skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand what you are trying to say, but this article is silly from many points of view. I don't want to answer with wise-ass comments like "you went to the wrong college" and such, so I'll give you a couple of arguments:

- College isn't only CS.

- Pure (computer or not) science isn't 'working for someone'. It's 'learning how to do (computer) science correctly', hopefully.

- Plagiarism is not what you are saying, which is superficial. Citing a paper and using previous work in academia isn't plagiarism, for example. Copying someone else's paper and putting your name on it is. Which IS bad. I can't take a linux distribution and tell the world I wrote it. But I can use it and (depending on the license) sell it. Or make something else with it and add my name on it.

- Performance matters or not depending on the users, obviously. But if you don't know that your algorithms are bad, or if you don't know how to fix them when you hit scaling problems, then what do you do with all your users? Sure, you can hire someone who went to college or learned that somewhere else, but then you'd be supporting the idea that there is no need to be technical to be founders, which is partly true but if google and others taught us something is that the technical founders tend to be able to understand some problems better (and solve them better).

- Learning the concepts behind the list you wrote isn't incompatible with college. If you take some business classes you can learn a lot of it. No one is forcing you not to take those classes or a major in CS and a minor in Economics.

- From college you don't get only the classes, but also the interaction with a lot of smart people, diversity, challenge and many other things. It changes you, hopefully in better.

- Getting excited about being entrepreneurs doesn't always mean the sooner the better. It depends if one is ready. Like with startup ideas, arriving too early may be as bad as arriving late. So, if you quit college for the sake of being an entrepreneur when you are 19 and then you fail, you lost the chance of getting 'more' ready through college.

- Same applies for grad school. You might not need to go to grad school to do anything. But a lot of people change the way they see the world going to grad school, which, if it made you wiser, could be a good quality to have when founding a startup (plus the extra knowledge).

All this to say that if you think that you can say "all this does is this" I think you might want to rethink a little bit, since it's rare that such absolutists ideas about things so controversial are ever correct.
taligent was still horribly wrong then, though it's easy to understand given Apple was a year late to the LTE party and since half his posts are pro-iOS apologies.

My Galaxy Nexus has 4G and has excellent battery life. The AMOLED screen is also, of course, gorgeous.
Very much agree with this. Websites rarely require users to choose a unique username nowadays (email is enough) and it's been a pain hacking Django to work like that, since many email addresses won't fit in the username field.

In fact I always hate it when application frameworks make arbitrary decisions at the schema level on how long usernames, real names, emails, street addresses, etc. can be. I always use varchar(254) myself. (Unless using a schemaless db like Mongo where this is not even an issue.)
Any Ethics course as required for ABET accreditation would have taught you that copyright is substantial in software. Most open source projects require the retention of the copyright notice at the top of every file.
"Education is what something does to you, learning is what you do to yourself. Education is the worst you can do to someone who wants to be creative" Joichi Ito
Ok so as a student who never thought going to college wasn't an option, until about Freshman year of High School I never thought about the fact that some kids didn't go to college.

So I am now a Sophomore in college studying Computer Science, and I whole heatedly think that you can do perfectly fine in the software industry without a degree. I haven't taken any classes that I feel like made me a better programmer. I learned some interesting things and got to spend a semester hacking Lisp but that won't really be what I ever do in a job, so not too beneficial.

With all that said, I wouldn't even consider not going to college. I don't really care that much about getting my degree, obviously I will get it (or in fact a few majors) but that's not why I would recommend college. If you are only contemplating going to a CC then it might be different, but the experiences and fun that I have at school I wouldn't trade for anything. I'd pay the $40k a year to just hang out for four years of my life and have a great time, regardless of whether I was getting an education.

The friends I have made and the confidence I have gained simply by being at shcool and interacting with friends and people on a constant basis are the reasons I love going back to school.

I have a friend who asks me why I don't want to graduate early, I have the credits where I could, and it's simply because college is the most fun I've ever had and I don't know why you would want to give that up.

So that's my opinion, if you can go to a Four Year college and have that experience I think you should jump on the oppurtunity
I will answer 5, 7, and 9. Although there are many ways to answer that are correct or good, these are what seems to work with my temperament.

5. The way I have done this is by a landing page to gauge interest and by getting a handful of customers willing to buy in a recurring fashion as a starting base before significant monetary investment on my part.

7. Get a partner in equity early and outsource or automate everything possible before hiring employees. Hire when the cost of failing to get the right employee will not harm you financially.

9. If none of the directions are obviously better or have data to show why they are better, find a way to get the data to show you which direction is best.

Just my 2 cents.
I disagree.

I'm a senior a very theoretical university and my friends in the CS department often complain:

- "Why should I learn all these sort algorithms? Let some grey beard figure out which one is best for me and wrap it up in sort()"

- "Why do I have to take all these required classes? Why do I have to do a semester of foreign language or a physic pre-requisite?"

- "Why do I have make an entire operating system in this class? When in the real world would I ever need that?"
etc.

Bullshit! It's good to be "T" shaped - studying a very technical area like honest-to-god computer science trains you to dive deep, to be able to confront a problem and approach it analytically. All the prerequisites have given you a stepping stone into understanding, or at least appreciating, other areas. These are very useful skills to have and they certainly make you a more interesting person.

Sure, there are plenty things left out that would be useful for entrepreneurship. Half of my friends in the CS department haven't taken the initiative to learn "real world" development yet with all the shiny tools and most (myself included) have no idea what it takes to run a business. But to say college only "prepares you for the life of a corporate stooge" is a mistake.
Because everybody who studies CS wants to be an entrepreneur? Of course you don't need a degree in Computer Science to develop a technology startup. Web design is a trade skill and should be excluded entirely from an academic curriculum. Sadly, some universities are being pressured into offering it due to increased demand from an influx of wannabe sellouts. I decided to pursue a college degree because I'm interested in solving challenging engineering problems that your two-bit startup and myopic vision couldn't possibly begin to encompass. So, Mr. Kendall, you have it rather backwards: it's not universities that are in the wrong but rather students who come in with maligned expectations and the determination to under-utilize their academic training.
As far as I know the two most popular licenses are MIT:

"The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software"

And GPL:

You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice;
Switching at the level of groups sounds like a terrible idea. Suddenly nobody is using the same software. You think an MS Office-only environment is bad? Try an environment with MS Office, Open Office, Star Office, and Google Docs all used as SOP in different parts of the company.
Thanks to all in this part of the thread for talking so pretty about Knockout - it got me to try incorporating it tonight on a simple interactive page I started recently, and it's a pleasure to use so far. Works nicely in combination with coffeekup, which I also enjoy a lot.
"So, if you quit college for the sake of being an entrepreneur when you are 19 and then you fail, you lost the chance of getting 'more' ready through college."

I hear this a lot (frequently even about passing on college for lucrative, if short-term, opportunities), but I don't get it. This isn't amateur athletics where you have to worry about losing your eligibility and wouldn't be able to get in without an athletic scholarship. You could easily go back to college at age 21 after a year or two of trying to start a business.
I've thought about this question for a while, if I would recommend college or not. Ultimately I've come to realize it has loads more to do with the personality of the individual than going to college or not. Some people are fit to be entrepreneurs, others are not. Some people are good at taking orders, others at giving them. It's not completely black and white, but generally a person leans one way or the other. The given person can change to the other side, though I would say that is less common.
University of Twente, The Netherlands :)
It certainly does. In tech, which would probably be one of the few fields that is like this, it seems open. It seems like if you know what your doing, regardless of your degree, you should be fine. I am sure it varies by company, but with the given climate in the tech field...just go work for someone else.
I'll chime in with the requisite "90% of the time, don't use an mvc framework in the browser." Don't build up a mountain of state for no reason. Use functions and composable, lightweight, short-lived classes.

If I had to choose the 'best' javascript development framework, I'd choose clojurescript, not because it's such a great tool in itself (it is a great tool, though still a bit immature), but because it forces the developer to write javascript in the best possible way: functionally, only holding onto state when it's absolutely necessary.

It's good that there are solid mvc frameworks out there for when they are truly needed, but when the average developer picks one up for a routine web app just because it's the hot new thing, he/she's walking into a minefield for no good reason. Javascript is at its best when it's just a dumb, fast bridge between your server and your ui.
What I got wrong in the Peanut Butter Manifesto
Google Music has a web client that is just as functional as iTunes and doesn't require a 1GB download for every update. Further, Google Music also performs matching now.

Nice completely inaccurate rant. Oh yeah, and Google Music matches at 320Kbps.
Oh, I'm not saying you'll be SOL without a degree. Rather, you might not be able to work at what would otherwise be your top picks or best options.
Also a motion sensor.
Python and Lua are both compiled languages, almost all languages are compiled these days.

For some strange reason, certain misconceptions in CS/programming have half-lives measured in several decades, such as this annoying distinction between interpreters/VMs/compiled languages. We're at least 20 years out from interpreters being meaningfully distinct from VMs and compiled languages.
Nice to see some activity in Lancaster for once. Definitely looking into going as a developer.
I love the economy of lisp implementations in dynamic languages. It's especially nice because you don't have to worry about the memory management.

On the otherhand, I've been interested in doing a lisp in low memory environments (uC's, etc). I've done a dialect in C using a semi-space garbage collector. But I'm curious if anyone's done any work on lisps in resource constrained environments.
Well... I knew he was British, as did some of the people I know that watched the show, and it really didn't have any impact on how we watched it (at least, nothing we noticed ourselves noticing).
The BSD license would like a word with you:

"Redistribution of source code must retain the above copyright notice ..."

Or how about the Apache license:

"You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work,"

Maybe the MIT license:

"The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

and so forth.
Junior - A Native-Looking and Feeling Mobile HTML5 Front-End Framework
Great advice, thank you for it.

I didn't really think about the actual rounding that college provides, I thought of it as simply an accessory to a career, which is exactly why I should follow your advice.

Thank you for that, I really appreciate it.
> Nature is a VERY complex system. When we mess with it, we make incremental visible gains, and run the risk of large, invisible losses.

this is an argument against literally any kind of technology. electricity, medicine, computers, steam engines, light bulbs, animal husbandry, farming, ...
They forgot to say "Are the condoms any good? Our condoms are f*ing great!"
Condoms near any sharp object like keys seems a very bad idea to me, great story though.
I don't know but just a while, even twitter I can access but google was unreachable.
Thanks, I've added it now! I'll be contacting you shortly.
Pass on the frat and join the rugby club. The beer is free and fitness is a by product of participation.
Wow, I hate this advice.

OP, if you are, like I was, completely repulsed by the constant insistence from everyone that you should go to college so you can toke, drink, party, and fuck: take heart, you can get a lot out of college without ever associating with meatheads and frat houses. The idiot carnival is not as prevalent as popular culture would have you believe; you can invest yourself into a hugely rewarding intellectual field, have excellent roommates that don't make you shove strange objects up your ass, and never even learn the name of your school's sports team, if that's more your style.

Also: though it is certainly easy to do all of those things while racking up student loans or mooching the monetary equivalent of a new car off your parents, the implication that you can't do most of those things without (or after) college is simply wrong. I feel much more able to "do whatever I want" now that I'm out of college and successfully making money for a few years.

I think college is important for the fundamentals it provides: data structures, mathematics, a vocabulary that helps you reason about (programming) problems. Exposure to concepts that you wouldn't otherwise know are useful. I met my wife in college too. But at the same time there's a lot that I think was both unavoidable and completely wasteful.

On balance, I feel like I got a lot out of it, and I'm glad that I didn't let the people whose college experience was mainly about sex dissuade me from going. It is what you make of it.
> I think "incremental" is a bit of an understatement if we can, for example, feed tens of millions of humans in parts of the world where conventional crops cannot (yet?) provide reliable and sufficient nutrition, a critical step in reducing poverty.

The problem is that in some parts of the world people are too poor to farm. GMO seed - produced by a company who will lock in farmers to that seed and prevent them from growing on from the crop - is not going to help that.

Kenya has barriers to free trade, which makes its food too expensive for many people to buy. (http://medilinkz.org/east-africa/kenya/37195-kenya-urban-poo...)

Some regions waste too much food, maybe as much as 33% (http://spam.irinnews.org/Report/96485/In-Brief-Southeast-Asi...)

Some more information about food insecurity (http://www.irinnews.org/In-depth/77872/72/A-global-food-cris...) - GMO isn't going to do much against war, HIV, natural disaster, etc.

Better weather forecasting (and education) may help - (http://medilinkz.org/africa/38139-climate-data-has-helped-af...)

This used to be a slide show, but they've broken it. :-/
(http://irinnews.org/Photo/Default.aspx?id=43)

Here's one image, but it's worth noodling through the others. (http://irinnews.org/Photo/Details/201202241150420779/HIV-AID...)

(http://irinnews.org/Photo/Result.aspx?id=43&CountryID=LS)

I'm not anti GMO; I'm just very cautious about allowing huge industry the opportunity to exploit starving children to make massive profits. We heard how agro-chemicals were going to feed the world. They don't. Now I'm hearing how GMOs are going to feed the world. Well, fix the other stuff and maybe I'd be more sympathetic to letting them sell their seed.
Couldn't agree more about the enterprise sentiment. That is why I like things like Grails, that try and drag the enterprise java world, kicking and screaming into the modern era of ruby on rails style mvc and such.

I think Grails mostly succeeds at this modernization, but I have to give fair warning that there are still some enterprisey bits (Spring, which isn't so bad and Hibernate, which will bite you) down in the guts.

edit: Forgot to mention that Groovy is a fantastic, under-appreciated language with some neat features that should get more attention. Groovy is a major selling point for using Grails.
I started school when I was 23, mainly due to pressure from my parents. I was working full time as a VoIP tech however my mom kept pressuring me to get my degree.

I'm 29 now, have worked full time until I was 26, and started my own web development firm at 27 (hired my first two full time employees in 2012).

I'm a few months away from being done with school, and I can honestly say it has been the most worthless investment in my life. Everything I have learned in my positions as a IT Admin to Dev has been on the job.

School has just been a lot of wasted time doing fill in the blank work that I could have spent learning things or bettering my business.
That's an excellent point and I appreciate the input!
Excellent blog post and points, I really appreciate the feedback and your time!
JavaFX on Raspberry Pi
Oh, I agree with you. Since I wrote a lot I didn't want to be so detailed, but basically I meant that I hear a lot of 'college is useless, I can learn by starting a company', and I disagree about the fact that you are learning the same things.

Of course you certainly learn a lot by starting a company, it's a matter of making sure you are choosing that over college for the right reasons, and not 'only' because you feel like you will be the next twitter in a year, which most likely won't happen.

I think that there might be a more natural order in going to school first, then starting a business. But it's not necessarily the unique or the right way. It's what I think.

Ultimately it depends on the person. It's just hard to judge well about college when you haven't really gone through college, and I think that starting too early could be worse than starting a couple of years later. Just my opinion.

It's not like there won't be any opportunities after college. So I just feel that I would expect a strong reason to feel like I can't wait anymore. But if the reason is that one thinks that in college you don't learn anything but working for someone, then I think that's the wrong reason. That's all.
Famous, Famous, Fictional
Condoms near any sharp object like keys seems a very bad idea to me

There goes carrying a condom around in my pockets... (no wait marriage took care of that one)

These were encased in hard plastic, I'm pretty sure they were safer then most condom transportation mechanisms.
Presumably, by your logic, Google and Adobe were wrong to adopt webkit instead of Gecko too.
Is it just me or has the other hacker news submission on this story with much more discussion disappeared?
First, let me put it this way: you can do perfectly alright without a college degree, however, you can only rise so high. You must not expect to be the next Gates who is obviously an exception.

Secondly, college is not about only about learning. Queue the "Don't let schooling get in the way of your education" spiel. It's experience. I'm not even talking about partying and getting laid, which are still experiences, but professional experience where you go a talk to a professor that you liked for four hours arguing how machines will never be truly intelligent.

So, yes, I think you should definitely go to college and do your startup part-time. The startup might not work out, and you will have the degree forever thus allowing for other prospects. Besides, who knows how you'll feel in ten years.
And those things only work in cases where Apple has made special agreements. It's going to look silly when Facebook and Twitter are no longer things and iOS rushed to integrate them instead of just opening an API to enable it.
I think you may be confused as to how OSS licenses work, and to a larger extend the OSS community. I'd recommend you read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". On the specifics of license, I guess good ol' Wikipedia works just fine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_license.

Now your teachers didn't focus on entrepreneurship because statistically speaking, most people who go through college (or any kind of education) will work for somebody else.

I'd add to this that school is, in most cases, not about learning practical skills. It is about learning how to learn, developing mental tools and acquiring a knowledge foundation that will help you work with others.

Debatable approach to education, maybe. But beware of thinking that everybody want or should be prepared for the career path you seem to be in favor of.
"The share of phones sold in the quarter is of most interest to investors."

Actually, not exactly. Let's say Apple sold 30% of all smartphones in a quarter. Now, from an investor standpoint that may seem pretty bad. However, Apple has a much higher profit margin, so what's actually relevant to investors and shareholders from a strict, short-term ROI basis is the share of the total revenue and the share of the total profit. As it turns out, Apple's share of the smartphone market's revenue is around 80%, so even if they dipped down to 30% of all smartphone handsets sold they would still have about half of the revenue.
I appreciate the kind words and your time, great advice for my major, I'll defiantly explore stats or marketing. Thank you!
Of course it's not, it's this entitled iOS mentality of "I learned it and it makes sense now so it's intuitive and everything else isn't."
Statlect - The Digital Textbook on Probability and Statistics
Can you really not think of any situation where a person might want to enter data while being able to see another document? Not even a coder looking at a reference guide?
Hmm. I don't see a reason to assume that GMO crops present "more" hidden risks -- since by definition any such risks are hidden in both the GMO and non-GMO cases -- and you certainly haven't provided any such reasons in your post. If we want to avoid future unpleasant surprises like the Potato Famine, it seems to me that the best strategy is to gain the greatest possible mastery of plant genetics.

There will be unpleasant surprises along the way but science, like life itself, offers no guarantees. Meanwhile I haven't seen any potato famines lately.
Agreed — Cyberdog was the best thing about OpenDoc.