skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like the way Sweden does many things, but:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3d/Tax...

It's political suicide in the US to raise taxes in any significant way, and so we suffer through the nonsense we've got.
Sweden also doesn't have universities that match up to the US when it comes to a ~$50k tuition tier. $50,000 per year is a lot, and buys you access to the best universities on earth, most of which are in the US. Harvard's tuition is around $44,000 for example.
The Eureka Phenomena – Issac Asimov [pdf]
Sorry for the meta, but three downvotes?

Somehow making some orbservations about what an article says without attacking anyone in this dicussion is controversial?
From the article: "But even a significant drop in residential water use will not move the consumption needle nearly as much as even a small reduction by farmers. Of all the surface water consumed in the state, roughly 80 percent is earmarked for the agricultural sector."
Mermer fabrikasında iş kazası 1 ÖLÜ – YALIN OSGB
1. US milk does not taste good. Actually, it does not taste at all. I always thought this is just in my mind until a Swiss guy said the same.

2. All milk products are do not taste so well and often have poor quality. Cheese, Yogurt etc.

3. You can get excellent cheese and yogurt but this comes with a hefty price tag. E.g. Whole foods etc.

I have the impression that supermarket foods in the US have a much lower quality compared to Europe. You can get the same or better quality, if you can effort to pay for it.
" casino security person admitted the 2 dollar bills were legit currency"

I think he said "it works with the pen", now this is a test but it's not very reliable

"Using such pens is not a foolproof method of checking that a banknote is genuine"

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/Pages/retailers/hin...

(they probably checked other security features, but the older notes have less features)
I know Europe is a diverse place, but I've studied at three universities in Europe (Germany and France) and at each of them I often had problems with computer access due to the labs being used for classes. This was an issue even as a graduate student.

Access to professors outside of class was also difficult. Where I was at in Germany, the professors would have about 4 hours per week scheduled where they were available for help or questions. At the end of each open-hours block they would go out into the hall and tell the 5-10 people waiting in line to see them that they would have to come back in a couple days. Compare this to the university I was at in the US where professors would practically beg students to come talk to them about homework assignments, lectures, etc.

I also had much greater autonomy in the US when it came to lab work (and course selection as well). They trusted us to use the equipment. As an undergrad in the US we were shown how to use an SEM and then left alone with it to play around with it and try different options, scan different objects, etc. For the SEM lab I had as a graduate student in France we watched a technician use the machine and tell us about what you can do with it and that was it. I felt like we were being treated like little kids. There weren't even any machine shops, 3d printers, soldering irons, etc. available for students to use.

In the experience that I had, the US university had much higher quality facilities than the ones I was at in Europe (I'm not talking about the lecture quality here). Certainly, one could argue that the increased cost isn't worth the increased quality, but I did notice a big difference between those four schools.
One criticism I have of education systems is that they structurally encourage only superficially studying content.

Let's take my compilers class as an example. I go to a 75 minute lecture 2 times a week and I do about 4 hours of homework a week. I do this over 18 weeks.

That's only roughly 120 hours of study over the course of a semester. That's only as many hours as most full time employees work every 3 weeks! And the sad thing is, I imagine if I spent 3 weeks reading a compiler book, reading though the source of lex and yacc, and implementing some kind of basic compiler using them, I'd be a much better programmer than what we're doing-- implementing a C compiler for MIPS in java, using a shitty lex library and only implenting the parts the professor thinks is important.

This brings me to another point. Programmers are necessarily autodidacts because shit changes incredibly fast. You can't be a one trick pony. So if we're pushing kids through these incredibly formulaic methods of learning, what are we really preparing them for? A life of being an enterprise code monkey? The student who taught themselves anything, even if they are missing a few core details, are more equipped to fix those gaps in their understandings.

I did a hackathon a couple weeks ago that had a sort of business spin on it. There was this group of 4 guys that made a college choosing application based off your GPA, as a desktop java application with a GUI that had background images and looked like an early 2000s keygen program.

The thing is, I have absolutely no doubt that these guys are good students and they'll probably find an alright job out of school. But all they know is java development.

I think that students that want to be more than that probably shouldn't go to school.

Here's a question to you: if I handed you a résumé, without a bachelor's degree, but instead included my github profile and a list of books I've read cover to cover and some open source contributions, am I going to get the salary I am worth?
This is the Biology equivalent of Astronomy's "land a rocket on a rock". I'll be happy to have $0.70 of my tax money allocated for this research. Deep down I think we're all fond of the mammoth. I know I am. Mammoths rock(ed).
In this case, we should also argue about, should software evolve into their any of it's logical conclusions?

I'm a cli ninja (at least for many tasks I need to do daily for a measure.) even though I nearly never ever need it's expanded use cases like arrays or process substitution. For example the latest shellshock was the result of an extended use case where implications of it was not well thought.

"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can." - Look at the samples: Emacs, MATLAB, Mozilla, Opera, Trillian, and Drupal. Really?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski.27s_law...
It's a practical concern, really. Too many people wrote Makefiles which called gcc instead of cc.
The same happened with Modern Architecture in Western & Eastern Europe in the Cold War times: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/17/unpopular-front

The influenced ugly architecture styles in question: International style (e.g. Bauhaus), Constructivist architecture, New Objectivity, Plattenbau. [1]

Whereas we have beautiful architecture styles (1900-today): Postmodern architecture, Neo-Futurism, Art Deco, Streamline Moderne, Baroque Revival architecture, Vienna Ring Road style, Art Nouveau, New Classical architecture, Expressionist architecture, Heimatstil, Historicism [2]

Tourists visit historical and modern cities because of the beautiful buildings. Nobody wants to travel and take photos of Plattenbau, Bauhaus or New Objectivity buildings. For some reason, many new buildings in Europe and Asia are still constructed in the ugly and sterile concrete box style of the Cold War era.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Style_(architectu..., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plattenbau, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Objectivity_(architecture), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivist_architecture

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_architecture, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-futurism, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streamline_Moderne, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Deco, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressionist_architecture, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baroque_Revival_architecture, http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heimatstil, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Ring_Road, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Nouveau, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Classical_architecture, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicism_(art)
The key part is that you're calling them back.

If someone fakes their caller ID candy you call the number they claimed to have, you're not going to reach the faker, you'll reach the legitimate owner of the number.
"we now have to be in the business of maintaining a list of authorized CIDs we can send on a specific trunk line"

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Similarly, some ISPs have implemented egress filtering to reduce abuse. At least a few speedbumps in the way of total anonymity over the phone would make scamming less trivial.
To give a comparison closer to the States, in Quebec (Canada), I paid about 5k (3 semester per year, one as paid internship) in tuition plus ~10k for a ~450ft^2 apartment. Obviously I will pay all my life in taxes, but that make higher education much more accessible and less intimidating that it could be elsewhere.

As a modern western state, the main source of GDP require college educated workforce, so it probably make sense to invest "other peoples money" into it. It is of course totally debatable if this is good or not. Not all college degree will yield a direct return on investment (/whisper social science, art, education) but those people are (mostly) required anyway to provide services to the others. This is a society choice. Some places let education be driven by the market while other see it as a public service (same for health care, electricity or running water). As this example show, there can be inefficiencies even when university are run like corporations.
Ask HN: Learning Web Development, where should I start?
I recently came across this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123903 and this was posted almost 7 years ago.Most people here suggest Perl/Ruby/Python.

I have recently started to learn MEAN stack, and I don't know if I am on the right track.

What is the best combination of frameworks/languages that you can use for webD, as of today?
I stand corrected, I must have overlooked that section. Callbacks (used to pass return values) are still experimental though, and it's unclear how this will port over to Android once that backend works.
Many trattorias (not 'ristoranti') operate like that: they have one or, at most, a few things, that are almost always delicious.
They still have to compete on everything from providing good enough facilities to paying professors enough to keep or acquire them. If you inflate half the market when it comes to salaries, the other half either has to compete or will lose all of its talent.

If X type of lab becomes standard at non-state schools, then all the state schools must build one too or suffer.
A closer look at emerging market stocks
There are at least enough Estonians who agree to elect a president who clearly does see a potential Russian threat.

Of course there are Baltic citizens who are not worried by Russia. There are hundreds of thousands of Baltic citizens who are ethnic Russians and do not want to be anything else, after all. And most people they know will be similar to themselves of course, because people on both sides of this ethnic divide live in ethnic bubbles. (Yes, again a generalization that does not apply to each and every person.)

But I would claim that a majority of Baltic citizens, particularly people of ethnically Baltic origin, are worried about Russia (and ethnic Russian minorities are not). At least that's what the election results look like.
Maybe it is my provider, but I hate voice mails because the I have to navigate using button presses and constantly wait until it is done reading things back to me.

An sms is so much simpler.
Developer's lifecycle: Fun but it's true
The mobile-home trap: How a Warren Buffett empire preys on the poor
What is the best way to live in the Bay Area[San Francisco] on 100k?
I'm moving to the Bay Area [preferably San Francisco], and am going to be making about $100k. If I am 21 years old and at the start of my career, how much rent can I afford? What is my ideal budget after taxes? Where in San Francisco should I live (or not, since I will be commuting to one of the big tech companies)?
Is simply having a more popular brand inherently anti-competitive?

No, having a very popular brand (>80% of market say), and then using that brand to kill competitors in another market is anti-competitive.

Google are not a gate-keeper for consumers, but they are for many kinds of business who want to be found on the net - they have no option but to try to reach the top of google in their domain, or in the case of this sort of move, actually pay for a presence in google results (because probably 90% of users don't look below this widget taking up most of their page).
No Asimov, the greatest writer of books on General Science for the public?
It an expense, not necessarily a cost. Their property values just rose for example. Over time the equipment ages which leads to breaking, and replacement because it's not state of the art anymore. If you expect it to last 20 years, then you can write off 1/20th every year, which are your actual costs. Meaning it's $100 per student per year, which is reasonably cheap because those are essentially your costs to have state of the art equipment available to you every year. Things like heating & lighting, employees, cleaning etc is added to that, but it's mostly independent from renovation as you had to pay that anyway before you renovated. It might go up a bit, it might go down because of more sustainable engineering for example.

There's a lot more to it, of course, don't get me wrong. But $2k per student for non-teaching isn't quite the truth, either.

But I think the notion of building decent public facilities and amenities is one of the best things we ought to do. It sadly doesn't happen often. But universities do it, libraries, rec centers, I think it's great. It has to happen in a smart way, of course, I don't support some of the ridiculous over the top projects you sometimes see. A pool in the shape of a buffalo, ugh, great example right there. Sadly it's often in the pursuit of collegiate sports and not really providing awesome amenities and facilities to the general student body. Reminds me of the piece about Alabama in this great Last Week Tonight [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX8BXH3SJn0
Also LTS means "95% of the developers left for the newer version because on open source projects no one can be forced to work on legacy applications like in business world".

Good luck with that. I tried to go on with the Ubuntu's LTS once, and the logic definitely doesn't work. Bugs, even major ones, just pile up faster than the remaining couple developers can fix, and it's was too painful of an experience to repeat. Ubuntu LTS has shelf life of 6-12 months unless if you start paying. Which is unfortunate.
It's 2015. Every bank will communicate with me using TLS and email. Why the hell won't the IRS?

It's insane, backward thinking.
I Second that. A Fantastic book which inspired me to go into science.
Ask HN: Need your feedback on an App idea
We're thinking about building a Pinterest like site but instead of sharing images from around the web, you share photos you take from your mobile phone. Remaining functionality is similar to Pinterest.

What do you think?
parrot
(common virtual machine for dynamic languages) named
after an April Fool's hoax that came true:

http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/04/01/parrot.htm

What a coincident. In 2015, Perl 6 (Parrot VM) and Python 3 have difficulties to transfer their community over from the former major releases Perl 5 and Python 2.

Offtopic: We can learn from it. Like fixing a language early or never/only in small steps. Other examples: XHTML 1 and especially 2 failed, HTML5 based on HTML4 won spectacular. PHP6 failed, but won with PHP 5.3+ and now PHP 7. The transition from Visual Basic 6 and VBA 6 to Visual Basic .Net failed, J#/C# won.
You'll probably take home somewhere around $5k a month after taxes. Rent will eat half of that, but living on $2.5k a month is easily manageable and you should be able to put some savings away as well.

I prefer to live in the city proper, but many people who prefer a more quiet lifestyle are perfectly content to stay in south SF or across the bay.

Commuting is easy, if a bit slow. Between BART, Muni and Caltrain getting to and from anywhere in the Bay Area is possible. I sold my car before moving here and haven't looked back. If I need to pick something up or leave the city for the day I just use getaround.

Hope that helps :)
Well you get $350 "for free", the rest is a loan.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_intelligence needs a creative commons cense remix?
It’s actually visa on four days’ notice before arrival
Going to plug Bill Gates' recommendation again. I enjoyed reading and thought the data was eye opening.

http://www.trustmedia.co/test/Books/Why-Does-College-Cost-So...
> 1. US milk does not taste good. Actually, it does not taste at all. I always thought this is just in my mind until a Swiss guy said the same.

I don't believe this. Milk sold at a super market comes from cows and cows need to be semi local to bring milk to any store. I'd love to know how milk from other places is somehow superior. My suspicion is that it isn't and just confirmation bias (that or someone is comparing different types of milk (e.g. 2% versus homogenized) which is a poor comparison).
> As a modern western state, the main source of GDP require college educated workforce, so it probably make sense to invest "other peoples money" into it.

Absolutely. There are some issues though with brain drain. Look at Germany, free education. Or Norway, you pay like $500 a year. I have friends who went to study there and then left and never came back.

And it's not inexpensive. Here in the Netherlands we pay about $2k a year on tuition, but the gov pays the uni an additional $10k or so per student. And then the unis get various extras from the government, so they have about $15-20k to work with for tuition per student. In any of these three countries, most or all of that comes from the government, who don't have a way of keeping that investment locked in to their countries.

Which is why a lot of countries nowadays keep tuition high, but create language scholarships. Study in Korea? Gotto pay up. Unless you want us to pay, great, we'll even pay you a monthly stipend, but you need to take this 4 year Korean language course and it's intensive, if you fail, you lose your scholarship.

4 years later, that person will be speaking Korean and tied to Korea for the rest of their lives. Even if they won't live their, they might go back to Europe and do business with Korean companies, make investments, etc. That's a much more sensible investment for them.

The second issue is that of cashflow. Investments are great, but paying $50k into an 18 year old, will start to pay off maybe a decade or two later in taxes on average. That's an easy decision for Sweden, it's a tricky decision when you're dealing with austerity measures, unemployment, failing healthcare, crime etc right now, something a lot of countries are facing.

But yeah beyond those issues, I'm damn glad I live in Europe, my education has been amazing. $10k student debt, got a 4y degree here, and did an exchange, a minor and summer school in 3 other countries (Quebec, too by the way :)!
I was using Foundation and Bootstrap for years and I recently switched to the amazing semantic-ui. This seems like a clone of semantic-ui (kind of) and I don't really understand what's the difference.
How is this different from Bootstrap or Foundation? Is this just another CSS framework? I wish they had a "what's good about Toolkit" section describing the advantages of this package over Bootstrap et al.
> unless if you start paying. Which is unfortunate.

So you want something for nothing. Why exactly would Ubuntu (or anybody else) want you as an user?
And who exactly makes the observations? Is a cat good enough? A chimp? If we get someone really smart to look at an electron can we collapse it better?

The brain centered quantum mechanics I've seen become fashionable to lay people in the last 20 years are a last gasp of homo-centrism that really should have died a very long time ago.
I once registered 0.0259 BAC (the limit for my license is 0) when I was pulled over at the bottom of my street. The cop had been setup there several times over the course of a few weeks, and consistently pulled me over for a random breath test. I had not had any alcohol for over 24 hours, and when I had some alcohol the day before it was less than 3 drinks.

I asked for a second reading, as the first must be incorrect but yet it was the exact same. Maybe the device was faulty or something, but it showed me that at any point, whether you think you are doing something safely or even legally, it does not mean that you will actually be doing so in the eyes of these tools that the police rely so heavily on. He let me go on my way, I could have easily lost my license because of that. Once you have a drinking driving or drug flag on your license, you will be pulled over and checked far more than those that do not, even if you are not charged with anything.
JSConf Budapest – conference on the future of the language
How Facebook knows who all your friends are, even better than you do
It's good to see something else than Bootstrap. If you like this, have a look at: http://www.semantic-ui.com/ - I love using this as every component can be downloaded separately.
When will singularity happen?
That depends on what Microsoft plans to do with the upcoming .NET Native compiler, but I guess that would be kept closed.
Safari and Firefox. Both are much leaner, faster and crash less on OS X 10.10 Yosemite for me.
You might also enjoy Skeleton.[0] It's a very lightweight responsive boilerplate "file".

Check the examples section (currently only one). [1]

[0] http://getskeleton.com/

[1] http://getskeleton.com/#examples
This is on HN homepage now, so the question you should ask is not who published it, but who upvoted it. And the answer is, at least 158 different people who found it useful.
The future of architecture
In a shared hallucinated dream/reality our bodies and planet, if not real, may serve as a metaphoric language for some purpose. Perhaps as a classroom or habitat for gods.
There's plenty of discussion on Hacker News about people management, culture-building, social issues, work-life balance, personal development, etc. Usually as it relates to tech and startups, but that's to be expected.
Firefox mainly because it is less resource intensive. When I made the switch firefox was also the first one to offer new features (as far as I know) like ctrl+shit+m to change to browser into a "responsive mode" where you could test your website on various browser widths.

I haven’t used the "hello" firefox feature much at this time but I can certainly see the use for it in the future.
The Rationale Behind Soaring App Development Prices
We all know "GNU's Not Unix." But what does G stand for?
Interesting article but what really grinds my gears is the following:

>My wife and I don’t normally eat breakfast (she has a cup of coffee and I drink a Coke Zero — yes, yes, I know it’s bad)

If you go through such effort to do a heavy crash diet and your base diet is fundamentally flawed why do you not fix your base diet first? Getting a proper meal cycle in there for the rest of your life is far more beneficial than reaping the benefits of a crash diet.

This especially bothers me when I hear people say "but I cannot loose weight!". Look at your base diet. Just freaking write on a piece of paper what you eat after you eat it for a week and you will be a lot more conciousness about it.
The enterprise world already had them since decades.

Just try to update a compiler version on a large code base, specially in corporations where developer tools are managed by IT support.
CFD: Why Formula One is creating its own (and less useful) branch of the science