skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"He doesn’t mention it much but I really think the problem with Higher Education is that people are starting to realize how useless it’s become."

In my opinion, vast swathes of many college programs are currently completely replaceable by online courses. The only thing preventing this from being acceptable to employers is the college mystique. If the college mystique gets punctured... and I can't think of a faster way than to jack the price up beyond what anybody can afford... and it becomes acceptable to have an online degree, what happens to conventional colleges then? On a pure dollar-for-dollar comparison, the online colleges will kill conventional colleges for value.

You might find this hard to believe if you went to college and took some actually non-trivial course, such as in engineering. Leave engineering and the hard sciences, though, and a lot of courses are just mind-bogglingly trivial to pass. As part of a learning content management system I worked on while in school, I once had to debug a junior-level marketing course, so I took some of the pop quizzes from the middle of the course. I got 7/10 and 8/10... and there are people who actually attended the course who didn't do that well.

I shouldn't be able to score 8/10 on a pop quiz for a junior level course in an unrelated discipline. There probably wasn't a single 300-level engineering or hard science course I could have done that on. But... not everybody going to college are getting degrees like that. (And, ultimately, quite a lot of even the hard courses could be moved online with little loss...)

(I said "vast swathes of many college programs" very carefully. There are yet some programs that aren't very replaceable, and will always have a physical component. Another way for a college to get around this is to make their courses less able to be taken remotely, although as technology marches on it gets harder and harder to imagine what exact form that would take... A lot of people complain about various problems with online courses vs. real courses but I find myself wondering how much of that is truly fundamental, vs. how much of that could be fixed with better technology.)

I'm not sure I could agree with "useless", but "poor value" and "easily replaceable with a cheaper but just-as-good-maybe-better substitute" I sure could agree with.

If some startup could get past the accreditation hurdle...
It actually has comments, which you can see by clicking the app links, but no voting.
The whole app-to-app mapping is a silly idea, though. Is powerpoint an alternative for Visio? depends on what your trying to do. Gimp is a fine alternative for Photoshop if you're making a web logo, animated gif or lolcat, but maybe not if you're a printshop.
Oh, they can come after you, and it'll probably cost you a lot to defend your position, even if they're wrong and you're right. They win because they're rich and you're poor.

What matters for the company is that you just stop doing what they don't like, not that a real judge in a real court with real laws agree with them.
Indeed, I basically just have a desktop background picture so so there's something pretty slightly showing through translucent windows.

I used to just turn all icons off on the desktop, but recently I've started to use XFCE's desktop-icons-represent-running-applications mode - to switch between applications, I can hit the "show desktop" and select a different app. So my "desktop" is pretty much just a very spacious and pretty hiding task bar. Since I seldom have more than 10 or so GUI things running at once, the desktop is still mostly empty of icons so doesn't look like crap when it shows through.
http://www.kexi-project.org/
I've met Gary and seen him speak live over a webcast and he is just a big kid. That's not to say he isn't very smart. We were with a couple of the Youtube folks and we spent lunch discussing monitization of that platform. Gary had some great ideas and insight and I wouldn't be surprised if they talk to him again about it.
It'll pass. It did for me, anyway. For about two or three months, I was here all the time. I was clicking "override" on the procrastination page five or ten times a day. But, it came from being unfocused about my work--I didn't have a clear, and exciting, vision of where I was going or how to get there, so I was putting off doing anything.

I did two things:

1. Started working on music again (which always excites me, but I had to give myself permission to take time off for something fun--I was wasting that time dicking around on the Internet, anyway, so I might as well have something to show for that time).

2. Sat down one day and figured out the overarching vision for my company and my development for the next week, month, and three months (don't think too far ahead--it causes paralysis because the job looks too big). This triggered several great ideas for big visible improvements in the product that don't cost me much time or effort or money (outsourcing brain-dead tasks to cheap labor, for example--for our website builder, for example, I just got 50 new Open Source templates added for $149...this would have taken two or three full days of my time, on a task that would make me nauseous with its tediousness, but for the guy who did it, it was easily a couple of weeks normal wages). Some of these ideas expanded my productivity dramatically, because it takes the work off of my plate almost entirely, but it still gets done.

What I'm saying is that if spending your time here is satisfying your accomplishment receptors better than your own work, then you're probably doing your own work wrong. You're treating the symptom rather than the disease.

Oh, and leave yourself something unfinished at the end of each day (this is old hat for GTD people, but I never really paid attention to any of that stuff). It actually works if you have something to do each day instead of going to HN first, you'll probably find you just keep doing things rather than reading random crap on the Internet.
The more you study intelligence, the more you realize that "smart" is such a vague concept that it is borderline useless.

Example: whose work was more difficult to understand? Godel's work came "naturally" to Godel; Einstein's came "naturally" to Einstein. They are both "unnatural" for most people. That says nothing about smartness, aside of that both are capable of something that most are not.

Next question: was Godel better at math than Einstein was at physics? My answer is "... huh?"
Link from better source was posted earlier to HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=445528
Like i care what people on the internet think. I am a pretty shameless person, so this is a bad idea IN MY CASE. Maybe it will help other people, i don't know.

The problem is more fundamental than that, procrastination seems to be a big problem with a lot of people here on HN, including me. I've been searching for answers and ways of countering it, i have thought a lot about the causes and effects.

My conclusion is that it is not HN that is the problem, procrastination is deeper that that, HN doesn't have anything unique that makes it addictive, there are many activities that are addictive in the same way, and a lot of them are offline, so its not an internet problem. Its a human problem. I have found that i am more productive without internet though, but not that much, it just takes me longer to find distractions.
Article subtitle is "A long-lost text by the ancient Greek mathematician shows that he had begun to discover the principles of calculus." This has been known for several decades, ever since Heiberg transcribed some of the text (I don't know how much), per the article.

I refer you to The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development, a 1949 book by Carl B. Boyer, reprinted by Dover Publications [ISBN 0486605094]. Boyer writes several pages about Archimedes' method of exhaustion, notions of the infinitesimal, and so on. The main footnote reads:

For the works of Archimedes in general, see Heiberg, Archimedes opera omnia and T. L. Heath, The Works of Archimedes. For Archimedes' Method, see T. L. Heath, The Method of Archimedes, Recently Discovered by Heiberg; Heiberg and Zeuthen, "Eine neue Schrift des Archimedes"; and Smith, "A Newly Discovered Treatise of Archimedes."

Boyer is clearly using Heiberg's work on the Archimedes Palimpsest.
Impressiveness of accomplishments measures the impressiveness of accomplishments. Not intelligence.

With that logic you might infer that Brin and Page are at the apex of programming ability.
Have you looked at how Newton presented the results of calculus in the Principia?
You'll have to take my word for it, but we definitely have a clear and exciting vision of where we're going and how to get there... of course we could still be going about it wrong. But the main point of the post is just that since a lot of people seem to have the same problem, maybe we could use psychology to finesse it. Even if everybody just goes and browses some other site, it would still be an interesting experiment.
Why do people do interviews where they come off like this? This must be the image he's trying to project. How could being quoted as saying "I absolutely believe I am going to own the Jets" EVER help anybody?
Euro DjangoCon: May 4-6 in Prague
I've found my engagement with the site has waxed and waned a lot over the nearly 2 years I've been here. I was on here constantly while I still had my day job, because I had a good amount of free time while blocked on other people yet couldn't work on my starttup at work. Then I dropped off to posting maybe 2-3 times a week once my startup started ramping up and I had a clear picture what I wanted to do with it. Then I started visiting more frequently again when my startup folded. Now I'm here a lot on weekends, but I check only once a day, while eating breakfast, on weekdays. There's enough going on at the Googleplex that I really have no urge to visit Hacker News or Reddit while I'm at work.

Procrastination levels really do have more to do with what you're avoiding than what you're procrastinating with. Figure out how to make your work more exciting rather than how to make your procrastination less exciting.
I just edited my /etc/hosts to point this and most other procrastination sites at localhost. The work day is for working. Now I have only two options at my desk, either stare blankly or figure out the next task and do it. I unblock it once a week or so to keep current.
This is humorous on so many levels.

One subtle point in all this is something I've mentioned a couple of times...

All these "marketing" people are trying to build up their online personas on sites like Twitter and Facebook and so on. Yet things like this show that you have NO CONTROL over these services. I don't believe that this "social media" thing can support the marketeer's for a sustainable period. Building your own sites, on your own servers, on your own domain (and yes, I realize that domain names are really more leased than owned, but there is at least a central semi-logical process behind most of it), seems like a far more logical approach. Twitter, Facebook, Flicr, etc. only need to make a minor change, or toss in the towel, and all this marketing effort will have disappeared into the ether.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/business/yourmoney/23trump...

At least one other guy talked his way to the top.
Surprise! VC Funding Fell Off a Cliff in Q4
"Info porn"

I can't find how I came across the term -- I think it was via a link on HN, maybe even in turn from this thread. My apology to whomever I may be shortchanging from appropriate credit for the reference.

The term, and its definition here:

http://tools-for-thought.com/2009/01/05/curbing-info-porn-wi...

capture a lot of my concern.

Just using the term in my own head is helping me to re-evaluate my behavior in this regard.
China's "human flesh search engine" vigilantes bring down bent officials
Anarchy != chaos in Utopia.
You ever find yourself staring blankly? I've done that myself sometimes - it's kinda depressing, that even with all distractions removed, I still can't bring myself to do what I'm supposed to be doing.
With all due respect, if that one data point has caused you to lose all faith in the current university system, I can only infer that that one university failed for you. The first reason could be the story, but the second reason is because of this exaggerated generalization.

The other thing that you can infer, is that the existence of institutions that fail to teach good reasoning (and practical knowledge) is a failure of the regulatory system, that inspects and certifies the quality of educational institutions.
Things my father taught me
How small are your tasks? I've found that once I've broken things down into the "Okay, I can get that done in the next hour" level, I'd almost rather just do it instead of saying I'll do it later. But if my tasks are "Okay, we'll get this done in the next month", I'll be like "Eh, a month's a long time, I can do it later."
Mark Jason Dominus wrote about this a couple of years back at http://blog.plover.com/law/Godel-dictatorship.html and http://blog.plover.com/law/Godel-dictatorship-2.html then again here http://blog.plover.com/law/Godel-dictatorship-3.html
I'm coming to find more and more that the most valuable part of school was athletics. They teach you how to focus ambition into practice for self-improvement. Since you can assume that everything you do professionally is going to require new skills that you need to learn yourself, the improvement skill seems critical. I learned it through sports.
A great tool won’t fix your bad process
I just finished reading a 688 page (according to Amazon's listing of the paper book) scifi novel on my phone yesterday, it took me about a week of leisurely reading. It's only one such novel in a long, long, long list of ebooks I have been reading on my phone since mid-2007.

I have read all sorts of other books in such a format. It ends up saving me lots of money, and if I just reformat the text to something I am more comfortable with (i.e. a pdf 2 pages side by side), it can be awesome. No need to drag 10+lbs of textbooks to classes and I can store hundreds of books between my iPhone and my laptop from the aforementioned textbooks to leisure reading.

Yes, I do prefer to have a paper copy of some books, but when resources are limited, there isn't much you can do. Online copies/ebooks can be amazing in that respect. I had a subscription to Safari Books Online until I found out either ACM or IEEE (can't remember...) had access to most of the books I wanted, and I also discovered my college library had Safari access that I also occasionally use. To me it costs less to access those hundreds of books online than to buy a single dead tree book every year, and I live in the United States.
this is silly. to quote richard feynman, what do you care what other people think?
The source post, including a PDF version:
http://extremepresentation.typepad.com/blog/2006/09/choosing...

One failing of this diagram is its reliance on 'what Excel provides', including chart techniques that are difficult to interpret or misleading, such as pie charts and 3D area charts. Please, for the love of quantitative visualization, don't use 3D charts unless you understand the implications.
According to http://blog.plover.com/law/Godel-dictatorship-2.html :

"Apparently, the "inconsistency" noted by Gödel is simply that the Constitution provides for its own amendment. Suber says: 'He noticed that the AC had procedural limitations but no substantive limitations; hence it could be used to overturn the democratic institutions described in the rest of the constitution.'"
Well, he's a personal branding guru, and "Gary Vaynerchuk is ambitious" is practically a summary of HIS personal brand, so at least in this case it helps him.
Free XP CD Burner that Rocks | TechJaws
Thanks for your insights. I agree that from the point of view of a developer writing complex applications simply, Plan 9 is on the right path. What I read of the cleaner operating system interface is what attracted me to Plan 9 at the start.

I think a lot of the "new" things in programming are also attempts to fill that same need, of a cleaner, simpler interface to the underlying computer. All the "frameworks" out there, Android even, are attempting to clear that tangle of OS interface that has grown up underneath the applications.

However, to have any of the nice design and brain-work come to real usefulness, Plan 9 has to actually address the grundgy parts of the problem. The hardware support must be there -- not for all hardware out there, but you have to get the items that have huge market share and are cheap. The user interface needs to be improved of course, and I think the community is actually pretty active and helpful for it's size -- if other issues were attacked, that would take care of itself.

Thinking over how Plan 9 failed, I am reminded of rms's assertion that there is a GNU operating system, and that there was so much work to do GNU ended up writing everything else except the kernel, and thus GNU is most often used with the Linux kernel from somewhere else. Plan 9 is kind of what an operating system that just has a kernel looks like. They need to copy large parts of GNU as quickly as possible.

I realized what acme was, but I never even attempted any spell-checking or fancy features. I may not have tried hard enough, but I had problems simple placing the cursor where I expected, and simple stuff like that. I never gave it hours uninterrupted learning and experimentation, which is what I did when I decided to become as good at vi as I am with emacs; given the whole Plan 9 system seemed dead, it didn't seem worth it.

If I had infinite money and were dictator of the world and etc, here is what I would do to make Plan 9 happen:

-- Make sure that the cheapest Dell laptop had complete hardware support. Note that this is something that Linux often fails at, and even Windows has problems in this area.

-- Re-license it under the GPL (maybe BSD) licenses. If that is not allowed under the current license, it is conceivable that a small number of smart people could re-write it in a year, using the Lucent as a template, and possibly improving certain areas as they went. Even if they tossed the hard features, once a self-hosting, working, useable system was available under the GPL, a larger community could re-address the problem areas.
Slightly off topic, but you can get the audiobook version of "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" for free right now: http://slickdeals.net/permadeal/17691/Free-Stephen-R--Coveys...
> I guess not.

Is this to imply e-books are a detriment to your study? My reading material, long and short, is almost exclusively digital now. In fact, I get very disappointed when there isn't a digital version. I'm close to an evangelist so I'll defend it to great lengths if you challenge me.

I will admit though, this is very much personal taste. But taste is the least of your worries if you're trying to learn, especially CS.

The day I found the SICP pdf, man was I happy.
http://garyvaynerchuk.com/
The problem for me is that stories are so time-sensitive. For example, there are a lot of good stories that never get to the front page, and if I want to see them, I have to continually refresh the "new" page. I hate that, but it's something I find myself doing.
I can't say I've used it, but this sort of sounds similar to what splunk (http://www.splunk.com/) does.
I think I basically agree with you. I think any solution (online, trade schools, etc…) is going to be effective in certain circumstances. The bottom line for me is that the current system has established not only a monopoly but almost a religion around how things are taught. Which means no one can innovate even though the current system appears to be failing (though I will admit saying "useless" above was probably over stating the point)

What needs to be done is we as a society need to find a way to break that monopoly/religion down and establish a system where Innovation of all kinds can take place.
Well actually it was 6 data points for the record. But I openly admit that the results from that incident reinforced an opinion I already had (which, if I am wrong, is far more likely to be the reason why). As for regulation I don’t agree on that. Regulators can only look at what is being taught and whether they are testing correctly for what is being taught. So they can’t 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.
This reads like parody.
Do Tags Work?
Kind of off-topic, but does Yahoo (or is it the publisher?) really think that interjecting ads in the middle of a narrative actually makes people want to click on the link? Do they really not know the least about human psychology? Most people who get to that point in the article have an inertial interest in finishing, and also a bias towards skimming over any contextual discontinuity.
There are contrast effects that pull you towards them, and those that are obstacles people are happy to ignore. This is the second kind.

And, I should add, what works on television (ads in the middle) doesn't work in the same way for text. There is a natural ebb and flow of attention in a TV narrative,
How To Make Forum Marketing Effective - Great Tool
A great tool to help improve your forum marketing.
Gary has always been a little over the top for me, but it works for him and comes off naturally. He deserves all of the fame he gets because he works his ass off. He claims to answer every e-mail. Based on how quickly he's built a following I wouldn't doubt it.

If you haven't already, watch his first appearance on Conan: http://www.viddler.com/explore/djsteen/videos/69/
I think it is an advantage to application developers. A lot of good ideas die because the programmer has to write 900 lines of cruft wrapper code to experiment with a 100 line cool idea, and the programmer never makes it through the 900 lines.

If you can mount web pages as a file system, then you can write a web search indexer in a few tiny lines of code. In fact, you can focus on making simply index-search functionality, and ignore whether it is a web search engine or desktop search engine.

Alternatively, you can use curl or some other library, and you can still get the job done. But you end up thinking a lot more about interface stuff to write applications, and computers end up having huge amounts of duplicate code on them -- curl, the code in various browsers, just numerous different implementations of client http all over the place, and many of them incomplete or buggy.
On the other hand, I sometimes get a big moment of super-productive flow after mostly staring blankly and doing nothing for like 20 minutes or more (or even several episodes like this in the day). But those 20 minutes are indeed really depressing so what usually happens is that I'll stare blankly a few minutes, then get overrun by depression and just give up and land on HN or something else unproductive, to "get my moral back up".

But I feel I could get really productive regularly if I just faced up that fear more readily. I wonder if maybe the big depression that accompanies this staring blankly and doing nothing is just my brain working in the background and realizing the intricate details of my complex task, and I interrupt the process when I'm just beginning to get real productive in the background.

Just a thought.
For the first time in history the answer to the age old question who watches the watchers? might actually turn out to be everyone.

Cool.
Donald Trumps father had a 400 million dollar fortune.

More accurately he talked his way from the near-top to the very top.

This article also mentioned Gary's father had a 4 million dollar wine business.