skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How much does it actually cost to educate a student? A full load is about 12 or so hours a week in class (at least back when I went to community college). If a class has 40 students, and the instructor spends 2 hours outside of class for every 1 hour teaching (office hours, curriculum structure, grading), and makes 80K a year, that is 2K per student per year.

Now add in the facilities expenses (roof, walls, lights, hvac), and some labs need labs, how much should that cost? I still can't see that being more than another 2K, but I haven't run the numbers on that yet. Overall, it makes 20K a year seem outrageous.
No it's not. It's a illustration of a need for some kind of regulation on the field.

Patents are much more 'powerful' than needed for pharma industry. They hinder good research by universities and other NGOs.
I hear what you're saying, but I feel the issue is that I'm not really learning the engineering basics or methodologies in my CS program. Basically, the program is geared to churn out mediocre Java developers, and it does a pretty good job of that.

It's incredibly frustrating to work on abstract coding projects only to have them reviewed by the TA and then thrown away. I'd much prefer to be working on real world stuff with impact, where I could learn by doing. And when I consider the amount of time in classes, it just seems incredibly inefficient compared to what I could be doing on my own or with the help of a bootcamp.
Tried neo4j , and I find it handy using python and py2neo . Since my laptop is limited in memory , I couldn't visualize graphs properly from web interface.
My original comments were based on reading additional pages of Rowe's web site...in particular his work pledge:

http://profoundlydisconnected.com/skill-work-ethic-arent-tab...

> 3. I believe there is no such thing as a “bad job.” I believe that all jobs are opportunities, and it’s up to me to make the best of them.

> 6. I believe that my safety is my responsibility. I understand that being in “compliance” does not necessarily mean I’m out of danger.

> 10. I believe that I am a product of my choices – not my circumstances. I will never blame anyone for my shortcomings or the challenges I face. And I will never accept the credit for something I didn’t do.

> 11. I understand the world is not fair, and I’m OK with that. I do not resent the success of others.

> 12. I believe that all people are created equal. I also believe that all people make choices. Some choose to be lazy. Some choose to sleep in. I choose to work my butt off.

*

On the surface his rhetoric seems reasonable, but there's a libertarian bent to his ideas that suggests he places the onus for success squarely on the individual rather than the individual and society at large.
My friend and I tried to use this method while scuba diving to communicate how much air we had left. It seems perfect- 1 quick flash of 5 fingers can display any number between 0 and 31, which in this system would be 0 to 3100 PSI.

(Scuba air in the US is measured in PSI and scuba tanks cap out at 4500 PSI, and since you never care about accurately communicating your air level unless its down past 50% or so, the upper limit of 3100 is sufficient)

Unfortunately, since thinking in binary doesn't come naturally to us, we would have to convert the binary into decimal in our head, which is difficult, error prone, and ultimately more work than just using one of the tried and true methods for communicating how much air you have left. We went back to the normal way after a few dives.

I think with practice though it could work.
I literally just hacked something together that does this a couple of hours ago using opencv/python: http://yusufsimonson.com:8000.

Edit: and here's the source: https://github.com/ysimonson/instant-santa
Also, please eat more veggies.
"Only two countries have done this well: Germany and Switzerland. They’ve both maintained strong manufacturing sectors and they share a key thing: Kids go into apprentice programs at age 14 or 15. You spend a few years, depending on the skill, and you can make BMWs. And because you started young and learned from the older people, your products can’t be matched in quality. This is where it all starts."

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/11/vaclav-smil-wired/
Pierre was killed in an accident in 1906. In 1910-11 she had an affair with one of Pierre's former students, Paul Langevin, who was estranged from his wife but still technically married. The Wikipedia entry links to this page:

http://www.aip.org/history/curie/scandal1.htm
You can also mmap a chunk of memory and share it between processes.
They include her husband's income, which is only social security and an extremely small pension that barely covers their food, utilities, mortgage, and property taxes. They don't, of course, take into account his medical expenses in the income calculation.
How about you actually try to debunk the facts I present instead of inanely and pompously labeling them a "conspiracy theory"?
Darpa makes finding software vulnerabilities fun
It's a typo or a misstatement. He meant to say that if you have cancer and HIV, then the benefits of BMT outweigh the risks (purely due to cancer).

If you have just HIV, then the risks of BMT outweigh the benefits (because of high near-term mortality).
The analogy is valid, but the difference is not minor.

With infectious disease, if there are ten possible mutations to make the pathogen resistant to treatment, each with a 1% chance of happening within the course of the disease in one patient, then pretty soon all mutations would be present in most of the whole pathogen population on Earth, because of natural selection.

With non-infectious diseases such as cancer, in the same scenario, there would be about a 10% chance of the cancer cells developing one or more of the mutations in each patient, period. A tragedy for those 10% of patients, but a cure for the other 90%.
Bundle.js: Micro View-Controller
In terms of paying for these bootcamps, I don't think you are the target market. You have CS exposure and you are already getting fluent with Python and Django. The target market for these bootcamps is people with little development experience. You are better off going through the many online resources. Your best bet is to target companies that do Python and/or Django development. I would focus on getting even better with these technologies.

I would also recommend that you finish your program. When we don't have a concrete plan for something else, the path we are on currently is usually still the best. In your case, it doesn't look like you have a startup that you are building and has investors, traction, etc. So, you didn't leave because there was much greater return on value on your time doing something else.

Now, I'm sure the material in the program is lower on the scale of reasons you are leaving and you have other reasons that are valid for you. But, it would be worth re-evaluating. It's hard sometimes to finish these things but it shows that you have determination and persistence. You can continue to do your side learning and improving your skills while still in school. Having a degree is still relevant. I know that here it sometimes seems like everybody gets work regardless of their education but that's not the norm.
Starting a startup is not just a matter of technical skills and getting hired as a coder might be difficult if you dropped out of college.

A few ideas, straight out of my mind (please don't flame):
- You should start a blog to document your journey anyway. Maybe you'll write a book about the whole experience later.
- Build a website for college dropouts meetups? Maybe you can build something that's bigger than you.
- Learn something, and become an expert at it. Learn Git/GitHub then write about it. Start a "become a Git hero in 6 weeks" blog?
- teach yourself a niche technology, rather than Ruby on Rails: socket.io mastery on node.js maybe? or mongodb admin? or nginx admin?

Don't spread yourself too thin: you can't teach yourself everything at once. Get a Wordpress.com blog instead of hosting one... except if you want to learn it and then teach how to host your own Wordpress :)

Teach yourself something thoroughly, a skill that's rare enough (if you're THE guy who wrote a book on sails.js, who cares you dropped out of college?). D3.js could be another option.

HN is definitely the right place to target the perfect technological niche. I've only suggested a few that I've looked into myself.

Remember, you don't have much to lose yet. But DO something, learn something. You can be bold, but you must ship.
We do precision tests of gravity and searches for forces weaker than gravity.

(Front page is dated, see publications tab for more recent work)
http://www.npl.washington.edu/eotwash/

The most-important experiment we do is to test the Equivalence Principle [1], the idea that if you drop two things in vacuum, they'll fall at the same rate regardless of what they're made from. Results from our lab have shown that, at 1 part in 10,000,000,000,000 (10^-13), that's apparently true. General Relativity takes the Equivalence Principle as a postulate, and works from there. Many theories of new physics would break the EP at scales of ~10^-15 or so.

My almost-complete thesis research is searching for violations of the gravitational inverse square law at short distances. In short, over distances smaller than the diameter of a hair, nobody knows if gravity acts. It probably does, but you don't know until you check. String theory would suggest that, at short-enough distances, gravity should get unexpectedly stronger. Solutions to the Cosmological Constant problem [2] may suggest that gravity should turn off at distances shorter than the diameter of a hair. Dark Energy/Hubble Constant observations would suggest that gravity might do something interesting at around this same scale.

Our workhorse technology is the venerable torsion balance [4], souped-up with modern experimental readout and data analysis techniques. Our best angle sensors [5] sense a nanoradian's angular displacement in less than a second. For scale, if we shine a laser pointer from Seattle to San Francisco, a nanoradian is equivalent to about a millmeter's displacement of the beamspot on the TransAmerica building.

If you want me to build you an angle sensor or a precision force sensor, I'm interested in hybrid industrial and academic work [6].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_principle

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torsion_spring#Torsion_balance

[5] http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.4828

[6] http://www.nanoradian.com
also there's nothing stopping a thread having its own logical heap.

grandparent is confusing the concept of address space and heap.
The use and abuse of ‘human error’
Vermont Approves Single-Payer Health Care: "Everybody In, Nobody Out"
> I've studied in mechanical engineering. I've never EVER seen anyone use calculus to solve their problem in the real world.

Consider yourself lucky you haven't been exposed to process chemistry. Those people have to rely on experimentally discovered equations where fractional exponents are the the norm. Not to mention that the math involved is, to an IT person, counterintuitive at best - and outright opaque at worst.

The impossibly devious math involved in that field was one of the major reasons I switched my major. (The same maths come across everywhere in that field.) It is hard to imagine the joy you feel once you get to deal with discrete, math after spending a couple of years trying to wrap your head around the mental torture of applied physical chemistry.
Here's what I always thought it would work best: free education up to 4th grade (reading, writing, arithmetics, AKA the basics), then free libraries everywhere. It's sad that we already have a lot of public libraries, but few people visit them voluntarily.
>if you go to Podunk university and study Asian comparative literature, you will end up with a good job?

This appears to be just my experience, but absolutely not. I graduated high school in 2004 and had a very strong sense of choosing between more marketable majors and majors that are less marketable but may be more personally satisfying. Everyone that I talked to: teachers, guidance staff, parents, and friends all urged me to consider (as one of many factors) what career a particular degree might lead to. I ended up getting a major in a field with jobs (CS) and a minor in an area with fewer job prospects (religious studies).

It's also worth pointing out that even degrees that are generally considered dead ends can work out quite well if you plan correctly. My friend who went into history is working on becoming a librarian (using an apprentice-like process) and his SO has been making a living doing freelance editing for a few years now. They both figured out paths that worked for them in a relatively weak jobs market.
This is getting really interesting. Between this, the Nexus 5 and the various Lumia's a $649 iPhone is starting to look very, very expensive.

Smartphones at the moment seem to have got 'good enough'.
my classmate's mother makes $82/hr on the computer. She has been fired from work for ten months but last month her pay check was $12046 just working on the computer for a few hours. why not try this out=======> jobs25.ℭＯM
An idea I had -- perhaps it's been already thought by lots of people:

Use the binary system to give access to tons (well, at least 128 or 256) notes to a musical instrument design.

You just need like 8 buttons (compared to over a dozen for a flute or 88 for a piano), so you can make it quite compact.

I'm thinking of some digital controller like instrument, but if they could pull off an analog one, that would be interesting too.
A few years ago, Jim Sanborn (also the Kryptos sculpture guy?!) built a fission device based on an early Fermi/Bohrs/Teller experiment from 1939:

http://jimsanborn.net/main.html#museuminstallations

I got the impression from his talk that he was more worried about DHS than NRC cracking down while working on it.

It wasn't ever turned on while it was in the museum, but just getting near the device probably left me with a greater sense of awe than even the Apollo 11 capsule. On the shoulders of giants, certainly, but one guy built this.
This was thinly veiled sarcasm. The app makes it incredibly clear that you're using SMS, with multiple visual cues.
This is really an approach that should get more attention.

People know all about database-backed websites (with an AJAX/REST server), and static-generated sites (with no server at all.)

But there's a middle-ground where you statically generate precomputed AJAX/REST responses to any query you could make, shove them in an S3 bucket and maybe put a CDN (e.g. Cloudflare) in front of it, and then treat that as your "server", building a traditional AJAXy frontend to talk to it. Scales nigh-on infinitely.

The best part is, it's not necessarily read-only! You can write a "real" server, too, that just handles updates. When it receives a request, GET the old version of the object it's modifying from S3 (no need for a database!), patch it up with the AJAXed-in data, and PUT it back. (And follow it up with a CDN single-file-purge API call, if it's relevant.)
The waste is a vastly exaggerated problem. We've released vastly more uranium and thorium into the atmosphere via burning of coal than we've generated waste from nuclear plants that needs long term storage (the vast majority of nuclear waste by volume has a half life short enough that it is not a storage problem for more than a few decades; only a few percent needs long term storage).

Now, the waste that needs long term storage is more dangerous than the dispersed uranium from coal, but most of the spent fuel can also be reprocessed at least once, and at least India is looking into reprocessing spent fuel multiple times to reduce the amount of high level waste that actually needs to be stored rather than reused.

The resulting storage volume is miniscule, and while it needs to be dealt with, it takes a lot for it to be a significant risk. E.g. plutonium is nasty in some ways - you really don't want to breathe in particulate. But it mostly emits alpha particles, which can be blocked by not much more than cardboard (I remember physics class when our teachers demonstrated with an alpha source, a geiger counter and cardboard...).

Large scale dispersal of plutonium particulate would require a large explosion, so the challenge with plutonium (and uranium) storage is largely to ensure there's no risk of reaching critical mass. But that's "simple" enough to do just by diluting the material enough. There is a security aspect (you don't want people to have an easy way of mining plutonium from waste to produce weapons) but the main storage problem is down to fear.

Most of the gamma emitters have short half lives. I grew up in Norway, and remember the massive fear after Chernobyl relating to Caesium contamination for example (fallout making it into the soil caused Cesium to get picked up in various plants that were eaten by sheep, deer, elks etc. in the highland regions). While it was a public health concern, Caesium-137 has a half-life of "only" 30 years, and a biological half-life in the human body of a few months, and there are plenty of "workarounds" in the case of a major accident (deep ploughing; screening the riskiest food sources; fertilizing with potassium) that helps reduce Caesium uptake until it's radioactivity has sufficiently diminished and/or it has been spread enough to not be a problem any more.

That's not to say we shouldn't take nuclear waste seriously, but it's not a big deal compared to a lot of other hazardous waste we don't think twice about.
I wrote the libertymail proposal. You said you'd read it but you never commented on it.
It is mainly a summation of attacks that are possible on bitmessage, and provides solutions on how to prevent such attacks. I also propose a solution for scaling, one that could actually be implemented.
i.e. Meme-marked.
I read Mike's list and it filled me with ferver and the desire to stand up and make my life better. I read you list and it made me want to sit on my butt and mope.
Fun story- lettuce picking used to be relatively high skilled and high paying, and the lettuce pickers were the backbone of Cesar Chavez's unionizing. This made them expensive enough that it was worth automating their jobs away. Today, a guy with an extremely fancy tractor does it.
This is almost certainly either a typo, or the doctor misspoke. The quote should probably read:

> "If you have an underlying neoplasm (tumor) like these patients had, then the risk IS OUTWEIGHED BY the benefit..."
I'm a Java dev in my day job, and I have to say that as a beginner in both Haskell and Scala, I surprisingly find Scala far more difficult than Haskell.

Scala's type signatures are even harder than Haskell's (or at least, mixing FP with OOP makes them harder for me) but you don't get the same guarantees about side-effects and the type inference doesn't work as well. And implicits scare me.

Scala's OOP may be good or bad, but it certainly adds an additional layer of complexity, and one you can't ignore when reading or using someone else's code.
With no doubt, Brazil.
>Could the purpose of these two gourds on a string have been something else?

Nope, the design and structure of it, simple as it is, are pretty telling.
http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

"Finally, that one of the simplest of diseases managed to utterly confound us for so long, at the cost of millions of lives, even after we had stumbled across an unequivocal cure. It makes you wonder how many incurable ailments of the modern world - depression, autism, hypertension, obesity - will turn out to have equally simple solutions, once we are able to see them in the correct light. What will we be slapping our foreheads about sixty years from now, wondering how we missed something so obvious?"
>However, it mutates incredibly quickly compared to other viruses - an HIV+ patient may have multiple strains of the virus in their body at any one time, requiring the infamous "cocktail" of drugs as no single drug will be effective.

I'm kind of embarrassed that I've not properly understood this, will probably spend some time researching it this afternoon...

Is this because it mutates quickly in the body? Or do people become infected with multiple strains often in a single point of contact with HIV?

If it's the former, how would the cocktail work? Or does it mutate predictably across the population. If it's the latter, is that purely a function of networking effects and unsafe sex working together?
>Weinstein's "deviants and delinquents" include "von Neumann [skirt chasing], Gamow [hard drinking], Shockley [bigoted], Watson [misogynistic], Einstein [childish], Curie [slutty], Smale [lazy], Oppenheimer [politically treacherous], Crick [incompetent], Ehrenfest [murderous], Lang [meddlesome], Teller [monstrous] and Grothendieck [mentally unstable]."

You know what? You just made me feel a whole lot better about my life. Thank you.

Gottlieb/Sennesh [childish, mentally unstable, anime]
For Engineer and Developers: 5 Growth Hacker Quotes
All the staff/counselors said that university would be different from high school: that the tests wouldn't be stupid, that the smart would love it, that it was all about merit and ideas and intellectual curiosity.

It wasn't.

Its a place where you pay money and show you're willing to waste a few years of your life for a piece of paper that lets you pass a certain firewall in societal hiring practices, shows you largely fit in to corporate and societal norms, and depending on where you went, lets you network with others while excluding those who don't jump through the hoops.

Because of that, don't stress about what you're studying. Just get the piece of paper, or network, its what you're there for.

And don't get me wrong, the piece of paper does let you earn more money and opens doors. Mines financially paid itself off by now, but I resent the process and society that means I had to get it.
HN: How many of you never up vote anything?
There have to be hundreds of thousands of people reading HN. How many never bother to participate in the voting system? Seemingly most...sometimes it would seem that an article appears out of nowhere with hundreds of up votes, and other articles in the "new" section that are clearly good articles on interesting technology related subjects simply wither and die. I think a "viewed" metric for postings might be useful as well, unless somehow the HN algorithm also takes this into account?
> Could you implement something like IRC's "flood prevention" in a proof-of-work based consensus algorithm -- so sending messages closer together costs prohibitively more?

This seems easily circumvented by creating lots of identities. Though maybe creating an identity could be costly?
The difference between arr and &arr - Find size of an array in C without sizeof
Thanks for posting this. I'm not a physicist but I do enjoy reading about new explanations that simplify things.

It wasn't clear from the article if this is all theory, or if there was some actual experimental use of electric fields and holographic mapping of particles?

If so, can I see those maps? I would love to see the closest thing we have to a picture of a microscopic wormhole.
When I went to the U.S. last, immigration made me feel like a criminal even though it was just for a holiday. I think it's just part of the U.S. immigration experience. Greatest country on earth, don'tcha know.
If by Indian you mean "native american indians of Peru", then yes.
...and "BOOM" the whole no-metadata thing as well. See also the craziness with tracking Bitcoins from wallet-to-wallet recently.
Armin Ronacher - Thinking outside of the box (video)