skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Higher learning institutions should help you explore your interests regardless of the applicability of those interests to employment."

I disagree. Historically, postsecondary education might have been limited to the disciplines of academia and focused solely on liberal arts. However, at this point, a four-year degree is an effective prerequisite to 90% of white-collar job. (Irrespective of the actual value of a degree in performing jobs, of course. Obviously, the overwhelming majority of professions don't require four years of institutional training or education to perform. Indeed, I'd wager that most careers don't require academic knowledge beyond that of a seventh grader.)

So, college has been perverted by the labor market into a corollary of the K-12, "career-preparatory" apparatus, and few students enter college in pursuit of actual intelectual stimulation. Most are simply going through the motions to get an entry level job. In effect, college has simply become a funnel from high school to the labor market. We can debate about whether or not this is good, but the fact remains that, given the current post-secondary education landscape, colleges exist to get people jobs and should be measured by that standard.

As for only K-12 being government-funded and thus career-oriented, many if not most students take federal aid of some sort, implicating public funding even for private colleges. It's impossible to disassociate colleges and government money, as federal aid pervades tuition expenditure.
I must be misinterpreting this - how have virtual worlds died? Every MMO is a virtual world, there's still millions who play them, and they're still releasing more and more.
That is certainly possible. If you want to make every space in a parking garage a 'recharger' space then you're going to rebuild the garage anyway. Tesla 'slow' chargers are 10kW [1] so a 300 space garage would be at a maximum of 3MW if every space was used and charging. That is a larger load than some commercial buildings but not exceptionally so (the NetApp building 3 used to draw 1.5MW from the lines) It certainly isn't 'new substation' level of load.

[1] http://www.teslamotors.com/charging#/basics
I don't know what your question is.
There are, in fact, metrics that show social mobility by comparing generational incomes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_...
I haven't noticed this myself (and I have the replies feature) so maybe it's just one of many things they're testing with a limited number of users. I agree with the OP though, I don't see how this would be useful for anyone.
Generally not unless you're in a business segment where trust is more important (e.g, financial services).
Same, didn't even read this one
For anyone who's after a book: I've found Dafydd Stuttard and Marcus Pinto's "The Web Application Hacker's Handbook" to be invaluable.
You might be surprised to learn then that you shouldn't trust modern cars. Car manufacturers don't test every part or component that goes into a car. Instead they rely on process control to ensure that said process delivers parts within the specs. Of course this means they'll take regular samples, but the idea behind it is fundamentally different. They're really measuring whether the process is stable and not testing the individual parts.
Well... the guy should read Schumpeter. Every "industrial" revolution wipes off industries. In the same time, a whole new industry appears, a whole new class of jobs and a whole new lifestyle and culture. The middle class is not destroyed at all. On a world scale, it is rising. Rising in China and South East Asia.

We can't reduce a world wide phenomenon without taking into account hundreds of other factors ( populations in western countries growing old, the globalization, sacrificed generations in Europe and exodus of its skilled youth ) to Kodak vs Instagram.
As a monetization strategy an app maker gets in bed with a certain vendor. This has literally nothing to do with Android (or "fragmentation"), and Samsung is just as capable of entering into such deals as HTC is, or Apple, or any other vendor.

If I were a consumer of the service, I would be pissed with the service provider for making that choice.
Everybody's nailed everything I already wanted to say, except for this... if you make improvements, send back a pull request.

There's absolutely no shame in using battle-tested code that somebody else wrote. If you really do experience guilt though (you shouldn't), the easiest way I can think to mitigate that is to just promise yourself to contribute any improvements you make, and don't worry about whether or not those improvements are accepted.
The same in Lithuanian. The more formal version is "motina".
- Just because virtual worlds didn't results in a multi-billion dollar IPO doesn't mean they failed.

- The sequel to LucasFilm's original Habitat still is alive and running online, 18 years later.

My two cents, in virtual worlds the users are the product. The more mass market they become, the more the less interesting the average user becomes. Unlike social networks, people visit virtual worlds to meet new people. In some regards, more could be learned from PlentyofFish than Facebook.
5/12/13 — Happy Right Triangle Day
I did the first interview on Mixergy with Andrew about a failed startup: http://mixergy.com/etzel-notifo-interview/ - I discuss my struggles and lessons learned, but it doesn't have a happy ending like you are looking for.
People will put up with anything if it's a prerequisite for being employable, as we've seen from the massive rise in tuition already.
Huh, TIL that I want nothing to do with startup culture. To me, those kind of companies are all about furiously maintaining a mix of smoke, mirrors, and suspension of disbelief until someone throws real-life money at you.

Just look at Instagram -- it was created by some guy fishing for a way to game the system, and lo and behold, it worked out for him (after failing with some ridiculous whiskey startup idea). What Zuckerberg did for Instagram was self-serving charity: he essentially used a billion dollars worth of capital to perpetuate the startup bubble (think of how many MBAs are going to flock to California now hoping to become the next Instagram), which only helps Facebook in the long run (once the bubble pops, no one's going to be buying ads from them anymore).

Any reasonable businessperson would see a company like Instagram for what it is: a server with some data on it. UI? Number of accounts? That's all irrelevant: the revenue was exactly $0. Even SEO scammers selling private label goods off of Ali Baba are more financially viable than them!

The problem of defining 'what a startup should be' is that you end up in a situation analogous to a doctor treating a patient's symptoms rather than the underlying disease. The idea that your company needs to have explosive growth and be reachable by x number of people and have a valuation y dollars means that the CEO is usually running around spamming his product everywhere, taking out huge numbers of ads, and schmoozing with VCs instead of doing what he should be doing -- developing a financially viable product that customers want to use.
They are also one of the players in rise in the price of oil.

It's good to be the king. (Or at least deep capture the media, the administration and the Congress.)
The virtual world was never a good idea; the whole concept arose from a bad analogy made by nontechnical people. I'm not sure it's even worth looking for anything good to come out of them; my impression is that what success Second Life enjoyed (and let's face it, when we talk about virtual worlds we basically mean second life) came not from its virtual world status per se but by giving certain subculutres a place to roleplay. Just let the concept die and get on with producing things people actually want.
In developing countries where smartphones are less common, Google offers Free Zone:

http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/mobile/landing/freezone/stp...
Baltimore, MD; Reston, VA - Videology - FULL TIME, INTERN (H1B maybe if already in US)

Videology Group - http://www.videologygroup.com/

Internet advertising startup looking primarily for server-side Java developers (if your Java is rusty but you're good, drop us a note anyway). I was working for a start-up called LucidMedia Networks (hence the "lmn" in the e-mail address below), which got acquired by Videology. The Baltimore office is a .NET shop, but the Reston office is Java on *nix (Mac for dev, Linux in production, and no plans to use Microsoft anything for development). Our stack is Java on Spring with MySQL and some NoSQL stores on AWS. We have some big projects in the works involving big data and volume as we scale globally and across mediums (video, mobile, etc.). Currently, our Reston platform alone handles 4 billion requests a day.

Contact me directly at sahil_lmn@yahoo.com.

I actually got hired through a HN "Who is Hiring" thread, and I hired an intern through these threads. These things do work!
Sounds to me like a version of the Politician's Fallacy. We must measure something, this is something we can measure, therefore we must measure it.
This article is written as some kind of drunken rant, desperately holding on to overly formed opinions and 2 validating points of data.

That's not to say that the author doesn't have a point, it's almost certainly true, but Salon should have really had an editor look over this. For crying out loud, he shifts between 14k and 140k employees for Kodak in the article.

How will readers who do not already agree w/ him become convinced?
How can they make a mistake like this? Unless they are aiming to change how people comment on things. That won't happen without an interface change IMO because people are used to the way it was for about 4-5 years..
7 Reasons Why I Won’t Buy Google Glass
Wow. This argument is somewhat ridiculous.

A) It proposes a solution that is already happening on its own. (micropayments for work that enriches the network.)
B) It compares apples to oranges. Instagram is not the Kodak of the Internet.
C) It misidentifies the cause-effect relationship of phenomenon that happened well before the Internet boom. The reason inequality is so high has very much to do with the winner-take-all society that was in place well before the Internet came to prominence. Libertarian fiscal policy and lax government regulation is mostly to blame.
> It's quite possible you have a really good reason for the anger that came across in your comment.

Anger? This is news to me.

I think you may be reading a lot more into my two lines than are actually there.

> I understand these subjects can stir powerful emotions, and I'm sure you have a valuable perspective to share on the matter - it's hard to tell, though, from such a curt and seemingly confrontational comment.

My own emotions regarding the matter are anything but powerful - which explains my resultant near-total apathy about it quite plainly.

Confrontational it was, though. I'm rather tired of people reciting platitudes as if close personal bonds to one's immediate family are universally beneficial. In many cases, it's far more destructive than helpful, yet people insist.

Society should endeavor to reject mindless duckspeak when possible.

To be clear, it's nothing to do with my own family circumstances, I just think it's incredibly rude to assume that some one-size-fits-all attitude is something to be espoused to random strangers as if you could possibly know better than them how to interface with their own family— A simple case of inappropriate presumption.
I find it ironic that "anti-fragile" or robust institutions can only be classified as such post black swan.
You're talking about the manufacturing of cars, not design and prototyping. The reason that they can take only a representative sample of each component that rolls off the assembly line is that they should be nearly perfect copies of the prototype which most likely did go through rigorous testing. In my analogy, building software is like building the prototype, not building the copies.
Oh great, yet another buzzword that people will throw around instead of actually discussing things.
"That eventually combined the right idea with the right execution in the right market to make a living. Not buy a boat you can land a helicopter on. Not conquer the world with iPads. Just make a living."

I think I wouldn't call that a successful startup. When someone says "startup" to me that inherently means the seed of a large business. A software consulting business isn't a startup in my book. Even Bingo Card Creator, though it at least has the technological leverage, is in too small a space to really be a startup.

Selling out early or late doesn't change it, and if they transition from startup to small-medium sized business somewhere along the way, they could have been a startup that had a best case failure, but they would cease to be a start up. I'd worked at one of the latter. A good indicator is when you are given 65k stock options ... at a penny a share.
You could also use CTRL-N in Vim. It autocompletes for any language (though it is not intellisense).
The exclusive deal last until August 31

http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/09/samsung-itv-player-androi...
But the end result is the same, they are being commoditized into irrelevance.

Is that really true? I like Thinkpads, but not for the "ThinkVantage" features. In fact, the first thing I do when I buy a Lenovo laptop is remove all the stuff that "differentiates" them. I just want a computer, not "an experience".
I don't know about that. My model of Taleb has him pointing out the many dangers of entrepreneurship, and the myriad biases which lead people to underestimate the risks of starting a business--survivorship bias et all.
Google Analytics is like loyalty cards for the web: they track user behaviour for the benefit of the service provider, not the consumer. But a "real" loyalty card at least pretends to serve the user by offering an occasional special deal or some savings, as opposed to added cost (bandwidth, load times etc). I vote with Ghostery.
They exist because they work - i can imagine lots of novice users clicking OK perhaps because they think its the only way to continue.
In the US, just pick a town, any town,
tiny to huge, and walk down its Main
Street. There you will see just what
you are asking for except mostly the
businesses are not in information technology,
Web 2.0, mobile apps, etc. Instead the
businesses are dentists, pizza shops,
Chinese carryout, franchised fast food,
auto repair, auto body repair, lawn services,
plant nurseries, boutique retailing,
kitchen and bath remodeling, roofing,
driveway installation, other construction
trades, CPAs, general practice lawyers,
auto dealers, bakeries -- get the pattern?

Can look at an information technology startup
essentially the same way. A great example
is the Canadian matchmaking site Plenty of
Fish -- long just one person, two old Dell
servers, ads just from Google, and $10
million a year in revenue.

There are some advantages to an information
technology startup: First, if connect
a server to the Internet and keep it busy
sending Web pages with ads, then at common
ad rates will get the five figures a month
in revenue. E.g., send two Web pages a
second, send an average of four ads per page,
get the charge per 1000 ads displayed (CPM)
average of $2.125 in the KPCB Meeker report,
and then get monthly revenue of

2.125 * 4 * 2 * 3600 * 24 * 30 / 1000 = 44,064

dollars. So, the advantage? Sure: The server
stands to be something can plug together in
an afternoon from parts that cost less than
$2000 in total. So, $2000 in capital equipment
and $44 K a month in revenue. Darned near a
license to print money and totally blows away
everything else, legal or not, on Main Street.

If the usage keeps growing, fine: Get more servers.
Else, the $44 K a month will do fine for
providing for a family.

Moreover, most of the work is just learning
the coding skills, e.g., in the Microsoft
world, .NET, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, IIS, system
management and administration. Then if the
first Web 2.0 site flops, use the skills
to bring up another one.

But, it might grow, especially if it was
carefully planned to from the beginning
to grow. So, then, let it grow.

Any questions?
Ubuntu seems to offer a nicer experience, but as a developer who likes FOSS stuff I trust Mozilla more.
>The average age of cabinet ministers is 65. The country has never had a prime minister born in independent India.
>One man who might buck that trend, Rahul Gandhi, is the son, >grandson and great-grandson of former prime ministers.
>India is run by gerontocrats and epigones: grey hairs and groomed heirs.

Aside from that wonderful turn of phrase, this may well be the key concept: India has long been run by entrenched interests for their own benefit and the situation shows no signs of abating.
I need to clarify. I'm not talking about manufacturing I'm talking about protoyping and design. Software deevelopment is analogous to making the protoype, not the copies. A replica of the prototype should be able to pass the same tests the prototype can - that's why manufacturers can get away with only testing a sample of them. You can be sure that the protoype has gone through rigorous specifications testing.

I think that you can look at part specifications as writing a test. The component we're aiming for has to meet x, y, and z standards. Then you design the component, then you make sure it meets those standards. If not, iterate. Pretty analogous, I'd say.
I think a better example would be the travel industry... the corner travel business has virtually been obliterated in part of the easy access to on-line travel booking and planning services. A lot of "middle-person" jobs are now unnecessary as most of their functions are now accomplished with scripts and servers, this goes with booksellers and other specialty shops.

Just look at any business that isn't direct from the company and does not really require direct contact with the customer ; those are the ones to worry about.

And sometimes we push it along, I've seen companies work hard to cut the bottom line by automating things, developing on-line materials, and reducing the accessibility from the public, part to cut costs, other to "be more efficient." Those are the ones what one day have worked themselves into obscurity, because what's the different if local person A helps you over the phone or corporate/outsourced person B?

So what do we get left with - outside (cheapest) labor and local direct services (construction, health, entertainment/dining), and creative.

If you think about it its the creative developments over the past couple hundred years that made many of us redundant. We either should look for new opportunities to grow (space colonization/exploration) or break down the mass production industry to make more communities sustainable.
Adding a /s to a non-sarcastic comment doesn't make it sarcastic. If that were true, people would add a /G to signify that their comment was a great work of literary art. For something to be great, it has to be great. For something to be sarcastic, it needs, at the very least, some snark.

Also, this isn't Reddit. Just write what you mean.
MMOs and their variants are going strong, this post is referring to the non game worlds like SL, IMVU, Lively, There.com etc
Thanks jp1989, looks that app isn't well promoted - before doing my app I googled and didn't found anything. Instabridge looks awesome but little bit complicated - everything is friends/sharing minded + I didn't found way to turn wifi off - when I'm done.

Anyways that was good weekend for me to code something :)
I get spam in my inbox in Gmail :(
Buying a duplex is saving. You're placing your wealth in a physical structure (and tenants, perhaps) instead of a bank.

Different, but not so different.
I actually switched to iPhone 5 after a couple months of Lumia 920 usage. Bought it right after release, with the wireless charger and stuff. I really liked the device.

My problem was the fucked up regional annoyances. If you are not in USA, good luck! No full size skydrive photo uploads for you! No Xbox online.. No album covers in music app. A lot of missing apps in store. No this, no that. Well, I have no such problems with iPhone and Android.

BTW: After I switched, I sold my Lumia to a friend and used factory reset before handing the phone. Guess what? There is a known bug in factory reset that bricks the phone and it was apparently not fixed in 2 firmware upgrades that I got during that time :)
I don't think it's false. I have a site with one page, one video. Time on site really is zero seconds.
However, playing the video may trigger an event that allows Google to measure some of the visits.
Register Your UDID To Install iOS 7
They're still releasing more and more, but the profitability is highly suspect. To be somewhat simplistic, the only profitable MMOs are WoW and a small smattering of niche MMOs like Eve Online.

Every attempt to unseat WoW from its throne has failed miserably - most recently the incredibly big budget SWTOR that fell with a big fat splat in the mud.

Even more niche MMOs are having trouble succeeding financially. APB, Star Trek Online, the Final Fantasy MMOs, all were commercial failures (big ones at that).

The game industry as a whole is a pretty risky investment overall (big-budget AAA-titles fail routinely and spectacularly), MMOs are even a notch above. Sometimes I wonder why they keep getting funded - EA poured a reported $200 million into SWTOR before watching it fail.
I tried second life a couple times, and just didn't get into it. Either it was totally boring, or way too kinky. Often, both. I designed a couple objects. It was exciting at first, but got tedious, and I lost interest. The idea of making a simple gambling game kind of got me interested again, because greed is often a good motivator, but I had so little interest in those games to start with, that my idea just seemed crappy after a day.

I'm kind of feeling the same way about tablets.
Paying for Channels You Never Watch [2010]
> Give people a blank piece of paper and ask them to “have fun!” A few might get excited and start writing a poem or sketch a masterpiece. But most will be annoyed, grow bored and give up.

Here we get explained how minecraft is a failure.
I used to enjoy sleep deprivation. In hindsight, that was me self-treating depression.
You pretty clearly didn't read the article.

Semantics weren't discussed at all. The focus was on making the best of working with a language that has a limited feature set, and learning to reexamine long held best practices.
'Junk' DNA Mystery Solved: It's Not Needed
For starters, it's ntoskrnl.exe. Dig out the original Windows NT stuff from the early 90s and you can infer Dave Cutler and team's original vision. The fact that Microsoft made hundreds of billions of dollars off it, layering all sorts of legacy chaos atop it, obscures the jewel at the core.
Our most recent startup venture did not just fail, it deserved to fail
I work outside for a good chunk of spring and summer.

The trick? A mini van with a leisure battery and a phone to tether to. On those occasions where the sun to be so bright that I can't see the screen (not as common as you'd think) I can sit in the van and still have the fresh air, the view and the sun on some of me.
Another thing not mentioned, so many faculty and administrators are often technophobes, luddites, and in some cases dinosaurs. There is a very strong "union" mentality about anything that even begins to encroach on the classroom experience, so professors and teachers will fight that tooth and nail.

Otherwise, I pretty much agree with everything in this article based on what I've learned about the education business recently. It's a long, long, long game and my guess is that most investors (right now) will not have the stamina to play it. It will happen, but my guess is that tipping point will not be reached as fast as it does in other verticals.