skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In both situations, people get themselves in deep debt with the expectation that they'll end up with a lot more money than they started. The housing market collapsed because prices fell after everyone realized the majority of the housing market was built on promises that could not be kept. The education market will collapse because available jobs and salary fell (analogous to prices in the housing market, and largely because of the housing market collapse) and the promises made to young people that they will be able to build a career cannot be kept for every student graduating today. I do not like the analogy either, because it ends with the country hurting hard, very hard.

It's easy to dismiss such analogies as idiotic when you assume that all you need to do is "live your life a certain way" for the diploma to pay off, and when you want to ignore the eventuality that the education market collapse will cause tremendous damage. Both the housing and education market collapses depend on promises made to homeowner and students that cannot possibly be kept for everyone involved.

Of course, limiting loans based on merit is a great solution, but it's not a politically palatable one. On one hand, politicians love to say that everyone will get an education and it will be paid for no matter what. On the other hand, what happens when students from well-off community meet merit-based standards for loans while students from poor communities don't? Banks and universities will be slammed for practicing discrimination. Sort of like how banks were slammed for discrimination when they were lending less to minorities and accused of discrimination based on race, when in reality they were limiting loans only to those who could pay for them, but banks were ultimately forced to give out subprime loans through legislation and we ended up with the housing market collapse.

Common sense solutions are not adopted when you have politicians involved who only appeal to the emotion of voters and seduce voters with promises of cheap housing and education, and slam politicians who are fiscally responsible and want to limit mortgages and student loans to those who have the ability to pay for them.
That's how I used to feel too until I read more economic history. Turns out, that's the way it's always been. At the end of the day, stock prices are 100% driven by supply & demand (beside the IPO price I suppose).

Sure, fundamentals are what a lot of people base their buying or selling off of, but what's "hot" is all that matters just like it always has. Maybe a company just crushed their numbers for the quarter or a drug company attained a new patent; and while that may contribute to the true value of the company, when it comes to the stock price nothing matters except how many people buy.
>The reason student loan debt has ballooned isn’t because students are paying more.

That's not true, I've seen numerous articles on the cost of public colleges increasing much faster than inflation.

Anecdote: I dropped out of Georgia State in 2007, I'm going back now to finish my last few semesters of a math degree.

The cost has more than doubled in the last 5 years.
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The comment is incorrect. Student loan growth far outpaces the number of new students:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/08/chart-of...
Then we weight their percentage based on the number that they cranked out. That way, the more horses they have in the race, the less the payout is on the winning one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZwvImsYo4E
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Things We'd Like to See in Windows 8
All I can think of is either complete amateur hour, or a Kickstart project inspired by Mel Brooks' "The Producers"
Judge Alsup: I said, you can make your pitch to the jury. This is being sprung on me... if you want to say to the jury that you're asking for hundreds of millions of dollars for nine lines of code, you can do that if you want. I'm not going to blurt out some ruling now. I took back what I said yesterday: if you want to make out a case for infringer's profits based on nine lines of code and seven files that aren't even part of the Android system, well, that's an extremely weak proposition, but I can't tell you it's illegal as a matter of law. It could be I'd be surprised by some statement in a decision somewhere....

I'm starting to really like Judge Alsup. Mostly for being an extremely sarcastic bastard.
For those who are interested in student debt, there is a really good website called Project on student debt:

http://projectonstudentdebt.org/state_by_state-data.php

The problem really lies in the fact that the US cannot find the right answer for the basic question: Is Higher Education a public or private good? There is no wrong answer, just that answer is really required to form good student expectations regarding the economic system, and what they should invest in a degree. Right now the US government subsidizes higher ed in various forms and manners, in order to bring the cost burden down. Pre-2008 crisis, the US govt used to mostly guarantee debt taken out by college students in order to bring down the rates. Banks would then securitize these loans, cut them up in tranches and sell them on to investors, pretty much like MBS's (mortgage backed securities). However, in the financial fallout a lot of students could not get loans so the US government decided to give out more grants etc.

However, the example of UK is quite interesting as well. The average student debt in the UK is lower due to a large part of costs being carried by the govt. Though, this does not effectually increase unemployment rate either. Lower debt != great unemployment and greater happiness. Also, historically civilizations with higher quantity of credit flowing around in the economy seem to do better as well.
My startup generates money and I can live with the money I earn, but I can earn 2x more money and have a better, regular and a more social life, that's the dilemma. And also I can provide a better childhood to my child as there is a big difference between what I earn and the offer. I can't directly say how much money I am earning as the currency and purchasing power parity are different. but the offer will provide a 15k USD lifestyle if I would live in the US.

If I take the offer, I can't continue working on these sites as I spend close to 12 hours per day. They will simply fail in time. I will probably sell them before they fail.
He just refuted that argument by denoting that 'price' as the sticker price. New Mexico for example gives all students attending a state school with a high school GPA over 2.5 a scholorship. The state could just directly give public schools the same money for in state students and avoid the 'scholorship' angle. But, this approach offers better publicity and if you have below a 2.5 GPA in a public high-school you might not be ready for collage.
Thanks for raising this point. I didn't think about this.
>Leaving us with around $6000, which is income, so that was taxed

That's just bad accounting. Making a game costs more than $35k. There should be nothing left to tax.
I've heard so many people talk about buying Facebook "as soon as I can get in". I think that's ridiculous. When it comes to individual stocks, buying or selling without concern for price is for suckers. That's what got us into the last bubble (or few): people who would buy something (like a house) regardless of the price based on an obscene overconfidence that it would appreciate.

I have no idea what the thing's worth, but I cringe when I hear people talking about how they're sure it's a good bet because of some X which is almost certainly already priced into the market.
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Hold that thought:
http://www.ycombinator.com/

I'm a traditional university type. If pg can drag the Zuckerberg set out my physics department, that's fine by me.
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> costs about £25 ($40) over here

You can do it pretty cheaply over here too... but it's a good idea to get a lawyer involved, and you get what you pay for.
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This is a really interesting post and makes a lot of sense.

I've now worked in a couple startups that raised enough money to hire for Stage 2 or 3 before they launched an MVP. In fact, raising early actually put more pressure to hire since Stage 3 looks better for investors.

This brought too much process and too many specialists early on. The early designs became too ambitious, the products became too complicated, and the launch dates ended up way later than they should have been. Ultimately, it all led to the market fit being really hard to find and a lot of the early stage team members leaving.
This is completely what's wrong with the system. Eventually everybody needs to work for money. That's not to say you can't go to University to better yourself and learn something that inspires you. Eventually, though, you have to eat and pay for creature comforts. If college has a huge sticker price, what's paying the bill? If not college, something else has to. Everybody who goes to school needs to make sure that they can cover the costs, either through the skills they learn in college or via some other means.

Going to college to study liberal arts is still a very respectful thing to do, if that's what you actually intend to do...as opposed to going to college, cutting classes, getting wasted 5 days a week and graduating with a C average in psychology.
Yes I agree.
There are 2 big problems with education.

1) The society requires you to have a degree. A self taught programmer will likley get paid less than a college educated programmer. Even though the self taught one is more skilled.

2) College students blindly trust that the college education will get them jobs. What many don't know is that the the stuff they are getting taught is obsolete already. Many Occupy Wall Street protestors said that "We went to college, where are our jobs?". Who said going to college will get you a job?
> You forgot one important thing: Potential for Growth﻿

The problem arises when that growth occurs but instead of the price now being reasonable at those levels, it increases further...which is probably what it's going to do.
Expertise vs Talent
Which argument are you talking about? If the cost doubled for him to pay out of pocket, it doubled for him. Talking about sticker price vs. adjusted metrics is really arguing semantics in this case if somebody is stuck paying what's charged up front.
Even if the original comment were advocating that, which it's not, it remains to be demonstrated that the number and seriousness of the bugs would actually get worse if the software were developed using a different kind of language.

And I'd never suggest JavaScript for that.
To this day my dad still runs a stock control program on MS-DOS 6.22. It does the job and never crashes. For a while he had a lovely orange display with a Hercules video card.

At least for him, 640K turned out to be enough :)
U.S has those. They are called Community College.
This is just absurd. Non-accredited, branded schools will provide better education for less money? Really? I assume he's referring to the growing for-profit college industry.

Yet for-profit colleges are actually the biggest culprits driving up the student debt. Students at for-profit colleges run up more debt, are more likely to drop out, and are more likely to end up under-employed than those at traditional universities.

This paragraph also bothers the crap out of me:

> The competition from new forms of education is starting to appear. Particularly in the tech world. Online and physical classrooms are popping up everywhere. They respond to needs in the market. THey work with local businesses to tailor the education to corporate needs. In essence assuring those who excel that they will get a job. All for far far less money than traditional schools.

Yes, students need relevant, modern, education, but education that is "tailored" to corporate needs is a little worrisome. Extremely targeted education might be sweet for the corporations hiring the graduates, but it sucks for the students themselves.

Economists draw a distinction between general human capital and specific human capital. General capital includes things like math and critical thinking, skills that can be applied in a variety of situations. Specific capital includes things like how to use a particular piece of software or knowing which forms need to be filled out for a requisition.

General capital benefits employees because the employee is free to take his capital and go elsewhere; the skills are transferable. This is what we see in silicon valley where companies acquire startups just for their employees.

Specific capital, on the other hand, benefits the employer since the capital is only valuable to a specific industry or company so the employee is limited in where he can take his skills.

Everyone needs a mix of general and specific capital. But the balance has implications for the economy as a whole.

One of the things that traditional universities have been pretty good at is general capital. This provides flexibility and resiliency to the economy. People can move between jobs and even careers, from dying industries to growing ones. They can fill jobs that hadn't even been invented when they were in school. And they can actually acquire specific capital more readily (the "ability" to learn).

Shifting focus to specific capital by allowing companies to control our educational system threatens to turn the entire country into one big company town, and that's a little frightening.

EDIT: Typo
If everything the warning serves is to ask me shut down the site immediately after the launch, I have to say that I ignored them.

However, I really did everything possible to prevent security attacks. I failed at trusting other partners too much - especially Linode. (You can say that the wallet wasn't securely stored, which could be my fault, but the hacker possessed the ability to log in to every single Linode server!) The recent email leak is because I added a guy who is responsible for security into our mailing list that was used for password resets.

I would say that almost none of the comments in the original post provided the right warning or predicted the right cause of failure.

Again, they are useful (and the described things could happen instead), but they are irrelevant.

Any business can fail because of various reasons, and predicting something will eventually fail will always turn out right, just like predicting a baby will die one day. I appreciate the warnings because I didn't make any mistake they mentioned - no SQL injection, no mass assignments, no unauthorized back-end access, no CSRF/XSS, no firewall break-in (the hacker got the database from the server backups, not from the live database server). I think I've handled everything that I'm able to handle well.
>I have found that a great many of the students have not mastered high school algebra.

That's been my experience tutoring all of my younger siblings.

I think that we'd be better served if all 4 years of high school were spent mastering basic algebra (with exceptions of course).

A mastery of basic algebra will better prepare you for college than a cursory understanding of trig and calculus.
I agree that this site looks like a pretty blog. In terms of lean startup, Wordpress was a good idea. Take a look at some other magazines (that may also have print versions), and online newspapers. I don't think the design is that important at this stage though, you need readers.

I've heard once that people don't read news for the news. They read the news for the community. The reason why you read the WSJ vs NYT is because of the community that reading that particular newspaper gets you. Maybe your boss, or maybe it's your coworkers. Maybe it's the people you're trying to impress so you can get a job with them. Or maybe you and your friends just like the same things. Reading your magazine is thing you can share with others. I believe what you're missing is the community.
Contributing to an open source project is a privilege, not a right. If you don't like the way someone treats you you are free to fork it and shrug them off.

As a human being you should be as nice as possible to others. However that does not mean you have an entitlement to be treated nicely. It is your duty as an individual to take appropriate action when you perceive injustice.
I may have discovered a secret form of advertising
Is it difficult to game a search engine like this for a somewhat obscure query?
The good part about this is that it's much easier for a new author to build a following.

Anecdotally, I have a good friend who had her first book published about a year ago. In the meantime she's published another full length book and about 5 novellas. They have come out through a range of publishers, from small e-pubs up to big, well-known houses. She makes incredible use of social media, and has recently seen her books starting to climb into top 100 lists on Amazon.
LOL thanks for the correction and the useful mnemonic trick!

I was fairly certain 'ringable' was not a word so I fudged the quote. Unfortunately, even 'wringable' isn't a word. I guess it has to be 'wring-able', which just doesn't look right.
It's definitely my experience that it's hard to find people with high levels of mathematical knowledge who don't have a 4-year, technical-field bachelor's degree. It's of course possible this is merely a correlation, but I would at least hypothetize that the students who've finished a four-year degree in an area like mathematics, computer science, electrical engineering, or physics, have more mathematical sophistication than they would have had if they had not finished that degree and taken/passed the mathematics classes it required.

It's not impossible to self-teach, but as far as I can tell, self-taught people usually don't self-teach mathematics, at least not successfully. Among self-taught programmers without CS degrees, for example, it's quite common to find people who are skilled coders, but much less common to find people who have a strong mathematical grounding.

Heck, if you want someone who really knows statistics and data mining, to take one example, I haven't met many people without grad-school experience who fit the bill. Masters degree is good, some PhD experience is better (finishing a PhD doesn't matter as much; ABD is fine).
Harder than resisting the urge to call people stupid is resisting the urge to think of them as stupid.
Mark Cuban writes: "As an employer I want the best prepared and qualified employees. I could care less if the source of their education was accredited by a bunch of old men and women who think they know what is best for the world. I want people who can do the job. I want the best and brightest. Not a piece of paper."

So, I suppose I could be wrong, but I would be willing to bet a great deal of money that Mark Cuban does not employ anyone in any sort of white-collar job who doesn't have a college degree from an accredited college.

It's nice for Mark Cuban to say that, but the reality is if you submit your resume to Mark Cuban Enterprises, Inc. where you list your education as being from the First Internet School of Book Learnin', Mark Cuban's HR people are going to delete it offhand. They're not going to call you. They're not going to try to find out if you're the best and brightest. They're going to delete it and call the guy who has Yale on his resume. Sorry.
Try this; socially liberal or fiscally liberal. There's also socially authoritative and fiscally authoritative.

Liberal topics; social: allowing nudity, gay marriage, hacking, etc, fiscal: lower taxes, less red tape, more corporate freedom.

Authoritative topics; social; outlawing nudity, gay marriage, hacking, etc, fiscal: more taxes, more red tape, more corporate control.

It's not unusual for people to have hybrid positions. eg an person can believe that hacking should be banned and believe in paying lower taxes.

Or a person believes hacking shouldn't be banned and believe in paying higher taxes.
Yahoo's CEO steps down amid 'Resumegate'; Board reshuffles
Ask HN: Percentages of developers who blog, release code online?
I find it's easy to forget many developers are effectively completely invisible online. I guess people just don't feel the need to broadcast information to everyone. So, out of interest:

What percentage of your coworkers
- maintain a blog?
- post code online?
is it a big company or a startup?
location? (i.e. the valley or elsewhere?)

I am interested whether we find the 1% rule ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) ) applies to developers&blogging, developers&posting code, or not. In my experience at least (small UK company), it's true for blogging, but not for posting code. About 1/4 the people I work with have a github account.
Exactly man - great point on the analogy, your dream project is certainly no routine thing.

Yet you can make it more 'routine'; engraved into your daily schedule. By not approaching the specific challenges, but rather - just the minimum amount of time you have agreed with yourself is appropriate to invest. Anyone can convince themselves to do that much. And the funny thing is - the challenges then seem to work out themselves.
This is why investing in stocks is also called speculation, investors are speculating that Facebook's revenue and profit is going to grow to exceed that of Ford in a reasonable amount of time.
Got a million put 500k in bank Use 500k for your idea. don't learn programming(you are going to waste your time), instead hire couple of good developers, see how viable your idea is for a year, if it works,good, if not at least you are not begging somewhere. You should know about limited resources, sine you've worked in the oil biz. Your limited resource is your time, don't waste it.
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Most traditional publishers refuse to publish more than one or two books per author in a given genre, out of a perception that it will hurt sales because the author's fans will only spend so much money on books from a single person per year.

This is why so many authors have secondary pen names or force themselves to cross over into compatible genres. (eg. fantasy and sci-fi)

And of course, it can take an entire year to go from draft to published novel... Traditional publishing is a grossly inefficient industry.
That's only because they made people line up to save bullets.
Really? I could be wrong, but I thought the F35 was officially not using Ada for anything.
Apple Founder Wozniak to Buy Facebook Regardless of Price
Would you mind explaining what the video is about?

I do not use youtube.

Thank you.
Your thinking - IMO - is affected by your experience with your grandfather, and I can understand that. But consider that for many people, myself included, the thought of dying in the future is a burden (not THAT big, in my case, but it's there) that we carry with us for a large part of our lives. On top of that there is the thought of our parents, spouses etc dying before us. I think that sucks more than the chance of life prolonging medicine going wrong. You know, VERY few people actually want to die even when they are debilitated by old age.

I don't want to have to die, and I don't want other people to have to die either. I would be delighted to spend as long as it takes solving the overpopulation problem once the problem of dying is dealt with.
That's the ideal, however often people leave tips for things that have little to do with how well the water does his or her jobs. There are also feedback loops where water's tend to provide better service to people who regularly tip well.
Link to last month's discussion of this story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3847373
I think the bigger question is what will the meltdown look like and how will it change our society?
> It's enhanced dramatically by it.

Not everyone would agree with your assessment. Case in point:

http://blog.fogcreek.com/why-do-we-pay-sales-commissions/