skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Often it's the dropouts that start companies...

It is probably easier to start a company on the side as a grad student than to wait until you graduate. Grad student salary sucks, but the flip side is that it can be a pretty awesome day job. The guy who pointed out that 50% of the average grad student's 60-hour week is spend playing WoW is pretty much on the money. You can go months at a time doing only 20 hours of research a week, or even 10, and still not get fired.

Of course, you're not getting paid much, but you're surrounded by lots of other smart young people who aren't getting paid much either, so it's kind of fun. And you certainly aren't going to graduate if you don't do a lot of work -- but if your preferred exit plan is to found a startup and drop out, who cares about that?

It's actually rather hard to fire a grad student. The adviser pays the student very little, but in return (s)he is expected to graduate the student. A student who is fired by Professor X three or four years into a Ph.D. program is well and truly screwed. They might sue. They will certainly tell every grad student they know, and they in turn might tell all the first-year students, who will avoid working for Professor X like he had the plague. So, once you've gotten established as a student in a research group, it's not so hard to spend six months or a year doing only 20 hours worth of work per week. Your adviser will roll her eyes a lot, but she's not likely to take action until you've accumulated a really solid, long-term record as a slacker.
I remember reading an article in Time about a shareware author who was grossing 600k a year from registrations for his software product. I forget which niche the product was in but the point here is, among the PocketInformant/WebIS big PDA apps there will be plenty of room for independent/small companies to thrive. Build a product that people will use, support it, and do well.
Meanwhile, once you have a PhD, you're untouchable by most employers

Who needs employers?
Hire Good Writers
U.S. Patent #5,493,618
"Method and apparatus for activating switches in response to different acoustic signals"

a.k.a. The Clapper "Clap on, Clap off"

http://tinyurl.com/3cp6cd
Is the closest most adults get to polyphasic sleep while they are caring for their newborns and get no sleep?
The pension fund owns 13,600 YHOO shares through mutual fund investments so they are kind of stuck. Of course, this begs the question of why they do not go after the fund(s) but that is beyond my realm of knowledge.

I would also think that an implicit part of their thinking is that if YHOO does not take MSFT's offer, the market bump in the share price that was caused by the offer will go away and the shares will be trading at sub $20 again.

Stephen Bainbridge has a good assessment of this and similar suits with additional info at:
http://www.businessassociationsblog.com/lawandbusiness/comme...
Becoming a partner:
Work 80 to 100-hr weeks for 5-10 years (M-F,S-S 10-10)
Sacrifice balance in your life
Lose your friends
If you're good enough, they'll ask you if you want to (take a loan) and buy into partnership
Bleh. That "book" (notice quotation marks) of 37signals' has more horseshit per word than the book of Mormon. Okay, let's "get real".

Candidate A doesn't know what a binary tree is--but he knows how to properly stamp out dangling participles.

Candidate B knows how to code.

The first rule of a good writer isn't clarity, style, correct semicolon deployment, etc, but is rather saying things that aren't patently false.
I can only speak from my own experience. If you're genuinely sure you're not in it for the money, you really enjoy the area you're working in, and you're prepared to work in a way you find interesting rather than simply doing what will bump you quickly up the career ladder - then academia might well be the best job that anyone will pay you to do. A lot of people find that they don't really enjoy one aspect of this and / or can't make the necessary compromises to make it enjoyable - then it becomes just another job, not much better or worse than most others.
Well, I would argue that its possible that "small startup" could mean a wide range of things, not simply the kind of company Y Combinator tends to fund.

I would also argue that an iPhone app company is at least as likely to be a successful Y Combinator startup as just about anyone else they've funded.

It's a mistake to assume that since indie Mac software has traditionally been written by one guy with an LLC, that all iPhone software will be written that way. For one, the iPhone is a completely different market, much more akin to the iPod than the mac.
but it comes pretty damn close.
It turns out that train tracks in Tibet aren't where the antelope play
I think that one of the things this article was getting at was that it feels like one is not captain of their own ship when they do science as a career. Ie, no matter how hard or much you work you won't get your due rewards.
Could a unified theory of modern life really be this simple/scary? (quick vid)
This is a the site of an author of a book. I am in no way affiliated with this site, the author or the publisher of the book. I have not read the book, it was just recommended to me and I came across the link when I Googled it.

On the left side you'll notice an embedded YouTube video; it is about 6 minutes. I've watched it and although it is, to say the least, a bit propoganda-ish, at the same time something about the proposed thesis intuitively struck me as neatly explaining the mess that we've all collectively experienced over the last few decades in general and the last 7 years or so in particular.

It's almost like I sensed the thesis proposed, but I couldn't quite figure out how to quite express it.

Again, I haven't read the book yet, and so I hold no particular opinion on it either way, but if the book is anything like what I imagine it based on the YouTube video, at the very least it would be one of the more original things I've read in a while (I tend to read a lot).

I'd be interested on anybody's feedback if you care to invest 5-6 minutes to watch the video.
This is the site of an author of a book. I am in no way affiliated with this site, the author or the publisher of the book. I have not read the book, it was just recommended to me and I came across the link when I Googled it.

On the left side you'll notice an embedded YouTube video; it is about 6 minutes. I've watched it and although it is, to say the least, a bit propoganda-ish, at the same time something about the proposed thesis intuitively struck me as neatly explaining the mess that we've all collectively experienced over the last few decades in general and the last 7 years or so in particular.

It's almost like I sensed the thesis proposed, but I couldn't quite figure out how to quite express it.

Again, I haven't read the book yet, and so I hold no particular opinion on it either way, but if the book is anything like what I imagine it based on the YouTube video, at the very least it would be one of the more original things I've read in a while.

I'd be interested on anybody's feedback if you care to invest 5-6 minutes to watch the video.
Yeah, that's kind of what I meant. People have to do this kind of value exchange to form an effective group.
True, I agree.

That being said, I try to capture items like that via a constantly evolving list (which is pretty much necessary no matter what). The relative business value of the next item in 'the sequence' would be higher that day/week than than it would be otherwise and would bubble to the top if it was the highest return on investment.

Likewise, it's possible for the 'cost' of certain tasks to drop/rise based on what's happened recently (i.e. you just learned more about something, or you're in a really productive mood or office setting).

In the end, my ideal would be just to figure out what's the highest return for my time __right now__ and work on that. I.e., it's a continuously updating function and the list is never set in stone.
I showed this to my math-major friend, who pointed out that if X plays first in the center, X will be able to force a win or a draw. Note that in the first iteration, all of the corners and all of the sides are symmetrically identical.
Representing something valuable doesn't make the representation valuable. I hardly ever check anyone's karma score. The only scores I know of are the leaders'.
There is nothing wrong with starting many projects. If anything, that IS a major strength of a good hacker!

The harder question is when do you know which project to run with? That might have as much to do with luck and maturity.

Zuckerberg almost dropped the facebook; youtube guys had very poor response to first version of youtube but they kept going.
YC RSS broken...
Is it just me? :(
Hagakure: Book of the Samurai [pdf]
This stuff seems to me a kind of premature optimization for life. I know quite a few people who've done impressive things. None of them did it by sleeping less.

What did they have? Boldness, focus, an ability to see through illusions and fashions. I'd go for those first, and if you're still not getting enough done, then try sleeping less.
If I most value learning and research, what do I lose if I do not become a member of academia?
Sleeping less also seems to impair my creative thinking and ability to concentrate.
article is flawed

1. User authentication was not 'tossed out the window'. You still need a .edu email address from the college network you would like to join. Which is the same authentication they had in the beginning.

2. Facebook actually has pretty good privacy controls. Feel free to block who sees your profile based on friends status or network.

3. Use the 'other applications' tab in the privacy menu to disallow applications from seeing your info.

4. So you're mad because they wanted your DOB? That req is there for legal reasons i believe. You could have made one up if you want. Or you could have not cared because your DOB is already public info.
In my experience, the biggest hurdle in math is understanding what the notation is saying. Usually the ideas are pretty straight forward, though clever.
People who are broke from grad school. :-/
Most research labs I know come very close to your description of them.

There are, though, a few exceptions here and there, but it will cost you time to find them.
I'd be interested in a causal representation: whether becoming less religious caused countries to become wealthier, or visa versa.
nice link thanks
"For us to work any other way was nuts. Uh, to us, those goody-good employees who worked cubicle jobs for bum paychecks and surfed the internet, and were bored all day long, were dead. I mean they were slackers. They had no vision. If we wanted something we just coded it. If anyone compiled twice they got 404'd so bad, believe me, they never rolled their own again."

— Goodhackers, 2008
That's another thing I'm interested in. It isn't clear to me whether it is only an inverse proportion. It may be more a matter of extremes: i.e. the extremely religious or irreligious countries do worse economically, whereas the moderate countries do better.

The relationship may also be qualitative instead of quantitative. The content of the religion may have more to do with the GDP than "religiosity."
Nice, but not useful. Google Earth is useful, so it will remain more popular than Telescope by an order of magnitude. Unless aliens land or humans settle on other planets, that is.
Perhaps you could use the Adwords test as described in number crunchers: create Google Ads for the various features you could be working on, and see which ones get clicked more. The ads could point to messages of the form "we are working on feature X".
Here's my attempt at domain-specific visual programming:

http://opsis.sourceforge.net
Criticism of Unreserved Google Praise
Where's Ireland, yo? They only have one of the highest per-capita GDPs in the EU.
"This depends a great deal on what your Ph.D. is in and how you treat it. I've never had this problem, but I got my Ph.D. in EE, with a focus on semiconductor device fabrication."

Agree. I was trying to be careful to speak only of the physical and biological sciences, because I know from experience that job market for engineering and CS is different.

I don't think that anyone tries to spend their post-doctoral years hopping between contract jobs; the problem comes when you simply can't get that first job in your field, and you have to do these things to make ends meet. Before you know it, you're stuck in a cycle, and people start to believe that you're "in love with the academic lifestyle". This happens to scientists more often than most people think.
It isn't about more or less work. Everything you do is work in some way. It's really about motivation. That's the secret to getting things done.
Oh yeah, the FDA makes most of biotech much more difficult and costly, at least the 99% of it they have jurisdiction over.
psychology is a science now?
I've just watched the video.

Naomi Klein (the author) is a respected and thoughtful academic. Her previous book ('No Logo') was well received around the world.

The ideas she presents here are obviously true:

Governments and corporations are colluding to exploit the poor and powerless by profiteering from disaters (natural or man made).

They get away with it by doing it at moments of national or global crisis, when the voting public has been shocked into momentary helplesness by disasters such as 9/11 or the recent tsunami in Southeast Asia.
I'll add that the bureaucracy depends heavily on the size of the group. Biological research (in particular, anything that includes the word "systems" or "-omics" in the grant title) has been succumbing to an empire-building mentality for a long time. These programs tend to be large, highly bureaucratic, and well-funded (they're also, not incidentally, the groups most likely to have the resources to pay a staff programmer).

Small groups are much more dependent on the productivity of each researcher. For example, it's not uncommon to see labs of 10 people publishing at roughly the same rate as groups of double or triple the size. Just like startups vs. big companies, the communication overhead of a small laboratory is much lower, and responsibility of each member, correspondingly higher.
I actually considered uploading the pdf version to Scribd for submission, but was worried it would break terms of use.
It seems you've read the book, then?

I could be wrong, but from what you're saying / what I saw on the video there's a strong implication, I'm wondering - if you read the book, is it actually stated, inferred, hinted, ignored, etc.:

In other words, if it benefits policy-makers/corporations to have a disaster - political, natural, economic, etc. - as a prelude to shoving massive change that would otherwise be unnacceptable in nature or scope while people are too busy recovering from disaster, well, does that mean then that policy-makers/corporations would have a strong incentive to actually invest in the creation of the disasters?

In other words, since businesses are based on plans and plans are based on predictability, why wait for "nature to take her course?" when you could "push the hand" to setup disasters to get the scenario that would most likely benefit your company's particular "market solution"?
Profession: a thought provoking Asimov short story on education
no wonder who may painted it!
"/Leisure and Idleness/. There is an Indian savagery, a savagery peculiar to the Indian blood, in the manner in which the Americans strive after gold: and the breathless hurry of their work-the characteristic vice of the New World-already begins to infect old Europe, and makes it savage also, spreading over it a strange lack of intellectuality. One is now ashamed of repose: even long reflection almost causes remorse of conscience. Thinking is done with a stopwatch, as dining is done with the eyes fixed on the financial newspaper; we live like men who are continually "afraid of letting opportunities slip." "Better do anything whatever, than nothing"-this principle also is a noose with which all culture and all higher taste may be strangled.

And just as all form obviously disappears in this hurry of workers, so the sense for form itself, the ear and the eye for the melody of movement, also disappear. The proof of this is the clumsy perspicuity which is now everywhere demanded in all positions where a person would like to be sincere with his fellows, in intercourse with friends, women, relatives, children, teachers, pupils, leaders and princes-one has no longer either time or energy for ceremonies, for roundabout courtesies, for any esprit in conversation, or for any odium whatever. For life in the hunt for gain continually compels a person to consume his intellect, even to exhaustion, in constant dissimulation, overreaching, or forestalling: the real virtue nowadays is to do something in a shorter time than another person. And so there are only rare hours of sincere intercourse permitted: in them, however, people are tired, and would not only like "to let themselves go," but to stretch their legs out wide in awkward style. The way people write their letters nowadays is quite in keeping with the age; their style and spirit will always be the true "sign of the times."

If there be still enjoyment in society and in art, it is enjoyment such as over-worked slaves provide for themselves. Oh, this moderation in "joy" of our cultured and uncultured classes! Oh, this increasing suspiciousness of all enjoyment! Work is winning over more and more the good conscience to its side: the desire for enjoyment already calls itself "need of recreation," and even begins to be ashamed of itself. "One owes it to one's health," people say, when they are caught at a picnic. Indeed, it might soon go so far that one could not yield to the desire for the vita contemplative (that is to say, excursions with thoughts and friends), without self-contempt and a bad conscience. Well! Formerly it was the very reverse: it was "action" that suffered from a bad conscience. a man of good family I concealed his work when need compelled him to labor. The slave labored under the weight of the feeling that he did something contemptible-the "doing" itself was something contemptible. "Only in otium and bellum is there nobility and honor:" so rang the voice of ancient prejudice!"

Nietzsche in La gaya scienza, §329 (1882).
the research group had both "systems" and "-omics" in its title!
Good question. The graphic is taken from http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/secularism. The article itself is rather platitudinous, so I didn't post it. Here's the passage that answers your question (and more or less summarizes the whole piece):

the idea of inevitable secularization has fallen out of favor with many scholars and journalists. Still, its most basic tenet—that material progress will slowly erode religious fervor—appears unassailable. Last October, the Pew Global Attitudes Project plotted 44 countries according to per capita gross domestic product and intensity of religious belief, gauged by the responses to several questions about faith [...]. The pattern, as seen in the Pew study and a number of other sources, is hard to miss: when God and Mammon collide, Mammon usually wins.
"It's actually rather hard to fire a grad student. The adviser pays the student very little, but in return (s)he is expected to graduate the student. A student who is fired by Professor X three or four years into a Ph.D. program is well and truly screwed. They might sue."

...which is why the question rarely arises. The faculty have devious ways of eliminating students that don't make the grade. Why fire people, when you can just collude to make their lives so miserable that they choose to quit?

Do it properly, and the other students will just assume that the problem is a personal issue. If you're a successful researcher, it won't scare anyone away from your lab.
The second comment on this thread:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/2275614130/

puts it all in context.

In short: the graph means what you want it to mean, according to your own background.
What can I say? I'm psychic. ;-)
Sleeping less is actually a secondary benefit... Its really about avoiding burn-out and staying mentally acute over long periods of continuous work. Breaking up things with naps is actually highly effective.

I'll agree that its not about how long you work, but how productive you are while you are working. While there is no substitute for genuine, hard work, I'd advocate that a polyphasic sleep schedule can help some people with long hours of intense work.
Like this only afflicts 19 year olds. How ignorant.
"There are people I know who have endured years of continuing depression because they were unable to become tenured professors. But there are also people I know who are depressed because they aren't bestselling novelists, professional musicians, lottery winners, or Bill Gates."

Granted, but science is totally unlike music, writing or gambling, in that that the best-case payoff is still quite meager. Wanting to become a professor is a good bit different than wanting to become a rock star or professional athlete.

Too many smart kids start into grad school thinking that a professorship is a reasonable, attainable career goal, depending entirely upon your motivation and intelligence. When they (almost inevitably) fail, it can lead to a crisis of confidence that goes much deeper than simply failing to become the next Kanye West. After all, everyone knows that rock stardom depends heavily on luck...but a professorship depends only on intelligence. If you ask me, it's a cruel game.
not good at all, the language barrier really stood in his way

seems like a very decent guy thought ...
Most PhDs in technical fields get paid tuition and a stipend.
Ironically, alot of this is stimulated by a lust for power. Keeping up with the Joneses is a form of social power. I've thought that Nietzsche's writing functions as a koan for the West's power drive.

Anyways, I agree. We can see this in how introverts are treated in our culture. They tend to be looked down on since they don't "do" things. I suspect, though, that most of the great thinkers who shaped the world were introverts.

However, the best approach is to not arbitrarily elevate leisure or action, but to consider the purpose of each.
If you already know any other (good) programming language, then "Essential Python Reference" by David Beazley is the way to go. For starters, if you are wondering, this is how I would do it in X, I wonder how to do this in Python - this book would get you the answer the fastest. There is also a detailed introduction (about 70 pages or so, IIRC) that will get you started as well.
There needs to be a way to save this comment alone for posterity.
Top 41 Negotiation Quotes
There are actually two separate suits. I've put them up on Scribd:

Feb 11 Suit
http://www.scribd.com/full/2161181?access_key=key-2mavl5upyv...

Feb 21 Suit
http://www.scribd.com/full/2161188?access_key=key-1356w5cvyf...
Cheap financial freedom
I was once a 19 year old dev... i turn 21 next month :( ... on the flip side, i'm finally sticking to one project.
Last time YC News was polled, most said they wanted to become rich in order to be financially independent.

This assumes a Western cost of living. This article describes how you can be financially independent much more cheaply by living overseas.

Say you saved up $100,000. If you then stick it all in a high interest savings account:
http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2007/03/21/which-online-hi...
you can withdraw about $325 a month from interest alone, which is more than enough to live in some overseas countries.

So, if you are interested in retiring early, and don't have expensive tastes, this is a route to consider. Here's someone who did it, and lives on $319 a month:
http://www.escapeartist.com/efam29/book.html

Even if you don't want to get away from it all right now, it is good to know you can. It takes the pressure away from life.
Do you want a professorship?
slashdot discussion: http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/02/23/2218256.shtml