skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
" couldn't you spend $9 billion on lobbying to end this whole disaster of a patent system forever?"

No.
It wouldn't even help.
Can folks please get over the idea that just throwing X dollars into lobbying somehow will magically get them what they want from congress.

Especially not when you have other tech giants on the other side.
I think you're extrapolating a bit too much. First off, those who are regulating are not those who founded tech startups. Additionally, if the general startup credo is "Move fast and break things", well, people shouldn't be surprised if they get fined.

If these schools are charging $17K tuitions and are being fined a possible $50K, that seems like a bit of a slap on the wrist. Furthermore, a lot of these regulations are in place for a reason -- and if startups want to break regulations, then they well know they're getting into shady territory. This is hardly "nanny state" behavior -- a good deal of these infractions are warranted (FDA's shutdown of 23andme, transportation on Uber and Lyft), but it varies on a case-per-case basis. I'd much rather live in a place that aired on the side of too cautious rather than just let random folk start whatever they want, causing harm to those around them.

In this case in particular, I'm glad they're regulating this stuff. We see randoms every day applying to work at our startup who have finished these hack-bootcamp things, and they frankly just don't have what it takes to work in a professional environment.
In this case, I think the point is to protect people from being hurt financially. As best I can tell, he's essentially trying to make sure that schools live up to certain standards.
Are you by chance, a complete moron? Wait a minute...
Um, no offense, but do you have any idea what insurance companies are really all about? That sounds, well, crazy to me (as someone with a) a serious medical condition and b) who used to work for an insurance company).
That they even focus on programming languages for candidates, seems misplaced.

When I tell people I am a software engineer, they inevitably ask me what programming language I use. I use the right language for the job. In the past 5 years I've just happened to use C, C++, C#, Python, Perl, shell, AWK, Fortran, m4, and several assembly languages. The language is just a way of expressing something which needs to get done. If necessary, I could learn a new language for a new job.

I'd rather hire a candidate who is able to find and use the right programming language for a job, teaching themselves if necessary, than a candidate with competencies in a given language.

It's always a matter of cost -- what is the quickest and most productive way, now and in the future, to deliver what the customer needs? The costs factor in the decision of which language to use.

The fixation with specific programming languages seems to be misplaced.

It also seems slightly insulting to say that if you haven't had prior experience writing code in a specific language, then you are not a good candidate for the job. Some of us can learn new languages quickly.

For example, I had over 20 years of C experience before I learned C++ on the job through self-learning. I was not hired as a C++ expert, but for broader experience. C++ just happened to be the best language for the project, so I learned it, all the way to template metaprogramming. Before I left the company, I was the goto person for C++ language questions, which is ego boosting in a way, but is not where I wanted my career to go. I did not want to become a language goto person where everyone sent their C++ template compilation error messages. C++ is just a means to an end.

Even if the job requires competency in a specific language because it is the best language for that job, or because there has already been a lot of code invested in that language, a generalist who is able to learn a new language is better than a specialist in one language.

The only time I'd want a specialist in a particular language would be if they were working on a compiler or interpreter for that language, where expert knowledge of the language, and not merely programming competence in the language, is required.

The question should be: Are you hiring a translator competent in a specific language, or are you hiring a problem-solver who can write in a variety of languages and who can learn new ones appropriate for the problem at hand?

Most programming jobs are the latter.
Not "for any reason".

Please edit your commment for correctness:

"""
General

"confidential patient information may be processed for medical purposes in the circumstances set out in the Schedule"
"""
Porsche's firt car was an electric carriage
Come to Seattle. It's a tech... nirvana. ;)

Liberal social policies (pot, marriage, choice) but fiscal conservatism (no income tax). Seattle has NIMBYism, but much less so than the bay. Get this: when rents went up, they built more apartments, and lots of them - what a concept!

South Lake Union has turned into this amazing place with incubators and Amazon and Vulcan and Bio Tech all around. Amazon, a major US tech company, has a downtown campus surrounded by apartments and places to eat! Wow! Why is that rare? No need to get mad at Google's busses that shuttle workers off to the sticks -- just put the jobs next to the people and existing transit. There are also local VCs and angels too -- but if you need to raise in SF/SV, it's just an hour away.
New 3D printer can print in carbon fiber
Honest question: Do they similarly attempt to regulate "learn to camp" [literal] camps? Do they go after/regulate GSUSA or BSA camps?

Since they are asserting that these are "post-secondary education" things, does that mean that organizations targeted at children are safe? Are organizations like Hacker Scouts in the clear?
you lost me at wearing a suit...
This seems a rather odd implementation detail to burden the user with.

Why don't you just use a hash of the filename for the partition key, so all files are distributed randomly regardless of their name?

Is there an advantage for amazon or for the user in having S3 files cluster up by filename by default?
Yea--the only reason I even know about Moto X is because I
was looking for a cheap data plan, and stumbled upon the phone at rebublic wireless. My point is I agree--it takes time.
Best move all year for Google.

Owning Moto's handset business was a goiter on Google, and the lack of clarity on Google's intentions might have been necessary to extract maximum value from this sale, but it was very bad in every other way.
When things begin at 0, it's often because they're abstracting an offset baked into the data structure - array[0] is 0 steps from the start of the array, array[4] is 4, etc.

Databases aren't storing things based on offsets, they're mystical and strange under the hood (by design - we worry about the schema, the database engine worries about the implementation). IDs are meant to be unique and that's about it. As mentioned by someone else, it's probably best if we don't use a value like 0 that can be misinterpreted.
You could ask your boss if you can test it via re-running that fateful command ...
I am sorry but I have to eat you.

?
They are doing the same thing that Devry was. They are making up statistics about job placement to justify the high tuitions. This should be punishable by the state.

99% placement is impossibly high.
This. What else was to be said? Really, what else could you say? "I'm sorry" Are you though? "You are a really talented worker" like that matters?

The relationship is a business one. Don't get confused. You are gone. You care about when, your shit on their computers, and money. Why spend a week laying people off when you can do it in two minutes? I have faith in the new management yet.
Because if treatment gets cheaper they have less business?
Developing Good Software is Damn Hard
FDC For Art News And Books
On board
I am currently a senior at Hack Reactor, and I can vouch for the high quality of education and job prep that HR gives its students. The figures that HR mention are real, and we have students who are now working at places like Google.

For more information, refer to this quora post: http://www.quora.com/Hack-Reactor/What-are-some-suspected-re...
Reading the headline I was like WTF that sounds like government run a muck. Then I got to this part...

"The programs typically last 10 to 12 weeks. Potential recruits are often told that they have a shot at a job or internship at a competitive tech company like Facebook or Google. Tuition costs vary widely. At Hackbright Academy, it’s $15,000 for a 10 week program. Full scholarships are available, and students who land a job at a company in the Hackbright network can request a partial refund. At Hack Reactor, where tuition costs over $17,000, 99 percent of students are offered a job at companies like Adobe and Google. The average salary is over six figures, Phillips told me."

To sum up these companies are charging a lot of money (more than college tuition) while at the same time advertising extraordinary results "99% job placement" with the likes of Google and Adobe. I'm guessing that some of them are making false advertising claims with respect to the chances of landing a job and that is why there is scrutiny here. There was a similar case with cooking schools not long ago also in CA[0] After reading that paragraph I'm a lot more skeptical of these companies.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/06/culinary-school-gra...
I agree with you but Patch was launched in December 2007 so I doubt they have these kind of employees.
An example would be nice.
So is selling accounts in MMOs etc. Doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
That would not be my first choice for an example of successful government regulation...
Idaho bill would protect businesses refusing service on religious grounds
So the UK govt aren't even claiming that this data is public information, and charging a processing fee for it -- the govt is claiming that citizen's personal health information is owned by the goverment with privileges to restrictively license it to commercial customers!
Does anyone have experience with Reduced Redundancy Storage on S3?

How often do you lose files? Do you run a daily job to check in on them?
> Fantastic post with really helpful tips. Thanks a lot for that.

Thanks!

> I really want to read the details on the spot instance setup for a web service. Do you have a quick summary for that?

I don't have anything written up to point to but the idea is to have the spot instances dynamically register themselves with an ELB on startup. As long as they stay up (ie. spot price is below your bid) you get incredibly cheap scaling for your web service. The ELB will automatically kick out instances that get terminated as they will fail their health checks. Combine this with a couple regular (ie. non spot instances) and you get a web service that scales cheaply when spot prices are low and gradually degrades the QOS for your users when it gets more expensive.

I've got a couple other topics in the works first, but I should the write up for that one up pretty soon too. Haven't gotten around to adding an email signup form to my site yet (need to do that...) so shoot me a mail if you want to notified when the full post is up. Email is in my profile.
Ayn Rand's opinions don't fit into a hybrid social system like ours. It can only be rationalized in a communist or other totalitarian society.

Can you imagine a corporation with unlimited power that is free to do anything it pleases?

We need government to regulate predatory practices. It would be great if government would step up and regulate healthcare costs and credit card providers a bit more harshly.
Thanks for sharing—some good lessons learned in there! I love that you posted this as a comment on HN…it is worthy of it's own blog post.
molly-guard is an good way to prevent this - forces you to type in the hostname of the machine you are trying to halt / restart etc.

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man8/molly-guard....
We don't know what patents google is retaining, so it's unclear whether they're FRAND or truly valuable.

Also, I've followed Nilay's post on several of these patent issues; he's either wrong or he sensationalizes to fit his narrative. I don't think he's very credible, even with a J.D.
No, that's not the case. You pay for the cluster by the hour.
Jeez the article itself contradicts the linkbait headline.

“Our primary goal is not to collect a fine. It is to drive them to comply with the law,” said Russ Heimerich, a spokesperson for BPPE. Heimerich is confident that these companies would lose in court if they attempt to fight BPPE.

Heimerich stressed that these bootcamps merely need to show that they are making steps toward compliance: “As long as they are making a good effort to come into compliance with the law, they fall down low on our triage of problem children. We will work with them to get them licensed and focus on more urgent matters,” Heimerich said.
As far as target audience for this, $183/month is a pittance. From their product site:

"Amazon Redshift is a fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service that makes it simple and cost-effective to efficiently analyze all your data using your existing business intelligence tools."

That to me screams "enterprise" and "big data" and all sorts of other silly buzz words. Your average startup is probably not going to need this, but their target audience may view that $183/month base price tag favorably.
Sorry but that was hilarious.
But testosterone.
I did some calculations and Californians also pay more in income tax than we do in Ontario, Canada, except we get socialized healthcare and our banks are fiscally conservative. So many things wrong with California, I'm in no rush to move to SF like other the other Canadian tech kiddies. Plus the value of the USD has been declining quickly, makes for nice salary arbitrage (roughly +9% in pay last month).
I didn't do this, but was the one who figured out what happened. I guy wrote an installation utility for internal use to automate certain software setups. Part of the program had to clear out a certain directory, where you had to enter the name of the directory. Problem was, if you leave that field blank (the default), it converted into c:\ and people would run it, and it would wipe out their hard drive. After finding the problem, I told only the guy who did it, and no one else. I didn't have the heart to destroy his reputation by telling everyone what had done it. I SHOULD HAVE let the chips fall where they may, because I needed to be sure NO ONE ever ran that EXE "utility" again. They figured it out pretty quick, but nobody really knew the true problem but me and the guy who wrote the bug!
>when rents went up, they built more apartments, and lots of them - what a concept!

We'll see if that's still true with Murray in office (hopefully it will be).
The regulator wants them to follow the law, as written, by the CA Assembly. Terrible title considering the regulator simply wants them to follow the law -- and says so in the article. Don't blame the regulator here.

Most state's laws for career schools are intended to protect people against scams. So, yeah, a few truck driving schools ripped some GED holding people off. We all suffer including these guys in CA.
> As opposed to what, speculation-based medicine?

Well, yes. The idea is that "speculation-based medicine" (better known as "alternative medicine") is, despite the name, not actually medicine.

Hence the Tim Minchin joke: "You know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? ...Medicine."
(December 1963)
In MSSQL it's arbitrary - you set the start number and the step size, but (1, 1) is the default.
Pretty cool list, and all three look like things you could expand your earnings on with some moderate extra work. Just out of curiosity, What subjects do your non fiction books cover?
I was responding to "America doesn't produce anything"...

All of those industries produce, and all of them make significant money, and the GDP backs that up. Producing stuff while going into debt, is still producing stuff, so your reasoning about debt has no relevance.

So maybe you should take your own advice?

Just for the record: I think America is a shit hole, and I'm generally anti-capitalist. But it's nonsense to pretend they don't produce anything.
Right, you "can't". Just like developers on Facebook's Graph API "can't" use social graph data for unapproved purposes. Because they signed an agreement.

Contracts are not the same as controls.
Three year old coffee wouldn't taste very good.
I am currently a student at Hack Reactor and I can assure you that the average salary students are offered coming out of the program are a lot higher than 60-80k, and the statistics are real.

I've been very impressed with the program and highly recommend it.

If you're inclined, please refer to this Quora post for additional details:

http://www.quora.com/Hack-Reactor/What-are-some-suspected-re...
This quip really annoys me. It only seems true because of a confusion or blurring of two very distinct concepts. There is tested treatment, which has been tested and come out effective. This can be put in dichotomy with untested or failed treatment. That is logical. Some treatments have been tested and passed some haven't. This is an entirely different dichotomy to that of mainstream and alternative or complementary medicine. Many forms of medicine have been thoroughly tested and come out effective and are not offered by pharmacies and national health services. Unless you want to claim that absolutely all proven effective treatment is offered by mainstream medical providers then this has to be acknowledged. Then on the other side there is a large array of medicine that is provided by mainstream medical providers that has not been proven effective. Many antidepressants consistently score the same or worse than a placebo in blind tests.

The distinction between alternative medicine and mainstream medicine is not proof, but the provider. So while Minchin may be eloquent he is confusing terms to make his point.
"That's weird, this UPDATE shouldn't have taken so long-oh shit."

That right there is one of the worst feelings in the world. I imagine that everyone on HN just felt it with you as they were reading it!

Totally agree that the higher-ups were responsible for not putting better roadblocks in place to prevent this type of thing from happening.
Did you not get his point or you were you not convinced it was a good idea?
"more appeasement of status signaling stuff", "Social games waste so much of many people's lives"

"appeasement"? Seeking social status is what primates do. It's not even "human nature", it's lower level than that. It's not cultural, it's primate genetics.

The disconnect in the conversations in this thread? Two groups talking past each other? It's because some people are talking about how homo sapiens behave and some people are talking about how homo economicus [1] behaves.

It's not like you are wrong, it's just two conversations happening at once. One is based in reality and another based in fantasy.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus
There could be an additional benefit to Google of having an Android maker that is also strong in the enterprise world (complementing Samsung's consumer strength).
That's exactly what I'm thinking. If you're going to charge tuition in excess of what existing community colleges do, I think you need to expect to be regulated like one.

I just don't see how the cost structure of putting a dozen students and an instructor in a room with laptops for a week comes to ~$20000. That seems pretty suspicious.
For the first quote, you could also see this as entering a period of rule by corporations and businesses, where government is the only means for people to combat this. To quote Chomsky, in his most recent book On Anarchism: "Well, we have this huge rabid raccoon running around... it's called corporations. And there's nothing in the society right now that can protect people from that tyranny except the federal government... So, find, I think we ought to get it to do the things it can do - if you can get rid of the raccoon, great, then let's dismantle the federal government. But to say 'Okay, let's just get rid of the federal government as soon as we can', and let the private tyrannies take over everything... that's just kind of outlandish in my opinion.'"

Also, the regulations in this case are to protect consumers, not businesses. The businesses are the ones at risk of making outlandish claims (i.e. "99% of us go to work at Adobe and Google!")
It seems that in this case we are talking about "personal confidential data", which includes both.

Their main page, http://www.hscic.gov.uk/dlesaac , states

> Personal confidential data is data in which individuals are clearly identified, or there is a high risk of individuals being identified. This includes patient identifiable data, such as: NHS number, Name, Adress, [...] Personal confidential data also includes sensitive data which may include items such as: Racial or ethnic origin, Political opinions, Physical or mental health condition, [...]
"We have students who are now working at places like Google" is nothing like the same as "99% of our graduates receive job offers from companies like Adobe and Google."
Regulation for this exists.

It's called free speech and the internet. Reputation online is practically everything to the credibility of workshops or services like this. It's a real wonder that people can still use their own minds without a gauntlet for approval. There will come day for that given the technology. It'll be done under the best of intentions, of course. A fool and his money are soon parted. But so too is a fool from his freedom and choice.
I said something earlier like this, but this is a much better analogy.
I wasn't under the impression that alternative medicine was the only thing that was not "evidenced based" - that while clearly it's an extreme example, there is plenty of traditional medicine that doesn't make the cut. Wikipedia seems, at a skim, to concur: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence-based_medicine
Google Is Selling Its Mobility Unit to Lenovo for About $3 Billion
Except no gigabit internet. Good luck trying to fuel a tech boom with slow-ass comcast internet.
"If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it."
whether the regulator has been paid off or not. seriously though,

barriers to entry, the number of competing firms, anti competitive behavior etc.

Low barriers to entry mean that if existing firms collude to artificially raise prices a new competitor may easily enter the market to undercut them.

A larger number of firms makes collusion less likely (see OPEC for example). Their attempts to collude are often met with one member state undercutting the agreed upon price and getting most of the business.

Other factors are also in play such as whether the industry is most efficiently served by a single entity as in a "natural monopoly"
Me too. It probably doesn't include students who drop out. Also, it all depends what "companies like" means.
> Can you imagine a corporation with unlimited power that is free to do anything it pleases?

Quite easily! It is called a "government".
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