skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Though definitely not a YC company, we're [1] doing alright for ourselves in the B2C disaster recovery market; there are certain niches that have not yet been fully taken over by the "this should be free" movement. Not that a day goes by that we don't have a comment left on our site or sent to our customer support department about why our software that has literally cost countless hundreds thousands of dollars and man hours to develop isn't free, but such is life.

I was previously in both the B2C and B2B backup market, but "cloud" has completely taken over that market segment. Our focus on (disaster) recovery solutions has proven profitable - it seems when their data is gone, customers will then do anything to get it back. Good luck convincing them to shell out for backup software before disaster strikes, however.

People always ask me why I'm in the recovery niche, and the answer is easy: when their data is safe, you have to beg them to buy your software to protect their information and their data. When their data is gone, they'll come to you begging and pleading to get it back.

A big problem with B2C these days is honestly piracy. We have our hands beyond full keeping the very first page of Google free of piracy links. Even the best-meaning of customers will turn when simply searching for the product name + "download" turns up "Download now, free activated and serial XXXX" as the 3rd or 4th result on Google or Bing. SaaS is much easier to police for piracy (or pre-empt entirely) in that respect.

B2C also isn't as "sexy" for investors and founders who've heard so much about and drank much of the "recurring revenue" koolaid. We try to sell licenses for updates as recurring charges, but that gets almost no traction whatsoever. This current startup cycle is very much recurring-revenue-focused, B2C has a much harder time with that than SaaS or B2B enterprise software.

1: http://neosmart.net/EasyRE/
I never had that definition for Gimp. To me it had always meant someone with a minor injury or handicap. Eg "my gimp leg is acting up again"
You've got 2 different concepts about college mixed up in your post.

> because the competition all had college degrees, I beg to differ.

This is an issue about "credentials" & "signaling in the marketplace"[1], and not possession of actual knowledge.

>I recognize the huge gaps in my knowledge due to being self taught, [...] which I certainly have because I never followed a structured path on the subject.
And that's why I'm returning to get a degree now,

This is an issue about attaining knowledge. This is a separate issue from "credentials". All the topics of computer science that undergrad students study at Stanford and MIT are publicly available. Course syllabus, textbooks, and not to mention the vast resources of wikipedia, etc. If anyone wants to learn CS, he/she can study it. There's nothing magical about the 4 walls of a college campus that bestows special compsci knowledge. This is why hiring managers complain that many compsci graduates do not have actual programming skills.

I suspect the main thrust of your post is about the credential which is very defensible especially if you have aspirations for certain employers that absolutely require that piece of paper.

[1]http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.htm...
Those companies are selling services not software.
This is such a bullshit reason:

For one, you could detect these no-knocking individuals quite easily:

- Cameras on the exterior of the property

- Motion lights, motion sensors, motion bells are all quite cheap.

And re: destruction/obfuscation of electronic evidence-

-"One-click" destruction scripts, etc.

- TrueCrypt volumes, everywhere. Circuit breakers, power strips, etc. with switches. If you don't manage to destroy the volume, no aggressor will be able to access it.

- Degaussing setups for spinning disks, activated by similar mechanisms.

This stuff is pretty cheap, easily available. Anybody caught by these technically-incompetent police executing no-knock raids deserves to be caught.

Hell, if you don't have a few 6TB volumes full of random bits, labeled "Evidence," you aren't doing it right. Gotta tie up those investigative resources somehow.
A dancing chicken
I wrote a post about this same issue a year ago. It's sad that debt is fueling the growth of administration staff.

Some interesting charts are here:

http://kylethered.tumblr.com/post/37790176790/data-says-high...
The Story of Record Shattering, All Electric '68 Mustang
Firefox and StartSSL Class 1 Certificates OCSP Botchup
We should all try to remember this because it's not what we've been told:

"What cannot be defended, however, is the claim that tuition has risen because public funding for higher education has been cut. Despite its ubiquity, this claim flies directly in the face of the facts."
Lost iPhone Results in Very Intimate USA-China Friendship
I guess is fear to unknown and unanticipated phenomena. Crazy high unpredicted outputs happened before (google operation Castle Bravo) so is not totally insane to consider a worst case scenario.

We don't have exactly a kickass theory (that's why we built the LHC in the fisrt place) and all we can talk (predict) about black holes formation is merely hypotetical.

I don't think we are in danger with this experiments other than draining taxpayers money at virtually zero ROI
Golang 0 downtime restarts: A stl http.ListenAndServe(TLS) drop in replacement
Hacker Monthly Issue #59 – April 2015
The safety of the LHC: http://press.web.cern.ch/backgrounders/safety-lhc
Sounds like a good plan. Just keep in mind, if you'd gone to school right away, there's a fair chance you still wouldn't know much about those things, and you'd still have to plug gaps through self study.

It sounds like you'll be in a better position to direct your academic experience, but you may end up feeling frustrated as well. There's a good chance you won't be able to study what you want to in college, and you discover that you have to get it through self-study anyway. On the bright side, some professors absolutely love students like this (because it's how they learned as well) and will help you out.
If you want to be a scientist and study computing, college is still a great option.

The OP's point was that increasingly, the low-hanging fruit is already picked and areas of high growth require a deep technical understanding of one or more fields.

The problem is even worse, because the low-hanging fruit isn't. The Paypals and Facebooks of today employ armies of Ph.D.s to work on their critical infrastructure. Google started as Ph.D. research.

On balance, tech startups that do not require a deep understanding of computer science to run are an anomaly. So where does Thiel's attitude come from?

I think the thing to keep in mind when listening to someone like Peter Thiel is that he's a businessman first, not an engineer first, and this colors what skills he sees as most important and necessary.

Thiel says "you don't need a degree to be successful". But almost all his warrants actually only defend the claim that "you don't need a college education or equivalent to build a successful business [because you can hire the college-educated experts you honest-to-god do need to build a business]".

Which is fine. But you're either under-estimating the difficulty of large swaths of Computer Science or over-estimating the intelligence and will of the average person if you think we can meet the demand for high-skill engineers with only people who spend large chunks of their childhoods learning about programming and computer science.
I don't see how you're going to find a "best of" for reddit. There are so many subreddits that everyone will be different. Although the frontpage of reddit already seems to give you an overview of all the top content in the subreddits you're subscribed to, if you're logged in. Just limit yourself to the frontpage, I guess.
How is the user supposed to pay? I did not found any obvious button, at least not in the page or after clicking images.
Show HN: UK Political Parties' Twitter Interactive Word Cloud
Using cgroups with Docker on Ubuntu 14.04
I'd love to see the source code. :)
> College, or any particular career field, isn't for everyone. I especially agree with the idea, and I've seen this in a couple places now, that college is just the final round of a long zero-sum tournament. You mess up early and you'll probably never win, regardless of actual talent or "merit". This seems like a broken system.

This is a really important idea for the public to understand. It's not simply a class thing either, which is how it's typically portrayed (e.g. "you just want college to be for rich kids and poor kids can learn to be plumbers at community college"). It's more of a "how is a person's brain wired up" thing.

I was an amazingly mediocre student, but I've been very successful in industry. I think it's because in school, the curriculum is set in stone - you're just consuming it. There's no opportunity for self actualization. In "the field", you will have opportunities to drive real solutions and even innovate.

> How does a "nobody" 18 or 22 year old prove his or her value without a letter of admission or a diploma?

Usually side projects and a kind of radiant passion. If you can point to some solid code you're written and you sound passionate when you're talking about the technology and the job opportunity, many interviewers will sense that.
A quick weekend project to satisfy my desire to visualize how many times key words are coming up in this campaign ('hardworking families' for instance)

It was my first time using the twitter api and jquery to create a front-end interactive application and an interesting learning experience, will post source shortly.
People, please be patient. There is very high load on the servers, I just added a third OVH server, and it should slowly balance out. If it doesn't work please try again.
Continuous Integration with WordPress and CircleCi
You should realize that many people have no idea how to spot a good programmer, because they aren't good programmers, so they just go with degrees. Most people, degree or not, cannot do even the most basic tasks.

If you could build a Snapchat app on your own, you are already far ahead of most programmers, so it is only a matter of getting experience to show people other than a degree. When you get into a job you will see just how incompetent most programmers really are.

If you got a job now you could have a modest house payed off instead of being hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt four years from now.
I found that project recently https://code.google.com/p/amazon-pricewatcher/

It's old, and probably won't work. But the idea is interesting. It monitors your AWS account, and shutdowns EC2 instances/removes S3 files if your bill goes up.
It could be interesting to re-write it using boto. Maybe even make it simpler: If the bill goes over a "hard" limit, shutdown anything that can be shutdown (but don't delete anything!). I guess I would prefer to have a short downtime than a crazy bill.
Added to a well setup alert monitoring, it could be a great way to limit crazy billing.

@WestCoastJustin point to use dedicates roles account seems like a quite import thing as well. I think I would also trend to avoid large-range ASG.
The Linux Desktop isn't dead, it just never had mass market appeal.

There was a belief for a while that mass market appeal was required for the future of Linux on the desktop but over time it's become apparent that really isn't the case.

The number of people working on the Linux desktop would be fairly constant whether it has mass market adoption or not and in many ways lots of those developers simply don't care about mass market adoption (which brings with it problems of it's own).

I've used Linux as my primary desktop for 16-odd years and things have never been better from my POV as a developer who uses Linux as a development desktop.
10 years ago, every company I worked for had a sysadmin, but in the last 5 years, I've seen the trend move toward cloud services like AWS and developers doing light sysadmin duty as well. My company is up to 35 people now, with 10 devs, but no sysadmin. If we hire one, we would still have 10:1 ratio of devs to admins. If we're typical, you'll see an order of magnitude higher number of dev jobs than sysadmin jobs out there, and they will likely be later stage. I would try to make the switch.
While the article suggests a few roles for college, including "investment", "consumption", "insurance", or a "competitive tournament", it makes no mention of personal growth. Most kids have no idea what they want out of life at age 18, and college is a place to be safely independent and start figuring that out.
I see his point about the Ivy privileges (really knowledge is so available nowadays, that nothing justifies the blind respect that people award them). But if college is the default religion what is the alternative, no education at all? I would like to see an alternative to having to spend early twenties learning stuff.
Nice catch. I'll need to do some reading to figure out the best way to actually handle the string safely.

In this small example we lost a lot of the safety, but for a larger library I'm hoping you could still keep most of the safety of Rust and just expose a smaller subsection of "unsafe" code.
Where are you looking for jobs?

The normal Linux systems administrator role eventually will go away. Many people don't believe it but it eventually will because it's a job that can be automated away.

The use of Linux as a systems is not going to go away. The need for people who know Linux is ever growing. A bit of a conundrum.

You are only seeing two polar extremes here and it doesn't actually reflect what the market represents. Competent linux sys admins are moving into devops and sre type positions where they are taking on more development responsibility. Focusing on automation and building tools that facilitate developers rather than transactional systems administration duties of the past.

Many companies now hire developers and devops/sre candidates from the same pools.

So there's a middle ground for you. If you still like linux then I'd suggest you really hone up on your scripting and really learn your networking and Linux internals and move to one of the mentioned positions. They are a plenty.
Ok, please can HN delete this now?.. I thought I could delete it myself, but it seems I can't (thought that expiring delete option was not active on own posts).
The ostensibly B2C companies that are ad-supported are actually B2B. The advertiser not the consumer is the one buying. As they say, the user is not the customer but the product.

Or perhaps we should call them B2A, since it's not fair to lump straightup B2B businesses with them.
Balaji Srinivasan's background probably counts: https://www.linkedin.com/in/balajissrinivasan
I would totally help crowdfund an HD remake.
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.

The points by Thiel seem to be that uni can exist purely to be an exclusive option for a certain [richer] demographic of people, rather than an open playing field for anyone to study and improve academically. And also that uni is expensive and sold on merits of lifestyle, exclusivity etc. rather than pure academia.
PC Liquid Cooling – The Rugged, Manly Way
The 16-colour versions were the originals. The 256-colour versions came later... he actually mentions this in the video. The 4-colour version was probably generated programmatically.
Reddit can be done via the rss of the subreddit. Each has it's own.
Battle of the Bits, a music and art competition community
Isn't the math he's going through the exact kind of math we don't really believe? Market size is X, if I get Y% market share, I'll get $Z.
I don't think you read my point in the way I intended for you to, and I'm sorry that my point could be misread in that way. I agree with all of your points.

I'm not saying at all that plea bargains shouldn't exist, I'm saying that at the moment there's an incentive to abuse them by indicting the accused on charges that they're very unlikely to be convicted of in court simply because it's known that the case will almost certainly be settled by plea bargain.

Indicting them on the greater charges simply strengthen the prosecutor's bargaining position, which I see as wrong.

We saw this in the article with the warning shot; if the other grand juror was correct and the warning shot was exactly that, then that charge would probably not stick in court.

However, by having that charge, they get to bargain for a far larger sentence, because the potential cost of going to court is far greater.

It also gives an incentive to (if someone opts for court) attempt to get them the highest possible sentence (if they are convicted) in order to set an example to future plea-bargainers.
Ask HN: Why was the HN karma ratio removed (HN profile page)?
(it was just below "karma" field on the profile page and contained an average score of the last few weeks, afaik)
the same malady affects health care. corporate-itis
I buy into Thiel's ideas on higher education. I created a startup out of high school. It failed and I went to college the next year. However, the startup taught me more than I have learned in my first two years of school. Many of my CS classes are simply a rehashing of what I already know. In my experience, Thiel is mostly right. It is possible, easy, and cheap to educate yourself and turn it into startup. The problem is it requires a great deal of luck and savvy to turn the college-less path into a sustainable model.
Reddit: building itself from the ground
Is it really way to expensive though? I will graduate with just shy of 40k in debt, and a 100k+ job. That is imho a great investment. I think the biggest problems with college is that too many view it as just a piece of paper and simply a continuation of high school. I went back to school after a decade from graduating from high school, and while I wouldn't say that college is perfect, I appreciate that they exist what they are for.
College has a specific and peculiar consumption pattern: almost everyone is under 25. This doesn't seem weird because it's pervasive and we're used to it, but it is. How many other things are only for a narrow age range of person? And how often is that an endorsement? Usually, it's the opposite. When it comes to culture, if the only people who like something are under 20, or over 60, that usually means that it sucks because things of quality are enjoyed by people of all age ranges. (Not necessarily uniformly. Most people born before 1955 didn't like Nirvana when their music came out circa 1990, but at least some could recognize the talent and creativity.) College, for as overhyped as the experience is, isn't really appealing to people over 23. Some will go, later in life, for the education (which is quite valuable, if you pay attention) but the overall product (which is what people pay $160,000, usually of their parents' money, for) isn't of interest by that age.

Advanced economies seem destined to breed immaturity and extended adolescence. You see it in the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan. It has to be that way, because the dirty secret of them is that there's low demand for workers and the only way to look like there is full employment is to delay adulthood (and hasten retirement, which is welcome if it's elective and wealthy retirement but horrible if it's age discrimination and despair).

We put people into college because most of them have no hope of getting jobs (at least, jobs appropriate to their social class) otherwise. Widespread college is the most socially acceptable way for (a) young people to stay out of a working world that doesn't want them and that they'd be too immature to handle, (b) middle- to upper-class parents to transmit connections and status under the guise of "merit"-- in reality, it's more complex than that, since academic success is a combination of factors including merit, and it's this illegibility that allows the ruse to work-- and (c) people to be fully enculturated into either their native social class, or (in fortunate but rare cases) the social class that society "corrects" them to inhabit when a lower-class child has proven extreme merit.

This is not an easy problem to fix. College has become a private safety net for middle- to upper-class children while they get to an age and level of intellectual maturity that will make them acceptable to the modern economy. It's a socially acceptable way for these kids to sit out of that game for 4 years, under the supposition (which I think is right) that the experiences that they'd have without college would be so negative as to be detrimental.

Peter Thiel's advice, in general, is bad. It applies to statistical outliers, perhaps. Even then, I'm not sure that I agree. But given that the social purpose of college (at this point) is to handle this problem of labor oversupply, the "fix" of asking young people to go directly into the workforce isn't going to work. It's just going to flood the labor market even more.
It is a shame that this got submitted before we actually published the code. It is Easter and many of our engineers are taking these days off.

The release notes are also incomplete and not ready for publishing

Miguel
How SEA hacked email accounts of Assad's opponents
This sounds exactly like what Mattermark is already doing.
I probably spend too much time on HN and Reddit, but I think I have better control over domestic, international, and economic news: I try to use just a few high quality sources.

First, I subscibe to Catherine Austin Fitts's Solari Report which yields a very good alternative view of how the economy, global power, etc. work.

Secondly, if a news story interests me then I go to news.google.com and read the same story as published in two or three different countries. There is a ton of bias in what material is covered in USA news sources.
This is the kind of thinking that worries me: "The effort involved to create a Glance is minimal, so all watch apps should bundle one." ... And I'm guilty myself of this. The glance board (or whatever you call it) is the new home screen. All apps will be fighting for attention on this, greatly diminishing the minimalistic utility of the iPhone. That, and apps abusing notifications even more to grab my attention.
It would take a lot to convince a prosecutor to charge a cop trying to help that prosecutor's case.
Pirate parties started spending more time focusing on LGBT and immigration rights than IP reform and transparency. Also was not pleased with Sunde's denigration of Lars Vilks regarding free speech.
>Don’t outsource your future to a big institution. You need to figure it out for yourself.

Discouraging high school graduates from going to college is just bad for society. Entrepreneurs are essential, but I would argue that the most profound advancements in STEM fields come out of universities. Those advancements tend to be in highly abstract fields (e.g. physics, math), where there is no immediate applicable benefit, but there may well be one in the future.

Students should go to universities to gain a theoretical foundation in STEM fields -- that's how we find young researchers. And those who decide that research isn't for them will nevertheless gain a strong intellectual foundation that is hard (but not impossible) to acquire otherwise.
Show HN: Node.js – find an unused port in your localhost