skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lead guitar in a band!

http://www.moirocks.net
College gives kids thousands of other kids to hang out with, at a critical point in their lives when they are just entering into adulthood.

College gives kids a chance to create their own social identity, as seen through the eyes of their peers, rather than their parents.

If you are a social recluse, and spend most of your college years hiding behind your computer screen, then yeah, you might as well not go.

If you recognize that human beings are herd animals, and that in order to learn how to be a leader in the herd, you need to have a herd to practice on ...

I learnt some really important life lessons in college, most of them outside of class. I heartily recommend it. Challenge your expectations of what you can and can't do. You may be surprised by how much more you can grow.
> at least 8 hours of continuous sleep

You need as much sleep as leaves you alert and non-drowsy, even when bored. That's less than eight hours for me or any other adult I've lived with.
I like how the article suggests that the cost of developing a viral Facebook application is $200 for outsourcing to India.

I agree with the premise of the article, though. Except for the $400,000 price tag. Where does that come from?
I don't think he goes far enough. Looking back, my university experience was indeed sort of a waste of time. However, the time I spent in college was orders of magnitude better than the previous four years of high school.

-edit-

Ok, I just closely read the piece instead of just skimming it. I do think college can be a waste of time for many people. However, the suggestion to instead outsource Facebook/MySpace application development to India is ridiculous. Also, what college costs $400,000? Ivy League tops out at about $40K/yr. UC Berkeley is about $9K per year.
Australian Startups Carnival, March 3-17, 2008
some parts of our culture think that. Other parts think children are something with a high cost and an immeasurably high return in happiness! :)
The case you're talking about, I think, was that of Kai-Fu Lee, who actually was allowed to work at Google, but wasn't allowed to work in the areas he worked in at Microsoft for a year. Instead, he did general recruiting.
JTV Tech Talk: Jans Aasman on "How Lisp will make Web 3.0 a reality"
I'm a vote for never, ever buying options in a private company, unless you're confident you know what the outcome is going to be --- that there's an imminent liquidity event, that you know what the numbers are, you know the VC's prefs, and you know where your shares are relative to the outstanding shares.

When I left my last company, they told me I was crazy for not buying my vested options. Multiple times over the following 3 years, coworkers would IM me and say, "I really wish I had convinced you to buy those options! Big stuff is coming!"

And it has: they bought another company, got revenues to the point where only 3 companies in the world can afford to buy them, and are digging in for the long haul towards an eventual IPO, where all the shares will get reset anyways.

That's not even close to a horror story. The real horror story is, you buy your options, the company exits 2 years later, management and investors get all the money, and current employees share a retention pool. You put your money in VFINX, you get 3-5% returns. You put your money in private company options, you lose it all.
I was at this interview. Does anyone else here do ETL at Stanford?
Officials Step Up Net-Neutrality Efforts
Professors awarded $1.1M by Keck Foundation to pursue brain research
'Recordable' Proteins As Next-generation Memory Storage Materials
Darwin Award Dimwits II - Attack of the Dimwit video
I agree PHP has a lot of ugliness to it, but it's hard to argue with things like the success of Facebook.

If that's not serious webapp development work, I'm not sure what qualifies.
The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever
I wish you luck Marcus in your AI startup and don't afraid of competition from university spin-offs.I had been involved in many seemed to be cool research projects while I was working for a uni, all of them are still a pile of papers, even those who tried to move on faild due to bureaucracy. Two years ago me and my colleague, we quit that dirty job and set up our own tiny mobile software dev company. The progress goes very fast now :-).
yahoo is a content company

google is a search company
Crowd control at eBay
im probably interested. i always like to shoot the breeze.
I read an article once that suggested that colleges and universities are part of a mafia-type organization that extorts parents/students to pay high tuition fees...otherwise the student won't be able to get a decent white-collar job as an adult (the whole college degree required deal)
"You must log in to access FAQ"

I think the only valid response to that is "WTF?"
umm, yes. a high cost. not just in money, but in "hassle". our culture, almost entirely, also thinks that kids have a high return. yes. i wasn't denying that. though i do think that set of opinions constitutes the wrong attitude to have.
Another Poker Hack
I don't know what an avatar service is. Is it a picture of me? I think other people might not know what an avatar service is either.
What Happens When We’re All Connected?
Hey, Ivan, I realize this isn't the right venue, but I'm not sure what is, so...

I like you guys's product a lot. The execution's really clean, and it seems that all that needs proving is the model itself.

My thought, though, is that you guys would drive a lot more tips if you focused on the people doing the tipping rather than the sites being tipped. Although there's certainly some altruism involved in tipping, I think the underlying drive for most when giving to charity is much more selfish. In real life, people make large donations to get their name put on buildings or to be respected as philanthropists. People tip in restaurants to not look cheap in front of their date and contribute to political campaigns so they can tell their friends they put their money where their mouth is.

In all of those situations, there's at least the ability to prove to other members of society that you did tip. In the case where you've tipped well beyond what might have been expected, you even get to be famous.

All of this comes down to the question: Why not provide widgets that show the top X tippers for a given website? You get peer pressure via the suggestion that you should be tipping like these guys, and you let the people kicking in lots of money feel special and be a minor celebrity within that community. Seems like it could really up the usage of your product.
My God, Adobe, how much memory does an updater need?
I can see it now: "Myspace Answers"
If by access to a professor, you mean someone who knows the material extremely well and can help you with questions or steer you in the right direction, you can get that for free from IRC.

I've been leeching off my friends' college educations for years, and although I'd agree that it would be impossible to learn some things (like advanced programming topics) strictly from books, someone who knows the material and exactly how to explain things to me is just as good as a traditional instructor.

It's also better training for the real world, where I don't have time to take a course on everything I need to know.
I don't think so. We used: Amazon EC2 Ubuntu 7.10 gutsy AMI built using code customized by Eric Hammond <ehammond@thinksome.com> For more information: http://ec2gutsy.notlong.com
Maclisp Manual Comes To The Web
Here Come the Shareholder Lawsuits Against Yahoo
37Signals' Backpack Getting Major Upgrade - Losing Focus?
it amuses me that people advocate the importance of college -- supposedly an educational institution -- based in part on parties and sex. and in part based on avoiding work.

if you can pay for college, you could pay less to not work or go to college. and still party and have sex, if that's what you care about.
the internet has made travel obsolete :)
True. It's easy for me to look back and say that college wasn't that useful, but that's because I have the maturity and experience that came from going to college and then leaving for the real world! You can bet for darn sure I'd get more out of college if I went back now.
i agree. btw it's possible to get actual professors to give you advice and help learning stuff, if you contact them and ask interesting questions, or make friends with them.
Congratulations on the new baby. :-)
A/B testing can help. In a recent project I increased conversion from ~6% to ~13% between six possible layouts.

http://flickr.com/photos/wehriam/428832337/in/set-7215759419...
You can always hire some high-paid consultants to come up with the perfect name for you: http://www.salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/11/30/naming/print....
As you peeps have pointed out, 400k is ridiculous. I go to an expensive private college, and it's on the order of 120 for 4 years (though it's actually a 5-year school).

And if his kids are really entrepreneurial, as he claims, then they'll have the motivation to apply for scholarships like I did. I have received absolutely no financial help from my parents, and yet have accumulated very little debt.

I have learned most of my knowledge by teaching myself, and generally goof off during class if I even go (and no, that doesn't put me into the B group). But I've also been exposed to an incredible variety of people and built a huge network of friends and acquaintances in almost every industry.

Another point he seems to be missing is that to make a Facebook or Myspace app go viral, you need an initial network of users, typically your own friends. I hope his kids have fun trying to promote their app to all their high school friends who have gone off to college and lost contact.

I think what makes me most upset about this article, though, is that he's not using his views to make his own decisions, he's using them to make his kids' decisions. I feel really bad for his kids.
Speaking of mimicry, joeh and I were just talking about that on the way back from lunch just now. Maybe Hacker News is trying to mimic us.
Damn - I'm going to have to cancel some appointments to make this. An impressive speaker and topic - Mike (cofounder) and I are looking forward to it. :)

I must admit to being a bit skeptical about the semantic web in general though.
And I was scared of a Yahoo / Microsoft merger.
Yeah, we have some really secret and highly proprietary stuff in there. :) Sorry, that is just an oversight, not meant to be like that.
for free off IRC? not the things I wanted to learn.
If all you want to get out of college is to learn to program or other "trade" skills, then yeah it's probably a waste of time, but that's not what college is all about (unless you go to a vocational school)
There is an issue of privacy, in that people might not want their tipping advertised. That said, we're definitely going down this path. We'll make the experience very open and social. I think the widgets idea is really excellent.

As for the right forum, we've had another idea which we'll implement soon: an open tippable forum. The feedback form here:
tipjoy.com/feedback

Will soon have the option to "make this public". Below it will be a ranked set of feedbacks given. Users can tip the feedback (and the tips will go to the submitter) to get the features they want.

I'm really excited about making this open and extensible, so tipjoy could provide a feedback forum for other sites as well.

Lots coming soon! Thanks for the ideas!
thats all there is to the registration, an email address and password. With that the user can save their work history from which their graph is built. they can then find companies that are in their graph, get feeds from those companies regarding milestones and openings and save companies of interest. keep track of companies they submitted their resume to. they also can edit and add companies to the database,
Oh, we spent much time trying different combinations of short english words having any relations to what we do, but all the domain names were taken. Then we tried a world play on english and latin words and came to "talk" + "naut" (lat. for sail) = talkonaut.com, which I believe precisely represents our mobile chat/voip software we develop: talk while you go. We also discovered that there's a chinese word "taikonaut" meaning astronaut (cosmonaut). So we used the idea of "talk while travel in space" in logo and promo. I think digging some rare languages (greek, latin, japanese, maybe scandinavian) can give you interesting names as well.
It's clear that the majority of YC hackers have been lucky enough to avoid Timezone coding -- otherwise you'd not consider "GMT-5" a timezone!

It's America/New_York, according to the Olson DB.
Hack idea: text classification for political propaganda
Reading the campaign material of political candidates in order to figure out what they stand for is a rather annoying exercise. Invariably, they're 95% fluff. Look at

http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/Issues/65bd0fbe-737b-4851-a7e7-d9a37cb278db.htm .

It isn't my intent to pick on McCain, but this makes a good example. These five paragraphs are almost but not quite semantically null. I can glean from the first paragraph that he believes in man-made global warming, and from the fourth paragraph that he supports nuclear energy. This is useful information, but having to parse five paragraphs to discover it seems inefficient.

I think text classifiers might be able to improve this process. "Nuclear energy" seems like it would be a pretty strong ham token, while "for our children" and "addressing the challenges" seem pretty spammy. Trying this out is not quite as simple as just feeding things into CRM114, because we're trying to classify parts of messages rather than complete messages. It ought to possible to work around that, though: perhaps score each clause, each sentence, and each paragraph, and then somehow derive an overall score from these inputs.

Anyone think this could work?
Oh, blah. I'll grant you that people (in this country) would be better served by slowing down a bit, but I wouldn't encourage a high school kid to start a business instead of going to college.

Maybe it's a good idea for a kid to work on his "startup" when he's barely old enough to shave, but probably not. The chances of success aren't higher when you're young and under-educated (likely the opposite), and you'll be squandering the one time in your life when you're allowed to get away with things and make mistakes.

Don't want to go to college? Fine. Travel the world. Have adventures. Play in a band. Make friends. Meet women. You're not likely to get the chance later, and you'll be a more compelling, charismatic person for the experience. Then go to college.

Once you've graduated, you'll have the rest of your life to start companies (and the charisma and friends you've picked up will help you on your way).
Pulling Strings with Puppet -- Book Review
I think he would want to go by Long Ron Conway. I wonder what effect that would have on his investing career. I guess any nervous entrepreneur talking to him could just think "hey I've seen this guy naked."
basil cell carcinoma
A nice collection of videos on basil cell carcinoma
Of course it is horribly inaccurate but his numbers are pulled out of thin air. If you could find a way to justify skipping college economically, for real people, I'm all ears. In fact money wise, college is one of the best investments you can ever make, there are countless studies to back that up. I really don't see what the big rush to skip college is. Do you really think that starting a company 4 years sooner is that big deal? If so then your business is going to fail because it is dependent on ONE idea rather than the skill of the people involved. A good group of people will find a new idea when need be, the world has plenty of problems to solve. So what are you in a rush to do? Work? You have all your life to do that. I think that the experiance of college when you are 18-22 is a thing you either do or you don't, there is no going back to do it later. On the other hand, you can start a business, travel, learn things, and work for the rest of your life. College is what you make of it, no one forces you to do anything here. I can't imagine being bored, I have about twice as much I would like to do as I have time for, the people who say it is a "waste of time" are ones with no initiative.
It amuses me how some people say that college is not worth their time and money. Maybe you stop taking easy clases? Get the challenging ones? Don't overpay for school?

Nobody is measuring the importance of school, on how much fun you have with it, but what I am saying is that you can learn a lot, and yet have a great time, and yes even fun. Unless you are sociophobe, scrooge, or something, most humans want some fun on the side.

I thought CS was not that difficult, so I decided to minor in math, which I found it not that difficult so I challenged myself even more, and I decided to minor in Physics, and here I met my match. A hard ass professor, that would teach a lot, but it was almost impossible to get an A. My first ever class, where I felt no matter how much effort I put into it, I couldn't get an A. It taught me about humility, and learning my limitations.

And, yes, I did all that, plus lot's of volunteering, helping with alumni affairs, while having a part time job (washing dishes, and then just a lab proctor) at the same time.

There is nothing more awesome when you learn a lot, and yet can have fun and get laid at the same time.

To all you say that college is waste of time:

1. Maybe you should study something that you are going to get a great return out of it, or it will be challenging enough.

2. You might want to check if you have problems getting socially adjusted.

So, unless you quit school and become a millionare by now, you have no cred on saying college is a waste of time. College is a waste of time for many, b/c they don't use it. To those that are smart enough, it is a great learning experience.
To those that think are too smart for college, maybe they are not taking the right/classes or programs. If you are a genius, what prevents you from finishing it in two years, get a masters, get a phd. and become the next albert einstein, invent cold fusion, a cure for H1V or something great?
You can do that in college. It allows very smart people, to have access to great equipment, grant money and other resarch, things that you probably wont have in your own basement.
The sign-up procedure we have on http://gtalk2voip.com is very simple and quite unique: no new login names, no passwords, not even an email address, but a working IM account. All user has to type in is his/her GTalk/MSN/Yahoo/AIM or ICQ id. Upon submission our system instantly sends back an IM message right to user's messenger with a unique link to his newly created personal account page. Since we don't have authorization per se (it's done on the messenger side when user signs-in into IM account), the percentage is very high, I believe 50% or even higher. One of the advantages is there's no need to remember another, most likely useless, login name and password. ;-)

The other question I would arise is what is the percentage of active users you have. I have a feeling that most sites and services keep on in their DBs up to 95% of dead souls -- those who once tried and never returned.
Nah, there's just not a good way to rate and rank potential job candidates without actually taking the time to get to know them. Finishing college is just an imperfect proxy for being smart and working hard, and companies use it as a baseline because it puts the onus on students/employees to attain. If there was a way for companies to more accurately rank candidates (without actually requiring more work on the company's part), they'd use that instead. Universities are more than happy to facilitate this.

See also http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/10/the-greatest...
I agree, with two objections:

I disagree with rewriting one's program. If I rewrite a program to solve the same problem, then I'll end up having exactly the same code. This is useless. If I am solving a different problem, then rewriting is usually in order.

In regards to writing (re)readable code, I feel that the word "readable" leaves the door open to a lot of abuse, and doesn't shut the door firmly on those who encourage literate code, James Joycian code, commented code, etc! "Readable" has connotations that one can read it at leisure, like a novel. It allows for some excess, some baggage. If there were an adjective which meant "the uncompromising naked terseness of mathematics, complete absence of comments except in pathological cases (to be avoided!), and short identifiers, especially in inner scopes," then I'd use that adjective.

I usually think in terms of Occam's Razor: what minimal program description reproduces the subjective effect that a user desires? I feel that any other approach would be based on ideology. "X-Acto blade like code," perhaps, rather than "readable code?"
ITA Software: General air travel search is undecidable
Jaxer AJAX Server: Server-side DOM, easy remote calls, and more
Q: How is software created at Microsoft? A: Very slowly (from the horse's mouth)
Yea, but that would assume a base tuition of 35,000, which there is no reason to spend. Go to a state school if the money is an issue, out of state to Penn State, considered one of the more expensive state schools, is 24,000 a year. That leaves 26,000 a year for living expenses. In state is even less. At my school it is 18,000 out of state and 7,000 in state and we're top 25 nationwide in both of my majors. My apartment is one of the nicer ones on campus and it is $700 a month, plus $500 for food and expenses, plus 2,000 for books and supplies, I'm barely up to 35,000 and that is with generous allouances and an expensive apartment. In state you could be doing it for 20,000 a year. The people who claim college is outrageous are far from the ground level. I don't know anyone who couldn't work it out by taking loans and going to a state school, everyone quotes these private schools and their prices but that is a whole different ball game. The reality is that college is not all that expensive in the short term, and it is nothing in the long term.
Play less WoW? No way... get real.
sorry, but taking a cruise to bahamas,or a two weeks trip to europe doesn't make one a "well traveled" being. Living in a different country for a while, it will open you a whole world of differnt perspective, and experience things that you just don't when visiting a place for a few days.

yes, just the fact of knowing a foreign language, (well), tells a lot about a person.
The least interesting number
Cool article, but that Library of Congress size of 20TB can't be right. I'm working with a 25TB warehouse now and it's not considered all that huge.
Greg Chaitin on the Berry Paradox
Use of Rogue DNS Servers on Rise
fyi: you're probably getting modded down because you add a signature to your posts (which people avoid, by convention, on news.yc)