skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article was clear that it isn't so simple. "“Ballooning administrative and capital costs, seldom related to the core mission of higher ed, far outpace instructional costs,” ... "High-profile spending has turned into a higher-education arms race, with universities pouring money into buildings, technology, academic star power, and administrative costs. Trevithick stressed that he believes this is the most relevant point of all—that universities aren’t paying fair wages to adjuncts because they don’t want to, not because they can’t."

Suppose we do #1. The easy university response for increased demand is to continue to hire adjuncts below the 30 hours per week limit for Obamacare => no improvement in the adjunct situation.

How do you even go about doing #2? Put a law in place capping the maximum number of PhDs per school? Push for an increase in technical colleges, career colleges, and other colleges without the liberal arts degree or graduate courses? Does that mean a retired person interested in learning for the sake of learning, who wants access to the research culture and resources, might be denied entry to a PhD program for fear of taking an adjunct position in the future?

So why not #3: unionize, with union contracts which require a working wage and health care coverage? Collective bargaining is a perfectly reasonable free market mechanism. If 75% of the teachers are adjuncts, and in the middle of a term 95% of them strike over demonstrably poor treatment, then it will be hard for the university to get the scab workers to finish off the term.

Or #4: place a limit on how much can be spent on administrative overhead. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2... (and others) point out that administrative costs have grown while academic costs have decreased, as a percentage of the budget. As a simplistic solution, require that there cannot be more administrative staff than teaching staff. This is all too easily gamed to be a realistic solution.
Graham is the coolest UCSD professor I have ever had a conversation with. I remember a particular instance, at the beginning of my first quarter at UCSD. I wasn't familiar with his work and had never heard of him. My naive 19 year old self walked into his office hours asking some simple probability question. I noticed a cast on his hand and inquired about it. He jokingly said he got a cut because he was juggling ice skates. I thought he was joking. I went home and looked him up, only to find that he was the head of the national jugglers association at one point. Pretty awesome guy.
Same problem here. Plus I am using sendgrid which automagically makes the link about 4 times longer using the same "trick" which further amplifies the problem.
In fact I decided that I should go the other direction instead. Now every outgoing email is stored in the database before sending. This makes it trivial to track every email open, every click on every link and the links look beautiful, like "/e/<random_email_id>/open". Been happy ever since.

Edit: This obviously doesn't invalidate the general idea.
I wonder why you didn't use LLVM to help make your language?
I can't tell if you're still trying (and failing) to mock me or if you've tried to contribute something of value.
Larry Summers's Campaign to Be President of Bitcoin Central Bank
Surge in web posts taken down by Hong Kong police sparks censorship fears
Well, if I remember my university's beginner linear algebra course, there were many topics on the syllabus only due to historic accident, ancestor worship, and theoretical necessities: I remember parallelepipeds, Cramer's rule, solving eigensystems by solving for a polynomial's zeros... Let me tell you how many times I've used parallelepipeds, Cramer's rule, or found eigenvalues via the quadratic formula in the 12 years since linear algebra (and a career in statistical signal processing and machine learning): zero, zero, and zero. Most things in college are important only to the extent that they're gatekeepers for what's really important. What hiddencost says is true, but very little of what you're learning in class is relevant to those important and interesting things. Sorry: college sucks.
Medicine is a vast, fast moving field. No shame in a doctor not knowing everything about everything. But if you want the best possible advice re: birth control I'd suggest finding a better doctor. :)

For your reference: The issue with IUDs and fertility is PID (Pelvic Inflamatory Disase). It was previously thought that having an IUD increased your risk of PID, but the latest research shows that the risk of PID is not associated with IUD use, but with IUD insertion. If you do not have an STI at the time of insertion, you're safe. Some research has even shown that the Mirena will lower the long term risk of PID, and a large study from China just came out showing that long-term use of IUD does not impact fertility.

You seem primarily concerned not with PID, but the risk of perforation during insertion in roughly 1 in every 2,000 women. Which, first off, is a pretty damn low rate, and compares favourably to the risks of other birth control options. And second, while a perforation can be serious, even if not caught it should just heal on its own. Worst case, it might require surgery, but it's not going to cause long term fertility issues.

Everyone has the right to choose which risks they're willing to take, to be sure. But I think you may be grossly misinformed if you think that the Mirena and similar IUDs convey significant risks of infertility. Don't get one inserted without an STI test, and get a followup check to make sure there's no perforation, and then there is no (repeat no) evidence of an increased rate of infertility.
I work on PaaS (Cloud Foundry) for my day job.

There's a big gap between the initial weekend-project implentation and all the many, many details that are required to build a full-featured one that "just works".
I can't really speak to the valuation, but I can speak to the Tesla myth:

Just because Tesla can beat Detroit doesn't make them the worldwide success Musk claims them to be. Toyota and Audi won't be nearly as easy to vanquish as GM.
Do engineers really have that big an impact on the success of the company? Their salaries and ownership share certainly don't reflect that, in my opinion.
Where can I learn more about the forces underlying the topography of cities? I find the connection you described between house width and taxation to be fascinating.
There will almost certainly be unseen consequences. Some may be negative, but I believe the aggregate will be more positive (assuming senescence remains at least proportional to lifespan). As Newton stated, we may see further by standing on the shoulders of giants. As our species acquires more knowledge, the time it takes to learn what has previously been discovered often increases. Our average lifespan may become (or already be) a bottleneck to faster technological innovation.

Imagine those at age 100 preparing for the second half of their lives rather than expecting to die in the very near future. That may spawn a new phase of maturation that doesn't exist today. What if, generations from now, people recall how young and dumb they were before they turned 100?
Chris, if I can be of some help... Hyper-activeness in children can be a sign of ADHD, but in adults it's not entirely true.

If you don't mind me posting this Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_attention_deficit_hyperac... you may find some answers there.

>Adults with ADHD are often perceived by others as chaotic and disorganized, with a tendency to need high stimulation to be less distracted and function effectively. Additionally, many adults suffer from associated or "co-morbid" psychiatric conditions such as depression or anxiety.[13]

>Symptoms of ADHD can vary widely between individuals and throughout the lifetime of an individual. As the neurobiology of ADHD is becoming increasingly understood, it is becoming evident that difficulties exhibited by individuals with ADHD are due to problems with the parts of the brain responsible for executive functions (see below: Pathophysiology). These result in problems with sustaining attention, planning, organizing, prioritizing, and impulsive thinking/decision making.

Hope I'm being useful -- a close family member was in the same boat. I was able to help, because it was me who randomly saw someone talking about this on an HN comment and I dived further into the world of ADHD and found out that it may not be 'classical' depression, but depression caused by something else. Since then, there's been complete emotional stability, rational decision making and depression is controlled completely.

Lastly, Chris... what you did I think was not a bad judgement call at all. In my mind you were making something right, and fixing a wrong because that was the only tool available to you. Debating something just takes forever and some things need to be fixed there and then. What happened to you, is simply disgusting. I am sorry for that, and I hope you can look back on it as a good memory and not a bad memory (which is tough).

I ran a massive community as the real admin, but the same sort of thing happened to me as well. Been years since I left but it's still sore to think about.

Hope all is well man. :)
You're actually giving him too much credit. Speaking as someone whose family has the same values, "having children" isn't enough. They have to be obedient and willing to care for you in your old age. Success, in these terms, is breeding future slaves for your twilight years. The academic term for this is "filial piety". It also includes things like guilting your children for all the things you forced them into doing, such as learning the violin or piano.

To state the obvious, I am kinda disagreeable to this presumption.

Similarly, he's not just talking about a "long term relationship", but a much more economic arrangement where one's wife fulfills your needs for companionship and breeding in return for the bread you win. Unsurprisingly, this is something that many modern Chinese women have started balking at.
The FAA’s new drone rules are four years late and still don’t make sense
>Susan remembers hearing about a theory that the most successful people in life are those who are still searching for their parents’ unconditional regard.
Sound like any famous (recently deceased) CEO?

If this is a reference to Steve Jobs it arguues with great strength against your point. Jobs was raised by a working class couple who adopted him. From reading Isaacson's biography they seem to have been proud but bemused parents. Comparing Jobs to his biological sister (His grad student parents later married and had her.) and his adoptive sister would suggest heredity is pretty powerful.
Hi there, comrade. Perhaps Americans are using the same coping mechanism we were using to deal with the exuberant and completely inane "party line". As outsiders, and engineers on top of it, we just don't pick up the inanity cues that everybody else in the room understands instinctively. Kind of like everyone would sing the International at the beginning of the day, or read an omage to the party once a quarter, but think nothing of it other than being happy to be done with a slightly ridiculous but overall insignificant chore.
Boise, Idaho; Fort Collins, CO; Madison, WI respectively
Ask HN: Is it worthy to do a MIT Challenge and how much will I benefit from it?
In case you don't know (and you probably don't) about the MIT Challenge, it is a challenge where you try to finish the whole MIT curriculum on your own using the free MIT resources (available here [1]). Even though you don't get an official MIT diploma, you actually learn pretty much everything MIT students learn (and you can prove it by doing some projects and putting them online).

It was suggested by Scott Young in a post in his blog [2]. He also gave a TEDx talk about it [3].

I'm wondering, how much will I benefit from it? Should I include it in my resume if I manage to complete it (under the additional education section)? Do you think it is worthy spending a year of doing so? Do you think that job recruiters will appreciate it?

[1] ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
[2] www.scotthyoung.com/blog/mit-challenge/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piSLobJfZ3c
Great question! I wanted to compile to js with a better interface than emscripten.
Well, I'm certainly not in favor of name-calling like that. HMACs don't provide any greater provable security guarantees than a database row in this scenario, so it comes down to implementation. HMACs are harder if you're not familiar with them, but almost everyone is familiar with a database. On the other hand, HMACs make the security of the overall system easier to verify, assuming HMACs are used correctly - but it's harder for newcomers to use them correctly.

I'm saying that in this scenario, it doesn't make much of a difference which system is used. So the author shouldn't be quite so forceful in telling people to use a crypto primitive outside of their comfort zone for minimal benefit. I'd rather use a system written by someone confident in their DB solution, rather than someone who learned their HMAC solution in a couple of hours on Wikipedia.
Good issue tracking tools can produce changelogs for you, which is preferable to maintaining a redundant, separate log manually. It also encourages good practices like tracking all user-visible changes and keeping issue summaries accurate and readable.
It differs in that it can't be cured. Although I suppose you could consider it a terminal illness then by definition.

Life can be extended, perhaps. Made more productive, certainly. But a cure for death? Show me one organism in nature anywhere near as complex as a human being with the capacity for unlimited aging and I'll believe it's possible. Technologically extending life for a few decades on average with a battery of complex and expensive medical treatments is not a cure.

Otherwise, looking at death or aging as a disease, while it might provide the catalyst for any number of worthwhile medical advances, also provides false hope. It's like waiting for the Singularity to happen so we can all upload our minds into the Eschaton. It's just another form of hoping for an afterlife.

Yes, absolutely act as if it can be cured, but don't believe it can.
There's really a strong reason to do this for things like user session tokens, where using crypto and avoiding database updates could easily remove a substantial portion of your database traffic.

But for things that are less common, like password resets and email validation, consider the downsides:

a) using the database gives you a built in (depending on schema) audit log of these events, where a signed token does not
b) If the key is stolen in the scheme described, the person in possession of the key can hack into all your accounts. If you use database state, someone needs to have access to the database.
c) (also mentioned above) You will almost certainly be able to have a smaller token if it refers to database state, which has it's own advantages: copy and paste errors, etc

There's certainly advantages to crypto tokens/cookies, and they're the right call in some circumstances, but there's downsides to consider as well.
Sam Altman feels there is space for a Twitter successor
That can be encoded.
Pure code with stateless systems are usually easier to test and less error prone.
Google Image Search Result for 'haskelljs'
I'm posting this, because I'm curious about what the Hacker News readers think about it and I want to read a better discussion larger than 140 characters...
"Because log diffs are full of noise. Can we really expect every single commit in an open source project to be meaningful and self-explanatory? That seems like a pipe dream."

I thought this was the point of squashing your commits together when making a pull request, so the `git log` of master reads like a changelog. You can also interactively rebase and change commit messages if the wording is confusing.
This is my experience too. I was just a garden variety minarchist libertarian before I had travelled widely. Seeing the common thread throughout the world that everywhere you go the people calling themselves the state exhibit the same totalitarian thuggishness is what drove me over the edge into being anarchocapitalist.

I find it tragically naive to see statists adopting this position as if they're the world weary travellers that don't wish to be bothered by the naivete of others that can't see the necessity of their chains, when the reality is closer to the exact opposite.
Ultimately, those queries you want to batch are either:

1. Not critical to the logic of your app and thus should be fairly obvious candidate for caching.

2. Critical to the logic of your app and quite possibly done within a specific DB connection / transaction for locking reason.

Trying to be too clever and parallel often flounders on mundane things like running out of DB connections.
Agreed that is what I like about it. However it came a bit too late and it will force fragmentation of the libraries even more.

Guido at the time was going through an "async" phase and was listening to Twisted developers and perhaps looking at the cool party across the street that Node.js was having and he didn't listen or entertain much of any other alternatives (supporting PyPy with STM, supporting or mainlining greenlet based approaches like eventlet and gevent -- libraries that are probably most commonly used for concurrent programming in Python).
I love the premise, though agree the option to change frequency would be useful. I often want to keep in touch with family (in Europe), I wonder if some form of "timed release" would be cool, e.g. I send a message and it gets delivered at the equivalent time in GMT.

Great work - keep it up!
Several points:
* A definitive decision with clearly defined dates.
* Acknowledgement towards successors
* The HUGE effort and endeavor to snapshot and maintain the archives for posterity.
> It is certainly not true that a Linux box with 2000 threads blocked on i/o will be having any sort of bad time.

You and I must have very different perceptions about the way a server is "having a bad time" :)

I was assuming they were at various stages of processing an incoming request, which means they were blocked on either legitimate disk i/o or swapping. It's very difficult to log in even locally in that case, because the login process can't read /etc/passwd in time.

> Also I'm not sure why you think that the kernel thread scheduler is all that good, or why it shouldn't be considered "outside our control.

I was just trying to say that it's dangerous to give non-trusted peers big influence on the way the scheduler behaves.
Yes, my comment was for SF and not South Bay where Facebook, Google, etc are.
There are still a few other things that will limit the life of modern computers.

1. That waxy thermal pad material certainly dries out and becomes ineffective in less than 10 years.

2. Power supplies still have large electrolytic capacitors right next to heatsinks

3. BGA parts with lead-free solder are still going to have a limited amount of thermal cycles they can withstand before the solder balls become brittle.

4. I notice an increasing use of conductive glue to attach flat flex cables in computer parts, especially ultrabooks, and this also has a limited number of thermal cycles before it starts to degrade. (Anyone who bought a Samsung TV between 2005 and 2008 might already be aware of this.) This is probably the worst issue since it isn't going to be fixable for a hobbyist.

Also, I wouldn't even guarantee that firmware in Flash that isn't rewritten often will last 10 years. There are a lot of dead Nintendo Wiis already due to bad blocks in the flash.

I currently own a 30 year old PC-XT and a 40 year old stereo receiver, but they didn't make it to that age without maintenance and replaced components. I'm afraid that in 30 years many of today's devices will have failed in ways that are impossible to get at or repair.
That makes sense. If your company doesn't have revenue, it could be worth 200 billion dollars! Once your company has actual revenue, it's pretty obvious it's worth whatever it's worth.

It's advantageous to remain in the mystery-land of hype and unrealistic expectations as long as you can keep drumming up easy investor money.
A simple way to implement fast pagination is to set item.idx whenever you insert an item into a collection. It starts at 0 and gets incremented each time.

From there, given the number of items per page, you can trivially determine which items to display given a page number or which page to display given an item.idx. And the query uses the efficient WHERE.

Of course, the last_seen pagination is only usable for pagination where users aren't deep linking into pages (like HN).
if you want to send out a series of long-reply SQL calls and wait for them all in batch, that is doable with Postgresql's async support, but they'd all be on distinct database connections, so you wouldn't get transactional consistency between these calls, but maybe that's not important. You can do the same thing with threads but it would mean you'd need to spin up that many threads, but at least would be something you could test in the short term to see if it is in fact feasible.

The rudimental SQLAlchemy-emulation system within aiopg right now can probably accommodate this use case but it is Postgresql specific. "Legacy ERP system" sounds like there's some different database in play there, if you are relying upon closed-source drivers you'd have to get access to a non-blocking API within them. Else you're stuck with threads.

acveilleux's point about caching here is very relevant and I thought of that also. if these are indeed independently read sets of fairly non-changing data, pulling it from a cache is the more traditional approach to reducing latency (as well as the need for 800+ database connections).
Running a regularly updated blog and linking to it in your resume is a great way to do both.

You can pretty much write about anything that is related to your education, your programming skills, your choice of algorithms, and so on.

Don't worry too much about your writing style in the beginning and just keep posting. Once you write about 50 posts, you'll see that your writing style will improve a lot. In my example, I have started writing blog posts about a half of a year ago. Now, my writing skills have improved so much that my article is going to be published on Opensource.com during this week.

So basically, I've put in my resume the link to my personal blog alongside links to my online portfolio and my LinkedIn profile. The rest of my resume is now pretty much the same and I do have a way of showing my writing skills.
Derp. I was thinking of Baidu. Knew it was search at least, from logs.
I hate implicit returns and don't even want them to be possible. A return is a major event. It's clearly a matter of taste.
The introduction is spot on -- it's a bad idea to fall into the trap of thinking that your existing centralized version control knowledge will transfer smoothly to Git. My division recently switched from Subversion to Git for source control, and I was made the "Git expert" charged with answering people's questions on-site. I didn't anticipate how much confusion and frustration I would encounter during the switch. Git really is inherently more complex than centralized version control systems, and while it is my favorite, I would not recommend forcing a group of engineers to use Git unless you really need the features that it provides.