skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Graduating from college might be worth it, but the total societal cost of college has to include those who attend, rack up debt, but do not graduate. You can't present college as a sure thing when actually graduating from it will never, ever be a sure thing.

And no matter how strong the case may be for college, in the end there's no glossing over costs. I just checked the total cost of attendance for our state school here, and it is 20K/year for residents. 80K-ish in debt is a big, serious, worth-thinking-over decision, full stop. Presenting this as a no-brainer will always be irresponsible until the costs go down.

And even if the debt pays off over the course of your multi-decade career, it's worth asking the question of whether paying down such debt already when you are so young is going to be how you want to kick off your adult life. Not claiming to have the answer to that one.

Ultimately I think it's flawed to claim a form of education that is so outrageously expensive should be just as crucial as high school. If you can't reasonably save for it, it should be a luxury.
This article on ArsTechnica covers in great detail the issue of "openness" in Android:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-...
The article itself pointed out that their headline number doesn't really account for pre-college differences between the two groups. For example, someone who grows up in a stable high-income environment will likely go to college, but that is because they have the support structures that will assist them prevent them from falling too far behind and help them recover from any setbacks. A person who might want to go to college but is from a disrupted lower-income environment may not have the support structures that help them get through college and find a good job.

From the article:

This calculation is necessarily imprecise, because it can’t control for any pre-existing differences between college graduates and nongraduates — differences that would exist regardless of schooling.

Completing college may simply be correlated with having a well-paying job because the skills required for both are very similar.

A second study, linked from the article, compared people with similar jobs and those with and without degrees, e.g. secretaries. They still found a gap, but again they did not control for for pre-college environment.
I get the feeling that many programmers have been bitten by weak typing too many times and have come to appreciate the benefits of stronger typing.

If you want to apply defensive programming, which is always a good idea, you usually encounter this pattern: "I'm expecting an Int. Is this an Int? No, this is a string. But if I converted it, would the result be an Int? No? OK, then we have a problem, what should I do about it?". Some languages even have automatic type coercion, in which the final result depends entirely on what the language decides, and varies across languages. It's a mess.

Languages like Haskell or the ML family, with their type systems and type inferences, simply won't compile if you say you are expecting an Int and some other part of the program sends anything else. Maybe it's more work for the programmer upfront, but it reduces future headaches, and it's not difficult once you get the hang of it. Many times you don't even have to state the types explicitly, the compiler just knows. Thanks Hindley-Millner!
It's almost all energy... food, electricity, clean water, a lot of recycling options, even hydrocarbons could be synthesized from atmospheric carbon if you have cheap enough energy. The only exception is atoms, and even for many of those, if energy was cheap enough, we can just go get some more of the desirable atoms, like the rare earths, from space. Civilization is ultimately all about the energy.
There are a handful of people worth watching at Microsoft conferences - no matter what they're doing. My list is:

* Anders Hejlsberg

* Mark Russinovich

* Scott Hanselman

They have the clout and the job security to speak their mind - and they do. They all work on neat projects and are interested in talking about the internals. I saw Mark at Build this year and his talk was about the "fails" of Azure. It was an honest breakdown of how they've had failures that have taken down customers, taken down Microsoft services, and hurt the reputation of Azure.

I've followed Mark's blog since before he became a Technical Fellow at Microsoft, and he deserved it, no doubt. Very few people could write or speak with such precision about the internals of Microsoft kit. His interviews on Channel9 are all fascinating, before Azure he did work on the NT Kernel (and who knows what else) and he spoke candidly about dealing with issues scaling up the operating system. He has given interviews solely about removing global locks from the kernel, because that's his domain and he's good at it. If that reminded me of anyone else, it would be Linus Torvalds and his intimate knowledge of the Linux kernel.
Yeah, if you ever get a chance to build something for production in Haskell / Scala / OCaml you'll realize how little even Go (which is better than Python and Ruby!) does for you.

The funny thing is, I believe (from real-world startup building experience) that Haskell has allowed me to iterate / prototype my products faster than I ever would have with Python and Erlang (my old go-to tools).

Also, with Haskell, there's no late-night and weekend fires to put out :) Which makes me more productive and generally happier.

[EDIT] To whomever is downvoting these legitimate comments, speak up why you think they are inappropriate for this discussion instead of downvoting.
No, because I am aware that my phone connects to the internet. If I want to exclude the internet from my whereabouts, I can just go without my phone.
"Dr. Eckel describes himself as 'a scientist and professing six-day creationist and a member of the technical advisory board of the Institute for Creation Research...' Many scientists are religious. This is not to question Dr. Eckel's religious beliefs, but to question his ability to think scientifically. He believes there is scientific proof that the world was created in six days and that evolution does not exist. This should at least raise eyebrows when the co-chair of [the AHA] panel charged with giving scientifically sound dietary advice has a financial conflict of interest and proselytizes for beliefs that are anti-scientific."
I used to work on finance spreadsheets that used VBA to perform ftp, connect to https servers to download and parse xml docs, perform file renaming, etc. Horrid, but functional. If MS shipped Excel with C# as a VBA co-equal, the reliability of these kinds of "hacks" would increase ten-fold.
His last few months as a snitch he changed his twitter pic to an islamic black standard militant flag and was openly calling for violence and 'cyber-terrorism'. Ridiculous
From the tagline, I thought this was a joke.. since "hide your header on scroll" implies default browser behaviour (i.e. position:static)
> Also, an agreement Verizon signed when buying their LTE spectrum from the FCC says that all Verizon LTE devices must be carrier-unlocked out of the box[2].

> However, Verizon will refuse to activate any device that was not originally sold for use on its network (they use a unique device hardware ID for this).

Which is a violation of those FCC rules you linked to. It's monopolistic, shitty behavior.

> AT&T and T-Mobile don't do this.

> Therefore, for maximum flexibility, buy Verizon versions of recent Apple devices.

Or just avoid Verizon entirely. That way you won't be rewarding their bad behavior.
Of course. I'm not making some pie-in-the-sky assertion that arguments should be devoid of emotion, just that I had noticed what appeared enough emotion to overrule civil discourse in the past.

That said, after re-reading your original comment, I don't see much to disagree on (except for one thing, which I'll cover later), and it doesn't seem to exhibit many of the problems I was alluding to, so you have my apologies. It was inappropriate of me to bring that up in this context.

What I should have commented on was that Parrot was all but dead long before MoarVM put the last nail in the coffin. I doubt the announcement did much beyond cement what most developers already knew - Parot was not well suited for it's original purpose, whether you view that as a VM for P6 or a general purpose VM, specifically because for too long it had tried to follow both paths to the detriment of all.

My impression of Parrot, as an outsider who consumed quite a bit of the public information available about parrot development, ended up being that Parrot was too experimental of a VM, and never moved beyond the stage of being a fun sandbox for developers to come experiment in. When P6 was still coalescing around how to implement what was in the spec (and revising the spec in light of that), this didn't matter much. As P6 increasingly moved towards an actual implementation, Parrot's misalignment with what P6 needed along with Parrot's deprecation policy caused many problems between the projects.

I think at one point, prior to MoarVM being announced, there was still a chance Parrot could have been "saved". But by saved, I mean continue on as a sandbox for developers to experiment in, possibly without ever culminating in a VM that was useful as primary target for a language. If enough developers would have been willing to continue with this truth exposed (and I'm not sure enough would), then if Parrot and made the choice to continue as a "general purpose VM" instead of primarily a P6 target, it may have survived as a sandbox.

I'm interested in your opinion on this interpretation - not because I think any of it is news to you, I'm sure it's not - but the opposite, in fact. This view is in no small part informed by your own writings on the subject over the years.

P.S. I was completely serious before when I said I missed your more frequent posting on modernperlbooks.com. I hope that no matter what the future holds for you, that it also includes you writing about technical issues in blog or book form (and enjoying doing so!). I know you've helped solidify my thinking on a great many things over the years, to my great benefit.
How sad to hear this. As he dies, the design principles he championed are taking over the interface design world with a vengeance. The visual language in iOS 7, Windows 8 Modern UI, and even Google Now owes a lot to designers like him.

Rest in peace.
Fake app reviews – more on iTunes but Google play has the "worst"
The phone cost is $145 plus S&H which is $25.

This phone has the precise set of hardware specs that Mozilla is developing Firefox OS against this year. It's more phone than some need (not everyone needs dual SIM, but it's in there) and less than others need but that's what you get with a reference device.
I think that's what "the last Thing D needs" means. Not the final piece. Rather, what people mean when they say "The last thing X needs is Y", they mean that X does not need Y. I make mention of this because the GP comment says the last thing D needs and you say "Not at all" and then go on to say effectively that the last thing D needs is Scott.

So, a lot of confusion in terms of wording, I think.
>'Am I the one in a bubble here or are the writers of this article in some strange feedback loop?'

It's not just these writers...

When's the last time you saw something that wasn't described as beautiful or revolutionary? You know it's bad when Silicon Valley spends an entire scene on the breathless "change the world" superlatives of startup culture [1].

1: http://readwrite.com/2014/05/20/silicon-valley-hbo-episode-7...
> My mother paid her way through college working as a waitress part-time. You can't do that now without also accumulating a massive amount of debt.

Yes you can. I had a friend who attended UCSC for three years (2004-07) on financial aid and wound up flunking out. According to him (I admit I haven't seen documents), the total debt he accumulated for those three years was in the low thousands of dollars. I'm pretty sure working part-time as a waitress for three years would cover it. I'm also pretty sure that, in the hypothetical case where your financial aid requires you to do well in school, flunking out doesn't meet that standard.
He also auctions rides in his Ferrari 458 for charity!
Well said. Too many websites these days are JS heavy.
What universal human experiences are you missing without realizing it?
I'm not much into frontend development, but AFAIU Font Awesome is a bunch of assets packed as a font [0]. Why is this is a good idea? Is it faster, smaller, more convenient, something else?

0: http://stackoverflow.com/a/15503304
>And probably can under-report tips and meet interesting people too instead of wasting hard earned cash buying rounds at overpriced bars and lounges on weekends.

That's one way to put "if you work every night, you won't have a social life."
T-mobile has an odd frequency band for 3G and I don't think the Flame supports that.
I'm surprised by how few comments mention one other thing that is important to consider: How does the lifetime value of a college education compare to someone who instead spent that money starting a business?

I went to a small private college and graduated in 2010 with about $40,000 in loans. My degree was in biology. So far, it hasn't really helped at all. If I were going to start over, I would skip college and start a business.

My student debt is higher than average, so let's be more conservative and use the $25,000 average debt stated in the article. For $25,000, you can create a pretty nice little business, especially in a small city. For example, I lived in Fargo for a few years where my living expenses were only $800 per month. Even if that business fails, you are no worse off than a college grad, except you also have years of experience for when you try another business.

I think the real question we should be asking is not "Is college worth it?", but rather, "How do we help young adults start businesses the way we help them get into college?". We spend so much time and money offering scholarships, which in turn is supposed to help them get good jobs. In other words, we are spending a lot of money to increase competition in the job market. If that money was spent helping those young bright minds start businesses, we would be simultaneously removing someone from the job market AND creating new jobs.
I see, thanks for pointing to that issue. The other issue referred https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/988 is still open, so I guess they work on sorting this out.
What good is a reference phone for development of Firefox OS itself and app development on that OS if you're running Android or Windows Phone? I think you've missed the point of the device!
Ah. I'm not super familiar with that "bug" - is it that "touchmove" events don't get fired for single-finger scrolling (panning)?

Perhaps you could make it work (albeit less gracefully) in iOS by reconciling the header visibility state once "touchend" finally gets fired though? Assuming "touchstart" gets fired as you'd expect, you can do a bit of manual calculation to determine if the y-position changed enough to warrant header hide/show.
It applies to everyone.

Everyone has a internal "thermostat" of how much they deserve to make. After they get above that, then they feel bad about making more and don't usually do any work.
The gap in average earnings between those who complete college and those who don't is pretty terrifying, given that it is possible to have no degree but all of the associated debt. If accruing all this debt guaranteed a college degree then yes, college is worth it. But it doesn't.

So I think the article suffers from selection bias. It focuses on a subgroup, that people won't know they will be a part of when asking themselves the question, is college worth it?
http://www.qualcomm.com/snapdragon/processors/200

It's a Snapdragon 200 which is built on Coretex-A7.
Stache – A smarter way to bookmark web pages for Mac, iPhone and iPad
You're trying to shift the goal posts, but okay.

Life expectancy isn't the only measure. Convenience and speed also count, when it comes to quality of life. That's why you see (e.g.) wealthy Canadians crossing the border to get treated.

"I'm not sure what this means."

The United States has a higher rate of obesity than many other countries. Similarly, it has high rates of violent crime and motor vehicle accidents. These likely account for some of the difference in lifespan, but are not (as far as I can tell) directly related to the presence or absence of socialized medicine.

Anyway, we have Obamacare now, so everything is wonderful, right?
both are great frameworks, Ritchie was one of the originators of Deployd, LB incorporates lessons learned from Deployd. We have the same WebSocket interface for LoopBack through strong-remoting to support real time. We haven't had time full bake it in, but will soon, especially now finishing up sync and needing server to device push.
We've started using fontello recently. We use some custom svg assets in addition to the icon font sets. I wrote a ~100 line python script that manages interactions with fontello. It'll open a browser with our config file, let you make changes, then download and store the updated fontello assets mostly from the command line. I highly recommend doing something like this if you get on board the fontello train.
If it's ever "necessary" for an employee to decrypt and use my password, something very wrong is happening. That is not acceptable practice.
I didn't realize they were certification places. My bad and thanks.
It is not really open at the moment. They are making heavy assumptions about developers willing to use HTML5/JS. It would be nice to see JVM/Mono APIs documentation.
Quick illustrated guide to what the legal concept of Entrapment actually is:
http://thecriminallawyer.tumblr.com/post/19810672629/12-i-wa...

By a former New York prosecutor.
I didn't particularly care for it anyways and it was a try it for 30-days deal so. I've used Google maps on my iPhone but I guess since I never signed it it didn't record the locations.

I realize that the phone company can to some extent track your location as well based on the cell tower but that isn't quite as accurate or convenient as the GPS data.
We need more vocational training. We need to rethink what jobs really need a college degree vs what jobs can be trained for in vocational schools. A fair number of programming jobs, for example, could be filled with students who could take the vocational route.

Not everyone should be or can be put into the 'college degree' box. This doesn't make them worth less as a person and it certainly doesn't mean they can't do certain jobs.

We seriously need to rethink how we perceive vocational training.
Well, you can factor in car maintenance to your costs as a driver. Given that the drivers would probably own a car regardless (because they need it for other things) the additional wear and tear is almost certainly more than compensated for with the extra income.

Also, if this is self-employment (which it sounds like it is) then the drivers can deduct $0.56 per mile they drive from their taxes.

As for a violation fee, I assume that for cabbies that's to cover the cost of tickets they get, not that it exempts them from receiving them. With Uber, you can judge the risk yourself. Presumably, just like with a taxi, it makes sense to accept an occasional ticket as the cost of doing business.

Overall, it seems like it's economically reasonable to be an Uber driver.

The big difference between Uber and a cab is that the existing regulatory regimes in many cities allow the cab company owners to extract most of the value from their drivers.
Telemba Turns Your Old Roomba and Tablet Into a Telepresence Robot
> it doesn't take into account the risk of paying a huge amount now for the hope of earning more later.

The article says, "After adjusting for inflation and the time value of money, the net cost of college is negative $500,000, roughly double what it was three decades ago."

which states that they used a discount rate higher than simple inflation, but doesn't say what that discount rate is.
The counter-point is that (a) the number of applications competing for resources is semi-determinate, constrained by the user's patience and willingness to upgrade and (b) the number of users the server must support is similarly semi-determinant, constrained by the popularity of the service, size of data a user could want to manipulate, and the desired speed of those manipulations. There's an argument to be made for the economy of scale of pushing some of the presentation work to the side of the wire where there is a user who wants to consume the data; I wouldn't want to have to use, say, Google Spreadsheets as a server-side-only product.

Note that we can reduce this line of thinking to absurdity if we substitute JavaScript with, say, video; some clients are incapable of rendering video, some clients are constrained in the size of video they can render. Do we therefore never stream video down the wire, and require the client to grab the whole video element wholesale as a single request-response? Of course not; users don't want to wait that long. So developers make an educated guess on what their clients' user-agents can do and set a sane bar for size and scope of video content. A similar sane bar can be set for richness of client-side executable code interactions.
A lot of font-icons allow you to set the the icon using class names. So rather than linking to a specific image file or using some obscure ascii code like in the stackoverflow example you linked to, I can just add a class name like 'icon-user' and the user icon will show up. It's definitely easier in some situations.

Font icons are scalable too, which makes it really easy to change the icon size on the fly. Since I do all of my development directly in the browser, I never know how big I need my icons until I've done some experimenting with different sizes. Font icons make this experimentation process a lot easier because I don't need to update an image file. I can just change the font-size property in css.
Hmmm, I make north of 60k. So I'm not sure if I should be concerned...bah.

Are you saying they experienced an income drop or just a lack of income increase?
Hoe laat je kinderen weer genieten van buiten spelen?
There are some cases where you don't want the whole bunch of font-awesome in your project, illustration or what ever. E.g. for mockups it's very easy to use, you just use it to drag and drop the icons you want.
It's fantastic. One of the areas where it has improved by leaps and bounds is in the documentation of it's "sql" like query language.

The tcp api and the http api are well documented as well. And if you are learning to use orient db for the first time. The getting started guide, and the wiki on main concepts is great and you will get up to speed pretty quickly. There are 240 pages(!) in the wiki so it is pretty exhaustive in case you need to know about orient db more ddeply.

Where I feel it lacks is in the documentation of client libraries. since orient db could be used both using http and the client libraries I was not sure which one would be the best choice. I had a good experience using the http api in couchdb and elastic search so my first instinct was to use that but I am still not sure if it is the right way?

Any way I think the orient db documentation is fantastic but it could do with better organization and probably some tips from devs on how to use it best. If I ever need a graph database I am definitely using orient db.

As a side note I think orient db's reputation of a graph database might be doing it more harm than good since it is really much more than that. It can save data as documents, build relationships on them and even do full text search. I think the orient db guys should focus efforts on marketing other aspects of orient db (like the awesome sql language) besides the graph part.