skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard while undergrads. David Filo, Jerry Yang, Sergey Brin, Larry Page didn't bother to finish grad school at Stanford and dropped out too. On the other hand, we can think of Craig Venter, Andrew Grove, Gordon Moore, Carver Mead... all of whom obtained PhD's.

The usefulness of a degree depends on what field one is working on. In the Software arena, smart kids out of high school can do a lot if college is not holding them back. But try to start a laser / semiconductor / biotech company with high school kids if you dare ;-)

One might not need a degree to be a good software entrepreneur, but there are many other entrepreneurs who don't live in the software world. Sure, HN is focused on software, but it seems to me that it's irresponsible to promote the idea that all that entrepreneurs need is passion and hard-work. Necessary but not sufficient.
For instance, poets who previously received two dollars per line now get ten.
I was really talking about the specific work (or practice) that goes into being great at something, not about misspent youth.

Let's take a computer science degree and a ten year path to great (whatever that means). If you just measure by time spent, you're maybe coming out of college 5-20% of the way down the path.

But I'd argue that the computer science degree isn't specific enough to count nearly that much. Really, you're graduating as an broadly experienced non-expert who then has to put a boat load of time into developing a specific expertise.

The value of that time spent outside of college completely trumps the value of the time spent in college, even if the amount of time spent is equivalent.
It doesn't matter how well your language is designed - it is not easy to write libraries from scratch for regular expressions, HTTP serving, or emitting json. All things that are pretty handy for hacking together a website.
This is basically an off-topic submission, but what the heck. In this age when bankers are getting mega-million bonuses amid financial turmoil, let's not forget that even poetry magazines with 200 million dollar balance sheets are still paying pennies on the word.
Richard Easts Internet Marketing Lessons
Richard East has definitely demonstrated that he is worth in Internet Marketing, as everything he addresses seems to be catered to our business, and is instantly applicable.
The classic has to be the ArsDigita story. It seems that Philip Greenspun has removed the story from his site, but I found it elsewhere.

http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/
JQuery Ajax Experience Framework Videos
Apple files patent for hover-ready touchscreen
If you are too tired to work effectively, first sleep, then work. Set your alarm clock very early. Then hopefully the adrenaline will help you work. If you still miss your deadlines, be honest, apologize, and try to work something out.
I've certainly never felt my lack of a degree to be a hindrance in any area except maybe fundraising. PG wrote once that he had come to the same conclusion but still had trouble believing it. Most investors never get there at all.

And I'd imagine even among those like Fred, they still find themselves impressed by a team of 4 CS grads from MIT. Thankfully for those of us who college wasn't for, customers are significantly less likely to read your resume.
I think demonoid (ignoring all questions of its legality) already does Oink-2.

It has a huge incentive for users to behave (I wonder if this would work for HN too):

+ registration is for free, but you need someone to invite you.

+ if you do something that causes you to get banned, the person who invited you gets banned, too. Makes people think a few times before doing something stupid.
Congrats, David and the rest of the team!

I have been aware of the existence of Lift for a while now - but I have never been able to understand the purpose of the "Lift Demo". When you open the demo, the menus on the left seems to be a list of features. But clicking on those links do not lead to pages where you can see how those features can be implemented in Lift. Overall, you get thrown into this app with little guidance on what is happening.

DHH's video, IMO, did a great job of introducing Rails to developers. Is there a similar video demonstrating the basic functionality of Lift? I think this was mentioned in Scala Liftoff meetup, but was one such video done?
Don't suppose you know of any HN/YC-related meetups in the area?
Get to the shower as quickly as possible. I find that I tend to snooze or go back to sleep if I don't immediately get out of bed and go directly to the shower when my alarm goes off. If I give myself any time to think about it, any time at all, I can usually rationalize another 10-60 minutes of sleep, and then I'm done for.

On a similar note, I always place my alarm clock on the opposite side of the room, which forces me to get out of bed to stop the noise.
Turn links in a user's profile into real links. (I thought it used to be this way?)
Jason Calacanis: What to do if your startup is about fail
I stopped drinking a 6 weeks ago and I've lost 15 pounds.

You might be surprised how much alcohol (not just the calories) is contributing to your fat ass.
I graduated high school in 1994. I'd have graduated college in 1998 with a CS degree. Two startups I held key roles in sold in 8-figure deals in that time period. I even got to do some academic research. I guess I'm unhappy I didn't take linear algebra (really!), but I think I'd have had to have been made of stupid to go to college in '94.
Sample Chapter From "Ruby Best Practices"
I'm on this "diet" and have lost about 45 pounds so far.

Getting skinny always seemed like black voodoo or something. Looking at it the way I would look at hacking together a system made it really, really, really easy.
What's the game you're talking about, and what are the contacts you suppose you'd be making in school?
This chapter is basically the meta-programming / DSL stuff if not by that name. It gives a good sampling of the overall feel for the book. Feedback is very welcome. The book will be released under a CC license 9 months after it hits the shelves, so it will eventually be an open community resource.
OK, I know this is off topic, but... I read this article an hour or so ago, and I have had the Inspector Gadget theme song stuck in my head since then.

Someone make it stop :)
I wound up in the same situation in an interview in 2000. They asked me to do Towers of Hanoi nonrecursively. I think I refused. Didn't get the gig. Things worked out anyways (ironically, I wound up at a spinoff of UMich, working for a professor and his postdoc).

If you don't have a degree and you go interview at (what turns out to have been) a Stanford spinoff, brush up on your useless CS 101, is I guess my life lesson there.
What city are you in? Go get some Yerba Matte, the loose kind.

But about 1cm of it in the bottom of a french press, and about 2cm of milk in the bottom of a 20oz glass. Mix.

Then add a few squirts of peppermint. (like 4 squirts).

I'm serious, this concoction has gotten me through more all-nighter-afters than anything else ever.
I really do not understand this blue ray being a dead format subject. I for one do not have the internet capabilities to download a cd sized file in a reasonable amount of time let alone an HD quality sized movie, and highly doubt my area will gain access to anything faster anytime soon.

If I did have the internet to do this I would also have to invest in the harddrive space to store it, be on a tivo or a ps3 or w.e and using digital technology means I do not have a hard copy of something which I prefer, as well as most people one or two generations older than me.

If anything blue ray came to soon (not many people have high definition televisions nor the money to invest in a player).
On museums: Define your goals and then don't suck
I can't really speak to why the rails core team made this default, I think it's a step backwards.

"It's cool." Seriously though, they probably picked it because it requires no configuration. It also avoids hitting the database for things like "Logged in as jrockway", which is always a good thing.
We don't do formal ones (we don't do anything formal), but we often ask alumni individually.
Pretty small screen.

I've done a little bit of Trac source browsing on the phone with Safari, but even with small fonts, you have to do a lot of horizontal scrolling.

It's possible to read, but I can't imagine editing. Keyboarding is so danged painful...
Las Vegas Running Out of Water Means Dimming Los Angeles Lights
That must have been fun. Was there anything really groundbreaking going on that hasn't ever seen the light of day, without breaking your NDA of course :)
Magic properties make Firefox synchronously load the Java plugin
Let's keep one thing in mind: financial engineering is not like civil engineering. It is not about helping society. It is about making money.

With that in mind, the practitioners of financial engineering aren't really doing so bad (the individuals, not their companies).
The point about Google having a datacenter in Oregon has nothing to do with mismanagement in California and everything to do with the availability of cheap, green, hydro power in the Pacific Northwest.
Seems like the cookie issue could be addressed by running a portable Firefox from a USB drive...and probably safer and easier than trying to make cookies/sessions behave a way they weren't intended to. I would imagine a lot of what you need would follow.
Well, after 8 kids (now 8 to 25), all homeschooled, and working at home for the past 20 years, I think the only solution is to get a somewhat secluded office where you can retreat. (Locked, if necessary.)

(Though having a small child beating on the door and screaming to be let in can be embarrassing at times when you're on the phone. I don't use the phone much any more. ;-)
I stopped reading right around this:

This is a state whose politicians, public sector unions and advocacy groups have been living in a fantasy world of overspending, investment-deadening taxation and job-killing regulation.

Now I know the article is just whining from someone who doesn't want to pay taxes.
Tweeting via texting is a big plus for me - I don't have an iPhone/Android phone with a data plan.
Imagine if Twitter became a Google App
So, one of the new things about Scheme in the late 70s was having TCO in the spec. Strictly speaking, it's not Scheme (though it may be just another lisp1) if tail-recursion isn't baked in.
Gvke - Grey's Anatomy Montage 5x17 I Will Follow You Into The Dark
Why Is Online Bingo Becoming Increasingly Popular?
Unlike many games that are specifically designed for playing online, bingo was not originally an online game. Bingo is almost 400 years old, it had its origin in Italy, and as such, it certainly did not have the online dimension when it originated. Today when you look at the trend, you will rather be surprised to see how well this game has adapted for the online environment. It is not just the game that has adapted itself, even the bingo fans have responded well to the online versions of bingo.
Crayon Physics is another relaxing game.
I didn't read the article but I'll be honest... I'm really thankful for my education. I taught myself programming when I was young and I thought I knew everything when I went to college. I was thankfully proved wrong.

College forced me to learn a lot of stuff I wouldn't have bothered to learn before. Stuff I had no idea would become useful and if I ever needed it may not have had an idea to look for it.

I have an interest in programming languages and interpreters--college helped me find and cultivate this interest. I'm working on a startup doing a lot of natural language stuff--college gave me the foundation necessary to teach myself the tools of this field quickly.

The theoretical underpinnings of stuff don't go away. Understanding different string matching algorithms can apply to writing an efficient style checker, not just making an asinine version of strcmp.

Granted this is all oriented towards technical stuff. I suppose if I wanted to be just an entrepreneur I could save money and buy a Subway franchise. I don't think a college education is necessary there either (but I'm sure it doesn't hurt).
Dear Paul Buchheit, may I officially request playback a la Etherpad in Gmail and Gdocs?
Just want to make sure the request is made, and I didn't see a better way to do it. If I could sell my karma points back to move this to the top, I would.
The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer
I worry there are people who didn't like us. We've now funded around 300 people, and out of that many there are probably some. But no group has actually told me so far that they thought YC wasn't worth it.
Gerald Weinberg refers to this same concept as "maintenance debt" in his four volume "Quality Software Engineering Series" from the early-mid-90's. I think it's an independent formulation of the same concept. The volume most concerned with it is Vol4 "Anticipating Change" http://www.amazon.com/Quality-Software-Management-Anticipati...

The whole series is definitely worth reading.
"11. Having staffers who you really need to double down and focus walk out the door after you helped make their careers."

Holy shit, is he serious?
> most of the highest karma users
Ones who post articles from PG.
Portable proqramlar
Yeah, the thing that stood out to me was this long tirade about how the state of CA can be so retarded so as to have services for its people... It all just sounded like standard conservative "let-the-market-decide-and-life-will-be-wonderful-for-everyone" platitudes.
this is awesome... i'm switching over from Starling sometime this week I think.
I've noticed this too. But I worry about encouraging people to drop out of college. There are probably a lot who don't really blossom till they get there. Especially those who went to bad high schools.

I think people should at least try a couple years of college, if they can, if only so they know what they're missing if they don't finish.
This sounds great. Right now I'm just using Amazon SQS, which lacks the "blocking fetches" like Starling did. It's probably not feasible to have something similar in SQS due to the distributed nature, but it would be nice, especially for low traffic queues. The vast majority of our SQS requests don't return a message.

They use 0.25 seconds as an example timeout, but I wonder if there's any reason it couldn't be something much higher?
"The last time I looked, biz were owned by people. More important, biz expenses, such as taxes, are paid by people too. As a result, that distinction between "biz" and "people" doesn't make sense."

Maybe you want to elaborate on this point, because I don't get it. How does the fact that businesses are owned by people equate to the fact that they should be protected from taxation from their valuable property?

My impression of Prop 13 was that the intent was to prevent retired people and low-income people who happened to live in an area of rapidly increasing property values from being forced out of their home. This I agree with. To argue that this should necessarily mean that businesses should be protected from paying taxes on property values that go up does not follow for me. What is the greater good achieved by this?
My LinkedIn profile is permanently set to 85% complete because I can't add a college education.

And I'm 100% happy with my decision to drop out of college after 3 months.
Getting off of HN and any other news site would be a start.
How does legally reducing the salary of a current employee work?
I realize that, and I can empathize with your plight. However, just as one would cull a herd or prune flowers, that cruft must also be removed sooner or later, else it will end up killing the entire system. Would this be a plausible explanation for why Windows performance continues to degrade substantially with each version?
He doesn't work at google anymore.
Intro to Clojure - 80 min screencast for non-Lispers (vid)
States and municipalities end up in Chapter 9 (instead of the chapters 7, 11 and 13 that most folks are familiar with). Chapter 9 cannot get rid of debt, it can only "restructure" the payments and interest rates. The reason is because of how courts have interpreted the 14th Amendment.

Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_Uni...

Because of the commas, courts interpret that to say: Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, shall not be questioned.

The only way for a city to ditch their debts would be to disincorporate and stop being a city. Jefferson County in Alabama is looking like the first county (as far as I know) to have to file Ch 9. And I don't belive that any state has filed Ch 9 either.

If it has to go the way of disincorporation, I suspect that CA would end up becoming a minimum of 2 new states.
MountableHDFS
Judge orders defendant to decrypt PGP-protected laptop
I trutly believe (after going through so many such "tricks/hacks") that you can never motivate yourself to enjoy something you "must" do unless you somehow make into something you "want" to do, and then follow it up with specific reasons.

Rather than saying to yourself "I must wake up at 7", why not say "I want to wake up at at 6 so that I can take my time and get ready for work at an easy pace"?

What I'm trying to get at here is that if you find yourself not wanting to do something, or running away from something you "must" do, then there's a real, deeper reason why you feel that way. In the meantime, such "hacks"/etc are only a bandaid solution and you'll be going throught he same cycle over and over again.
"I'm reducing your salary. If you don't like it, quit."
Believe it or not, the site looks that way on purpose. It's supposed to be coolly bleak-looking. I don't love it either, but its not an accident.
It does prove my point I suppose.
The simple formula of 'Calories in - calories out = change in weight' has always been interesting to me. More recently i've been wondering if there is some way to measure calories burned accurately using some sort of skin-contact device. I've seen the "bodybugg",[1] but I have trouble believing a few sensors and a microcontroller is worth $250+.

Anyone have any experience with this sort of electronics? The "bodybugg" website claims that it does its measurements with an accelerometer, a 'heat flux sensor', a temperature sensor, and a sensor that measures galvanic skin response.

The more I look around, the more this looks like a market ripe for a quality start-up.

[1] http://www.bodybugg.com/science_behind_bodybugg.php
Is finding help possible?

Living with a pair of hackers, I frequently run about asking technical questions or getting them to review bits of code. It makes the process a lot faster, and speed helps getting things done.

Good luck to you, mate. I would keep working and only refresh this page every hour or so -- only other people with insane workloads are still up ;)
I second the "don't think it's necessary, but sure it doesn't hurt" stance; I doubt someone would be docked points on an assessment or interview for having a degree right?

Some of us had parents who never stepped foot near a college or university and having their kids graduate with a degree is one of their dreams. Having picked up programming in high school, Computer Science was really the only appealing option. Overall I don't think it was a waste, though some parts were (most general education requirements.) At that age, I don't believe I would have been ready or mature enough to even work a full-time programming job, let alone start some sort of business.
How much do you guys pay for your internet connection per month? What is the speed that you get and where do you live?

Me?
Rs.750 (around $15), 256kbps (Airtel), India (Bangalore).
If you have enough points, you can flag a post and the admins will take a look and maybe remove it.

Or just wait for it to die on its own accord.
No notice or consent required?

Edit: Salary vs hourly make any difference?
I'd hate to be your S/O
(Australian) Web censorship plan heads towards a dead end
I was the one who submitted the original story (<shameless>that's my own blog</shameless>), so I have reasons to be very angry right now, but I don't quite agree with what you said there.

I have lived in New Delhi all my life, and I've seen this city grow. I remember the regular power outages, but that was some 5 or 6 years ago. The power still goes out, but it's a very rare incident. In fact, people of my age are rather surprised when that happens. My parents are, of course, unfazed because they've lived in times when it was considered disturbing when the power didn't go out after every few hours.

I've been with Airtel for about two years now, and so far I've experienced just two problems with my connection, both of which were fixed within hours. I remember the roads being flooded with water and school being cancelled when I was a kid, but that doesn't happen anymore (no matter how hard I wish ;)). MTNLs landlines are the only constant many Indians know in life. Come whatever may, your trusty old MTNL will always work. (MTNL's customer service, OTOH, treats you like shit.)

I wonder how my experiences will compare with those of other Indians. I live in a great neighbourhood in one of the better areas of New Delhi.
"You know what? I just don't like you very much anymore. Pack your shit and get out."

Also legal in most states.
101 Reasons Plus 9 Optimists
If you want more, there's also the fairly recent biography "American Prometheus" (which won a Pulitzer).
The sparse design of the site actually appeals to me. I'm willing to entertain the possibility that I may not be a typical example of the general population of musicians but I was at least once an "artist who was pouring his life into creating music".

The music must speak for its self eventually... why not immediately?
Perhaps incorporating rapid thought in your morning routine as a way to wake up energized?

Anyone have any ideas? In the morning I tend to think kinda repetitively - what are my priorities for today... In the evening I tend to start thinking rapidly when I try to sleep but it ends up keeping me awake.
Reflections on Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson is an absolute must read...
Unless they have a contract, they are at-will employees, meaning you can fire them or reduce their salary at will. On the other side, they can quit at will as well.
How Do You Recruit Passionate People Who Would Work For Free? - The Jun Loayza Interview
Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far
This is one of the most brilliant startup stories I have read in a while. Im not a big calcanis fan and dont think too highly of mahalo, but the amount of wisdom and insight in this post left me reading this over and over again for almost an hour (Normally, I dont read anything 1/10th this long and even if I do, I just skim.)
He is dead serious and that is an incredibly honest and accurate piece of advice.
Suunto T6 owns this market. To use it right, tho', you need to have a VO2max test done.

Also, it's not as simple as that. You might think "I'm eating less so my body must burn fat" but your body is thinking "shit, I'm starving, better conserve energy" and turns down your metabolism, prioritizes fat storage, etc. A whole bunch of survival mechanisms kick in. Cutting more than 500 calories/day doesn't lead to sustainable results. There's no quick fix.
Creative Commons Zero: Waiving Copyrights
Cloud Computing: An Escapist Fantasy?