skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The most common example of this is a lawyer or banker. They craft nothing. They care not about who they offer their service to but instead care about how much money they will make.

You could say this about almost any profession. There are bankers who want to give people a chance to succeed, and there are inventors and artists driven solely by profit. To say whether or not a person can "contribute to better the condition of humanity" on the basis of their job is very short-sighted. If the only job someone can get is a dull, 9-5 office job, does that suddenly make them an insignificant person incapable of making a difference?
Absolutely. Bright people are who I would hire. And bright people don't need state regulation.

Caveat emptor.
http://voicechatapi.com/p120caoh1/?share
> "I don't see how licensing could keep anyone from being a (successful) self taught programmer"

It is one more barrier that does not currently exist. Surmountable? Sure. But nevertheless yet another obstacle.
That magic is public accountability and elections.
Make Your Own Acura NSX With a 3D Printer
Does anyone know what the qualifying criteria is here? I'm teaching coding to kids after school in California, no idea if this applies to me.
No one is "pretending to represent the government." He simply said he works for the TSA. As an employee at the lowest level, the last thing he is doing is representing the organization's policy or philosophy.
That reminds me, its been a while since I've donated to EFF.

https://supporters.eff.org/donate
/me drops the MUMPS reference manual on the table

That whole language is one long-running WTF.
David Hilbert, the great mathematician, was told that one of students had decided to study poetry instead of mathematics.

"Good, he did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician," he responded.
American drinking water is perfectly safe to drink basically anywhere in the country. Many places on earth don't have safe drinking water due to a lack of infrastructure and regulations mandating it. The expectation is that those people will buy water or attempt to purify it themselves, whereas in this country we're expected to be able to consume water delivered to us without a fear of getting ill.

Regulation with the intention of saving lives is not a bad thing. I doubt anybody would say we should abolish driving laws and driver's license requirements because they're "regulations that limit innovation." Saying we should have safe drinking water in no way limits innovation or freedom either, yet some people seem to think we need to scrap this.
That's a shame, because you missed the qualifying remainder of that sentence, which that PHP isn't awful, but rather that the code looked janky. This makes me nervous when part of my mission is privacy. It should make your nervous, too.

Some of the 3rd party plugins, such as the Music extension (which was included with ownCloud 5) looks like a security nightmare.

PHP by itself has had some security problems, but combine that with poor programming practices and I avoid it. Again, especially when privacy and security is key. But, I get the impression that you're just here for a PHP battle, so I'll bow out.
This similarly happened in Canada.

http://business.financialpost.com/2013/06/24/ontario-investi...

Days later, the Minister of Training, Colleges, and Universities Brad Duguid got involved and let the program continue under a careful watch, after some restructuring.

http://readwrite.com/2013/07/03/canadian-coding-camp-bitmake...
I was using the term "prosecute" figuratively. But thank you for your pedantry. Sometimes I forget I'm on HN and comments like yours remind me again.
I think that's a given. I don't think any school has ever claimed to take someone from 0 to developer in 3 months. That's unrealistic.

There's obviously a baseline below which any short, high intensity training course isn't viable.

A similar analogue would be baseline fitness levels expected out of candidates at, well, real bootcamps. If you can't jog more than a block or do 1 pushup, chances of making it through are relatively slim.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reasoning
The author argues against the pursuit of wealth on the grounds that the pursuers do not help people.

In fact, being rich is the single best way to help people.

Being rich expands your reach as an individual. It allows you to fund initiatives that revitalize entire communities: building homes, providing medicine, contributing to science, technology, arts and culture. Bill Gates has fundamentally changed more people's lives than a million middle-class volunteers combined.

If your goal is to help people on a large scale and in a concrete, measurable way, getting rich should be one of your first priorities in life.
If you look too far into the light, you may go blind.

Hard work and iteration is what led to the creation you speak of: the Automobile, Electricity, Artificial Light.

Children's creativity is, for the most part, aimless and inconsistent. None of the men you mention were by any stretch of the imagination, childlike, though Edison could have been following "the light."

Also, including Ford in your theory, for example, someone who used thugs to break unions with baseball bats, also does not speak to lightness.

Being childlike is great if you aren't interested in making money and want to spend your life giving your ideas away, but you'll need a lawyer if you want to make and keep the money from work you've done to make your ideas a reality.
"Sorry none of the water suppliers in your area provide water safe for human consumption. Good luck!"

Now that would be helpful. But sure, you can just move elsewhere. It's going to be easy selling your old house given that there is no clean water available.

Edit: As a bonus, health insurance companies should deny you coverage because you live in a high risk area.
Rackspace’s Policy On Contributing To Open Source
Once we get some union teachers in there, I'm sure these schools will be tip top!
I think it's sad, mostly.

The rug is really cute. I hadn't seen it before; I wish they'd kept it.
I built this. Happy to take any questions. Code is hosted here - http://github.com/plivo/voicechat/
What happens to a company if it's not doing the right thing and is not providing me with a good service (in that case, consumer protection service)? It first loses money because I stop paying immediately and then it goes out of business pretty fast if I spread the word and people agree the service is bad.

What happens to a politician if he doesn't keep his promise or if an agency doesn't perform as it should? Nothing. A politician keeps his office until the next election and the agency stays in business, possibly with the very same people in charge of it. Can I stop paying taxes? No. I go to jail if I do.
While I agree with nearly every assertion you make, I'm still hazy on what 'good' is. Surely the fact that so many people find PHP the most productive language they could've worked with, and produce mountains and mountains of working code that is at least mostly reliable - don't those qualities alone make it in some sense good?

Then again I think some pop music is good, so I'm starting from a point where I don't necessarily think being popular makes something mediocre.

That said, I really hate being forced to write in PHP because of its complete inelegance, so much so that I have left all my legacy PHP in a burning garbage heap and ran screaming to Scala, where type safety is a given. But as I'm being forced to move back to PHP for a project because of a client's demands I'm trying to look at the silver lining of programming with it. Sometimes it takes some squinting but it is possible to appreciate what PHP has accomplished.
That's exceedingly high. Did they have prior work experience in tech?
Sounds like they were selling them at a loss and decided to either move them into the add-on program, or remove them from the site all-together. Which is is better?
> No. Caveat emptor. The State should only get involved in the case of outright fraud - you pay your money, and they don't actually run the class, or the class is taught by a 6th grader or something.

This sounds frighteningly arbitrary. So if I pay for a class that will teach me to be a programmer and I get a class that has no realistic hope of accomplishing that, it's caveat emptor, while if I'm in exactly the same situation but the teacher is a sixth grader, caveat emptor doesn't apply? How do we determine when a case of ripping people off is excused by caveat emptor?
PHP doesn't have annotations.

The framework you are using may be emulating them, though.
$75k is about what the typical new college graduate with no industry experience gets as a salary for any major CS company in the bay area.

For a program that does 9-6 PM 5 days a week for 10 weeks, that's ~8 hours (not including lunch) x 5 days x 10 weeks = 400 total hours. That's about the equivalent class time to 8 semester-long CS courses.
Children are great for the wide-eyed sense of wonder.

But there's something more than a little puerile in a society that only values that particular sense of wonder. A five year old might indeed be more valuable than me today but I suspect that come because he's far more easily directed by the candy and the fluffy bunnies.

On my Facebook feed, the cleverest quips generally come from those old and jaundiced enough to have an ample supply of double entendre and know how to use them. You can see lots of playfulness from the less-than-spritely and smooth-skinned then.
"You got 4 out of 5 answers correct. When you try this quiz with a sorry quiz-taker like you, that’s the result you’re going to get. [That's a joke, we think you did fine :)]"
If there is a demand for clean water at the price level where it is economically feasible to supply one, it will be supplied. If people prefer to spend less money and have dirty water, they made their choice too. Your case is completely hypothetical.
There exists "for profit" schools that take young, naive students and don't end up giving them an education or value equal to the life-time of indebtedness that they bestow.

Regulation of post-secondary educations programs, be they "game design", "communications", or "hacker" schools, is a a reasonable idea.
Personally, I like that the federal government has the authority to shut down food production plants if they are deemed unsafe. Consumers rarely have full information, and individuals are demonstrably bad at evaluating long-term risk.
One month left till I hand in my thesis :)
(Bachelor of Engineering in Mechatronics)
PHP doesn't have annotations.

The framework you are using may be emulating them, though. By parsing docblocks. Hence why it feels like that.
California Lags Behind in Child Care Oversight
Does anyone have a rough census of what top websites use? I've had this same reaction, but more than once with PHP: I know now that at least Box, Wikipedia, and Facebook use PHP.
It looks like this is the registration form the bootcamps would need to fill out (plus a $3500 fee): http://www.bppe.ca.gov/forms_pubs/renewal_nonaccredited.pdf

It seems like it's basically a whole lot of bureaucracy the schools would need to go through to ensure that they're not selling snake oil, haven't been involved in felonies, etc. Nothing too absurd, but an unnecessary hassle.

Perhaps I'm too much of a free-market loving, meritocratic startup junkie, but all of this seems completely unnecessary. If "colleges" like University of Phoenix et. al can make it through this process, it isn't really going to rule anything out. It introduces a lot of record keeping, forces some self-regulatory procedures, and implements other things that will only slow down the classes.

Are coding bootcamps perfect? By no means. Trying to pack a basic understanding of programming into a three-month course is by no means an easy task (and debatably an impossible one). That having been said, it gets the fundamentals in place so that someone can start to learn on the job, and the demand so highly outweighs the supply that I've seen recruiters and startup founders literally lining up to talk to people who have been coding for three months. It says something when the people that annoy programmers the most are recruiters - people trying to give them a job. You don't see recruiters being hated by people with English degrees.

Sure, a coding bootcamp is no CS degree from Stanford; I don't think anyone would pretend like it is. But it gets you into the coding world as quickly as you can, and the more programmers the better. The people I've seen go through bootcamps would not claim to be the best programmers in the world, but they get their foot in the door and start getting paid to learn. The companies hopefully realize that's who they're hiring, and make their hiring decisions accordingly. I can't see any need for this type of regulation whatsoever.

There's a need (or at least a market), people are willing to pay, they seem to be able to find jobs, and employers are becoming smart with regard to how to properly find/hire/train programmers coming out of bootcamps. Regulation like this, while possibly well-meaning, will only slow things down.
No one is talking about banning a perfectly reasonable enterprise.

Talk about strawmen.
What is it like to work at Clinkle?
Yeah, on second thought the "barely" in "barely more charitable" is going to far. Universities definitely do the same thing (though to the credit of universities, they are up front (or even brag) about having stringent admission standards).

Your standard university CS department has no problem accepting freshman who have never even heard of HTML, but they are also operating on a different timescale. In universities it is reasonable to spend a few months getting freshman up onto their feet. When the entire program is a few months, you have to operate differently.
Yea, I thought the same when seeing the fine.
Based on eekfuh's first comment, no.
How much "competition" is offered by the effective duopoly that exists in most places for broadband?
Facebook used to just be a profile system. You put up information about yourself and hoped other people would look at it. People could write on your wall (timeline now) and you could write on theirs.

People at your university and your friends could see your profile. Nobody else could.

I remember spending hours looking at other peoples profiles. They're a computer science major? I'm a computer science major. What kind of music do they like? WOW this is interesting.

They also had this really fascinating "How you're connected" feature which would give you a list of friends that connected you to that person. You could pick almost any random person at the school (I went to a school with almost 40,000 students) and you would almost always be connected to them through your friends.

MySpace, while offering many similar features, was annoying to use. Oh great, white text on a yellow background and emo music blasting on page load. It got to a point where I wouldn't ever click my friend's MySpace pages because I just knew it was going to be terrible.

The exclusivity of it to college students was cool too. My friends at schools that didn't have facebook yet would be jealous of all the cool connections and groups we made on facebook that they couldn't do. Then, when it rolled out to their campus, they would do the same.
It's hardly pedantry when it comes to legal documents... The first amendment does not protect against figurative prosecution, at least to my knowledge, so your premise is off.

I realize you probably feel the actual text of the first amendment is needless pedantry, but what it actually says is congress shall pass no law...
sigh

I once read that Americans over-estimate children and under-estimate age (and expertise in general). This shows so well.

Can children enjoy food? Music? Play music properly? Pursuit passions? Spending days glued to a book? Of course, make it a series of books. Obviously, I just listed the obvious activities. Can children feel the full depth of betrayal? Full happiness of unexpected return? Full hopelessness in face of impossible? Full excitement when attaining things once thought impossible?

Children are stupid, shallow, short-sighted, undeveloped. They know nothing save the most primitive urges. They do nothing save screaming for help. They are, in short, very young humans who need growth. They are neither angels nor saints, but CHILDREN.

Wake up, please, from your disrespect and overly-spoiling of children.
That's very nicely done. Could be an easy website support option.
I'm conflicted. On the one hand, it seems like a Randian dystopia, with the government stepping in to prevent you from telling somebody else how to do something. Want to tutor your cousin? Fill out 80 pages of paperwork, register as a school, submit to time-consuming performance reviews and curriculum evaluations.

On the other hand, the law is addressing a real problem, and as the article points out, these schools are charging top dollar, and making some very big promises. If nobody is calling them on it, or if somebody is, but they wield no authority, then we have a problem. I'm not a libertarian, and I have no problem addressing these things on a case-by-case basis.

The problem I see is that the law seems to be very broad, and could be applied arbitrarily to private study sessions just as well as the diploma-mill-minus-the-diploma situation we're seeing here. I think the law needs to be more targeted towards the problematic aspects of these schools, like grandiose claims in their advertising.

If the standard truth-in-advertising laws are too toothless to apply here, then inspections are in order. But they should only apply to schools that make the kinds of claims that triggered the crackdown in the first place.
And look at how many douchebags became lawyers. If we develop further into a technocratic society than we already are we will see people like Schmidt and suck dictating how our lives, rights and privacy evolves for their ability to make a profit.... Oh, wait....
BBM Messenger for Android 2.3 Gingerbread
By that logic, people shouldn't be allowed to vote either. Also if you don't allow people to learn to make choices, they never will, always relying on the nanny state.
Hello,

Not yet, but could you send us an example?
>In fact, being rich is the single best way to help people.

Having empathy is key. Being rich alone doesn't help anyone.

In the capitalist state that we live in perhaps you are right, but if there wasn't such an economic divide in the world, that may not stick. In order to get rich in the capitalist state you essentially have to displace capital from others, who could be the very people that you end up helping in the end.
>GOD is REAL, unless declared INTEGER.

I'm stealing the hell out of this.
Facebook's Hack lang is open source, though not publicly documented. This commit points out a lot of the implementation and test files: https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/commit/db9577b1409b74293fd9...
There are probably areas in this country that it would be more profitable for the water companies to stop serving. I think that it is a good thing that they cannot do that.
What's old is new again.

Bootcamps remind me an awful lot of the certification mills of 15 years ago. It's the same 2 months or so and $10K or so with the suggestion that a well-paying job is waiting on the other side, just swap out MCSE / CCNA for Ruby / CSS.

I'm sure the cert mills launched some great admins, but I know from experience that they shoveled through plenty of people who had no real aptitude or enthusiasm diluting the field and completely devaluing those skills.

It took years and surely a number of painful interviews for those people to filter back out.

It's hard not to expect that bootcamps will play out the same way.
Scientists condemn retraction of GMO study
Full-time but non-tenured is different than adjunct. Adjuncts are not full time and can be terminated after any given semester. Full-time non-tenured professors have a full-time job teaching and an office. You could expand junior faculty positions without expanding the ranks of tenured professors.
Retrospective: Google Wave
This video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDu2A3WzQpo) discusses what Google Wave was and what problems it was trying to solve.

Were these problems of group/threaded conversations real problems, and if so, what now has solved those problems, if any?
Is this a rhetorical question?

There's a delicious irony in the phrasing of that!

Yes, I really do want to know. Though I am a biased listener as my confidence in the motives of state officials is not high and I'm not a great believer in set curriculums or standardised testing.

I know when I'm in the presence of a strong educator and I'd rather just spend time with them, talking and listening to what they have to say.

You can get the details on tech by RTFM - it's the direction, the opinion, the experience and talent that is valuable to be around.
You realize this is precisely the mandate of BPPE, the agency in question, right? They're a consumer fraud agency, part of the California Department of Consumer Affairs, and their rules include such nefarious things as...

"The institution shall employ administrative personnel who have the expertise to ensure the achievement of the institution's mission and objectives and the operation of the educational programs."

"An institution shall not promise or guarantee employment, or otherwise overstate the availability of jobs upon graduation."

You can read them for yourself: http://www.bppe.ca.gov/enforcement/institution_minreq.shtml
I think it's garden-variety skepticism of a rather broad claim. "Behaviorists" ticks my charlatan-radar. I'm not arguing for perfect - how do we even know it's good? And I would like to point out that I sought out some sources on the subject, which points to lots of research.
It cites a "legal department", which is probably enough to make it pretty Kafkian as well
printf (and others in that family of functions) are only exploitable if you do something like `printf(user_controlled_str)` (possibly with extra arguments).

Basically, don't let the user control the very first argument (which would allow them to add format specifiers like %d or %x) and you're safe.
Firefox Sync: Then and Now and Soon
Ask HN: where can I find list of YC 2014 accepts? (and previous batches)?
Pardon the newbie question, but googling around didn't go anywhere - is there a list of YC companies by Year/batch/other?
This is incorrect in multiple ways.

- Apple says this because it doesn't want its trademarks to become common words ineligible for trademark protection (like what happened to xerox and kleenex). But it can't stop people from referring to things however they please; this is nothing more than a statement of how Apple wishes the world would work.

- If I say "I bought two Apple computers", Apple is still a noun, not an adjective.
One of the biggest reasons people sell private stock on the secondary market is because the want (or need, in the case they leave) to exercise options and pay the associated taxes. Early Twitter, Facebook etc... employees who left had the standard 90 days to exercise options. The good news is that an option exercise might only be $30k, the better news is the stock was worth $15 million the bad news is the tax bill was $6+ million - probably more than Mom or Uncle Willy could lend! Hence a stock sale. The other big reason people sell is life happens, i.e. after 5+ years earning $150k in the Bay Area doesn't buy a new house after you get married and have kids. I've done hundreds of deals and the reasons for selling are very consistent. But there are definitely issues with the proposed structure of Equidate. Happy to discuss with anyone larry@ebexchange.com
Someone already did: http://www.amazon.com/The-Fall-Faculty-Benjamin-Ginsberg/dp/...
Tiny editable jQuery Bootstrap spreadsheet
> By that logic

I wish people would stop using this phrase to mean "I can invent a chain of reasoning which leads to your conclusion and also to this ridiculous conclusion, but has no resemblance to any premise you've actually stated, and I'd like to pretend that that chain of reasoning was yours".