skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I went to Madison and it was great. I think it all depends on what state you're in, but many states have great "second-tier" schools that offer cheaper tuition.
They didn’t get straight A’s because they couldn’t be bothered to give everything in every class. They concentrated on the ones that meant the most to them or on a single strong extracurricular passion or on projects that had nothing to do with school or even with looking good on a college application. Maybe they just sat in their room, reading a lot and writing in their journal. These are the kinds of kids who are likely, once they get to college, to be more interested in the human spirit than in school spirit, and to think about leaving college bearing questions, not resumés.

Anyone else feel like they're in this boat?
Too obtuse?

C++ can be used for systems programming, so I don't think there's any good argument that it's not a sharp enough tool. I agree that "obtuse" is a poor criticism.

[...] from my experience it takes at least one year to understand C++ to reach the level of being proficient in it. [...] I found that the critique of C++ comes from people who didn't put enough effort to understand it thoroughly.

But this is a much better one.
What else do you measure, lines of code/day? Hours spent working? Bugs fixed? New files created?

Joy.
> Warning: not a party school

Being Mormon helps as well. :-) You don't have to be Mormon to go there, but well over 90% of the students there are Mormon.

That being said, it's a nice school.
cplusplus.com to be honest that has most of the info you need to start
If you're in California, you might also want to consider Cal Poly SLO.
http://www.notcot.com/archives/2008/04/stefanie_posave.php
You can probably achieve similar effects in c++ some way, as well as you could with any system programming language. The point is how fast those can be achieved.

For example c++ is very hard to parse, that does not make implementing tools impossible, but it's slowing down the process enormously.

Btw. I'm still mostly a c++ programmer, but D is one of the languages I'm watching really close.
Can I get reality checks here from some people who actually attended Ivy-league schools? The author's description of Yale doesn't match my experience with MIT very well, but of course, MIT isn't one of the Ivies.
The Future of Programming includes Modeling
NOLOH (not one line of html) Beta Program
If you're in California, you should have a variety of schools to choose from. I hear Berkeley is great. I think I'd jump at the chance to go there.
I was very impressed by UT-Austin and the community there. They also have a honor's program for CS majors (Turing) that you may be able to get into with okay grades but good experience. But even if you don't get into that program, you'll still be taking classes with those folks.

Also think of the relationships between schools to get in the "back" door at places where the competition might be higher. For instance, at the Univ of Pittsburgh you can take one course every semester at Carnegie Mellon. The Pitt credits are cheaper but you get the instructors and knowledge at CMU. Of course, your degree would be from Pitt. Still, knowledge matters. I think the same is true of Tufts and MIT/Harvard.

A third option is going to a local state school and getting your grades in order to transfer after a year or two. You'll probably be in school a semester or two longer (cause all credits won't transfer), but your degree will have more of a "name" and you'll benefit from increased competition/knowledge.

EDIT: Sorry if this sounds disparaging of Pitt. I had a great experience there in a combined cogneuro Ph.D. program with CMU. But I know nothing of Pitt's CS department even as the cross-over of the communities made a lasting impression. You'd likely to have to work a bit harder to make those connections as an undergrad. But it is possible.
If you're certain you want to major in engineering or CS. I've read really good things about Olin (http://olin.edu) If I were applying to colleges now, I'd apply there.

http://wsjclassroom.com/teen/teencenter/05dec_olin.htm
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/may06/3432
It's funny. I hadn't started University, and I was accepted at Sheffield to study AI. Now, I arranged to meet a hypertext legend to help him with a recent project, and I ended up having Christmas dinner with this guy, and some of the faculty and the head of computer science at Sheffield.

Something tells me it would have been better going to Sheffield than going to this local University just for this reason, but we all make mistakes.

As it happens, I became friendly with the head of computer science at my local University choice, for doing well in a computer trivia quiz.
I second that, although I am a Cornell grad so I am biased :)

Cornell also accepts a huge amount of transfers. It's somewhere around 20-30% when I was there.

But be aware of the stats on sites like US News. The engineering school is much more competitive to get in.
Tech Crunch For The Enterprise: TechCrunchIT
No Arrington? Sweet.

TechCrunch has somewhat gone in a different direction than its original intention with his latest posts that haven't been "insightful" posts.

I'd like to see how these two writers fare on the TechCrunchIT. Definitely an interesting topic.
Why Google's Android delays don't matter
No, don't do a 3rd language yet. Learn scheme well.
99 Apps to Help You Ditch Your Box and Go Internet Only
Whether you’re on vacation or just at a different office, you can always log in to web apps and know that all of your tools and information will be available. So why don’t you ditch your dusty old desktop programs and fully make the switch to web-based applications? With these apps, that just might be possible.
AOL proves yet again it doesn't have a clue.

They've realized that IM traffic monetizes at a terrible rate. Their solution? Make it up in volume!

Making money off of communication by using display advertising is like trying to get blood from a stone. Facebook has the same problem.
If you're in California, definitely take a hard look at the UCs: in-state tuition is very reasonable, and the schools are among the best on the country for CS. Generally, the highest ranking UCs are: Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB. All four of those schools tend to be in the top 30 for CS.

Also don't forget PG's thoughts on elite institutions: http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html
I'd love to see something like this with other axes represented somehow: number of employees, years in business, programming language, average employee age.
Qik+Twitter+Summize+(Spinvision): We Have Met Big Brother, And He Is Us
contact me at paulpajo [at] gmail
maybe asiapay [dot] com can help.
you can browse through this: http://www.slideshare.net/ebiziseasy/pesopay-presentation/
slide 17 might be of interest to you (payalert)
Cascadia Community College (in Seattle, Washington).

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2007/0709.careycas...
All I can say is, make a list of places and go visit.

I ended up at a (very) small private school about 400mi away. When I visited, the head of the CS department talked with me in his office for over an hour. From that conversation, I learned:

A) He is completely brilliant and extremely competent

B) He teaches about half of the upper-level CS courses

C) His dissertation was in an area that strongly interested me

After that it was a no-brainer. Obviously, going to a smaller, lesser-known school, I don't stand out as much on a resume. But at the "good companies", it matters more what you've done with your spare time than where you went to school.

Turns out other competent people also followed my line of reasoning. My first year there, I found two cofounders for a startup. So not only do I have a good mentor (at least as far as the tech part goes), but we all get some leeway on assignments if we were up until 1am adding a new feature to our codebase.
The article is covering features in C# 3.0. Mono is perpetually playing catch up to Microsoft's implementation and according to the Mono site the "Mono API today is somewhere in between .NET 2.0 and .NET 3.5". Besides the fact that the language implementation is behind, developers also have to deal with the fact that the standard library isn't 100% compatible either. It seems pretty clear that C# developers that are not on Microsoft's implementation are basically second class citizens. I don't think Mono can be taken seriously if we're talking about being compatibility with Microsoft's implementation. It's not all bad, though. Mono seems to be a perfectly good platform when evaluated on its own.

That said, I have little experience with Microsoft .NET and Mono so these are the observations of someone only casually acquainted with either project. Can anyone here share any experiences with Mono?
What you have there is a gen-you-wine clusterfsck, my friend.

You need at least a handful of variables to name and hold your intermediate values. Putting names on things is good. It lets you refactor and debug your code in a reasonable way, without doing partial function application in your head.

Furthermore, it aids in doing reasonable functional decomposition. If you have several terms to which you're applying similar operations, that may be a natural target for abstraction via a function. Without the intermediate assignments, though, the syntactic noise of parenthesis, ternary statements, and weird spacing tends to mask the commonalities in actual code flow.

Even worse, by making so many inline function definitions and applications, you've re-defined 'this' to mean several different things in a single scope. Full-time JS jockies may be used to that, but it makes my head hurt.

Code like this screams to me that the author would rather rewrite it completely (or force someone else to do so) than change it.
I love Carlin, but this IS NOT STARTUP NEWS. The article was on digg, slashdot and wired. this feed used to be different. ;-(
who says this one is ok.
If you're interested in Math, I can recommend Rutgers - the math dept, esp. the honors track, is as good as any Ivy. The CS dept. is good, too, esp. if you're interested in the subject.

I would imagine any major public research university having the same ...
Haha yep. I'm a Cornell grad too so I'm a bit biased. I wasn't strictly a CS major though.

When I was at Cornell they had the Computer Science cross listed between Arts and Sciences and Engineering so you can get the degree in either school. I was doing Math as my primary major so I was in the Arts and Sciences school but I picked up the Minor/Concentration in CS through the Arts and Sciences school.
Berkeley is awesome. Nothing you can't get here academically that you could get at another school. Great bang for your buck.

(EECS senior)
Salesforce and Google take their partnership a step further with new APIs
+1 from a BYU alum. Tuition is $2K/semester, $1500 if you're Mormon. It's approx 80-90% subsidized by the LDS church.

My uncle has been a software manager/VP in Boston and Utah, and he said he prefers BYU grads to MIT grads because they have a strong enough theoretical background and much better practical skills. Starts out in Java but also lots of C++ programming courses.

It's not a party school, but great if you love sports, outdoors, mountain biking, hiking, camping, and skiing, it's hard to beat. If you really need to party, Salt Lake and the UofU are an hour north.
No one's looking for elegant algorithms for real world problems here.

The reality is that most real-world problems are not particularly complicated, yet most have exceedingly complicated solutions, and as a result, disproportionately large maintenance overhead -- and that maintenance is largely code archeology (wow, what idiot came up with this bit dumbass approach? Why does this framework require 6 new classes in order to add a simple pair of pages to the site?), not productive time.
You can always apply to another easier-to-get-into program within Cornell and then transfer into the engineering school. You just need a 3.0 your freshman year. You can even take all engineering courses before you transfer if you want to, not that I'd recommend it if you're trying to get a good GPA. (Also a Cornell grad.)
The best music you’ve probably never heard
Someone needed to say this. Glorifying the Putnam is a perfect example of what the author of the essay was discussing as a "false sense of self-worth" that's based in numeric metrics.

The world is filled with brilliant, respected people who never did well on a math test.
Go after those top-tier schools.

If you're slacking off on homework working through SICP, you're probably top-tier worthy. People who go after their interests are by definition more interesting.

Don't weigh yourself on the standard metric because you're not standard. And don't let that hinder the selling of yourself in your applications. I would much rather hire a person who has started a startup before than one from a corporate environment, and I think this principal holds true for colleges as well - they would much rather accept someone who does what they're interested in and pursues things beyond the norm.

College is the first great opportunity for young people to learn how to sell. Think of yourself as a package - what differentiates you and makes you special? Then, arrange your application that way. It's foolish to put your SAT scores and grades up front as your flagship 'feature' that differentiates you from others, even if you've aced them. Take some time arranging your application centered around your strengths and things that you're proud of, and make them want to have you, or regret it every night for rejecting you.

Again, go after those top-tier schools - being rejected is not as bad as regretting not applying to them.
What state do you live in? If you're in California, a good option would be community college for two years and then transfer to UC of your choice (Berkeley is on par with MIT as far as EE/CS goes). I am sure your state has excellent universities and similar programs.

I'd say any university in the UC system is an excellent bet, as is University of Washington, U Michigan, UMN Twin Cities, etc. You'd get an excellent CS/EE education any one of those places.
I know you said software, but if you're into web development at all, Freewebs and Clearspring seem to be two big companies in the area.

Disclaimer: As an FW employee, I may be a bit biased. Besides, it's technically Silver Spring MD. Go figure.
New internet domain names in 2009: ICANN
I don't think there is one specific metric. It seems like SVN commits would be more accurate than LOC, but when I hear numbers like that, I begin to seriously doubt it. You have to take a lot of things into consideration when trying to measure "forward progress".

In theory all of our commits are approximately one feature, and I can't, for the life of me, imagine finishing 100 features in 2 days (even split between all three of my team). Clearly there's some disconnect between what different people consider to be a feature.

For the record, we've made a little over 1000 commits in the last five and a half months. I certainly don't think that makes us 20 times less productive.
I've worked with/known several SJSU (a CSU University) graduates and I definitely wouldn't call the education you get there anything like ITT. You can see the curriculum here: http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/Programs/bs_in_cs/requirements/CS_req...
(yes there's also Java and there are courses in UNIX system administration, so the "straight to work" track is definitely available but real theory - formal languages, data structures, architecture - is required).

That being said, if you can afford a UC and can get in (particularly UC Berkeley) - including through the community college transfer option - you should go for it.
Georgia Tech is a great school for Computer Science (they model their program after the best of the top-tier schools) and will IMO give you a much stronger foundation than a liberal arts school with a CS program.

I spent a year at MIT and transferred to Georgia Tech and I don't regret it in the least.
Blowhard nerd with an ego wonders why he only gets along with nerds. What else is new.

And correlation is not causation. He never stops to ask whether the brats he's complaining about are simply drawn to elite education and not at all produced by it. The idea that college fundamentally changes people seems far fetched to me.
Don't we have enough TLDs? .info is basically free and it's a quality TLD, there's just no demand for new ones. Can anyone here make a case for more?
The danger of stories
The richest guy I've met never had any post-secondary schooling except Hamburger U. He owns 12 McDonald's franchises and each clears about 1.5 million a year.
Instead of C++, I would advise learning C. If you are still interested in learning C++, I would still advise learning C first as C++ is (or at least was originally based on) C. K&R is probably the best way to start on C.
Content MD5
I agree that trying drugs (particularly psychedelics) is worthwhile, but your endorsement isn't very convincing.
Jeremy Zawodny
http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jzawodny
I lived in a building smack in the middle of San Francisco and didn't know my neighbors either. The only real difference in a city is that your neighbors are 10 feet instead of 100 feet from you.
hot off the press, came out today

http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/grad/eng/c...

i think if you buy the mag, there's rankings for more than 10 schools. And i vaguely remember another ranking for best values in education, places like Rose-Hulman, Cooper-Union,
Since when dud "grabbing what you can get" become wicked especially once long term implications are accounted for?
I really appreciate all the great feedback. Thank you. More info to follow once compiled.
No news here. The employee did something which one of his employer's (IBS's) major customers (NBC) didn't want him to. IBS wanted to preserve the trust that NBC had in them to handle their information they way they preferred.
TechCrunch for the Enterprise: TechCrunchIT
The premise is good, but the conclusion is flawed.

There are Ivy-league alumni who are creative and inspired, just as there are public school alumni who are insipid and shallow. The interesting question is, how could someone go through all of that high-quality education, and not gain the capacity for introspection that would allow him to be more original?
C for low level stuff, Objective Caml after you feel confident after C.
Of course try UC Berkeley. It's a bit of a crapshoot - I know people who have gotten into MIT and rejected from Berkeley but also the other way around.
Okay we get it, newspapers are dying, ads are moving to the web. It seems like Techcrunch doesn't have much to write about lately so they just keep coming up with ways to say the same thing, over and over.
UK High Speed Rail
While I heartily agree that K&R is the best way to learn C, I'd strongly recommend against learning C en route to C++. Most "best practices" in C are usually frowned upon (or worse) in C++. For example, using c-style arrays (instead of Vectors), using pointers excessively (instead of references), malloc/free (instead of new/delete), lots of global functions/variables (instead of classes, etc).

As far as picking between the two, it depends on your goals. If you really just want to learn about low-level programming, then C is probably the best option. On the other hand, if you want to be able to write low-level code for speed (i.e., to then call it from a high-level language), you might be better off with C++ (which is much more flexible while maintaining most of C's speed). Keep in mind, however, that using C++ effectively can get significantly more complicated than C (templates, classes, etc.), and so it is not usually a good idea to learn it "for learning's sake."
Trust and Credibility - They Go Hand-in-Hand
"The Semantic Web" would be better called "The Graph Web"
You shouldn't degrade other people on the Internet, even if they don't have 7 figure deals to revoke.
I was going to suggest UT (before I read that the OP is in Cali) simply because of the UT network. It constantly amazes me how many people either went to or support UT.

Then again, I'm in Dallas, so take that with a grain of salt :)
This is one of the better posts on this site. Long, insightful and educational. I'm sure Tang will be successful in the future, as he comes across and intelligent and humble.
I was just going to say, "Pick the best public university in your state." But you beat me to it.

So, I'll add that admissions are usually nicer to in-state students (the UT system in Texas is extremely generous about who they admit from state high school graduates, for example, and cheap to attend for Texans). Since the OP has revealed he's in California, he's even better placed, though I think state schools are significantly more expensive in CA (but what isn't?), but the quality of education available at some state schools is excellent.

UC Davis and Berkeley are both very well-regarded in comp sci (as are many others). I know that a large number of UC schools are on Google's "will hire from" list of universities (as is the previously mentioned UT Austin).
Fundfindr.com - Speed Dating for Entrepreneurs
This has been long overdue. Almost every single main line or commuter route train I've been on in the UK was full or overcrowded. Unfortunately the government just left the market to it after the privatisation. However, that completely failed to produce any improvements to the rail network, in fact it fell into disrepair and the infrastructure has been partially returned to state ownership.
Cloud Status - Amazon Web Service statistics
Unless you are trying to get to know your neighbors, it is very easy to not know them.

I found that after freshman year of college, you had to make an effort to meet upperclassmen, even those on your floor. They already have friends, and routines, and meeting random strangers is not usually a part of those routines.

It seems like this has only gotten worse since college. So, on this note, when is the last time you struck up a conversation with a random stranger. I highly recommend trying it sometime, as it tends to be enlightening.
From my limited experience with Ruby, I'd say it would be a step backwards for someone who knows Python. It will largely show them how things are done awkwardly in another language while attempting to solve similar problems. Something like C, as other posts have suggested, would teach a lot more in the same period of time.

I don't mean to diss Ruby too hard, but I don't see the points here as strong enough to detract from an argument for learning C.