skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Plentiful cheap labor, abusive bureaucratic and lethargic organisational structure, plentiful federal subsidies... why aren't we seeing more startup universities / community colleges snapping up these over-qualified and underpaid professors for themselves and offering them to the highly subsidized and eager student population?

At some levels, college is a popularity contest to get the best credential. At other levels, college really is about learning the necessary skills to enter the work force.

Is government and self-regulation of education really such an incredible barrier to entry that new entrants can't offer better deals to the best teachers and still compete?

Edit: I am seriously considering getting together with 10 other parents I know, and we can just collectively pay someone like this to teach our kids all day. He could teach a class of 10 kids for a year, earn 3x as much, and we would still be paying less than half what the private school down the street costs.
No fuel source--apart from a wood- or coal-fired stove--is cheap enough in the US for folks in coldish climates to be indifferent to heating costs. Natural gas is probably the best deal right now, but lots of homes have oil or electric and it doesn't make economic sense to cut over the equipment. Also bear in mind a lot of the (populated, chilly) northeastern US's average housing stock is older than many other places.
> So, yes, type safety in golang is not as powerful as it is in Haskell. I think we already knew that though didn't we :)

That is just a really big one for me I wanted to share and get others opinion on. I guess I just feel like a lot of people don't realize how much having that stringly typed hole means. Perhaps others just disagree.

I would love to hear a counter argument for why others don't think this matters.
As a 29 year old male myself, the of idea of dating a college undergraduate is just plain weird... particularly in this case, where there is such an obvious power imbalance. The outcome (though perhaps not the severity) should have been apparent from the get go.
That's exactly right. Once a moderator sees the comments, we unkill them and mark your account legit so future comments will be fine. In the future, you (or anyone) can always speed that up by emailing us a link at hn@ycombinator.com.

Comments posted from Tor IPs by new accounts are put under moderation because of past abuse by trolls. Sorry for the inconvenience. We have a plan to turn the review process over to the community, which should ease the problem considerably, but I don't know yet when we'll get to it.
>I'm rooting for a Wintel underdog comback.

Yes, if only because Wintel has a history of relative openness and backward compatibility.

However, the new Microsoft board is going in a different direction, prioritizing cloud and cross-platform over Windows. Hence Win10 will be cheap/free and continually updated by the cloud without notice, i.e. it becomes a non-deterministic magic box. Businesses will have to pay for Windows not to change.
Some of us do.
As a tangent, I was appalled to read that Stanford undergrads can major in "management science". What happened to the high academic standards for which Stanford is famous?
Thanks. I was wondering about the Tk implantation in terms of plotting and charts.
Touche. Thanks for making such an effort to understand the sentence.

What I tried to convey is that the ability to say you've made a sale is worth a lot. It's a milestone, and it comes in the vulnerable make-or-break days of a company.

A flawed contract provision only hurts when circumstances force you to live by or enforce that provision. The chance of that happening for any provision of any particular contract is usually low. On the other hand, if the flaw in the language can shut your business down, even a small chance of that bad outcome is worth worrying about.

I assume that a very orthodox proposal will draw less attention, prompt less negotiation, and get more deals signed quickly. My conclusion is that, because the first sale is worth so much when you need it, you might be better off with a traditional, error-prone form that's easier to get signed than a modern, technically superior form that protects you in edge cases and after long negotiations. Your business might fail because you never sold, long before anyone has any reason to sue you.

In my defense, I don't choose to express myself personally in the style of my contracts. You'd probably have understood me better if I did, but no one should have to live that way.
So long as bright young students continue to ignore market realities and pursue academic careers, nothing will change.

In fact, as a taxpayer and student I would be upset if my university unilaterally chose to pay more than the market would bear. So long as highly-educated individuals will accept reaching jobs for $34,000 a year, that is precisely what we should continue to pay them—doing otherwise would be an inefficiency in operations which would drive up the already high cost of education.

Unfortunately, even in his follow up he fails to acknowledge that market realities are the cause of his fate: https://medium.com/@AndrewR_Physics/jump-to-conclusions-4044...
HP wants to be the new mainframe for Earth, by developing memristors that they won't sell to anyone except via hosted software.
I remember someone from Facebook saying that ( can't find the link ATM ) when HPHP was being built there was a competing project to trans-compile PHP to Java. In the end they compared the performance and found that the C++ was faster and went with it. Is it true ?

If it is, I wonder how they feel now that they have given up speed improvements and built a VM in search of other advantages. At least if they had chosen the JVM they could have taken advantage of interoperability that JVM provides with other languages to convert at least part of their code base to JVM languages, thereby possibly improving maintainability.
Apple teams up with Pinterest to make it easier to discover iOS apps
On docker group security
XBox360 stored a unique crypto key in ROM inside the CPU. No one cracked it. Though the DVD drive firmware was insecure.
How is Gratipay different from Patreon?
It's downside protection. It's basically saying they get paid before the founders but after loan holders. I'm simplifying, since multiple and/or participating liquidation preference does alter the math, but roughly speaking that's it.

On common stock though, I don't think that'll fly. There are a number of ways where founders with board control can screw a minority shareholder. For eg. they can issue 10x the current outstanding shares to their family, or appoint their friends to the board, or sell the company, or sell the company. It's only in extreme cases that VC's will expose themselves like that. I believe facebook's first institutional round was for common stock and no board seat.
I tried comparing some plans, but it always gives me 500 with the very familiar red "We're sorry, but something went wrong." message. At least I know you are using Rails.

And now I know in terms I can understand why healthcare is such a pain. :)
"The C random library has always been… to put it politely… less than ideal. Okay, it’s pretty fucking horrible. It’s so bad that the C standard itself suggests you’d be better off not using it."

Back in the days 4.2 BSD or so, the BUGS section of the manual entry for rand understatedly mansplained that it had "bad spectral characteristics". In fact, it was so bad that the lower bit alternated between 0 and 1 every time you called it. Hard to miss that bright line on a spectrogram.

If you couldn't figure out what to expect from such a forthright disclosure in the manual, then you were in for quite a shock when you did the obvious thing and tried to use "rand() & 1" to simulate flipping a coin!
I'd agree with the broader point that this guy is making, he's being exploited by the university, and doesn't owe the school any additional work.

That being said, he does owe his students the chance to at least look at the culmination of their semester's work. I know at my university, professors are obligated to have exams available for at least a year past the date they were taken! Maybe if allowing students to look at their exams would truly take an additional 75 hours of his time as claimed, he'd have a stronger case, but that's simply not true. If the student was requesting him to explain why a problem was wrong, or engage with this exam in anyway, I'd be completely in agreement. Hell, he could just put them all in a box outside his door, or maybe leave them with the departmental secretary (this happens all the time), or come up with some sort of solution.

His broader point still stands, but this is absolutely part of the responsibilities of a teacher, and I can't get behind this guy making a point at the expense of his students.
Xiaomi was banned over patent issues for like a week before they resolved it.

The issue you are referring to, the Indian Air Force "warned" the use of Xiaomi devices because they tracked them uploading data to China. Xiaomi responded with an update which had one-click Mi Cloud turn off switch to stop that from happening. They were uploading meta data for their cloud services just like any other company. Xiaomi also announced a new datacentre in India to mitigate this concern. But they never got banned over this.

Xiaomi sold less than 2 million devices in India in 4-ish months. But to put things in perspective, they sold 8-9 times more than Google's Android One phones, another program targeting the same market. They sold the flagship Mi3 only for a couple weeks and then continued selling lower end device. They are launching Mi4 here this month, so that number will now probably go higher.
Hello again. Why are you into spreadsheets?
A set of 306  icons optimized for iOS, Windows Phone, Windows and BlackBerry 10
My mistake, sorry. (And apparently everyone else is making the same mistake too...) I've edited my comment for clarity.

Did Tox devs express anything on the matter? It's very hard to substantiate all of this without someone who knows the Tox project.

For example, the last reply was "The Tox protocol is very easy to parse in C which means little chance of issues." Is that from a Tox dev?
Although he didn't say so, Raymond's thought analysis is based on the development of software in a commercial or professional setting. The decision of whether to release personal projects as open source is a different discussion altogether.
The inductive claim "more likely to be correct" is strongly supported by the evidence gained from enumerating the number of ways the functions could go wrong. Now if we want to expand our domain out from just that function to programs in general, we need an idea of how applicable those ideas are to larger programs. The biggest source of reducing error cases in my example was purity.

Some parts of programs (namely the side effecting parts) can't be expressed as pure functions. So the next piece of evidence we need is an estimate of the percentage of large programs that can be expressed as pure functions. From my experience writing Haskell full-time for the last five years I can tell you that it is very substantial. Even in very impure code you can often factor out lots of small pure operations. I feel very safe in claiming that at least a third of Haskell code can be written with pure functions, and I think it's likely greater than half. (It could be a lot higher, but I'm trying to keep the confidence level fairly high.) You don't have to take my word for this. You can go off and browse through millions of lines of Haskell on [Hackage](http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/) and see for yourself. It probably wouldn't be too difficult to write an automated script to do this.

Now we've seen that pure functions have a small fraction of the error conditions that impure functions have. And we've seen that maybe half of all the code we write can be expressed that way. That's a pretty dramatic reduction in the number of potential error conditions we might encounter for even complex programs. That is why I think the claim "more likely to be correct" is strongly supported by evidence.
>Sure, but our food is $2, not $20

Only in government subsidized, tax exempt food courts. Restaurant prices are not all that different.

>we have completely different restaurant economics from Australia

The difference is mainly caused by higher median wages (a policy choice) and the lack of government support for food courts (again, a policy choice).

>Also, what's wrong with drones?

Intrinsically, nothing. What I have an objection to is publicity stunts and public relations exercises designed to inadvertently foment support around a policy of suppressing wages.

What's wrong with suppressing wages? Ask that kindly 85 year old uncle next time you order your $2 bak kut teh from him if he feels financially comfortable enough to retire.
I do.

When faced with the sad fact that Turbo Pascal was PC only I had to choose another language.

The year was 1993 and C already looked dated when compared with what Turbo Pascal was capable of. Also when compared against Modula-2, which was on the way out as well.

So I went C++, which even with C++ ARM compatibility issues, was way safer than C.

Nowadays there are plenty of compiled languages to choose from, but between C++ and C I only pick C if obliged to do so.
The universe DIDN'T begin with a Big Bang, new theory suggests
On Really Trying
"self-designed major in management science and neuroengineering"
I would guess it is one of those programs where you kind of make up your title and path. Is neuroengineering more to your liking?
so simple andrew.
quit job. get a cs mater in us.
get a software job, easily pay 150k per year plus stock, rsu, bonus and 401k, ptos.
Undoubtedly--tests, static types, debugging--I want them all!
While I agree that there are great flaws in the US medical system, I don't think that life expectancy statistics is a good proof of them.

It gives you an idea where the health care system stands because life expectancy is low in places where there is no health care system. But life expectancy is greatly increased just by public sanitation - generally, education - and vaccinations, but could be lowered by factors that have little to do with health care.

American life expectancy is surely lowered by how Americans eat (no, I don't blame McDonalds who often gets the blame as an iconic brand). The kind of health insurance or lack of it, or how doctors work, cannot really decide how people eat. They try to impact but they cannot decide. Also, the US has a homicide rate that is substantially higher than in other developed countries. I won't bother myself by calculating how much that alone decreases life expectancy, but it's just an example of these other factors.
Did we bring new heights of innovation? What are the results? Did the software industry bust? When, and how? What has taken its place?

Self programmed AI.

How is the west coast software culture depicted?

Like surf rock bands of the 50s.

Did the startup scene last?

Nope.

Is the US still a leader in the software industry?

Are you kidding? The world's chinese AIs!

Did artificial intelligence make software workers obsolete?

Long ago, yes.

Did the industry's general disregard of security come back to bite us in the ass?

Who's us? It certainly served well AIs of spy agencies everywhere.

Who are the leading companies?

Hon Hai-Apple.

Are any of the big ones from today still around?

Nope.

Of course, this is the bad scenario. In the best case senario, it would be all different and much nicer.
> cost of education having outpaced CPI

"CEO wages" have also out-paced the CPI. I'm sure the administration isn't paying themselves a pittance (and that in a budget crisis their salaries are the last on the chopping block)...
Sorry about that. Which zip code are you in? We are accepting enrollments in the 37 healthcare.gov states - FL, TX, NJ, etc. We are working on adding CA, NY and others soon. To see it all in action, try a FL zip code like 33604. Thank you for taking a look!
AdBusters. Enough said.
That's a start but the GP wasn't asking about competing entrants in the same batch but about a theoretical entrant that would compete with an established YC partner.
I wonder if it's feasible to build a hosting site that strictly forbids (and actively removes) copyright infringing material, intended more for this kind of file hosting than for piracy.

Monetising would be a challenge, since rapidshare et al mainly made money by selling premium accounts, which are generally only attractive for piracy purposes.
That's pretty awesome growth from the 40 signups NYT reported you had as of March last year! [1] Congratulations on the incredible break-out success.

If the broker's cut is average just $100 / year (WAG) on 110,000 signups, that's ARR of $11 million. Holy shit, nicely done on $1.1m of funding.

Their agent platform [2] nets just $10 per application and gives the agent the full commission, but even just $1m revenue is impressive for the funding level.

Also, can we now officially stop talking about trying to fix the problem from the inside? If this doesn't show that healthcare.gov (and every single other state-exchange) should never have been built in the first place, I don't know what does. It also makes you wonder, does the Fed get that annual broker's commission when you signup fully on healthcare.gov, or do they just give it away to the insurance company?

[1] - http://www.nytimes.com/news/affordable-care-act/2014/03/06/m...

[2] - https://www.healthsherpa.com/agents/features
Chinjut's multiple posts here have argued much more eloquently than I can about "utility" or what is "rational" to different people. Here's my simple way of explaining why I will buy a ticket tomorrow if the prize isn't won tonight:

If, for a $1 bet, you offer people a 1/2 chance of winning $2, most people won't bother. However, if you offer those same people a 1/1000000 chance of winning $1000000, many more people would become interested.

Winning $2 isn't meaningful to most people. But a chance of winning a sufficiently large amount of money that they could significantly change their lifestyle is a much more "rational" decision for them to make. And that, in a nutshell, is why lotteries exist at all.

I do love the idea of the Kelly criterion, and I do try to keep it in mind when investing. Unfortunately my "edge" in most investment situations so small that I shouldn't be betting, err I mean "investing" anything!
> “This is something you can stick on your existing computer to protect your existing software.”

Let me adjust your expectations accordingly. I will not be sticking your software on my computer, at least willingly.
> 1. Cars are moving into this with heated seats

Moving into? I thought this has been commonplace for a while now? My parents 1991 model Volvo had heated seats. Maybe it's only common in colder climates.
Khan's Academy, Coursera, etc. I even donate to one of them as I think it's the future of learning, free from government intervention that seems to cause so much malaise these days. But that's a long, other discussion, before anyone jumps on it.

And to tell you the truth, I've often flirted with a similar idea to the one you mentioned at the end. That, along with plain home-schooling. So it doesn't necessarily have to be a "startup" that disrupts the current teaching ecosystem. It can simply be a bunch of parents buckling-down and doing what they think is best for their children.

Hopefully they don't make home-schooling illegal, as I've noticed it occurring in a few places. That would make it impossibly to change the status-quo without breaking the law.
My HS (2009-2013) had an intro programming class where we programmed little robots in Java, AP Computer Science, Game Programming w/ C++, and App development w/ java.
This is actually even more important in cooler climates, where you may need to scrape the ice off of your car right before driving. Having frozen hands most definitely does not make driving easier.
Only from the scroll bars.
What are people's thoughts? Legit or another case of investors being sheep and simply following the lead?

I mean I get it.. the CEO is very qualified and sold a company in the same space. But just the money he has raised already exceeds the last sale. It is hard to believe that they have any ONE competitive advantage over Amazon considering the amount of years amazon has been around and just how advanced their logistics are.

Any validity here or are things like this bad signs of a potential bubble...?
Adding in neuroengineering makes it sound even more pretentious and fake.
Can Esther Dyson’s Way to Wellville Challenge Improve Population Health?
SourceForce pushing malware would fit perfectly into this dark pattern category. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8849950

Btw. In most of apps user interfaces and usability is just so bad, that you don't need any dark patterns to completely ruin experience and frustrate users. Making something purely random and without any logic, isn't 'carefully crated', but it does exactly the same.
That last comment was by irungentoo, who is the lead Tox dev and the one who wrote the parsing code.
Video Games Were Never a ‘Boys Club,’ and Never Will Be
Grafana is fantastic. 2.0 handles multi-user accounts, multi-tenant access, seamless integration with InfluxDB. Thank you Torkel.
I believe eru's point was that those kinds of tests are not necessary in Haskell because if a function takes something of the type IpAddress, None simply isn't possible. So everywhere IpAddress is used, you don't have to do any of those tests.

It sounds like your point is that even in Haskell there will inevitably be boundaries where the None case is an issue. And that's true, namely the point where you call:

parseIpAddress :: String -> Maybe IpAddress

Somewhere your app will be sucking in a string and you need to have a test for the empty string case. That's true. But the surface area of the application that is susceptible to this problem is reduced (often dramatically). All code that works with IpAddress is free and clear. Whereas in most other languages, every function that takes an IpAddress probably needs to be tested with the None case. If you try to argue that you don't need to test every one, then you're plagued by the difficulty of knowing which need it and which don't. Haskell's types solve that for you completely.
Why would you presume that a startup would offer better wages and conditions for those "below the API"? The first one might, but then the second one would start trying to drive costs down in competition.

In countries that allow such things there are plenty of private college "startups" and they are almost universally awful. There is more money to be made churning out hordes of poorly trained students than there is in properly training them.
At least in Japan and most parts of China, houses are poorly insulated and heating is often from aircon, which means if you want to stay warm, you wear thick clothes inside, sit under a heated blanket and what not.

This sucks.

Your nose and hands are still cold. If you want to move from the blanket its cold.

I don't see anything that really addresses this. Yeah, the insulated chair is nice when you sit on it, but what about when you need to get a cup of coffee?
Learn how to read.
I think the argumentation here is a bit a skewed towards 'what static types can and cannot do for the compiler' - i.e. how they can help the computer in constructing formal proofs. For me another almost as valuable thing is how static types help me think about and design the code. The static type information is always there to remind "this entity belongs to this set of objects" which frees me from the cognitive burden of maintaining this constantly in my working memory. With specific static types the function signatures now document the tranforms defined for those entities . This aspect of static types as a cognitive tool is highly personal, and not same for everyone, unlike the language and the compiler, though.
Make sure you catch the follow up article as well: https://medium.com/@AndrewR_Physics/i-was-not-amused-b4a2e4c...