skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I will graduate with just shy of 40k in debt, and a 100k+ job. That is imho a great investment.

That's not enough information to tell you if it's a good investment or not. What would the next best alternative be? Unemployment? A 70k job? And remember that you didn't just lose 40k - you also lost the potential income you could be earning during those years. Assuming that job would earn you 40k/year of disposable income, and you went to college for five years, you actually forwent $240k, not just $40k.
I did CS50x on edx.org . I feel the same about it as you do CS184. It's a shame these things aren't valued at their true value.
Nice try, Comcast PR
I'll respectfully disagree.

I found that the material I encountered in college was significantly more difficult than anything I've seen in industry. My coworkers have expressed similar opinions.

I certainly agree with wanting candidates who have a love of learning though! On the other hand, I would think someone who loves learning would want to go to school. I can't see why someone who loved learning wouldn't want to work with people who are the experts in their fields and tackle challenging, still unsolved problems.
I would much prefer it to be page based instead of scroll based. Feels more like reading a book and easier to follow.
Sorry, but I have to correct this.

1) It's very far from proven that water pilot wave experiments say anything at all about the quantum world. Most physicist believe they don't tell us anything about it, they just provide a simpler system that "looks quantum". This quote is from the article you linked:

“It is not by itself capable of representing very much physics,” Oxford University physics philosopher David Wallace told Quanta earlier this year.

2) Physicists have no problems with handling/removing infinities, just see regularization or renormalization in quantum field theory.

3) In general, this comic applies to anything you read in popsci sources: https://xkcd.com/1240/
Your mugshot went on page one. News of your exoneration was buried on page 10.
It's interesting how many people seem to read this as an argument that college is no good for anyone as opposed to the more reasonable college is not good for everyone. Many people end up in college not because it is a good fit but because it's the default thing to do, because people assume you're a complete failure if you don't and because it's artificially required to have most good jobs. The number of openings that require a college degree—but don't care which one—makes this abundantly clear: businesses are using it as a signal that's entirely independent of what you learned.

I've always been curious, and a little disturbed, at how inflexible a college education is for something supposedly universal. People are different and need different things from their education, but everyone gets the same sort of classes at the same sorts of medium-to-large institutions. If you want something less oriented around classes or smaller and more personal or more specialized or more hands on or not forced into digestible quarter- or semester-sized chunks, you're completely out of luck.

But if this doesn't work, it's apparently a problem with you, not with the system.

And then, of course, we turn around and feign surprise when college prices go up as we artificially drive demand through the roof.

I personally valued the college experience I've had so far... with the exception of most of my classes. What really worked for me was doing research, taking graduate courses, learning on my own, interacting with other students and a bunch of external things like working part-time at a startup. But there's simply no other way to get into research, even though many seem to agree that the overlap between strong study skills and research potential is, at best, limited.

I'd like to be doing research now and, false modesty aside, would be entirely capable, but it's very difficult outside the inflexible system. It really doesn't need to be.

In hindsight, I would have loved an alternative. But, as far as I know, that alternative does not exist and, if it did, I would not have known about it in high school. The only other choice would have been going to a small liberal arts college, which has more classes and less of everything I actually liked.

The pressure to go to college is too high. The worst part is that the pressure itself is not irrational because of the irrational way the rest of the system is set up.
Watson in the Wild
I understood what the article said ... I was warning that this thinking hasn't worked out so well for some companies. In this case I'll admit that having (successful) paid competitors at least indicates there's a market that will pay (and in theory recognizes the value of this service vertical).
You could theoretically switch to a system where there is a standardised national exam at degree level in subjects such at computer science. Then instead of paying lots to go to a fancy college you could learn inexpensively and still get as impressive a qualification. Dunno if it's a good idea. In the UK there are standardised exams at 18 so if you get 3 As at A-level people know your bright regardless of where you went, in fact it's probably harder to do that at a rubbish school. At university level though you don't have that so a degree from Oxford is probably going to be valued more than one from Bedfordshire, say even if the grades are similar.
> I genuinely believe there are some good individuals in the US justice system, but most of the people at the top and the politicised prosecutors, politicians, and judges just ruin it.

I disagree with this conclusion: It's too easy to blame someone else, a way of maintaining our own sense of innocence. Things happen in a democracy when voters insist on it. I'm willing to bet that nobody reading this will do anything about this problem. The great majority will not even vote for their local politicians and can't even name them besides governor and mayor (try it: name your state legislators and judges). EDIT: How many reading this would serve if called for jury or grand jury duty?

Finally, the political elite behave the same all over the country. That's either a massive coincidence of bad apples or it's a systematic problem. Most people reading this would (and some probably do) behave the same in those situations.

"We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo (Walt Kelly)
I agree with everything you've said except for the conclusion. I think Thiel's point is that it doesn't have to only apply to statistical outliers. It only applies to them right now, as the culture surrounding higher education is very ingrained in the developed world.

Also, I agree widespread adoption of going straight into the workforce could affect unemployment numbers tremendously. But for most people, the current "fix" is to have an institution babysit young adults for 4-5 years while allowing them to accumulate a mortgage's worth of debt. At least with the unemployment numbers the weakness would be more visible.

Disclaimer: I'm not advocating the abolition of college as an institution, but I've seen too many people graduate with no marketable skills (and no job prospects). I would argue that for most people, it's not worth the price of admission.
You make be actually be talking about plasma Wakefield acceleration
re: getting control of the habit: The best way to break a bad habit is through aversive conditioning ==> Electric shock classical conditioning.

I discovered how effective electric shock was a few years ago and created an electric shock wristband called Pavlok (pavlok.com). Here are 21 studies on the efficacy of shock for bad habits: http://pavlok.com/blog/21-scientific-studies-on-electric-sho...

I actually built a chrome extension that does this automatically. Get the pavlok, pair it with your phone, and download the chrome extension. You can add in a list of blacksites. If you access a blacksite, your wristband will vibrate, then shock you, to train away the unwanted behavior.
Instead of going through all these aggregators and digests, I just follow the links and news that my tribes - whether IRL, IRC or Slack – share. They act as my curators and since we all have similar interests I trust that most things they post will be worth my time to consume.

If you can get some curators to do this for you, then you can start blocking these sites from your /etc/hosts and not look back.
What makes the ankle exo so effective is its simplicity
You can watch the live stream of the webcam on location if you are concerned about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JYkMhQ9gf8
That's a great age and you live in a great place for kids.

Some places to go:

- Coyote Point

- Happy Hollow

- City of Palo Alto Junior Museum & Zoo

- Ride the train or light rail

- Ride a bus

- The ocean (Santa Cruz, the boardwalk)

- Farmers markets

- San Francisco is full of great places, playgrounds, etc.

- Vasona Park in Los Gatos, great playgrounds and a train ride

- Stulsaft Park in Redwood City, for water play

Gymboree is great, although they start younger than two.. not sure when they grow out of that, you may be close.

Talk to her a lot. Explain everything you're doing constantly in full sentences as you go around the house doing even the most mundane stuff. Not using baby talk, just matter of fact talk, and not in two-year-old language, just normal language.

And get her to explain stuff to you, too. This is really fun, hearing what they have to say about things. You could do little interviews with her on tape every six months, and make an archive of her perspective on things. Have fun!
It may just be the present college generation, but future generations will not hesitate or have issues getting into communal learning groups online to study similar topics without the need for a centralized instructor, especially when that instructor leaves them a hundred grand in debt.

Today, there is everything from IRC channels to mailing lists to forums to subreddits to facebook / g+ groups to linkedin groups to get involved with other students of the same topic, maybe even with a few veterans to provide guidance, to learn these subjects.

You won't find people that lecture you, but you will find people that will answer questions. I'm surprised there isn't an SO for that yet...
Sorry, saw it on reddit as "Mono 4 Released"[1] and reposted here, without noticing it was just a draft (the "THIS IS A DRAFT" comment wasn't there at the moment).

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/31ezp0/mono_4_r...
As a fan of 99pi, I struggle to see how this episode is about design. I fear they've run out of topics, and are straying from their original purpose.
What percentage of industry-standard incompetent programmers have college degrees?

If it's a large proportion, doesn't that say something about the quality of intake, education, and qualification in college CS?
I also use semantic-ui and can only say good things about it expect for those situation where I search for a particular "widget" such as a split button and cannot quickly find good results.
Here's the link for the paper:

Nature: Reducing the energy cost of human walking using an unpowered exoskeleton http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...
Exactly. I'm sure really great online education stuff will exist in the future, but now? It's a poorly organized, incomplete mess, with a few great resources and a ton of holes.

Stop encouraging people to abandon the old system when the new one is nowhere near ready yet.
Sadly, deployment of Python (or Ruby, Perl, etc) is horrific pain at scale.

If you are automating a large organization -- Powershell has one massive edge, already deployed and able to be managed sanely via the domain management tools with a permission model around it.

Some large (30k+ machine) organizations actually have fairly decent sized research projects on best ways to automate deployments and system management. It ends up being far trickier than it appears on the surface and any tool blessed by MS and shipped by default has a huge edge. Powershell might not be great -- but it is already on the machine and the competition is batch files.
Orgzly – Orgmode on Mobile
Asked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9320742

dang's answer here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9314604

More details at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9322256
That link 404s
Going for my bachelors, most professors said we would have to spend at least three hours of study time for every hour we spent in lecture.

Splitting it up another way, that is three years of studying on my own, and one year of lectures.

If I had decided to forgo a bachelors, if I wanted the same level of knowledge as someone with a bachelors, I'd have to spend the same three years studying calculus, discrete math, theory of computation, graph theory, algorithms, data structures, databases, assembly, C++, Java, paradigms of programming languages, AI, graphics etc.

So really a bachelors is just one more year on top of that. Plus the extras you learn from the professor in class, or after class, or during office hours, or hanging around with other students.

While theoretically an autodidact can study the same as a college student, they generally skip over pushdown automata and Gödel numbers and L'Hôpital's rule and go right to learning things such as Ruby and its methods, without any theory. Some progress can be made initially, but the lack of a base of theory usually causes problems at some point.

You can get into a good local public school like Berkeley or UIUC or Georgia Tech for a decent price. You can apply for Pell grants, work/study and so forth.

During go-go times, you can often get work without a degree. During downturns like 2001 or 2008, suddenly everyone is laying people off, and the market is flooded with job applicants, many with college degrees. This is when you really need a college degree, especially if you have a family. You don't want then to be the time to realize you need a bachelors. Even if you get work again, you'll be juggling a full-time job, wife, kids, in-laws, plus your night/weekend classes and studying, in addition to whatever else you're doing.
Bug Prediction at Google (2011)
Hello and welcome to the gail.com FAQ
Fewer prosecutions.

Only pursue cases that are slam dunk prioritized by cases that have highest social benefits.

More community service based punishment. None resulting in rap sheet.

Drastically reduce jury system.

Pay Clawback and impose penalty on judge and prosecutors for wrongful convictions. Hit their collective pay pool.
This reminds me of one of my favourite Google doodles ever:

http://www.google.com/doodles/large-hadron-collider
It was, but it took some experimenting to see how to do some things. I understand though - it's a great product overall.
> cases of people who are innocent pleading guilty to lesser charges because regardless of innocence, there's still a good chance that they'll lose

In that case the plea bargin looks like it helps society, not hurts.
> Get found "innocent"

When I was younger, a local judge came to visit my Boy Scout troop and discuss the justice system. I don't remember what question I asked him, partially because he never answered it. The answer never came because I touched on an incredibly sensitive pet peeve of his - defendants are never found "innocent". They are merely found "not guilty".

He went on to explain that the court can't find you innocent, because no one who goes to court is innocent. You "obviously" had made some mistakes with your life if you were on trial in his court room. His duty was to decide if you deserved to go to prison for those mistakes.

It was a long time ago, so I only remember bits and pieces of the other parts of his lecture. The part where he talked about how things went so much more smoothly and quickly when he could talk to the defendant directly without his lawyer still sticks in my mind.
From the perspective of a recruiter, simply listing that course has zero predictive value for a candidate. It's too easy to fake/cheat. The value is demonstrated by what you do with - like what you say about creating your own PRs, etc. Hopefully that will be demonstrated by your professional references and career advancement.
Brian Kernighan, Hello World 1978
There definitely should be a resource to find the most valuable online courses among the bad ones.
Drill down to the key topics you need to stay on top of, find reputable sources for those, then try and kill the rest (or at least leave it to your spare time, using your phone in bed, whatever).

We do stuff like Hacker News Digest but for numerous programming related areas, such as http://javascriptweekly.com/ http://rubyweekly.com/ http://dbweekly.com/ (and several other) and 240,000 people trust us with this each week now. There are many great folks doing similar things in other niches, however.
There is a danger in taking Thiel's plausible general observation and applying it to specific vocations. The obvious example involve surgeons installing heart valves, lawyers preparing trusts, and engineers designing pacemakers.

In software, the term "engineer" is roughly meaningless without anchoring to a specific context of company culture and/or an individual's experience. That someone can be called a "software engineer" with no formal training and six month's industry experience doesn't change the fact that designing a procedure keeping a process out of NP is not a natural talent.

In the same way that plans for a homeowner's kitchen remodel don't require an architect's seal has no bearing on the requirements for a hospital emergency room remodel, amateurs are fine for bridal consultant landing pages but not for self driving car control systems. There are problems that require professional judgement not just a technical opinion.
As a reformed sysadmin, I suggest giving devops a closer look. It's less of the handwavy voodoo buzzword it was a few years ago and has taken root in many orgs as a means to enact real change on the status quo, not only technologically but culturally.

It's still engineering, so that part isn't going away. Just pay no mind to the rainbows and glitter, unless that's your thing.
127.0.0.1 www.reddit.com reddit.com i.reddit.com

In /etc/hosts works for me, the conscious effort required to remove it reminds me not to.
Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that Comcast will be dependent on exclusively TV in the future, and instead appear (to me) to be actively adapting: They own Hulu and are the only broadband ISP available to many Americans.

Regulation as a utility, prosecution under anti-trust laws or disruption (like thaumaturgy suggests above) seem like the only hope.

The age stats are interesting though. Times have changed since the world that csixty4 describes.
World Lithium Supply (2010)
The wiring in the apartment complex is owned by Comcast or the provider. It is technically a separate asset to the real estate in the building.
It is not much but in those countries it works. Not $ but I know people with a family in PT and ES living off E400-500 and they manage so in the balkan you should be ok.
Nanoneedles deliver nucleic acids inside cells
This is pretty sweet thanks!
They still have to pass the hiring requirements, then have to go through 1 to 2 years of rotations before they are considered a non-development member. They actually do this regardless or rolls. They also will require applicants without a degree to show previous work.

The main idea is that many smart people start companies or consult and dont go to school. There's no reason to ostracize then.
Good for you. While I see some wisdom in Thiel's campaign against the idea of universal higher education, I think college is still great for many individuals who can afford it. Focus on the "unknown unknowns" – you can go read about kernels and bits and bytes and cryptography, but college is the most efficient way I've experienced to become familiar with things you've never even heard of such that you can figure out how to learn more about them if the time ever comes to do so. This isn't just about the course of study either, it's about being around so many different people learning about so many different things. So don't get too heads down on computer stuff, it probably has the lowest density of "unknown unknowns" for you.
404 Animated Character in CSS
What I'm gonna say is pretty harsh, but, you see, for a long time (almost as long, as I remember myself at all) I have a feeling that election results don't matter. Not because "majority makes a wrong choice", no. There's just no choice. Either you go in politics yourself or you say "fuck them" and try to make living being affected by all these guys on TV as less as possible. No difference what they say. What they will do when elected is of no use anyway. Where I live (Latvia) I remember 1 somewhat useful president and 0 useful premier ministers. For me they are just like weather or something: they are just there, I don't really pray God to protect me from bad weather, I build a house that will.

In fact, I've seen politicians who are making their image as pro-russian and ultra-anti-russian perfectly hanging out "after work" together, so I don't believe in their play a tiniest bit. Nor do all the rational people I know, of both russian and latvian origin. It's kinda obvious that this theater is oriented towards not-so-educated aggressive minorities in order to gather votes. Normal people just don't care. In fact, we don't care so much that jokes about "wish these effing russians would leave Latvia already!" are perfectly fine amongst our russian friends (which actually surprised me at first, because some 15 years ago people were a bit more radical here). I'm just tired of all this "latvian/russian" thing, I don't really understand what "nationality" or "origin" is anyways. The only "international matter"-thing that bothers me where I live is NATO-soldiers playing war on one of our polygons: you cannot imagine how much noise these bastards make!

Of course I don't really know how things are in Estonia as I don't live there all the time, but impression I've got from visiting and communicating with people who do live there isn't really much worse.
Phoenix – Redis-based queue task runner for PhantomJS tasks
The paradox exists. I did not solve it., I worked within the confines of it to find a potentially better outcome.

You have changed the definition of the paradox. Both can be valuable avenues of thought. I tend to view paradoxes as learning opportunities or a way to practice critical and logical thinking skills. Both of us have achieved that, so yay, but there's definitely not a single way to approach a paradox when presented with one.
The term "higher education" is completely wrong. Education is not a strict total order, so one cannot speak of "higher" forms of education.

For instance, if I learn to speak French in school A, and if I learn to solve differential equations in school B, then which form of education is "higher"?
Have a look at Lua scripting for CHDK. Get a Powershot SX50 and a handheld stabilizer. Then make something magic.