skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think a college degree has a huge amount of value, but the catch is getting a college degree in 2012 is much more expensive than say 1992. I see kids and parents going into huge amounts of debt and that's also a big issue which will haunt us well after the Great Recession is over.
Looks like an update on the continuing development of Tata Motors to try and build a car using an engine made by MDI; I saw articles on this several years ago.

For a solid overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_car
> I have seen estimation and tight project control taking up substantially more time than delivering actual features.

It sounds to me that what you saw was a conflation of estimates and plans. Which is a common error.
The article assumes that all four-year college degrees are equivalent, but if I had to guess, people with computer science degrees had different outcomes in this recession than people with philosophy degrees.
Craig's List comes to mind. They're doing fine.
At that point Twitter will simply block IP address, or some such. Sure there will be a game of catch me if you can, but the end is that no one really wins, and Twitter may suffer because people will use it to bad mouth Twitter. Enough user sentiment, even if it start from the devs of a few highly used apps, and Twitter might want to reconsider.
Now go try and see how many bushels of wheat you can get your hands on with just exchanging tally sticks. Then try to buy some using gold.

No farmers near me take payment in anything except United States Dollars.
We have also used it extensively and found the script/storyboard integration a must for collaboration.
Culturally western, yes. While we're positioned in 'Oceania', we were settled(invaded?) by the British and had a 'White Australia Policy' up until the 70's, meaning most migrants were of European descent.

Good point on Lavazza, was a bad assumption.
So, what does this mean for CLI clients?

I hardly ever use them, but things like Bitlbee or the ruby twitter gem are handy once in a while...
That's the whole point: you don't have to research the coffee because you already know what it's like. People don't like to pay for stuff they don't like, and they don't like doing research. So if you can somehow assure them that they are going to like what you're selling, that's worth a lot. I'd rather spend $5 on a cup of coffee that I know I will like than $.05 on an app that I don't know I will like. I don't trust the opinions of people on the internet, or even most of my friends in real life, so reviews are not that useful to me.
I don't doubt there is some truth in this. Certainly if an employer can choose between a college grad and a high school grad for the same job / pay they may feel they are getting a better 'deal' with the college grad.

That the population of folks with degrees has less unemployment than the set of folks who don't have degrees has been true at least since the 50's according to the Census data. (and they have nifty new APIs to access it but alas they are down at the moment). What is less well understood are the roots of this correlation.

At one time people assumed that folks with college degrees had higher IQs or higher socioeconomic status, but later studies have not born out that hypothesis. There is something different about someone who decides to finish a college degree, in the general case, than someone who either pursues no college, or starts college and drops out.

There are of course anecdotes of college drop out successes and college graduate failures, but as a population group they seem more employable overall.

So far from the data I've seen it seems there is an aspect of this question which is not yet well quantified.
That's the biggest false dichotomy, piled on top of a whopping huge tautology, that I've ever seen.

EDIT: Ok, you deserve more explanation than that. Claiming that "true hustlers" will always succeed is the tautology, because after all, it means someone who doesn't succeed mustn't have been a true hustler. It also sounds like something a drug-dealer says to satisfy their success. "Hustle" is a positively-connoted abstraction that doesn't actually mean much, rather like "work ethic" or "education".

The false dichotomy is the one between "entrepreneurs" on the one hand and mindless 9-5 drones who produce little and deserve nothing on the other. This one is, like "hustle", a very small phrase that wraps up a very large Just So Story people tell themselves to justify their own position in life while dealing with the cognitive dissonance of knowing deserving-seeming people who don't have what they have.
Thank you Debian. Happy Birthday
Show HN: Shade. A Free Mac App to hide your messy desktop.
Grooveshark CEO on empowering musicians and beating the labels
Amusingly, I have a polisci/philosophy with a minor in history and I make my money in computer science. I never viewed college as a tech school, I viewed it as an avenue to study things that expanded my mental frames of reference.

Perhaps that's why I'm not just a pure coder but also a biz dev, marketing, and operations resource for the companies I've worked for.

Abstract thinking with an understanding of how it applies to multiple problem sets is far more valuable than sheer technical knowledge.

edit: damnit, misfire. This was meant for another post.
Yeah, on second reading, I was totally wrong. I went and looked at the actual document (what a concept, heh) and they are specifically talking about using applications to display or embed tweets.

I still don't think that's a great idea, but it concerns me a lot less.
I don't understand why people think it's fair to criticize a move like this without offering a plausible alternative that will sustain the business. Sure, letting other people build on it got them to where they are today, but where exactly is that? With massive infrastructure and engineering costs, but little income.

Twitter doesn't owe anybody anything. We owe them. If they don't find a way to monetize, then everyone loses.
> risking intellectual death by cutting off the internet

Give me a fucking break. I know many people (even several programmers) without an internet connection at home, and none of them are at any sort of risk of “intellectual death”.
Has anyone considered that twitter is actually pretty stupid?
Nike Zoom KD IV 4 Galaxy All Star 2012 sale cheap price
WebGL Sphere Demo
Amusingly, I have a polisci/philosophy with a minor in history and I make my money in computer science. I never viewed college as a tech school, I viewed it as an avenue to study things that expanded my mental frames of reference.

Perhaps that's why I'm not just a pure coder but also a biz dev, marketing, and operations resource for the companies I've worked for.

Abstract thinking with an understanding of how it applies to multiple problem sets is far more valuable than sheer technical knowledge.
I've wondered about this too. The conspiracy theorist in me came up with some silly ideas. But, in reality my guess is that people associated with YC (alumni, friends, YC co. employees, investors, etc.) vote up posts about launches as part of rooting for & supporting each other. Of course, many people associated w/ YC visit the site so it's almost an automatic front page.
I think this is over-hyped. Yes, it can cost $250,000 for four years at an ivy league school. I can also cost $25,000 for four years at an accredited institution in your home state, less for an accredited institution in some countries.

And yes, college costs have gone up faster than inflation and so on college hour per work hour basis it is more expensive, there are yet options for folks across a wide range of abilities to pay.
From Apple to Facebook to Twitter, are we learning that APIs and App Stores are simply traps wherein complements are commoditized so as to drive adoption and to explore (or ripoff) enhancements?

These things seem to be win/win/win for the providers and angst/angst/angst for wannabe collaborators.
N64 Emulator Written In JavaScript
In this case, it would appear that the line is "have you just copy and pasted the text of a tweet or are you getting it from the API?"
Hmm, looking back, you're right. I missed the forest for the trees.

I guess then, the question is why people find it natural to pay for tangible goods like coffee (a temporary good, but physical), a movie (an experiential good, also ephemeral and not physical) which by the way can be either good or mostly poor, a hammer (an extremely re-usable good and physical good) preventive care (is this tangible? not physical, anyhow) but when it comes to SW, people, depending on platform, perhaps, just don't want to pay, even if it's a nominal amount and go to extraordinary and disproportionate lengths to scrutinize the purchase taking hours perhaps researching an insignificant (in dollar terms) purchase.
The types of jobs traditionally filled by those with high school educations disappeared disproportionately (manufacturing, construction). i.e. high school educated people are increasingly useless to our economy. This means two things: firstly non-college prep high school curriculum is failing to prepare citizens for any non-college niche of our economy. Secondly, they face higher competition for the remaining non-skilled jobs.

Also a net negative effect on your life: unemployment.
status.net is great, but I would have federation where you can add a server as a source rather than just a user. Then if that server has a @fred, @fred would always be resolved to the @fred on that server. In conflicts, you should be able to resolve these conflicts and proxy names yourself. (my proof of concept doesn't do this)

Maybe even taking Diaspora and taking out everything except 140char status updates AND adding an API compatible with Twitter apps would be a better approach.

edit: clarity to first sentence.
Twitter Has the "Now Syndrome"
explanation?
Interesting thought! It's a very Apple way to handle user auth, no need for a switch user/login screen.
From what I heard, if we had retained existing public-sector jobs through the recession, we'd be back at net job-gain by now. Our apparent "job losses", at this point, are solely due to cutting state and local government jobs.
It even works fine on my iPad 1
if the grownups could hide all of the comments here about your feelings towards Starbucks, your insightful coffee preferences, and other inanities.. this could have been an interesting thread to participate in.
Initial revision of "git", the information manager from hell
"Why not price the coffee at $30 then for millionaires? Surely the marginal utility of $30'

If they could figure out a way to differentiate the product either in taste or image they actually could sell coffee or a coffee drink at a higher price in addition to what they are selling now.

PR wise it could prove strangely to be a bad move thought and might send the wrong message.

This is currently done with liquor to mention only one product where people pay outrageous sums of money for something that is not clearly better (taste tests of grey goose come to mind). And who would have imagined that people could charge for bottled water? Or that people would pay money for luxury ovens? Unheard of back when I was growing up.
I think we are learning, given App.net isn't a closed, centralized system and can't dictate usage terms for users and developers at will.
Facebook makes a lot of money from their devs.
Fact: he is not starting every paragraph with "Fact:"

He is presenting several facts labeled as such and then follows each fact with a paragraph or more explaining the fact. It's not condescension... it's science, man.
I don't think it's for people who need SPSS. Statwing is great for much simpler use cases. When you need statistical heavy lifting, go to SPSS or R or something else that can do all that, but if you're not a statistician / data person and have simpler needs, things like Statwing (and, presumably, Wolfram Alpha Pro) can do a decent job.
"We have the capabilities of sifting through bleeding edge information that shapes our lives on a daily basis with the internet."

What exactly are you talking about here? Of the top of my head I can't thank of anything on the internet that isn't a total waste of time, with two exceptions:
- looking up specific information (programming docs, the first 10 minutes on wikipedia, etc)
- browsing the arXiv
What's incredibly stupid is starting a business that depends so heavily on a free third party API that it can be brought down by a rule change.

Nobody is entitled to twitter's data except twitter.
Take a look at Google Refine; for some use cases, it's just fantastic.
What is wrong in spreading life on a planet which already doesn't have life?

Agreed that first you need to establish that. But once we've searched enough, shouldn't we send tiny ecosystems kind of stuff and try to spread whatever life we can?
You're being naive. Read the fine print on Intuit's offer. Their rate only applies to "qualified" transactions. Rewards cards, among others, aren't "qualified."
Shady SEO / marketing tactics suggested by a "professional"
If I can't use Hootsuite, I can't use twitter.
But those contributors... they gave them $50 bucks. It should be whatever they think it should be!
Amazing what a change in tone will do for a product/API/launch announcement.
"huge chunk of Starbucks strategy involves there being a Starbucks on every quarter"

The other chunk of Starbucks strategy is that it's not about coffee.

Speaking strictly of the product (and not the experience which of course is equally important) Starbucks secret sauce is essentially that it is a "sugar delivery system".

I've yet to be in a Starbucks (and I"m in them every single day) where the majority of the beverages that are sold are not black coffee but drinks with a high sugar and even mocha content that are addictive on several levels.
Perhaps this is inevitable. A necessary step for Twitter to stay alive. But then maybe instead we should be asking ourselves what's next? What's after Twitter? Twitter (et al.) have proven how valuable this kind of service is, but also that it can't be sustained as a business, at least not without some pretty ugly changes.

App.net is a start, but I think it gets it wrong. The value in Twitter is that anyone can use it, anywhere, for the cost of getting online. If we boil it down to just being a highly-scaled service layer with a standard API, maybe the it's the developers themselves that should be paying for API access. Let the 3rd party app ecosystem thrive, but make them pay for what they use. Right now Twitter's doing the opposite and might end up dying slowly over many years as a result.
I think it is more about attention to detail than just design. It is just that design is how that attention to detail manifests in this example.
I can't tell if your're serious with the first point. Either way I reject the idea that a person can be successful simply by possessing a positive attitude. Or that facts should be dismissed for anecdote.
>If you're in debt out the wazoo to work at a minimum wage job, then no, the college degree is probably having a net negative effect on your life

Usually it is the reverse:

If you're in debt out the wazoo due to a college degree and forced to work a minimum wage [low wage] job, then college is having a negative effect on your life...
That link is 404.
Exactly. Correlation != causation.
...I don't think I understand the utility of this. Scrolling is already pretty smooth. (unless I'm wrong)
I've seen that method used on a few desktop apps.
Clients sometimes want an estimate of how long a single feature or fix will take, even when it will take only 15 minutes. The communication overhead and time spent estimating easily outweigh the time to implement.
Is there a causation/correlation analysis missing here?
It loads content as you scroll down the page.
I'd be curious to see how much of the job growth is coming from those with Masters and above.
Cool app, I just installed it. Some feedback: Would be nice if double click shade desktop would show real desktop. Clicking the icon isn't always handy.
Why No Mention of Merchant Customer Exchange on HN?
If you try to move really fast with Infinity on, the screen turns completely white for a split second:
http://airbnb.github.com/infinity/demo-on.html
Storing 500GB on S3 would cost me over $60/month, which is pretty hard to swallow.
Yeah I don't know why Twitter gets so much hate. It is similar to Reddit: What you get is what you subscribe to.
In addition to being a young founder, Dan could be the most talented writer I know. Engineering + communication, quite a mix.
How many statistician do you know who has heard of Dependency Injection?

Yet another incredibly poor litmus test for assessing one's suitability as a data scientist, engineer, or anything else.
> What matters is never "return" but always "return on investment."

You're right. This is one of the primary advantages of startups with technical founders that talk to customers. Among many other flaws of the "OfficeSpace" work environment, one of the biggest is the fact that no single person in the organization knows 1) what is possible to build 2) how much it will cost to make and 3) what is the value of product to the customers.

At my last corporate job before I founded a startup, the CEO didn't know which software was possible to write, and didn't know which new features were easy vs. hard. The marketing people rarely told engineers what the customer wanted, and the engineers didn't talk to customers, and didn't know the cost (or value) of their time.

If there are any well-tested rules for producing good software, they're 1) small teams, 2) technical people with authority and responsibility, 3) talk to the customer.
I use Boston's bikeshare (Hubway) all the time, even though I own one bike and could easily buy another.

Advantages:

One-way trips. Bike from one Hubway station to another, then go home on the bus or train or in your friend's car without needing to figure out what to do with your bike. I do lots of circular itineraries where I switch from bus to bike to strolling to train to bike and back to bus without ever retracing my steps.

100% secure bike parking at any Hubway-equipped destination. Because bikes stolen from Hubway stations are not my problem, they are Hubway's problem, so once I dock a bike at a station I just walk away with no worries.

(And right there we've probably got my $85/year of value. Imagine a service which provided lighted, security-monitored bike racks at forty or fifty stations around town, with insurance against theft and an iPhone app to tell me if a particular rack has space for my bike at this moment. I might well expect to pay $10 a month for that service. And Hubway provides that, plus they throw in bikes for free!)

Minor advantages include spontaneous bike trips (mitigated by my own insistence on wearing a helmet, which is annoying to carry around "just in case") and much faster arrival and departure because unlocking and locking these things is fast. I walk up and leave in thirty seconds, most of which is spent putting on the helmet, readjusting the seat height, and strapping my bag to the bike basket; arrival is faster, maybe fifteen seconds. Looking for a good locking spot, then fiddling with U-locks is not so much fun as that.

Meanwhile, sure, thieves could strip the bikes at a Hubway station. I'll bet they'd be doing it on camera the whole time, though, and Hubway stations tend to be near major intersections in populated neighborhoods. And Hubway bikes are pretty odd; I'm not sure there's a lot of easily-fenced standard parts on there.
That's true of any API, though. You don't build your entire business around another company's API without a contract.

And yes, people are building apps for fun. Programming isn't just a job.
I'm ... not sure what this proves?
Usenet is dead now, but worked for quite some time.
Cool! So basically it's a lazy load
If someone tells you the one or two tiny things you did wrong, you will just fix those two tiny things and interview again and maybe make it through instead of building the broad skills necessary that would have made those two things non-issues.

For instance, if your resume says something like that you want to be CEO within five years, the interviewer could tell you that they can't take you seriously. You will just fix your resume and reapply to some other job. However, all that telling you accomplishes is that there is now a person out there that has completely unrealistic expectations but knows not to put it on his or her resume.
"there's probably 80+ startups in this batch and enough alumni a site like TC could be created that exclusively reports YC news."

I think that's a great idea even if some of those stories end up being posted on HN.
Heading for the Exits in China
Ask HN: Is anybody working on open protocol like SMTP to replace Twitter?
Twitter has scaling needs because it has reached beyond the scale of SMS and they are trying to store all the tweets. SMS networks don't have any scaling needs. Why aren't we thinking of SMS/SMTP/bittorrent like protocol to replace twitter?
As far as I can see, it also removes invisible "pages" of content(i.e. stuff you saw and you are about to see) from DOM to decrease the load on renderer
Author here. The utility is just to improve scroll smoothness (aka repaint times) of very-expensive-to-render pages, like infinite feeds with nice CSS effects. If you check out the demos linked to on the page, the demo with Infinity turned off should be noticeably choppier than the demo with it on, even once it's completely loaded and the browser's stopped reflowing. Probably depends on your machine/OS/browser combination -- but it'll keep loading more pugs as you scroll down, and eventually the version with Infinity off will grind just about anything to a halt.
Camouflage robot changes colour for disguise
Square doesn't have a network effect, it doesn't really matter if one store uses square, and the neighboring store uses google wallet, dwolla, or something else.
> continuous deployment works fine for web projects, but it's not an option if you've got a packaged product that you have to ship at some point. Agile is not a panacea for these environments.

I think that misses one of the key insights of continuous deployment. The biggest gain in CD is not about actually pushing code to production on every commit, but working as you actually do push to production on every commit.

This means that commits are small, contain tests, are delivered frequently and don't break the build. That workflow is a good idea, regardless of the final product or industry.

I practice CD (hell, I built a company to do CD), but if I ever had to go back to shipping desktop software or whatever, I'd still practice CD.
Hm, it doesn't degrade very well without javascript on (pagination would be a neat fallback). I know it's not generally worthwhile to cater to such a limited user population, but what about search engines? Should this only be used for content you don't need indexed, or you have indexed a different way?

Or, since I think Google uses javascript in its crawlers, I wonder how it handles it. Presumably it would just keep scrolling until the content ran out or it gave up. But does it ever come back later? I know with pagination it could pick up on the links it left off on, but couldn't really do that here, right?

edit: I guess this is really a question of infinite scrolling more than this particular implementation. Kudos to Dropbox for releasing a well-done version of the technique.
The problem is the teeming masses that are the ones creating all those nonsensical tweets that make Twitter so popular couldn't care less about these problems ...
Divide and Conquer: Cracking MS-CHAPv2 with a 100% success rate
Awesome! This is going to help so much.
I agree. Bitlbee is eons better than Twitter's official client in terms of accessibility for the visual impaired.
They are conceptually more high level than anything in C - that's what I meant.
Plan 9 for raspberry pi