skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The real education bubble is the number people willing to borrow nearly $200,000 for a BA (or PhD) in Anthropology that exceeds the number of positions available that require that degree at that price. I read an article yesterday that mentioned a detective with a PhD in Anthropology. [1] While it seems to be working for him, I just don't see it as economically efficient. If we look at the causes of this inefficiency and bubble, we see similar government incentives and payouts to those that drive up the price of houses and medical care.

As far as the increase in AP goes, the real push behind that is the lack of curriculum standards in the US and the unfairness of the GPA system. If you have a class of students taking the AP exam where none of them get higher than a two, I would expect that someone in that class would still be getting an 'A'. There's nothing "bubble-like" about AP- it's simply fulfilling a gap in the educational system.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05...
Really interesting. I think that most diets don't work because you're forced into thinking about what you eat (and what you're not supposed to). Perhaps the best diet involves changing your lifestyle so that you're doing things that remove your mind from thinking about eating.
I agree.

Here are the choices 1) Do as you are told and get another marshmallow 2) Eat as many marshmallows as you want with no punishment. That doesn't seem to be a very hard choice. I personally like the kid that checks to make sure that no one is looking then eats the inside of the Oreo and returns it.

I'm not arguing with the results. I would imagine that on average those that do as they are told and conform do better on average. But I doubt those are the same people that make big discoveries or become successful entrepreneurs.

So what happened to the kid that split the Oreo and returned it? That seems like a much more interesting question.
This is particularly relevant given this "Ask HN" post today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=603511
Effect or affect? Use the following words, only: effect (noun), affect (verb), effective, affected, affecting (you’ll be right more than 75%).

Accept their our other common misteaks people make, so its not at all clear that you'll get to 75%.
It's not a zero sum game here. If you test out of the 101 level course in lets say, American History, you are at many schools avoiding the large 100+ person auditorium style class which is not much more interactive than one you could watch on TV. In return, you can then take the succeeding courses, which are likely smaller and limited to students with an interest in that subject as opposed to extra-departmental students meeting a liberal arts requirement.
I would have to say NOLOH (http://www.noloh.com), but then again, I'm somewhat biased. Check it out for yourself, and see what you think.
You don't need to invent much. Think of what you already know:

Wash your hands before eating; boil the water before drinking; put toilet facilities downstream of drinking water; cover open wounds and keep them clean.

In short, you already know about the biggest contribution to human health: Just Stay Clean. Everything else is icing on the cake.
I wouldn't call it amazing, but there is definitely some useful stuff in there. I would distill the entire thing down to "engage with material that you enjoy learning, and success will follow."
i also like kohana, but i think CI wins with respect to docs and materials available to get someone started.

i'm coming at it from a perspective of getting this dude up and running quickly on something good, which i think is easier with CI.
Smart people can rationalize anything
While true, what you want is controlled initiative. You need a person that can follow direction, but can also adjust to a changing situation, or to the absence of instruction.

You'll never get that from a conformist, because (in my experience) they are too afraid of failing to start something. They spend too much time analyzing risk and not enough time acting if left to their own devices.

Conversely, someone who is too much of a risk taker spends too little time analyzing the risks of an action.

The sweet spot is right down the middle, and is extremely rare.
There is no silver bullet. Blood, sweat and tears is what you need. I played with Django one night and then tried to repeat what I did the next day, but unguided. I failed, and gave up. I started playing with Rails and the same happened, but this time I snagged more training material and hit the books again. This time, it stuck. Personally, I have to hit the subject from several angles before it makes sense. Perhaps you work the same way?
Check out Mark Forster's Autofocus system -- worth a shot.
I've attempted to use a windup flashlight with a 12v port to recharge my iPhone; I get about one minute of 3g use for 5 minutes of winding. Now, if you had a footpedal, or some other way you could charge it while using it, that'd work.
"In order for legibility to be achieved, a certain degree of contrast must exist between the background and foreground colors. However, it’s important to remember that computer screens have much greater black/white contrast than the typical printed page. To that end, many web designers prefer off-black to pure black on white backgrounds. Likewise, it is sometimes more elegant to use very light gray instead of pure white on black backgrounds."

The above quote is take from "Elegant Web Typography" by Jeff Croft

http://www.slideshare.net/jeff_croft/elegant-web-typography-...
Wtf is this? How did it get 7 votes?
I'm actually shopping through these different hosting services today, so this is very timely for me. What I'm really liking about CloudLayer is their ability to expand my HD storage capacity (a feature which is important to me as I operate a crawler). Linode and Slicehost don't seem to offer that and, so far, CloudLayer is looking pretty competitive with EC2. Does anyone know of any other services that offer that?

The unlimited incoming bandwidth is great too.
Software developer summer internship - StyleFeeder (Cambridge, MA)
We're StyleFeeder and we're building a personal shopping engine, which basically is a next-generation shopping service. If you're looking for a compelling summer internship hacking code for a high-volume website, let's talk. We'll give you plenty of opportunities to learn about databases, web development, concurrency, performance tuning and usability. We work in a casual, quiet, bureaucracy-free environment right in Central Square where we focus on building great shopping tools for our users.

Here's what we're looking for in our candidates:

You should know PHP reasonably well. You should ideally have some experience with MySQL. Bonus stuff: version control, Facebook apps, Javascript, Flash (or Flex), Linux. You should have a sense of humor and strong work ethic. We use frameworks where they make sense. If you think frameworks are bad, you'll have to defend that viewpoint during your interview, so be prepared to do so.

How to apply:

Put together a brief one-page resume and email it to jobs at stylefeeder/com. Include a one-page cover letter describing who you are, what you like to do, and what you want to learn this summer. Send us some code that you wrote that you are proud of and is representative of your skills. If you have a blog, website that you built or any papers that you wrote that we can read, please send those along.

We look forward to hearing from you. We have a few openings for interns, so if you want to come and work with some of your qualified friends, that's great.

This is a paid internship. You'll be compensated based on your skillset and experience.
And yet as a profession Architecture seems to reward art more than engineering. The phenomenon of an award-winning building with a leaky roof is a cliché for good reason.
just ran this site again today, and the JS is far faster now.
I live in the USA on a small farm in an ordinary, modern house . Yesterday I removed two ticks from my body. In a few weeks, I'll be doing it daily, and checking my son for ticks at every change of clothing (he knows to kill the ones he finds, but he can't check his own back). We mostly have wood ticks, but there can be deer ticks along with them. Deer ticks carry Lyme Disease.

This is just a simple example of how bathing/changing clothes can affect your health. In the middle ages, you would have been walking in pathogen soup in all those dirty, sweat/urine/etc laden clothes you couldn't change out of.

Don't discount the impact of simple cleanliness. Pristine countryside? Doesn't exist. Go travel to one of those beautiful vistas you see in paintings, untouched by humanity and drink the clear stream water. Then spend the next few days doubled over in pain from all the parasites that live in the water, having arrived there from animal feces.
Last year it was closer to 85% of market, so the description is pretty accurate, really.
That's about 50% better than it looks here (Safari).
Ondřej Čertík: My experience with running an opensource project
Please describe some of the commercial exchanges you partake in that are not mutually beneficial.

The difference between government and an outsourcing organization is that the government will violently shut you in a room for a very long time if you decide not to participate in a mandate.
Thinkgeek already sells some device that lets your plants tweet.
Blood and tears are usually not required... I don't know of any frameworks that physically assault you, and generally I'm quite happy when I'm learning new things.

As for the sweat, you might want to invest in some deodorant, or perhaps turn up the air conditioning.
Being hot is, however, a valid criterion for judging 'hot tweeters', which is what the site appears to be attempting.

It would be a 'misjustice' if they were being called the best/most amusing/interesting/insightful users, but were still only ranked on their pictures.

As it stands, it's shallow but no great injustice.
Watch Out Google, Obama’s Antitrust Chief Is Looking To Make A Big Case
I also once tried referencing the C++ FQA on stackoverflow and was quickly downvoted. Maybe SO is just the wrong place to mention it, probably because of a C++ bias from the high percentage of SO users who develop on MS platforms.
None of these companies are trying to maximize profit-per-employee, just profit. There's obviously a diminishing return with each subsequent employee, but that's no deterrent for larger companies. It's pretty reasonable that healthy companies will have per-employee profits around the average salary: if a current employee "pays" for a new employee, there's no real reason not to hire one.

If you search for software companies that do try to maximize their per-employee profit, you find companies like 37Signals and id software, which I imagine are at least an order of magnitude above any other organization that's been mentioned. They're what make the business of software special, not Microsoft and Google.
Oh yes, of course... but how does one eliminate subvocalization. I find I can't take in information unless I vocalize it. Because of this I can't read sentences.
Magical iPhone View Controllers
Revenue per employee seems like a ridiculously meaningless statistic. It tells you nothing.

Total revenue can be useful. Total Profit can be useful. Profit per employee can be useful. Loss per employee is useful.

Revenue per employee is half the story. This is how you run your business into the ground - Believing half stories.
FutureFeed - What will your friends be doing?
Google, Android and the future of Netbooks
Looks like its not handling the extra pressure well.
It it just me who is seeing a cowardly surrender to cultural decay here? From the renowned Sussman, no less.
The glorious MIT of the 1980s and prior appears to be dead. Erased, in fact, without a trace. Consider the following:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/browse/browse.asp?btype=2

These are the latest releases from MIT press. Among them you will find nothing remotely like SICP, but plenty of postmodernist/related pablum.

"You have to do basic science on your libraries to see how they work, trying out different inputs and seeing how the code reacts." Is this not an atrocity, to be fought to the last bullet? Is this not an argument for declaring all existing software obsolete and starting from scratch? Why are we - even luminaries like Sussman - so willing to give up on the future without a fight?

As argued in some of PG's essays, in order for creativity to bear fruit it is not enough for a given individual to possess a creative mind. The culture has to be hospitable to creativity. And there are processes which come close to stamping out creativity without any overt or deliberate suppression involved. Specifically, a transition to a medium where one cannot get reliable, understandable "small parts" having predictable behavior.

Take note: http://xkcd.com/298/

Programmers have indeed created a universe where "science doesn't work." Learning where the permanent bugs and workarounds are inside a phonebook-length API teaches you nothing. It is anti-knowledge. Where your mind could have instead held something lastingly useful or truly beautiful, there is now garbage.

There is no longer a "what you see is all there is" Commodore 64 for kids to play with:

http://www.loper-os.org/?p=16

No one is working on, or sees the need for a replacement. This is just as well, considering as one would have to start from bare silicon - and avoid the use of design tools built on the decaying crud of the past. Only a raving lunatic would dare contemplate it...
Outside of programming: Linus Pauling developed an interest in chemistry by experimenting incessantly throughout his childhood. Today, he would have been imprisoned:

http://memepunks.blogspot.com/2006/06/americas-war-on-scienc....

The new generation will have no Linus Pauling, unless the Third World - where one might still purchase a beaker without a license - supplies us with one. Likewise, we will see very few truly creative programmers. What creativity can there be when your medium is shit mixed with sawdust?
Only if you abuse your statistics and choose numbers from different sources - 65% is the lowest figure for present market share and 85% is the highest for last year (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers).

It's true that Microsoft are losing marketshare with IE, I'm not denying that. But I seriously doubt it's "becoming irrelevent". It's much easier to lose marketshare when you dominate a market than it is to gain it, they now have increased high-profile aggressive competition on Windows from both Apple, who are bundling Safari via iTunes Update, and Google, who are pushing Chrome on OEMs and via their search engine. Microsoft also have no version of IE for rival operating systems, particularly at a time when Apple's desktop market-share is increasing, so clearly if their desktop market share drops by 5% in a year, then that's up to 5% fewer people running IE. I actually think IE's usage figures have held up surprisingly well, considering.
Thats interesting. I've always thought that you should be prepared to be UNLUCKY -- that way if the worst stuff happens to your business, you will be ready for it, and if the best stuff happens, its all gravy.

Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst.
* Swear words & Double Entendre

Maybe a good check would be :: Does this sound like a swear word in your language?

A Swedish guy at EuroDjango con said the Finnish chosen domain http://muutu.com is a very bad swear word in Swedish.

* Checking pronouncability values are correct

Is there a sanity check step?

Can you inspect some results to check that the Mechanical Turks are not just piping in /dev/random to the results?
The one thing to take away from this post is "Interesting things happen to interesting people." Therefore make yourself interesting. Most of the rest of it is extremely misleading.

As with most career/life advice, its relevance depends on what you want to accomplish. The kind of broad "pursue a lot of different things" approach advocated here is great for some people, but it definitely can limit your opportunities. For instance, if you want to get into top PhD programs the professors reviewing your application will care that you had a triple major and took the hardest courses in your field. If you don't focus early, you'll miss that opportunity.

The argument here is that college is too early a time to focus on one thing. Even though I didn't, I disagree that this is generally good advice. There are many ways to be interesting.
One step closer to my slap-bracelet cell phone (http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Slap_20Bracelet_20Cell_20Phon...) :)
This site apparently takes whatever you search for, feeds it into youtube, appending the word "instrumental" to the query, then returns the results. When you play a clip, it just plays the clip from youtube, except it's using its own flash player with no video.
It's not a bubble if it doesn't burst.

I think it is a trend.

As you point out, a college degree is the new high school diploma. (and the MSc is the new BSc). We are not going to step backwards on this. There will be no burst. Hence, it is not a bubble.
"Intellectual ballast". I like it!
NYT reader 2.0
I'm surprised that nobody suggested Web.py (http://webpy.org/) by Aaron Swartz. Since you're comfortable with Python, that's the best starting point, I guess. If you're ready to give Ruby on more shot, try Sinatra or Ramaze. Both excellent light-weight frameworks.
i dont know how these linkbait stories get voted up so often =/
This may be why:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.emacs/msg/821a0f04bab918...

"with a culture that is becoming more impatient and managers demanding ever more blind _effort_ to maintain ever stricter bottom lines, it's sadly obvious that we are moving into a way of working that is predominantly _conscious_, for which I believe the human brain was never prepared."
Except due to release-quality drift, RC is the new beta, and beta is the new alpha, unless you're talking about Web 2.0 in which case "beta" is what goes live.
It simply lets you find instrumentals and create a playlist. You cannot truly appreciate it until you create a playlist and Play All.

Instrumentals are easy when you work.

Now the site looks/acts crappy because selfishly it was created just for myself a few months back, but I thought a handful of others may find it useful.
I don't understand why you aren't getting more upvotes for this. AP exams are no indication of a bubble at all. I took as many AP exams as I thought I could pass - a bunch of them I didn't even take the class for I just bought a review book and passed them on my own. If you have a choice between 40-100 hours of hard studying, $30 for a review book, and $90 for the AP exam vs 4 months of work and $3,000 in tuiton what rational person would NOT take a bunch of AP exams?

The thing the article misses is that the number of tests taken is not really correlated to the number of people taking tests. Maybe 20 years ago people only took what they were good at, I took a dozen AP exams in subjects I couldn't care less about becuase then I avoided taking those in college. Plenty of other people did the same. I am one of the people inflating the number of AP exams arbitrarily.

That has nothing to do with me thinking a lot of people in college are not getting their money's worth in their education. The bubble is the cost of tuition vs the payoff afterwards.
Only _one_, you still get macros, robust data structures (for example hash-maps that take anything as a key), multimethods (dispatch on anything, not just type), lazy data structures, dynamic variables, metadata, etc. macros alone would be worth it in IMHO, the rest is just icing on the cake.
This is actually what Facebook is trying to do with Facebook Connect.
That is it Sounddust. That is how it makes it a lot easier to find and listen to instrumentals. That was its sole purpose.
again, more does not mean better. relevance and quality go hand in hand.
How does the existence of RTTI falsify the statement "you can't tell the class of a C++ object given a pointer to it at run time"? Not all objects are instances of classes with vtables.
Tupper's self-referential formula, implemented in OCaml
What an appropriate article for some thoughts I've been having recently around a 'founder's syndrome' I've experienced in two consumer tech startups. I've found myself saying this a lot lately, "consumers are not rational" and "you're over-thinking it".
Mediocre products with huge market penetration are more likely to die a horrible death because: 1) they have maxed out their growth potential, and there are fewer and fewer converts for them to target. 2) since their quality is bad, better competitors are likely to gain viral growth by only contrasting themselves to the mediocre status-quo; its name recognition will be used against it and its brand sabotaged (i.e. "Like X but doesn't suck", "a better X", "an X with ..", etc.)
I installed windows 7 on my dell mini 9. I've been pleasantly surprised with its performance. It's fast, looks nice and everything worked (except touchpad scrolling) after the install.
Why isn't he charging for it? I'm not sure if that should make me less ("he can't figure out pricing") or more impressed ("he doesn't care about just money").
#2 simply will not happen.

The best of the best have no concern for what college costs because of scholarships. They will never be going anywhere but colleges because there is no reason to go a cheap school if you can go free to the college of your choice.

The trade schools are then left picking from who is left, and no matter what they do their best will not match the colleges bests because of time and raw talent.

Thus the trade school will never surpass colleges in reputation. They will not attract that top talent (positive feedback loop!)

People with college degrees have a vested interested in keeping them valuable and so will always be biased towards the college degree making it even harder for trade schools.

So with that landscape in front of them, middle of the road students will logically go to regular college instead of trade schools whenever possible so that they are not disadvantaged. These people actually get more value out of their degree than the best of the best. The best of the best would be able to work their way into jobs regardless of education, but the average person needs the credentials to boost them up.

The only bubble that could burst are overly expensive private schools. You can go in-state to a public school for less than $30k a year including all living expenses. Anything beyond that would be in danger of losing ground to ever expanding public state schools. I think that will ultimately be the real solution - cheaper, larger, 4 year public schools and fewer people taking out loans for $50k a year private liberal arts colleges.
Appstore: Developer=70%, Apple 30%

KindleStore: Writer 30%, Amazon 70%

note:
http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/07/amazon-takes-70-percent-o...
Entrepreneur sells painting on Ebay to bootstrap a startup
Greg is cool, and I am guessing he is a pilot. Good to see VCs getting there hands dirty.

The 5* is just from one review so not really a headline.
Simple Nanojit Example - Mozilla's x86/ARM JIT
It would be interesting to not just track % of browser marketshare, but also track the derivatives of marketshare. With this data web developers could more accurately determine how much they should invest in making a web application work with older browsers.

Does anybody know if this data exists somewhere already?
Apple bans iPhone apps related to BitTorrent