skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree education (and even more particularly, the method and quality of teaching) is a problem, but it's not the same problem as student debt.

As far as I can tell, much of the (debt) problem is caused by bad decision making by clueless parents and teenagers who think they need to send their kid to an Ivy League or think that their child somehow needs to spend 40k a year to go to an in-state school.

Let's be honest. The cost of education is going up, yes. But getting into debt is also bad and a poor choice. Yet nobody is responsible enough to consider it when making college choices, just to whine about it after the fact.

Students do not need to own a television or get cable or even have a video game console. Students probably don't even need a car, definitely don't need smartphones, and at least where I went to school, could probably do just fine without owning a computer, too. Likewise, instead of getting into debt they could go to cheaper community colleges or a whole slew of things.

Instead many college students, regardless of economic background, seem to have smartphones, Macs, and 42" TVs.

When I see someone complaining about college debt, I see somebody who went to an overly expensive school, without a plan, and did whatever they felt like without ever stopping to consider first if they could make a living when they were done. I see a child.

As someone who looked at the big picture when making college decisions and now has no college debt two years out of school, I have no sympathy.

I turned down the University of Chicago (among others) so that I wouldn't be in debt and to hear all the whining about it from entitled feeling kids who didn't make smart decisions makes me angry.

Now I'll agree that you may need to take on some debt to complete college. But if you're taking on more than the cost of a new car, you're doing it wrong.

Don't get me wrong, either. I concur that colleges waste lots of money.
Or if you want to be taken seriously, as the target of such criticism you could roll your eyes and devote exactly as much mental energy to such criticisms as they deserve, which is approximately zero.

Finding sexism in absolutely any scenario where there is a reference to sex is an all too common skill that one might be better off not possessing, but that's just my opinion.
Agree, great resource. Also, cool podcast.
Exactly!

HTML5/CSS/JavaScript are finally moving in the right direction.

However, what we should be doing is making the browser nothing more than an x64 VM. That way, all of the underlying OS calls could be wrapped in an OS-independent way, and for those that are specific to a particular platform, a generic way to access host-specific features.

Because each generic OS call maps into a real OS call, every call can undergo a security check. We can use ACLs or web-based authentication, or distributed authentication, etc. Or perhaps none at all for something like "give me the current date".

Each "app" (and, they would be real apps!) would run inside a separate VM. Communications to other parts of the system - for example, to another running app - would be done via messages (or some other method that could also be authenticated).

Now, some of the beauty of this scheme is that existing apps could run without modification on this platform because the VM would trap all the "real" OS calls and authenticate them, validate them, etc. As in unix, I/O would get mapped to arbitrary streams; for example, if the existing app was console-based and did printf() and scanf(), those would be mapped to the user's keyboard and output of the VM on the screen.

I wrote a much longer version of this and sent it to Alan Kay, but I must not have his "real" email, as I've gotten no reply. (Or maybe I'm nuts...)

What is astonishing to me is that if one of the "big guys" (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, ???) were to build this "Web-Enabled Application Platform" (WEAP sigh...) [perhaps using Xen] it would TAKE OVER the entire OS market. The only "program" a user would run (at least what was visible to her) would be WEAP.

Years ago, this would have been a crazy idea. But today's machines are so fast that I believe we're finally ready to accept the need for better security and authentication, and, at the same time, accept a bit of a slowdown of our apps to trade for robustness and safety. Not to mention the side benefit of getting rid of HTMLx CSS and probably JavaScript !

I've never seen this idea written up anywhere else, so I hereby put this into the Public Domain.

This concept needs much more detail before doing a reference implementation, and I definitely haven't considered every corner case. But, given the exceedingly poor state of "the web" these days, something like this will (clearly!) eventually happen.
There's far more than 3 identities wrapped up in "the Chinese".
"Non-owner" was a poor choice of terms. I was thinking more in terms of the little guys who have at most a 1-2% ownership stake in the company.
I use the pentadactyl extension for firefox, and I've added the emacs hotkeys <C-a>, <C-e>, <C-n>, <C-p>, <C-f>, <C-b>, <M-f>, and <M-b> to insert mode so that I can at least move between lines and words without much problem. It's not vim, but it makes things like writing this comment a lot easier for me.

Also having <C-p> and <C-n> as up and down means that moving between search suggestions on sites is really easy, which is nice.
Just remember, this too shall pass.

You can't be Chinese right now, but that doesn't mean you'll never be Chinese.

Governments do fall and rise at the drop of a hat in China. People know that right?
This isn't just a Chinese thing. I've experienced it personally in Russia, and I've heard of it in other countries too.
It would seem buying up talent is like buying up land. There is only so much of either to go around, and the price is just going to get higher and higher.
Thank you so much! We understand and believe that design is integral to your product's success so we do everything we can to make sure we deliver the design you're looking for.
I mentioned in another reply that it actually does gzip fairly well (and bzips even better). But you still end up with an order of magnitude expansion with gzip (as compared to gzipping the original source), and around 3x expansion with bz2 (again compared to bz2 on the original source).

That's from a <0.5KB test input, so the expansion might be mitigated a little more for larger files. I was going to test on a 3KB microlibrary, but gave up after about 10 minutes of waiting for the conversion to finish.
What sorcery is this!
Tech Support: Five Free Antivirus and Antispyware Tools
I was really expecting "Hacker" to be used in the "person who enjoys playful cleverness" sense of the word (Thanks RMS), I wasn't expecting it to refer to people who break into Wordpress sites. (I expected anti-advice).
Google's leak finder for JavaScript
Or use vimperator (or its replacement whose name escapes me). 'd' deletes a tab (as will C-w), 'u' "undeletes" it.

History made marvelously easy. This alone sold me on the extension.
Until PayPal kills it....
Software Development Manager
Rackspace Cloud is seeking a Software Development Manager, who will direct, manage, and participate in the day-to-day operations of a team of software developers. You manage all the operational aspects of the software development teams to ensure business and product objectives are met. You provide administrative, technical, and people leadership for multiple, diverse, and sometimes geographically distributed teams. You are responsible for providing feedback to the team and individuals on their performance. You will coach and guide teams to enable future success.
Well explained. I get it now. Thanks
We have some of the same thoughts on the matter. There was a thread on invention and marketing that I had to drop. Treating the marketing aspect properly takes the conversation too far away from the main subject. Points like who invented what first are too hot to introduce without spending a lot of time accounting for them. (That surprised me.) The same goes for who can be considered an inventor today.

I think invention and marketing have an old and deep connection.
The water is coming downhill. So it probably starts higher and goes lower and lower. Same thing with sewers. they have to have a slight angle in the right direction
Quite different from Dribbble, our focus is on connecting customers to designers for projects, not show and tell among designers. Meer.li seems closer to Dribbble in that it appears to focus more on connecting mobile designers to mobile designers too.
I think the problem is more storage than power. I don't know exactly how Google Translate works but I've heard it uses human translated information as a corpus in an attempt to get natural-sounding translations (as opposed to the goofy old babelfish type translations).

Eg. Someone is translating something from Russian to English. They'll look back into their history of web pages which have human-translated Russian and English versions to see if any phrases in Russian match what they are actively translating and if they do, they'll attempt to incorporate the human-created English translation of that into their translation. The data allowing for this must be absolutely huge.

Having said that I'm sure they could do an offline version which didn't use the fancy human-translated corpus data and just gave you the crappy babelfish-style translation, which in a lot of real-world situations is good enough to get the gist.
The good news is its just HTML5/JS, so it can absolutely be changed!
I use ijkl. My config (taken from the interwebs somewhere and adjusted over time):

" remap h to i and use ijkl for inverse T cursor movement
map k g<Down>
map i g<Up>
map j <Left>
noremap h i

The g makes it work more intuitively for wrapping lines. Use h to insert, or for "inner" selections, instead of i.

One problem with doing this is that when you're on some random server without your .vimrc set up, you won't have these mappings. Just scp/wget over your dotfiles for those cases anyways. But you'll definitely find yourself slowed down without the mappings.
Thank you! The right designer for the right project is exactly what we strive towards.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that Manhattan is much less organized below the city than it is above the city.
I made a more detailed post below, but I would think an alias to something like vim -c s/^/\\=@\* (or @\+ I'm not sure which register you'd need to use) would be your best bet for fast editing: it should let you open vim with text from your clipboard already inserted on the first line.
I think even though that's not guaranteed by the standard, it's a lot more portable in principle than relying on the DOM.
Possibly the A train at 168th St. in Manhattan.
The chart you linked to doesn't refer to giving from educational institutions themselves. The chart is tracking contributions from individual employees[1] of those institutions. Seems to me that simply represents the fact that professors tend to be Democrats.

On the other hand, with for profit colleges, institutions themselves [2] are contributing directly to superpacs and other political groups. It's a totally different metric.

[1] from your link: "Since school districts, colleges and universities are generally prohibited from forming political action committees, political contributions from the education industry generally come from the individuals associated with the field."

[2] The Apollo Group, which owns the University of Phoenix, contributed $75,000 last month to Restore Our Future, a super PAC run by former Romney aides. The pro-Romney super PAC is one of the biggest players in the GOP's long-running nomination fight, pumping more than $38 million into commercials, direct mail and automated phone calls that promote Romney and attack his GOP rivals. http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/story/2012-03-26/romne...
Copyright wars begin in earnest...
I always liked "Write code as if the next person who has to maintain it is a sociopath who knows where you live". Simplicity, Brevity, Elegance fits in that overarching ideal nicely.
While I don't think this is systematic, it definitely happens from time to time and nobody says anything about it.
Same here. I'm wondering if this is maybe an incomplete list. There have to be more than three failed open source hardware projects out there.
All of my passwords are randomly generated and kept in a password database. The database is then auto-sync'd to a cloud storage service. This keeps my passwords secure, but easily accessible.

Specifically, I use Password Gorilla (since it's psafe compatible and cross-platform) and SpiderOak (since it's encrypted and cross-platform).
There is a continuum, and there is an explore/exploit problem.

Using notepad (on Windows) has 0 up-front cost. But you are going to be frequently frustrated, you are going to frequently produce files with errors in them that you have to fix, and you are going to be frequently doing things in a repetitive way. And then you are going to have to do things differently on another platform, etc.

Using a highly configurable, plugin-rich, live-programmable editor like vim or emacs does have some up-front costs to configure and learn to use. But almost certainly not as much as you think. They LOOK absolutely terrifying, but the reality isn't so bad. (I haven't found it bad, anyway - I certainly don't keep around refcards or consciously memorize things, although that might mean I'm not taking 100% advantage of the tools or maxing out my geek score.. those just aren't my use cases).

Feeling frustrated all the time breaks up your flow and just feels bad. And yes, if you are feeling frustrated with repetition, you probably ARE wasting real time... but it's up to you whether it matters. Some people have half the productivity of others and get by fine and get paid the same.

The underlying philosophy here is: it's a programmable computer, you should be able to have it your own way. vim and emacs are the fruits of text editing being a really mature problem domain for software.

But if your philosophy is rather: I don't want to take an extra week to learn a new tool... then you are not ready and might never be ready to leap to a really strong text editor.

vim and emacs have warts. but if you know them and need their power, it will not matter much to you that (say) scribes is so much simpler and prettier, because the absence of warts doesn't make up for the massive loss of functionality.

Each of these embodies about a lifetime of very poorly compensated work; there isn't anything else like them in the pipeline, so you might wait a lifetime for something with the same functionality and fewer warts. And the problem is that others will perceive warts in the new thing and it will be a religious war just like vim vs. emacs.
I remember being so excited about this product that I sent a msg to the IronSpread team thanking them for their work, even though I hadn't even used their product yet. (I'd never done that before for any product)

It's great to see this taking off (and I had no idea it was part of YC until now), and am looking forward to future updates!

Best of luck to the team :)
> Bad choice of words maybe, but that is what it feels like.

What it feels like and what it is are often at odds with each other. Emotional appeals allow for very sloppy reasoning. We can, and should, do much better than that especially on a forum like this.

50% of the population doesn't pay income tax. The vast majority of them still pay sales and property taxes (even renters pay property tax, though indirectly). If they drive they pay fuel taxes. The majority of that bottom 50% still works. They are contributing to society. They are contirbuting to companies by doing the jobs the companies want them to do. They spend their money on consumer goods and to various service industries. Companies, outside a few industries, don't exist without those customers.
>No, it's almost impossible. Doing the same thing for year after year is impossible because someone comes along and does some part better from the customer's point of view, and then you don't have a business.

That's what I'm saying. Nobody in the pc OEM game has done that lately, that's why it has been so easy to be a OEM.
Imagine a world where you can retrain yourself on the order of months, not years, and take on little or no debt to do it. How would that impact unemployment or underemployment?

When Obama stands in front of a bankrupt auto factory in Detroit and says, "We'll retool these factories and retrain these workers to produce wind turbines, solar panels, and electric cars!", how do we do it?

People are desperate to answer that question and services like bloc.io, Udacity, Coursera, Khan Academy, University Now, etc. are just our best first answers.

Education is more than a big problem: it's the root problem.

Caveat lector: I help run http://devbootcamp.com and the bloc.io guys work out of our offices 2-3 days per week.
The Internet IPv4 address business
Here is an interesting Subway chart from 1904 with a depth chart.

http://talk.nycsubway.org/perl/read?subtalk=589316
Visual Website Optimizer is 7x faster now
The Social Psychology of Olympic Relay Racing
Clarity. Expressivity. Simplicity.
Did the Olympics websites grab a gold medal? WebPerf data
Mobile Apps must die
urgh; I feel that the last thing we need is to couple our editors even more strongly to the flavors of the month (and 500mb+ of dependencies). I wish these things were more ecumenical...
Easily turn existing HTMLs into APIs
this is incredible!
That's actually completely false. Just about all of the features are there, but they have been reorganized a lot. It seems like they're trying to align the organization of their inspector more with the way the debug tools in XCode work, so that the experience is unified across them. It's a bit tough to get used to if your habits are with the old inspector, but it's actually not too bad once you start getting the hang of it. Just a rearchitecting of your brain map.
Scoutzie is founded by an awesome duo! I've known Kirill from his days in Seattle and met Jenn a few weeks ago in SF. Congrats you two, keep it up!
Review of My Google Internships
The (unframed) article: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/mark-kitto-youll-...
I agree, this is an excellent example.
Ask HN:How do I convince visitors to sign up on Xervmon 
There are few signups. I want to increase the sign ups. I believe we provide a valuable service in managing costs and budget on IT spend. It would be really helpful.

Thanks
Sudhi
Its an interesting anecdote.

There is a lot to be said for the advice "Don't work where egos are more important than the mission." But what Russ didn't learn was "How to get the mission done in the presence of egos." The thing is that there are lots of people with big egos, people who rightfully or wrongfully work against others who threaten their ego, even when doing so is counter productive to the company. What is worse is that as a manager you know these egocentric people are there but sometimes you really can't do a whole lot about that.

However, when you find someone who can get stuff done without rustling the feathers of the prima-donnas, that person should be pretty valuable. A good manager can really appreciate that skill, a poor manager cannot. Allow me to illustrate.

Lets use Russ' example because its out there and we won't get into trouble. Jump up to the corner office and look at what is seen:

1) Product is slow

2) Repeated meetings and updates where the slowness has been raised have been deflected with various plans, arguments about direction, finger pointing, and general lack of progress.

3) Junior programmer rewrites a chunk of the system and shows off an order of magnitude improvement.

4) Meetings where senior people are exploiting that demo to make others look foolish, advance agendas, and generally do damage to others.

Now consider a different scenario

1) Product is slow

2) Repeated meetings and updates where the slowness has been raised have been deflected with various plans, arguments about direction, finger pointing, and general lack of progress.

3) Engineer figures out the problems and, knowing the solution, starts talking to various other engineers about how they decide to build what they build. Asks questions that talk to the bottleneck (Like they might ask, "I'm thinking about using that kind of socket in my code, but I'm not sure about it, how much performance could I expect?" and "I wrote this bit of test code, it just copies stuff around, and it seems to be waiting on the socket a lot, could you take a look and tell me if I'm doing it right?")

Now by planting the questions/seeds around these engineers start to do things a bit differently, the come up with some alternate strategies. The socket gets eliminated and this speeds up the product tremendously. Everyone is excited about how much progress they are making and generally morale improves.

4) Meetings now how have big performance gains, and the product is going to be much better. Congratulations all around.

Now in the latter case the environment gets better, the same result is achieved, but most of the company doesn't know they were the one who 'fixed' the problem. That employee's manager should know, and they should be ready to reward that effort. People who can effect the change you want in an organization without disturbing the politics are really good to have around. Things just 'magically' get better. When they leave it is really obvious that things don't work as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTf-iAWfvS4

I think it's weird when people believe there's a tool that will do their job for them, like a hammer that builds a roof by itself.

I'm sure HyperDex is totally useful for some cases, but it has clear disadvantages when you try to use it for what it wasn't intended (like global HP databases). All of a sudden you find yourself building glue to make it fit with your hybrid architecture. Instead you could take something simple and customize it, and build a huge successful business off of it, like the biggest sites in the world do currently with various tools that weren't engineered to solve simple problems like the number of round trips to look up an object.
Beware Of Corporate Cockroaches
I'm surprised someone hasn't thought of this yet, it seems like a worthwhile pursuit. (thumbs up)
He's saying that it's important to remember that it is terrible advice.

When someone mucks around in your code, remember how shitty it is to be given that advice and try to handle the situation more gracefully.

When you are in a shop where that advice is considered good, find a way to leave.
Very much disagree.

> This reveals the fallacy that coding standards are built on – that there is some kind of one true way of programming, ....

No, a coding standard establishes conventions for a project, so that people can more easily understand and maintain code written by others. Moving between coding conventions is jarring, and adjusting to it takes time & effort away from figuring out what code does or what is wrong with it.

Similarly, the fact that an entire novel (or website or ...) is set in a particular font does not mean that this is supposed to be the one true font; rather, consistency means we can simply read, and not be continually jarred by font changes.
If you really want to experience frustration as a vim user, try working on a legacy proprietary Unix box with nothing but old-school vi on it.

If you simply want the breadth of experience without access to such a system, the 'nvi' package (available on most Linux systems) promises to be bug-for-bug compatible with BSD vi.
One chart measures which party gains if more money flows to the non-profit sector. The other chart measures which party gains if more money flows to the for-profit sector.

You can nitpick the details of exactly what entities the money flows through, but the politicians aren't.