skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
you should just make a list of pros/cons and trust your instincts

Agreed that ultimately the applicant has to decide, if he is in the position of having more than one offer of admission. No applicant should feel bad about disagreeing with someone else's sincere advice, including the sincere advice of a parent. Nonetheless, sometimes an applicant knows himself better after feeling his own reaction to someone else's advice.

I ask here because I was a language major as an undergraduate, and not particularly entrepreneurial, and now I am a math coach and am getting into college advising with my more sci-tech-interested clients, some of whom would like to grow up and run for-profit businesses. Within my own family, I don't have lore to pass on that is fitting for my oldest son (who will go through the application process at the end of this calendar year), so I appreciate hearing everyone's advice here.
Your point about the government taking advantage of a slippery slope is excellent. The OS vendors may be too powerful of a group (investor pressure can make them do things that wouldn't be considered benevolent). Perhaps third-party providers would be a better solution. At least then there would be a chance of responding to market pressure to be good.

We would need some way to verify that our computers were "clean." Without this certificate (or whatever), we wouldn't be allowed access to web pages or http ports. But we would be free to get the cert from any vendor we could.

Even with this method, there is a vulnerability to spoofing the certificate.
ruby! he will be a rockstar by 16 and we will all thank you
I think he isn't trying to court you guys as a consumer, but rather as fellow hackers to test his beta site. You guys should cut him some slack — I always thought YC was a positive environment, but all your comments are incredibly unhelpful and just showcase your personal laziness.

BTW, this is site is FREAKIN' AWESOME!!!

It has a bunch of live DJ sets that you can listen to and even allows you to jump between tracks. It's for people that enjoy trance music and are tired of having to constantly find new sets.

Good job man, keep up the good work.
None of it really matters. Visit each college until it's just obvious. "I could spend 4 years here and be happy" Stay overnight with a freshman. Get a feel for how things are run. Talk to as many freshman and seniors as possible, candidly, in private. Go to some sample classes.

Don't just take a tour or investigate it online. I chose my college because the people going there were all pretty hard core geeks. And undergrads could get paid to work for Masters and PHD students on their thesis. (I wanted hands on experience) This, naturally, made having a killer social life a little more challenging, unless your definition of a "killer social life" is playing net trek at 3:00am on a friday night in your dorm's computer room.
Long enough to discover that I have sausage fingers. Long enough to realize that they did a great job with the automatic corrections, but that when that fails, the process of correcting a word is brutal, and that it happens enough to make the whole experience grating when you're used to a keypad. Long enough to discover that there's no way I could shoot off a text one-handed without looking like I can on a device with a dedicated keypad. Long enough to know Blackberry-esque models are for me.

I don't know how many minutes if that's what you're asking. I don't think it's a hole in what is clearly an opinion piece that I didn't describe the exact length of time I spent typing on one.
You can also apply these by developing contacts over the web.

Seriously, your most important experiences will be with people. The most important thing will be forming truly meaningful and effective working relationships with particular people. If you fail to do this, your college experience is wasted. If you do this in a half-ass way, you will only get a half-ass benefit. Therefore, your criteria should be focused on this.
Yes. iPhone isn't a serious contender in business.

It may be a threat to the iPhone in the pro-sumer market (yeah, I hate that term too) also though, since it too has a full-screen WebKit based browser, a UI people are raving about, $200 price point, and potentially (jury's still out) awesome platform. And, most crucially, it will be on many networks. I like it's chances.
This is all good advice, but don't underestimate the value of credentials. I agree that credentials are overvalued by society, but there isn't a lot that tokenadult can do to change this or even avoid it.
As a user of both French and English, having the ability to switch from QWERTY to AZERTY in a single click on my iPhone is something I really appreciate. Especially since switching to French loads up the French dictionary, completing and correcting words in the language I'm currently using. I probably use 80% English, 20% French, and live in France so having only a French keyboard would be pretty annoying.
It's an idea for an application I would like to have, not for a startup.

However, I wouldn't be surprised if there is money to be made with an application that helps users their spend money. You could try to sell it to a phone company, or a supermarket. You could let supermarkets advertise discounted products. You could make people pay for the application, or for 100 updates to the list. If users update the list per sms, maybe you can share the revenue with the phone company.

I suppose the biggest problem is not the monetization but the distribution. This is solved for the iphone, and for android phones, but for other phones it looks like a nightmare.

Another problem is to make easy enough to use that it actually makes life more simple. I find typing on a phone cumbersome. Maybe using a dictionary of the items you have bought previously would make it easy enough. It could be nice to be able to take a picture of a product's barcode to add the item in the list. On the other hand every added functionality diminishes the ease of use.
Would you recommend Age of Tolerance as a book?
I upvoted you both for being so nice.
I think there are two main benefits that you get from a college education.

The first is your personal growth: what you learn from your courses, what you learn about yourself, what you learn from your classmates. The personal relationships you make with faculty and with other students that last past your graduation. Like stdcredzero said, this is all about the people and the environment.

The second benefit is the few seconds of recognition you get when a new acquaintance or a potential employer finds out that you studied X at college Y, and they think "ah yes, that's a good college" (or alternatively, "I've never heard of it").

If you play your cards right, the first benefit should vastly trump the second one. Unfortunately, the second benefit is much easier to quantify when you're choosing colleges.

Ideally, I guess, you would get both, but that's not always possible.

Within reason, list price should be the least important criterion. At most, it should be a tie breaker.
I'd put courses on the bottom of that list. In fields like Comp Sci, many of these are standardized, so there is less differentiation. What differentiation there is is due to the efforts of individual professors.

You don't even need to get accepted to any school at all to take some courses. They're free on the web. The differentiating factor is the instruction.
don't underestimate the value of credentials

I'm agnostic on this issue, so I'll ask a follow-up question. What would be the value of credentials (in the form of a college degree) for a young person who desires to launch a start-up right after college?
There was a tremendous amount of negative publicity around dropped calls specifically when the 3g launched. I'm sure you're not the only one, but it's clearly a common problem, just as some people still have an Xbox 360 from launch day that works, while I'm on my third.

Call quality goes beyond just that too. There's the abysmal maximum volume. General sound. Etc.
What, with his comment about being able to eventually understand sociology using physics, I think this essay is easily 3 Cuil.
The point of the book is that you should do what is fun for you.

For Tim, that is not work.

If for you, it is work.

Then perhaps Tim would argue that you should do ...

guess ...

that's right,

work.
Call me old school, but I would start off with Basic. If he was younger I would recommend Logo. Once he's hooked I would get him into C or pascal.

I can't recommend enough getting him a "Basic Stamp" kit. Seeing how software can control hardware is magical. Then work him up into "Arduino" world in C.
Disagree. There are enough people out there who are aware enough to realize what really counts. Why waste your time on people less aware than that?

I have Ivy-League credentials. Has this benefitted me ever? Yes, a little. Was that worth the 6 figure amounts it cost my family to get me there and put me through there? Nope. Not sure how well my experience generalizes, though. I suspect that I would've gained several times the benefit, had I taken some time off and prepared myself for college with regards to emotional development.

Still, I think it's better to spend that time and money in ways more directly correlated with gaining enriching experiences.

There was once an AT&T study that found the success of execs in AT&T was correlated more with how well the exec did in college, and not so well with which college he went to. And this is from the monopoly AT&T days, which is well within the heyday of credentials.
It will...
http://lifehacker.com/5115473/touch+screen-keyboard-shown-in...
Superb comment!
I would say you should go to the hardest college you get in to (that you generally like). The more smart people there, the better because the classes will be more challenging and likely more stimulating. I went to a hard school, and going from being the smartest to suddenly being average was a stimulating transition. It makes you learn to work hard to get good grades, which are that much more rewarding.

I would also say you should go to a bigger school. For technical fields, the more students, the more choice you will have for courses. Diversity in a technical field is a great thing because you get to see what you are really passionate about. I ended up really loving applied math after going through an engineering track.
The first is your personal growth: what you learn from your courses, what you learn about yourself, what you learn from your classmates.

I imagine that some of that personal growth and learning from classmates can come just from being farther away from rather than closer to home during college studies. I commuted to the very nearby state university (but didn't usually live at home) for my undergraduate degree. I thought I learned a lot just from the surrounding environment when I lived overseas after I obtained my arguably nonprestigious college degree.
The Road to qooxdoo Part III: Why It Rocks
Note: Rand doesn't care how productive someone is, only that he/she attempts to actually be productive. Obviously there is great variation in how productive (in an absolute and economic sense) that individual humans can be. The point is that some people strive to produce while some strive to take power over others.
I think you have to type "vim foo" with vim-tiny.
I can't believe how many people are bashing this book without actually reading the book.

The book's title is to catch attention and summarize a goal that uses a lot of little cool "life hacks" that Tim has invented.

His book is not so much being lazy or avoiding responsibilities. I got out of it 2 major learning points:

1. How to use your time wisely, either by streamlining human interaction or outsourcing menial jobs.

and

2. How to execute on a product business using new web tools and hacks that even I, a veteran web entrepreneur, had very little exposure or knowledge of.

Obviously either of those titles would be extremely boring and not sell well, so Tim had to do what he had to do to sell his book. But there is a lot of good stuff, probably one of my top 5 books of all time.
I would say you should go to the hardest college you get in to (that you generally like). The more smart people there, the better because the classes will be more challenging and likely more stimulating.

That's my general tendency in giving advice, but I've had people disagree with based on the idea that being a big fish in a small pond can build a student's self-confidence and win the student recommendations from professors and the like. Does that make sense to you?
Yeah. It ticks me off that Rand is associated with anarcho-capitalism (I think that's the phrase to describe people that want to replace government with corporations, no?). She isn't. She's all for government, but she has it restricted to three primary functions: depending people physically (with police), depending people morally (with law), and defending the nation (with a military). However, she says that these functions should be kept as minimal as possible, so as to give people maximum freedom.

It bugs me, because the Anthem argument ignores so much to make a snarky point (and Anthem is a terribly-written book, both Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are better-writ). It goes by this vision of Rand as a near-Nazi who wants conformity to her Galtian standard. She doesn't, and she says this repeatedly. Rather, she wants Galt to be the bringer of the message that you ought to do things using your own abilities, primarily for yourself.

She's fine with charity, as long as you give what you want to and not what you feel compelled to. She's fine with tax, as long as you're only being taxed for the services that directly apply to you. She's entirely fine with people disagreeing with her, provided they disagree based on their own moral convictions rather than on the convictions they read of others. (I thought that made the OP a bit ironic.) This all gets ignored for the blind Rand-hate that exists solely to counteract all the blind Rand-love. It's frustrating.
Ruby.

It's the most human-readable language out there. I personally think that it's a lot easier to get started with the basic concepts of programming like while loops, if statements, etc. It is a lot easier to do those things when you don't have to think about including random libraries and putting everything in specifically named functions (ie. main() or static-something-or-another in JAVA) and what-not.

It's the fastest way to get started.
None of it really matters. Visit each college until it's just obvious.

My son forms some of his impressions of colleges from summer program classmates older than he who have already gone off to college. His current favorite college is the one where most of the summer classmates he likes best have gone. I certainly agree that campus visits are a great idea, and some colleges formalize those for admitted students. They can be expensive for families (like mine) that live in the middle of the country if the colleges being considered are mostly off on one coast or the other.
I would recommend Python or if the Unix/Linux component isn't as important, JavaScript.

JavaScript would allow your brother to share his creations with friends and learning the amazing (and at times frustrating world) world of the web.
> I'd put courses on the bottom of that list. In fields like Comp Sci, many of these are standardized, so there is less differentiation.

I disagree. Having been to Berkeley and Georgia Tech, I found that the latter's undergrad CS/CM program would have catered considerably more to my interests. For instance, if you're interested in creative/expressive computation, Georgia Tech and CMU vastly outrank other colleges, while Stanford has been notable for offering more "timely" courses like Facebook and iPhone development.
Don't teach him one programming language, because if he wants to be a hacker, he'll need exposure to many.

Ruby or Python is good for a start, because it's easy to debug and you can do simple, cool things with them pretty quickly. Then introduce him to Lisp or Scheme, and finally OCaml or Haskell so he's exposed to good static typing. Save C for later (by the time he's ready for it, he'll be picking languages rather than asking you for advice).
I can't seem to type anything on this page: http://mugasha.com/browse/sets

The input box has a highlight but when I click on it, I can't type anything at all.
Funny, in my opinion, the first four things you mention do not matter at all. Throughout my schooling, 98% of my learning came from books, self study, and friends. If you can't learn from reading a book faster than you can learn from a professor, you're probably in the wrong field. But if you are choosing a college based on the professors, look for professors doing interesting work, not necessarily good teachers. Basic instruction you can get from a book. But if you can be near someone who's at the top of their field, you can learn stuff that is not written down anywhere, and gain valuable contacts.
Have you considered the idea of licensing the patent from them?
Is it necessarily false? I mean, yes, of course it's false for the people who use the book like a cult icon, but think about the countless people who read it and got from it the moral of "it's okay to do what you feel is right, even when other people may disagree, because in the end you should trust your own feelings first and foremost." That's a very healthy thought, and it's one that I've never seen illustrated as clearly as it is in Rand's two books.
AppJet now, C later.
Rand already failed. Old News.
As a teenager, I tried various "real" coding languages - C++, Java, VB (ugh) - but I was never able to get engaged in them. All I wanted to do was build something cool quickly, and none of these languages allowed that without a significant time investment. Then, I tried out PHP. Within a few days, I was building random tools left and right, and having a great time doing it. So, to get him interested, I recommend you choose a language that lets him get results fast.
> Not "no" regulation. Bad regulation. It exists! ... so why does that common-sense declaration feel so subversive to say?

I wonder this same thing to myself every time I turn on the news or get into an ideological argument with a friend!

I wish I could just give all my karma to your comment. I agree with everything you said. You put it well.
Agreed. Many of us that are children of the 80's are obviously and woefully self-bootstrapped into the compsci and compeng industry. It really shows, compared to a lot of kids who are up-and-coming stars who already have mastery in subjects I haven't even had time to diversify into.
Spending several years mastering Cisco router operating system commands, Sharepoint internals and development, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Java, Oracle, Jabber protocols, SGML/UML/YetAnotherMarkupLanguage?

Lisp and Haskell, on the other hand, I'd place closer to the "music, woodwork, ..., painting" category.
You can buy a USB microscope at my local Maplins store.
I may not have read it as carefully as I should have. But I insist that there is more to life than both consumption and production. There is civic engagement. There is activism, no matter what your political philosophy.
Funny, because (as an older article said) Gladwell is Rand's idea of a villain and vice-versa. They've both got flaws, but Gladwell in particular likes to coin phrases and say things that are easy for others to parrot, and this cap rates thing is among them.

This is the country that has spawned the richest people on the planet, many of them from very lowly backgrounds. The most influential web sites on the planet came from the
United States. The greatest TV shows I've seen were all but one American, and the one - The Office - managed to at least win Ricky Gervais an Emmy once he brought it over here. Ditto greatest movies. In almost every field, America has got at least a distinctive presence. So obviously some people are escaping the stupid, impoverished culture.

I think that in Atlas Rand does abandon villains, but I feel that's because she's relying on her readers to have read The Fountainhead so we can already understand their justifications. In that earlier book, she spends a lot of time treating her villains with sympathy. She tries to explain why they are what they are. And while I agree that she does simplify in Atlas, I've absolutely met people who have similar mindsets to the villains from The Fountainhead - she's not just making up that type of person, and they often are as vile and as insignificant as she paints them to be.
As I said, what differentiation there is is due to the initiative of instructors. I agree that this is an indicator, but it's still a somewhat indirect indicator. Often courses are also a reflection of what's popular at the time, or what might win brownie points for a particular professor or department.

If you want to find out what's really brewing in people's heads, it's better to just look up papers and talk to particular professors.
I tried making a simple Django app on Google app engine about 5 months ago, and I could never get it running. It left a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe it was just half baked on Google app engine at that time?
What's the rest of the evidence that society is avoiding difficulty? Are fewer people becoming doctors or engineers?

For a while, a lot of talented people were piling into the financial industry, which is (was?) the only industry in which it's possible to be entirely mediocre and make $1m/year within a decade. The horrific collapse of the academic job market was a contributor to this trend.

However, I don't think the desire to make large sums of money with modest effort is a new feature of our "hyperdiverse" economy. It's a rather mundane result of human nature.
If you succeed, then probably not much. But don't assume success -- desires can change. If you get frustrated with the startup and quit, then all of a sudden you're just a person who hasn't gone to college.

Also, the types of places that give you strong credentials are also full of smart people you might want to work with if you launch a startup.
You might want to look into ropemacs (and pymacs which it uses) for some slimeish stuff with python in Emacs. I way to go from there to slime but it's a start.
Since you know OCaml how about teaching him Haskell followed by C? The former should be pretty accessible to a 13 year old and he’ll have a lot of time to wrestle with some of the more difficult concepts like Monads (although I think exposure to them at an early age will make them easier to grok since he doesn’t have to unlearn a bunch of other stuff). I highly recommend Real World Haskell (http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/) if you do decide to go that route.

Apologies for a (related) tangent but I'm in a very similar situation (except that my little brother is 31). He has more artistic inclinations but in the past he's demonstrated an aptitude for mathematics and is generally good at problem solving. I've been teaching him some basic set theory and number theory in preparation for some actually programming.

My first thought is to teach him one high level language
like Lisp followed by a low level language like C. On the other hand, JavaScript (+ HTML) has some of the best of both of those worlds with the added benefit of affording immediate gratification. Any thoughts?

*Admittedly, my bro is a bit more motivated by financial considerations but I do think he will come to appreciate the beauty of programming if it is presented the right way.
Awesome! Djangobook.com and the official docs are how I learned Django. Djangobook.com is definitely a great place to start when then you can immerse yourself into the official docs (digging deep inside them) or the actual Django code, which can teach you a lot.
I realize I'm sounding here like I've been seduced, but I truly don't understand why you would want to teach any first language other than Python.