skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We all have different perspectives depending on the school, the subject, the adviser, the project, and how many years you're currently at in your PhD career.

To speak purely from experience, I would have to say that I had similar choices coming out of my undergrad. I went directly into a PhD program. The first two years I hated my life, and I would have agreed with you then. Now, my life has completely changed.

First of all, it takes a while to build a new community. Grad school (and just life after college) is just different. You are no longer a part of the same social groups. You also have to find a project you are passionate about. For the first two years I was working on something I hated. I made a critical decision to switch and I haven't looked back.

Second, coming back to do PhD is not easy. As more time passes from undergrad, the more bills you have to pay, the harder it is to get recommendations, and the higher expectations will be. Passing your qualifying exam may be tougher.

Third, a PhD does not rail you to anywhere. It OPENS doors. American students do not fully comprehend this fact, and as such, American PhD students are the minority in most PhD programs.
I'm a little surprised "21" wasn't mentioned yet. The movie, like the book "Bringing Down the House", is a fictionalized account of a true story about how the MIT blackjack club took Vegas casinos for many thousands of dollars.
You forgot to add that the US government heavily subsidizes corn (and a few other crops) as well.
This guy is pulling "facts" out of thin air left and right.

The average person doesn't trust computers, automobile mechanics or lawyers

Hello? Statistics? Data? Evidence? I guess those are obsolete too now that we have the cloud. You see Dare, unlike with automobile mechanics, people have an alternative with things like storage. They have plenty of easily available storage right on their computer. Also, people don't trust mechanics with charging a fair price. To apply the mechanics analogy to clouds, it would be like a mechanic that goes out of business and takes your car with him, never to return again.

Given the massive adoption of the Web from search engines and e-commerce sites to Web-based email and social networking services, it is clear that the average computer person trusts the cloud enough to part with their personal information and their money.

Search engines have nothing to do with giving up personal information. Web-based email has been successful because people associate email is very much associated with the web (think of all the sites that need to email you in some way). In what sense are social networks cloud-like?

the average computer user doesn't have a data backup strategy than it is likely to occur if their information is stored on some Web company's servers

Another unjustified claim. Giving a personal anecdote is not proof.

Articles like these make me more and more confused about what the cloud really is. Is it just about storing information online? In that case, this entire phenomenon is hyped up several degrees more than "web 2.0" and should be thought of as nothing more than marketing-speak. Storing information online is nothing to be excited about, how sexy does "cloud" sound when you realize it just means some data is saved on a network of servers somewhere.
This view is not only ignorant, I think it is dangerous.

We should only trust institutions that are capable of meeting the real challenges we face today. But neither the problems of hosting 6->9 billion people on earth nor figuring out how to capitalize on the vast knowledge we've gained over just the past 100 years were anticipated by existing institutions.

We don't have longstanding traditions around the roles of 'internet entrepreneur' or the 'genetic programmer'. Why? Because they're not old enough; they haven't been around long enough for a halo of rich meaning and culture to form around them. The real economic value (let alone environmental/social value) of modern roles have not had time to become embedded in longstanding tradition.

If we make decisions based on tradition, we blind ourselves to everything that is made possible by the unique place in history we find ourselves in. I think it's a dangerous time to do so. You cannot live as though nuclear warheads have not been invented, just because it feels good to respect old institutions. You cannot live as though there are 500 million people on the planet, when there are 6 billion, just because it feels good to follow in the footsteps of your forefathers.

Human culture does a fantastic job of making people feel important by building rich traditions around important roles in society. For 99% of human history that was probably very useful; most of the time it made sense to adapt to existing institutions, because they were likely to be around for the rest of your life. But that's no longer true.

I think "life" asks us to wake up and smell the coffee. Neither the problems we face today nor the tools that may solve them are embedded in tradition and institution. The slower we are to adapt, the longer we remain stuck on old habits, the more harm we'll cause by pouring energy into systems designed to solve yesterday's problems.
one simple idea: put a big number in the header or on the homepage with how many terms you have.
I found this to be a good guide to the design of a resume:

http://www.lifeclever.com/give-your-resume-a-face-lift/

It discusses fonts, layout with a good eye for design.
"Mexicoke", with sugar instead of HFCS, is the real "classic" Coke!
I agree that other stuff is interesting, even book reviews, movies, and politics, but I don't think HN should be a classified advertising space.
Go to the big vendor, try it out there. In the meantime learn how to launch, promote, grow a solution with a safety net. You'll have other ideas. When you do you'll be able to do them on their own and use all the advantages of what you've learned to push it through.
What is the innovation? Don't all binaural recordings sound like this?
How are you planning on tackling each task? Do you have a project in mind that you will create using either c++ or objc/cocoa touch?

Plus, does it have to be "either/or"? Spend a few days learning one, spend a few days learning the other. You should have gotten to some non-trivial level with each one and more of a taste for what you actually want to do.
Sounds like you should be able to learn either objective c or c++ pretty quickly, as they both have bits in common with c# and java.

I would recommend coming up with some project in either language that interests you, and gives you a reason and a purpose to learn the language.

Do you want to learn for personal projects, or for your job?
As others said - don't do PhD right away. Take a break from the school and have a closer look at other options first.

For one you may discover that you can do cooler stuff in less time and to more satisfaction. For two you may notice that not all PhDs are created equal.

I had a choice of doing PhD when I was graduating (that was in Eastern Europe and it required getting an approval, a recommendation and god knows what else, so it was more of a privilege than an opportunity) and decided not to. Now, looking back, I'm pretty sure the stuff I worked on in a past 10 years would easily get me a PhD or two. It also earned me enough money so I can actually go back to school and do that PhD ... only if I wanted to :)
IPhone Air Mouse
1. Start-up

2. PhD

3. Corporate job

Order is from "earlier the better" to "later is better" order.

I would also suggest you read this: http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Choices-Practical-Making-Decisio...
Might as well throw in all the Philip K. Dick movies. Total Recall, Minority Report, Paycheck, A Scanner Darkly, and some others.

Of the collection, Paycheck is probably the most hacker-related movie, as the main character is a reverse-engineer.
Yep. It's obviously not hidden :-)
Do you have a sense of which one you'd regret punting MOST? I can't imagine not getting a PhD gnawing at you for the rest of your life unless you love deep academia.

I can't imagine regretting punting a job offer from BigCo, but people are different.

The startup idea sounds cool, but making a better (or at least decent) mousetrap is really just an entry fee for attacking the sales/distribution problems associated with enterprise software. Hopefully you or your partner are good at sales and eager to do it.

I think most people are likelier to regret punting on a risky choice than the safe choice.
Back to p2p networks then, is it?
Kindle should be software, not hardware. And it should run on as many different devices as possible--including my mobile phone, on which I read the newspaper and HN every day.
I think they are really trying to discourage usage. It used to be a nice, fast, and simple http server (when it was originally written), but from a quick look it appears that they made all "enterprisy" with FactoryFactories and whatnot.

Java the language is ok, but I the culture is dangerous.
My ASP.NET is a little rusty, but I did a fair bit upon a time. Bottom line, if you drink the Kool-Aid and do it their way, it's not so bad. If you try to translate some other web stack concepts into ASP.NET, you're going to be very frustrated.

Specific things to understand:

Page cycle. Critical.
ASP.NET events.
Viewstate (nice if you don't lean too hard on it)
App_Code/App_Data directories.
Master pages (heh)

Also MS has some funky way of handling javascript that is non-standard. You add a javascript handler in Page_Load or something like that. I wasn't doing JS back then so can't tell you more. If use a lot of JS you'll want to understand how the IDs for ASP.NET controls are generated.

I tried to use a UserControl in a project and wasn't satisfied, couldn't get the different pieces to see each other and talk to each other correctly. Try before you fly.

I'd recommend finding a source of examples and starting there.

(P.S. If anyone else is curious like me about why someone would want to move from RoR & Django to ASP.NET, read the first post on n00bnotes, it's explained there.)
That's already in progress. Also, many of the core devs that I know about run OS/X so it does get a lot of flexing.
Some good points - I agree with hs saying 'do the scariest thing'. While you're young. I think this means either the startup or the PhD. But you sound more interested in the startup - you didn't even mention your intended research area!

A PhD is lots of really hard and thankless work, and if you're not really excited about it at the beginning, you won't finish, and that's the worst thing you can do.

So - unless you're hiding your passion for research in your post, I recommend the startup.

I'm sure you know about them, but just in case: the AML field as represented in the Wikipedia article (and the sales report PDF it linked to) missed one company I know of who's been doing AML services 'since 1993', called Logica: http://www.logica.com/risk+and+compliance/350234053
This is exactly the right answer.

The key here is that you've got to fail quickly when you're young. And no matter how smart you are, a PhD is simply not a fast form of failure -- it takes years just to get a sense of what the research life is like, let alone know if you'll be any good at it. A PhD is something to pursue after your confident that all other, faster options are deemed undesirable.

The only exception I'd make, is if you're one of those rare people who knows that you want to be a professor, with no doubts whatsoever; in that situation, you should get into the best graduate school possible, as soon as possible, and never look back.

That said, if you're asking the rest of us what you should do, then you don't really want to be a professor.
Use a serif font for headings and a sans font for text. For code blocks or anything requiring monospace be sure it clearly defines characters (like profont) such as 0.

You can go all Sans-Serif or all Serif but it won't be the same as combining the two. Going Sans-Serif for headlines and Serif for text kind of works but you have a narrower range of choices.

We use a Serif font for headlines and a Sans-Serif for body text, freeing us up to use the Sans-Serif font exclusively in certain situations for headlines where needed, and the Serif font for bolder statements.
Yes, I actually do have tasks for each. I have been doing some work with MAPI (messaging API) and see an opportunity to create a subscription based website doing electronic forensics. That would be on the c++ side.

On the iPhone/objective-C side, I have a project in mind integrating iPhones with a dieting website. So many choices, so little time...
FactoryFactory sighting!

http://code.google.com/p/opengse/source/browse/trunk/transpo...
The meat of the article:

After you have narrowed the pool of applicants down to those with the skills, experience, and knowledge to do the job, ask each candidate one question:

What do you do in your spare time? [...]

people are often successful not despite their dysfunctions but because of them. Obsessions are one of the greatest telltale signs of success. Understand a person's obsessions and you will understand her natural motivation. The thing for which she would walk to the end of the earth.
It probably doesn't make a huge difference, but I don't think the OP is in the US.
"Do not do your Ph.D. now. There is no rush."

I think it becomes harder to do a PhD later in life, whereas it seems easier to me to do a startup at any time.
That's a funny kind of freedom.
Until Windows is a free platform, I think you'll always find that it's relatively difficult to find, use, and develop free software there and that the users of the platform will tend to be people who care less about free software. Having said that, things would be better for free software contributors and users if Microsoft were merely passively uninterested in software freedom.

I think the first thing for them to do is to stop actively opposing the free software community. Microsoft has repeatedly attacked free software projects on the .NET platform, from NUnit to NAnt to NDoc, by launching alternatives with few or no technical advantages. This not only destroys momentum, but it strengthens the cultural tendency among Microsoft customers to distrust anything that does not originate in Redmond.

Lately Microsoft has released some of their software under liberal licensing terms. I think this won't help much, so long as they discourage and hamper participation beyond consumption by members of the public.
What about all the old people being born?
4 startups making australia an enterprise 2.0 hub
If I had a cofounder with an interest in finance, I would choose the startup path.
What about our world today makes it so different from 500 years ago? Both are run by people, and people haven't changed.
My real interest is in getting to the "next level." Being self-employed for the past 12 years has been good but now I want to start my own business(es) and be an entrepreneur. Building subscription based websites is one of the ways I plan to accomplish that.

One of my "problems" is that I get excited about all sorts of things so I really need to focus on getting projects finished. That's why I feel I need to be in an either/or place right now, so that I don't over extend myself...
"Third, a PhD does not rail you to anywhere. It OPENS doors. American students do not fully comprehend this fact, and as such, American PhD students are the minority in most PhD programs."

American students are a minority in PhD programs because the risk/reward is traditionally awful, relative to the other options available to US citizens. The calculation is different for foreign students (particularly those from emerging economies), which is why you see more of them in graduate schools.
What do you do in your spare time?

IANAL, but I've heard warnings that this question might be illegal since (a) it isn't directly related to an applicant's ability to do a job, and (b) it is likely to reveal information about the applicant's marital status, children or lack thereof, ethnicity, and/or religion.
Deployment is less convenient (fewer Windows webhosts, especially on the low end).

If you don't run Windows, Visual Studio becomes less attractive, cutting out the free unix and Mac crowd.

Also, their marketing is just... not as nice. Compare rubyonrails.org to asp.net. One says 'Web development that doesn't hurt', and has big clickable pictures. The other is ugly and seems to be selling stuff.

When you're just starting out, the little things like that matter.
Can't we do both? In a way, I prefer specialization. Then I don't have to think so much about what I'm doing, and can spend more time thinking about more interesting things.

It's interesting how now we think being a fulfilled person means being able to do a bunch of stuff. That just seems exhausting to me. People aren't really so interested in the skills, anyways. It just makes them look cool to others, which is what they really care about. Then the process becomes self perpetuating. It's a very roundabout and unsuccessful way of making good friends.
iPhone, iPhone, iPhone. If you know OOP and C (that's regular C), you can pick up Objective-C in a matter of hours. If you don't know C already, you'll have to learn it anyway as part of C++.

C++ is not generally a language people ought to learn unless they have to.
I was a professional PHP developer for 4 years before picking up Drupal. I studied it. I read books on it. I built a half dozen sites with it. I participated in the forums. I submitted a couple patches. One thing I never did is "untar the package on the server" because I'm a real developer and of course I have my dev environment set up locally. Deployments are pulled from source control.

My closing statements were definitely hyperbole, but I fundamentally stand by them, both as a web designer and a developer. My opinion comes from experience, which I believe is more informed than looking at a bunch of sites without knowing what went in to each one.

The thing with Drupal is that it caters to generic needs very well. It will get you 95% of the way on any project with moderately standard functionality. However the last 5% includes fine design and usability touches that I take as a point of professional pride.

I had one project where I built the whole thing in Drupal in about 20 hours. After crossing the finish line, the client was unhappy with the checkout flow from the e-commerce section. I wasn't happy with it either, but it was just the way the module worked. Although there was no reason we couldn't re-work the e-commerce module, there was no modularity or unit tests to help with this kind of refactoring. I estimated the rewrite to be somewhere in the 20-80 hour range given the potential for massive breakage. In the end we decided to cut our losses and spend 40 hours rewriting in Rails. We fixed a lot of other design details along the way, and we have a lean 2000-line code base that we could extend in any reasonable fashion. Sure we couldn't drop in a forum/gallery/blog/library at the drop of a hat, but is it more important to have a million pieces of generic functionality at the tip of your fingers or to get the core user experience correct? It's bad enough when you have to fight with the client to get the UI right, but what I find truly unbearable is when everyone's on the same page, the ideal UI is clear, the logic is simple, yet you're encumbered by technology that's designed to solve 1000 extra problems you don't have at all.
True, but, as GK Chesterton says, tradition is just democracy extended temporally.
What a fine recipe for recovery: every nation for itself, make companies buy only what's politically-favored, reduce competition, reduce world trade.

(Those were all popular-but-misguided mistakes that made the 1930's depression deeper and longer.)
a good traffic deal pays based on the turnover generated at the destination site, I'd definitely pass on a 'one time fee' per signup, unless it is very substantial.
Not entirely true, even Brooks on "The Mythical Man Month" suggests to Plan to throw one away.

So the suggestion isn't "the path to madness". The way to avoid the Second System Effect is simply to make a commitment not to develop new features on the rewrite. This second system will do the same as the first one except the code will be better.

An example of a successful project that did this is Subversion they pretty clearly said that they wanted to Create a CVS equivalent with certain annoyances corrected. That clear purpose and definition helped them avoid feature creep.
"the culture"

There is no single Java culture.
A word of warning about web startups: what you find interesting is not necessarily what the average web surfer would find interesting.

In fact, it's even worse than that: what you find interesting is not necessarily something that the average web surfer could even understand.

Of course, academia has its own problems (e.g., your peers don't really care much about your success and have their own agendas, which causes problems with peer review). Also, publishing stuff isn't really anywhere near as rewarding as having a successful web startup.
I love it - but I try to only have 1 can every few days at most - but only cause here in .au its sugar !

If it was readily available I would drink it all the time (which would be quite bad for me).
Ask HN: How does HN rank the comments section?
I found a place in the FAQ where it describes that its the votes divided by the time, but was wondering if I could see the more specific answer?

Wheres the true code to see how they are ranked?
Abbayas are also good for men to hide in. One of the terrorist leaders during the Algerian insurgency often used an abbaya to sneak around. No one stopped him because they thought he was just a Muslim woman (couldn't see any facial features), who have no leadership roles in the culture.
Once you get many "enterprisy" minds, they will be screwing stuff badly. Startups usually proven to build nice and simple solutions, without fat. ;-)
Today, I just finished a book called "Pointers on C" by Kenneth Reek. I read it to come up to speed on pointers and now feel comfortable with that. That's why I posted today, I am now at the fork in the road...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=451866
Check out Freecycle.org. They are linked to Yahoo now so you need a yahoo account but i find the service quite good. However it isn't good enough to find something specific you are looking for - essentially it's hit and miss.
I read the article in the Economist discussing that paper you cite the other day.

(a) Health is an end in itself.
(b) Tackling non-letal diseases that keep people from working, will raise living standards.
I think the misguided mistake was giving Citigroup too many tax dollars.
Not only that but a lot of traffic on NM is from corporations. And I mean, there's like 50% of traffic coming from various F1000 & banking institutions. Problem with them is that some are too afraid to post anything that might be traced back to them.

I'm thinking about adding SSL and removing IP logging to facilitate communication. Not sure yet what the best solution would be.
A big part is that more of us live longer, more healthily and are literate, traveled, multilingual, interdependent, etc.

500 years ago the neighboring village was often a major threat to your existence, crops, etc, as well as a possible disease vector.
Thanks for the plug mixmax! :)
Why _web_ startup? Just because he'll be selling 'Softwar as a Service'?
He is also probably overestimating because he isn't including any competitors that were put out of business. That's okay, any estimate of a total number of jobs impacted is going to be fuzzy.
Agreed, but I think paul is referring to the most prevalent culture, which, unfortunately, has a tendency to over-engineer.

Here's a completely unscientific comparison:

Java: http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=Factory...

Python: http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=Factory...
This is mostly outdated information and these issues can be avoided by using ASP.NET MVC instead of Webforms.
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