skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can learn computer science, programming, physics, chemistry, english, psychology and more...in your own home. You don't need a B.A. or a B.S. for that.

I'll disagree when it comes to chemistry and physics. If you are going to be doing either of these in anything above the 200-level classes you are going to need resources you can only get in two places - universities and private/gov't institutions.

Besides that, there is a wealth of knowledge at universities that you can't get from a lot of books. And what if you don't comprehend something? You're paying someone to help you understand.
I don't get the feeling that the bias is particularly subtle. I wouldn't trade my time at Chicago for all the vocational training in the world; but, different strokes &c.
Was confused myself as to why he doesn't do this. He mentions not having titles being an issue in Google Reader, but the same issue is apparent if you try to add the rss feed of his linkblog in Firefox; you just get a bunch of links with no details.

Do RSS titles have character limits?
The Supreme Court did rule on it. In the 60s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._virginia

"Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival.... "

There is also a significant difference between "not supporting" something and campaigning to prevent anyone from doing it. I "don't support" tax-exempt religion, but I'm not giving money to a lobbying group to try to end it.
Australia--particularly Western Australia and Queensland--is currently undergoing the largest resources boom in history thanks to China's insatiable appetite for petroleum and iron.

Because of this there are two industries that are big winners: construction and the direct resources sector. EVeryone else--including software--are losers. So you might earn A$100-150K (base) as a senior (5-10+ years professional experience) software engineer in a capital city but you will have an extraordinarily high cost of living.

To put this in comparison, my nephew at 17, was a deckhand on a tugboat in a mining port making $120K+. Now that he has a license to captain a vessel up to 25 metres I believe he's rapidly approaching if not exceeding $200K.

Now this isn't without expenses either. A crappy home in a mining town can probably put you back $1000/week or more in rent (20 years ago they couldn't give these houses away at $50,000).

He's not a special example either. Those who did apprenticeships (eg electricians, plumbers, fitters and turners) are particularly well-off. Australia is highly regulated when it comes to these jobs. If you say you're a licensed electrician and you're not you can go to jail. The only way to get licensed is to do a 4 year apprenticeship.

The plus side of this is that the standard for Australian tradesmen, at least in my experience, is exceptionally high. The UK is essentially unregulated here (by comparison) and if you're in the UK, hiring a licensed Australian tradesman is really your best bet if you want quality work.

Now, software engineers are on the high end of the salary scale for those who must (or generally do) go to university. You could easily end up in other disciplines only making $50,000 a year. Trust me when I tell you that in Australia this is a pretty low standard of living now unless you were lucky enough to have bought a house 10+ years ago.

So what you're seeing in this post is nothing new to Australia and it's even more pronounced in Australia.

I actually think this is an economically structural problem. Building a new house now (both my brothers-in-law are in construction) costs about $1500-2000 per square meter (for single storey, add 50% for two-storey). New apartments in West Perth now sell for up to $10,000+ per square meter. This is insanely high and well beyond local living standards (for all but a few).

Anyway, picking up one of these trades in Australia at least instead of going to university has been lucrative for many years and shows no signs of abating.
>So, we write our laws based on reason and justice, unless some religious group threatens to make a really big stink then we just do whatever they want?

No, we write our laws based on reason and justice, but there is nothing wrong with taking people's preferences into account as long as those preferences don't violate the rights of other people.

Assuming you were for a single payer healthcare system. Would you object to a president pushing for a single payer socialized healthcare system, but calling it something else in order to appease people who hate the word "socialized"?
This table seems to disagree: http://www.demographia.com/db-uscity98.htm . From the totals at the bottom, I found that the average population density for the 600 largest cities in the U.S. in 2000 was (total population)/(total land area) = 99,000,000 / 34,000 = 2911 people per square mile. Kansas City's density is 1100-1400 people per square mile, meaning that not only is it false that it's as "dense as any other developed urban core", but in fact it is not even half as dense as the average city (with population 50,000 or higher).
Over and over I emphasize that Twitter is not a public utility. If you're an organization that has to get your micromessage out there, you're better off hosting your own services.
More like college is overrated and apprenticeship non-existent. You need to both be connected and wealthy to get an unpaid internship, where you will get experience in data entry and coffee-making. Any actual apprenticeship program has people breaking their necks to get in.

$25-$30K a year to learn a trade? I could find you 10,000 candidates within the hour, even if it was located in BFE, Montana.
"Advertising effectively in the mobile experience" is basically Taps on a trumpet for the FaceBook app. I don't know anyone who actually enjoys using the existing app. It's clunky, poorly sorted, and extremely hard to navigate. Why does FaceBook want to make the experience even less enjoyable?
Silk Road is only available via TOR, so there is no exit node involved.
Google - Old Storage Account to be Deprecated unless autorenew on
I had a $5 a year plan that they eliminated earlier this year. But they said people get to keep their plan if:<p>https://www.google.com/settings/storage/
"Google storage plans have changed, but you can stay on your current plan as long as you:<p>Keep your account active
Keep payment information in Google Wallet accurate and up-to-date
Don’t make adjustments to your current plan"<p>But today they sent me an email saying that <b> Auto Renew </b> must have been turned on:<p>"This is a reminder that your one-year Google Storage plan is about to expire on Aug XX, 2012. If you'd like to continue to use Google Storage, please choose from one of our new plans at google.com/settings/storage.<p>Can I renew my current plan?
Only people who purchased Google Storage plans before April 24, 2012 and set them to automatically renew can keep their current plans. Since your plan wasn't set to automatically renew, you'll need to choose a new plan."<p>Seems kinda unfair -- they added the autorenew rider to their initial promise. No number that I can call to voice my disagreement. How have people dealt with this?
There's no fundamental reason that things should play out either way (consolidation in a data center, or personal hardware). It will come down to economics, performance and convenience. Up until now performance (latency) has favored personal hardware, but it appears that may soon change, at which point the economies of scale of data centers, and the convenience of not needing to upgrade/store/maintain/move personal hardware, could very easily sway things in favor of consolidation.
The Climate Change Advertisement Competition 2012
Thanks for the link, this is very interesting.

Although by transmitting any personal information (email address, etc) through a supposedly anonymous network you kind of limit the benefit of said network.
After seeing the headline, I expected to read a bluff by the Australian Federal Police that they can pierce through TOR.

Instead they didn't even do that; which to me implies that they caught this guy through weaknesses in his anonymity that had little to do with the merits of TOR.
Why would it? Do you think twitter has a patent on the idea of status updates?

Hey, maybe they do, the patent system is pretty messed up after all, but I would guess not!
what are you basing this on?
good luck. and thanks.
if most of the crop has college education and you're interested in hiring the cream of the crop, requiring a college degree is given

I will agree with you that this is how many hiring managers think. I happen to know counterexamples (people who declined to finish college degree programs even though they were admitted to college on financial terms affordable with their family resources) who have nonetheless obtained paying work based on college-graduate-level skills they developed despite lack of a degree. But you correctly state the general state of mind of hiring managers.

That said, the general state of mind of hiring managers is wrong. Preferring people with degrees to people who lack degrees is less supported by research than quite a few other hiring criteria. I last posted my FAQ for Hacker News on company hiring procedures

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4270768

seven days ago, so rather than repeat all those keystrokes here, allow me to say that hiring managers have more reliable criteria to look at for hiring job applicants than college degrees or any other kind of biographical data about the applicants. Check the FAQ

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4270768

for more details.
I'd love to hear other tools that you guys are using for your daily workflow.
Funny story, an early version of the OnLive controller used the letters L,I,V,E, which spelled EVIL when read a certain way.

http://9to5google.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/onlive_control...
Exit nodes are only relevant if you're communicating with servers outside the TOR network. Silk Road runs as a Tor hidden service[1], which means you never go through an exit node, it's TORified (and therefore encrypted) end-to-end.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)#Hidden_...
Cool kids are on FourSquare?
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Also, the conflict resolution library (https://github.com/codeparty/racer) that is used looks to be very cool.
Taking into consideration that you now have a decent understanding of python and you want to build something substantial, here are some suggestions :

1. Decide a project you want to do. Think about a piece of software you want to develop. Come up with various ideas. It can be anything - a web application, a python module, a game, a small command line utility - anything. Make sure it solves a problem and better if it can make some money for you. It will keep you motivated to complete it.

2. Think about the MVP for your project. What are the minimum set of features you need to get the first version out. Work to develop a MVP first. You can add features later.

3. Do a research to know which python or related technologies you need to develop your MVP. Learn those things and try to develop your MVP. When in doubt ask on forums like HN, Reddit, Quora, StackOverflow.

4. Continue with learn-do-learn cycle till you finally develop your MVP.

5. Show it to us. :)

Here are some different kind of projects you can try :

1) Web Application - You need to know a web framework for python apart from web technologies like HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, jQuery, Twitter Bootstrap and a database like MySQl, MongoDB. Most popular framework for web development is Django but you can also try micro-frameworks like Flask.

2) Mashup Sites & Apps - You can fetch data from Internet through web scraping or through various public APIs made available by popular sites like facebook, twitter, g+, youtube, etc. You can then process and display these data to create interesting mashup applications. You can use Python Libraries like Requests and BeautifulSoup for web scraping.

3) Games - Develop games using PyGame.

4) GUI - If you want to develop a GUI app, I would suggest you to try Qt with python.

5) Library - Develop any new python library or improve any existing library. For example, learn how python's Requests library provided a better alternative for urllib2 library.

P.S. : If you are unable to come up with any ideas you can try some of my ideas : http://blog.anujkumar.com/post/27913522655/please-steal-my-s...
The more similar the languages (which he addresses in the article), the more small issues I run into. The biggest issue I've be running into lately is that I do a lot of Go code in my free time but mostly C#/C/C++/Java for job stuff and I find myself pretty frequently not adding semi-colons to the end of lines even when not in Go.

Generally no big deal, the compiler picks this up easily enough, but in some languages (eg. Javascript) this could be an issue due to optional semicolons but with sometimes unexpected side-effects. Though when forced to write JavaScript I religiously JSLint for my own sanity, so I'd still be okay there.
I think all the adoption regulation is completely bullshit, and likely against every nations constitution.

Every one is allowed to have a baby. But, oh dear, if somebody wants to take care of a kid that has no parents.

Personally, i dont think religious people are fit parents. Should i now campaign against religious people taking care of children?

Or maybe, just maybe, people should just give the freedom to others they expect for themselves.

I have no moral authority over any one, nor does any one have a moral authority over me.

Why is it that fascism is allowed to flourish, as long as the fascists call it a religion. And how is that fair towards the 1% of religious folk that are actually religious? ( actually religious == using religion to guide your own lifechoices, instead of using it judge/oppress others and play god)
Microsoft Responds To Its "Lost Decade"
When my dad had a apprenticeship, there were two types, technical, and craft. Craft apprenticeships were machinists, and they had no chance of ever going to university. They often stayed on the shop floor for the rest of their lives.

Technical apprenticeships(Often requiring o-levels and such, and came from grammar/technical schools), never touched the shop floor and many went on to university. Example Apprentices - Draughtsman and such.

Obviously different companies operated differently, if you was operating as a machinist... on the university track...

The image of CNC machine operator going on to engineering at an elite college may be nice, but often it's just PR to get people to apply for the jobs and a fairly exceptional career path. Most don't.
What Twitter Can Learn From Weibo: Field Notes from a Global Tech Ethnographer
The point of this product is to serve as a replacement for factory farmed chicken, not the whole chickens you buy at your local farmers market raised in somewhat sustainable conditions, so your point of comparison is moot. If you compare the ingredients of this fake meat to what you find in factory farmed chicken this clearly wins out (no antibiotics or hormones, no cholesterol, higher proetin and carbs, etc).
Dalton's definition of a platform is excellent. It doesn't reach up and mess with your application.
Like someone else already said, you get a generalized education with colleges, unless you know what you want to do for the rest of your life at 17.
The other flip side to apprenticeships, particularly in the US, a year into it company management could decide to shut down this cost center and then what?
Sounds like nobody has a case of the Mundays
Early Apple designs show Sony’s influence on the iPhone 4
Also, many of these "disaster" cases may simply be suffering from an unfortunate, but all too human cases of stage fright, especially if it's their first F2F at a big company like Apple. Some people just freeze up involuntarily, and trip all over their tongues when being grilled by people they look up to and respect. They're human beings, not quiz-answering machines, after all.

Not that we need to slow down and make some kind of special accommodation when this happens -- because indeed, such episodes may fairly be viewed as signs of a lack of experience and confidence.

But it still surprises me how often people fail to see the basic humanity at play in these situations: instead of thinking "poor guy, he seemed really nervous", all that comes to mind is "What a loser! He couldn't solve that Euler problem with me staring and grinning impatiently at him the whole time. How did he ever make it through the phone screen?"
I think it's partly a structural problem.

I like solving problems for other people. But when I'm using open-source software, the only problems I'm really aware of are the ones I'm having.

In a commercial setting, I'm very motivated by user tests or data that demonstrates problems people are having. I've seen a lot of other developers get excited about that, too. Fixing things is fun when you can see that your actions actually help somebody.

But I've never seen an open-source project that makes it easy to get engaged in that fashion. The closest I've seen is users asking support questions on the mailing lists, which is a pretty small slice of users these days. Plugins also seem to provide a nice feedback loop like that: you make something for yourself, you throw it out there, and you see people installing it and commenting.

But broadly it seems like an unsolved problem in consumer-facing open source.
We could go on days and days about this matter (and maybe we should).

But we live in the times where nobody knows what will be going on in 30 years time†, so I believe this quote is spot on: "Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything one learned in school."-AE

† to all who don't agree with this statement - we can't report weather for 5 days in advance, let alone know the economy and everything else in 30 years
Cool, but seems unwise.

If you are smart enough to do this to PHP, then you are hopefully smart enough to know you should probably not be writing your large system in PHP. There are many better base languages, as opposed to one which has the consistency of perl combined with the string handling power of C (a mild exaggeration, but not by as much as I wish it were). PHP's main advantage is that it is installed everywhere and just works. This breaks that, and therefore renders PHP's main advantage moot.
Thank you for posting this. I wish there was something like HN for interesting papers. This is definitely worth reading due to its high practice relevancy.
One of the more interesting things I've heard about iTunes/iPod shuffling is the phrase 'it knows me so well', obviously every shuffle isn't a win, but I'm guessing it's not just seeding it pseudo-randomly but also applying some specific constraints on the playlist.

I don't realllly like completely random shuffles as jazz into techno isn't the smoothest transition, but I've never really seen that with iTunes.
Which is apparently more wealth than the entire output of humanity.[0]

[0]: http://www.pcworld.com/article/223431/riaa_thinks_limewire_o...
OK, I want to hear you out, but I have major problems with this evidence. First, in what way are the mayor of Boston and the Jim Henson company emissaries from the gay community? Second, this article references things that happened after Dan Cathy's remarks. You indicated that there were incidents prior to (indeed causing) those remarks to be made. I'm aware of all the stuff going on now, but you led me to believe there was some history I was unaware of. Can you explain?
The pro collage stance is something like:

Spending 4 years at ~19-22 living on your own without a job near a lot of other intelligent 19-22 year olds is a lot of fun. The skills gained are minimal, but the credentials are worth something so why not?

But, that's no reason to actually higher someone because they have a collage degree ed:In the computer field. So, yea I am glad I went to collage, but I don't care about degrees when looking for people and I feel little need to subsidize other people going to collage.
Pretty low if I'm listening to all my music at the same time, but what if I have a playlist of 10 songs?
What's the best way an individual can support this effort? Do I write/call congress/senate/other?
Better Value, Easier to Use Marketing Automation
Or like textile workers would break into factories and destroy the frames invented to make the work faster and easier, calling themselves the "Sons of Ned Ludd."
I bought Facebook shares, here’s why
The devastating effect a natural resources boom can have on an economy are known as:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
IOS Image Tricks
Yeah. As inspiring as it sounds right now, it is not going to work. Your common user is not going to shell out cash for a service like this. It doesn't matter if he won't get ads or if his information won't be sold.
This thing will build up a lot of hype, may probably get funded, but eventually will die out after hackers and tech blogs lose interest. Much like diaspora.
From over here in the UK, the quickest fix would be a central patents court with expert judges and qualified patent lawyers.
Well, if you're willing to run afoul of SEC regulations, you can do much more lucrative things, like manipulate the LIBOR, provide inside information to select customers and use it yourself :)

(And what do you know - the big boys on Wall Street actually do those lucrative but not really legal things!)
Agreed. The anti-college bias here is astounding. College is an incredible time to learn everything.

What are you even interested in? I went to college thinking chemistry or chemical engineering. Found I just didn't like either and moved to computer science. At 18 it's hard to even have a clue.

It's hard to feel sorry for the kids coming out of school with loan debt and a sociology degree. That's a career, but you need to know your field is full of people and it's going to be tough to find a job. Kids today need to adjust their expectations.

But the article is rubbish. 4 year apprenticeship for an associates and your journeyman card? Fine, anyone can find a machinist school (won't cost $44k per year) and be a machinist but that doesn't make you a materials scientist who came up with the alloy. You aren't going to be doing that without college.
The original critical piece was written by someone with a vested interest in defaming Khan, as he runs a company that is (in a way) a direct competitor. That alone should be enough to dismiss his critique.
Why reinvent the wheel when XEP-0277 (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html) and OStatus (http://ostatus.org/sites/default/files/ostatus-1.0-draft-2-s...) have already accreted quite a bit of thinking about what open microblogging could be ?
Google didn't delete all Street View Wi-Fi data
How to bust your Rails etag cache on deployment.
Speaking as an 18 year old almost done with my first Summer internship, I could not agree more. I went into college with a pretty solid grasp on Java (competed on the national level) and didn't learn a thing my first year. However, as soon as I stepped into my internship, I was learning from day one. You just can't learn the same lessons in school as you can from writing code that silently deletes database records when they should be getting updated...

Yeah. Internships are important. :)
Except it already exists in the form of StatusNet. You can already download the program, install it on your server and follow people from other servers (and vice-versa).