skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since government started subsidizing higher eduction by underwriting student loans, college tuition has risen much faster than inflation, both for private and public schools.

At the same time, more and more people have gone to college and the value of a college degree has declined, as more people enter the marketplace with them.

Anecdotally, it appears (from the college graduates I've interviewed) that the quality of a college education has also declined noticeably in the past 30 years.

All of these are unintended consequences, but not surprising results when you look at the situation from the perspective of economics.
I've use Pimsleur as a starting point for Japanese, Italian, French, Mandarin, and Brazilian Portuguese. They have 3 levels of 30 lessons each typically, and getting through level 1 before going to a country has been more than enough to get by conversationally and impress the natives. If I go back to a country a second or third time or I have friends here that speak that language, I'll try to get through levels 2 and 3, but so far I've only done that with Japanese and Italian.
And those terms may be used not to refer to the system as a whole, but particular tasks within it. Hard constraints on tasks that can never miss a (often nanosecond resolution) time point, firm real-time that can't be missed but which can be delayed, soft real time that can be missed (but only a certain number or percentage of times, or can't be missed twice in a row, etc). Different systems and teams may use those categories differently. For example, the AGC alarms that nearly caused the Apollo 11 Eagle landing to abort were for tasks in the last category, so they were able to continue. There were other tasks on that same real-time system for which missing the timing would have required an abort (or triggered a lot of very loud noises followed by silence).
Point-to-point microwave latency should be the same as fiber latency at the same distance.

Multipoint systems used by most WISPs are TDMA-based and should have a fixed latency well below 10ms depending on how many active users are on a cell.

HOAs aren't allowed to prohibit antennas under 1 meter in diameter per OTARD [ http://www.fcc.gov/guides/over-air-reception-devices-rule] You should educate your board and contact the FCC if they balk.
That's why you shouldn't eat Californian cows. Import them.
Yeah someone also asked him if they did "code reviews" while developing Unix. The response always makes me laugh.

Interviewer: Was there any concept of looking at each other's code or doing code reviews?

KT: [Shaking head] We were all pretty good coders.
Apparently the r/spacex community got together ahead of the AMA with Musk to come up with quality comments. During the AMA they worked together upvoting their questions to get the most visibility. The mods on r/AMA felt that this was against the rules, and crowded out the natural discussion, they subsequently deleted all posts from r/spacex. Sounds like a good idea, until you realize that they were very well thought out questions, head over heels better then the questions posed by the r/AMA community. I found the AMA to be underwhelming.
Perhaps that could be easily revised to:

"3. Within reason, always respond to requests for more information."

Many communication "rules" require the ability to moderate one's interpretation of the rule. I don't think this is any different. It's a good thing to give candidates feedback and if they're confused, the feedback did no good so you should be willing to help them understand. But if they're just unwilling to see the world or themselves for what they are, it's out of your hands and you should leave it well enough alone.
Oh dear, you brought that up.

I predict the stream of CISPA defense comments from tptacek in 5, 4, 3, 2...

...unless he has better things to do (I hope)
So that means you're also against smoking and drinking...? Not trying to be snarky - but there are LOTS of activities that are socially acceptable that endanger others. And they are probably a whole lot more dangerous overall than lack of vaccination. (For the record, my children and I are vaccinated).
Neil DeGrasse Tyson's StarTalk is Coming to TV
I've been learning Mexican Spanish - it's dialect is quite different from Castillian Spanish

I grew up in Los Angeles, so Mexican Spanish is what I speak almost fluently (though in high school AP Spanish we had to learn Castillian Spanish as well). I had trouble getting the hang of Puerto Rican Spanish, but I was able to master it by my 4th visit there (and convince the natives I was was one of them!). It was back to square one when I went to the Dominican Republic, which was a little tougher to mimic.
shouldn't insurance decline to pay for treatment of a disease when parents willfully declined vaccination? After all it is a completely irresponsible inviting of the problem just like driving while drunk.
Yes, you can still run LISP on x86 hardware, but why would you ever want to run C++ on LISP hardware?
Hehe. Dat was 'm dus :)
Ask HN: How to onboard users better?
I have a SaaS that lets people extract data from video files. It's simple enough to use for 1/5 users but the remaining 4/5 seems to never get it right (they are doing the wrong steps) Their mistakes are forming a pattern.

My next immediate step is to improve the UI so that they don't make the same mistakes.

However, overall, I find that some video files won't work properly without me guiding them. I have to literally tweak the product so that it will work out the way they want it.

Now upon sign up, I offer them a way to get in touch with me if they run into trouble. 4/5 users don't seem to reply or even reach out, they simply use it, try it and leave.

I want to improve this by helping them have a successful experience with the product. How can I improve the onboarding process so that I won't have people leaving because of unsuccessful jobs (either because they didn't do it the proper way or the product is simply running into bugs which I need to fix).

Also, should I be doing this for every prospect without qualifying them first? I spend all day and night helping new users as they come and request help, but sometimes I find I do all the work and fixes to find that they are not interested or it's too expensive and that their department doesn't have the capital.
Orthodox Islam, to the extent that it was effective in the US Civil Rights movement in the 60s, had its start with Malcolm X and its end with Clarence 13x and his founding of the Five Percent Nation, which is a rejection of Islam at its most fundamental level: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_13X It replaces the "Mystery Spook" Allah and the Prophet Muhammed with the individual himself "A.l.l.a.h" (arm, leg, leg, arm, head) which is an acronym of a human being. There is no god, other than the living person. This is nothing more than atheism with a healthy dose of Randian objectivism. I fail to see the "3 feet" you mention here.
Lisp All the Way Down!
https://twitter.com/thelittlelisper/status/55098754701526220...
This is not an external compliance issue, it is entirely the university management that is responsible. Plus, it is only one example out of many. I was never in the system deep enough to be able to recount the other examples, but I certainly remember lots of drama around forced classroom aids and other nonsense.

Excessive bureaucracy is not some inevitable thing that you cannot help. It's driven by people who directly cause it to fester and grow.
> "open, tolerant and inclusive society"

This is what we need, not the usual approach of using tragic events to justify new surveillance, law enforcement powers, or military action. The only response that could offer a real long term solution is outreach and education, because fundamentalisms only flourishes in an environment of ignorance and poverty.

One of the few downsides of the technological revolution that we live in, is that everyday it lowers the barrier of entry develop nuclear or biological weapons. If we don't do something about extremest, they will be the cause of our civilization's demise. In the past decade, we have spent $3 trillion fighting wars in the Middle East.[1] That money and our presence there hasn't worked, it's only created a new generation that hate Western values.

I just watched on news footage of hangars and barracks being bulldozed in Afghanistan.[2] What I saw was potential schools and homes being bulldozed. Imaging what could have been accomplished after 911 with $3 trillion invested instead in Education, Science, and Technology. Imagine the good over $800 million each day for a decade could do. Let's stop dropping bombs and start teaching. That's the only way we're going to end this vicious cycle before it's too late for all of us.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09...

[2] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/afghanistan-war-60-minutes-lara-...
True, but when you talk about the perspective of economics, it behooves you to talk about demand, I think. The broad based demand for a college education is based on the irrational thinking that so many should have a college education in order to work, which is pretty much untrue.

It's hard to argue that the quality of a college education has declined when its purpose has changed. So many folks just need a college degree to remain competitive, at least on paper, and not much else. I think this is a much more modern trend.

Perhaps one could make the case that the low cost of a college education somehow spurred this irrational demand for it. So many people have set off to set themselves apart with a degree that now only substandard prospective workers don't have them.
> Most of the cultural norms are dictated from above, not necessarily by populist consensus.

Steven Pinker might not agree with you here. See his book 'The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined' and the reference in it for some examples of cultural norm changes occurring from the bottom up.
>I don't need to live in your neighborhood to have an opinion. A

Nobody in the neighborhood needs your opinion. If you are going to comment on the community you were never a part of or a certain class you never been a part off, then be humble when you get corrected.

> It was not an arrestable offence. Selling "loosies" gets your a $100 fine, not an arrest. Read the laws.

Get off Wikipedia and stop pretending to know stuff, there is a clear pattern where you attempt to know everything.

The fine has not been anywhere close to $100 in NYC for selling cigarettes for years now. This fine you are speaking about is also imposed on stores. Not people who are classified as drug dealers.

Right now you get fined $1000 for failing to display warning label within your store. Selling to minors? You are looking for thousands of dollars of fines. Those fines go up 3/4x if you keep it up.

This would have been arrest #3 for Eric. Which would likely would have resulted in heavy fines / jail time.

> The crime was of selling loose cigs, not selling to children. It was a tax issue, plain and simple.

What tax issue? He is selling loosies at profit. Taxes are already paid and the kids can't get those in bodegas anyways. If anything he was helping with your so called 'tax' issues.

Majority of buyers are kids. Grown men won't pay 50% mark-up on something they can get in the store.

Neither of your counter points hold any water, stick to bullshitting your friends. They don't know any better.
Thank God that isn't what's currently happening, then.
I do wonder what type of effect this will cause with job requirements, will master's now be the new bachelors?

The more worrying issue is the government taking on more student loan debt. There is a student loan bubble but it has not hurt the economy partially due to federal requirements that the loan not be discharged. What happens if current graduation rates hold steady and the US is stuck with a large bill but nothing to show for the effort?
Or just outright make this the equivalent of high school, but for students that actually /want/ to be there, instead of whom are /required/ to be there. That, and sports distractions instead of academic pursuits, are the most grievous reasons 'High School' isn't fulfilling the role that '2 years of community college' is supposed to provide.
Yuck.

Maybe your company sucks at interviewing? Maybe you're lucky and all of your candidates are good enough to do the work so you can cherry pick the ones that "fit"?

I've interviewed a reasonably large number of people, and I've worked with some folks who were good at interviewing, and there were many times where it took most of a day to figure out whether or not someone was worth hiring.

What I've found is that credentials, like a CS degree, are generally garbage and bear no relation to whether or not someone can code or problem solve. Experience and resumes can be misleading as well and rarely tell you for certain whether or not someone can actually do the work. Maybe something like half to 2/3 of the time it's obvious within the earliest portion of an interview that someone just doesn't have the skills. The remainder often takes a lot of work to suss out skill levels. Rarely someone will knock it out of the park and be an obvious hire. More often than not it'll take several interviewers concentrating on a few weak spots to see how weak they truly are and figure out if they're still a good hire. Not to mention the problems of trying to gauge someone's skill level in a high pressure environment where they will absolutely not be at their best.

Increasingly I get the impression that silicon valley is becoming like a giant frat house where companies just hire people they like and then bang out horrible code and fail to execute on projects until the VC money dries up or they get pity-acquihired.
Reasonable people can draw reasonable lines. We can use the last 20 years of the PC industry to come up with an initial list of consumer-impacting behavior.

If the behavioral targeting industry can fingerprint every possible aspect of browser behavior, and run subsecond auctions, OEMs can track a subset of BOMs on an annual cycle.
Not specifically, but it could be.
I really hope that this comment is sarcastic. But due to Poe's law, I'll never know...
How to Rip Blu-ray 3D to SBS 3D
Coulton also had some first-mover advantage with his thing-a-week model which got press because of its originality (as opposed to the quality of his music).

Not to take away from the quality of his music, which is really good (I have a few on my playlists), but there were also plenty of other very good musicians that tried thing-a-week and didn't break through.
I disagree. Teaching science as a series of facts is in no way akin to religious indoctrination.

Edit: And Kaye is also ignoring the fact that every high school science curriculum covers the scientific method and includes hands on experimentation.
I might be mistaken, but my impression was that the "web apps only" thing was real and not a temporary compromise. They may have spun it that way retroactively, though.
> Even the CDC has admitted it excluded the data showing that the chance of autism from vaccination increases based on the race of the children being injected.

http://www.snopes.com/medical/disease/cdcwhistleblower.asp

> So keep using slurs to bash those who prefer to act in their own self interest rather than discussing the real facts.

Would you like to discuss some more "real facts?" I'm happy to oblige.
Plague, the Viral Social Network
Feihu plastic hose factory
Did he? I was under the impression he wasn't approved to write C at Google when Go was initially being developed.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/21/ken_thompson_take_ou...
Expressive Functional Programming with Continuations in Python
Check the story of Pomplamoose's recent tour for a counterpoint on just how sustainable a tour and live show is for a group of a certain level of popularity.

https://medium.com/@jackconte/pomplamoose-2014-tour-profits-...
Rain Dance Music Player WOW
I think you don't understand science. You choose to believe one unpublished bit of gossip about a unpublished study on one segment of the population (which happened to disappear when the study was done a slightly different way), but you ignore the overwhelming evidence that vaccines have nothing to do with autism?

Yes, idiots is a good word for these people. All the evidence shows that vaccines do a hell of a lot more good than harm, yet the continue to believe in shitty science and conspiracy theories.
This is not a good argument.

Novelty-seeking is a great pleasure for much of the population. Something can't be both non-addictive and also the most pleasant thing to do all the time.

We would have to breed out or genetically engineer out the possibility of boredom, which we're not going to do. Or if we do, then that's the source of the problem, not the drugs.
So.... why is it necessary to become "independently wealthy" for music as a career to be "sustainable"?

There seems to be a disconnect there. Also, maybe his work is out of date, because there are a lot of independent musicians who have achieved massive success outside of the traditional recording studio model in the internet age, largely through selling their own work and through touring.
As AI/automation takes over jobs, this is exactly what people should be paid to do - go to school.
Wow, that's impressive! I'll have to check Pimsleur out. What do you do for language maintenance? Did you ever get the languages mixed up?
Perhaps the demand is irrational, but the effects are very real:

http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm

It would be nice if we could change the fundamental problems underlying that irrational demand (pre-college schooling which doesn't prepare students for work, a national obsession with white collar jobs, etc.). However, if I was staring down a big wealth gap and decided to propose a concrete policy shift to resolve some of it, I think that it's not a bad idea to get people moved from the 7-11% unemployment category to the 5.4% unemployment category.
Obama declines to fire U.S. attorneys over Aaron Swartz’s suicide
Wine Uncorked: The Rise of Big [Really Big] Box Wine (2012)
So, here is my answer to the question, "What do we owe the people who we do not hire?"

- Information on where they stand.
- An explanation of what they are doing wrong.
- Help improving.

Things you will never get from companies like Google.
If you're agreeing not to sue, then the company can use any criteria they like to hire or not hire you and there are zero consequences.

Imagine you check the box, you don't get the job, and your feedback turns out to be "You're a man and we don't like to hire men." You have no recourse because you agreed not to sue.

You can argue that that's obviously illegal hiring criteria and you should be able to sue anyway, but then you're back to square one.
I went to community college and transferred into an excellent, top 5 (according to some rankings anyway) school. I would say that most people in community college don't really want to be there. Many of the students that I started with are still there (3 years later), and will likely not graduate nor transfer.

From my experience I still think the education problem needs to be solved in K-6th grade. I believe my successful transition from community college to a university was the result of excellent classmates who I joined in middle and high school (many of them went to schools like Yale or MIT so perhaps there was some sort of exposure effect) and/or very encouraging community college teachers/professors. Personally I found community college professors to be way more invested (on the upper end, anyway) then my high school teachers, and I went to a pretty good high school.

The reason it should start at K-6th grade is because so many people lack solid foundations. There are people in community college who are not good at algebra. These fundamentals need to be well taught. In addition, kids need to learn how to teach themselves and also need to be properly motivated, but not coddled.

Increasing the pay of teachers and making teaching as a profession more prestigious and rigorous will solve the K-6th grade education problem, which will help with education as a whole.

Oh, and we should do something about poverty (because let's face it, if you're poor and in a terrible neighborhood, the odds are against you. I know, because I was that person).
"As the CDC noted, the authors of that study suggested the most likely explanation for the moderate correlation between autism and vaccination in young children was the existence of immunization requirements for autistic children enrolled in special education preschool programs."

Read more at http://www.snopes.com/medical/disease/cdcwhistleblower.asp#d...

The Snopes article has you out-experted. Moreover, it fits with all the other studies ever done.
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The general population has been sold a bill of goods by those in power that those in power cannot possible make good on. As long as there are small groups of armed individuals, highly motivated and unmoved by the fear of laws or death, a government cannot guarantee the general populations safety.

Only when the people finally come to understand this fact and decide to make good on the need to provide their own protection will you see a change in the reaction to these events.

This idea is what continues to drive the gun vs. anti-gun movement in the USA. Individuals still want to be able to provide for their own protection, while the other side wishes that we rely upon government to provide that protection.

Like it or not the unarmed police officers on bikes were just more sheep sent to the slaughter by a government that had convinced the people that it could provide for their safety. When it not only failed totally, but is still failing today as the people are no safer then they were yesterday.
Sounds like a good plan to me. Community colleges are one of the most overlooked--yet most important--parts of the educational system. Almost everyone who attends a for-profit school with flashy ads would have been better off at their local community college.

America has been forsaking our commitment to public higher education for decades now. If we're going to finally start investing again, community colleges are a great place to begin.
And that's the fatal flaw of Reddit. The more people it attracts the worse the content becomes. /r/iama used to be really good, but it has turned into a vapid wasteland of PR departments.
I'd rather see a more general program that would pay anyone's tuition for one class per semester.
> The proposal would cover half-time and full-time students who maintain a 2.5 grade point average and “make steady progress toward completing a program,” White House officials said.

So it will be performance based, rewarding only those students who have a good grade, incentivizing studying.
Lets just say that the relationship is purely corrupt. How does that justify not immunising your children and endangering other peoples children? This argument is bogus, and you've helped to clearly demonstrate the quote above at work.
This is exactly how I feel. Even though my income has quadrupled in the last three years I haven't made a single positive impact to anyone's life using my skills. This was a very sad realisation that I've basically been reinventing wheels for a living and not really engineering anything.
"...but it has not hurt the economy..."

Really? When people are burdened with mortgage-sized unsecured debt, they spend much less. It places enormous downward pressure on the economy.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business-jan-june12-studentlo...
Ephemeral storage is just that - ephemeral. Amazon can decide to retire your instance at any time.

So your persistence plan is RAID 10 it sounds like.
If its free to go to a community college, won't 4 year universities have to keep their prices lower or people will just decide to go to community college for free.