skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The ASP.NET MVC framework is a pretty close imitation of RoR.

The traditional ASP.NET framework is an attempt to shoehorn the Web into the Windows Forms conception of the world.

One thing that MS MVC doesn't do particularly nicely is to capture the declarative character of ASP.NET 1.1; the default view templating machinery leads to a comparatively ugly mix of literal markup and imperative inclusions of C#. But, this may not be a severe problem for you in practice, and anyway you can use other view template subsystems.

I think if you're starting out, you should stick with MVC. It harmonizes better with the wider architecture of the Web (http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/), and it doesn't suffer from much accumulated cruft.
Whatever font the LaTeX resume template uses..

http://www.rpi.edu/dept/arc/training/latex/resumes/
http://www.modpython.org/

http://www.modruby.net/

http://www.modrails.com/

Lua is easy to add "by default" because its interpreter is tiny and was designed for embedding. The others are too big.
Well first, be thankful that you have incredible options. To be fully funded for a PhD is not unusual, especially for engineering/science fields, but in this economic climate there are far more people applying for fewer positions. The same goes for the job offers.

That being said, what do you really want to do? What are you good at?

I've written a bit about PhD life in another post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=445082) and of course you are welcome to contact me if you are being pulled this way. Bottom line is that I think you should do the PhD if you are completely ready. Putting off a PhD will only make coming back to do it much more difficult, especially when bills start to pile on. Getting a PhD is not setting your life in stone, rather it will open up MANY MORE doors for you in the future.

The start-up sounds enticing. If you two agree about how much work needs to be done and this is an area that you are truly passionate about...just go for it! However, know that good ideas are not finite. There will always be time.

As for the job offers... Well, I tend to hate the corporate environment so I couldn't give you unbiased feedback. If you feel you can create value, and feel like your skills are valued, then perhaps its a good match.

With any of these, I would encourage you to talk with the people you would be working with. Your community will make a HUGE difference POST-college, because life after undergrad is shockingly different.
"I would say it should be taught in school."

That depends on what you go to school for. If you're going for training in Microsoft technologies -- to a technical college or the like, that's fine. If you're going to what's supposed to be a computer science program, they should teach general computing principles using, whenever possible, free software that has been around for a while and will continue to be around for a while. (Yes, that means they shouldn't teach Rails either.)
Reggie Watts, Francis and the Lights, Adron, and Vulture Realty are all from Normative. Eric Lodwick - Jakob's younger brother - is a member of Vulture Realty.
that is actually exactly how the kindle works. not any book, but many books.
And why does Roku sell for more on eBay than you can buy one for online from Roku?

http://shop.ebay.com/?_from=R40&_trksid=m38&_nkw=rok...

vs.

http://www.roku.com/default.aspx
There is also the pressure on the other side that many disruptive technologies require less jobs. For example when manufacturing machines took over previous manual work, or MSN Encarta and Wikipedia affecting the number of door to door encyclopedia salesman.

I think job creation/destruction should be looked at independently from innovation.
I just built an application using JAX-RS/Jersey. It was super easy and painless.
I use Georgia and I have used Bookman at times. They are both reasonably open styles and look good on both a screen and paper. The old standard is Times New Roman, but Times was designed for legibility while cramming as much text into a newspaper column as possible. I think it looks cramped.
i like georgia and verdana -- shouldn't have any issues if you end up having to send something as a .doc, and they're good basic-but-not-too-common fonts. use one for headings and the other for body, either way works.
Well... no, because that was violating copyright like mad. On the bright side, that led to Opentape (http://opentape.fm/), which is much more open for use.
HD version here: http://vimeo.com/2979892?pg=embed&sec=2979892&hd=1

(Even still, it's very hard to see.)
I keep thinking about how and when to launch, but one thing I keep hearing in my interviews is the importance of knowing when to sell. Looks like Bebo's founders knew when to sell.

Jason Calacanis told me that he sold Weblogs Inc because he didn't sell Silicon Alley Insider at its height.
Plants can now twitter you, to tell you that they need to be watered
it doesn't actually..it means to explode or burst from anger or laughing, as in "I can't laugh anymore or I'll "plotz." or as someone from Brooklyn said, it meant to plotz (lay down for a rest) after having too much sex. Different meanings from different people, but hey, it's all publicity.
Doesn't matter really, I took the domain name 3 years ago, without knowing Yiddish meanings till very recently. A short domain name is so hard to find these days, and if ifart can do well, why not iplotz..:) I suppose I could have called it ibarf...
This is a terrible attitude. If you don't write maintainable code then the price you pay for it later is that your project eventually ends up permanently stuck in the mud.

There is a line that you can cross where no amount of refactoring will rescue you from the mountain of technical debt you've accumulated. Once you're on the other side of that line, your project is 'bankrupt' and other than putting out fires you're never going to get anything done ever again.
If you don't power it on with the SIM card, they usually work.
The car companies that had to give up their jets aren't too happy about it either. And so goes nationalization.

http://www.freep.com/article/20090126/NEWS15/90126063/1001/N...
Wingdings.
Convenience is number one factor in keeping browsers secure
How not to log a Bugzilla Ticket (or ask for help on an open source project)
I, for one, hope that "leaked" design isn't the actual redesign since judging by the pictures I liked the original better. The shape, while weird at first, works well for something you can hold easily in one hand. The large buttons allow you to hold it in much more varying positions without having to worry about have a specific finger rested in a specific place on the device to perform an action you are going to be doing quite often.

Plus, the new one looks quite a bit larger.
That's the least accurate headline ever written.
Let me underline this part: Do not do your Ph.D. now. There is no rush.

At best, you would be wasting the extremely valuable "get out of industry free" card that an as-yet-unearned graduate degree represents. If you find yourself two years from now, trapped in an industry job which you hate, or in the aftermath of a failed startup, or -- worst of all -- laid off in a really down economy, you can go back to school then, reinvent your resume, revisit academic fields that have made progress in your absence, and meet an entirely new set of fellow students/potential co-founders.

At worst, if you go to grad school without sampling the actual world you could spend another half decade or more getting an advanced degree in a field that, once you graduate and the rubber meets the road, you might discover that you hate working in. Academic computer science and the software industry are rather different things. Being a grad student and being a professor are rather different things. Shop around a bit before committing yourself too hard to any of these paths.
Why do crack dealers still live with their moms?
"Bankers, for example, used to have a code that made them a bit stodgy and which held them up for ridicule in movies like “Mary Poppins.” But the banker’s code has eroded, and the result was not liberation but self-destruction."

Or, perhaps, to reconsider anew forgotten ideas and examine their applicability to modern life.

The idea that "the old rules don't apply" had a lot to do with the decision process that obliterated Wall Street.
More accessible article:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/01/27/citigroup-nixes-p...
When I got a 15" MacBook Pro (2.4ghz, 4GB RAM, 320GB HD, Glossy LED screen), I quickly discovered my desktop became obsolete and I unexpectedly stopped using it. It's not that it became obsolete tech-wise; there was just no reason to continue using it.

My MBP has enough power to run OS X + two VMs (Debian and WinXP) so everything I could ever need to do, I can do on my MBP. (For gaming, I installed Win XP on a second partition and boot to that when I need to get some FPS in.) And since I bring it to work and use it there too, it's basically the only computer I use from day to day.

(Of course, the downside to this is that it's also a single point of failure. Just yesterday I got to work and discovered my laptop's screen was blank. It turned out to be the infamous NVidia defect that created much commotion last year. But, even though I was 6 months past the warranty, Apple is fixing it free of charge: http://tinyurl.com/ctz3h9. Luckily, I also create bootable backups on a fairly regular basis.)

On the big screen issue, I've found it has less to do with the physical size of the screen as it does the screen resolution and your multi-tasking habits. If you really need more screen real estate, use the Unix screen utility or some form of desktop switching with keyboard shortcuts.
This is probably a good idea. I can't remember when I last clicked on a Facebook Ad.

Also, this is a little random, but why are Facebook Ads on the right (I know it has been like this since they released the new version)? Don't most people read from left to right? I've found that I notice Facebook Ads now far less than I used to.
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/ebook/

Not the right price, but the PDF support is build right in. alt.binaries.e-book.technical will finally realise its promise.
I would say you are also with David Brooks on this one. He is saying precisely that there used to be strong institutions in American life, and that they are all waning now.
Everybody writes shit code when they implement something new to get it working as quickly as possible. What matters is spending an extra 10-30 minutes before checking your code in to turn that sloppy code into a work of art.

It's really that easy.
Twitter's burn rate: Our search gets closer
Good beginning but mediocre ending, your post reads like an average Hollywood movie. A used cell phone? Come on.

There are more "hackery" things we can exchange without USPS involvement.

I am looking for a skeleton sample of building an Outlook plugin, Xobni-style, with potential cotchas solved.
"Because corn syrup is in almost everything it's hard to know just how much mercury you're ingesting."

I think that's Retric's point, and if it's not his, I'll certainly claim it. There's a little bit of everything in everything (thanks, entropy!). This article does nothing absolutely nothing to inform us as to whether this is actually worth thinking about.

The information content of this article is zero. Without more information it's not even worth your time to think about. (Trying to find more information might be worthwhile, and based on the other HN-posters who actually did that, I find myself fairly unconcerned about this putative threat.)
Would Sandberg have made millions in that institution had he not been so dedicated to it?
I was lucky enough to discover ASP.NET MVC a couple of days ago, and it's much, much better. I think ASP.NET is fine for internal development, but for anyone looking to build consumer sites, is it a reasonable tool? Yes, I know MySpace is on it, but when I look at PHP adoption, and use of Rails/Django, I find people are willing to try that "new hotness" but just don't like MSFT. Someone told me that they didn't learn ASP.NET because they didn't think it would help their resume (for startup type jobs - for IT it's good). Is that a generally held view/opinion?
I think if you are going to develop web applications you are better off with a dynamic language, recompiling large projects is a time killer and can get anoying. Another thing that is you might not like is that in general the opensource community for c# is not as big as other platforms have.

On the other hand the technologies are nice and fast, but for .NET it is all about tooling which can make you lazy and it can get in the way if you do not understand whats going on under the engine. You can pretty much forget about being productive without Visual Studio.

If you wanna geek around in a command-line interface, then .NET is not for you. If you want to do one part of your project the non-MS way, then .NET is probably not for you. I'm Microsoft partner and get all the software for a good price, but I'm not convinced that I would be more productive than with python and django.
Both great choices. I'm not really a fan of using them together though.
Lets ignore the term perfectionism and its meaning for a second.

We are people who build and produce (as someone in the comments so eloquently put it) and let say we set out to build X. X happens to takes a set of inputs and produces a set of outputs. It can be built in many different ways, each of which can be affected by a set of external factors. The effects of many of these factors are under our control, other however are not. We have a vision for X and a vision for how people will use it to accomplish a certain task.

Given all these factors (and many others) we build v1 and end up with X'. We look at X' and realize its not the same as X. The difference is caused (lets assume) due to the set of external factors we ignored, set of inputs that we didn't consider and the resulting set of outputs that we couldn't have expected.

Now it should be clear that X != X' is because we didn't consider all the cases along the way. But as human beings we learn from our mistakes and we iterate and X' grows closer to X over time. The important part here is that we iterate and iterations take time.

The author of the article states that "I knew that real artists ship, but I refused to ship mediocre work, which meant I could never ship anything.". Now does he mean he couldn't ship v1 or that he was awe struck by the discrepancies between X and X' that he couldn't iterate.

I also don't understand this part about "...but embraced via lack of symmetry, respect for blemishes, and unsanitized simplicity.". Does he mean we need to accept that we will never be able to perfect what we do? If so then I think he is wrong. We might not get it right on the first try and depending on the complexity of the task we might not get it right on the 100th try but as human beings you can bet that we wont rest till we get it right.

Perfectionism to me is a result of the process of iteration that is carved into our very being. Being human is not the achievement of perfection or in his case the acceptance of our lack of, it is the pursuit of perfection. And the day I forget that fact is the day I would stagnate and perish.
This is a very interesting point...do you have any suggestion for the types of tools that you would want to see be free which aren't? Would contests from MSFT help in this regard? What kind of investment could they make on this problem which would resonate with this audience?
Despite rough economy, Linden Lab continues expansion
Institutions "can be changed" is the same as saying that institutions "evolve."

Seems the disagreement is on the semantics of "invent institutional practices." How different does a practice need to be to be considered newly invented, rather than an evolution of an old one?
i definitely like both of them, and i also definitely am not very artistically inclined. i'll cede to a higher authority on whether they work together or not.
The papers, however, were specifically looking for mercury that was "lost" during the creation of caustic soda, at plants that literally use tons of mercury for this purpose. That is, the mercury is being added when the HFCS is made, not when the corn is grown. (One paper indicates that the four plants responsible are in GA, TN, OH, and WV.)

Switching to a better caustic soda process should eliminate the detectable mercury, regardless of the proximity to coal plants. And some food producers are doing so; as one of the papers points out: "No mercury was detected in the majority of beverages tested."
Unlocker at dealextreme.com for $5 -- works on most nokia phones. go on att.net and buy a nokia gophone for $20 or so, use the unlocker, and you're good to go.
Snaptalent offline?
I am 24 and have also been in the LAMP stack for the past year until I began programming as an unpaid intern for a local web development company. The web company uses a MS stack and I have LOVED it. I have a physics background, so I never really "learned" how to code, and picking up PHP felt disjointed. One thing that I have appreciated about MS is the consistency. The IDE is wonderful.
I'd agree with this comment that MVC is a lot nicer without the overhead of everything that comes with pretending you're building a Windows Forms app -- it's definitely in better harmony with the web's architecture and you get more control over the HTML you're outputting.

As others have said the databinding and drag+drop features are often useless and you spend a big chunk of your time working around the framework to get it to do something that doesn't /quite/ fit the drag and drop model, or figuring out exactly which event you need to handle to get things to happen in the right order (Page_PreInit, Page_Init, Page_Load, or Page_PreRender?).

But also as others have said, the C# language and the Visual Studio IDE are really nice, and while I haven't developed anything serious with the MVC framework yet, it promises to remove the frustration of endlessly working around the framework's artificially imposed complexity.
Cetera algorithm demostration from Starkey Labs
Before listening, make sure to wear your headphones, close your eyes and sit comfortably in a chair, like you would in a real barber shop. DO NOT use speakerphones and keep your eyes closed.

http://bucurenci.ro/2009/01/barbierul-din-cetera/
The funds have the $billions. If you want a piece of it, you go to them.

Or perhaps financial firms should hire hackers to talk to investment funds and tell them how irrational they are being by refusing to do things remotely.
Just how secure is Google Chrome?
Some thoughts:

Maybe write a script that goes through the web, starting with Wikipedia, and intelligently extracts facts from sentences. From there, pass it along to Mechanical Turk folks to gauge whether or not it makes sense. You could cheaply populate your database with all sorts of relevant information this way.

Maybe focus on a particular field at first, such as tech industry or the stock market or... whatever. Once you've got a grip on that, start expanding to others. I'm not suggesting you stop gather other types of facts, but I think right now its better to focus than spread yourself too thin. I think your visitors rather have your site tell them a lot about one topic than a little about a lot.

It's a small detail, but capitalizing the first letter of the descriptions would make it look sharper. Also, on my browser, IE7, the "More information" link drops down below the "Welcome" link. I think you could do better with a different, unique color scheme which people would associate with Factolex. (At first I thought HN was ugly, but now I wouldn't have it any other way.)

Overall, very well done. I could see a lot of search engine traffic getting directed to Factolex someday down the road.
I feel sorry for David Brooks, because he may never experience life.

He may never experience that moment when one knows he or she truly exists, that there is no blue pill, no "way we are supposed to act", and that life is not about climbing the ladders constructed by those who have come before us.
How to feed, indulge and guide Google's robot
Looks like they were going to buy a Dassault Falcon. I wonder how these kinds of decisions will affect Aerospatiale/Dassault? It's not like they make a lot of them.. last year they made eight Falcons per month. They've already fired all their temps and cut back on subcontractors hours.

It just goes to show, you can't win for losing. One more notch in the economic death spiral.
That's definitely the way I see it -- hardly any startups use ASP.NET, but it's everywhere in corporate environments.

I guess it doesn't make as much sense to build your product on a platform that's controlled by a company who may either turn off support for it (eg. VB6 -> VB.NET not being backwards compatible), whereas an open source community isn't going to disappear overnight and if it does, you can maintain the platform yourself - at least in theory.
Thanks ToComment. I am emailing you. The incoming address is 1000app.
They use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Modern
and can optionally use Helvetica or New Century Schoolbook.
On the flip side, that is one guy that created 40 000 jobs in his career so far? that is really quite amazing. If that was me I would sleep very soundly with a smile on my face. He should just get up, and do it again.
These have been my preferred resume fonts as well, but my upvote was for the key point you make about issues at the other end. Especially with a resume, you don't want the fonts to not exist on the recipient's machine because a lot of formatting will be lost (and your text may be replaced by Courier New - aagh).

I've worked with a few companies now that have used specialist fonts for marketing; it's fine in pdf form but most documents end up being Arial or Verdana anyway to be safe.
Reggie Watts is Jakob Lodwick's roommate.

It's always more incestual than you would even think!
Get some "real world" experience first. I got bummed out doing a Masters many years ago - got distracted by money making ops. So 20 years later I'm back doing a PhD. The topic is more practical and yet breaking some new ground from the academic perspective.

Don't let money dictate your decisions. Seek to optimise your experiences and that goes for life outside of IT & work. The startup option will teach you the most. Just don't count on getting rich. It so spoils the experience.
Too Broke For a Vacation? Take a Stay-cation
The MVP programme is highly regarded, I think -- perhaps that could be be amended to celebrate open source contributions to a wider degree or a parallel programme established.

Codeplex and Microsoft releasing open source code in general (eg. Oxite) probably helps too. Microsoft engineers openly working on projects not originating at MS (FacebookToolkit, say) might be a welcome move too.
This is huge. The autism community has long suspected that mercury is a driver, yet eliminating it from childhood vaccines hasn't lowered the rate. Could HFCS-borne mercury be the cause? HFCS was introduced into the food supply in the mid to late 1980s, and autism cases have grown 15-fold since then. (I believe HFCS is also the major driver of the parabolic growth in diabetes during the same period.)
Next step after XML sitemaps: User Assisted Web Crawlers?
yeah, i considered mentioning what fonts i'd use in the case of converting to pdf, but doc is such an HR standard. i've had bigger tech companies ask me to send doc after first passing along a pdf.
After 4yrs developing on the MSFT stack, I can say that it provides a nice end 2 end experience, especially using VS IDE. Now with Mono your deployment options are more open as well, which I find useful.

My only gripe is the cost of the stack, if you are hosting your own servers. I also found it hard to debug live environments, as it was hard to do introspection without bring the whole system to a halt.
Normative and Muxtape also share an office.
Since you're already on AT&T, go to best buy and pick up one of those motorola gophones for 15 bucks. They work with the regular AT&T SIMs.