skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For an opposite view point, see the Salon article Tuition is too damn high. It argues for the vast majority of people tuition has increased because government has drastically cut funds to public education. Not because of Pell Grants or "easy money". The author has some interesting data, as well.

Here's a glimpse:

"The first step in grappling with the rise in the cost of higher education requires understanding where students go to school. There are three main categories — public schools (which include both four-year public universities and two-year community colleges), private nonprofits (the Ivys, most liberal arts colleges, etc.), and the for-profits (Kaplan, University of Phoenix, Corinthian Colleges, aka “career schools”). Here’s the key statistic: Fully 70 percent of the 19 million undergraduates and 3 million graduate students enrolled in post-secondary education in 2010 attended schools considered to be in the public sector — by which it is meant that some portion of their funding comes directly from government."

"The problem: The word “public” doesn’t mean as much as it used to. Direct state support for public colleges has cratered over the past 10 years, and really fell off the cliff after the financial crisis. Yes, tuitions have risen, but not by as much as state and local appropriations for higher education have fallen. Just between 2008 and 2009, for example, average tuition revenue at public research institutions increased by $369 per student, but the loss in state and local appropriations per student was $751. Similarly, at public community colleges, tuition revenue rose by $113 per student, while appropriations fell by $488. Since the recession of 2001, tuition hikes, as exorbitant as they have been, still haven’t kept pace with the fall in government support."

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/11/tuition_is_too_damn_high/
> If you want opinion as news, I refer you to Fox News or Buzzfeed or Upworthy.

All "news" is someone's, or a group of someones, opinion. There's no such thing as objective journalism.

> chicken little reddit-level bullshit

It's only been a couple of weeks since people became aware that the largest spy agency in the world is spying on pretty much anything they can get a bead on.

Perhaps cutting people some slack until 24/7 surveillance becomes the New Normal might be in order?
communicate communicate communicate

I've worked in several jobs with remote teams (as the team and managing the team) and the difference between the ones that worked like clockwork and the ones that didn't almost inevitably came down to communication.

The amount of time and energy sorting out problems because of a lack of communication will absolutely dwarf the amount of time you should have been communicating.

- Have at least 1 weekly roundup, guaranteed, no exceptions. Even if it's just for everybody to get together and say they have nothing to report, that is even in and of itself a communication. Some places did daily end of the days, some did Mon & Friday mornings, it doesn't matter. Do it.

- Use more efficient communication proxies when possible: trello, jira, salesforce, whatever. Enforce it with an iron fist. Don't let people get away with not using the tools, they're easy to use and if you get in the habit, saves hours upon hours of time. I love love love Trello for this.

- Have constant ad hoc communications. IM, phone, email. Schedule times so you don't interrupt somebody's work day. Missing a scheduled time should be a shocking breach of protocol.

- Please try not to use speakerphone or conference room speaker phone, it makes the meeting unpleasant on the other end and much harder to undertand.

- Google docs, really great for drafting up things and early collaboration. Switch to Office for the final work.

- if you can afford it, have as many face-to-face meetings as possible, be it once a week, or once a quarter, or once a year. Try and make the effort. I've found that learning people in-person helps smooth over digital communications.

- document document document - everything. Have a centralized and constantly organized document repository. People leave, sometimes without doing a good handoff. Not having good documentation will kill a company for months or years.

I agree with most everything else here: especially "5. Hire people who are ok without a social workplace."

Amazingly, most people don't actually realize what it means to work alone every day, all day. I've had a couple people go a bit loony and flake out after a few months on their own. The environment was discussed, and they felt confident about it, but simply couldn't handle the reality of it. If this is a requirement, prepare for issues no matter what. Try and hire people with a track record for this kind of work.

One guy ended up hitting bottle pretty hard (bars can be chatty places), his wife filed for divorce, and he simply stopped showing up to work. Working remotely it took a couple of weeks of no shows on the weekly all together to figure it out. He ended up quitting and moving to the desert to sort his life out. Working alone simply shattered him.

And finally,
"4. Hire people who can write"

You wouldn't believe how many emails I've received from certain remote workers that are utterly indecipherable. You think most native speakers of a language with some college in them can write an intelligible email. It turns out many can't. And you waste lots of time clarifying, making phone calls, etc. And the worst case is you go off on the wrong direction.
You don't need to be a lawyer to have basic familiarity with the legal process. Knowing that juries issue verdicts and judges issue sentence is something people should have realized by the time they made it out of school.

You know what else people should learn in school? how to recognize a bullshit news article on a site that traffics in conspiracy theories.
More than stupid, the Indian government is clueless and careless about how it spends its earnings from the 2-3% of Indians that actually pay income tax. That coupled with rampant corruption and politicians only interested in saving their vote-banks adds to the woeful state of affairs.

If the Indian citizens started being more demanding about how their money was being spent, on whom and the ROI per rupee of tax collected, the government and the politicians would be forced to change. See, http://openspending.org/
This is my thought exactly, and made me immediately suspicious of the article's analysis.
That's the right choice - work harder or work smarter ? It's true that getting into a top school like the IIT will open some doors, but that's really important if you don't know about the doors you want to open and head down.

When someone already knows what they want, there's often a simpler way to get it. Unfortunately, that's not expected of 17/18 year olds and in fact, parents in India will say "Oh you want X now, but what if you want Y later ? Better go to an IIT so that your options are open".
If he attached the lanyards to anything other than a harness, a fall would end poorly. I've seen people mis-rig harnesses - actual paid professionals who got hurried and got stupid - in ways that would have maimed or killed them if they fell.
I would argue that most other countries to not have such far-reaching interception programs with access to so much internet traffic[1] and therefore, while their intent is the same, their capability is wildly different which changes priorities somewhat.

[1] As the NSA presentation said, an awful lot of backbone traffic passes through the US.
It still seems like a bit much if I can't spend my local Bank of America branch dollars outside the town I'm in. Regulation is one thing but that's practically medieval.
Oh for shame! This was debunked on reddit before it was even submitted here. :/
I can't think of many fun games for Android. What are we paying for? Old Final Fantasy and GTA3? I don't see a market for this until their games improve which is nontrovial given the poor graphics performance of these so called consoles.
The whole thing as implemented now definitely needs better accountability and oversight to call it a program that befits the public service. But I don't know about the rudder being gone (or what you mean by that exactly).
Well, it would be redundant to send a user back to the page he or she just came from, i.e. back to the Google home page.

DDG is similarly self-effacing: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=search
It's not hard: CEO of Google.

Having said that, you're right in that there are not very many such jobs.
Laziness and memoization in Clojure
I like how you agree with the premise of the article while simultaneously calling it "bullshit". Big Brother is proud of your doublethink.
Not in California it isn't. The property owner is responsible for the sidewalk. Fall on a poorly maintained sidewalk, and it's the property owner that you will sue for damages. This is one reason homeowner's insurance is mandatory.
The increases in spending are indeed soaked up by overpaid administrators and their teams, known as "institutional support." For state schools, budget information is public and you can see for yourself how the university spends its money.
This opinion piece regarding the University of Minnesota distills some of that information:
http://www.startribune.com/opinion/42550752.html

But in one category, expenditures have nearly doubled over the last five years. That category is "institutional support," which consists essentially of central administration. The 2008-09 budget plan increases expenditures for institutional support by more than $143 million, or 80 percent, over the figure for 2004-05. The spending increase in this category alone covers the amount by which the governor proposes to reduce the state’s annual appropriation to the university.

What has the university bought with all this additional money spent on "institutional support"? Among other things, a growing array of vice presidents and associate vice presidents. The university now employs 12 VPs, several of whose positions have been created during the last five years. Every occupant of such a position earns a six-figure salary, starting at around $250,000 per year. Multiply by twelve, add a number of associate VPs, then staff support, plus assorted expenses for everything from office supplies to travel — and the institution spends millions more each year on central administration

This same pattern can be seen at almost any state university in the United States.
Since this is HN, I'd like to draw a parallel. Six gruelling hours of complex programming.

I think you can now appreciate the level of concentration that the exam requires because no question is easy. (well, to be fair, maybe 2-3% are..) So when you have to think really hard about each question, and think really fast to solve it, it becomes a bit tricky. I don't know if they have penalty marking now but before if you got a question wrong, you'd get a negative mark too!
> It's illegal for a reason.

Thou shalt remember the 11th commandment and keep it wholly.
I almost feel funny answering this seriously, but you can try to compete with Google in some area where they're weak.

They're run by very smart people who rely very heavily on algorithms and raw data and often ignore factors related to human needs and emotions. They do have their blind spots and weaknesses.

Despite Google's cries to the contrary, a lot of people don't trust them with private info. This is why DuckDuckGo's traffic is spiking. You can compete with Google on privacy.

Google's customer service is maybe the worst in the world. Even many paying customers get the big old middle finger when it comes to getting a problem resolved. That's a weakness that can be exploited.

Google has gotten much better at design in recent years by adopting a very minimalist and consistent style throughout their products, but you can still compete with them on design.
Why not just cap the annual payout of federal loans to a reasonable level? This would surely put downward pressure on tuition.
What makes you say that? The reporting in the OP's article seems quite accurate:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/25/jeff-olson-californ...
> They won't be, of course, they'll be written in NDK because the culture of the game industry is a powerful one, and one that takes pride in their ways. It would be like telling a race car enthusiast that continually-variable transmission is better for racing because even though it's less efficiant it allows the driver to focus on driving and is always in the exact gear needed. The driver would never except this because in their mind they are an amazing driver and manual makes them faster because it is more efficient and makes them feel cool.

The problems of concurrent garbage collection in games are not imaginary, as you seem to be implying. Keep in mind that 60 FPS allows a maximum of 16 ms of GC per frame, and that's assuming the game has no work to do at all. Turn on the GC profiling sometime in your browser of choice and look at the numbers sometime; then extrapolate that to the slower CPUs and RAM on mobile and you can see why this can be a cause for concern.
I have no doubt that I will be able to, buy financially I'm not in a position to be picky and I don't want to feel obligated to settle for a job that I don't find interesting.
How about "it's not society's job to keep people (even insane ones) from doing what they want with their own bodies"?

You can take this to apply to everything from the inside of one's uterus to hurling oneself off a bridge.
Well I went.

Didn't see anything about the Ecuador leaks though. Should I wait another few months maybe?

I did see Syria Files though, and was even briefly excited, but I see that WikiLeaks was able to work in a dig at the whole West in the synopsis alone so now I'm sad again.
Thanks :) I appreciate it.
Here's an idea: If you don't want to make an anxious public even more anxious, don't name your NSA surveillance program "EvilOlive." Or really, anything starting with 'evil.'
About collectivizing costs, you speak as if it has never been tried and you discount the idea based on your own assumptions that it would be too expensive? As someone who has gone to university both at a free*(you actually get money to study) (~top) Scandinavian university as well as a (~top 10) US university, there is not much difference in the actual education from what I could tell. Where there's a real big difference though is research. US universities consistently outspends and outproduces European universities by a large factor. My theory is that the undergrads are paying for the professor's research and grad students, but I'm not sure. The money has to come from somewhere. Either way, neither I nor my parents would ever have been able afford US tuition + living costs. I took a loan for all the living costs that were not covered by subsidies, a loan with an interest of about 1.9%, so I can't even complain about that. My point is that in the US, I would probably not have been able to afford a decent college, and I think that's a broken system. Research and fancy campus gyms should not be funded by stepping on poor undergrads.

By the way, it also seems that student loans for US students mainly consists of tuition payments. There is rarely any mention of livings costs which I find curious. Do people just take it for granted that the parents will pay that part? Myself, after 5 years, I was roughly $50,000 in debt, all of it living expenses (note, that's only $10,000 a year in a country with high cost of living). My family didn't (and didn't have to) pay anything to put me through college. From what I can tell, this is the norm here, students take loans for their living expenses and parents are not expected to support them.
Sometimes Google feels unfocused to me, and this is a good example of this. This reminds me of the Nexus Q which came out a year ago — and was never backed a real national (or international) ad campaign. Is Google really ready to make a real game platform, or is this just another android thingie? In the same way that Apple struggles with software services Google really has a way to go with hardware. And I don't mean just making good hardware, but marketing it to a mass audience.
Show HN: Simple JavaScript Parallax effect
There's a clear difference in power between power that controls police and military systems vs. power that's limited by the controls of natural, voluntary actions. I can't blame you for equating corporations with government and suggesting they both have unbridled power, given the current systems most of us live in. But it's absolutely wrong to infer that actions that would otherwise be illegal/violent by organizations are the equivalent of violent actions set into government policy. Again, the largest corporations many fear have disproportionate influence and market share specifically because of the backing of government law.

For instance:

When a group or psychopath commits mass murder, yes, it is a form of power. Yet, it's relatively contained. Society is more able to fight it and reject it. However, when a government that relies on involuntary funding commits mass murder - under the auspices of formal policy and fancy language - it becomes a form of power that society is less able to reject.
Yes, we agree — the graphical interface is just part of the interface that is presented to the user. It's a shame UI often means GUI.
Love the way this looks. Do you have any support for keyboard shortcuts?
This isn't about censorship or trying to shut the barn door after the horse or anything about trying to prevent the spread of documents to the public (or even realistically the people who work at the DoD). The key words are right in the article itself: "integrity of unclassified government information systems.”

Note that it's not the classified systems they are worried about, but the boring unclassified ones. There are separate systems for classified and unclassified information, and there are rules to make sure that stuff doesn't move from the classified systems to the unclassified ones by accident. One of those rules, very sensibly, is that classified information shouldn't be on the unclassified systems.

Again, this has nothing to do with stopping public spread of the documents, and everything to do with trying to keep "clean" systems clean, as they explain in the article.
I refer you to the reast of the thread, and to the other thread; but as a general rule, you shouldn't use one sensationalist semi-tabloid news source to confirm another.
America: The Land of the free.
:) :)
James - off topic, but you write well. You seem like a high quality dude. I wish I had the money to work something out with you like other posters. Just want to offer one piece of advice: watch out for Winklevoss-type douche bags. They'll exploit you without pay, so make sure when soliciting work on here you end up with someone who will furnish a letter of offer or an agreement so you get paid even if their dumb idea doesn't work out, etc.
In my opinion, there is about a 30 minute wait on the I9, and now in sports news, in my opinion the raiders beat the muskrats last night.... etc.

There is definitely such a thing as reporting the facts, and just because there are levels of opinion doesn't mean that all outlets of journalism are somehow comparable. Fox News != Anyone with credibility.
You could delegate decryption to the video-card itself. This would also prevent the attack vector of running a 'secure' system inside of a transparent VM.

Not to mention the fact that Linux has some very smart people, with a history of reverse engineering stuff for compatibility; and breaking any advanced DRM system is an honor onto itself.
1.25 million, for those (like me) forgot how much a lakh is.
Is there reliable definitive information on whether he marked up private or public property?
So what's the consensus on this? I'm looking to integrate either Stripe or Simplify... which service do I go with?
I didn't jump on the digitalocean bandwagon after the linode incident and surprisingly I'd a similar situation but with a positive outcome: Had U$20 past due for close to 20+ days due to my credit card being blocked (was stolen), and Linode proceded to remove the server. Once I paid what was due, they recovered the machine in no time.
IMO, this is a confusing puff piece with gaps you could drive a truck through. Typically for a serious profile, people from key timeframe points in a subject's life are interviewed as well, to prevent the story from being biased in favor of the subject's POV and to round out events for the historical record. This was not done here.

Also, points in this article are flatly incorrect. In one section the author states that Wales has said "mum" (nothing) about Edward Snowden, when the opposite is true (and in current headlines - Techmeme cluster here: http://www.techmeme.com/130625/p49#a130625p49). Wales' interest in finding Snowden's identity as a Wikipedia editor - against Wikipedia rules - can be plainly seen on Wales' talk page dated June 25, two days before this NYT article (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wa...).

This NYT article is very confusing. How much else in it is inaccurate? Was it a PR stunt?
As soon as you permit property ownership you introduce a whole slate of ills with nary an end though.

Even personal property alone leads to greed and envy, which lead to suffering and eventually violence. Communism is not magic in this regard, nor is it the proper solution. There will always be a bully out to take your lunch money, at least with capitalism and representative democracy we're able to acknowledge that and try to rein in that aspect of human nature.
Regardless of the actual damage in this instance, the CCC is empowered to restrict the use of public lands when they reasonably think environmental damage might occur. Parker/Ventana violated their rules, so the CCC sent a Cease and Desist, and they settled with Parker paying fines and Ventana agreeing to restore the area a bit. As a matter of public policy, the system worked as far as I can tell. As a matter of actual wrongdoing, I don't think we'll ever know — as you say, that would require a scientific study to discover.

As for Parker's absurdly long article, I dug into one of his more verifiable defenses and found that he's full of it:

"The media reported that this fish was an “endangered” species whose spawning ground was a creek near our wedding site. Yet a simple Google query of “steelhead trout” reveals that this fish is not, as the media had reported, a truly “endangered” species, but rather a fancy variant of the common “rainbow trout” that is abundant across North America — so abundant, in fact, that it is sometimes considered a pest species. "

Steelhead/Rainbow Trout is listed here on the NOAA website:

http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/species/fish/steelheadtrout.htm

This web page says that 1 "distinct population segment" is endangered, 10 are threatened, and 1 is a species of concern. And they kindly point to a report listing which is which:

http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/pdfs/fr/fr71-834.pdf

Lo and behold, the Steelhead along the Northern and Central California coasts are on the "threatened" list. So the "pest" bit was just empty rhetoric.
The Spy Photo That Fooled NPR, the U.S. Army Intelligence Center, and Me
Here's one: the large number of unwilling human test subjects we will need in order to really tell exactly what genes need to be changed, and why. (Modifying the genes of someone with a simple mutation like downs syndrome is a lot simpler, though.)
I don't know fuck-all about chemistry or physics (I dropped out of the 10th grade), but could someone confirm for me that the correct answer to that multiple choice aluminum-hit-with-an-alpha-particle question about 20% in to the article is (a)?