skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Original Source (2009):
http://www.recombinantrecords.net/2009/05/24/amusing-ourselv...
They lead by a large margin because they are buying their scores. People who have highly-cited papers are going to end up at very prestigious schools. For instance, imagine you publish a paper while at Oregon State on curing cancer and it gets 5,000 citations. Soon, you're offered a tenure-track position at Stanford. According to this scoring system, your cancer paper is now "associated" with Stanford as well as OSU, thus giving Stanford a big boost.
This reminds me of edw519's comments on how he codes fast http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1544453:

"Very fast. Let me explain.

"I work in 2 modes: (A) At the computer and (B) Away from the computer.

"When I'm in Mode A at the computer, I'm cranking out lines of code, testing, revising, testing, revising, etc. This process must be very fast. Several hundred lines of code (or whatever) in less than an hour. A complete cycle in less than a couple of hours. My guideline is that if I'm not working that fast, then I must not be prepared to work that fast, so I don't deserve to be at the computer. I should be in mode (B).

"Mode B is generally much slower. Reviewing code, specs, or notes. Refactoring code. Laying things out with pen and paper. When I have enough work clearly laid out, I know it's time to get back to the computer and return to Mode A."
New Beta release of Jython
Good to see some movement on this project!
The Future of the Book
Because I'm smart.

Money certainly has utility, but it's not the be-all and end-all of my existence. It enables freedom in choices but doesn't become the reason I make choices.

And it certainly has let me chose not to work with someone who is impressed by 'dumbing down'.
The author also mentions that negative things or problems are almost never blogged about.

I guess thats at least partially because the founders are busy fixing things and have not enough time / patience to blog about it. Positive blogs can be seen as marketing efforts and justify taking half a day off for it, but do negative ones too?
I agree with your opinion. I would say if the company can make an effective way to give feedbacks and to filter candidates, they would bring a good thing somewhere in life. After all, we are all connected.
It got him a job and time to look for a better one.
Yep. Self-induced lobotomy is a very useful skill.
The First Energy Star Data Center
Yeah, well, there were some days when I thanked god for the Eclipse's refactoring capabilities. I had to refactor large amounts of code at one time and had I done it by hand, it would have surely taken a lot more time and would have been a much more tedious process. Not to mention that I would've probably introduced one or two more or less subtle bugs while doing that. This fact alone is enough to make me assured that, when writing code for a large enterprise app, IDEs just can't be beaten.
I have nothing to add from a business prospective, but from a UI/UX perspective, you NEED to change that header font. It's not legible. Your logo uses a serif font, so you should use a serif font for your headers (that's legible), such as Palatino.
I totally sympathize and if you are on the startup path it sounds like quiting was the right move.

But I think your expectations for an entry level job are too high. One thing newly minted adults would do well to realize is your first few years at any job are going to be spent doing the grunt work. If you go into it expecting to spend your days oscillating between mind numbing boredom and hectic days filled with busy work, it's a lot easier to deal with. People with this perspective know opportunities for better work will arise -- and seriously, two or three years is just not that long.
Justin.tv is hiring a sys admin
Kindel cover
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The cartoon notes that the comparison was taken from Neil Postman's book "Amusing Ourselves to Death".

Postman wrote this 25 years ago. If anything, his observation is even more true today.
Have you looked into http://www.tornadoweb.org/?
I find the idea of paper degrees being somehow a synonym of "smarts" a bit elitist.

As far as getting rich goes (at least in startupland), there's a big difference between "so, what can you do?" and "so, what can do to help me"?

If life isn't turning out quite like you expected, perhaps it'd be "smart" to be a bit more proactive?
i think the author of this post needs to drop his intense feelings of superiority and entitlement as they are obviously not backed up by any real world metrics. sorry, much of academia is completely disconnected from the real world. just because you made marks doesn't mean the rest of the world should bow before your superior intellect. sheesh, the nerve of some people...
> Teachers already work less during the year than other professionals

Do you have any idea how much time teachers spend grading and preparing lessons after the school day ends? If you teach 5 classes, with 20 kids per class (that's being optimistic), then every time you collect an assignment, that's 100 assignments to grade (same goes for homeworks, quizzes, tests, and labs -- holy freaking cow it's a lot of grading). And not only that, but high-schoolers will nickel-and-dime you for every point (and compare grades with friends), so you have to be painstakingly consistent. This is excruciatingly boring work, and it sucks hours of the teacher's time after the school day has ended (and most evenings).

Not to mention contacting parents after school (who believe every word their child says about how mean and awful you are (translation: you expect them to actually do work in your class and behave)), after-school meetings, hunting around for lab materials, and coordinating with the other teachers so you're all on close to the same page.

> Are you seriously comparing an easy 6 week continuing education course to full time employment?

When the school year ends, besides all the wrap-up paperwork teachers have to do, they have to deal with angry parents of kids who failed (and about whom they've been sending letters home from day 1). Anyway, after all that's done, teachers are standing in a large pile of material they've burned through throughout the year. All this needs to be organized, revisited, and made ready for next year. The school year is about Sept to June. That's, what, about 34 weeks net? Figure 2-3 homeworks per week, 1 quiz per week, 1 test every 3-4 weeks ... that's a boatload of material to edit/revise over the summer.

And don't discount recovery time. Teaching is mentally very difficult. Students are constantly testing your limits all year. Parents are forever questioning your teaching and complaining why their kid has to stay for detention or whatever. Sometimes you even have to attend meetings and explain in great detail to parents and administrators how you warned the student n times, how they knew the consequences, and how they decided to behave badly anyway. And this doesn't even account for the actual teaching -- which means being on performing in front of an audience every time (think how difficult it is to write a program with collegues or your manager looking over your shoulder). And they do it every day -- to the ring of a school bell even. And when that bell rings, you'd better be at that door, taking attendance, dealing with late passes and excuses, collecting homework, and getting the group into learning mode because you've only got N minutes until the bell rings again, they shuffle out, and the next group comes in.
For me it was because I was unable to access the log files if a job failed since I was on Heroku. Also it gives me a general idea of how the system behaves; in one second I can tell if the system is normal. I can tell if I need to bump some workers up for a certain queue. Basically it saves me from creating my own 'dashboard'.
It would appear that you talk like a fag, and that your shit's all retarded.
I think remember that the full time heads up guy (Steve Mann? MIT?) needed anti-nausea drugs to handle the constant visual disturbance of the display. Perhaps there are resolution improvements to the goggles. Learning to use a chording keyboard always seemed like it might make sense, just touch type and edit later. What about voice input?
From the sounds of it, the author didn't have much work experience. What else can he apply for?

Around the time I finished my undergrad, there was a recession (almost 20y ago), and most of my liberal arts peers were taking customer service jobs. When you're fresh out of school, you gotta start somewhere.
This guy has a similar rig without the vuzix:

http://mobilecommunitydesign.com/2006/11/writing-while-walki...
This is true only for ideas that aren't original, but instead are very small modifications to existing products.
>If "teaching to the test" is a bad thing, that just means you have a bad test.

Look at it this way: We do not want students to all know the same things. We want to increase the amount of learning, but ideally, only 30-50% of the knowledge kids learn should be held in common. In a perfect world, the remaining 70% would be different from classroom to classroom. Varied experience is crucial to making our society function better.

So if we take varied experience as a value we want to encourage in our classrooms, you cannot have a good standard test, because the standard is more amount and quality of knowledge than a predefined notion of what knowledge is necessary to get by in the world.

And likewise, because this is how I value it, I would prefer that standardized testing be around one-third of the evaluation score, if not 20%. I want teachers and school administrations to be free to take big risks like teaching everyone computer science instead of math - because teaching a well-thought-out course of study is not a risk. Classrooms should definitely do instruction in ideas of the past (history is always vital), but more than anything they should be incubators for new ideas.
Orwell wrote about overindulgence of others? How so?
[Note that there's a ton of Brave New World that's not in the comic, as pointed out by dbz. I'm reacting to the comic's version.]

Note that, unlike Orwell's dystopia, Huxley's doesn't require squashing every voice of dissent - as long as the majority of people don't care, there is little danger in allowing some dissidents.

Some would say that this, in fact, has already happened - Berlusconi controls a sufficiently large part of the population via the media that he's effectively untouchable. In the American situation, there's Fox News and its competitors.
I've never run into this myself (BSc Comp Sci, MSc Management), but that might be because most jobs I've had have come through word of mouth / networking. Plus, once you've got a bit of a career history, your education doesn't matter much compared to your experience.

I've spoken to plenty of friends/employers who don't care about degrees at all, but not many who would actively count that against applicants.

As other people have said, it most likely depends on the kind of jobs you're applying for. Being massively over-qualified for the position you're going for can certainly act against you as you're more likely to get bored and move on.
Well, "well constructed" is the tricky part. It's not even clear to me what one would look like. K-12 schooling has a lot of goals, most of which don't involve literal transmission of information, but boil down to something like, "we want as many kids as possible to be normal members of society, with decent jobs, some sort of civic engagement, not engaging in criminal or shady behavior, and able to handle their affairs". Ideally we'd also like some subset to be brilliant, although it's not clear how much K-12 education influences that.

You can judge most of the goals in retrospect, say 20 years out: what proportion of kids ended up in jail, what proportion ended up with good jobs, what proportion are informed citizens capable of reading the news and participating intelligently in the political process, what proportion are able to handle their personal finances, nutrition, health-care, etc. successfully, what proportion won prestigious awards or started successful businesses, and so on. But writing a test for 18-year-olds to take that predicts all that accurately is pretty hard, and as far as I know, no tests have shown even plausible evidence of their predictive power in that respect, especially when you control for demographics.
Neil Postman made the same observation already in 1984: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

EDIT: Just read aardvark's comment. So never mind.
This is a false dichotomy. It's quite possible - and indeed, probably much more likely - that aspects of both are becoming bigger parts of our lives at the same time.
These two aspects of human culture - authoritarianism and dissipation have always been with us, this isn't new; 'dictatorship' & 'bread and circuses' would both be familiar concepts to citizens of ancient Rome.
Hey Chris,
I'm the author. That was exactly the point, fed up of reading the "it's fantastic, we rock !!" posts. So just an honest feedback on our first 6 months on my 3rd startup ....
I do :) And I enjoy having nice neat tight code as a result. I don't need the completion, shortcuts etc, because I "know" the code base. Sometimes I need to grep etc, but knowing, and having a handle on the entire codebase is pretty useful for when you need to do big sweeping refactoring.
For those of you, like me, who had not heard of npm yet, npm is a "a little package manager for node".

site: http://npmjs.org/

source: http://github.com/isaacs/npm

install: curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sudo sh
Good point.

Brains can only take you so far. Passion, skills, experience, luck, timing, instinct... those elements are also in the success/riches equation.
I agree, but I don't think that this pattern is peculiar, nor is it restricted to the startup community. It's a very common pattern in tech, in big companies and academia as well as startups. I assume that this attitude is a big part of the culture that keeps game developers going, for example.

And it extends to other fields. The finance guys on Wall Street and the Chicago Board of Trade do it. Lawyers do it. Medical interns do it.
Somewhat soft article with not too much new ideas but interesting reading afterall.

The main lesson for Nokia should be to ditch the OS and software business. It's easy to realize that they DO have a nice hardware offering, something that people pay -- and go with the Android as they can still charge the same price for the phone.

Latest symbian-based phones are not that stable and snappy anymore (primary reason for people choosing Nokia), and it's very hard to fit into the OS competition landscape with memo as third player.
Francis Fukayama made this very same assertion years ago in an essay in The Times Literary Supplement or The New York Review of Books. I remember reading this maybe six, seven years ago and his assertion was that the Huxlean(?) view of the future and not the Orwellian view of the future was coming to pass. I thought that it gelled with his capitalistic view of the world in general. It's a futile debate because clearly our present world exhibits traits from both of Huxley's and Orwell's imaginings. Arguably Orwell was by far the superior craftsman and wordsmith which is why I think his images carry more weight and are more current. Their visions are both culturally very important and this kind of "who's better?" malarky is ... um, malarky! Like I said before Eric Blair to Tony Blair in < 50 years ftw!
>> "when writing code for a large enterprise app, IDEs just can't be beaten."

For that case, then yes you're probably right. Thank god I don't write 'enterprise apps'. IDE's are good for getting mediocre productivity out of bad programmers.
Did you read the comment you're responding to? I said they were wrong sometimes, specifically in regards to merit pay.

I said that, in black and white, right there on the page. Or gray, because it's being downmodded because people who don't like the implications of it.

Anyways, yeah. Charter schools. Whole other bag of worms. I like them in theory, in practice the way they're funded usually tends to be crooked -- quick example, in the town I was a Selectman in, a charter school started up. It cost us about 7k/year to educate a student, round numbers. Cost the charter school, say, 9k. Every student that left us for the charter school, 9k was taken from our budget and assigned to theirs. To add insult to injury, we actually had to pay to bus the kids there on top of it, plus additional unitemized strains on the police budget, etc. That's not exactly kosher.
Look at table 5. Over the entire week, teachers work about 2.5 hours less than other professionals, for the 9-10 months/year that they work at all.
Using the VM only work if the size of the cache fits in the process address space. If your cache size is greater than 4GB in a 32 bit machine, you will have to manage the cache on disk. It becomes less of a problem now with 64bit machine.
IE9’s Stunning Text Rendering Quality
I hadn't seen http://zazzle.com/wedding+invitations before either, so now I'm curious how weddingtype.com would be different. It'd be good to think about a couple places where you might be able to differentiate by focusing on this particular niche. E.g the ability to add extras to the card such as ribbon. Also, one thing I didn't like about Zazzle was that I can't order just 1 invitation. I'd be nervous about ordering 200 invitations I'd never seen in person and would want a sample first.
At least the counselor got him a job. What is strange is that he apparently gave up on his job hunt despite being underemployed in his new position.

I wonder at some of these stories I read where people spend months looking for work as if it were some kind of game. Do they not eat or live under a roof? How do they pay for those letters and faxes?

When I left school, I temped in warehouses, factories, offices, whatever, while I was hunting for a programming job. When I lost my programming job some years later, I temped at a bank until I got another programming job.
As I understand it, one of the main reasons indigenous Europeans evolved lighter skin was to allow vitamin D synthesis in a cloudier climate. An indigenous Australian in Europe is more at risk of vitamin deficiency, while an indigenous European in Australia is more at risk of skin cancer.
Weebly (YC W07) ImagePerfect Gives Users Drag-And-Drop Image Editing
You make it seem like that ~200k salary for a 25 year old developer is the norm in NYC. It is not. The only industry that comes close to that number in NYC is in finance (hedge fund, IB quants, algo trading).

I've working in NYC for 10 years in various industries. Here is my observation of pay rates from highest pay to lower:

Finance line of biz (eg. quant model programmer)

Finance IT

megacorp software corps (Google, M$)

startups no equity

startups w/ equity

other industry IT (publishing, media)

My observation is that nyc startups pay slightly more than your run-of the mill fortune 500 but less than megacorp software shops and finance. Even less of a base salary if they offer equity. Granted I may be talking to the wrong startups and anomalies exists but your characterization is off.

Yes, NY is expensive but your limiting your scope to Manhattan. The average salary for people living in NYC is 50k, most of whom work in Manhattan. They somehow manage to "get-by". Also, high cost of living doesn't automatically equate to every company doling out high base pay.
But there's a difference between the banning in Brave New World and what we consider the term to mean today (or what it meant in 1984). Most World State citizens couldn't read at all so banning books was done so they wouldn't be tempted to learn. The government wasn't taking something away as much as they were simply not giving the population access to it.

Books were essentially like illegal drugs in our society. The Government had decided they were harmful to the citizenry and attempted to restrict them from coming in. But it's clearly a fairly minor thing (again equivalent to our drug policy where most personal use offenders get drug treatment rather than punishment).

For example, John the Savage is allowed both to quote Shakespeare and to interact with those who come to the reservation. Yet there's no Government repression and it's certainly not like in 1984 where you get a lobotomy. So the banning of books really reinforces the cartoon's point because what the government has done is to convince the population that books are bad for them and then offered the ban as a way to keep the population from being harmed by them.
Staying alive and being able to pay the rent is creating value too.
I've had to abandon coffee at the Starbucks on market street in San Francisco several times. I'd go in with 12 minutes until my bus came, and they weren't able to make a coffee that fast.
A really smart person I know read Brave New World and thought it was a Utopian novel. At least, so they said.
This comic rings mostly true for me, but I disagree a bit with the claim that information in 1984 was restricted; Good information was hard to find, but if I recall correctly, bad information was abundant.

For example, even when Winston begins to realize that he's being fed B.S. information by the government, the book he reads for "real" information is also (probably) filled with lies. I find this point to be especially poignant today as some niche alternative news outlets (such as conspiracy theory web sites) are as inaccurate as the outlets they seek to criticize.
Yes! It's the first thing I looked at when I started on my project. But honestly, I just can't work in Python. I'm not going to bash it, but we just don't jibe. I found EventMachine for Ruby and have a nice pipeline set up, from nginx (server) down to Cramp (framework).

Still, it's not really what I was asking for. I'm looking more for a job messaging architecture, where the client makes a request and the server asynchronously works on it, and sends it down whenever it's finished. Ideally you have one connection that stays constantly open (or you re-open it whenever it closes) that receives the results, and you use the other connection (since the bare minimum for Ajax connections is 2) to make your requests. That requires cooperation on both sides of the gap.
Would love to, you have a great form ;)
The legend of Wing Chun attributes its development to a woman too, though it seems like the real origin is unknown.
Exactly. That's what it means to do what you have to do when all things are not equal. When you can pay your bills you can afford to get choosy about work, but not everyone has that privilege. He played the game he needed to play to avoid a desperate situation.
If you're only/mostly consuming media, you don't really need a keyboard. For small amounts of typing, on screen keyboards will suffice.
Dumbed himself down for a job he was over-qualified for and ends bored to depression. Sounds about right.
A more funny, unabridged version of this interview: http://www.cbi.umn.edu/oh/pdf.phtml?id=296
Making Your VC Pitch As Cliche-Dense As Possible, One Pivot At A Time (video)
All of the above are not a recipe for success, and may set you on the slow road to ruin. There's a tradeoff between holding out and trying to get a job which is really appropriate, and just taking any dumb job which comes along. It might be true that there are still many more dumb jobs than ones requiring high intelligence, and ultimately everyone has to pay the bills somehow.

If at all possible you should avoid wasting your time in a job you don't care about with people you can't relate to pretending to be someone other than your real self. Your time is limited, and it's a good idea to try to figure out what you want to do with your life, then act accordingly.
Up close and personal with SAIC's Yez Concept Car
Joshua Bloch, Chess and Scala