skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It sounds like we agree

We agree in the sense that we both believe there is value in a good education. Especially a liberal arts one.

I learned how to learn in college. By taking disparate subjects, I can absorb new information with ease. That is the most tangible and valuable skill I picked up. I got it by taking random subjects. The very definition of a liberal arts education.

That said, the degree itself is worthless. I never had a resume. I started my first business in college. That was 12 years ago.

For me, it might have been better to simply audit those classes or do something on my own, and put the tuition in my pocket. I have a strange feeling that applies to many people here.
Ok if you lived in a major metropolitan area you'd be getting screwed.

Cost of living is cheaper in rural areas, and there are fewer tech companies. But the vast majority of CS graduates live and work in metropolitan areas, so for the vast majority of CS graduates $50k is getting screwed.
Have to agree with Neutronicus here. The prevailing example would be the "But I'll never get into med school/law school if you don't raise my B+ to an A-" argument which I hear at least three times a semester.

This gives us two solutions. First, is to convince naive kids that it's OK to be something other than a lawyer or doctor. Seriously, any students reading this comment, pay attention: There are plenty of other wonderful (and lucrative) professions in the world. If you genuinely care about medicine or law, you should certainly pursue those degrees. But if you're only concerned with career earnings and/or prestige, well, I have plenty of out-of-work lawyer friends.

Second, the academic industry (and it is an industry) needs to place less emphasis on grading and more on education.

I can hear the objections now: "Wait... you mean schools don't emphasize education?" Sigh... we'll save that for another discussion.
There's a thought. What would happen, hypothetically speaking, if an asteroid large enough were to hit the moon and spin it out of its orbit? What would happen to life here on Earth? Obviously tides would be affected, and I am assuming that this in itself would probably affect a lot of animals, fish, birds etc?
Neat! I looked and I've been using the term "Lean" to describe development for 14 years now:

http://web.archive.org/web/19970602013356/http://www.scrawls...
I'd say it gives you a better chance of founding a successful startup, if you're so inclined.
Nat Turner
> "Several" billion? That's half the world's population.

Yes, it is. Are you suggesting that more than half of the world's population wouldn't move to the US if doing so was a reasonable option for them?

Seriously - for most people, being poor in the US would be a huge step up. (As someone put it, almost every "Occupy" protestor is in the 1% on a world-wide basis.) And they're pretty sure that they would do better than the worst.
One thing I did pick up on that could be _very_ attractive is the idea that you would use the same apps on the iphone and ipad so you can take your desk with you on your phone in a way that you can never do with apps that you run on your laptop.
Interesting idea, but I'm with Napoleon on this one

"Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence"
Also there's additional cost in buying Mac workstations for development and submission of your app to the app store. Its ridiculously closed minded of them to require this and its a huge barrier to projects because of the much higher cost in buying Mac Hardware...
I've personally experienced the set of circumstances he describes many times in school, so I don't think it's rubbish. In fact I switched from engineering to math specifically because I could better get by on raw intelligence rather than rote memorization or suffering through boring textbooks.

I've heard that the value of a college degree to potential employers is as proof that a candidate can finish, follow through or endure, so many times now that I accept it as fact.
Here in The Netherlands we have buienradar(http://www.buienradar.nl), or drizzle radar. Works like a charm for short term rain predictions in our wet little country!
You quote me inaccurately where you disagree, I actually said:

>If we have a STEM graduation problem, I place the blame squarely where it belongs: on STEM departments.

And then proceed to state that we need a redesign. The comment was already too long, so I left out any detail about what that would be. I have in mind a long-cycle plan that culminates in a master's in 5-6 years, using early semesters to bring people up to the workload level and spending the additional time gained getting fundamentals (calculus, thermo, statistics, structure of computer programs, etc.) right. We can then proceed with the 4+2 or 5 year models often used in architecture.
This is why college is specifically designed to thwart the intelligent. It is entirely crafted to keep those naturally intelligent from succeeding in proportion to their intelligence. Instead, the curriculum encourages those who persevere.

Funny, life tends to reward those who persevere too.
Top River Island Jobs And The Best Vacancies Online
This is why they invented the word "drivel"
The datasets is a really interesting concept. Maybe SQLite database support? It would need to be some sort of single file database. Then you just need to figure out how to run queries on that data.

We want to do syncing of images, video, and audio. It would be nice to be able to construct a well designed page by dropping assets (text files, images, other media) into a directory in Dropbox and having Droptype automagically arrange those items.
Making art is not honest work?
Monitoring Django - Optimizing for Page Not Found
So for a 200$ drive versus a 100$ drive using 4x as much power with both having an expected life time of 4 years, the 100$ drive is still cheaper.
I'd like to see the gender dimension here. How were these ratios changed by increasing numbers of women attending college?
Self Developments 10 Greatest Myths | A Daring Adventure
The other high schools in my district do a more breadth-oriented first-year course using Scratch, Jeroo, Alice and Python, and that works pretty well for them.

I will say that Stacy Armstrong's "A+ Computer Science" curriculum is quite good and well worth the money.

I've taught Pascal and C++ before, and dabbled in Scheme, too. In my opinion, Scheme is lower-friction than Java, but precise logical thinking is hard in any language, and precise logical recursive thinking is even harder for the average student, which negates any syntax-related benefits.

My kids are very successful in Java, and so I'll stick with what's working until the College Board changes the language of the AP exam on me.
Anyone know how fast it is going relative to the earth? And I'd love to get an answer to wether it will be visible.
But C-t is a useful Emacs keybinding. I use C-z. Pressing C-z z when you want to suspend the running app is not particularly disruptive.
Why I will miss the Sharing feature in Google Reader: it's more than sharing
There are several dozen other incubators out there... And I'm sure some of them would love to compete directly with YC projects.
How does your flippent conclusion that "incompetence" is the cause of failure in the hypothetical student from the essay, rather than lack of perseverance, move the conversation forward?
I think that works well for computer science but possibly not so much for other fields. Comp sci seems unique in that it does not require immense background to get moving, unlike mechanical or chemical engineering.

How did the master's go? What was your prior background in comp sci, if any?
Do they really need $35,000 to do this? It seems like so many people produce apps first and get paid later, I'm not sure what makes their situation different.

Thinking about this more, its brilliant that they put their project on kickstarter. It didn't click for me that people are using kickstarter this way. They get some extra marketing and some extra $. Interesting also that they aren't afraid of someone taking their idea because they have a head start.

Good moves.
No one wants to buy your iterations
Chaos Monkey: How Netflix Uses Random Failure to Ensure Success
Interesting how they decided to copy the sliding panels from Facebook for iPhone. I wonder if it will become a standard on iOS.
He doesn't even mention his experience in the essay.
How to Get More Traffic To Your Online MLM Marketing Page
I couldn't get past:

"One can make endless arguments as to why history texts are spectacularly bland."

Of course, many history texts are bland - but so are books on many subjects. And the best history texts I find some of the most fascinating things to read...
I'm the developer of [git-annex](http://git-annex.branchable.com/) which is AFAIK the closest eqivalant for git. I only learned about the mercurial bfiles extension (which became the large files extension) after designing git-annex.

The designs are obviously similar at a high level, but one important difference is that git-annex tracks, in a fully distributed manner, which git repositories currently contain the content of a particular large file. The mercurial extension is, AFAIK, rather more centralized; while it can transfer large file content from multiple stores it can't, for example, transfer a large file from a nearby client that happens to currently have a copy, which git-annex can do (if a remote is set up). This location tracking also allows me to have offline archival disks whose content is tracked with git-annex. If I ask for an archived file, git-annex knows which disks I can put online to retrieve it.

Another difference is that the mercurial extension always makes available all the large files for the currently checked out tree. git-annex allows a tree to be checked out with large files not present (they appear as broken symlinks); you can ask it to populate the tree and it retrieves the files as a separate step. This is both more complex and more flexible. For example, I have a git repository containing a few terabytes of data. It's checked out on my laptop's 30 gb SSD. Only the files I'm currently using are present on my laptop, but I can still manage all the other files, reorganizing them, requesting ones I need, etc.

git-annex also has support for special remotes, which are not git repositories, but in which large files are stored. So large files can be stored in Amazon S3 (or the Internet Archive S3), in a bup repository, or downloaded from arbitrary urls on the web.

Content in special remotes are tracked the same as other remotes. This lets me do things like this (the first file is one of my Grandfather's engineering drawings of Panama Canal locks):

joey@gnu:~/lib/big/raw/eckberg_panama>git annex whereis img-0124.png
whereis img-0124.png (5 copies)
5863d8c0-d9a9-11df-adb2-af51e6559a49 -- turtle (turtle internal drive)
7e55d8d0-81ab-11e0-acc9-bfb671110037 -- archive-panama (internet archive http://www.archive.org/details/panama-canal-lock-design-papers)
905a3a64-4149-11e0-8b3f-97b9501cdcd3 -- passport (passport usb drive 1 terabyte)
9b22e786-dff4-11df-8b4c-731a6178061c -- archive-leech (archive-6 sata drive)
f4c185e2-da3e-11df-a198-e70f2c123f40 -- archive (archive-5 sata drive)
ok
joey@gnu:~/lib/big/raw/eckberg_panama>git annex get img-0124.png --from archive-panama
get img-0124.png (from archive-panama...) ok

I'm hopeful that git will grow some internal hooks for managing large files that will improve git-annex and also allow others to develop extensions that, perhaps, behave more like the mercurial largefiles extension. I recently attended the GitTogether and this stuff was a major topic of discussion.
I am not the lucky one to have the development board on my desk , nor seen any timeline or product roadmap. But would happy to see a commercial launch soon.
Oh ok. I guess I didn't do the math correctly, I also didn't know you are going to work on it full time.

Good luck, please come back and post here when you are done. You already have one future customer here :)
Just look at the Doom 3 SDK. It is C++ -- they use their own sort-of inheritance / type-check implementation as well.
I think what I would do is take a look at the Android compatibility library so that you can use ICS 4 APIs in older versions of Android. That way you can use things like Fragments on Android 2.x phones that will never get updated to ICS.
> want http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/HisteditExtension.

That that is the another problem -- extensions. You go and read how to do something in mercurial. Go try it on your machine doesn't work. After a while realize you have to enable an extension. Why not just enable all the useful extensions.
Gentoo + ZFS on Linux + RAID-Z1 = Awesome
You're right, cost of living matters. I think it's safe to say that 50k in most metros (even ignoring the coasts) is a pretty bad deal, though.
I think that advisors at private 4-year schools should have a responsibility to strongly advise against a poor choice of major compared against a bad student loan situation.
$50K in Missoula is probably $80K in San Francisco and $100K in NYC, and that's without taking discrepancies in federal, state, local, and sales taxes into account.

A senior developer in SF or NYC is still coming out ahead - probably due to the sheer amount of competition for them - but not quite as much as you'd think at first glance.
> However, [legalizing hard drugs is] socially irresponsible.

You've said that - I'm asking how you're defining "socially irresponsible".

> I don't think a society will function as well with a government making clearly adverse narcotics freely available because people want them.

Not banning something is not the same as "govt making available".

More to the point, those drugs are freely available despite all the laws.

I'll ask again. What benefits do we actually get from the drug laws? If you mention availability, you get to show that the laws actually affect it because if they don't, that's not a benefit. Since they are freely available, that's a tough argument to make.

Then you get to explain why the benefits that we actually get are worth the very significant costs that we pay.

I note that beer distributors don't kill folks over territory.
Is any using it?
And runs on Linux, unlike Textmate.
The author seems to be under the assumption that you can only learn what is taught to you. As a college student myself, I read from various texts + the internet to tie classes and concepts together. If lecture sucks, I find a more interesting way to learn. Nobody is forced to only learn from a single source.
How to find out if your email address has been compromised
Which he then goes on to say.
Hotel Luxor
I dream of the day when I would be able to work completely remote. Much like using a VNC now to connect to server and do the work.
Unfortunately.. the internet connection is not good enough for anything like that, and VNC is sub-optimal for this kind of things.

Imagine being able to work remotely, being able to "rent" a couple of more virtual processor when you need to compile something bigger, having as much RAM available as you need and paying only for what you use, and most of all, having the security that all your data is safely backed up with a 1-second delay at most. Virtually unlimited bandwidth (again, pay for what you use), as all the other resources. Just imagine ...
A Jack and Jill Halloween | Morpho Designs
My only very minor issue with screen is that it ignores window resizing escape codes. I have my .vimrc setup to resize on start/exit and screen doesn't care at all. I am totally vain I know.
This is nothing but an unsupported conspiracy theory wrapped in a long-winded rant.
That's pretty awesome, then. Because your other options are to stack the RAM on top of the chip like older OMAP parts, or put the RAM on the board and hope you get the circuit trace timing and impedences right.
I don't buy it.

My company manages a number of websites; the site with the most homogenous use across all demographics shows IE at 80% usage.

Here's a shot from the last couple of days:
http://a.yfrog.com/img614/5741/ls8.png

Edit: IE usage breakdown:
http://a.yfrog.com/img612/6052/f2yf.png
Has anyone tried it already?
> You like to type things like this:

Why would I have to type that? I have been using git for 4 years and never had to type git-update-cache --add or copying .git/FETCH_HEAD. Are you spreading FUD?
Gender Demographics Trends and Changes in U.S. CS Departments
Apple’s Planned Obsolescence Schedule
Thanks for your input. I'm glad to hear you find it useful.

Our hope is that by having a pretty flexible data storage format (plain text), we can concern ourselves with laying out the content in an optimized manner for any device that might like to access it. By eventually outputting to ePub, responsive HTML/CSS, KF8, we hope to allow writers to write once and let us handle putting it in formats that would make it available everywhere.

Also, 100% agree with you on authors not understanding plain-text and Markdown. These are at the forefront right now because the product is rough enough where the only people that will get it are people that understand these things. To build something your average writer will want to use, we're going to need to provide a soup to nuts experience, but one that respects the content creator and keeps them in control of their content.
I don't see .NET for the OSX either for windows mobile dev.
You can do Android apps, yes, but look at how many ugly and useless apps there is on Android Market.

For me it has nothing to do with closed minded. It's Apple's mantra, they rather have a small group of developers so they can select quality apps, than to have crappy apps.

Yes, you will need to have a Apple computer, but come on, it's not that expensive, besides if you want to make money you have to invest.
yes, that is true, the disks will run fine without. airflow is mostly for any heat generated by the sheeva and port-multiplier boards .... just to be on the safe side.
This article could have been written to not push people's buttons so much, but you've got to admit: there's a significant difference between "weeder" classes and later classes that actually focus on understanding.

Calculus courses are the worst offender I can think of. They're not about imparting you with a complete understanding of the relevant mathematics, but much more about whether you can stomach being made to memorize lots of pattern-matching heuristics to do endless reams of tedious problems. Contrast this with an upper division or graduate course: they're much more focused on concepts, patterns, and understanding. The curriculum even admits this; they have the "advanced calculus" upper-division courses for actually teaching the underlying math.
Really hard indeed!. Mind blowing. At first I thought C but then I cheated ( it is hard even cheating...) and drawing the diferent posibilities I only see A=D and B=C. I dOn't know what I am missing.
Then who would make the art assets for all of our Web 2.0 sites and mobile apps?
It doesn't look like it supports multiple accounts unlike the web app
I can't agree with this. Spending a couple hours at a time discussing Heidegger with an engaged teacher is not an experience you can get outside of a college. And it helped me ask questions I am not smart enough to have asked on my own.

The best argument for college is the social environment, which can't be replicated outside of it. Not education.

I don't think that's true in serious liberal arts colleges. They're all about changing the way you think.

Edit: of course the social aspect is important. But it's not the best argument.
New Review about "lose the back pain system"
Doesn't seem to support multiple accounts - back to Mail.
Why You Aren’t A Millionaire Yet. 10 Reasons
They lead with:

"A couple of interesting things happened in the world of Web browser usage during October."

But at the end:

"Ars Technica's unusual usage figures are not surprising when considering its audience: visitors to the site tend to be technologists and early adopters"

Many people are likely to just assume they have a source other than their own usage statistics and ignore the long winded explanation at the bottom. The red flag for me was the mobile browser statistics.
Aside of the fact that the app displayed an error message at first launch ("Notification error" - "no valid 'aps-environment' entitlement string found for application" - how did this pass review?), it a) doesn't support multiple accounts, b) is very laggy to use when you compare this to, say, the android version and c) feels like another one of these "let's embed the website above a little native toolbar"-apps

Because Safari gets to JIT-compile JavaScript and UIWebView embedded into apps can't, this actually feels slower than the website (~0.5 seconds between clicking on a message and seeing it load? really?)

I really think I'll move back to using their Exchange-Sync for push together with the standard web shortcut for mail management as this is faster and supports multiple accounts.

(edit) On a related note: Doing these "let's add a native toolbar to my website and publish this in the AppStore"-apps feels nearly as stupid as when everybody felt the need to add flash intros to their website. There's next to no additional value (especially with the currently broken push) provided by such a half-assed pseudo-native app.

This does nothing but hurt both native development (by leaving a bad impression on what's possible with native apps) and the open web (by making people believe that a website is not good enough)
Gmail App For iPhone: A Google Mistake?
GMail official app lands on the App Store
It does work that way, although more subtlety. More like "Oh you went to %SCHOOL% and we know some people in common. Welcome to a solid entry level position with decent pay and opportunity for advancement."
We have very different definitions of "pretty nice".
I'm always doing

git push origin develop

for this reason, but some environments probably don't allow you to do this easily? I work alone. (EDIT: be nice to people)
Rainwatch for Android is a thin layer around the precipitation radar images from BBC.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/weather/forecast/8?area=London
>I seriously do not understand why people come/stay here given the way they are treated by our government.

The US is really good at advertising.
Actually, I think there's a really, really interesting point hidden in here:

While technically true, it could also be argued that
you should rederive summation if asked to add all integers
from one thousand to one million. However, math classes
never seem to make such unreasonable requests.

Do you remember the first moment, as a child, when you first grokked that two blocks and three blocks was the same number of blocks as four blocks and one block? I don't, but there must have been one. Some time where I looked at my hand, looked at the blocks, looked back at my hand, and suddenly got it. "Five."

What was that, if not a derivation of summation?

I propose that we are teaching physics (and most everything, really) much, much too late.
It looks like Dark Sky takes this data and uses it to predict up to an hour ahead. It may not be revolutionary but at a fair price it could be a nice to have.
If you are asking whether it's actually possible to test natural talent rather than learned knowledge - I don't think so. they are always conflated in tests (this is no exception)
Try adding

"hot_exit": false

to Preferences>Global Settings - User