skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No! No!!

"No" is "no",
"No" is always "no",
When I say "no"
It means "a thousand times no."

"No" plus "no"
Equals "no".
All nos lead to
"No no no."

Why not? Just listen to yourself:

I'd much rather like to start working, doing my own projects, etc.

And so you should.

What's a PhD worth?

Three to five years of existential despair.

will a PhD get me somewhere a MA wouldn't be able to get me?

Well, my Ph.D. is in EE with a concentration in semiconductor manufacturing and quantum electronics. So mine got me into labs filled with one-of-a-kind, multimillion dollar equipment, and gave me an up-close and extremely personal view of how microelectronics are made. Later, it allowed me to contribute to cancer research (cancer cells = microscopy = optics!) and spend a delightful but unrenumerative three years learning about the biosciences from the inside. None of which was fun enough for me that I wanted an actual N-year career in it, but it was certainly fun. Perhaps even fun enough to be worth the cost.

Unfortunately, you're thinking about a Ph.D. in comp sci, which will get you access to a crappy desk with a PC on it, a lot of barely adequate coffee, an inferiority complex, a lack of sleep, a lack of pay, and the opportunity to write a huge tome that only a handful of other people will read. I assure you that all of these things are available to civilians at a great discount.

Should I only pursue a PhD if my goal is to go in academia/research?

Yes, that's what it's for.

Would a MA be more advisable if I just want to pursue my entrepreneurial career?

Yes. "I'm getting an M.A." is a great excuse to move to a startup hub and hang around with a bunch of smart programmers who are itching for action. So I won't talk trash about the M.A. -- go for it, if you like. The sunk costs are a lot lower, and the benefits higher.

For more on this topic see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117294 . For more gratuitous TMBG lyrics see
http://www.davidkjones.net/tmbg/no/04.php
Good one, but don't quit your day job.
"Applying to Ph.D. Programs in Computer Science

This document is intended for people applying to Ph.D. programs in computer science or related
areas. The document is informal in nature, and is meant to express only the opinions of the author.
The author is currently an assistant professor of computer science at CMU, and has been involved
in the Ph.D. admissions process at CMU, U.C. Berkeley, and MIT."

www.cs.cmu.edu/~harchol/gradschooltalk.pdf
This definitely puts the spotlight on Yahoo to start performing PDQ. If they are the same track six months from now that they are on today, you can expect some real gnashing of teeth among the shareholders.

On the other hand, Microsoft comes out of this looking pretty good (among the none geek crowds). They tried to buy this poor company at a 60-70% premium.

I wonder if MS has another acquisition target in their sites .
I'm still an undergrad and wondering the same. Is it ever worth it primarily for the credibility? (outside of academia)
The book that got me started was Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt (http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understa...). Published in 1946, and still considered a classic.
Amusingly awesome, but somehow I doubt they'll let you get a license plate with punctuation in it.

Ah, well. A man can dream.
I have one. Here's how to do it:
a) get an MA
b) get a job - work at least 5 years
c) go back for your Ph.D.

Advantages - you will have to be motivated enough to give up a pay cheque. However, being more mature than the other kids, you will get financial aid first.

You gain a lot of credibility in industry with a Doctorate...people defer to you on all things scientific. And you join an elite club, though not quite as elite as it used to be before they required all professors to have a Ph.D., forcing colleges to hand them out to people like me to keep the supply of professors steady.

Oh, and put your all your advisers on every paper you publish. It is hard to deny someone a degree after they have published 5 papers that you agreed with so much you put your name to it.

And get rid of that foolinsh "create an account" waste of time - do you really believe any data entered these is not junk?
Dr. J. K.
Will a master's open up any doors that wouldn't be open for a Stanford grad with a good resume?

Wait and see.

In your case, I'm extremely doubtful that a master's will make any difference whatsoever. And getting one now is premature optimization. Wait until you find yourself trying to get a specific kind of job, but failing, because the jobs are being snapped up by people with advanced degrees. Then get a master's. It only takes a year.

I bet you'll wait a long time before that happens.

And why play the go-back-to-school-for-free card now? It's valuable. Keep it in your pocket for a while. You've been in school recently, at Stanford for god's sake -- you've already got a lot of recent contacts from your school days, and you're already in a startup hub. So, wait. After you spend a few years in industry, and find yourself stuck in a rut, you'll discover that it's wonderful to have a ready-made excuse to take a year off, go back to school, and make a whole new set of friends and professional contacts. You might even have a better idea of what you want to study, and where, and with whom.
Don't get a PhD. Get a MS from a good school like MIT, Stanford, CMU, etc., if you really want a graduate degree with the most bang for the buck.

A PhD is really only necessary and sufficient for an academic career, which is not the same as a research career.
They talk about a home charging station that uses 70 amps. Assuming that is 120VAC, and it takes 3.5 hours, that is roughly 7KW per hour times 3.5 =24.5 KWH. At 10 cents per KWH you are talking $2.45 per charge.
From the tesla website: less than $0.02/mile.
My calculations for my car (99 Camry) come out to be $ 0.12/mile, and with gas prices going up, I wouldn't be surprised if the savings increase to 10x.
Yes I am, Stan. Me too. Deeply frustrated with Firefox.
it would be nice if arc was to be implemented on the JVM, it will be instantly portable, easy to install .. both of which can boost arc's popularity and adoption
This could be the wrong way of thinking about it.

Maybe radical changes can only start within a certain distance from the top, and as the company gets bigger, the bottom moves further away from the top and can no longer initiate those sorts of things. Just a thought.
How To Make Wifi Signal Booster
6 years ago when i was in your position, my teacher/professor/ willing sponsor told me that if i can do my research in the public sector and make money..... GO DO THAT! but if i was unsure, then he would be willing to sponsor me.

An MS is worth about $5-10k extra per year, and it will allow you to act as a lead or get professional stature which is a requirement for some government regulated contracts.

A PhD is worth $10k-$50k extra and will likely allow you to lead a research team, rather than just a development team.

However if you are on YC then you probably have an entrepreneurial spirit, and the 3-6 years you spend on a PhD could have been spent learning how to run a business.

My advice is to start some small simple business, make it profitable, sell it and start another one. In the mean time practice your tech, which should always come more easily to you. There was so much for me to learn on my first business that could have been learned in a cheaper industry than Software.

A PhD, MS, or any other validation of your tech skill will be much less valuable than your ability to sell product at a profit. A proven track record with some mediocre tech, is worth more than some great tech and a shotty business record.
IMHO the purpose of MS should not be to find a better job or to get a raise. You have already proven that you are an Entrepreneur therefore it would not be too difficult for you to start where you left off after a year. You can never go wrong with education and investing a year of your time will only make you a better decision maker.
I think it's a question of sharpening research skills. It's a qualitative deepening of critical thinking, and the step far beyond passable or great to great and original.

I think it's a bit like comparing high school math with university math. Or like saying that you can program after taking a single programing course. :)

Similar skills can be gained elsewhere, are other skill sets are often needed in industry.

I have to agree with the rest - do a PhD if you clearly want to do research/work in academia. If you're just doing it for the credentials - stay far,far away. You might survive, but you will be utterly miserable.
A MS usually requires about 30 credit hours, or 10 courses. Do these accelerated MS programs have the same requirements?

Sounds like earning the degree now may shorten the program's duration.
"Browsers enhance the abilities of content creators, instead of directly enhancing your experience"
Multiple A records are OK, but used alone - i.e. not in combination with another load balancing strategy - they can be troublesome. A few years ago, we ran a fair volume of traffic (hundreds of req/s) across three A records for a site. The distribution of requests was simply not uniform, and when a box failed -- even with low TTLs -- many, many clients just plodded away for hours or days with the old IP.

If you do go the multiple A record route, do so in combination with one of the load balancers you asked about, and ideally with IP failover. But probably this is a lot more complexity than you want.
As a troll (bridge troll, see?) I agree with rms.

As a newbie to this site, I know I stand on little HN history and don't really expect the benefit of the doubt.

I'm sorry I missed your suggestion. Hilarious.

I think we can all agree that "all work and no play makes John a dull boy." but that "there is a place and a time for everything." so I personally like a little humor interjected in to otherwise serious conversation, but too much joking is boorish, at least at HN. If I want abuse or to abuse someone, I'll go to slashdot (yeah, that was a trollish statement).

Now what about the difference between being a troll or a devil's advocate, or someone who is just plain crude, but well meaning? Sometimes easy to tell, sometimes tough.
I did a PhD while continuing to pursue an entrepreneurial career. While it worked out well in the end, I borderline regret it.

I found academia incredibly frustrating. If you're used to Internet time, the pace will drive you insane. You submit a paper to a journal, get comments back 2 months later, submit a revised version, than get approved 1 month after that. Then you're published 6 months later, and then 9 months after that (do the math) the first citations of your work start to appear. So the feedback cycle is around 18 months. And instead of having your ideas tested in the marketplace (near impossible to fake), you're judged by a small number of people who are highly protective of their egos and careers. The whole industry is driven by a need to get published and get grant funding, not to make or promote useful things.

Kissinger said that the reason academic fights are so brutal is that the stakes are so low. A lot of truth in that.

On the other hand, if you want to be a top-notch tech entrepreneur, a PhD is CS has a huge amount of value. Just make sure you pursue a field which lets you learn and apply lots of useful algorithms and data mining techniques, e.g. bioinformatics, information retrieval, image analysis. I regularly use a lot of the things I learnt during my PhD - not the theoretical stuff, but the experience I gained in dealing with messy data. These kind of "deep tech" skills are desperately lacking in the Web 2.0 developer community, and will help you truly delight your customers. You needn't look any further than Google to get the point. My two most successful web projects both have a strong mathematical/algorithmic element which has made them very hard for most programmers to reproduce.

Still, these kinds of techniques are becoming better known in the Web developer mainstream. For example, the book "Programming Collective Intelligence" is a good first taste. So on balance, I'd say skip the PhD, but invest seriously in educating yourself about the kinds of things that are still mostly taught at PhD level.
i was thinking about writing one of those in a weekend on google app engine, well now i can move to step two or contribute i guess.
Noumenal Null: Null vs. Pure Reason
Posts like this make me wish I had worked harder in school. Which is why I'm back and getting my MS -- doing things right this time. grin

In your case, you need to ask yourself if another year in school is what you want or need; nobody here can answer that for you. A Master's will open new doors, but at the opportunity cost of taking time away from other projects that may be more beneficial.
Ask YC: Site usage data for math modeling exercise?
For my undergraduate Probability Models course, I want to do a small queueing theory analysis of submissions to Hacker News. I've looked through the source and found the submission ranking formula, so I can proceed, but it would be great if I could find site usage data or submission times throughout the day and week.

I'd like to determine things like the most and least effective times to post, the effect of early upvotes, the variance of hitting the front page (which would tell you how robust the system is to chance, how well the ranking system is working), etc. If I can't get numbers, I'll academicize it and make them up (does anyone have an idea for how to distribute them?), but it would be much more interesting to have them.

I realized that this kind of data has been asked for before:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=179981
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=114862
I figure it is worth asking again. I wouldn't have to post the analysis, if thoughts of gaming the system are a stumbling block.
haproxy and nginx are the best of the lot. Consider also ipvs for layer 4 load balancing.

One question that will help decide how things are structured is SSL. If you need it, putting haproxy up front gives you a bit of trouble -- haproxy doesn't support SSL (though it will blindly forward SSL at layer 4 if you want). So you'd need stunnel, nginx, Apache, or something else up front to decode.
In your case I would say that you should NOT pursue the PhD. However, to counter some of the ridiculous comments I've read...

1. I get to work on the problems that interest me most.

2. I make more money than I would starting at an unfunded startup. It is more than enough to live on.

3. I'm working towards the union card for interesting research jobs and/or academia. These jobs are for people who like to work on problems that interest them.

4. PhD's typically make higher salaries than other degrees. The statistics show that the payoff is only marginally better, if at all, to get a PhD over a masters. However, these statistics include people who work in academia who have intentionally given up salary in exchange for intellectual freedom and thus bring down the average. On the other hand, a lot of people who get terminal masters are doing so to get the bump in salary.

5. I love what I do.

However, if you aren't at all interested in academia and/or research there is no reason to get a PhD. If you'd "much rather like to start working" than you have already made the decision.
I occasionally get asked the "should I do a PhD?" question. And I'll tell you what I tell everybody else: if you wanted it enough, you wouldn't be asking that question.

There's only one right reason to do a PhD, and that's because you really really really want to do a PhD in some particular subject. I did one in physics because I really really really wanted to, and I have never once regretted that decision.

So for you I think the answer is no. If at some later stage in your life you decide you really _do_ want one, you can always go back.

If you really _did_ want to do one, the question I would be asking is this: why would you want to do it in the US instead of the UK? You can usually save at least two years by doing it outside the US, and the UK has some very good universities (well, at least two of 'em).
Price Theory: An Intermediate Text by David Friedman. Online version: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Price_Theory/PThy_ToC...
I for one, will welcome our robot overlords. Did I say overlords? I mean protectors.

Joking aside, I have no idea of most of the ideas as I'm no expert in them.

I DID find it striking that not one mentioned climate change or global warming and its impact on us and the information technology needs we will face to meet the challenges of an environmentally changing world.
How about: Get on waiting list. Wait 18 months. Sell to an impatient wealthy buyer for a hefty premium.
I agree, but that is in the past. He's asking about the future.

I don't work in the field I got my degree in. But I still enjoyed the experience.. :)
You can write a lot of code in a year. If what you want to do is write code. (And he does.)
How to explain rss to normal people.
The opportunity to bang it out in one year is something that shouldn't be passed up lightly. Going back after being out for a while is hard.

I'm getting my masters now (graduated undergrad in 2003). It is difficult, but then I'm working and going to school.

The one thing going for taking time off and going back is that you are amazingly focused because you know why you are there, but then if you are graduating from Stanford and considering a MS, then I don't think that is really a problem for you.

I don't think the MS for you would be as much about career options as it would be being able to get even more in depth with subjects in a way that you really don't get much opportunity to do later in life. At least for me it became become fluent enough in subject n+1 to do task x+1. The queue only gets longer and I never have managed to go back to any one thing that has interested me.
Yes, Yahoo management will probably end up defending themselves.

But Yahoo management has a legal obligation to do what's best for the company's shareholders. Unless they've got a silver bullet that will double YHOO's market cap soon, their performance on this front seems to be below average.
The Big Book of Getting People to Link to You
Actually, rss is reasonably mainstream. You don't have to explain rss to normal people!

Most of my non-hacker friends use some sort of feed reader. They know that RSS lets them read blog posts in their feedreader without visiting the blog, even though they may not know the format specifications.
Long lasting house for under $1000
HTTP Caching Done Right
A mentioning on Schneier's blog -

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/04/sql_injection_...
what part of the reverse takeover is hostile? The reverse takeover allows a private company to go public without an IPO by merging with a smaller public company.
Python Robotics
Current econ PhD student here. Sowell is great. There's a 3rd edition out now.

http://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-3rd-Ed-Economy/dp/0465...
http://friendfeed.com/stammy
Not requiring sticky sessions is one of it goals when wrting apps. It's not always easy (or even possible) but I love the freedom it buys me.
I cannot think of a better advertisement for staying small and profitable. Why work so hard for financial and creative indepenence, and then have money-hungry shareholders take that away for their own motives?

It's not only bad VCs that can do this, apparently bad
shareholders can too.
Since Scala is a compiled statically typed language and not an interpreted dynamic one, this technique is not necessary. Where this technique is useful is cases where the method being called is impossible to know until runtime, such as in Ruby or Groovy. Scala, like Java, is not like this and the compiler can be guaranteed to have enough information to generate the right bytecode for the call inline.

The key difference between Scala and Java here is that because Scala uses type inferencing at compile time, the programmer has to provide a lot less of that information than they would in the equivalent Java code.
What doors would those be?
Rockstar Python / Rails Programmer at A Newly Accepted Y Combinator Company
As a freelancer you will rarely (if ever) be asked about your educational experience. If you were for some reason, then a bachelor's degree would probably suffice. If you are good at what you do, then you will have high enough demand for your work that you can pick the work you do. If a potential client makes unreasonable demands, then you simply go with with next client in line.

The world moves fast. If you have an idea about a certain niche for enterprise software then right now is probably better than a year from now. The earlier you can break into a market the better.

A degree is more important for working for others. You need that degree to get past the HR gatekeeper. In the freelance world, things are different. I don't even have an undergrad degree and I have had no shortage of freelance work.

Once you go freelance, you will have a hard time convincing yourself to go back to working for someone else. Leave the grad degrees to the academics. For hackers, grad degrees take us out of the real world for too long.
This is how I have explained RSS for the past 4-5 years:

Question: Simplifying greatly, what are the 2 ways you can get a newspaper/periodical/magazine?

Answer: One way is for you to go buy the newspaper/periodical/magazine (Pull). The other is for the newspaper/periodical/magazine (Push) to be delivered to you whenever it is published.

RSS is similar to getting the newspaper delivered to you, and hence saving you from hitting refresh or checking a website to see if it has been updated.

Similar to email, RSS needs a reader/client to read these updates, and these readers/clients could be similar to microsoft outlook or yahoo/gmail/hotmail.
The End of Ballmer?
But it's a 60% premium on a very low price. It is only a good deal if the shareholders don't expect Yahoo to rise above $30. Only time will show, but I think they have the potential to climb above $30. Their deal with Google shows that they are slowly starting to see that they can't do everything.
That's where I found it.
Yahoo was in the headlights before. Now they're just roadkill.

I think a MSFT+YHOO merger would have been massive fail, but it's Microsoft that ends up dodging the bullet here. Yahoo just takes one. Where exactly is Yahoo relevant anymore?
Schneier (who found it) said it was almost certainly Photoshopped
Or to sell both A and B class shares :)
Students and Startups: Notes From Talk at MIT Underground 2008
Founders want to go public to cash out, not because they want to run a publicly traded company. In fact, many leave the company after IPO.
Moreover, I know that I will be facing with more crashes with a beta.

Firefox 3.0b5 hasn't crashed once on my laptop (Ubuntu) or desktop (Vista), and I've been using it since it got released.

On top of that, I can't imagine what you have done to your Firefox 2-install, if it crashes that often and you reach that high CPU- and memory usage.

Something besides the main Firefox install must be fubar'ed...
Mainstream economics refuses to admit it deals with a complex nonlinear system. And econometrics claims it has all the answers through gaussian statistics.
Research at a university is an excellent time to do whatever you want. I would plan on doing it self-funded if you need to, and just start working on interesting problems.

Don't let the bullshit of academia get in your way. You don't need to go to too many useless conferences or publish more than you think makes sense.

Most programs will let you leave early with an MA, so may as well start with a PhD program.
Acquiring cultures get co-opted by their acquired companies all the time; think VW and Audi.

In this case, a much-needed culture shock to Redmond was almost an explicit perk of the deal for MSFT. It's not hard for me to imagine that a MSFT with a revitalized web strategy could go on to acquire more companies than they will on their own.