skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have you ever worked hard for something and then realized it wasn't enough? Or worse, working hard brought you to this point, alone and unable to pay for school? It's clear that if she's writing this, she's trying talking to financial aid. She's tried saving as much as possible for school. She's tried all the options... but none were left for her. I go to Stanford and I found myself in a slightly similar situation on a smaller scale. I had $1.2k in debt before the start of the year. Yes you read that right, just over one thousand.

Well... Stanford won't disperse financial aid if you have a balance of over $1k. So, I had 2 days before school started and I didn't have the money to head back to school. No matter who I talked to or who I called, the story was the same. That $1k was my responsibility but to be honest, I didn't have it. That summer I barely made enough to support myself. I also maxed out my credit cards and because of my family situation, I didn't have a cosigner that could help me co-sign a private loan. I also couldn't apply for a loan through my school because that was also considered financial aid. That night I cried... so much. I called my financial aid office over and over only for them to tell me the same thing. I called relatives. I even begged my brother for a small loan just so I could register for classes (which he never gave btw). The next day at work I burst into tears for seemingly no reason at all. Why should I? I go to a school with all the bells and whistles. Why would that be a concern? Had a sorority sister not heard me crying, I would never have gotten the money to enroll.

It's because the system is broken. This story is not about amounts or what she "could've done," it's about the reality of being in a situation you can't possibly control.
>We can't get better policies until we elect better parties, but we can't elect better parties until we address campaign finance and fix the electoral system, but we can't address campaign finance and fix the electoral system until we elect better parties willing to pass better policies. And the merry-go-round goes on and on.

So you have to pick one and fix it. It's an engineering problem.

So for example, you have to fix campaign finance. The people in Washington aren't going to fix campaign finance in Washington because the system that exists is the one that got them elected. Ditto for the people in Sacramento, Albany, etc. But wait, you can have Sacramento and Albany fund the federal campaigns of Senators running in California and New York (and so on). State Senators don't get money from K Street, they get money from an entirely different set of lobbyists, so you can get the bills through by taking advantage of the regional weakness of the specific opponents. And then do it the other way around and have the federal government pass a national campaign finance bill for state-level offices.

That is obviously not a trivial undertaking, but we can't jut say "damn it, we're stuck in a cycle" and throw up our hands or it'll never get fixed.
Shameless plug for my dulwich-backed project, grit:

https://github.com/rsgalloway/grit

- Python WSGI "Smart HTTP" server
- Limited remote object proxying
- Stream blob data from remote repositories
- Hierarchical repos with top-down inheritance
- Check out individual blobs
- Python and HTTP+JSON read/write API
- Supports a centralized workflow
- Command line, Python and web UIs
- Git not required
Yeah, the financial aid system is pretty bad. A single woman I know who lives alone got denied financial aid because her gross annual income was 31k instead of the limit of 29k that financial aid requires. If you do the math and include all average expenses for any single person, you'll see that there's no way to pay for tuition and/or housing without a student loan in a situation as this. Is financial aid only supposed to be for people who either have no job at all, are completely poor, or are doing fraud?
Just wait until he gets Pfizered. At least all the experienced Med. Chemists that Pfizer let go since 2008 had ample time to pay off their student loans, nevermind that when they got their degrees 20 years ago it was actually possible to work one's way through school.
Is the traction you're referring to here the type limited to web startups or (if anyone else knows) does this hold true for virtually any startup in any industry? I imagine there are a handful of industries where achieving 'traction' may take several years, eg biomed.
Exploring iOS 7 Rounded Corners
TIL they make msata ssd's .. very cool :)
I'm looking to get back to race weight, so weilos looks appealing. However, I'm wary of getting someone who doesn't know what they're doing. Is there a way to search background or do some more advanced filtering?

The general advice for losing weight when someone is overweight or grossly overweight is fairly standardized and generally works well. However, I think my situation is a bit different - I'm 6 feet fall and currently at 160 lbs, but my race weight is 135lbs.
Securing the password page is not remotely similar to an FBI warning on a DVD.

One requires a bit of manual effort and thought to get over for the casual user, the other becomes ignored by the casual user.
sounds like you may need lns:

http://interglacial.com/~sburke/pub/lns.html
Nice graphics, but this creates some problems with the back button. In IE10 the back history is transformed into an infinite list of "Fractal Machine" links (specially using animate). In Chrome pressing the back button does nothing (the icon spins, but the page never changes.)
You have no idea. When I first came in it was a common practice to bounce calls up to Canada because the intercountry rate was better than interstate.
I couldn't even afford to get INTO university. By 18, I had to pay $1000/month rent or get kicked out. My family had NO money saved to help with college. I wasn't eligible for any scholarships I could find. The city I was in paid minimum wage for EVERYTHING, even skilled work. I worked $8/hour doing web development.

I tried saving up enough to even just move away. 3 years later, and not a penny ahead, I just threw caution to the wind and plunged myself deep into debt to get the hell out of there.

A year later, I've made more than I did in those 3 years put together. I'm still in debt, but I'll comfortably be out in 6-8 months. At this point, university would only be of value to me if I felt like immigrating to the US.

The point is, if your situation sucks, change it. If school doesn't seem viable, skip it. Find a workaround. The point is not acquire a piece of paper, the point is to prove your worth.
It's puzzling to me that Qualcomm has managed to get to the position now where it is virtually a monopoly provider for ARM chipsets that support LTE. A lot of discussion happens about standards essential patents wrt Motorola and Samsung - surely that equally applies to Qualcomm and the other chip makers (not least of all Samsung) should be able to readily license these patents and build competitive chipsets?
Show HN: LeapFM - A new way to find music
See Bush vs. Gore in 2000.

How many millions of voters thought the Democrats were so conservative they went green? After the dust settles suddenly Obama has a chance to compete with the rich old white guys.

Change only comes from outside pressure. I'm proud to vote against the status quo.
I have a feeling that there are going to be more and more stories like this. Especially with 60% of Fed student loans non performant, interest rates increasing, and the cost to acquire the piece of paper (and the "college experience") increasing.

But Sallie Mae would have you think otherwise when their split goes through on wall st. I have a feeling someone is going to get rich off of CDS backed by securities on student loans… as for the rest of us, I guess we have to create new paths in life to acquire and apply knowledge for the betterment of our communities that we are apart of because going x times more in debt than the generation before, to acquire knowledge to apply in a world that is increasingly making it obsolete (as far as human labor is concerned in a service dominated economy) seems like an exercise in futility and fiscal suicide.
Not sure what could be more relevant to devops than idiomatically updating state.
Announcing Hopscotch: Your Personal Guide to LinkedIn
You're still not sufficiently differentiating between "visual design" and "ephemeral fashion".

Visual design is itself a subset of functional design. Its function is to convey ideas - whether logos, ethos, or pathos - in a way that's accessible to human perception.

Perhaps the reason why Slashdot hasn't changed its visual design significantly is because the current design is sufficiently successful at fulfilling this purpose.

If we regard reference to trend and fashion as a subset of visual design, the function of which is to convey ideas, then it becomes clear that one of the ideas being conveyed is "we follow trends", from which we can reasonably extrapolate "we follow the lead of others" or "we care more about novelty than effectiveness in design". Perhaps the people who run Slashdot don't want to say these things?

The only actual substantive criticism you've offered is that you think that Slashdot's design is "busy" (calling things "dated" or "out of style" is unsubstantive). The one thing I'll agree with you on is that the left sidebar might be better implemented as a tag cloud, and included in the right column, or incorporated into a topic index accessible from the main navigation bar.

But this is a relatively trivial complaint, and overall, I much prefer the structured layout of Slashdot to current design trends which arrange content inconsistently in haphazard grids, and separate distinct elements not with clear visual cues, but with vague whitespace.
"Just wait until he gets Pfizered."

On a long enough time scale, everyone will get "Pfizered." What makes you think this is likely to happen soon? Genuinely curious, as a practicing (sort of) EE.
Another great example of how discussing politics on HN is frustrating. You started out with an observation that the executive branch had overreached. It was pointed out that they were delegated this power explicitly by the legislature. Now your argument changes, without acknowledging the correction or the error of your previous comment, and, as usual, it shifts to something too nebulous to discuss.

It's not your fault; this is just a really terrible venue for political discussions.
Yep. If your parents are wealthy and don't want to help you, you are most definitely not going to a high-end school, not even a state flagship. At that point community college is the only reasonable option (because it's actually possible to earn enough without the degree to cover the cost).

You couldn't really have it any other way without drastically altering the structure of higher education: the alternative is that everyone's parents will "refuse" to pay and the financial aid system would be totally overwhelmed.

I am incredibly lucky and incredibly thankful that my parents value high-quality education and come from a tradition of academics who help their children through college. Some of my friends who are far smarter than me had to give up on dreams because their parents don't understand how inflation works and think you can still pay your own way through high-quality undergrad in the US.

That is, until you get to the high-end Ivies. Harvard would have cost me $12,500 over UW Madison's $24,000, but I was never going to get accepted there.
I think it's pretty great that Dalton implemented all his promises and then some!
Has the author tried the appeal process?
"Despite having federal loans and a work study job, I had to borrow money from my friends and max out my credit cards just to make ends meet."

When I was in school, that was a red flag. Without knowing the details of Ingrid's education costs and spending habits, it's just as easy to conclude that Ingrid lived beyond her means.

Thus, before blaming the system, I'd want to know what Ingrid's numbers were. She did intern for Intel, which pays very well and provides lots of assistance.
Hey - Just wanted to say great job on taking the plunge to get yourself out of that situation. That really takes a lot of courage throwing yourself into an unknown situation like that - I really hope others can learn from your experience if they're in a dire situation as you were.
Don't memorize. Use unp:

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/unp
Can you please explain the potential liabilities for making Chrome work the same way Safari does when attempting to reveal passwords? (I.e., ask for the Keychain password before unmasking.)

To me this would be a great solution and would improve Chrome's user experience. I am unsure why the strong argument against this.
I can empathize. My only constructive comment would be to never waste time complaining or exuding frustration. I understand your situation is tough, but everyone who does anything worth doing will undergo hardship. Find a way to make it work -- if it is impossible or not worth it, choose another route and go on. Your route should never be one of complaint. I don't mean to sound preachy, this advice comes from a sincere place.
There should be a way for companies to invest in promising interns, paying some of their tuition costs in exchange for a certain number of years employment with the company afterwards.

While this wouldn't work for many fields, it would certainly help in cases like this (and tech in general). It would seem that with as much as companies pay for head-hunters and recruiters (and how much they whine about the lack of quality candidates), it would be a no-brainier.
This closely mirrors my experience, though my "summer job" straight out of my Freshman year of college was part-time cashiering at a pizza restaurant. From there, I temped as an office worker at a startup, convinced them to hire me full time and let me build databases, then pivoted that into writing Java code.

After a year of work wherein I made about $25k, I talked to the financial aid office and found out that my expected contribution towards tuition, room, and board was likely to go from about $5k/year (barely covered via loans and family support) to $15-20k, which was totally untenable.

My response was to drop out, keep coding, and figure out how to backfill the CS knowledge I needed by working with smarter, more experienced people than myself. 15 years in, it seems to have worked reasonably well, and I'm regularly reminded how much easier my life has been not having tens of thousands of dollars worth of student loan debt hanging around my neck throughout my 20s.

To be clear: I know that the plural of anecdote is not "data", and I don't want to suggest that the dropout -> tech industry path is easy or in any way guaranteed. However, I think that it's a far easier field to get into than many others if you have the aptitude and motivation to build some things on your own and learn as much as you can from the process.
Petition calling for Sochi Games to be moved to Vancouver
Just for clarification (I'm a Pitt alum): Pitt is sort of a public school. A portion of the budget comes from the state, but not as much as many other state schools (the California system, for example).
Ha! I like the whimsical philosophy. Next time a pedant tries to bowl over my point by enumerating my inconsistencies, I think I might just hold up my "poetic justice" card.
>It's not just that the bar of having an opinion is low, it's because these decisions actually affect all these people, and all in different ways. The fact that they may not have the expertise or knowledge to know the true affects and are easily manipulated by identity-appealing propaganda just exacerbates the problem, but it's not the root cause.

You make it sound like people end up voting to protect their own interests. A lot of studies show this is frequently not the case: Far more frequently they vote their values, which ends up with a very different result. This is why the Republican "Family Values" theme has been so effective.

>Even if you are the foremost expert on the implications of some political issue and your facts are indisputable, people will still (with good reason) disagree on the merits of those indisputable implications.

George Lakoff talks about two major philosophies in the US that define the Liberal and Conservative movements, respectively. [1] I think he gets to the heart of the disagreement between these two sides, explaining why large groups of poor people, for instance, vote Republican despite this being against their own self interest (workplace safety, minimum wage, workers' rights, etc.).

That said, it seems sometimes that even indisputable facts (dangers of cigarette smoke, seriousness of lead poisoning, and more recently, anthropomorphic climate change and the proven failures of "trickle-down" economics) are frequently politicized such that people end up believing that there's still a debate among experts, and that all politicians are lying to support their own side. Propaganda at its best (or worst, I suppose).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Politics_%28book%29 or http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/elephant
The US Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes an Occupational Outlook Handbook. [1]

It includes projected number of new jobs this decade and projected growth rate per career.

[1] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/
What are those legal steps?
Visualization Metaphors: Old & New
This is a travesty, and one I witnessed as a college professor again and again. Why does the US pretend that we don't have enough science and engineering "smarts" among our own students, and seek talent from other countries, when in fact our talent is right here, but unable to afford tuition. Moreover, we hear quite a lot about the lack of women in science and engineering fields.....and here is one who is passionate about engineering yet cannot afford to complete her degree. Something is terribly wrong with this scenario. Businesses: if you really want bright, gifted young women and minorities in the engineering field, put your money where your mouths are and pony up. The rewards will far outweigh your contributions.
You should play in a workplace pool situation. $5~$10 is a fair price for psychological insurance.

If most of the people in your office win the jackpot, no matter how Vulcan you think you are, it will negatively affect you psychologically for many years.
I was in a similar situation in Canada (but of course, total cost for a semester in engineering school + housing + food amounted to about $8k - $9k). With an internship that landed me about $22/hr post-tax, 40% of the total I made was put towards paying for the next semester. That automatically kicked me out of the low-income family grant which would've given me $8k a year.

I remember some of my friends saying they received more in grants and bursaries than what I made in that 4 month period alone (with no effort, to boot!), and that slightly discouraged me a bit, but one needs to remember this is an investment that will pay off in the next few years.

That being said, I was enrolled in a software engineering program, but most of my friends have found work in EE as well.
Welcome to real life. Shit happens. Keep trying and it will get better.
UndecidableInstances a.k.a. YouDecidableInstances.

While I was writing the Prelude, I messed up one of the definitions and ghc kept blowing the context stack limit. So I tried it with -fcontext-stack=5000, figuring it wasn't my bug but just a consequence of the inefficient encoding I was using. The type system ended up allocating upwards of 4 gigs before I killed it.
Ask HN: Getting That First Client?
So I am interested in getting into freelancing, but I'm not quite sure how to get started.

I think that I have a lot to offer -- I have strong full stack development skills with a focus on rich front-ends, either with pure JS, jQuery, or Angular; I know my way around MongoDB and PostgreSQL; and I can go from raw ideas to finished products on my own and in a team. I am very good at organizational thinking and planning and have a sense for design throughout the development process.

The trick is, I have very few connections. So how can I (and people like me) break into freelancing? Is trolling twitter for jobs the answer? Maybe getting started on a site like freelancer.com (I hope that isn't the best option)? Or just building static sites for local farmer's market vendors?

I'm in NYC, so I think if I really put myself out there I would have plenty of options available to me, but I'm at a loss for how to go about it. Does HN have any advice?
Something interesting for the mathematically inclined.

"Statistical auditing and randomness test of lotto k/N-type games", available freely at http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.4595v1

Powerball is not like a typical k/N lotto game though, but you might still want to skim the paper.
> The answer is clearly 0.

No, because there are no people to get 0 dollars; the concept of "each" makes no sense when there are no eachees. The answer is clearly undefined.
Our approach is that the author can choose up to two tags, and the community (excluding newbies) can add a third. The most suggested community tag is the current tag.
Very hard for me to tell. The nomenclature suggests use of the SpeeX codec, but I can't tell.

These companies break down into a few broad categories:

1) it's new technology (this is the holy shit category)

2) it's cheaper (IMHO boring)

3) it's higher quality (think uberconference)

4) It's a different experience (Grouptalent using conference bridges for interview screening)

Most of these services are of category 2 or 3 and aren't that interesting. The 1's and sometimes the 4's have the potential to be really cool.

I don't know where speek fits but I think it's a 2 or 3.

Edit: not to say 2 or 3 businesses can't be hugely profitable but they're less interesting to hackers. There are still Multi-billion markets for businesses in category 2 or 3. I happen to love the guys at Uberconference and think they have a great product as a sidenote.
OP here. Interesting article. "Fantasizing" isn't what I was trying to describe in the "entertainment" section. I 86'ed a longer explanation of what I meant, but here goes:

When I say, "I also enjoy letting my mind wander and think about what I’d do with a nine-figure windfall," I actually mean that I think about it, not that I fantasize about it. Some of my problems would go away. Others wouldn't. I'd have a whole new set of issues to think about. And I'd still come in to work [0] tomorrow.

When I think about what it would be like to win the Powerball jackpot, I tend to reflect on some of the issues raised in PG's "Cities and Ambition" essay [1], when he talks about the things different cities value: "New York is pretty impressed by a billion dollars even if you merely inherited it. In Silicon Valley no one would care except a few real estate agents. What matters in Silicon Valley is how much effect you have on the world."

The utility I get from buying a lottery ticket isn't about dreams of private jets and caviar. It's the perspective I gain: if I didn't have to think about money ever again, what would I want to do with my life? I think I'd keep working on startups. What would I do differently? I'm not sure, but I'd start with buying a better set of wheels for my bike. In the bigger picture, I'd probably spend more time on projects that have the potential to have huge impact, and think less about whether a particular idea can be a profitable business.

It's easy to get caught up in the patterns of daily life. Thinking about winning a jackpot makes me evaluate my life from 30,000 feet. I guess I could do that for free, but at least for me, that $2 gets me thinking a little differently. And to me, that's where the value is.

[0] http://zeromailer.com
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html
1/0 is inf, 1/-0 is -inf, 0/0 is undefined
Looks like I deleted the word "effectively" in front of "same thing". I wonder how much the difference matters.