skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am stunned. The questions were mostly way off and got only marginally closer in the last 4-5, then came the correct answer: Pancho Villa.
If possible, I'd advise you to take more challenging and/or more interesting courses. I know there are probably several required courses that you cannot avoid (of which many are probably going to be worthless/boring), but for the ones where you can choose, pick ones that interest you. Often, more off-beat courses can be very rewarding -- for example courses in foreign cultures, various arts-related courses, etc.

Also, I'd use college as a means of finding talented people you might want to work with in the future. It's an ideal place to meet such people, and perhaps even start cooking something up together.

Finally, college is perhaps one of the last times when you'll have large chunks of time to do whatever you want (especially if you feel your classes are easy). Take advantage of this to explore your interests.
Oh, great. Just what I need.
College does two things primarily:

1. Learning.

2. Credentialing.

There's also the social aspect, but it's way overrated. There's way more fun/socializing to be had in the real world. So you've got:

1. Learning: You're obviously able to self-teach. Not sure how familiar you are with college courses - it's much slower learning than self-teaching. The place where college is good is for things that'd be way too tedious to stick with in self-teaching. I still think Accounting 201 is the best college course I ever took - everything else I could have self-taught or learned from someone I respected. But I sure as hell would've never taught myself double-entry accounting without a course.

2. Credentialing: College is a credential. A degree is an easy big credential to get, and it helps a lot. But if you've done lots of great stuff, and no degree, you won't have much trouble. The problem is the "lots of great stuff" - specifically, tangible great stuff that you can show and point to. I wouldn't hesitate to hire a hacker who had built a couple cool things, experimented in business, and had no degree. If a kid had showed me how he started a business that made $7,000 in revenue before folding, and that he'd coded a Firefox add-on, I'd be all over it. If a technical writer listed on a resume that he'd compiled research and created 300 Wikipedia pages just because he loved it, and gave me links to his favorite 3 or 5, lack of degree wouldn't stop me from checking him out thoroughly.

Managers/bosses look for credentials and track record. College is such a good credential because college sucks, so bosses know you can stick through something that sucks when it starts sucking if you finished college.

If you want to get in "the army" (big companies), you might need a college degree. It shows you can take orders and do stupid stuff. If you decide to just go crazy and start doing mercenary work, you'll be able to sign on with some revolutionary, commando assassin companies, but the army will frown about taking you on. That's okay if you find the army boring.

The key is, figure out how you're going to learn if you don't go to college. (You seem like you can self-teach). Then figure out how you'll get CREDENTIALS. A track record. Do some tangible stuff, and FINISH IT. Even if it sucks. Something you can write down if you apply for a job or try to get financed or borrow money or get investors. Any credentials are good credentials.

Dropping out might be one of the best things you could do for your life - just make sure you do some cool stuff instead of playing XBox and drinking Mountain Dew.
I was in the same boat as you not too long ago and while I haven't found my undergrad. experience to be a particularly enlightening one, it has had value.

Also, a bachelor's of some sort is almost a universal prereq. for a decent job. While you may be able to convince a hiring manager your skills are solid and that you're worth hiring, they're going to be talking to those who meet their requirements first so you may never get that chance.

Rather than drop out, why not take a heavier course load and finish sooner?
isn't this what "open social" is all about? i mean you can't carry your karma (actually a pretty weird concept to me), but a person that chooses to associate with you, gets to see your profile, your friends, your pictures, and whatever other info you choose to share. i think this model closely follows how real life works. having a rating that describes and follows you, i think, is fairly useless (i'm sure plenty of you will disagree).
" ... 2 (simplified) situations ..."

But those are not the only options, so more thought need be given to what action to take, at what expense and to whom, and at what opportunity cost, and to the (relative) detriment of other pressing problems.

The speaker refers to his approach as a silver bullet; it's more of a silver lollipop.
Joost for the iPhone: Good, as Far as It Goes
Steve Jobs is not an exception. He met Woz in college. This means he benefitted from college.

Jobs, Woz, Zuckerberg, Gates, Dell, and virtually everyone on this planet benefits from college up until they don't. A big portion of students escape before they graduate, though most escape at graduation. Almost all students drop out for the same reason--financial. That's because other reasons--geographical, academic quality, offerings, or costs--can be addressed by changing schools or majors by those who are willing to find a better fit in another program. And yes, working at McDonalds has priority over college to drop outs only because they don't feel they can afford college. People don't work two low-paying jobs while attending community college or state school half-time, if at all, for fun. If you can afford to go, then you're not in the same position.

Therefore, if your problems with school are that classes are too slow and you're not getting enough real-world experience, do what Jobs, Woz, Zuckerberg, Gates, and Dell did--use that extra time to experiment with ideas while in college.

(Note that I did not say start your own business/startup, because you have to start tinkering before expecting to come up with a great idea and product right away, and anybody who says the first thing software billionaires did or that you should do is to create a startup, is lying. First, you have to fool around and try to create your own software while you're in college. Once an idea seems to take off, and seems plausible, then you can consider taking some time off from school to see how it goes.)
I'll join the crowd. Worked for me: Manila, Philippines. No data available about the weather though: "i'm not sure what the weather is like in Makati,PH"
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Communication, Leadership, Relationships - Perspective & Advice
Without any particular plans for what you want to do, I think the other commenters' concerns are valid. However I think the best solution would be come up with some plans, not to continue university.

You've expressed your disinterest in spending your life in a company's employ, so I question the utility of getting a degree. Four years of your time is not a small price to pay for a qualification you may not need, to say nothing of the financial cost, so I don't buy these 'nothing else better to do' arguments.

Regardless, it's a significant decision, so I would advise against a hasty choice. Consider the other benefits of a degree - for example, if you ever need finance for a project, an investor would likely be comforted by some proof of your qualification.

I think it sounds like you'd be best off dropping out, but do think hard about your plans before you make a decision. If you do need to get a job in the future, IT is one of the most receptive industries to people without formal qualification, provided they can demonstrate their skill. Good luck with it.
The average billion dollar company is not in the web app business.
If you don't now the answer yet, then you should stay where you are until you know what you want to do next.
Small freedoms are important too.
Pixelpipe - Free your media, upload and share anywhere
Or how about transfers just between our own comments?

I'd love to be able to slide surplus karma from dumb-but-popular things I've said to the underappreciated, more controversial comments I'm more proud of. :)
The Internet Archive is almost certainly capturing all these changes for posterity. That admittedly doesn't really address O'Reilly's main goal, to legitimate version tracking as a device for political transparency.

But there's another problem, too. The Internet Archive has a 6-month lag between collecting and publishing. That cripples it for oversight purposes, which is a pity. I only found this out because http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://change.gov doesn't have anything yet. Maybe they could be persuaded to fast-track pages with a .gov suffix or something.
I can second the Supermicro solution. Worked for a hosting company in the past and we never had a Super Micro machine fail. They cost less and are built a lot beefier than comparable Dell's.
I'm a high school senior student who has applied to several public universities; mainly a subset of Berkeley, UIUC, UWash, Michigan, UT Austin, GATech, and Purdue.

I'm wondering if you are at one of these these places (or a university of a similar reputation.) Do you think attending a private university such as Chicago or CMU is a better option?
Sure. But comparatively few of those samples represent things that you would actually want to use in the real world, while there is a lot of overly shiny eye-candy, poor user interfaces and non-native widgets - things that Flash has always been notorious for.

Flash has always served a niche for what HTML and JavaScript can't easily do; the problem is that over time this is diminishing, and it's looking like over the long term Canvas and SVG will be one more nail in the coffin.
> Steve Jobs is not an exception. He met Woz in college. This means he benefitted from college.

Jobs met Woz during the summer after his sophomore year of high school, when they were working at the same company. Jobs later went to Reed, in Oregon, before coming back to California and eventually starting Apple with Woz.

What he benefited from by going to Reed was exposure to their top calligraphy department, which inspired Jobs to support rich typography on the Mac.
Here's another version of the analogy: you say that eating Big Macs will cause other people to die and cities to sink into the ocean, and that I should limit my intake of Big Macs because of this. It's OK if I continue to eat some Big Macs, though as long as I pay you a tax or buy Big Mac credits from your company and I let you regulate what I eat. If I don't pay the tax you have imposed on Big Macs, I will be thrown into jail. If I then resist going to jail, you will have the police kill me.

In light of those claims, I find it strange that you (the fictional Ron-Al McGore) are not really changing your eating habit of at least 4 Big Macs at every meal.
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"Steve Jobs is not an exception. He met Woz in college. This means he benefitted from college."

are you sure about that? any reference?

from www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html:

"There's another guy at Homestead High School, younger than you, and he's interested in electronics and pranks and things too and you really should meet him." So he thought we were alike.
Kind of old school but find a local real estate agent that lists rentals or manages properties. They can give you a list of apartments that fit you needs and you won't have to spend so much time dealing with flakes on CL. Worked for me.
Are ordinary "good" citizens capable of really providing such "intelligence" without doing much damage for things about to happen? I doubt it.

However, I really appreciate the sheer lack of original journalism that came from ordinary citizens during this time... I think only one or two people were reporting from ground zero... Pretty much everyone else was just echoing the main media. That is a problem that needs a solution...

A serious collective of amateur journalists doing some serious journalism and not just echoing the established media would be a great thing to have. No idea, how that could be achieved but if it existed during this mayhem, it would have been the resource I would be glued to, not the maddening sensationalist sickening reporting of the news channels.
There's an opportunity cost to everything you do. So if you prioritise carbon emissions and the result of that is that poor people can't keep their families warm, you lose. Most of the evils of politics in the first world happens as opportunity-cost theft, because it's easy to hide. For example - force people to pay taxes, enlarge government in the process, and then fund something stupid and thereby prevent the original person from putting it to better use.

> Whichever side of the argument you fall [..]

Be that as it may, if it develops as a result to market impetus you can be generally confident that it will be a response to actual demand. Whereas as soon as the government gets involved we lose our valuing mechanisms and get locked into what the geniuses in the capital think is going to happen. Also, it depends which fuels you pour your energy into and whether this is actually a good choice. If you invest in a bad route there for political reasons (e.g. ethanol) you'll have the effect of increasing world hunger as a side-effect. Nuclear is another option which is difficult to separate from political concerns.
I think it's mostly a question of caveat emptor.
Could always recycle ...
Lebedev’s pyramid
Well, government documents aren't eligible for copyright, so anyone could hack together a crawler and republish the entire history of change.gov (or any other .gov, for that matter). Right?

In fact, this would be even better, since there would be no way for the government to retroactively tamper with the record.

<tinfoilhat>well, except by cracking my servers via those NSA backdoors in AES</tinfoilhat>
I tried searching for Paul Graham. I got Linus Torvalds, then Sergey Brin, then Drew Curtis, then Will Wright. Not bad company.
Does that include two meals? Eh?
don't confuse college 'experience' with freedom, they're not the same

nothing gives better track record than startup (even failed ones) ... don't confuse it with the college-track-record ... they are not the same

college rank is a gamed metric (engineering rank #1=100 pt, rank #2=90ish pt, rank 3-rest=60ish) ... don't bother with it

college debt is an early enslavement scheme (later u'll get family and mortgages) ... beware

My suggestion is you to drop out and read this book:

How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis:

Young, Penniless, and Inexperienced?

"Excellent. You stand by far the best chance of becoming as rich as you please. You have an advantage that neither education nor upbringing, nor even money, can buy—you have almost nothing. And therefore you have nothing to lose.

"Nearly all great fortunes acquired by entrepreneurs arose because they had nothing to lose. Nobody had bothered to tell them that such and such a thing could not be done or would be likely to fail. Or if they had been told, then they weren't listening; they were too busy proving those around them wrong."
A better map: http://www.nationalatlas.gov/printable/images/preview/fedlan...

EDIT: this one is better yet: http://www.adcre8tr.com/oldgrowthweb/where.html
Many national parks were at least partly rangeland for livestock. Think of Arches, Bryce, Zion, Joshua Tree, etc. I certainly think Texas and Iowa would be better off with more national parks. The original tall prairie grass ecosystem is mostly gone from the midwest. I'd like to see some of that.
Don't forget the wider social aspect. Getting into college is the important part that will follow you for the rest of your life. Dropping out and doing something is fine, but getting in in the first place will mean less time wasted later convincing people to take you seriously.
I beat it with The good in the good the bad and the ugly. He answered Leon.

It is timing out all the time, unberable.
How I Work by Paul Krugman
Particularly interesting are his Rules For Research:

1. Listen to the Gentiles

2. Question the question

3. Dare to be silly

4. Simplify, simplify
http://www.rsspect.com/

Not cumbersome at all.
It's clear that he believe that he himself should remain in the public arena despite being rejected by the democratic process. There's no evidence that he believes anything else, given the disconnect between his lifestyle and what he advocates for others. There is absolutely no reason (it's not like he can't afford it) that he couldn't be powering that mansion of his with wind or solar, and that's just one example. There's no reason that the profits from his carbon credit company couldn't be spent on alternative energy research. The evidence is that it's all self-promotion.
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I think I might have some insight. I'm a sophomore in the Computer Science Department at UIUC, and my college choice came down to the Econ program and Chicago, or here.

The only thing that matters for the colleges you mentioned is what you want to study. Public or private doesn't make as much of a different as the strength of the department. It would have been silly to study Econ at UIUC instead of Chicago, and vis versa for Computer Science. If Computer Science is what you want to study, you can't go wrong with UIUC, Berkeley, or CMU. If you want to study Math on the other hand, you should definitely give Chicago serious consideration.

Besides the strengths of the departments, there is no different in terms of education. Just because CMU is a private school doesn't mean it's not a research institution. Same with Chicago. You may get a slightly better student to faculty ratio at a private school, but if you are in a top ranked department you will run into many professors who simply think teaching is a waste of their time and you will still have classes taught by TAs. You will need to be a motivated, independent learner, no matter what. You wont have anyone holding your hand. If you want a more interactive educational experience, I highly recommend checking out some of the top liberal arts schools like Amherst.

This is not to say that you can't get to know professors at research schools, because you can. You just need to work hard in order to do so. This is as opposed to Amherst, for example, where the vast majority of professors are there because they _want_ to interact with students. At CMU or UIUC, the vast majority of professors are there to do research. If you do go the research school route, you'll just need to try harder and find the professors that do care. It's definitely doable.

Of course, I have only addressed a few academic aspects about choosing a college. You should put equal weight on where you feel the most comfortable, where you think you would be the happiest. For example, if drinking really makes you uncomfortable, you'll need to recognize that Greek life at UIUC is huge. Similarly if you are worried about being in a large city, you might want to consider that when thinking about going to Chicago. All of these things are just as important to consider as academics. It is four years of your life, after all =).

You can post back here, or my emails in my profile if you'd like to know more.

EDIT: Something I forgot to mention is money. Public schools have none of it. If you actually need money from financial aid, go to a private school that guarantees to meet 100% of demonstrated need (all competitive private schools do).
Sand Hill Slave from Internet Archive
I was afraid this was going to be some story about top-level management cutting jobs in the harsh economic climate, and then rewarding themselves (only somewhat handsomely) with bonuses. I'm glad to see an uplifting story instead.

From the perspective of the purchasing company, I wonder what effect it would have on employee retention. The article mentions that life hasn't changed much in the interim, but it was also unexpected. Some employees may find this a good opportunity to strike out on their own, or retire just a bit earlier.

I would be curious to see if the aggregate effect is one of employee loyalty or loss.
I go to UCLA. I personally think it's an awesome program (I think we're ranked top 15 in CS). I would definitely recommend it given that UCLA is ridiculously fun, the people there are pretty smart, and LA is a great city for the young and wild.

As a side note, my parents saved up enough for me to go to a private school, but I chose to forego that option to go to a public school. As such, my parents gave me the difference to spend at my discretion and I'm currently using it as seed money for my startup (the disparity is about $100,000 over 4 years, not withstanding scholarships or grants).
I prefer them because they have more crunch and don't get as soggy as the lighter atoms after 5 minutes sitting in milk.
Privacy breach could harm a company a lot. Japan Network Security Association reported that, in 2007, total of 30 million personal information records are breached and estimated 22 billion dollars for damage/compensation in Japan.

Most of these incidents caused by employees taking out the data, but there are some cases caused by sloppy web app.

(I could find only Japanese version of the report:
http://www.jnsa.org/result/2007/pol/incident/index.html )
Lebedev’s pyramid may be correct in terms of proportion but the structure of the pyramid with said distribution rarely maps to the structure of an org chart.