with 12 chilren and a person of colour' - the fact that he was able to receive considerably more and better education than his peers, and has had a very successful career and is a respected member of society actually demonstrates how relatively open, kind and tolerant the UK is at least overall.

He's almost a living, breathing contradiction of his own argument.

This misattribution is a daily, constant problem in the press (almost all of them) and it's a primary source of false information and social malaise.

The G has some great writers, I wish they would try harder.
You'd need some really great moderators for this kind of conversation. No conversation is perfectly linear - new ideas lead to forks, and a large group needs to somehow choose whether or not to take one. But if there's a queue of five folks waiting to speak, that's four opportunities for the tangent to either be taken or not taken, and exponentially many opportunities for the wrong tangent to be replied to.
Are you actually complaining that wind is bad because it ruins the view?

Windows, cars, and pet cats kill multitudes more birds than windmills

Hydro plants do use wind to bank energy. Either by shutting down and banking water when the wind is blowing, or even running the pumps in reverse.

I agree with you that energy storage is a big problem with wind. It is with solar too. But we can get near 50% wind and solar before it becomes a problem since much more energy is used during the day.

Dams also have a finite lifetime, something nobody really talks about. They silt up over 50-100 years until they're completely full. This is a bigger problem in places like China with turbid water but happens everywhere eventually. The sun will shine and wind will blown till long after we're gone but dam sites will be gone eventually.
> allows

That word is blackli^Wblocklisted in Google developer documentation style guide.

https://developers.google.com/style/word-list
Can we change the title? Him being a vegan has nothing to do with this story. It's a story about a young man from California who poured $5M into Joe Biden's campaign fund who runs a risky markets business in Hong Kong.
I'll bite: as a very traditionally trained woodworker (professionally), there's a very apparent and steep learning curve to mastering manual, traditional skills. Sharpening a plane or chisel (fundamentally the same process) requires a degree of finesse, understanding the process, and how the process achieves the desired result. And then it takes practice. Anybody who mistakenly approaches sharpening with the expectation that they're going to end up with a razor sharp chisel the first time is almost certain to be humbled. Virtually every skill has this learning curve: layout, sawing, dovetailing, carving, etc. None of these skills are hard, per se, but they take practice to learn.

The modern maker movement largely sells an illusion that you can sidestep all this thanks to the involvement of computers: just 3D print your thing! Laser cut it! Or CNC router it! And then put an Arduino on it and make it do something!

And you know what? All of those also have a steep learning curve. They have the illusion of accessibility, but if you want a good part off the ShopBot, you need to first be able to very precisely describe what you want to end up with, then understand what's an appropriate cutting tool for the material you want to make it out of, understand chip load, speeds, feeds, and a slew of other stuff. And the laser cutter has all of the same hurdles, but slightly different, and I've heard enough people complain about 3D printers to know the same is true there too. Oh yeah, and there are a million paths to get to g-code, all of them with their own quirks and incompatible file formats.

Most people get stuck at coming up with a sufficiently precise description of the thing they want to make. If it isn't on thingiverse, it's basically impossible. Most people could learn, but they aren't looking for a hobby that requires that much effort before they see an outcome.

So the population that makerspaces are trying to attract is pretty small, at least once folks realize how much effort it is to actually do anything beyond making a canned intro item.

Reality, it turns out, contains a surprising amount of detail. Whether you're altering it with traditional tools or modern "maker" tools, you have to put your time in understanding it if you want to move beyond the basics and reach a level of skill and independence.
A trick is to use something in the 10 range but not /8 - 10.185.203/24 will work on a 10/8 network (assuming no actual host overlap) as it’s more specific and will route first.

Still gives you fun issues though.
> (10 million watts of electricity)

10 million watt-hours of electricity

Your system would produce 10 million watts if it did 10 million watt-hours per hour.
I would say it’s more a plea/encouragement by the software maker to buy the license rather than a anti disassembly mechanism because it’s too easy to get around.
Open letter from researchers involved in the “hypocrite commit” debacle
For text-only view, no Javascript or cookies:

curl https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/24/pentagon-internet-address-mystery/?outputType=amp |grep -o "<p data".*</p>" > 1.htm

firefox ./1.htm
> It seems to me there's a trend around "enterprise" software having weaker supply chains than the more nimble and agile tools.

Or enterprise tools are a more attractive target for attacks. Due to that they should be better at this, so still shame on the slack ones.
In my case, the most critical passwords are memorized and are not stored in any other medium after the brief period that it takes to memorize it. Simply put, I saw a breach like this coming and I anticipate many more in the future. Simply put, password managers are too big of a target.

As for the rest, a written record is sufficiently secure since most of those login credentials aren't protecting anything important. I also have a tendency to avoid services that require a login.
It seems that ctags requires you to run a command which builds the index used to jump to the definitions. Does this update automatically so the function I just wrote gets indexed?
Virtually nobody realizes 172.17-172.31 are available.

And many are surprised to find that there are 172.* that are routable.
Shitty First Startups (2015)
Very promising. Psion-killer?
Reminds me of
https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-...

Cluster computing can be useful, but until you're talking about petabytes of data, it probably isn't helping you
Show HN: Next.js and Tailwind CSS Landing Page Template
> Early idealists saw TV as bringing Shakespeare to the masses. We know how that went.

Yes. The masses got to see Shakespeare.

At school we spent a year on Julius Caesar. Now, the problem with these plays as literary material is that they're intended to be performed. The school was able (with support from parents) to ship students to see one performance of the play they were studying at a professional theatre (in our case a Royal Shakespeare Company performance) but for an entire year's English classes that's a pretty poor ratio.

However we could watch (video recordings of) several different TV adaptations of this work during class, we could see a staging with "authentic" Roman backgrounds and a cast dressed in togas, and we could see the same scenes re-imagined as a Present Day drama. Short of having us actually put together a performance ourselves (this was English class, not drama) I don't see a better way to actually teach these plays.

What I'm reading here is the usual nostalgia for an imagined past. If you wanted the Internet to make the masses suddenly better educated and more interested in expressing themselves then you've made a mistake just as if you expected the city park to make the masses healthier and more interested in running. This is infrastructure, it's necessary but not sufficient.

Also, surely the least healthy thing the Internet did so far was create the Twitter pile-on? Which is totally user ability to participate, create and learn, it's just that they will participate in hating today's Milkshake Duck, they will create memes and awful jokes about Milkshake Duck, and they will go out of their way to learn other reasons to believe that actually Milkshake Duck was always awful and anybody who thought otherwise ought to be next in the pillory.
IME enterprise software is chosen very poorly in general.
Microsoft wouldn't be nearly as large now if it weren't for this.
The Indian government has proven time and again that it is no friend of an open and uncensored internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_India
I'm friends with an environmental economist that did the analysis while working for the state of Oregon. He also was involved in the reports that shut down Boardman. The information is accurate.
And also lots of literally Shakespeare on TV.