skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Will MOOCs eventually disrupt below-average US grad schools?
I personally don't think you can (or should!) replace the 4-year undergraduate experience, and I don't think you can kill Ivy League schools. With that said, do you think MOOCs will ever become a viable alternative to below-average, overpriced US graduate schools?
PROTIP: if you're so serious about your 'career' and 'power', maybe you should stop 'hyping' and 'pushing through' this weeks hot tech toy you read about on HN and Reddit, and start building something worthwhile yourself. That way, you won't have to bet your precious career on some dude on the internet you never met before to not screw up. What a concept!
Exactly, I just found out that a friend is finishing her studies with 100k in debt. I'm not saying that it's the worst scenario out there, but it makes you feel grateful for incurring a relatively lower amount.
Getting a Heroku Application Error.
Your comment gave me a sudden craving for great sourdough bread. I ran out my door to the local bakery and literally got the last loaf of the day.
Another Billion Dollar Web 2.0 Startup Acquisition
I can't speak to other times and places but in silicon valley in the late 1980s I went to a temp agency and looked for unskilled work during the summer - I don't think I ever came across any jobs that paid as low as minimum wage. One summer I was a "shipping clerk" (meaning: guy who gets stuff out of a warehouse and puts it in boxes) at Syva - that paid over twice the minimum. Another summer I did data entry for the Accounts Receivable department at Dialog - that also paid much more than the minimum, and required only rudimentary typing skills. And yes, naturally once I was a declared CS major I could intern at IBM, but even before that I didn't see a need to work minimum wage.

(Even McDonald's was paying more than minimum in my area.)
I set up a cheap dedicated server with OVH a few months ago. it took 48 days to get it set up and the OVH flavor of linux I went with was some bastardized version of gentoo so inbred that after two weeks of trying to get it upgraded to a sane version I just canceled my account.
Happy Eyeballs: Success with Dual-Stack Hosts
Which bakeries source your breads? The Mill? Tartine? Acme? Would love to know which before I buy! (though I might buy anyways because I think this is awesome). Awesome Webflow site that is simple and to the point.
> It just works.

I have found this to not be the case.
Malaysia Plane Was Carrying Lithium-Ion Batteries
He clearly understands the concept. What isn't understandable is why it's here at HN, why it's within the top 10 front page submissions, and why some people claim to think this idea is innovative or special. It's really nothing more than pizza delivery.

I don't think he thinks it's a "dumb" idea, either. Clearly it's at least somewhat viable, given that pizza delivery is well and alive, with many establishments being around for many years, if not decades.

But that's really what it boils down to: this is just a very limited form of the well-established, long-running practice of pizza delivery. Pizza is, after all, just freshly-baked bread delivered to one's door, but with the benefit of various toppings.

It's really absurd to see you talking about "why it's only happening now" or that "nobody ever thought of it", especially when we've been ordering pizza and having it delivered to our door in well under an hour for many, many, many years now. This is an old idea, plain and simple.
Guy-cry film (Wikipedia)
On the topic of free textbooks, I recently bought the OpenIntro to Statistics. For just $10, I received a soft-cover full-color 300pp textbook on statistics. I found the price to be simply amazing so I had to get a copy: http://www.openintro.org/stat/
perhaps the regulators themselves represent a majority of that minority (for example having to travel in another country which is the seat of some part of the European burocracy).
>increased student expectations of 'fun', leading to new facilities (dorms, student centers, etc), as colleges compete with each other for students

This gets cited a lot, and sometimes people actually go to the trouble of citing the cost of a new facility at $x million. Is there evidence that these facilities actually raise the cost substantially per student per year? Often when I hear people getting offended about, say, a $15 million building, I run a back-of-the-napkin calculation and it's not even a drop in the bucket on a tuition bill when you consider that it's going to serve something like 40,000 people per year for more than 30 years.
IT Excuse Tees
Having worked in finance, I can promise you that a lot of people in finance are playing zero-sum games. All trading is basically zero sum. No trader goes home saying, "Hey, honey, I imperceptably increased global liquidity today; yay me!" They say things like, "I'm fucking awesome. I gutted those chumps in the LIBOR pit. Whores for everybody!" [1]

Anybody working for those people is also essentially playing a zero-sum game, in that their activity is just aiding in shifting value from one pocket to another. Which is why I no longer work in finance; I wanted to do something useful.

[1] Yes, I have actually heard traders say "Whores for everybody!" in the office. At least in the office they were joking.
I'd love to hear more, especially about where to stay. Could you please share your email? My email is in my profile. Thanks!
Programming lessons from studying mathematics
I'm not very knowledgable of this sort of thing -- what have other professions historically done to mitigate this sort of thing? Unions? Licensing boards?
What makes you assume something went wrong? It sounds like they were doing really well, but the bust hit them extremely hard, like it hit many others.
Same bad experience here.

I have 2Mo/s on my hard drives and they claim everything is normal on their side. I could trigger an investigation but if it comes from my config, they'll charge it on me. I don't know how I could have configured my disks to output 2Mo/s, but more important, I don't want to drop a single extra penny to that company.

And support takes around 30hrs to answer.
I had a professor who assigned his own book when I was an undergrad, but he specifically didn't get royalties on those copies of the book (they were sold to school, we had a textbook rental system), and he explained this fact on the syllabus. I thought that was a pretty big thing of him to do, but he was a great guy, so no surprises maybe.
It also gives police no leeway when it comes to enforcing unfair laws. Instead, even the most empathetic and genuinely helpful cop will have to enforce it to the letter.
I'm responding to the headline claim that it's allegedly impossible to work oneself through college. The corrected claim is that it's quite difficult to work through college on a minimum-wage job. But probably still possible for some if you're a CS major or an architectural major or any number of other majors. Basically, if your degree is one that promises to be lucrative or if you have any other valuable skills or expertise you can probably get SOME of the value of having a degree before you actually finish it by working in a degree-relevant field.
Combat Gum: Fighting Dental Problems in the Military
Ask HN: "Humanitarian" H1B's for Ukrainian developers?
I have a number of friends in eastern Ukraine, some of whom are interested in emigrating in light of the threat of civil war, violence, and the possibility of a "new iron curtain" looming. As skilled technologists, there must be companies who could benefit from hiring these individuals. My questions for the HN community:
* Any companies here looking for and open to sponsoring H1B candidates?
* What other possibilities exist for immigration with a work permit, either to the US, Canada, Europe, or Asia (really any stable region with a strong technology sector)?

Advice and contacts much appreciated.
Article doesn't disclose that Crunchfund has a stake in DO.
When more than a student or two has the idea of using the library's copy, it becomes a battle over who will be able to check out the limited number of copies. Sometimes this becomes serious enough that the library will freeze the availability of a book if it's been assigned that semester.

Obviously there is something to be learned about the price differences in the different versions, but there is also a non-trivial difference in quality. I've had International Versions that were missing whole 10-page sequences, pages out of order, and different problem sets whose answers had factual errors. Also the lower grade paper is an obstacle to book reuse.

By this I don't mean to be negative, I just believe the final answer involves more reasonable digital distribution; I'm sick of the myth of "getting the exact same book for cheaper" because I've been burned by it a number of times.
You've identified a big part of the problem, but one also needs to consider the overall economic environment during that period. The chart in the blog post starts at 1980, showing that you could work 10 hrs and pay for a credit-hour of tuition. But remember, 1980 was the end of the financially disastrous 1970s. The 80s and 90s were boom decades, so parents with money in the markets were increasingly able to pay for college for their kids. This added to the demand side of the equation, along with the easy money in loans and grants, to cause the explosion in tuition.

You're also right about the buildings and staff bloat. I work at a state university and see all of that happening. The IT organization is honestly twice the size it needs to be, if people were held accountable for being even moderately productive.
TRX for me :)
The idea of consumption smoothing & college as a human capital investment (particularly in an arena with outsized rewards at the top end, which is now most areas with decent payoffs) imply that to the extent you don't absolutely have to, you shouldn't work through college. Other than perhaps connection-building internships during the summer, but those aren't really about the money.
An Anti-DDoS protection ! That's a god-send ! I had a terrible experience recently with Digital-Ocean. A VPS of mine with a fresh launched project was knocked down with some basic ddos attack. The support nodded and pointed to use CloudFlare. My server was down and they didn't do anything, that really sucks, you can't use a VPS without a DDos protection for anything serious. It can go down anytime when some script-kiddie opens a hunder of sockets.

It's really sad that DDoS protection didn't become ubiquitous yet. It's unacceptable that you can get down a server, even VPS with not-so-much bandwidth. All VPS have limited number of sockets and resources and it's trivial to knock them down. Absence of a DDoS protection makes them extremely vulnerable.
Thanks, PyCrypto is an outstanding lib.
Pointing out that pizza (or other food) delivery is a very well-established practice that's been carried out successfully all across the globe for a very long time isn't being "snarky".

He's merely stating the obvious facts that, for some reason, a lot of people here are totally overlooking when they think that this idea is somehow "innovative".
That's why the opposite of "guilty" at trial is "not guilty". Someone who is not guilty is not necessarily innocent, even of the charged crime, but there's not enough evidence there to find guilt.
"Killing someone is only acceptable in self defense"

How is that not "depending on the circumstances"? Is not "killing is needed to defend myself" a circumstance?

"while cannibalism is just sick."

So, if someone is genuinely in a situation where their options are 1) starve to death, or 2) eat the other guy who just starved to death, you think it's clear that they should choose 1?
Owning a Programming Language
You realize the 75% tax rate is on year income exceeding one million euro, right?

Yes, though please note that I was commenting on a general trend of confusing going after bankers with actually catching entrepreneurs, not on the French situation specifically.

One million euro is 34x the average salary in France, which means that anybody hit by that tax makes more money in less than two years than the majority of their countrymen will earn in their entire lives.

By the time you allow for progressive taxation at lower levels, and for the other taxes in the French system, the multiplier for how much money those people are actually keeping is smaller than that. Of course it's still a wide gap, but let's not pretend these people are rich enough to retire after two years on that salary.

People don't exist in a vacuum, economies are wonderfully interconnected things and acting like the people who take risks and succeed are some kind of superheroes who shouldn't give back because of some deranged notion that they "did it themselves" is myopic, dishonest and, to be frank, total bullshit.

I have little interest in debating in detail with someone whose argument boils down to swearing at me and calling me delusional, but please consider this: taking the argument you seem to be making to its logical conclusion, why shouldn't everyone pay 100% taxes and have the state pay for everything, because we're all part of the same system?
I was eagerly anticipating A New Kind of Science and bought it when it was first available. But it was a tremendously aggravating read. It was repetitive, inconclusive, and far longer than the material merited. I came away thinking Wolfram must have set some kind of record for use of the personal pronoun "I" in a book, including autobiographies. The egotism shines through that much. Perhaps this accounts for the perception that nobody else gets credit in Wolfram's book.

This was how I thought before I read any reviews or heard anything other than laudatory things about Wolfram. Until I read the reviews I thought there might be something terribly wrong with my understanding of what I just read.
> No normal lender would give an 18 year old $50,000 to get a degree in anthropology, because they are unlikely to get it back. When the student is legally obligated to pay it back, then there is much little risk to the lender.

I think the argument goes like this:

1. Allow college debt to be defaulted on

2. After some time the government (or banks) will start to assess the risk of making student loans

3. Some time after that the loan market for students will be less crazy and more rational

4. With enrolled students able to spend less, colleges will be forced to charge less or lose students

5. Some college close, others stay open

6. College now costs a more reasonable amount of money

We're seeing the same dynamic in the college market as we saw in the housing market. The banks were typically in the business of saying "no, you can't do that" to people who were borrowing money, thus enforcing restraint on those who didn't have enough on their own. Once the banks stopped saying "no" when people were not a good credit risk, everyone went nuts and bid housing up to rather crazy levels. Housing prices are inversely proportional to interest rates in a very nonlinear way.

The situation is similar in the college market. The interest rates are more sane, but the risk assessment is much worse. There's all kinds of loan money sloshing around and not a tremendous amount of out-of-pocket money. If college had to be paid out of pocket you'd see lower enrollment or lower prices or both. Allowing defaults will force the market from largely loan-funded to a more reasonable mix of loan and out of pocket funding.
"Brin appears to not know what the nature of the agreement is between the two companies."

I still remember a HN thread which suggested that Larry/Sergey fire Eric Schmidt for this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3523513
Call me a dreamer but creating a startup is one way around this.
Depends on the culture of the tech. If they only review videos after complaints or issues, they will still be able to enforce their own interpretation. If they are regularly reviewed for strict compliance then you are right. I find the latter to be unlikely. Mainly because it would be prohibitively costly and would go against current police culture which affords officers leeway.
I didn't even think you were talking about grants. Are you saying grants are responsible for high tuition costs? Without grants, the gap would have to be made up in student loans. What good would that do? It would simply make students assume a higher debt burden to get the same education that society demands from them.
i really love this site.

For a while now I've had one of these parables earmarked to conclude an article about the follies of my youth.
In practice, what this means is that everyone will be treated the same. With leeway, policemen will treat groups of people they like better than they treat others. This is not because they're particularly evil but because policemen are human and rely on instinct (which is easily corrupted). Then you get preferential treatment.

Now, an unfair law is exposed as unfair because all will suffer.
You get what you pay for. Oh, and by the way, this isn't the most affordable VPS. CloudAtCost's cheapest plan is $1.00/month, and in USD, VPS Classic/OVH is around $2.75, give or take (http://www.cloudatcost.com/). (current exchange: https://www.google.com/search?q=%E2%82%AC1.99+in+us+dollars&...)

However, you do get what you pay for. I'm a CloudAtCost customer, paid for their $35 one-time fee because I figured it would be nice to not have to worry about yet another recurring payment (however small) for stupid things like having a Linux machine to test new apps on and run my IRC bouncer. When they had some downtime, they did alert us but I didn't find out my server had failed to power back on until I opened my laptop one day and couldn't connect to IRC. Given their impossibly-low prices[1] and lack of history in our community, I'm probably always gonna be a little paranoid that my server is just going to die one day and there's nothing I'll be able to do about it.

That said, I think OVH is in a similar boat. Crappy customer service, but low prices, so my advice for anyone wanting to take a gamble on this is to definitely NOT host anything important on these low-cost VPS services. They're really best for staging and light internal use, and they're not to be trusted with the architecture of your whole company.

[1]: CloudAtCost is essentially a big Canadian ISP's server hosting brand. Basically, their parent company owns the datacenter they're hosting you in, so the service they're offering is practically cost-free to them. If this is true, the money they get from you must be 100% profit, or they wouldn't be able to keep themselves in business. (http://www.cloudatcost.com/aboutus.php) Go ask a record label owner sometime about how profit margins on the fraction of a dollar, even when new sales come in every day, work out for his bottom line ;)
The usefulness of the mail system for anonymous/pseudonymous communication is really underrated. It's pretty easy to mail a reasonably tamper-evident, encrypted letter anonymously in a way that doesn't raise any red flags and is unlikely to result in the ciphertext being noticed and stored forever. This is more than can be said for PGP-encrypted email.
I agree his statement appeared to be making a black and white argument. Your reply seemed to be further defining the concept behind his statement. Perhaps you were redefining it and I misinterpreted it.
Hi i think you refer to this : "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." and is attributed (disputed) to Cardinal Richelieu , not a communist precisely. By the way i completely agree with what you are saying , that's the tactic and is been used in a lot of places around the world.
A similar service called Delivered Dish uses the same fax conceit to provide delivery service in the Portland, OR; Denver; and San Diego areas: http://d-dish.com.

You can even order from bakeries (at least in the Portland area). I use them all the time for food delivery, and it's rare an order takes more than 45 minutes to complete.
Your colleges will only produce successful people in the sense that success can be directly correlated with income. There would be no point in doing anything else. Do you think that income-generating activities are the only purpose of education?
Why `new express.Router()` is awesome (express 4.0)
On the flip side, if you have a degree, this means fewer people can afford it and your degree becomes all the more valuable over time.

I've had a similar, but different thing happen as the state school I went to has shot up in the arbitrary US News and World Reports college rankings list over the last 20 years.

It enabled them to finance a bunch of new construction (research buildings, classrooms, specialized degree satellite campuses), all new dorms, etc. What used to be basically a small commuter school that happened to offer university (Masters and Doctorates) degrees has turned into the largest university in the the State.

The prestige it's offered my resume has gotten me endless recruitment offers and I ended up just taking it off my facebook profile I was getting contacted by too many people I didn't know wanting to form various alumni networks.

At any rate, rising tuition, etc. just means that what I already received is becoming a more valuable investment. I like that.

But I also feel empathy towards those going into college, knowing what a huge boost it was to my income earning potential.

I worked my way through college, Pell Grants, a few loans. I was doing an 2x minimum wage internship my last 2 years that made it suck, but doable. I made enough after graduation that I paid off my loans in just a couple years. It was really tight though. I think it's still very possible to do at the state school level if you get the loans. But it's definitely getting harder.

I couldn't imagine doing it at the private school or out of state level back then, and I can't imagine doing it today.
Blatantly, and has been so for a long, long time. I might be able to buy that Brin circa 2005 was unaware of that, but not Jobs, Schmidt, or Whitman.

Edit: It's been clear at least since Nichols v. Spencer International Press in 1967, and arguably since Radovich v. National Football League in 1957.
That's two weeks before the no-hiring agreements were put into place.
FWIW, I opened a French HSBC account (I am a US citizen, btw) and used the ATM withdraw-deposit trick you just described in order to produce Euros for local use. I was subsequently called in by the bank because they found my high denomination cash deposits very suspicious and requested that I stop doing it.

I wanted to offer an anecdotal warning that such a trick may work fine, or it may ruffle feathers; just be aware.
If it could be managed, that may turn out to be a good thing.

If laws produce significant social distress to a large number of people, then the law is more likely to be changed.

Whereas if it's only ever enforced against black people, or people the policeman has decided to screw for whatever reason, then it could go on forever.

#

If you think of police action as being analogous to pain, then it's not clear that less pain is always the best thing for society in the long run.
First, I think wearing cameras protect law enforcement persons from wrongful complaints that can damage their careers.

It's still better to have them wear cameras. They can definitely "lose the recording", but what do you think the jury will do?
"rejection" -- I had to reread that headline 3 times before I figured out what it was trying to say.