skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a freshman IT student, but I'm currently in India so I might not be able to give you useful advice about which college to join, but I can tell you this - for Pete's sake, choose wisely. I could have taken an year off to prepare for the college entrance exams (college is a big deal in India, so we have too much competition) and got much better marks, but I chose to just join whichever college I could get into, reputation or no reputation. Now I regret it. My college is more like a 4-year crash course in getting a 9-to-5 job, my teachers care only about academic performance and my peers think I'm a nutjob. Not that it's a bad college, it's just that they don't really get education. You know, never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity.

The environment of your college matters. Your peers matter. In college, a bad crowd will not just slow you down, they'll take you down.
I beg to differ.
There's nothing to be gained by accusing anyone.

When I'd written the article it never occured to me that the title might come across as inflammatory. I think an edit is due.

However, I do feel the underlying issue is well worthy of discussion.
What I personally feel is if you believe you have the next big idea, you must limit disclosure to a handful.
There's a fear of rejection that might compel many to disclose their concept at several fora.
That might eventually hurt them.

And finally, please don't get personal. I'm expressing personal opinion, and I'm ready to edit bits if they seem insinuous/inflammatory. But nobody likes getting flamed after having put in a fair amount of effort into compiling something they feel might be insightful to others.
Agree with the point, except that the true answer is MIT or Caltech, Harvard really wouldn't push you ahead to any HR guy worth his salt at a tech company.
But they are also a very easy target. Immigration services do a job that is never going to be popular, but in the end their actions and decisions are mandated by a political leadership.

It's too easy to single out these agencies in a hatefest.
I do not suggest that. I merely ask you to support your jokey suggestion that the overhead of sleep is prohibitive when it doesn't seem to have prohibited ... anything.
I dunno, there's probably a large market of women who don't really want some NSA relations, but still want to play around like they do. Or that aren't sure if they do or not and just want to dip their toe in. Or that do, but don't have the courage to throw themselves into the bar scene.
I disagree. Some people may be considered judgment-proof, meaning they have no assets to be sued for (O.J. Simpson, for example). However if you win a judgment against someone who has assets but refuses to pay, a court could order wage garnishments and even asset seizure. Basically the courts can make you pay by taking from you. (At least, this is how it works in the USA.)

Of course cases with citizens of different nationality are different and much more difficult to work with, even with a paper contract. Both governments must be willing to hold their citizen up to the agreement in the contract. If I have a contract (printed, signed, and notarized) between myself and the deposed king of Nigeria, it would be hard for me to take the ex-king to court.
" In what universe would you want the Chinese, Americans, Russians, or even French to share authority over you?"

They already do, of course. Heard of the WTO?

Anyway, I'm not proposing we submit all authority to the UN. One country One vote doesn't work, IMO. But One Trade Bloc One Vote is far more palatable.

The arguments you make against global police are generalisable to local police, too. Yes, corruption is a danger. With good governance this is manageable.

"What experience with supranationals supports that theory?"

The WTO, which has, as far as I can see, been a smashing success.

I don't really understand the rest of your points. "Isolationism" has not been practised by the USA for a century.

I would be a lot more persuaded by your points about an evil supranational if we didn't see so much evil perpetrated by mere nations all around us. You might fear the USA's wings being clipped, but everyone elses' would be as well. And a global body with real power and moral mandate could do real good. For example, it could have stopped Darfur. And, being disinterested in China's exports, it could constrain their misadventures in Tibet and Africa too.

Think "WTO with morals". Does that really sound so bad?
My best advice to you is to take none of our specific "go here" advice...

Take a good week off to just step back from the college admissions process and recollect your thoughts so you can look at it objectively. I'm sure right now it's a bit stressful and probably overwhelming, not to mention getting spanked by the rejections is a bit of a blow to the ego... especially coming from somebody who sees themselves as slowed down by my peers...

Once you take that break, spend a good couple hours alone and not distracted to just write out (and I mean write, not think) what you really want out of your life for the next couple years. You don't need to have concrete goals, but something as simple as "I'd like to start my own software business before I graduate" or "I want to get involved with mathematics research projects" are examples. You seem like someone who is very driven, so I bet you'll have no problem with this.

Secondly, write down who you are and what are your values. Are you the type of person that needs the structure of class to be motivated, or can you stay focused on your own? How much personal time do you want? Obviously a less demanding class-load gives you more time to work on your own projects.

Once you lay down the big picture of who you are as a person and your overall goals/purpose for the next few years, it's going to be 1000x easier to choose a college. It's like finding the shoe that fits you best.

Finally, you'll find plenty of people who are smarter than you, even at a state school. I knew many people "smarter" than myself when I went to a state school, yet I was the one who was making a 5 figure income by my senior year in college from my own business (as if money is the only thing that matters). For the record, I was only a 1400 SAT.
"Drupal works, lets rewrite it in Rails." Other than serving as a thought experiment on a grand scale where is the perceived benefit of trying to implement the feature set of an existing CMS in a slower language? Is this an example of language preference taking to an extreme or are there concrete benefits to this approach?
I'm not a native speaker of English, I've studied the language for seven or eight years, and a couple of months ago I signed up on Hacker News and Reddit. I've learned a lot about establishing strong and rich discussions by reading and writing comments and messages. Generalizing, this idea could be boiled down simply to "practice is good." Of course, all the years I took formal English classes were very useful, but we must not underestimate the power of putting our knowledge to use. Theory without practice is meaningless, knowledge without use is, well, useless.
I'll second the points about yale culture. Honestly, if you're worried about being A downside would be continuing to be the “too-intense guy” I come off as at my high school, and potentially continuing to feel slowed down by my peers." then if you're as technically / mathematically oriented as you claim, outside of certain parts of mit, caltech and other places with a large engineering culture, you'll continue to be viewed as such.

A simple, but in retrospect insightful bit of advice that I ignored (but shouldn't have) when choosing a university is the following: go through the course catalogue and figure out what percentage of all the classes you would certainly find interesting, all other considerations being equal, choose the school with the best percentage!
While taking a year off can work, it can also seriously hurt your application the next year, as colleges will think you aren't serious about getting an education. Instead, I recommend accepting an offer at, say, Tufts, and delaying admission for a year.
Just my opinion. I went to some random school that nobody here is going to know of or care about, and I had a blast at school. College should be a place to have fun at. Realistically, 3+ years out of college nobody cares about your education anymore anyway.

If you really want to go to MIT/etc. or something and kill yourself for 4 years, go for it. I don't think it's necessary, unless you HAVE to work at <insert name of prestigious company> as your first job out of college.

Also, don't underestimate the effect of a full-ride or close to it. Being debt free or nearly so while making 60k+ a year in your early 20s is nothing to scoff at.

If I were in your shoes, knowing what I know now, at 25, and given the options listed, I would take the full ride in a heartbeat.
The discussion is not about legality. I was responding to the OP saying that we shouldn't "blame Blackboard for bad behaviour" because if they hadn't done it, then someone else would have done it anyway. Hence the analogy is valid.
Not to be critical, but... A student population with contempt for numbers and extra money who want to go into business? I don't know what that's a recipe for, but it can't be good. :-p
Agreed. This is the fundamental flaw with the affirmative action and other diversity advocates.

Artificially increasing diversity is institutional racism which only serves to mitigate a symptom, not eliminate a cause. Rather than forcibly put more minorities through college, we should improve schools in poor and underprivileged neighborhoods.

Unfortunately, this real solution may take 10 to 20 years to see results... which is far shorter than the average term in public office.
You should go to GT without a doubt, literally NO DOUBT in my mind. I'm not even saying GT is better than Emory, I know people at both and are happy, but if the difference is between 200k+ in debt (don't forget rising costs over 4 years!) vs 10-20k, take the smaller one! Imagine you come out of college making 60k a year, by the time you subtract taxes, rent, food, healthcare, car, cell phone bill, ISP bill at home, you will spend 10 years paying off that debt. It will NEVER be worth it. Seriously break down average pay for your degree, guesstimate your bills after college, and figure out how much it will cost you. My girlfriend and I both make over 60k, we had only a combined 50k in loans, and it is still will take 2 years to pay off. If you are doing it alone with 4 times that amount, forget it.

Second, more people know GT than Emory anyway. I only know Emory because a neighbor went there.

Third, if you get a graduate degree, it will completely over run your undergrad degree anyway. My dad went to a shitty (so shitty it no longer exists) state school in west virginia, and got C's. He then went to work for 10 years, then got an MBA from a good business school. Now he is the CEO of a 160 million a year company. Does anyway care about his undergrad degree? Hell no. Do they care about the MBA? Definitely more than the undergrad, you can't sit at most of the interviews if you don't have an MBA. But the only thing they REALLY care about is his performance ON THE JOB.

Remember, your undergrad degree only gets you the first interview. It might seem huge from high school, but you will eventually realize that teachers only hype it to motivate you in high school. it doesn't matter that much in the business world.
I'm extremely sorry if this blog post came across as rude; it was just one of those passing observations I thought I'd document.

What I wanted to highlight is - there are several seed stage venture funds around now, and one must be a tad careful lest they disclose to too many entities.

I did edit the title as one member found it inflammatory and called it linkbait.
Well, I'm an avid mixed martial artist, skier, and violinist on top of the technical stuff, although those might seem superficial since I have so many interests.

As for the gap year - wow, that could be a really good idea. I had considered that option, but I guess I didn't think about it enough. The lack of co-founders and money could pose problems in certain areas, but I could either just keep pushing the web app I've been developing to commercial release, or go to work at someone else's startup. Do those sound like potentially good ideas? (I can probably even defer enrollment to a college to have a safety net in case rejections round two comes around)

Also, what did you learn during your gap year, more specifically? (if it's not entirely specific to your case)

Thanks for the insight; I have a lot more thinking to do, but taking a gap year could be a very good option for me.

Edit: Posted before I saw your comment, fuzzmeister; that's probably a good way to have my cake and eat it too, although the downside is that I won't exactly be motivated to succeed with the startup no matter what if I have a spot at a college waiting for me.
Sweet, an Amherst alumn. I strongly considered going there and I'm still impressed by the place. If I remember correctly, their placement into CS grad school is pretty damn good, despite the fact that their CS offerings are a bit scarce. A place that like simply teaches you how to think.
It is all about being DEBT free, if you can get a full ride somewhere, do it. 60k without debt means you have a few hundred bucks to burn at the bars or on a nice car or saving for retirement or traveling or starting a company, whatever you want to do. Paying for school loans would suck, it is a bill for something you already used up, and probably figured out was a scam along the way.
There's nothing to be gained by accusing anyone.

I think you missed my point. You're trying to have it both ways: you're not willing to stand behind an actual accusation, so instead you hide behind weasel language and only insinuate.

When I'd written the article it never occured to me that the title might come across as inflammatory.

You didn't think insinuating that these incubators are stealing ideas and passing them to their own people would be inflammatory? Please.

What I personally feel is if you believe you have the next big idea, you must limit disclosure to a handful.

Fine, then say that. You have no evidence that it's actually happened, though. Your little list is not evidence.

And finally, please don't get personal.

What did I say that was personal? Everything I've said has been directly about the article, except for the bit that you weren't off to a good start.

But nobody likes getting flamed after having put in a fair amount of effort into compiling something they feel might be insightful to others.

I have a really hard time believing you had no clue this would be seen negatively by some people. The whole point of the article is to insinuate, without any real evidence, that these companies are doing something unethical. Honestly, what did you expect in return?
Military Robots and the future of War (TED)
> Would YC prefer a non engineering grad from Emory or GT?

Stop conforming. Immediately.
That's 15 cents per share: millions of dollars.
Royalty paychecks are required to "keep" the "vibrant" music industry alive? No wonder everyone wants to be a musician
Eight Queens. Six lines:
http://code.activestate.com/recipes/576647/

Alphametics solver:
http://code.activestate.com/recipes/576615/

Data Mining with Neural Nets:
http://code.activestate.com/recipes/496908/

Mastermind-style code-breaking:
http://code.activestate.com/recipes/496907/

Sudoku Solver:
http://code.activestate.com/recipes/473893/
If we didn't require sleep (and thus had 8 more hours each day we could work) we could produce far more as a race. It's not like it's some crazy suggestion, it's obviously true and unrealistic at the same time.
"Now a triple-A rating is supposed to mean there is zero credit risk. So you take something that not only has significant, it has crushing risk. That's why it's toxic. And you create this fiction that it has zero risk. That itself, of course, is a fraudulent exercise."

I am (by no means) an expert on Structured Finance, but didn't these "toxic assets" have AAA credit ratings because Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae would absorb the default risk?! Would anyone care to comment on this?

This interview sounds terribly superficial, biased and sensationalist.
I find this failure and the failure of Yahoo deal with Microsoft to reflect poorly on the tech industry.

In both cases it is culture/innuendo getting in the way of making a practical deal. The us vs. them group conflict mentality. Also unreason. This type of luxurious thinking will be beaten out of the industry by competition eventually.
"2.) Menace: who or what are they menacing? If you feel threatened, don't use their products."

Well, apparently they are "menacing" content producers on YouTube by [!shock!] deciding that rather than renegotiate higher payments per view they would prefer to stop purchasing the content.

I mean, how DARE Google stop buying the right to distribute someone's creations when the seller raises the price to a point where it's no longer profitable to be involved with the deal? That's evil if I've ever seen it...

Yeesh.
Not so much rude as irresponsible. The more serious the accusation, the more evidence you ought to have before making it.

Other YC-like organizations have done various moderately dubious things over the years, but there's no evidence any of them have done anything so serious as stealing applicants' ideas.
Thats a great response, but as far as anyone knows it does not exist yet.
It's possible that it isn't actually any different than posting the un-shortened URL. Unless I'm mistaken, of course. That's why I'm asking.
I don't have much to say that other people haven't said already.
But: It's unrealistic and silly in my opinion to plan on graduating from college in 3 years. If you really want that atmosphere of smart, driven people you're going to want to be around those people /as long as possible/. I don't advocate 'taking your time' (you know, graduate on time! go on to other things!), but as someone who could conceivably have graduated from college in 3 years and chose not to, I just think you'll get much much more out of college by going there for a full 4 years.

Honestly, you're never going to be 'slowed down' by your peers the way you probably were in high school. A lot of learning in college goes on outside of the classroom. I /think/ a lot about all my classes, go talk to all my professors outside of class (even the humanities ones!) and probably get a lot more out of my classes than everyone else taking them. People aren't slowing me down, I'm just getting more out of the same material. Additionally, there're independent studies, doing research, having a job--you'll find that there are plenty of ways to occupy your time. : ]

So, with that in mind, I'd consider the overall culture of the school. What do you want to be doing in your spare time? What type of people do you want to be hanging out with? That being said, every school (especially the larger ones) have people of all types.
I really don't get it. How is this article different than saying:

"In 2003, MySpace launched. Then in 2004, Facebook launched. Conspiracy? You decide."
Congratulations on getting Cornell -- I'm graduating from there this May. Though I'm clearly biased, I'd recommend Cornell all the way. Definitely speak with the financial aid office to see what they can do for you; they're trying to get better about offering students everything they can. If you have to take some private loans not through the school, that's okay too -- just more work for you is all.

Cornell Engineering really is good, and I have nothing but good things to say about the CS department here (okay, I can criticize them on using SML/NJ for CS 312/3110, but meh. It's still a functional language). Every one of the students I've worked with has been great. Another thing is that engineering here isn't looked down upon. It's sort of looked at as one of the hard colleges to be in here. If people want a group of students to make fun of here, there's plenty of Hotelies. :)

The CS education you'll get here is great. If you can find the money to come here, it's worth it. I know someone graduating with something like $80,000 in loans, but from the opportunities Cornell has given her, it's worth it.

About the rejections from those good schools, I've heard it's possible to reject some really good students because they're literally too good. If a school thinks that you're likely to apply to a bunch of really good schools and get into some of them, they may reject you so that they don't end up extending an offer and getting turned down.
Believe it or not, this isn't a question about security practices. My question is if there's a way to block or redirect incoming traffic from a URL redirection site.
Yep. If you have the option to go to college without paying, you should do it unless there are strong mitigating factors. And you haven't got a free ride to Idaho State University here: You have Tufts, in Boston, for free. Swallow your pride and grab that!

There is nothing better for your career as an entrepreneur than to spend four years in Boston, among students, and then emerge debt-free. Save that money you would spend going to Cornell so that you can spend it on your startup later.

The dirty little secret of undergraduate education is: It's much the same wherever you go. You are taught by grad students and by professors who have not got enough seniority to get out of teaching undergraduates. The textbooks are the same everywhere. The engineering schools with better reputations usually get those reputations by having lots of great, well-funded researchers... none of whom have anything to do with undergraduate teaching if they can help it. And if you're smart, curious, have a good library and two or three mentors you're going to learn as much as you want, no matter the surroundings.

Sometimes the smaller schools with poorer research reputations actually have better undergraduate teaching.

Until you get to much lower-ranked schools than any on your list, the major difference from school to school is your fellow students. But Tufts is in Boston. If the Tufts scene just isn't for you, ride the train to MIT. I've been impersonating an MIT alum off and on for years, and I'm sure impersonating a student is even easier if you're the right age. Just go to their club meetings, study in their libraries, hang out at Mary Chung's. Get summer jobs in their labs or their startups. You can probably even take their classes if you want.

Now, here's a hypothesis for you [1]: I'm guessing that your otherwise inexplicable rejection from all those top schools is because they took one look at your application, said "hey, this one will be getting an admission and a free ride from Tufts," and decided to expend their precious slots elsewhere.

[EDITORIAL UPDATE: I've removed my interesting sidelight about the old Ivy League admissions collusion scandal, partly because it wasn't important to my wacky hypothesis, but mostly because I misremembered it. See below for correction and link.]

I'm sorry if that rankles. Nobody likes to feel like they're being railroaded. But you are being railroaded into freaking Tufts. Count your blessings! Ride the legacy-student rails! Pick another time of life to be crazy and rebellious! And if you get too depressed, go talk to someone who just got out of school and is $50k in debt.

---

[1] Obviously, this hypothesis hinges on your application containing information about who your mother is and where she works. I'm assuming it does -- financial aid applications have that and more, right? Although for all I know the colleges have a strict separation of financial-aid apps and admissions apps, and they also don't cheat. In which case, on to the next hypothesis! ;)
I never said that the staging site was publicly accessible. That's beside the point. What I'm trying to figure out is if there's a way to block or redirect incoming traffic if it comes from a URL redirection site.