skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First: I don't believe this. I went to grad school (in physics) with a couple of students who had spent one to five years in industry first. They weren't exactly indistinguishable from the other students: my impression is that they had a better idea of why they were there and what they wanted to do once they left, a more finely calibrated sense of what to study and who to work for to advance their chosen careers, and perhaps a slightly shorter time to graduation. They certainly didn't seem to find it much harder than anybody else.

(Anecdotal evidence, obviously, and a small data set. You're welcome to bring your own anecdotes if you like, or even data.)

Second: I'm not advising that someone work in industry or on a startup for fifteen years and then go back to school. You can sample careers pretty quickly unless that career is "professor". I believe most startups do you the favor of giving you a quick but intense taste of the startup life and then promptly failing, saving you the embarrassment of having to quit. There's also no rule that says you need to sit at your desk at Microsoft until they kick you out: You can work there for a year or three and then go back to school, and the choice is yours. By contrast, it is really hard to leave grad school and then return, so once you're two years in to your Ph.D. program there will be strong incentives to stick around until you're done, even if it takes eight years. The only way out is through, unless you want to become what Matt Groening once called "The Bitterest Person in the World: The Grad-School Dropout".

Now, it is true that getting a professorship could take you a very long time, and that you therefore want to start as young as possible so that you still have some youthful vigor left to find a new career after you can't secure a tenured position. But you can spare a handful of years.
Code is available here:
http://arclanguage.org/install
As a taxpayer, I'm glad they canceled the order -- if it made business sense to do so. If it was just to look good (and they end up spending more money without the jet) then double bad on them.

As a pilot? A Falcon 6X? 5950 nautical mile range? 3 engines? Complete glass cockpit with lots of standby gear? Have you seen that cabin size? The possible configurations? Anybody like to have a private ride you could pick up in DC and get off in, say, Milan?

What were we talking about again?
If you want to do one part of your project the non-MS way, then .NET is probably not for you.

This is completely false. There's a whole movement (http://altdotnet.org/) of developers not doing it Microsoft's way and getting along just fine.
Gmail goes offline with Google Gears
"That money should be used to lend to consumers to get the economy moving again"

Maybe the problem was they didn't write that on the back of the check when they made the deposit.
Socialtext! Hahaha.

There was a time once, when I was paid to work on Socialtext... but I'll spare you.

Let's just say that Socialtext is not the usability professional's answer of choice to MediaWiki.
I'm trying to think of an easy way this idea can be hacked together with existing tools, instead of writing a bunch of new stuff.

Could this be handled by macro programming on a lisp machine? Lisp is essentially the parse tree, which all languages have, so it provides the syntax agnostic representation. Macros allow you to easily specify DSLs, plus the macros themselves are lists and thus manipulable by macros. The lisp machine is essentially emacs that really is an OS, so the entire programming environment is programmable. But, emacs on top of some shell isn't so bad either.

The only thing missing is the syntax layer. Maybe regexps could suffice? Also something like LaTeX can provide a rich variety of symbols and symbolic structures for syntax.
I guess now one knows this code well enough to sort through it...
Agreed 100%.

The idea of user-editable content isn't the problem. But wikis are an unknown quantity and a slippery concept for non-nerds to grasp. There are no affordances, no guidance, no structures to help orient people[1], and while wiki syntax is awful that's only a contributing problem.

It's like if a carpenter/handyman/car repair guy handed you a smooth, featureless egg-shaped object and said "This is a Ziki. You can do everything with this tool. Now, check my tire pressure."

Even if you knew how to check tire pressure in general, you'd be SOL.

Second issue is that people use wikis for things other than collaborative documentation, just like people use blogs for project management (just because they're easy to install), and that's not helping the adoption problem.

[1] I don't mean the document tree, either. People are used to structured content.
IE8's JavaScript performance lags well behind Safari, Chrome
What an interesting point...yes, the sites have very different looks and feels, for sure. I wonder how many newbies get scared off from ASP.net from the ASP.net site.
You are right about not to over extend yourself. (http://lifehacker.com/5125764/leo-babauta-on-the-power-of-le...). As PG says stay upwind.
I understand what he was referring to... but there is a pretty big part of the Java world where things are actually kind of slick. So I don't like seeing such a blanket and semi-derogatory statement.
Freecycle varies area to area. We were active members of freecycle Canberra which was a great group, but freecycle Perth is pretty crappy and seems lorded over by some self appointed email nazi.
Considering you have a masters or at least an undergrad, you could probably ride the recession out inside a classroom.

A startup seems like a relatively quick return but its a gamble.

As for a career, both other options constitute as elements of one. If you mean striving to have some polished, dignified social timeline in your field, I say screw it, live for now.
There is already such software it's called PDF.
The "var" keyword in C# 3.0 has nothing to do with dynamic type-checking whatsoever. It's just basic static type-inference that the compiler was doing already (just only exposing through error messages).

I hate how the noob brigades are swapping the meanings of dynamic type-checking and static type-inference at every availably opportunity.
Huh, I've grown up in a Christian culture all my life, have heard this sort of thing many times, and it has never clicked for me. I wish it did, but it hasn't.
Erm, I mean from 2004. October 2004.
I think all of the money is in hardwar.
Social Media Strategy of Obama Campaign
Congratulations on lining up all the top options. This may as well be a rethorical question since it covers all the possibilities!

Normally, based on my background I'd recommend the startup as #1, the job at Microsoft as #2 and the Ph.D last.

But I must say I'm not crazy about the startup you describe. Would I really advise you to join a startup I don't believe in?

Failure is a great learning experience. Looking for paying customers is a lesson that neither Microsoft nor a Ph.D will ever teach you. But isn't it a little bit early? My preference is to become an expert first and then start something. You must do your own soul searching. Are you satisfied that you are "great enough" in your field yet?

For some, it takes a few years of a regular day job. For others, they are great by the time they get their bachelor degree.
Yes, Computer Science departments should not be running damn vocational programs.
Google gmail goes off line with google gears (official google blog entry)

s/gmail/Gmail
s/off line/offline
s/gears/Gears
s/google/Google/g
This must have been a real pain to implement; rumors of this have been floating around for years now.

Reader has had Gears for many moons now.
FWIW, psychological research (into the area of manamagent quality initiatives, self-help techniques, etc) has shown that adoption of any system works because of the attention applied to the situation, and I'd stretch that to include code, too.
C++ programming is like a monkey fucking a ball. You would probably want to stab your eyes out.

C / Objective-C will probably provide you with more joy and opportunity to work on the iPhone.

I suspect other mobile platforms either use C or Java for programming apps (as opposed to C++), but I might be wrong.
> Could this be handled by macro programming on a lisp machine?

Sure!

Now all we need is a lisp machine that anyone can run on modern hardware. Any ideas?
To me, being open or not is a big factor in being "the best", so if IE8 was "the best" and ran on the OS's I use then yes. I would use it.

Although I place a high value on extensions as well, so a browsers extensibility would also be a factor in being the best choice.
I've been using .NET full-time for 3.5 years. There are two types of .NET developers. The first group uses the * View controls, uses the designer, does everything (or most things) declaratively and generally conforms to the Microsoft way. Then there's another group of developers that care about design patterns, maintainability, testability, and everything else that goes along with being a good programmer, not just a good employee. I started out in the first group and now I'm in the second. It's a totally different world.

Microsoft has made a lot of effort lately to improve their appeal to hackers. They have free (Express) editions of their tools. IIS is still free. If you want the full-blown tools, they're available for very cheap (BizSpark) for startups. They're releasing more and more source code everyday (you can step through the .NET Framework core while debugging in VS2008) and CodePlex is helping bulk up the available OSS libraries for .NET. It's very rare when I need a library and there isn't an open source one or its included in the framework.

ASP.NET MVC is an excellent framework and eliminates most of the problems Webforms has. Webforms has its place in corps for the first type of developer I listed above, but MVC is made for the second. I wouldn't spend anytime with Webforms if I were just starting out. Save yourself the headaches.

I think the quality of C# 3.0 has been covered enough. If you like dynamic languages, IronPython and IronRuby rely on the Dynamic Language Runtime which will be included in .NET 4. C# is getting support for interopping with dynamic languages. F# is purely functional and will be a first-class language with tool support coming up in VS2010.
And it just counts as a learning experience - a prolonged bachelors!
Making sure absolutely every ambiguity is eliminated from a mathematical proof is perfectionism. That can be quite hard.

There are a large number of things in our modern world where not shooting for perfection can be disastrous. Space flight is one area, finances is another, weapons targeting a third, etc. Great art is also known by its perfection.
Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock ...
KDE 4.2.0 Release Announcement
You should have probably disclosed up front that you work for Microsoft. As much as I like .NET, I like full disclosure more.
Ugh. Proponents of status quo always invoke tradition and use some attractively pastoral but highly marginal examples to paint a white-washed picture that's quite far from reality.

In reality, it's not about the clothes. Muslim men base forcing women to cover up on "hard" facts of exactly the "sun orbits the earth" variety. If you did not think western, you would know that these men think of women as being both naturally disabled (mentally and physically) and inferior in the eyes of Allah (intellectually and morally). This goes far beyond mere decorum and is not at all comparable to office wear vs. bikinis.

Case in point, a few years back I spent a month at an all-women resort in one of the more liberal muslim countries. Once, I happened to swim in front of a local man. To say that he was stunned would be an understatement. His eyes bugged out, he lost his breath, and when he finally managed to speak, he was stuttering. Turns out he quite literally thought that women are physically unable to swim. It was as though he witnessed pigs fly.

What I am saying is, it's easy to take the cultural relativism position until you consider where it leads. As just one example, this is what happens in Saudi Arabia today during rape hearings. A man's testimony is considered fact unless proven otherwise, similar to Western law. A woman's testimony however is considered a presumption, based on these "facts" as loosely quoted from actual Saudi law: women are emotional and as such incapable of sound judgement, women do not participate in public life and as such incapable of understanding what they merely observe, women are forgetful and as such their words are unreliable, and finally, men are by God's will superior and therefore dominate women by default.

So what do you think happens to rape victims when you frame it in those "cultural" terms? By the way, if you think you know where I am going with this, you are wrong - rape victims get sent to jail for the crime of being in the company of a male non-relative in the first place. When you get down to actual lives of actual people, it's not quite as conveniently multi-culti anymore, is it?

So let's not be careful of what we are criticizing. When a tradition is practiced by a whole people, it's cultural norm. When it's forced on a minority that's unable to defend itself - even if said minority has been slowly beaten or acculturated into docile agreement - it's perfectly ok to say it's asinine and just plain wrong.
the risk/reward is traditionally awful, relative to the other options available to US citizens

Mind you, this is not true for every US citizen, and it could change. If you can't get a job, getting a graduate degree is a lot better than taking to drink. (Unless your graduate degree drives you to drink, which I have seen happen. Try to remember that doppelbock is not a food group!)

But the original submitter is fortunate enough to have three job opportunities, at least, so that doesn't seem to apply in this case.
Gears is great. "Flaky connection mode" is even better.
While I agree, I also think there is more to it than that, such as how Americans value education.

I would be interested in seeing how many PhD students come from affluent backgrounds. How do those statistics compare to foreign students and their backgrounds?
If you learn iPhone programming, you'll learn essentially the equivalent of C++ in the process, so you win on both sides.

If you just try to learn C++ with no clear purpose, I'm not so sure your learning will stick.

So go with the iPhone, you'll enjoy it more and you'll learn just as much.
It's not illegal to ask a question which in answering, the applicant may offer such information.

Illegal: Are you a U.S. citizen?
Where were your parents born?
What is your native language?

Legal: Are you authorized to work in the U.S.?
What languages do you speak?

Illegal: Are you married?
Do you have, or plan to have children?
Have you ever been divorced?
What do you do for child care?

Legal: Are you willing to relocate?
Are you willing and able to put in the amount of overtime and/or travel the position requires?

Illegal: Are you a U.S. citizen?
What is your religion?
Are you practicing?

Legal: Does your religious affiliation, if any, interfere with your working in this position?

Illegal: How old are you?

Legal: Are you over 18?

The very first interview question I ask is "Tell me about yourself".
I'm pretty knowledgeable about Lisp so if these ideas could be implemented just by using some existing tools together I'd probably know. This article goes much further than that.

As high-level as Lisp is, it's still a general-purpose, turing-complete language and as such there's always going to be a DSL that's better suited than it to solve a particular domain-specific problem.

While it's true that you can embed DSL's in Lisp easily with macros, that doesn't address the editing issue at all. Current IDE's are not so easily extensible to support the high-level semantics of new DSL's, so even if your DSL is 20x more expressive than vanilla Lisp in your domain, you lose a lot of that productivity to the lack of tool support for it which we've grown accustomed to having with general-purpose languages (syntax highlighting, dependencies, reverse-dependencies, parameter hinting, refactoring, etc).
I believe that I'm placed here on Earth with a purpose and a plan

I stopped believing long ago, and this feeling is the one thing I miss.

Ironically, perfectionism could be just the thing that drove me away from religion. I could not accept to believe in something that does not entirely make sense.
slaps forehead

...a clusterfuck that was 2 years in the making.
Life is all about taking chances. Do what you think is best to further your career.
I'm not sure if you're joking. It has always been the case that you could run Lisp on stock hardware. Lisp machines were just an optimization for back in the day when hardware was slow and Lisp compilation techniques weren't well-known.
I've been waiting for this for what seems line eons.
Found it in the news.arc page. About 1/4 the way down. Do a search for ranking.
How about authentication?
Well to release gears to a application like reader or docs is easy cause your userbase is small. Gmail is a HUGE product with thousands of users and to even release something like that to labs you need complete protection of not only the data but also security for your DBs.

Reader and Docs were simply there to ensure the safety, if they went down due to security issues not that many people would be concerned.
this is "new" only if you don't know ruby or lisp.
I'm not sure I agree with your assessment about which is a faster route to failure. A startup can definitely be a fast route to failure. Working in an established corporation can be a startling experience though. Sometimes people seem to do absolutely nothing and collect a nice bonus or raise at the end of the year, etc. On the other hand, when I started grad school, it was very clear that some students were in over their heads and they were mostly gone by the first semester. Other people did take longer to realize that grad school was not for them, but the largest group of drop outs seemed to happen around the one semester mark. I think a lot of people just have their preconceived notions of grad school undone, and almost always in a negative way.
I think it goes something like this:

The People paid taxes to the government for the bailout, Citi got some of that money, which allowed them to survive, which allowed them to pay dividends to its shareholders.

Therefore, Citi is using tax dollars to pay its shareholder dividend.
I've heard this sentiment echoed numerous times (esp. by people who love Python).Could you guys clarify more as to the different things to keep in mind while writing "good" Java? Are there examples of Java projects you'd consider good and worth learning from?

As far as Python (and dynamic languages in general) goes, I haven't heard any good responses to Ted Dziuba's blog post: http://teddziuba.com/2008/12/python-makes-me-nervous.html
I can see that a startup would prefer Python/Ruby to Java, but what about bigger projects?
AMap: Argument Map
I wouldn't be surprised if the P2P networks have less available bandwidth than the CDNs.
How Google Will Fix Cloud Computing
BS. I am not defending culture. But you are inserting narrative. Exactly the way these 'men' are.

The reality is that it is not 'Muslim men forcing women to cover up.' It is society forcing women to cover up. Culture. The reality is that culture is almost always coercive & has many irrational elements. Dress codes particularly so. The fact that they base it on supposed hard facts is irrelevant. People always think they have hard facts backing up their irrational convictions. Covering women is a fact of virtually all societies. Including the US or wherever you're from.

As I said in the original. I do not agree with the conventions of Saudi. I don't like them. There are many cases of women being disadvantaged to the point where they have no hope of a satisfying life. That needs to be opposed. But when opposing there is a danger of considering all opposition equal. Taking anecdotes like yours as seriously indicative of any liberal Muslim country is like getting behind Khomeini because you oppose the Shah State.
Ahh the joy of manufacturing. Each manufacturing plant pays for tons of raw materials, engineers to design the product, engineers to design the machine the workers are working, security inspectors to make sure the machines are safe, government regulators, now cascade that down to the machine makers. I haven't even got to the-general public side of things (food, shopping).

I seriously doubt that more peripheral jobs are created per startup than those destroyed per manufacturing. But hey maybe I'm biased I did grow up right outside of Detroit.
Not really. It's freedom defending itself. The freedom to take away your own freedom...sounds kind of silly don't you think?
Cuban argues that serving many simultaneous video streams is expensive, but what's the ratio between simultaneous streams and total viewers?
Register before you try? No, thanks.
"Can't we do both?"

Yes. If I may interpret Heinlein, he wasn't saying that you need to be an expert in each of those things... he was saying you should be able to do it.

You still can be an expert in some things too, as long as it's not at the expense of those things.

(I'm not saying I agree; I don't entirely disagree or agree. I'm just trying to explain what he was saying, as best as someone else can divine his opinions.)
"This is huge"

no it isn't: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=452906

"The US allowable limit for mercury in bottled water (and tap water) is 2000 parts per trillion. The report documents a maximum of 350 parts per trillion in Quaker Oatmeal to Go.

Omitting that data which provides context probably tells you a lot about the people who wrote the report."
Hrm, if Python's OK, I think I've seen one either in the examples of the Win32 extensions, or the SpamBayes project has an Outlook extension (not a skeleton though).
Any chance we can do away with this kind of nit-picking now? I'd hate for it to get out of hand like it is at "that other site".
Will it be getting autosync?

It always bothered me that I had to wait for Google Reader + Gears to download before I left the house.
Also, I think with Gmail its a bit harder to decide how much to store on your local drive. I believe Reader just stores your unread stuff, but with email you often want to search or reference old messages, so its a substantially more complicated thing to deal with UI-wise.
I don't find this at all. Most of the .Net tools and things I use are free and open source: NHibernate, Rhino.Mocks, NUnit, CruiseControl.Net, NAnt, Wix, Windsor, Quartz, log4net.

Admittedly good profilers aren't free, and nor is the obligatory ReSharper. But for the most part all the extra utilities and things I've needed are readily available and open source.
Why must the shareholder get stuck holding the bag? It's not like they get special inside knowledge or treatment. We're punishing the people who bought Citi's story instead of the ones who ran it into the ground?
I think the definition of "later in life" makes a big difference. Five years is probably not a big deal in my experience (I worked and traveled for 3 years before grad school). As far as startups, I think you are probably in a much better position to do a startup when you're young if you need to live on a near zero budget, since you are less likely to have a family, etc.
I think you're right, the little c++ programming I have done has been an exercise in frustration. But it was mainly because of my lack of skill. And I do think that iPhone programming would me more fun...
Well that was quick! Sold out!
I presume that in most cases FactoryFactories exist for testability, and aren't created just to check that off on the enterprise checklist ;)
Short answer: because drug dealing gangs are organized like McDonalds franchises where most "foot soldiers" make minimum wage or less while the leaders make hundreds of thousands of dollars.