skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's probably true for a largish percentage, but it's a huge generalisation that does nothing to actually help OP with his question.
maybe by having attended the actual talk at 30c3 on friday?
I dropped out super early. Worked for some software companies, built some internets.

Trying to get a US visa now, the decision to not get a degree is pretty bitter. That said, this is the first and I optimistically anticipate the last time a degree would have been any use to me, so I'll just power through and hope for the best.
What is the depth of menus you have implemented. Twitter Bootstrap recommends only 2 levels. I am looking for simple solution to allow multiple levels of menus. Any pointers?
Came here to post this. Scrolling is a nightmare on this page. Why would you do this to your visitors? How would anybody still visit anyway?
Well the advice here would be to reflect if they wanted to drop out of college, because it's not challenging or because it is too challenging.
Since day one, Amazon EC2 used a copy on write system with their LVM volumes to protect against this problem (without them having to do expensive zeroing operations).

This has been an identified and solved problem for YEARS. No excuse for a modern VPS/IaaS provider to be leaking customer data in this way, except incompetence.
Good to look at both data sets, but it is possible there is no correlation to being a billionaire and going to college - no way to tell without a constrained environment as there are a billion variables (wealth of the parents, grades in school, etc).
I suspect you're right. It's not hard to find numerous stack overflow questions clearly posed by people trying to learn emacs, who've mistakenly run the terminal version - and who now, as they say, have two problems.

But even for more experienced emacs users I'd argue that the terminal version probably is a mistake. Think of it as akin to eating out-of-date food: even if the only other option is starvation, it still probably won't taste very nice, and it could even make you ill.

About all you can say about terminal emacs it is that (unlike vim) it does at least use the familiar emacs keys... provided you can remember that the meta key probably doesn't work. Along with some (random) set of key chords that involve shift. Sometimes by playing with your terminal program's options you can change which half of the keyboard shortcuts are broken.

Still, I'm sure some people like it, and they shouldn't listen to me. It takes all sorts.
If you want to be successful, one of the things you've to learn is how to stack the odds in favour of you, and that is by squeezing every opportunity you have. Being in college, meeting all those people, networking all that, in addition to the certificate you'll get at the end, will all contribute to that.
I just hope they'll make it available for non-windows platforms. Despite C# being a great language, being great only on windows is not attractive anymore.
And so someone who signs a mortgage for a house they can't afford is completely blameless?
I disabled electric-indent-mode, because it really doesn't get along well with org-mode in my experience. I only really use it for select languages, but otherwise tend to disable it globally.
For h1bs, most areas do almost require someone competent to have gone through a degree program in that field. You can't exactly self learn biochemistry or semiconductor process engineering because of he the tremendous equipment needs.

Software is a huge anomaly because it is so ear easily self learnable. The supposition that someone good at it needing a degree is patently false. It's really a shame. I know a few people with things like psychology degrees who are proficient programmers, and their path to a visa is not straightforward :(
>they do want more men involved.

Why is it so important in modern society that every area has an even split of men and women and the right quota of every ethnicity?
Or because it's too expensive. Or it's getting in the way of more important things. Or too stressful. Or someone at the uni is making their life miserable. Or one of the other 10 million reasons that people drop out.

To presume that this decision is entirely motivated by how hard uni is is astonishingly naive, imo.
Haha that's exactly why I dropped out of business school :p
"Work hard at something people are willing to pay you to do and you will be successful".

Like picking fruit, working in a stockroom, or staffing the support phones? There's plenty of paid menial work out there that won't give you 'success'.
Linkbait. Title should be "Digital Ocean API is not told to scrub (securely delete) VM on destroy"
For l1b there's no actual visa requirement, but the burden of proof for eligibility is still set incredibly high.

I understand to some degree the rationale behind the absurd process, at the same time it's incredibly frustrating to have a company that wants me here, and no avenue or realistic end in sight to make it happen.
I frequently use emacs when SSHed into remote servers where terminal mode is the only option. When I run it locally I still prefer terminal mode out of familiarity, I guess. Also, I'm usually working on shell scripts or the like. And I like being able to drop to a bash prompt with a keystroke (ctrl-Z).
Wriggling?

What is the HMS Queen Elizabeth? When did the UK ever have the sustained ability to launch into orbit?

Go back to reading the Daily Mail, son, it's a safe place for bigotry.
Maybe we should stop buying Saudi oil first? I mean, we've pretended to stop buying Iranian oil, so we could pretend that about Saudi as well. I hear good things about fracking.

From an ethical standpoint, you violate the Categorical Imperative, to say nothing of the Golden Rule. We also have schools (religious and otherwise) that demonize Islam, Arab nations, Iran, etc. Does that fact justify violent action on the part of those aggrieved parties? Should we care about similar anti-"western" lessons taught in various parts of Asia and South America? Suddenly it seems your proposition could be very profitable for the military-industrial complex...
Exactly my thinking. Taking huge risks later is (theoretically) also easier if you've got a degree behind your name because you've got something semi-marketable if things go sideways.
I had a 4S with iOS 7 for several months and what you're saying is complete BS. I can upload a video if you don't believe me.

Try non-hostility as an initial response in the future.
Take this with a grain of salt, but I believe that Emacs Lisp will be implemented on top of Guile. More precisely, ELisp code will be compiled to Guile bytecode (which runs on a register VM[1]), which should make ELisp code run faster.

As a result, Guile and ELisp code will be able to play together.

[1]: http://wingolog.org/archives/2013/11/26/a-register-vm-for-gu...
I'm not quite sure what is so special here. It is a device, it has firmware, the firmware can be upgraded. The same is true for your HDD or SSD. Why is an SD Card any different?

If someone hands you an SSD in an external enclosure do you automatically suspect it too? A similar hack is known to work there, witness the number of SSDs that needed a firmware upgrade after their field release.

I do applaud the finding of how to do it and the proof that it really does work. It is a nice work in that regard and I have a few SD cards I'd be happy to hack their firmware for fun if nothing else (damn fake SDs, if they at least just advertised their real capacity they could at least be useful).
I would love to visit your land. The land where there is no Google.
That USB flash drives have reprogrammable firmware is fact that is even sometimes advertised by manufacturers. It's not exactly well documented, but certainly better documented than with SD cards, you can even often get meaningful datasheet for the controller.
Oh damn, I wanted to reply to the dropout/billionaire comment. sry!
The grey text on each button is completely unreadable, there's no contrast at all.

It looks better if you remove the font-weight = 300 but the text is still not really readable
Oh, gosh, the usual tokenadult nonsense.

I will just counter 5) with http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/46....

But if you like a one-to-one correspondence between spoken language sentence structure and the usual first-order logic notation, Chinese is a good place to start.

Umm. Wat? Care to elaborate more? Any papers? Also, first-order logic has many grammars and different families of syntax. Postfix, prefix, infix, graphical, linear, controlled English-based Attempto Controlled English. It makes absolutely no sense to say Chinese syntax is more logical than Sanskrit.

A language is logical if it has a controlled syntax (at the least, well-defined semantics is the holy grail for AI). Attempto ACE (http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/site/) and http://www.jfsowa.com/clce/specs.htm are logic languages. Chinese has no controlled syntax. Sanskrit is the only natural language to have a controlled syntax. Chomsky even credits his famous notation to a Sanskrit grammarian, Panini. Does any of your other languages have this advantage?

Since you accuse other HN-ers of being Hindutva posters, can I do the same and accuse you of being a paid Chinese shill? Stop with the unsubstantiated intellectually low-grade vacuous negativity.

Once again, please keep your biases at home and keep HN a civil place. I can't believe your glib uncivil FUD-ish comment is top ranked. Ugh.

One wonders what kind of mind would feverishly advocate for any language to go extinct.
To be honest it never even occurred to me to classify it as "hostile".

I think its fairly dependent on the climate you grew up in. e.g. I'm from a fairly warm/dry climate so "storm" sounds mean rain & relief from heat. Plus the local farmers are much happier (except when there is hail involved).

>damage the building you are in

Again - never occurred to me. Its just a non-issue here. Buildings are built to last & we don't get natural disasters here.
The one thing to be aware of here is that they didn't drop out of college, because they didn't succeed in it. They dropped out because it was too easy for them.
I personally don't think an even split in every area is the right way to go. But the percentage of men in nursing is in the single digits - far from 'an even split'. There are concrete benefits to having more male nurses - some patients respond better to being handled by a member of a given gender. Same thing with teachers for young children, in that more male teachers means having a broader, better range of role models. 'Matching the demographic proportions' is a stupid goal, but 'well-represented' isn't.
I was very sad to discover that most of the hits (I only checked one page) for slash on stackoverflow are actually questions involving the slash character (Generally http request parsing)
Well, Mary Jo Foley is a well known blogger with sources deep inside MS, and has been right on so many rumoured things, I'd say her sources are a bit better than reading Reddit; the problem arises in trying not to burn those sources, so discussing public info and adding her extra knowledge to it is a good way of achieving that.
I think the chart in this post makes more sense if you ignore the word "safety" on the Y-axis.
Ask HN: How many still use torrents to download Movies instead of using Netflix?
Nowadays there are many services to stream movies/tv shows such as Netflix, Hulu, Amazon etc..

Do you find always what are you looking for?

Do you use Torrents when something is missing?
By the way: that script is meant to be sourced, not execed: the HISTFILE manipulation at the end only works if the script is sourced --- that's why you see this script in your shell history.
If you've fullscreened the vim container (eg, gvim macvim) then

set lines=80

Will center it. Not super complex in vanilla vim :)
Why is it that you can only find purpose for your life so far away on the other side of the world?

Why is it that nobody from Nepal or Tibet ever come here for the same? They come here only seeking material wealth.

I am baffled by this.
tokenadult is a known Chinese anti-Indian shill.
Show HN: Embedded Systems Weekly
Sanskrit is not a dead language. Enough with the FUD. At least it is more intellectual than current day colonial languages like Spanish.
I'm from India, and I use the American Kindle store as many books I want to buy are not even available in the Indian store. I haven't checked for a few months though, so things may have improved.
I didn't drop out, but i changed profession -
had i gotten a programming education i'd probably fare better.

That said, i'm making a good living on my company anyway.

Luckily, running an IT company is not only about programming but also about people skills, finding the right clients and fulfilling their needs.
L-1B is intra-office transfer. You still have to prove "skill", there's just no degree requirement. If you're a specialized worker (L-1B) or manager (L-1A) and have been so for over a year for your sponsoring company (a requirement for L visas), with a full salary, you presumably have the skills.
I'm a teenage highschool dropout. I got my first computer in 1983, and my last year of highschool was 1988. In the 5 years between those two events, I managed to make myself more money writing code than my parents were making in the real estate market .. and I've never looked back. I've been lucky to be able to say that I grew up with the computer industry, and have always been able to - somehow - stay on the bleeding edge of computerization as its occurred over the decades.

That said, I must admit that the idea of returning to education at some point does arise now and then. I'd love to be able to do it now, in my 40's, when I think its really worthwhile - with what I have under my belt in terms of industrial experience, I think I'd have a lot more fun at school than I would have in the 80's - when the closest thing I could get to a CompSci course back then would have had me using technologies that were already outdated by then, and which wouldn't have taught me anything I wasn't already learning in my non-school hours, hacking away.

Its been a long, hard slog though. I have to tell you that if you decide to go the industrial route over education, be prepared to work hard. Harder than you would work at school, that is for sure - and also, be prepared for the responsibility of having to learn new things, yourself, in an industrial setting, without much hand-holding. I was fortunate enough to have had the right kinds of guru's over the years, as an apprentice working with masters you do get a lot of benefits that school does not provide.

Maybe when I hit 50, I'll go back to school .. mostly so I can contribute, somehow, to the educational scene, and maybe also so that I can write a few of those papers that have been backlogging in my mind over the decades ..
> Would you still write the article if the link was nofollow?

Typically I've written the article before passing it on to someone, so in those cases, obviously the question doesn't apply. In the latter case, if someone asks for me to e.g. write about tax credits for their site, then it's only polite for them to allow us to include a byline without nofollow.

> And what links are you requiring in the byline?

Hah, whatever I can get :-) Depends on the site, obviously, but if I can get links to some of our topic pages with the right text, I'll go for that! (e.g. http://www.ec1capital.com/blog/rd-tax-credits-explained).

We don't "ask to guest post" as a company, though I've offered to write some good original content on occasion, but only in person and with no pressure.
As you can clearly see from the code it's perfectly acceptable in Objective-C to send a message to nil. This is a powerful feature that prevents the program from crashing but it is confusing for beginners.
I'm not sure where the "place house ads for your paid service" idea is coming from? We haven't paid for advertising.
Transparent LCD Bus
Say LIGNUX
Accepting almost half of undergrad papers seems like a very weak accomplishment.
Anatomy of a Tumblr
The end of 2013 brings SchemeSpheres v0.4 - The Blog of Fourthbit
Yeah, I stopped showing up to College. It was a bad idea in retrospect but I could not handle both work and school at the same time so the choice was to work. I don't recommend this route and I feel like I'm a good five years behind where I want to be due to that decision. You have to live with your choices so make them thoughtfully.

On the other hand my aspirations have always outstripped current skills but that has, on net, helped me move forward. What does success mean to you?
I think it's weirder that so often such critical bits still are the makeshift unoptimized first version. But I know how it works in the real world, it's good enough and there are no reported bugs, so don't touch it until you have implemented all these features and fixed all these issues....
> There are some things I still don't get about git. And I still find myself with some weird commits that look like I'm committing what other people just committed (because my tree was behind theirs/HEAD, and I had commits that happened and then I had to pull in order to push...I still don't know how to avoid that, other than always pulling immediately before doing any commits and then pushing immediately after committing, which feels clunky).

Git pull --rebase?
The meaning behind work placements: What my work placement taught me.
The importance of gaining work experience is currently on the rise. work experience is important. There have been debates on whether it is preferred to apply for placements during university, or to wait after graduating. Some courses include a placement year and obviously some do not. Either way, I do believe it is beneficial to gain an insight into the profession that you aspire towards.
I, Glasshole: My Year With Google Glass
> Now, I'm unsure of American trademark law, but I understand it's a "use it or lose it" styled setup. Correct? Well, they took four years to challenge them, if it went to court, and subpoenaed information shows that they knew about yourather.com for years, would that work against them?

It can do. I imagine it'd also affect any damages awarded.
12 Life Achivements to Unlock
I see where you're coming from, but there are lots of things you could put in that category: food, water, warm clothes, energy for heating and cooking, etc etc. Should no-one working in any of these industries be entitled to no more than minimum wage? I think most people would say no, and I think most people would agree that the profit motive has made all of these industries more efficient, e.g. there were and are famines in countries where farmers can't make a profit, but very few in the West.
Thanks for following up. For what it's worth, you have a flawed view of Mortgage backed securities. By virtue of the mortgage behind it, it's a real product like a bond. It is the Credit Default Swap betting on mortgage (or corporate credit) performance that is insurance Against the mortgage backed security.

This is just nitpicking and doesn't alter your argument.
I definitely felt a sense of bitterness towards the rich:

>But it’s too much to ask bankers to justify the bonuses they sucked off the public teat.
>A culture that forbids employees from comparing salaries helps companies pay women and minorities less

I don't understand these people who are hostile towards "bankers" and "big businesses" as they call them. Usually they seem to blame poverty to their wealth, and failure to their success. You may not become wealthy studying to be an accountant but you sure as shit will more likely have a stable career than somebody trying to make it in the arts. Yet the accountant is now the enemy. Somebody founds a company and it starts making a lot of money, suddenly he is responsible for everyone around him having no money. This is our generation, no wonder they call us entitled.

I mean she even mentions the economic system being rigged but she can't see that it is precisely that which needs to change. Businesses and bankers are trying to make it, like everyone else. Don't complain about them then vote for Obama.
Pattern Recognition Fail: Experience of a 42 year-old female entrepreneur
Because it turns out Ng is doing a good job.

(Insider joke, "it turns out" is one of Ng's favourite phrases...)
ARIN allocated free IPv4 addresses almost exhausted
Recently there have been quite a few debates on the subject of solar/alternative-energy users feeding power back onto the grid .. and the latest story seems to be that power companies are attempting to fight off the impending doom of self-powered individuals by stating that 'it costs too much to update the grid to allow everyone to push to it, so these alternative-energy users should pay a hefty fee to upgrade the grid'.

Well, this story seems to point to the solution: put batteries in all the things! If its going to cost more to feed power back to the grid, then why not just make everything in your home store its own local power supply ..

To some extent, I'm already doing this - pretty much every electronic device in my house uses rechargeable batteries. So maybe the campaign by the utilities against feeding power to the grid is going to have the effect of pushing everyone to localise their power needs even further, and instead of pushing excess to an ageing, antiquated monopoly, us alternative-energy freaks are instead going to foster the creation of a heftier market for battery-protected devices. (I'd be quite happy to run my TV on battery power, if it only had one in it, like my laptops and cell phones and toothbrushes do ..)
I am not sure I understand what you're saying.

I know that getting a paper in a conference like this is not an achievement. However, I know lots of students who do not know this. I know faculty in Engineering colleges who do not know this. I know many people who actually pay money to get published in such conferences because they really believe it's an achievement.

Hence, this expose to improve awareness.

I am not sure how I have poorly represented the academic system and myself by doing that, so could you elaborate?
Man, I was obscenely happy when I discovered "git stash", and these jokers want to get rid of it. Not interested.
If they are in the minority they probably are not doing most of the rejection in computer science...

And if you really looked hard, you would see numerous initiatives from women.
This sort of "bending" of opcodes designed to make saving registers on the stack easier (MOVEM was a common part of most 68k functions' preamble) seems like it was a favorite trick:

http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2013-12-14-great-old-timey-gam...

(above ran on HN a couple weeks back)
On Defensive, JPMorgan Hired China’s Elite
It might be appropriate on reddit, on the street, in a TV debate, in your living room, Hyde Park speakers corner, but it is not on HN. These kinds of comments are discouraged here, it's in the posting guidelines.
Here's an interesting interview with Joe Duffy:

http://www.infoq.com/articles/Joe-Duffy-Safe-Parallelism
Show me some Daily Mail links then boy, because I haven't read them. In fact if I were going to guess what paper said "no nukes" I'd say the Grauniad. India's policy of "guns not butter" cannot be justified given the very real issues facing their population.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns_versus_butter_model

What is the Queen Elizabeth? I'm glad you asked. It's a carrier that will come into service at some point in the future and we could not afford to keep a carrier capability going in the meantime. FACT. It's a class of 2 ships, one of which will be mothballed as soon as it is built as we cannot afford to operate it. FACT. The project is ongoing because penalty clauses mean it would cost too much to cancel it. FACT. The aircraft that will operate from it are the second choice as we couldn't afford to fit catapults. FACT.

Shall I go on?