skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There isn't one reason.

I think a lot of people really underestimate the power of the Silicon Valley brand. Silicon Valley has over 60 years of history as being a place where tech companies come from. It has had nearly the same amount of history of venture capital investment. Just like the United States was branded as the place where roads were paved of gold, Silicon Valley is branded as the place where dreams become reality.

This is powerful. It means we draw in the young, the dreamers, the motivated, the intelligent, the networkers and (generally) the doers. We drain other areas of their talent. We drain entire countries of talent. Plus we have three world class universities with stringent entrance requirements that put out huge numbers of people that were literally surrounded by peers starting companies in fields that have easy financing (berkeley - tech/cleantech/biotech, ucsf - biotech, stanford - tech/cleantech). A few National Labs (Berkeley, Livermore and SLAC) and the NASA Ames research center didn't hurt either.

On top of that, we have an area where nearly everyone is a potential beta tester. We're talking about a population of 7 million people who all know someone in tech or related to tech that are willing to try out your random product. Who will talk about it in the coffee shop. There is a large enough initial user base in the bay area alone to get you over the network effects threshold which is important to a whole host of companies (not all of course).

The reason you don't see this in other places is because it took decades and decades to happen and several cultural anomalies were instrumental in it continuing. A big one was that startup founders who got lucky in the early days also didn't hoard their money. They reinvested it in the next generation of companies which really helped keep SV strong. They also tended not to move. Once you come here, you stay (your kids on the other hand are a different matter).
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Only one that I can think of, and a frequent one:

if (a == null) bla;

This checks for null and undefined.
Indeed, and it doesn't take much data crunching to realize that the vast majority of habitable space on the planet is in the northern hemisphere. No slight to Africa, S. America, Australia and parts of India, but most of us are up here in the North. Blame plate tectonics before you blame your white European overlords
Do you do a fluoride rinse? That can help to strengthen enamel.
Open 3D city platform ViziCities released on GitHub (uses OpenStreetMap)
It's not implemented by Airbus, the revision control is built into CATIA, the commercial software they use (made by Dassault Systemes).
If you can access $60k jobs after leaving high school, then pursuing a full-time degree will cost you at least 3x$60k + tuition.

This advice is specific to your situation and not my general advice:

If your assessment is accurate, and if you have options in the job market (you are not tied to a single generous employer, say), I would recommend you don't take a degree.

A degree is going to put you perhaps $300k (1 house) and several years in the hole. It's not obvious that you'll then have better access to the job market than you have now. It's even possible you would have worse access. For most employers, practical experience of work they need trumps college classes.

There is absolutely nothing stopping you from taking a degree later or taking one part-time if you decide that it's relevant to you.

As a final point, you should consider applying for both college and jobs, giving you a clearer choice of your available options.
Sigh. This doesn't seem slightly immoral to you guys?

This is a fairly common idea, and it usually gets shot down. I am surprised you guys made it this far into the process. Unless maybe there is some user opt-in model?

For example, do you know how much more expensive this is (e.g. Wh/Tflop) than traditional datacenter grid computing? Or, how you are essentially charging users without their knowledge? I'm sure the legal system will love that one.
How about this use case: I have a ChromeCast on my home network, but I want sandbox/log its traffic. I would want to write some logic to ignore video data, because that's big. But I want to see the metadata and which servers it's talking to. I want to see when it's auto-updating itself with new binaries and record them.

Is that a good use case for Snabb Switch, or is there is an easier way to accomplish what I want?
Earth's orientation in the galaxy isn't relevant when making maps of Earth's surface.
The new Pando: “Speaking truth to the new power”
There is nothing free about the market for cable & internet access in the US.
That's my thought exactly, if there were different "stores" to choose from, then they wouldn't have to make this kind of casual arbitrary impromptu policing. The current middle ground is bad for everybody.
Yes. The point of a degree is to ensure you learn enough about the right content/concepts without proceeding with gaping/gratuitous hold in your education. Self-taught certainly can work, but better that you have dozens of well-informed experts review every aspect of what you need to know. A degree also assures employers of the breadth & depth of your knowledge without having to deeply examine you themselves. Yes, the process isn't perfect, but it's better than the gross ignorance I've seen in some surprisingly well-placed people.

Now, if you're confident enough in your current talents, strike out into the workforce and earn what you can until you (A) can pay cash (yes, cash) for that degree, and (B) you can figure out where that cash will be best spent. You can also persuade some employers to pay for the degree, saving you a bundle.

Whatever you do, don't go into debt for it. Cash only. For everything, not just a degree.
Despite Protest, The USA Freedom Act Remains In Holding Pattern
I think that the author is a bit unfair to himself, in the conclusion. He wrote the following:

>"I think the single largest mistake we made was to not invest more time into OpenCNAM as it was growing. Instead of devoting time to other projects, we should have doubled down and focused on developing the product even more, and made it into the best possible product.

At the time, it seemed like a good idea -- but in retrospect, I believe that if we would have really focused on adding more features to the API service, cleaning up the user dashboard, and fixing some UI elements -- we could have won a lot more potential customers over."

While he acknowledges that this is only apparent in hindsight, he does not seem to give himself credit for diversifying his risk portfolio at the early stage, when success was uncertain. It may be that doubling down earlier would have put the business in a better situation now, but that does not mean the expected outcome of doubling down was better than the expected outcome of maintaining parallel projects.
It's interesting to see how little emphasis is placed on "Evernote, the product" on the homepage. More "Evernote, the ecosystem".
In-state tuition at my state flagship (Illinois) is $20,000. Factor in cost of living and various fees, and costs can easily run into the $30,000 to $40,000 per year range. Moreover, state funding for the university has fallen in recent years, meaning that financial aid is scarce and that tuition is perpetually rising.

If I recall correctly, the interest rate on Stafford loans is 3.4%. Government "Parent PLUS" loans and private loans are much higher. What's especially appalling is that the federal government actually uses student loans as a source of revenue. (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/ripping-off-young-...)

The cost is getting out of control.
Design Pattern: Blind Builder
This is a false dichotomy. I worked summers and part-time during the school year, my entire time in college. I had graduated with no debt, 4 years of book learning and 4 years of XP. Most of my fellow C-S students had internships paying $15-20/hr by their sophomore year, and almost all that wanted them by their junior year.

This is not to mention that outside of the coasts, unless you are freelancing or starting a startup, people hiring developers often require a degree (at least in hires with less 10 years XP).
How about ditch the management aspect and go with the open internet? Let everyone decide when and where they get their software. You know, let the people who own their computers actually control what's on them!
And don't forget the Wit Speech API if you want to be able to talk to your Skynet-automated home! https://wit.ai/blog/2014/02/12/speech-api
I do, but only every 3-6 months via a dentist's prescription.
I was about to move over to Gulp. Can you let me know why you prefer Broccoli over Gulp?
Which is effectively Quora's stance on this whole idea. Do you think this is useful? https://www.evernote.com/shard/s12/sh/8a16e553-3a10-476a-8f1...

EDIT: To answer your question - the only way you can make a well thought and clear decision is to implement the system yourself.
PayPal President Envisions Full Mobilization of E-commerce
Realistically that isn't much of an issue. If you are doing something at this level, you pick your hardware for the task. You don't need to support every random old dell PC someone wants to use like a general purpose OS has too (linux, the BSDs, etc). And of course, intel cards are not hard to find.
"I'm also quite worried about the debt load that a degree would require. I anticipate having to take out between $50,000 and $100,000 in loans to finance a degree."

You may want to consider if you can do better than that. My Bachelor's and Master's are from Michigan State University. There is little (though not quite zero) evidence to suggest that there are radically better programs out there, because so much of what you get out of a college depends on you. (I wish I'd done better, I certainly could have done worse. But I can definitely attest that top-tier != awesome skills; I've given interviews that are definite counterexamples.) Double check, because some state university programs do seem to be wastes of time, but by no means all of them.

College is an easy, but expensive, way to acquire certain skills that, yes, will indeed future-proof your career. It is easy in that you will be guided through a useful course of study; it is expensive in that it requires not only some money, but also a lot of time.

One way to resolve the matter is to try your best to work with a counselor to up the quality of what courses you take. While this is poorly advertised, a degree is ultimately a certification from the certifying body that you have completed their minimal course of study. The set of requirements they lay out front is their default answer, but they can give others. While they will probably be inflexible on the number of requisite credit hours, they're often quite flexible in terms of what those credit hours can really be, and in particular they can be quite flexible in terms of substituting harder courses for easier ones. Consider trying to skip over the intro courses, as that will particularly open up the more advanced tier earlier. Much of the real value of a college degree is in the higher level courses; if you can get there faster, go for it.

I'd honestly think about a dozen times about taking on $50,000-$100,000 in debt right now if that's really the only choice you can find, though. That's frankly catastrophic levels of debt at the beginning of a career. One nice thing about the computer career path is that you will be able to handle it, but even so it's a burden, and if you have any sort of life hiccup this level of debt can become a big problem. I'd seriously consider grabbing a job, doing my best to pocket as much cash as possible, and wait for the post-bubble-pop to get your formal education (taking the previous paragraph even more fully to heart at that point). You may also discover that you do indeed have the discipline to pick up the harder stuff on your own. (The touchstone for that, IMHO, is whether you can teach yourself how to build a compiler; if you can do that, you can probably self-educate just fine.) It's hard to be sure when and if the bubble will pop, so it's a risk, but at this point, so is taking on that amount of debt. Alas, there are no non-risk choices.

So, no quick & easy answers. I'd be suspicious of anyone in this thread who offers one. But the question becomes much easier if you can work out a way to take on substantially less debt, though.
Do it on-line.
> I'm trying to decide between enrolling in college to pursue a BS in Computer Science or entering directly into the workforce.

Do what I did and have it both ways: take a gap year before starting college. I was accepted to MIT's class of 2016 but I won't be joining until the class of 2018 (this coming fall) because I joined a startup in San Francisco. If you're as good as you say you are you'll be able to get a job, and most universities allow gap years without a problem.

> On balance, do you think pursuing a degree will be more lucrative in the long run?

Yes. There are also many other reasons to go to college. Let me know if you have any particular questions or if there's some way I can help.

EDIT: Let me recommend a gap year again for a different reason: it lets you put off your decision until you know more about working in the real world. It would be easy to decide to continue working after your gap year and never go to school. It also provides a nice "hedge" against the real world — if you end up disliking your job, it could never be more than a year before you head off to school.
That's New England dialect. Almost nobody says that outside of New England but people commonly know what it means.
Yes, agreed. Evernote's strength seems to be its crystal-clear cohesion and focus on helping people remember things, but then it sells things like socks and wallets. I don't quite get it.
In a way, it's kind of a shame that we don't see this in the US Congress.

It really would get more Americans engaged in politics.
It's interesting to see how misinformation propagates.

The second-highest-rated answer on Stack Exchange (46 votes and climbing) claims that another reason for the left arrow cursor in early GUIs was to put the hotspot at (0,0) to save time in the mouse position calculations:

http://ux.stackexchange.com/a/52349/43259

The answer cites this Reddit comment as its source:

http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1qhzym/wh...

That comment is a direct copy of this Yahoo! Answers comment from 2009, which says that the Xerox Alto worked this way, but cites no source for the claim:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090520113724AA...

In fact, the Alto did have multiple cursor shapes, and the hotspot wasn't always at (0,0). For example there was this cross in a circle:

http://www.guidebookgallery.org/articles/thexeroxaltocompute...

and a right-pointing arrow:

http://toastytech.com/guis/saltobravo.png

Let's ballpark the CPU overhead. According to this article, the Alto executed about 400,000 instructions per second, with an instruction set modeled after the Data General Nova 1220:

http://www.guidebookgallery.org/articles/thexeroxaltocompute...

Here's a brief description of the Nova instruction set:

http://users.rcn.com/crfriend/museum/doco/DG/Nova/base-instr...

There are four accumulators, with an ADD instruction that adds one accumulator to another (and a similar SUB). There are LDA and STA instructions that load and store memory, addressed with a displacement and an optional accumulator (e.g. to access into a structure using a pointer).

It seems reasonable to assume that at some point in the mouse refresh code, we will have the mouse's X value in one accumulator, and a pointer to the cursor structure (containing the cursor bitmap, hotspot, etc.) in another.

So to adjust our X value using the hotspot X from our cursor structure, we simply need an LDA to load the hotspot X into another accumulator, and an ADD or SUB to do the calculation. Repeat that for Y, and we've added a total of four instructions.

At 400,000 instructions per second, these calculations would add a 1/100,000 second overhead to the mouse calculation.

A worst case might be that we don't have a free accumulator when we need it. So that would be another STA and LDA to spill one temporarily.

If we have to do that for both X and Y, it would put us at eight instructions total, or 1/50,000 second.

Still probably worth doing it to get the flexibility of custom cursor hotspots. :-)
So I have done SEO at enterprise level for many years now (i.e. not the snake oil that is commonly labeled as SEO).

My first piece of advice would be to not under any circumstances go with what you are suggesting by creating your own artificial link network. Not only will it not work but it will more than likely hurt you significantly. In fact I would go as far to say the same thing about all link networks, they are a ticking time bomb that will be waiting to blow up in your face.

My personal suggestion for someone who is fairly new to this is to take a look at http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies for what I consider to be the most comprehensive list of link building strategies on the net. You can also get a feel for what the value of each of these strategies would be there as well (for your own sake, avoid the low quality ones, they too are a ticking time bomb).

Also for what it's worth trying to include your keywords in the anchor text of these links is waaay less important now (thankfully) than it used to be. A general rule of thumb I follow is if it looks out of place then don't do it. 7/10 I am perfectly happy to just have my brand name or URL as the anchor text to my website.
[video] How Does Text Become Data? (Strangeloop 2013)
I haven't, but I'll buy a bag from Amazon today. Thank you.
Have you seen Frozen-Flask? It's a clever extension that "freezes" a dynamic flask site into HTML files and static assets you can upload anywhere. http://pythonhosted.org/Frozen-Flask/
I also wonder how it compares to Gulp (mainly in terms of performance in practice). I've just started to use Gulp, migrating away from Sprockets and so far it has been a joy.
Good point. I can't think of any example off hand.
Great article, the explanation of rearchitecting the app left me hungry for more!

I currently work on a Django project and I'm pushing tastypie to its limit as well. Working on switching to django-rest-framework.

At a high level, what does your flask service architecture look like? I dug through your blog but couldn't find much. I'm particularly curious how you handled migrating from a django database and schema to whatever you ended up using.
"You mean, my local municipality has a binding, perpetual contract with Comcast"

I don't disagree with your sentiment, but just to note:

Municipalities can't have exclusive franchise agreements anymore (since 1992).
If you have the discipline to teach yourself front-end engineering in high school, you have the discipline to teach yourself anything in realm of applied computer science. Github has replaced the college degree in this field, and differentiating yourself from the rest of the competition is pretty easy to do if you stick to a meaningful path of self-improvement.

Paying $50k for a college degree in computer science is ludicrous. Most of the people here who are telling you to do so are probably more interested in retaining the value of their own investment, by influencing the next generation to make the same decision. If there's value in having a college degree - your employer will reimburse you for tuition expenses. If they refuse to do so, it's a tacit admission that the value it adds to your output is worthless to them.
I'm what you would call a 'front-end' engineer. Senior front-end developer is my current title, though I'm quite capable of full-stack development. I make $103,000 annually and do not have a college degree. There has never been a job that denied me due to lack of education because I've been able to prove myself and my abilities. Going to college is a great resume boost, but has had no bearing on my career thus far.

(source: Front-end dev for 5+ years)
I know there's no formula for a successful startup, but if you had to pick one, this would be it: Build an MVP, get product validation, scale, find paying customers, make outside hires.
(Another professional cartoonist here.)

I strongly disagree with the suggestion of starting with cartoons first. Start with real anatomy first.

Books that show step-by-step guides to drawing a comic character are only good for one thing: Learning how to draw that comic character, in that position, in that style, in that medium. I hate them. One may look at these books and think that's how all cartoonists (or other artists) learned to draw, and they'd be wrong.

To be a good cartoonist, in my view, you need a foundational understanding, not just technique (which is what these books teach, in a very limited way). Once you understand anatomy, how bodies move, forms, perspective, composition, visual weight, ... Then turning your ideas into a cartoon (or any other form) becomes simply a matter of technique. (And even at that point, learning techniques from step-by-step instruction books is a lousy method.)
Better recommendation or sorting systems. Instead of removing flappy bird games entirely, just put them at the bottom of the search results. Ideally this could be done by machine learning or community ratings, rather than a Google employee deciding they don't like flappy bird games and down ranking them. But even the second option is better than refusing them entirely.

Remove stuff that is actually malicious or breaks rules, not games that aren't original (keep in mind the original flappy bird was incredibly unoriginal itself.)
I think this is a weak argument that ignores some of what the OP wrote.

A CS degree alone will not keep him relevant 5/10/20 years from now. The industry is, for the most part, a meritocracy, and he will need to keep his skill set up-to-date with industry trends forever.

In my experience, good CS students tend to learn more outside of class. Based on the OP's post, I would bet that he is sufficiently capable of self-educating.
Yes.

I do think which school you can go to affects the outcome. I understand that application season is over, but hopefully you've applied to many need-blind schools that are in the top-50 where you wouldn't have to take out any loans.

It's also a great way to seed your life-long personal network in a different way. A lot of your college buddies will go onto diverse fields, and together you will spot many connections between them and pursue those. This can be very lucrative as well.

College, besides the learning, teaches you things you didn't know you needed to understand. It often changes you as a person - It's not only that you now know more answers, it affects what types of questions you ask.