skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> really tell the difference between a class that teaches people to memorize facts long enough to regurgitate them at the end of the year and a class that teaches things in a way that’s compelling enough to get the students to remember.

That actually reinforces my point, and tells me that you actually agree with me. If we assume it is the duty of the regulators to make sure that the educational institution is doing its job properly (and how to measure "properness" is also the responsibility of the regulators -- after all, they have the role of gatekeepers!), then if what you said is true, it is precisely a case of a regulator's failure.

Aside of that, I realized how you could have validly arrived at your conclusion (lost all faith): if all you have seen is bad universities, then your generalization is probabilistically correct. Now it's really none of my business, but I can assure you that the belief is factually incorrect, because there do exist very good universities. That you were not able to experience the benefits of one is an unfortunate, but separate problem of the system.
Even if you don't use Gmail ... Google (apps & hacker resources included) offer so much that it's a shame not to have an account already!
codecon.info. erica.biz.
It's funny to see the perspective a first time visitor to Europe has. I was looking through the pictures and trying hard to see anything unusual. Once I really put myself in the author's shoes as having been raised solely in North America, I could start to see the novelty.

Those raised in Europe look at these pictures and it's probably the same feeling Americans get looking at a blog about old dumpy cars http://www.losercars.com/ .

If you're european what do you find most novel about north america?

If you're american what do you find most novel about europe?
Great talk by Bezos on how the internet is more like electricity than the gold rush:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jeff_bezos_on_the_next_we...

This is similar to his Startup School talk (http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/jeff-bezos), but perhaps offers a bit more perspective.
Does that tell you how many upvotes and comments each story has received? Certainly I could use that to continually poll the site and tell me.
The problem with the 'religion' as you put it is that no one wants to admit they have been believing something that isn't true, so there will be incredible resistance to change.

Imagine if you went out and paid $40k for a super sweet TV, and then some friend comes over and tells you about his TV, which is actually better than yours and only cost $2k. You aren't going to believe him no matter what he says, because doing so is admitting that you did something very very stupid.

The same is true for higher education. At the undergrad level, outside of certain technical areas, the entire value of the degree is due to the belief that it is valuable. As long as more or less everyone continues to believe the degree itself has inherent value, it will continue to be valuable. Even if something obviously better and cheaper comes along, those that have bought the proverbial $40k TV are going to continue to insist it is better, for fear that admitting otherwise will make their degree worthless.
For how many people on the planet is that not a feasible option?
I don’t think regulation is primarily to blame here but I’ll concede that regulation needs reform to.
On the failure of Universities I said I’d lost faith in the University system but that doesn’t mean I believe every university is a bad one. I’ve lost faith in our Prison system’s ability to rehabilitate people because most criminals get out and commit more crime. But that doesn’t mean there are no cases of criminals being rehabilitated.

I think most universities are flawed to the point of not justifying their costs. But I fully acknowledge there are some that earn their fee and then some.
I absolutely agree with you but I'm not sure how that changes anything. No matter how much resistance there is it needs to be done
Let the Music Play
20 Lines JavaScript Super Mario Tribute
What a Nigerian Facebook scam looks like
My wife is currently going through college because she needs certification. However when we worked it out she's paying the equivalent of $80 every time she walks into a class, yet for an entire 2 hour class they were taught how to fold a business letter (she didn't attend, we went out the night before because she already knew how pointless the class would be), I made the nice point that the dollar store sells a letter folder. So they paid $80 for something that can easily be done for $1.

This isn't to mention that her books can basically be bought only through the college bookstore because they add some tiny unnecessary thing in and double the price. Her Machine Transcription book (like $50 off amazon) came with a foot pedal (we've seen ones with the same basic functions for $20) and she was forced to pay $150 because they didn't say what make the foot pedal was or what software it came with.

Higher Education is essentially a scam. At 16 I started working as a reviewer, my editor said that he avoided taking anyone who'd been through college and university because they didn't know how to speak their own voice. The most successful journalism today (where the money is) is a form of Gonzo (IE Hunter S. Thompson), I mean read the main articles in Wired and they're Gonzo. Yet Journalism courses don't teach that and they can't, because there's never going to be a course that can teach you to be unique.

I ended up reading many things from magazine and newspaper editors. I can't remember the guys name anymore but he was editor of the Times newspaper, he said whenever an application appeared on his desk, if it included taking Journalism in college or university anywhere except at the bottom of the list he'd throw it straight in the trash. So basically, if you wanted to work for Times Newspaper when he ran it you had a better chance if you was anyone but a journalism graduate! His reasoning was precisely that they don't know how to write news that sells. He said that he'd prefer someone who had good personality in their writing and build them up from there, because all the journalism graduates thought that going through university entitled them to a job and most didn't even send samples of their work in, which IMHO is patently moronic.
From UIUC, http://www.iventures10.com/ < IV10.

Disclaimer: I am not associated with them.
Recovery.Gov -- tracking “how and where we spend taxpayer dollars”.
I've read that Trump's fortune, before he became a TV celebrity with The Apprentice, was actually less than he would have had if he had simply taken all of the money he inherited and put it in a savings account at a bank. Essentially he wasn't a very good investor.
There are many parallels between Bezos and Jobs. Like you mentioned, Bezos is great at both macro- and micro-perspectives of his business.

Amazon didn't win because they were one of the first out of the gate, it's because Bezos has been obsessive (like Jobs) about the quality of his product.
Plasmonic whispering gallery microcavity paves the way to future nanolasers
Oh I agree something needs to be done. I guess what I am saying is that instead of replacing the current system, whatever comes next will just add another layer to it. Instead of having the bachelor's degree as the golden ticket to employment, everyone will start to see the master's degree as the gold standard.

This might finally allow for some innovation at the undergrad level, but the end result will be the same: in an effort to handle so many students suddenly interested in pursuing a MS/MA, schools will lower the quality of education and dilute the value of the graduate degree. Then it'll start again with something else.

To actually abolish the current system and take up something new would require people with current degrees admitting they aren't the sole route to success, which is like saying you know the $2k TV is just as good, but you preferred to pay $40k anyway. This just won't happen.
Has anything taken the Common Lisp world by storm in the past decade?
From the HTML source:

<h3><a href="http://WhiteHouse.gov">http://WhiteHouse.gov</a>...;
<p>
<h3><a href="http://USA.gov">http://USA.gov</a></h5>;

Whoops.
How is this even remotely of interest to anyone?
I love the smell of megalomania in the morning.
Rhodes: Develop Full iPhone, RIM, and Symbian Apps using Ruby
There is no surprise. It should be expected.
Run, don't walk from IllinoisVENTURES. Read up on them at TheFunded.

They're probably even worse than these Dreamit guys, but they are definitely of the same ilk.
Yes. I watched all of the lectures and read the entire book.

The point is that you don't need money for books to learn CS. You just need a laptop and the ability to get online.
Of course I have a Google account; that's not the point.

What is strange is that a site that may, from the context of the thread, be a source of unauthorized ebook copies:

- hides its 'help'/'about' info from all-but-registered users

- requires a Google account to register

- runs Google ads

Wouldn't it be a little odd if the Pirate Bay required a Google account to see its content, and ran Google ads?
I'm going and looking forward to meeting everyone who's worked on SBCL there. What an excellent system!
Sleep.fm.
Wealth is neither here or there. Or did you mean intellectual wealth?

Well, I'd say that newspapers, in print or online, or blogs are all in writing. Thus more or less equal in potential power. There we seem to at least mostly agree.

I guess I was guessing that if people in the US didn't read newspapers they got at least some information from alternative sources. The ones I could quickly think of where all non-written, e.g. TV or youtube. Those would, in contrast to the written ones, generally not be as well suited for in depth analysis. My guess could, of course, be widely off.
$350 in free advertising money at Facebook
Wikipedia Co-Founder Calls for Major New Moderation Policy
What sorts of consequences would you introduce? It's tough to figure out a deal that doesn't hurt anybody innocent in the process.
China sees record VC investments last year, but cool-down may be coming
Insert some slightly sexist comment
hahaha, j/k ;)

And people wonder why more women aren't in tech.
I've always used cplay, myself.
Slightly different ilk, I think, but IllinoisVENTURES will offer the worst valuations out of anyone in this game.
One of the features is "free Microsoft software". How is that a feature?
Lots of people try to get to a good brand on twitter. There are thousands of "social media consultants" that advise people how to get it:
http://www.fanboy.com/2009/01/social-media-experts-rant.html

The crowd is fragile.
You want crowbar + solvent:
http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Crowbar
http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Solvent

Basically from an opensource MIT project to do very close to what you're trying to do.

Alternately, you could contact YC startup http://www.awesomehighlighter.com/ for advice perhaps (which does EXACTLY what you're talking about).
Free the postcode
Their valuations are terrible and the program's entire purpose is to try to get lucky and latch onto the next YouTube coming out of UIUC.

It's like YC except without any of the benefits and with terrible terms. There is no value added.
My personal website is a .name

I assure you I'm not trying to sell anyone anything, I just couldn't get the .com

I definitely agree with .biz though. Just looking at it invokes a scammy sensation. There are lots of good .info sites though... regular-expressions.info and magiccards.info come to mind.
It's not about what you can or cannot build. It's about how you build it. For example, if you build a distrubuted system on unix or win32, the MPI API is almost the only way to go for you, which turns your code and entire application into complete mess. Whereas, Plan9 introduces a very different approach, which makes your code neat, lean and robust and you can dynamically add/remove nodes without rewriting and/or restarting your app.

I believe there will come some Linus Torvalds into Plan9 world who will revive the system and its ideas. From my point, Plan9 is ideal infrastructural solution for heavily loaded distributed web systems (AKA cloud networking) and other Web 2.0 stuff.

PS. pls don't mention Mosix.
He is posting on his blog and yet doesnt know how to use the internets or even amazon or ebay? Who buys books in a bookstore at full price anymore anyway?
Oh wow, I think I may actually try to go to this. I live in Silver Spring, so I don't have any lodging concerns - could be awesome.
Palm Pre: The Definitive FAQ
I liked the article, but it was very much "in the weeds".

I hack Scheme, and have never written any Haskell, though you have to know some to read the papers. But when programming in Scheme I find myself wanting monadic operations, like the seed in Oleg's SSAX parsers. But my code that rhymes with monads requires tail recursion, and the author didn't mention tail recursion at all.

I prefer to see monads as fold + tail recursion -- and without the latter, it seems you need the mutation that Common Lisp encourages.
Has everyone forgotten this? http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sect...

Seems like Jeff could do with getting down to the distribution floor again!
Well, they do over here on this side of the world (UK & Ireland). Chip & Pin cards here were introduced in 2004 and most stores must carry them or Visa / Mastercard will not indemnify the stores against fraud.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_and_PIN for more info
That sounds pretty much like why PHP won; the effort of making a programming language work (ie the standard library) overshadows the effort of implementing better abstractions.
Does the White House Have Wi-Fi?
Folks living in developing countries where "Free" shipping is not an option still buy in bookstores.
I don't think Apple's comeback (the OS-X based one) was miraculous. They took a basic Unix that the Plan 9 guys would have turned their noses up at, and put a reasonable user interface on it and worked their way through all the tedious parts of making a stable, useful operating system; and then, it did exactly what the linux zealots had been saying was possible with Linux -- it became very popular, and known for being more stable, easier to use, and more secure than Windows.

The miracle is that Windows survived. Given that Apple had a focus on hardware lock-in and the high end of the market, that left Windows a big hole to live in; Linux should have copied OS-X "look and feel" down to every detail, made it run even faster on cheaper hardware, and given Windows a run for it's money.

As one of those linux zealots, I intend this to be self-criticism.

Ubuntu is going to eventually do that, I think. It is not OS-X compairable yet, but it is improving.
IBM Confirms Layoffs
So, you pick one example of a bad school, and you conclude that all of "higher education is a scam". Nice.

I don't know what kind of college your wife is attending, but it sounds suspiciously like a University-of-Phoenix-ish institution. In 11 years of post-secondary education, I never once took a class on letter-folding.
I hope someone in their organization sees this thread and ganders over here to provide some insight.

When developing most products, you must know that your audience is not an engineering student or a hacker and probably don't know how to SSH into your server.

But I wonder if they have a separate perception of hackers, and if that could imply that they're looking for a different type of hacker than the type on news.YC?
Even when you do have control it's not hard to screw up... http://www.davidhenderson.com/2009/01/21/key-online-influenc...

("keyinfluencer"... please!)
Taking a glance at the partners / speakers / advisors, there are some seriously smart and successful people in there http://dreamitventures.com/node/2

I think the YC crowd is hating way too quickly, there is plenty of room for more then one seed stage YC style fund... especially on the east coast now that YC is full-time in Palo Alto.
The whole Illinois/Chicago group is a bunch of way-too-late wannabes who are looking to take advantage of people. Startupnomics is 200 bucks with real people; DePaul's startup conference is 600 with no value.

The environment here are these people. This is why I go on and on about "Chicago is the next Detroit".
"At the undergrad level, outside of certain technical areas"

So the technical areas are good but of course university teaches such meaningless stuff as umm hmm duno (put something meaningless here)

The problem is, as the above quote clearly shows, inherent biases towards believing that a certain degree is better than some other one which is then taken further towards suggesting that education as a whole is "useless" or not good enough.

Education is the most genius way that mankind has come up with to develop the brain. There are things wrong with education of course, but pop culture debate helps none at all.

I personally believe that education will not be improved until and only until the opinions of the students are taken into consideration.
Ganglia http://ganglia.info is pretty easy to setup and is good for charting simple machine statistics.
ambient light sensitive LED, using the same LED for sensing as making light
(pretty nifty trick, makes me wonder my more electronics
don't do it. No need for blinding indicators in a dark room)

I've recently bought an arduino and have been playing around with it. I'm definitely a novice when it comes to electronics but I would love to know how that works.

Do you have writeups online for any of these projects?
By 1994, when I first used Linux, it was vastly better than any other Unixes for interactive use. The basic Unix software was much higher quality than other Unixes (see the original "fuzz") paper for some measurements of this), much more featureful (look at the old joke about GNU Hello, the "hello, world" program with 150 options), and much more usable (e.g. --version and --help, long options in general, tab-completion and WYSIWYG command-line editing in bash; compare to csh !-2:s/vresion/version/).

Linux defaults in 1994: fvwm, rxvt, color (in ls and rxvt), Emacs, Seyon, less. Unix defaults in 1994: twm (or mwm if you were really unlucky), xterm (huge memory hog), black and white, vi (not Vim!), cu, and a more where you couldn't scroll backwards. Also remember term? You could get, approximately, an internet connection through a dialup shell account on Linux, by the simple expedient of recompiling all of your networking software to use term.

When I started using IRIX in 1994, ls to a terminal defaulted to single-column output; find . -follow -print on a directory with symlinks up the hierarchy would infinite-loop; find defaulted to starting from no directories and not doing anything with the files it found; etc. It had a much prettier GUI and 3-D acceleration, though.

Remember also that at the time Microsoft OSes shipped with no TCP/IP support.
Hmm,

Higher education is indeed one of the few remaining areas of "fat" in today's economy. However, the fat is certainly not in the teaching staff but rather in the "fixed costs" - the "bulding binge" which the article only obliquely refers to.

One thing I'd like folks to consider, however. After all the fat is cut, who will buy anything?

The housing boom was all fat and got the economy going for six years. But without it, we're in a bit of trouble. Start cutting higher education too and what happens? Does efficiency create demand? Where is the evidence?
Tab-completion and history in the Python interpreter
I will make this comment only because I perceive that it is mostly people who are much older than me and left education a while ago that are commenting.

To me personally ( I have not read the article imply replying to the comments) seems that people are generalising excessively and most importantly being very simplistic.

Education is a very very very big thing, education almost encompasses life itself and everything that life entails. As such it is not very easy to find the right answer to the question of: how can we best develop the youngsters of today for the skills of tomorrow.

For me personally I believe that the only way we can improve our educational system is by listening to the students and their criticisms or compliment for afterall it is them who are going through the day to day experiences of being taught. This approach is not perfect of course, but then hey nor is life. I simply think it is a much better aproach than allowing those who have been in a classroom 30 years ago dictating the order of the day although the posibilities are rather high that they have lost touch with the educational system.

That is only one part but then academia is so uterly complex as to take into consideration the hierarchical society that we find ourselves in and maybe conciously or uncoinciously upper the standart for some places while lowering it for others.Maybe against even this taking students view into consideration can counterbalance it.
I'd rest most of the blame with the people, not the site (no offense) -- if you become "addicted" to this site, you'll probably become "addicted" to other sites too.
We have lots of people who use Paglo to monitor data center infrastructures. In fact we use Paglo extensively to monitor itself. The best thing is that it is easy to feed in custom data into Paglo and trend that alongside other information about the infrastructure. For example, I watch the side of queues in our messaging system together with the load averages, memory and bandwidth usage of key servers.

We also use monit to monitor and restart processes under Linux. It is great for handling a couple of services which leak memory and need to be restarted periodically.
First off, I've read HN for a while and never felt the need for an account. This post provided that need. Thank you.

"A Computer Science graduate, for instance, can often graduate without having ever written a line of html, javascript or css."

In the interest of full disclosure I hold a BS in Computer Engineering and am currently working on a MS in Computer Science. I myself graduated without ever writing a single line of HTML, JavaScript, or CSS in any course and have yet to write a single line in my MS.

We used Assembler (16 and 32-bit, Motorola and Intel), C/C++, and Java. I never wrote HTML, but was required to write a basic web server that provided access to HTML pages. I didn't write any JavaScript, but did write code for embedded systems.

Point is no Computer Science student should ever write those as part of the program. For one, any student of CS worth their weight in salt can teach themselves such things. And the only time it's acceptable in the class room of a quality program is when the Professor asks for the documentation of the program to be an HTML page. In that case HTML, JavaScript, and CSS are an afterthought, not the point of the project, and not taught in the class room.
You think humans aren't affected by this kind of thing? Are you aware of the myriads of data showing that we are? Even the people who think they aren't. Probably especially the people who think they aren't. Which is basically everybody.
one of those reventons, amazing, love the way they present all the stuff on jameslist, pure eye candy
On that matter, I heartily recommend Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information": http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi
Looking at this from a strictly economic point of view, it is obvious that as the price of higher education continues to outpace inflation, a point must come when is negative expected value to attend college. Knowledge will be your reward. And debt.
Steve Jobs demos Apple Macintosh, 1984 (25 years ago today) [video]
I'm surprised they're not actually reporting the issues twitter has been having the last week or so - random followers removed, random tweets not showing up...