skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Part of the issue is that many places use a bachelor's degree as a screen for employees. As a token that gets you past one turnstile in the job hunt, it is worth a ton!

It also takes a certain type of person to be an entrepreneur. Not everyone has that instinct or motivation.

I'm a big fan of ideas to change the way post-secondary education is done. Right now, it's expensive, time-consuming, and undertaken when you don't know what you want or need. However, right now HR people just love that BA and that BA puts you in a certain class (beyond work or money, but in terms of associates/friends). And people are willing to pay up for that. How do you get the HR industry to start valuing alternative modes of education and experience? Our universities have a reputation built over hundreds of years - if not for educating people, then for screening intelligence.

It's a wonderful essay, I guess I'm just cautious and would want more social change around the issue before I felt comfortable following this path.
College is more than just a networking opportunity. College exposes you to the vast world of ideas that you didn't know existed. It's a well established fact that the more incompetent someone is, the more confident they are in their own competence. This can be directly applied to knowledge. The more ignorant someone is, the more confident they are in their expertise.

College is the place you go to that educates you enough to realize how little you know. How little you will ever know. A college education is what turns people from ignorant and arrogant into basically ignorant but humble and ready to learn some domain well enough to be truly considered an expert. It gives you a lifetime of ideas to explore in detail, when time permits. This includes both the ideas of your professional domain and its neighbors, but also the domains of the general public good (like economics).

This post ignores the broader issue. It pretends the purpose of college is friggin vocational job training.. as in.. you decide when you are 18 what job you want, and then you train for that job, get that job, and work at it the rest of your life...
> Time to check out PyQT.

Not so fast. The Python bindings are still licensed under GPL (and a commercial license) by Riverbank.
College is a big lesson in time-management for me, these days i'm trying to figure out ways to maximize the time I spend on side projects and work besides managing good grades at college which eats 12 hrs a day.

Its gradually leading me to a routined life where I plan each day and loads of sticky notes find their way on my wall :)

hmm... what about learning to collaborate and organize events, we can't do that so easily, schools and colleges provide excellent opportunity for that! :)
I'm not the trader type and I don't like the idea of such extreme income disparity, but to say that Paulson didn't create value is factually incorrect; he created it in the same way as the banks you mentioned did: by exposing and exploiting a market inefficiency and causing it to patch itself up.

The reasons behind his actions can make him a saint or an asshole, but the fact that people like him exist just reveal properties of an imperfect system. And he won't be the last.
I'll miss the attention to local politics. Not everyone who runs for office is honest - as the bush administration showed us. For local politics, the only attention comes from local newspapers - unless there has been some outrageous behavior so bad that the stink can be smelled hundreds of miles away.

There are some local issues I care about. Enough to make me run for office. These issues would get lost in the noise if I only had national media available. And that the folks who blog about some of them, well, they tend to be single-issue-cranks who only care about their own spin on things.

disclaimer: I ran for election this past November and lost. My estimate is that less than 1 in 1000 Americans ever run for political office at any time during their life.
Track Twitter users using Google Analytics
Hee hee! I think this is what they call a "silent protest".

If I wanted to make a commercial to highlight the absurdity of music industry copyright practice in the internet era, I could do no better than this.

I can almost hear the YouTube guys now: "Sure, we'll take down that music that you claim copyright to. In its place, we'll just put up a giant, permanent annoucement that says THIS LAMENESS BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE MUSIC INDUSTRY. How does that sound?"
It could be that the news industry is getting split in two. On the one hand, there is up-to-date breaking news where all that matters is how fast you can get it out. Prose, spelling, sometimes even accuracy can be sacrificed to get it out faster. On the other hand, there's in-depth news and commentary like the Economist does. These are things that can be a week late, they can take their time, they can make something truly good because people don't read it to be informed about the latest thing, but to get really informed about the important stuff.

Where this leaves many papers is unknown. In the age before 24-hour cable news and the internet, the New York Times could be both good and in-depth and fast. However, the NYTimes will always be behind what I can get from any number of other sources today. They still have good analysis many times, but it isn't the Economist and it isn't the speed of internet news.

Eh, maybe I'm completely off base, but that's why I too still read the Economist while not being big on papers.
With the exception of national security stuff, US patents are now published one year after application.

http://robertplattbell.blogspot.com/2009/01/prior-art-search...

If a Patent is "pending" it is kept secret for 18 months, then it might be published. Some are not published (it is an opt-out system) others filed under the old rules (pre 2001) are not published, period. So it is possible that a patent may be "pending" that you don't know about. If this product has been on the market for several years, the likelihood of it being "pending" diminishes accordingly. But some Patents take 5, 6 or more years to issue. So you may never have a concrete answer whether one of your competitors has filed for a patent or not.

Additionally, a patent can be reserved, almost two years before filing, by the following sequence:

1. Perform an Invention Disclosure before a credible witness.
2. Wait almost one year.
3. File a Provisional Application for Patent.
4. Wait almost one year.
5. File an Application for Patent.

So, normally, there could be 3.5 years of secrecy. If USPTO publication is opted-out, or if the filing was done under the pre-2001 rules, the secrecy term could be longer, possibly to infinity.
Why you may never see Firefox, Opera or Chrome on the iPhone
There are a few of those.

They're actually quite vile: The webcomic artists depend on the ad revenue received from people visiting their sites, so the scrapers which aggregate other web comics end up leeching bandwidth while snatching revenue from the content creators.
One hopes people learned from their mistakes.
the more sides the merrier. i'm all in favor of citizen journalism and open content from more organized efforts.
Fuck business, go get some education and become a decent Homo Sapiens.
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: A new Google Sitemap Generator for your website
Ask YC: Founder agreements
The legal docs (http://www.ycombinator.com/seriesaa.html) are a great resource provided by YC. I was wondering what initial founder agreement documents people use. Also is there any specific things that should be avoided including types of companies, specific agreement clauses, etc.
I'll miss settling down in my favourite pub with a weekend edition full of analysis and commentary from people who are truly experts in their fields.

Casually reading a broadsheet on a Sunday afternoon is a decadent pleasure (pretty-much gone now that many newspapers have moved to a smaller format) and I will truly miss it.
yes exactly that is how it should work.
In my experience, I did make slightly more, but I couldn't afford health insurance. If I had any kids, it would have been even worse.

That's why I believe that some form of nationalized health coverage will actually lead to far more entrepreneurship as many of these concerns evaporate -- especially for those with families to worry about.
Things I Learned the Hard Way: Ignore the Content
You clearly have no clue about trading.

Though short-sellers are hated, they are necessary. For every trader who goes short, there's a trader who goes long. No one is forcing them to enter this trade. They do so because they want to. Banning short-selling would be a disaster because prices would stop reflecting reality.

Paulson may have made money in an "unethical" way, but he played by the rules. I didn't hear any investment banks complaining about short-selling when they were making money. They were dumb. They lost. They won't be missed.
I work at a newspaper. If they do it right, they won't be gone, they'll just adapt.
This seems like a classic troll blog--write an extremely inflammatory headline that vastly overgeneralizes the subject, knowing it will annoy a whole lot of people.

It's a great way to get your blog posted on tons of social media sites and jack up your ad revenue (or, in this case, get more people to see your portfolio).

Hacker News should be above falling for this sort of thing.
One interesting thing to me is that even if you do this (correlate compensation with longer term results) a lot of the same problems still happen. Take, for example, the first big hedge fund blowup: Long Term Capital. Shortly before they blew up, they kicked most of the third party money out of the fund and even levered up their own individual positions (see the book "When Genius Failed").

I'm not saying that misalignment of incentives doesn't play a significant role in a lot of what we are seeing now, but never underestimate hubris.
The culture is definitely important here. I learn how to downvote (to indicate a comment that doesn't contribute to the culture or to the discussion at hand) and when to downvote (when a problematic comment is first posted, rather than piling it on later) from other participants. Now that I've been acculturated, I wouldn't dream of downvoting to indicate disagreement. If I don't have an actual comment to write out to indicate my disagreement, I just let it go. There is good clash of ideas here in lots of threads.

The other thing that keeps downvoting from being too frequent is the karma-dependent ability to flag questionable posts that may violate the guidelines.

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Flagging evidently does draw the attention of some "supermoderators" to the post, and they deal with it according to community standards they have agreed to. That's enough for me.

In general, I say "Good job!" to the people who run this site, who are thinking carefully about how to get both the technical and cultural issues right. Inasmuch as they don't seem to desire to expand the scope of discussion here beyond HACKER news

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

it seems to me that some entrepreneurs could attempt to transfer some of the technology and some of the culture, with appropriate permissions and credit of course, to sites with discussion of other issues. That would be lighting a candle against the current darkness of much online discussion.
I don't know; when books are gone, what will you miss?

Or: when vinyl is gone, what will you miss?

Etc.
Yes and no; IIRC the XKCD chap says he makes his money from merchandising. But you're right; people who want their content syndicated set up RSS on their sites and people who don't, don't.
More importantly, though, we’re taking a big leap with Sizzle: We’re releasing it as a completely standalone project to be collaborated upon by many library creators and developers.

This should hopefully lead to a library that makes cross-browser development even easier:

http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/10/22/javascript-will...
How about making perfomance based payouts only on longish returns, say 10 years? That is, money manager has to be consistently producing positive returns over 10 years, before starting to collect comissions. Now, this can be gamed too, but to much lesser extent than the current system.
And there's also a fear factor. If you're alone guy, how can you fight against big corporation that is able to spend millions on lawyers?
How we dealt with several internationalization issues in Teamwork
Bad spelling and foul language. Is this a parody?

Reminds me of "two years ago I couldn't even spell engineer, now I are one."
That's a clever use of the iPhone, but why are people so eager to be parted with their money to buy some eye candy app?
The new API looks really nice compared to the classic version:

http://api.jquery.com/
Blogs are so low quality and crass there is no way they can properly replace newspapers.

So when newspapers are gone I'll be really unhappy to have a bunch of amateur punk leftists getting duped and reporting the same crap.
I feel a lot of the reaction here will be, man if only I could come up with something like that! The reality is, though, they probably spent a lot of time on this project, and when you divide the $100k up between the people who worked on it and the number of hours they worked, it does not come out to a ton of money. Also the $100k in a month seems unlikely to be repeated - a bunch of people downloaded it for the "coolness" factor, but it will fade and drop off, as happens with so many apps that are basically tech demos rather than truly useful and productive apps. To summarize, this is likely not a good business model.

However, that's not to say the project wasn't worth it for the people who worked on it - just a caution that while the headline is catchy, the upside for these guys is probably the resume / VC pitch bullet rather than the money.
Why are we downvoting this comment? It's not offensive, and it contributes a different viewpoint to the conversation. Is it going down because the opinion the poster presents is unpopular?
"Meanwhile, Newegg.com simply stopped collecting it."

That's not a bad idea, either- what's the State of New York going to do- as long as your company doesn't hold any assets in the State?
live events are great since they can be bound to future elements. this simplifies, for example, adding components with ajax.
Proof that iPhone users are complete fools.
Likewise. I kind of felt like saying "I'll miss all the same stuff I missed already 10 years ago, like investigative reporting." But now I can't even remember if they were doing that 10 years ago.
I agree - sort of. A company should always present a unified front, and no one person should be asked to sacrifice himself (or herself) because of a problem.

Internally, however, you have to make sure you have processes in place to find out what happened so that if someone was responsible, you can figure out where they went wrong and teach them the procedures that will prevent the problem from happening again (this assumes that the person or people weren't willfully causing the problem, of course).
While the semicolon is only a convenience it has some common use cases. For example shoot-and-forget invokations of third party modules:

import sys; sys.exit()
import pdb; pdb.set_trace()
import cgitb; cgitb.enable()
import psyco; psyco.full()
import pygtk; pygtk.require('2.0')

And of course it's pretty useful in environments where one-liner are easier to handle:

$ python -c "import mymod; mymod.test()"
The guy programs in Ruby and says you don't need college. I see this a lot of Ruby people. They seem to hate all forms of education. It is like they couldn't take it so they have to rally against it. I'm not sure why it is mostly rubyists who seem to say this, maybe ruby was the easiest thing to get into when you just can't cut classroom learning.
Great news, I just checked it into my current project and was able to dump the livequery plugin.
When I read that I thought they changed the API. I do agree though, the new API documentation is much faster.
How to "get" Philosophy
thoughts on "no more browser sniffing"?

http://docs.jquery.com/Utilities/jQuery.support

is this helpful? i still get bit by js failures in ie, but i'm not sure what the impact of this change is. is the advantage more that no sniffing means less chance to get that wrong or be fooled?
People like eye candy. People like to have fun. It's a toy. You get to show your friends, and say, "Look at this cool new toy I found."

Entertainment is a huge market.

"Make something people want."
It's a dollar. Most people (at least who own an iPhone) can afford it even if they only use it once for 5 minutes and forget about it.

I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of people buy these apps on impulse and rarely use it again after checking it out.
Really?!? You're questioning why Apple iPhone users would want to purchase an app solely because it's shiny "eye candy"? Sorry, that joke just writes itself.
I'll miss the quiet "me time" of reading the newspaper in pyjamas in the morning, or at a restaurant on my lunch break (not in pyjamas).

I'll miss the local sports coverage, box scores, etc. All of this is online, more or less, but it's just not the same.

I'll miss the local news. Our local newspaper plays a valuable role as watchdog. They recently brought down a corrupt mayor, for example. But even the mundane news is useful: road construction, a new restaurant opening, what's playing at the local theatre, etc.

But, I was raised in a home where both my mom and dad read the newspaper everyday. So, I've been reading the newspaper for almost my entire life. Whenever I move, I leave one local newspaper behind and start reading a new one. It gives me a sense of place. A sense of community.

So it's hard for me to imagine a world without newspapers. Sadly, it appears to be inevitable. My local paper recently announced that they'll be cutting home delivery to 3 days per week...
Banks can make money by exploiting market inefficiency but banks also create real value. A loan to start a business creates value if the business works.
Google's Microsoft Complex
working A-OK then :)
I assumed you could just keep dragging the slider up/down and it'll update my rating.
Most of the time you shouldn't even need to chunk processing like this, and if you do, you might be doing something else wrong.
I wonder if there is a way to have a minimum amount of time registered before allowing people to post.

I bet it would cut down on this sort of moronic trash.
Yes, but Oxford is still about learning (and suffering for it!) and far less about job training.
Why do other people refrain from negative voting

Downvoting is automatically limited to the total number of upvotes a given user has made. If you have made 10 upvotes, and you try to make 11 downvotes, the 11th downvote will not stick. If you then make one more upvote, then a downvote after that would stick.
Think about what else in the world costs $.99 -- can't even get a 20oz soda for that anymore -- and then think about what cool software -- like games -- normally cost.

This is a cool little piece of technology for less than the cost of a soda. That's a) something you can't really get anywhere else and b) possibly the beginning of the micropayment revolution for things other than music that we've been waiting on for awhile now (unfortunately self contained to the iphone for now, but I'm sure coming to the rest of the product line soon)
How you come by the knowledge to pass that qualifier will be up to you.

To a certain extent that's already true of degrees; you can choose not to show up to lectures at all so long as you show up for exams (if there's no coursework obv).
Joyent takes on Google by acquiring Reasonably Smart
It's primarily helpful to jQuery itself. The problem is that most libraries have blindly assumed that specific browser bugs (such as an Internet Explorer bug) will exist forever in all versions of the browser. When the time comes for IE to fix the bug (and it will come) the library will break due to the blind assumption. Using feature detection, like we have, is a sure-fire way to make sure that this doesn't happen.

jQuery.support, itself, will likely only be marginally useful to those outside of jQuery core (since we're checking for some very specific bugs or features). That being said we have documented it since it could still be useful.
as a Joyent customer, I'm glad they've actually been doing something for the past few months!
Re: local news, here's an example of a local paper doing quite nicely:

http://www.7dvt.com/about-us

Like your local paper, this one isn't a daily. I think this could be a trend. Local papers will be weeklies, and they'll continue to exist. The switch from daily to weekly will be stressful.

(Related submission to HN, didn't get traction when posted, but gives a little more context: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=431498)
"Capitalism allows you to act without regard for morality so long as it's within the law and that's fair game. Doesn't mean we need to like the people who do act that way."

It's easy to be "noble" when you don't have the chance to be "evil". Don't get me wrong, but I find it very, VERY hard to believe that if you were on Paulson's shoes and had the chance to make some $3.7 billion, you would still be so moralistic.

Paulson made money within the law (though "unethical" his trade may have been). Seems to me that people who bash him are just jealous.

Paulson can now invest some money in new businesses and create some value. He took money from the idiot banks and those who invest in them. I won't shed a tear.
Another idea is the prisoner's dilemma. By upvoting more than downvoting, one helps spread a culture of karma generosity that might improve one's own karma score.
Chapter 11 For Nortel
3D graphics are now 100% free software
That was a good point, and we updated the site to point back to tipjoy in the footer.
Oh, okay. At $.99 I can see why it would be popular.

And I've just demonstrated that I read one too few paragraphs in the story.
How to teach computer programming to blind people
Hedge fund managers get paid more on their performance than on size. Their % of assets under management is generally about enough to keep the lights on. And many hedge fund managers are heavily invested in their own funds.

What he describes with " And money managers are rewarded based on the size of their fund, or the level of returns. The managers do not risk their own money. " sounds more like a mutual fund, though selling out of the money puts does not.

Hedge funds usually carry losses over from one year to the next as well. They're definitely designed to align the interest of the manager and the limited partners much better than mutuals.

In fact, in the long run hedge funds outperform mutual funds by a substantial margin for exactly that reason. He's right that neither have pure investor/manager alignment. The only way to do that is to lengthen the term from one year to 10 or something.
I wouldn't call it propaganda. Al Jazeera seems very balanced and has even overtaken BBC as my preferred mainstream news source.

They're doing great things with citizen journalism and opening up to new channel such as mobile, as well as hiring smart people and considering the future of news.
Google accelerates drive to sell more software