skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I got pretty good grades but got really unlucky. In my 3 years at Duke(graduated early with triple major ECE, CS, Econ) I got all A+'s and one A. The A was in Mandarin 312 and it was because I got sick during finals week in my study abroad program in Beijing. So even if you do get good grades you might get sick like I did and it could totally ruin your transcript and making finding a job harder.So don't worry too much about grades--sometimes no matter how hard you try things beyond your control will decide the final outcome. Even with my A I ended up fine and was still able to get a Rhodes and a Fulbright.

And as long as you know how to manage your time you can get good grades and do fun things. My favorite part of college was not getting good grades--the best part was being student class president and winning the ACM-ICPC. I also enjoyed having the time to start a company that ended up getting acquired by Google. So make sure you measure your life, like you said, not by how good your grades are(I would be miserable if that's the case) but by the whole balance of your life.
As someone that reads resumes and works with both degree and non-degree individuals, I couldn't disagree with a statement more. The difference in quality of work between those with degrees and those without is significant. It is even possible to distinguish those with some college over those without any.

Like any generality, there are specific counter-examples, but the people that will need to judge you quickly by little pieces of information are very likely to skip over you. That is unless you have some amazing thing on your resume.

I did ok in undergrad (3.4), but I'm finding that as I tackle a masters full-time will working full-time I am rocking... Funny what perspective and motivation working gives you.
You have to be either really stupid or lazy (or smoking too much pot)

Or really bored with the work assigned.
The Skeptics Guide to the Universe Presents our Top 20 Logical Fallacies
I think we can all agree that, other than the girls and parties, college wasted some of our best years.
I didn't get good grades until grad school. Undergrad was too
useless to me and I didn't get interested in any of the material presented before senior year. But electrical engineering is a useless major anyway. An artifact of the 20th century.
If you haven't already done so, may be you can tell that person that you liked the trick. That will be a huge encouragement, I am sure.
"But it's not true for Generation Y, when college for many people is a meaningless waste of $100,000 that qualifies them to do absolutely nothing."

--Or you can be really smart, and get a free academic ride as I did, or go to schools (state schools) that don't cost too much and are decent.

You can get a DECENT (maybe not the greatest) education for LESS money in this country, you just have to try hard.

Remember, often in undergrad, it is what you do that matters the most. Once you go for Masters/Ph. then the school where you go matters a lot more.

For some wierd reason, the people that I met that didn't go to college but went straight working (usually during 98-2000 boom), even thou are very smart, and did well are somewhat rough on the edges. It is hard to point it out, but they just don't seem well refined...
Yeah I happened to put the first tank in my first car at 79 cents a gallon in 1998. I feel like an old man telling people about going to the movies for a nickel when I say that.
He writes like a 8 year old talks, only without the SMS-ish shortcuts. Its like he tapped it out on a phone while on the toilet, and is just an annoying style to read. I miss tech writing.
There are people trying (I am one of them). It runs off bytecode (which is converts to another format) - so it looks possible. Will find out shortly. I am interested in jruby, jython and scala.
I wouldn't trust either. Jumping through hoops doesn't cut it. Do something unforced that is exceptional.
how it wasted your years? Sure, you can start a startup at very very young age, but there are lots of other usueful things you can learn in college.

I had the chance to get some good art clases (which were fun, and a good way to meet girls), minoring in physics, math, doing some finance/accounting.

I did things that I wouldn't normally do, i.e was forced to go beoynd my level of comfort, which is a good thing, as it forces you to learn new thigngs and it broadens your horizons.

Whoever says that college is a waste probably didn't know how to take full advantage of it. (in academics, fun, creating life lasting connections, and learning from interacting with so many people of your age).

In the "Real World" you just don't face the huge amount of interactions in such a confined space, with some many people of your own age.
I don't see work as pain, school is pain. So far I have had the luxury of picking and choosing jobs so that I only take the interesting ones. Granted, maybe tomorrow everyone without a degree will be ignored regardless of what their actual qualifications are, but I'll take that chance.

I don't want to work for someone who places such an importance on having a degree anyway. I want to work for someone who hires me for my ability to do work, so I think demonstrating that ability to do work is more important than getting some piece of paper.

A Bachelor's degree is just a certificate of minimal competence anyway. A significant fraction of people with BS CS degrees can't even write simple programs. There's plenty of other ways to demonstrate minimal competence than to get an undergrad degree.

So, anyway -- why's it so important to have a degree? Everything they teach (and much more!) is available in the form of dead trees at my local library. I can party with my friends regardless of whether I'm in college or not, plus now I can afford awesome beer. What else is left?
What I meant was that even with college, many people utterly fail at life because there aren't as many opportunities as there used to be. I'm sure that if you are evaluating programmers the average programmer with a CS degree will be better than the self-taught person.

I know that not having a degree hurts me severely in a traditional job pool. I don't care. If I need to submit my resume to get a job, I will have failed miserably. I think I would choose street life over working for the man. I probably couldn't get a real job anyways, because I don't have very many skills or qualifications. Despite my lack of skills, qualifications, and especially motivation, I am confident that I have the instinct necessary to manage successful and obscenely profitable companies.
My freshman year sucked ass grade-wise. But I also had the most fun that year.

Sophomore year started off depressingly. Then my start-up took off and it was lots of fun. Funnily my grades improved a great deal between freshman year and sophomore year(even with the start-up).

That's how far I got before taking off. Hopefully I won't have to return anytime soon.
"Or really bored with the work assigned." == lack of commitment to work.

In real life, even in startups, there are boring stuff that have to get done.

I remember, on one of my math classes which was easy (let's say I took Calculus 3, and then this easy class to finish off my minor), I slept on most of it, yet I managed to show up in tests and (to my suprise) got a B.

The girl that I had been helping on her homework all semester got an A.
Bascially my B showed my laziness for petty work, and not necesary intelligence.

So, GPA is 2/3 a display of your commitment to work (somebody that finishes off a given task), and 1/3 intelligence (some people, no matter how commited they are, are not smart enough to get all A's).
Was this inspired by Artix?
How is the math olympiad forced?
Also, presumably everyone on this site that is starting a company or working for an early stage startup is on the path to being a millionaire.

I like to think that I'm on the billionaire path.
>In real life, even in startups, there are boring stuff that have to get done.

Sure, but the payoff for the boring stuff in startups is much bigger. The boring stuff in startups needs to be done so you can make millions of dollars. The boring stuff in college needs to be done so you can get a job paying tens of thousands of dollars a year.
lol, so instead of equity we get beta invites?

in seriousness, 2K is not worth raising money for, just get a job as a waiter and work for a month
my google searches always seem to get driven to these kind of sites, so I bet they draw a bunch eyeballs, the answers seem to be pretty terrible though in general ( at least for technical ?s )
First college? Systems Analysis. I dropped out after one year because it seemed like total crap. I had a C average.

Second college? Business Administration. I dopped out after one year because I was getting a divorce. I had a 4.0 average.

I felt awful about lacking a college degree -- until managing my first PhD. He was an idiot. The second and third were worse. Really smart guys with an awful attitude.

Ever since then -- I keep asking myself what the point would be to go back? College was fun. I learned to play games by arbitrary rules some jerk set up. I would much rather learn all the time than play games.
3.8 GPA with 1 semester to go.
I meant that it is more impressive to find and solve a solution to a novel or significant problem than jumping through a difficult set of solved insignificant problems. Forced in this sense means that someone has framed where your mind has to go; you don't have to recognize and make value judgments on it's worth.
Long vs. Short Articles as Content Strategy
Actually I had a pretty bland uni life :D I spent most of my times in the CS labs learning things I was curious about but never had the common-sense to find a cofounder to start something with. Point of the story? Do a startup while in Uni. It is the best place to find co-founders! Plus you have very minimal costs (especially staying with your folks!)
You guys already know that high school doesn't matter, right?

College doesn't matter, either. You will discover this eventually.

Sure, it might seem important if trying to impress an employer right out of school, but that's still like waiting to be rewarded by Daddy -- much like the Christian religion, in which Celestial Dad is going to punish or reward you after you're dead -- there is no self-determination, only supplication. Everything depends on pleasing, or obeying, some other more powerful entity.

Take off the shackles and decide for yourself. Grades make zero difference for start-ups -- it's like Captain Jack Sparrow said, "The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do, and what a man can't do."
Maybe he is?
flunked out.
Critique our new startup: Gatherama.com
We're planning to launch in about 2 weeks. It took one developer 12 months working full time to develop this website. Was it too long or just about right for one developer? Looking for feedback before we launch. Thanks.
3.5GPA

May sound cocky, but did not put forth a whole lot of effort in my classes. I put in enough to get a B (or an A if the class was interesting or easy) but 90% of my time (and learning) was spent working on my own projects.
At the very least, your ego is impressive. And sometimes that is enough. See Mark Cuban.
I started out thinking that grades weren't everything, but then when I got my first A+'s I realized that really learning material dead was a terrific thing educationally. I was also greatly swayed by the fact that this could earn me scholarships. These scholarships ended up paying for me the whole way -- I couldn't get an entrance scholarship because I never went to highschool.

I could choose my classes so that the material would be generally useful, by moving into a combined honors, or interdisciplinary degree. I tried really hard, and eventually people started coming to me for tutoring. I taught a few classes, professors asked if I wanted to work with them, and eventually I graduated with the university medal.

One thing that I never gave up on was the idea that you can turn anything from an 'assignment' into a really educational experience by going above and beyond. In math assignments, prove auxiliary theorems, and the general case. Always do the bonus problems. For projects, release on Sourceforge. Write essays to please an online audience. For new projects that would be better in a different language, learn the new language. Learn everything from first principles, and when something looks wrong, bring it up. Do all the readings, and read the original works. Program in programming contests. Program for fun. Program as reflex. Don't ask permission to do research. Live in Libraries. Play games with smart people. Give talks. Teach. Publish. Learn.

University, for many people, seemed to involve a lot of rote learning, but I seem to have avoided that substantially. I loved my years in college.
I went to a state school with the mindset that:

1) It'd be cheaper

2) It's still a solid education that will get me a job

3) I would have time to party and work on my own projects, rather than be at the whim of a professor's latest epic dull assignment

The result? 3.7 GPA and have run a successful entertainment blog, have two Facebook apps with 550,000 users, and hopefully announcing my web startup in the next month.

Also have a job locked in at a top engineering company, should I choose to work for them.

Certainly not saying there weren't stressful times, just much less of them and far more time to enjoy what you really like to do.
is GBrowser Comming ?: as Firefox Contract Expires With Google next year
$200 Linux PC at Walmart sells out
Man, I can't wait until I can swear at basketball referees from the sidelines.
"Thou a 3.0 and higher GPA demonstrates commitment to work. You have to be either really stupid or lazy (or smoking too much pot) to get a lower GPA than that."

Or you studied engineering at Georgia Tech or Berkley or, well, anywhere else. And 'thou' definitely doesn't mean what you think it means.

Your GPA doesn't mean much in the world, but your TOEFL score does.
Quite possibly, but I still think there is something vaguely mean spirited about it, truthfulness notwithstanding.
Your plane analogy was responding to a strawman anyway... thus it was pretty asinine to begin with.

I'm sure concensus management has worked for you-- never said it didn't and haven't said its impossible. However, the problem is that you're saying people must have a co-founder, and that they must manage this way... and there's a big difference between having a cofounder you've known a long time and getting a cofounder because you foolishly followed the advice of a self styled guru.

If my response seems harsh, its because your tone is pretty strong. If you expressed your opinions in terms of preferences it would be one thing-- but you lay them down and defend them like they are religious law, and do not respond to the fact that this religious law does not work in all situations... which brings us back to the plane analogy-- its great for trying to make me look stupid, but its piss-poor (actually irrelevant) for arguing against what I was actually saying.
I can't agree with that.

I didn't go to any parties or have any significant involvement with girls when I was doing my undergraduate degree (unless departmental awards ceremonies count as parties), and I'd say that my years were not even remotely wasted. Neither were the years when I was 20-24 years old (when I was doing my doctorate).

Of course, if you're not interested in learning, you'll find college/university to be a waste -- and in such circumstances I would very much encourage dropping out. For those of us who enjoy learning, however, it's the partying and girls who are a waste of our best years.
Not very. Marks anywhere from 40% to 85%. I started when I was fifteen and failed out in my fourth (last) year.

Went back part-time about 5 years later, and failed a compilers course after I decided to forgo the group, write the compiler myself, but got sidetracked leading bots in assault mode on Unreal Tournament.

I really learned how to study about 2 years ago. Sigh.

Spending too much time playing games was a major contributing factor. OTOH I now work in game-development.

I occasionally think about going back so I can some day get a post-grad degree, but don't relish being some profs biatch.

I have a university library-card, read theses and research papers, and generally do whatever I damn well want, while getting paid and hatching product ideas.
Acquisitions: IBM Buys Cognos, Microsoft Buys Musiwave
That's generally good advice but isn't realistic for most people here, except maybe cperciva. Something tells me you're a good two or three standard deviations ahead of the average IQ of this board.

I barely passed Calculus III; there is no way I could have proven any auxiliary theorems.
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Really? If the guy behind Qcrunch.com and seemewin.com, "we scratch lottery tickets live," is a Rhodes scholar, they need to give up.
This graph is in error. Historically the price of gas has been declining over the period shown, if actual inflation figures were used.

The NYT uses government provided CPI based inflation- and CPI is based in part on the price of gas, etc... and chronically under-reported... thus trying to represent the price of gas adjusting for "inflation" measured by the price of gas doesn't really work.

Real inflation-- which is defined as growth in the money supply- would show that the price of gas has declined strongly over this period-- primarily because of the effects of the "robber barrons" who drove down prices to gain market share, and because productivity has made gas a much safer and easier item to get from oil... though I expect in recent years the prices would be going up because of increased government regulation and asinine "environmental" requirements.
Android by a 34 Company Committee
Please explain. I have a few friends studying it and they seem to think they are going to make 80k starting.
Er, why do you care?

Make sure you do lots of extra-curricular work that you enjoy, and that's difficult. If your grades aren't great, you can show off projects to get jobs. If you want to make your own job, grow it out of your projects.

I failed out of school, and I'm an inconsistent employee at best, but I only know a couple of people who work harder than I do, and they're all business owners.
No. The price of milk, oil and gas are all effected by inflation.

Inflation comes from only one source- an increase in the money supply. When the government prints lots of money, inflation gets high (like the %10-%20 we're seeing now). When the government isn't running printing presses in overdrive, then inflation is lower.

Milk, Oil and Gas prices are affected by a lot of factors such as regulation of these industries, farm subsidies, discoveries of new resources, productivity improvements, etc.

But when you define "inflation" as a measure of prices, then you speak in error. Using the CPI as a measure of "inflation" is really untenable, and its a measure of just how economically ignorant americans are that every news report uses the term "inflation" when the government releases their current CPI numbers (which, by the way, are so manipulated that you can't compare them from year to year as they don't measure the same thing from one decade to the next...)

CPI is a fabrication designed to keep people from realizing how much of their money is being stolen by the government thru the mechanism of monetary inflation...

BTW, the constitution has written into it the requirement that it be run on a gold standard-- this trick is not new and the founding fathers were well aware of the actions of the bank of england. WE were on a gold standard up until the 1930s-- the period where we were the fastest growing economy on the planet. Since then, we've been slowing down, and this is not a coincidence.

This is really important for startups because if you are measuring your returns in USD you will get a very differnet number than if you are measuring them in Euros, and both of those will do poorly compared to an objective standard like gold.

We have the situation where the economy has not grown very much but the DJIA is at 14,000 or something.... people think this means the economy has grown, but the reality is that the dollar has simply declined.

The dollar is not an objective unit of measure, due to monetary inflation.
He errors in assuming that if your company has 10X potential you should take venture capital. He doesn't recognize that Venture Capital increases the risk of you having a 0X result. (Probably becuase he's only had good experiences.)

I'd rather have a %75 chance of %60 of a $15M company than a %2 chance of %10 of a $300M company.
Well, engineering is never useless if you goal is to get a high starting salary engineering for the man.
"Or really bored with the work assigned." == lack of commitment to work.

Who wants to commit to boring work?

I don't.
Great article! And this is a business that is going to grow at the same rate whether they have venture funding or not. Sure they could increase their leverage a bit, but this "lifestyle business" is more likely to be a success than the average VC backed startup....(unless success only means an exit north of $100m or whatever)

EG: Better to have %90 chance of %50 of a $30M business (what I'd evaluate their likely outcome as) than a %10 chance of %5 of a $200M business-- what they'd be looking at if they took VC funding. (Though maybe angel funding might help, though it seems they don't really need it.)
Tim Bray on Unicode: is UTF-8 a racist kludge or a stroke of genius?
Congratulations, you're riding the rails!
Nice. Just got two.

One for me, one for my Dad. He's 75, and still writing Mathematica notebooks and software to try to help educate people in developing countries. Rock on dad, this one's for you.
One of my CS professors said something along the lines of A students generally go forward and get masters and phds, B students go out and build the stuff that changes the world
My classes are probably the least interesting part of college for me. Being in an environment full of various really interesting bleeding-edge developments kicks ass though. I work in neurobiology, code whatever projects are interesting to me, calculate methods for signaling between autonomous vehicles, and am 5 minutes away from talking to someone right in the middle of solving problems in quantum physics or international affairs.

And then I go to class. Oh well. I suppose college isn't perfect.
Fruit of 4 years of 14 hours per day, 7 days a week
You're right. How can they ever top me? Better give up now and quit while they're ahead.
I think people are capable of a hell of a lot more than they think they are if they put their minds to it. I see this over and over again. I don't think that pure math or quantum physics or research or, in general, going academically above and beyond the call of duty, is something beyond the reach of regular people.

I do think that it takes years of general dedication towards learning to start tackling such topics, and it takes confidence to know that what one is aiming for is achievable, and it takes the honesty to realize when one truly is and when one truly isn't understanding some topic. I am continually astounded by the insight and intelligence of what some on this board might consider regular folk, and I think that what sets me apart from the masses isn't in hardware (a better brain), but software (beliefs and an outlook more conducive to learning).
I think the book he wrote is even more interesting. My ex-girlfriend was exceedingly smart, but in her young life did poorly being judged as ADD and Dyslexic. I got the opposite treatment with gifted programs and expanded curricula. When we compared symptoms, though, we were generally the same.

I wonder how many children in "special" education should actually be in gifted education...
I just went looking for recent examples to prove my point and found none. Perhaps my memory of CLL is inaccurate, or it has become more friendly recently.
The six hour startup