skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Meh, maybe it's because I came of age during the first bubble... but I see life as a series of opportunities that open and close; they open and close in part based on your own attributes (e.g. you need to meet the minimum qualifications for the job, and you need to apply or otherwise make yourself available,) but also based on time, chance, and other things you don't control.

I got out of high school and got my first programmer/sysadmin job in '97 or so. (I had a few years of cable monkey and hardware/windows work in high school.) - But that was almost entirely timing; The minimum requirements in '97 were really low, due to the dot-com bubble; Pure luck, really. But then I was able to learn enough that I made the cut when the minimum requirements went way up after the crash. (There is no way I would have made that cut right out of highschool.)

If I had gone to college... well, it was really, really hard to find a job in my field with no experience, four years after '97. Maybe I would have learned enough in school to make the cut, maybe not. Maybe I would have been able to convince an employer that I was that good without paid work experience, maybe not[1].

Also, if someone else is paying for school? that's a big opportunity there, too, and it's possible that opportunity might not be there in a few years. (Is it a bigger opportunity than a job in the field you want? I don't know.)

But that's how I'd look at it.

[1] As a sidenote... if you are badass enough to go to school and have a job/internship in your field at the same time? that's best of all. Many of the best people I know did that. It's really difficult to pull off, though. I don't think I have what it takes to pull that off, not without stretching the school over 8+ years.
> Some Professors just keep shooting down their students' ideas, rather than actually teaching or guiding them.

This is what they are supposed to do. You can't be taught or guided on how to PhD-level research; like writing, it is more about trying and being critiqued on your outputs for N years straight. If you don't like being critiqued, don't do a PhD. If you think your ideas are good, persist with them even though your adviser is saying "no," and be ready to accept when the idea really sucks and you need to switch.

I took 8 years to finish, no regrets at all.
It probably would, but I was hoping for something a little more built-to-task: holes for cables, a grippy surface, the right size, etc.
Beautiful Web Developer CheckList
I'd say it's a slight mis-statement. It's more accurate if you replace the last three words with "web became more common."

BTW, the web was a big deal in a very small circle. In the Fall of 1994, I took a college ENG 100 course that explained how to email and browse the web. It was still very early days.
What makes you think you know what's best for him? I guess you probably went to college, but maybe you didn't. What I do know, is that you didn't both go to college and also choose not to go to college.

If you did go, then you don't know what would've happened to you if you hadn't gone. You could have lived in Costa Rica for 3 years and decided to establish a charity, never thinking twice about the value of higher education. Maybe later you would've posted in this thread, and had the top rated comment about how much you learned on that trip in comparison to what your friends learned in college.

However, it's also possible that you didn't go to college, and are simply regretting that choice and trying to warn those younger than you not to make the choice that you did. But what if you had gone? Maybe you would've hated it, and dropped out after two years, thinking it was a completely horrible idea.

Whether or not you went to college, you don't have the full picture. You don't know what it would've been like to do the opposite. That's why this is not an easy question -- that's why people actually talk about this. If it were as easy as "I'm older than you, and I think you should go, therefore you should go," this thread wouldn't exist. So don't act like you have the right to tell others how to live very important parts of their lives. We all have to walk our own journey, and make our own decisions, and if we just listen to those more experienced than us, we will never get anywhere important. And we probably won't be very happy, either.
Switching from Windows to Max OS X
Well, if your point was to remember me that everything is possible... you made it greatly.
No, that is actually somewhat normal. Even low-end assisted living institutional care is probably $5k/month
No, it's clear: university is not necessary. From a business perspective, universities have been a bubble for some time now: as Americans, we're expected to think and produce at the highest level of global citizens, to make our people thought workers... and yet we bitterly lament the exporting of our wealth to China to support manufacturing that we as the general public are too holy to embrace.
We sent those jobs over there and inflated unemployment by expecting that everyone in the country become scholarly. It's unbalanced and degrading to our people.
Have you ever eaten artisanal food? Real Parmigiano-Reggiano instead of shaky Kraft cheese? Real Boeuf Bourguignon instead of Campbell's Chunky Cow Nuggets? Then you understand the value of tradesmanship, of learning a craft.
If we want to take back manufacturing, to reduce unemployment, and to keep American products the pre-eminent craft in the world, we need to get over ourselves. Americans are smart regardless of our level of education. Let's stop degrading the working man, the trade skill worker, the apprenticeship: the things that make us human are the things that require a lifetime to master, not the ones that are learned from a book.
College is not always the answer. Not being haughty better-than-thous is the answer. We should appreciate American craftsmanship. Meanwhile, I'll eat the real Italian cheese while you eat the American cheez product.
-From a college graduate and Silicon Valley entrepreneur. And foodie, if it's not obvious.
Education is necessary. Schooling may not be.
I think his gripe is that he couldn't see the blog post because their site did some browser detection and took him to the mobile version.
Ask HN:startup scene in Singapore/Asia, any contacts?
I am temporarily relocating to Singapore to work on our startup Hautely.com. Looking for any introductions to startups in Singapore. Please send me an email to hautely@gmail.com.
The bummer is that, depending where you live, there is a good chance that even if you preserved your electronics, you wouldn't have any mains current to run them for a long, long time. I would be more worried about rushing to Walmart and stocking up on canned goods and bottled water before anyone else figured out what was about to happen.
Nostalgia. The amount of 2e and prior content that I have that are on there makes me smile, but also realize, I haven't touched it in years.

Some treasures stand out, first and foremost - Temple of Elemental Evil. Missing -- Tomb of Horrors.

Reading modules, not even playing them, was fun.
Hmmm .. a company that refuses to sell to a potential customer. And that doubles their prices for the government. I guess one cant be too surprised at their downfall....
I think it's important to note that "is university necessary?" is not the same as "should a person go to university?" The second question is largely pointless because whether or not the university, as an institution, is necessary is determined only by the mean benefit it provides to society. Individually, everyone is different. College is for some people and not for others.
South Of Normal
IPhone Sales Strong
Apple needs to grow up and stop acting like a 12 year old.
The problem is not the store rules. The problem is that the store is made mandatory.
With you all the way, overall longevity is much the same, but the way we go has changed a great deal.

I don't know if I'd consider heart attacks mundane, they've just become that given western diets. heart attack used to be rarer 100 years ago, but now a combination of longer life and diets that have more negative cardiac impact leads to the growth of heart attack and the subsequent research and improvement in cardiac intervention that can be seen in healthcare today. We've made them mundane through our collective wild ass lifestyle choices.
Consider: “Family members of people who live in China and like Falun Gong”.

And: ”When users recognize or fear that their privacy or confidentiality is compromised, true freedom of inquiry no longer exists.”

- American Library Association, http://www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Section=interpretations&...
I think its also about Microsoft and how the company has failed to provide any real additional value over a Windows XP machine with Office 2001. My corporate client is running XP with Office 2003 and I really wish they'd stuck with the 2001 edition. Same features, less annoying.

Stagnation in innovation is coming back to bite them.
Animation: How to build skyscrapers over working train tracks
Sonar Project. GNU/Linux operating system focused on accessibility. | Indiegogo
カルティエ指輪
Dell is a surprising addition, but only logical if you consider that every business partner of Microsoft, ever, was either bought out or killed by Microsoft. I am still surprised people want to be business partners with that company. Watch what will happen to Nokia.
After 15 years in industry (Compaq, Microsoft, a couple smaller shops) I'm now back working on my PhD and enjoying the hell out of it. Totally different experience than if I had gone straight out of undergrad, though.
I'm curious about the standing desk because to me it's always seemed like something that would make me focus less on the task at hand. Then again, I've always been baffled by how others at the gym can read novels while on the eliptical. I can't even focus properly on the TV shows the gym has running when I'm exercising. Perhaps it's a reflection of my overall health or maybe my brain is wired in a way where I can't handle both involved physical and mental activity.

I'd like to hear from people who use standing desks on how it's affected their productivity and quality of work.
Maybe it's just me, but the FB Graph Search intro video seemed to be more of an objective-based searching tool. I (probably stupidly) assumed it could serve as a sidekick to Google search. Forgot that the majority of Facebook users use the default search to find (stalk) other people, and this is just an engine to do it more efficiently. I'm starting to be a bit wary about the monetization potential of FB Graph Search.
MIT hacked by Lulzsec in tribute to Aaron Swartz
What Google Does Best Is A Stark Contrast To Apple, According To Larry Page
How blogspam works. This is blogspam upon blogspam. I dare not say that this link

http://delima.soup.io/post/295576131/how-keys-work

is the original link, but it's at least two links closer to the original source than the link submitted here to HN.

AFTER EDIT: Many thanks to the HN reader who found the original source, which deserves traffic much more than blogspam. I flag blogspam relentlessly since another HN user asked about the issue.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4583307
A strong Dell buying or partnering with Red Hat would make sense for Red Hat for the reasons you propose, but doesn't really make as much sense for Dell, and especially not for Dell as it is now.

The commodity Linux server world is going to switch, increasingly, to Supermicro or even lower margin providers.

The kind of enterprise sales which do bring in big margin and big absolute dollars for Dell are still Windows (and to a lesser extent, VMware), and include ok storage and crappy networking/accessories.

I think there's money in USG-scale desktop deployments, but it might just be a cost of getting the server business; it's hard to separate out "we can cover all of your desktops AND servers" into separate profitability for each line, since clearly servers, storage, and services are used to cross-subsidize the desktop/laptops.

The weakness for Dell is mobile (which Red Hat doesn't touch); Windows Phone may be a viable partner there, although personally I would have bought RIMM at the depths of their doom instead.

The other weakness has always been a lack of professional services, but we've seen how badly attempts at that have worked out for HP, too. What might have made sense would have been buying mid-market microsoft solution providers and rolling them into Dell Professional Services.

Partnering more with Microsoft seems like the best move for them to preserve total profitability; it probably isn't the best for Dell's overall position in 15 years, but I think that ship sailed; the biggest server vendors in 5-10 years are going to be building totally commoditized stuff to public specs, I believe.
Google's store is not the only way to get code onto Android phones (which is why I bought one, after rejecting iPhones).
There is only ONE thing that a maps product absolutely has to get right, and that's the data. It's the core of the whole product.

It wasn't just some unlucky team working that went down the wrong path and produced a substandard product (Aperture or MobileMe), this was the outright replacement of a product that almost all iPhone users consider a core feature of their device and, at some point during their time with the device, depend on to help them in a confusing situation.
They haven't found any concrete flaws though.

Several XSS flaws were fixed quickly:

http://reflets.info/le-retour-du-mega-merdier-de-kim/

(french)
I'm not targeting you specifically, but in general, I see a lot of people making the mistake of using their own experiences as general rules. Mark Zuckerberg's success neither supports nor challenges the value of the university. He's a unique person with his own set of circumstances for whom dropping out was a better option. It means neither that everyone with a startup idea should drop out, nor that they shouldn't.
This looks like a good read:

http://www.adambarth.com/papers/2009/barth-weinberger-song.p... Cross-Origin JavaScript Capability Leaks: Detection, Exploitation, and Defense

Although these vulnerabilities are imple-
mentation errors in WebKit, the presence of the
bugs illustrates the fragility of the general architec-
ture. (Other browsers have historically had similar
vulnerabilities [17, 18, 19].) We detail these vulner-
abilities and construct proof-of-concept exploits to
demonstrate how an attacker can leverage a leaked
JavaScript pointer to inject a malicious script into
an honest security origin.
Dell customer service was awesome, then turned awful in 2000 or so when Dell left the company. I dont know how it is now but I imagine better again? Dells entire value was solid computers + great service, thats how they got big. These days I suppose everybody makes pretty good quality hardware. Having said that my last PC purchase was in 2005. All Mac since then.
Google vs. Facebook - Business
With great power comes great responsibility.

Companies such as Facebook and the like undoubtedly draw great power from their "social graph"; however, human interactions are subtle, complex, multifaceted and often contradictory.

Nothing good can come out of applying dumb algorithms (that is, any algorithm) to a sufficiently rich "social graph"; it will always lead to situations like that which are, at best, embarrassing, and at worst, dangerous, for whoever is in the system.

I don't think it's a matter of doing things the right way or fixing them- trying to put human relationships in a computer system will never reproduce the human experience (however, you may make marketers very happy). The best you can do is complete certain very focused subsets of it in an interesting way.

Zuckerberg's views on privacy and openness are laughable, and to be completely expected from someone of his background and world experience. If you think about who the average Facebook employee is, you'd realize that you probably wouldn't want them to be in charge of designing a system meant to model the intricacies of human interaction.
Maybe this praise is due to the Velocity program really helping students solidify their ideas/business models before pursuing YC. I believe Pair and Bufferbox were apart of Velocity no?
As another CS student who has had the opportunity of working in many different companies on internships, I certainly agree with the sentiment that for our field of modern software development, university is certainly not necessary. Learning through experience and mentorship is by far a more effective process, though it is a lot more dependent on the student in terms of how effective it is.
However, I feel that many of these kinds of arguments are approached in entirely the wrong manner. Not everyone can be Bill Gates and moreover, not every field can so easily cast aside a formal education in favour of "spunk and effort".
Even in other technology fields such as electrical or chemical engineering, the facilities the university provides in terms of laboratories and instruction are definitely very necessary for the training of such specialists.
Perhaps these arguments need to be narrowed down in scope.
It always seems a little strange to me to reference issue IDs from a centralized system (GitHub) in your commit messages (and therefore the history) in a distributed version control system.

It sure is convenient though.
If you can afford it then do it. Those social lessons you are learning are no doubt invaluable. The issue is that for a lot of people it's just not affordable. And it's getting less so every year. If you're well-to-do and have the money then have fun and enjoy yourself.
Does the NAS support the possibility of whole disk encryption? (A little OT here.)
How do I run code in Chrome?
This is awesome, thanks for posting this.

I'm having trouble getting the VM going and I have a pretty vanilla set up so I'm worried the requirements might need some more detail such as version numbers.

I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on an i3-2350M and all BIOS settings for virtualization are enabled.

I installed Vagrant 1.0.6 and VirtualBox 4.2.6.

Vagrant gives the following error:

[default] The guest additions on this VM do not match the install version of VirtualBox! This may cause things such as forwarded ports, shared folders, and more to not work properly. If any of those things fail on this machine, please update the guest additions and repackage the
box.

And running directly from the VirtualBox GUI gives an error:

Failed to open a session for the virtual machine gswd_1358906798.

VT-x features locked or unavailable in MSR. (VERR_VMX_MSR_LOCKED_OR_DISABLED).

My hardware is 6 months old, would you expect people with
4 year old hardware to run this without trouble?

Any ideas would be appreciated.
Thanks I'll check it out, but I thought that tptacek was talking about manipulation of JS runtimes instead of exploitations of XSS bugs in webkit.
Snip.it acquired by Yahoo
Why Evolution Is True,

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/

which includes a lot of personal posts by the site's keeper, but also includes very interesting posts about cutting-edge research in biology.
Jeff Atwood Goes Off The Rails
How To Fake A Great Night Out
It seems that some are claiming that crypto written in pure javascript inside a browser is very unlikely to be "good" crypto.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WsfS5kr...
Another data point: My wife is a relatively recent PhD (6 years out). Her experience has been nothing but amazing.

When it comes to academia your field of study matters. Alot. My wife is a behavioral accounting researcher, which is a high-demand field with incredibly low supply. Her experience, compared to other disciplines, just couldn't be any more different. She's highly paid and does exactly what she loves.

It helps that she's really good at it I suppose. She received early tenure and will likely be promoted to full professor early as well. She publishes routinely and is active in service even though, given her discipline, she really doesn't need to be.

tldr; If your passion is accounting I'd highly recommend pursuing that PhD.
I think "necessary" needs clarification here. What you intend or expect to be able to do or understand dictates what's necessary or sufficient. There is no necessity for an education when your goal is simply to feed yourself; many menial jobs that are entirely within the grasp of people who have no formal training or education will satisfy this need.

In more of an HN demographic context... I'm in the "socialization" camp. College/university can serve a similar purpose as attending primary and secondary schooling, i.e. to further develop your social skills with other people as you age. While this can be found in other places, I'm not sure how effective it can be for those of us who wouldn't otherwise go out of their way to interact with others.

In the vein of preparing you to do specific, non-obvious things, I would agree with you that education is necessary; I do think we should get out of the "high school -> college -> job" idea that seems to have turned into a fallacy over the last decade or two.

Trade schools can be a good example of this; in my opinion, apprenticeship is also a great alternative, though in the US those are -- as far as I know -- almost nonexistent.
It's not, they did, and I don't think they were. Quote from article:

> But the problem goes beyond trusting Mega’s servers, says cryptographer Moxie Marlinspike, who recently left a position as head of product security for Twitter. Browser-based cryptography also means that anyone who breaks the SSL encryption that protects the data sent by the server could tamper with the code just as easily.

> “The security of Javascript-based cryptography is reducible to the security of the channel in which the Javascript is transmitted (every time you visit the page), which in this case is an SSL connection,” Marlinspike writes to me in an email. “If you can break SSL, you can break MEGA.”

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/01/21/researc...
My personal website now has a terminal
An important category is apps which are not sold in the app store, and whose provider makes money in other ways, for example account subscriptions. 500px's is an example of such an app.

I'm more than willing to believe Android users on average buy less apps than iOS users. But that just means different business models will succeed there.
That almost seems to say something, but I can't tell. Would you care to make your point for those who don't have access to divine revelation?
These are often too narrow and end with your face in the screen. I've apparently got perfect vision but had difficulty focusing when I attempted such a setup using standard-depth shelving.
I did this: http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/phantom

It did all the SMPTE reading & writing in software. Good times.
I'm running VirtualBox 4.2.4 but I would think, since it creates the VM when you `vagrant up`, that it wouldn't matter what version of VB you were running. So that's odd.

The Vagrant version I have is 1.0.5, just for completeness sake.

I just downloaded the zip file again to check, and there's nothing in there (at least that I can find) that mentions a version of VirtualBox. You're also the first person to mention a problem like this (one other person had a problem after running the VM with getting packages from Google).

You could try downgrading, or, since you're on a sane OS, just running everything sans VM. You'll need to install Git and PostgreSQL yourself, though.

Let me know if anything changes, please. I'll ask around and let you know if I find anything out.

Thanks, and sorry for your problems.
This is bad news all around. It is likely a huge percentage of searches performed by people will not enrich lives but most people will use it to mine out insights that others don't wish to be publicized.

Can you imagine people being rounded up in China over this and put into prisons over their "like".
Toosell blog | Fix the Leaking Bathroom Sink by Yourself