skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just a quick reminder. The Amiga, Wild, PC 8k and Demo competitions at Revision (a big demo party going on right now) are coming up in just a few hours if you want to see what the scene is up to.

Schedule (German time) http://2015.revision-party.net/events/timetable

Live stream here http://2015.revision-party.net/live

Live stream with chat http://salinga.everywebhost.com/sofascener/

edit Wild compo is ongoing:

demos on a Microcontroller, a Gameboy Advance, Gamecube, and some guy made a digital camera out of a scanner, some lenses and a Rasberry Pi.

And a version of a Rachmaninoff Rhapsody with orchestra provided by several Commodore 64s. This would have been on the forefront of Avant Guarde music not too many decades ago.
> I believe Google would hire people on what they can do rather than focus on their paper qualifications. And I see this being a growing trend in the future.

Sure. Any my point was that I don't believe we can sustainable pump out the number of high-quality software engineers that a place like Google needs without something like a college system.

I think your interpretation of Thiel is uncharitable, and I hope it's not true. That would be awful.

> And also that uni is expensive and sold on merits of lifestyle, exclusivity etc. rather than pure academia.

This is certainly true and needs to change.
Clickjacking coinbase with html5 sandbox
If you want to live in the City, now is a great time in your life to do this.

You can get your own studio and it will cost you between 2K and 2.5K. A better idea would be to find some roomates. You can get a bigger place, pay less rent, and live with with interesting people.

Good luck!
Doesnt that make college a fantastically expensive summer camp?
The top 100 investors on crunchbase have made 2000 investments in the last 6 months. If that's similar to the sources from the PWC report, then crunchbase seems to have a lot of the raw data (see for example the USV page https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/union-square-venture... and the specific Etsy example https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/etsy).

There's an extra step, which involves pulling out parameters and running through them in an ordered way, which would definitely be an interesting read.
time to take action:

kill -9 all_administrative_positions
>But, for most people, the atmosphere of a university, the exposure to and attention from experts, and in addition the various sticks and carrots in place (e.g. if you don't study this weekend you'll fail the exam), help with learning.

Sure, many folks need structure for learning. But why would such folks be desirable for hiring in programming jobs? Wouldn't we rather hire an autodidact that happened to suffer his way through college instead of the student that required the forced structure of college to learn?

There will be a lot of new and difficult material (additional compsci and/or business domain knowledge) to learn after the the 22-year old student graduates. If the student didn't have a "love of learning" to motivate and self-discipline his study, what value should we place on him as a job candidate?
Reducing the energy cost of human walking using an unpowered exoskeleton
Step 0 of fairness. Separate the incentive from the enforcement. Fines shouldn't benefit to the same entity who pays the police.
I built this a couple years ago using Crunchbase data. I found the data to be helpful in weeding out the walking dead VCs so I could focus on the investors who were actively investing in bay area companies at the right stage and sector. My plan was to add a network component to show both first and second degree connections to the VC partners and executives at companies they had funded, but we closed our funding before I finished it.
Test your Salt infrastructure (state, pillar, reactor, api) via Docker Compose
The "natural monopoly" that you speak of actually tends to be enforced by municipal contracts. Cities and counties signed over exclusive service provider rights in this market.
Not zoomed in or out. 2 * 65 = 129.
We are working on replacing those parts that we can.

But there are several issues:

* reference source code not being portable and not working on Unix.
* complex dependencies between the portable and non portable pieces
* some bits were only released recently, and without those it was not possible to port other chunks
* dynamic happy code high prevents some code from being adopted as Mono can be used as a full static compiler on iOS, Xbox and Playstation.

So as time permits we will bring those over.

We also plan on supporting the "core" model where our contributions will flow back upstream.

But "core" is still a bit undefined
I can't speak for others here, but college degrees don't really factor into hiring at my company. We have one lead engineer who doesn't have a college degree, and at least one other who also did not complete college. Some other fellow engineer co-workers did stuff like graphic design in college.

FWIW, I too don't have that low level knowledge - I did math & physics in undergrad and math in grad school. I never took a CS class, and am completely self-taught. I am happy & successful, and have no problems with getting a job if for some reason I am unhappy with my current one.
The article is not anti-college, it's against blindly going into college. Thiel is proposing that you decide what is the best for your future. If you want to build a company that provides ephemeral messaging and not much else, perhaps college isn't for you because there is little you can learn there that you can't learn on your own. If you want to build something that indexes large amounts of data in ways that were previously not doable, then college might be a good choice because you can do research and have your work reviewed by a community of people more interested in pushing the bounds of human knowledge than creating a business. My latter example would apply to a very small subset of existing companies.

The reality is that when you are at the stage of deciding whether you should do college, you have little idea of what it is that you want to do so it's difficult to reverse engineer your education against your potential career path. For this reason college seems like a good default. It's insurance (as was mentioned in the article, but in a different light) against realizing that your career path would benefit from a degree but you did not get one. It seems like a useful strategy may be to help young students discover their careers at an earlier age, or at least to enter the workforce before deciding whether college is for them.
That's what it always meant to me, never knew it had any other meaning.
Is there any need for a "plan"? Ultimately having a default option being college is obviously not working all that well for a lot of the people going down that route (dropout rates are high and finding a job in your field isn't a guarantee).

The "plan" would be to take an honest look at yourself and decide what sort of career makes sense for you. That might mean you go to a trade school, it might mean that you go to college, it might mean something I can't think of right now :)

The worst advice is saying just go to college and it will all work itself out.
> it is shift of consumer perception that everything on internet should be free. With exception of games - of course.

I don't think games are exempt in this case considering the dominance of F2P games in the market.
...and I imagine the alternative plan for most people would be an application for a job at a big institution, in industry.
Did some people theorize that testing a nuclear weapon could cause the entire atmosphere of the earth to ignite?
What's your point? I can do a simple search of any keyword and get back hundreds or thousands of results. There's no harm in sharing a recent article about a topic to spark discussion.
>>I am far less happy using software written by a graduate of one of these "learn to code" 12 week workshops... Security is hard. Reliability is hard.

Sure. But the graduates of those workshops don't get jobs working on security and critical infrastructure. Rather, they get hired as junior programmers and are given small-scale projects where they can continue to learn and grow under the guidance of more experienced developers.

Besides, the code school graduates often have critical subject matter expertise in their former fields. For example, when I need a programmer to build an in-house system for a marketing team, I'd be much more willing to hire a former marketing specialist who completed a 3-month code school than a fresh computer science graduate.
This is heartily depressing. If you're as good as you say you are, I'd love to help you. Contact info in my user profile.

(Overuse of credentialing in engineering hiring is one of my biggest pet peeves and something I'm doing my best to fix. Wrote about it at length here: http://blog.alinelerner.com/silicon-valley-hiring-is-not-a-m...)
Having regulations that acknowledge the reality of a natural monopoly does not make that monopoly unnatural. When a municipality grants a provider exclusive rights it is almost always done in exchange for requirements that they provide service to residents who would have zero providers to choose from in a competitive market.
When to stop tweaking Vim?
If you are looking at college as an investment, here is some interesting data:
http://www.payscale.com/college-roi/

Moreover, it's very difficult to be admitted into an Ivy League school. It is also very difficult to recruit graduates from Ivy League Schools. They are rare: In 2014-15, 1.8 million bachelors degrees were awarded in the US [1]. Roughly 20,000 of those are from Ivy League schools. That's about 1%.

Hence, even sought after employers like Apple employ more students from mid-tier schools like San Jose State than top-ranked schools [2]. So if you are an Apple recruiter, the bulk of your recruits come from a University that is ranked 38 out of about 130 -regional- schools. It is not even ranked nationally.

The notion that if an applicant is not admitted to a top-ranked school, they are going to wind up a janitor, is simply false.

What has become skewed is the perception of the value of elite schools. Since perception drives price, the price of attending them has skyrocketed. The 4-year cost of Harvard is now $234,000 [3] vs. San Jose State at about $100,000 [4].

And schools like Missouri University of Science and Technology present the better ROI.

[1] http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372
[2] http://www.wired.com/2014/05/alumni-network-2/
[3] http://www.harvard.edu/harvard-glance
[4] http://www.sjsu.edu/faso/Applying/Cost_of_Attendance/
Ask HN: Activities to do with my 2 year old daughter
My daughter is now turning two and she is past the stage of playing peekaboo. What games or activities I can do with her to increase her curiosity and learning? What things are appropriate at her age?

If it helps, I'm a software engineer in the south bay.

Thanks.
This is 100% not true. My employer would have preferred that I dropped out of school after my internship to join full time rather than complete my degree. I have a handful of friends that chose to not complete school and then found jobs later. Also, there are a lot of companies (particularly startups) where recruitment does not involve dropping a stack of resumes on a managers desk. You can directly contact existing employees and propose how you'd be a good new employee or intern, and if the match is there they'll likely give you a chance.
Itami was a master. I highly recommend The Funeral (Ososhiki). It is a beautiful dark comedy.
How to send a text message to the 1970s
You should read this article form Martin Fowler: http://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/uiArchs.html

It has an excellent analysis about GUI architectures. This problem is not new and as such, there are already proposals to solve it. Every proposal has his pros and cons. It is a shame that we prefer to immediately "invent" our solutions instead of first looking to the past and check how it has been solved. A lot of people has told me that is not important to know the how and why things work in order to be a good developer, but this is exactly what happen when you have a lot of developers that don't understand the fundamentals
nice; I need this for a project and had assumed I was going to have to write my own.
i would say that university is more than just a place to learn. It prepares you for actual adult life.

Most 18 year olds are not ready to go straight into work and I'd say they are definitely not ready to start a startup (remember, general case).

At uni you learn a great deal but you also benefit from being eased into adult life with internships, mentorships, you have tons of opportunity to network too.
Also, Revision releases:

http://www.pouet.net/party.php?which=1550&when=2015
Who said they "need" structure? Maybe it is just an ideal environment? Sure you can learn without professors, free time, and research facilities. But college was the ideal place to learn simply because there were no other demands on my time. I still learn a lot outside of college! But I wish to return to that environment again some day just for fun.
Power distribution is generally done like that in the "deregulated" states in the US. The electric utilities were technically private entities, though not very free. The same legal framework could be used for other sorts of wires, I suppose.

Around here, Comcast (or their predecessor) actually does resell other providers' services through their service. I don't know if it's voluntary or not. It's kind of an odd relationship, but I'm happy to divert a few of my dollars from Comcast to Earthlink.
When you say you had a decent portfolio, was this at previous companies or stuff you did on your own?

The reason I ask is I don't have a degree either but I haven't had much trouble getting offers after I got my first job.

Nevertheless I think it's great that you're going back to school; I plan to do the same later.

But, I went to school for a few years didn't find that the undergraduate curriculum really went in detail for any particular subject, so I hope you won't be disappointed as I suspect you will still have gaps in knowledge even after you leave. On the other hand, you will have a good foundation and also have an idea of where to look or people to ask.
Physicists have looked at all the angles on this, and are pretty certain there's nothing the LHC could do that would pose a threat to the world.

On the other hand, the universe still looks pretty empty of extraterrestrial civilizations, despite the availability of nice planets and so forth. Perhaps they were all pretty certain too.
My point was just that, on balance, colleges -- especially elite ones -- tend to produce the "highly skilled engineer working on critical infrastructure" type of CS practitioner, not the "in-house data munging app" type of CS practitioner.

And it's the former that there is a critical shortage of.
> There's nothing magical about the 4 walls of a college campus that bestows special compsci knowledge.

There's a few things that make them good — most notably, the support available if you don't understand something well. While certainly there's a fair amount of support available (esp. online, and depending upon your corporate culture possibly at work as well), I'm yet to find a community that's as willing to help people understand material as many teaching staff are, especially when it comes to more obscure material.
Sadly, we don't need good ideas for how the system should function – lots of people have lots of those – we need good strategies for affecting change in the current system toward those ideas.

Just to illustrate using your ideas (which I'm absolutely all for), all three of them cost public money. We would have more trials requiring more time in front of judges, but they would need to be speedier, so we would simply need to pay more judges salaries. A similar calculation suggests we would need to pay more public defenders, and if I'm interpreting your last point correctly, we would also want to pay them 20% more than we do currently. So we need a strategy for selling the tax increases at least at the state level – because the districts most affected by these cost increases are probably the least wealthy – and perhaps the federal level. Not many people will care enough that we aren't treating criminals (which is what people who have been arrested are, to most people) well enough to pay extra taxes.

So I guess, what's the strategy to push us onto a path outside this spiral?
That appears to be an April Fool's joke.
I'll bet the "Wizard of Oz" strategy would work well for this idea.

Start off by NOT building any of the fancy infrastructure—the crawler, crunchbase joiner, LDA algorithm to cluster investors, etc.

But set up a form where somebody can enter their company idea, URL, and traction metrics and then you'll do the research and suggest 5-10 VC firms and partners.

You (the maker of the site) will learn a lot from being the wizard of oz behind the curtain.

And when you're done, you have two routes: 1) the "Google" approach: build algorithms to automate what you're doing already, 2) the "eBay" approach: let the VCs themselves onto the site, show them a stream of (anonymized?) pitches, and let them choose which entrepreneurs to meet. No need for an algorithm. Then the site becomes a marketplace to match startups and investors, a sort of an online, always-running demo day.
Bazaar Services
Just as a data point: my best friend served on a grand jury in New Jersey, and this account squares almost exactly with his experience as related to me in many conversations.
Just spit-balling, what if we had a competitive prosecutorial system? Instead of a single DAs office, two or more with aligned, but not shared, incentives.
I was a huge fan of Loom too. There really aren't that many original and creative worlds in games and Loom definitely had one. Planescape Torment is another good example.
>The biggest problem with B2C these days is honestly piracy

It might also have something to do with the fact that free (in both senses of the word) alternatives exist for your product. It must be difficult to sell a product that is already being given away.
> Unity is moving away from Mono anyhow,

I don't know man. Mono moved away from Boehm GC to a real gc (SGen) because it never really worked for them bespite feeding it a lot of metadata.
Others before them have found out that tanspiling to C/C++ isn't really that great (some of the more recent ones where HipHop PHP).
One of the big crimes of these administrators is that it's so hard to get accurate numbers when trying to have this debate. Has the funding per capita gone down proportionally to the tuition increase? Is the increase in administration and facilities proportional to the increase in enrollment?
Last summer I took CS184 Startup Engineering. It was a free Stanford Computer Science Course on Coursera, taught by Balaji Srinivasan.

It was about 10 weeks long. There were ~100,000 students enrolled. It was free. And it was, far and away, the most valuable thing I've ever done in my life. It was an order of magnitude more valuable than my 4 year undergraduate education at the University of Connecticut.

Since taking that course, I've pushed hundreds of code commits into the Airbnb codebase (I work on the online marketing team here). They're small pull requests , and I'm rarely ever writing anything from scratch, but the number of engineering hours I've saved by being able to write my own PRs is extremely valuable.

Out of curiosity, I asked a few of the recruiters at Airbnb what putting CS184 on my LinkedIn means. I explained to them what it was, how much value I got out of it, and how much value the company got out of it. I showed them the course, and the certificate you get when you finish. Everyone had the same answer: "It doesn't mean much".

My bias is, online education still has that "University of Phoenix" stigma. How valuable the course actually is still doesn't seem to mean anything yet. Maybe, in general, that's correct. Maybe most online courses still suck. But I can very much verify that life-altering, immensely valuable online courses exist.

This idea of online learning and more specifically, credentialing, looks more like it's a social engineering problem rather than "knowledge delivery" problem.

I've been geeking out on institution-agnostic credentialing and accreditation for a little while now. If you're interested in this space please get in touch with me - email is in my profile.
So design the tasks, make the measurements, and publish your results.
I think the structure of school is supposed to be like a set of training wheels, with the hope is that people ultimately learn how to learn.
A college education is like money: It has value because we all agree that it has value. And like money, it will retain its place in society until we all decide to use something else instead.

The system of higher education isn't going to change because people have too much invested in it, and that investment can never go bad like the housing market or tech stocks did. College graduates will talk about how much they learned, the networking and social experience or of being exposed to new ideas and ways of thinking. It isn't possible to question the value of those intangible benefits, or to prove to someone that they could have gained the same things through other means. So the system perpetuates itself.

To be honest, it seems like an unbreakable cycle. Well off kids go to college, get jobs and move into management where they hire other well off kids who also went to college. MOOCs, community/online colleges and vocational schools are emerging as additional options, but most of the decision makers at major institutions attended traditional four year colleges and expect the people they work with to have done so as well.

It seems like the best way to control the cost of education would be to make employers responsible for paying for it, instead of the students. Then market forces would come into play. If a business had to choose between paying $120k to send someone to Harvard or $20k to send them to a state school or community college, then they would have an incentive to evaluate the difference in quality of education and training from the respective institutions. Right now all of the financial risk is placed on students, and businesses get to pick and choose who to hire with relatively little consequence.

Obviously the system isn't going to change any time soon, if ever, no matter how many opeds the washington post publishes.
I am not super super keen on the devops thing and even that can be automated eventually. Once someone has done the bulk of the scripting to get a deploy process streamlined and then the environment is configured with auto-scaling etc, then there isn't a huge bulk of ongoing work to do, I think.

Even with that middleground, devops jobs are still going to be in much less demand than dev, right?
Yeah it's interesting, a couple times the article seemed to want to make the larger point that prosecutors have huge power to direct a grand jury in the direction they want them to go, but the evidence in the article actually makes the slightly different point that grand juries nearly always indict. Those two different points lead to two different conclusions about the Michael Brown case.
I looked a bit at some of the alternative libraries, but was frustrated with the environment due to the slowdowns in trying to use it during peak hours. Perhaps with more digging I could find one that works well, but it would mean having to create a project, import the library in, and then exporting the bundle into Eclipse for processing.

The biggest interesting feature is how third party libraries are easily integrated into software you're writing. It's trivial to publish and retrieve the libraries other people have written, which is something I'd really enjoy being able to use.