skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Author's Suggested readings:

How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation, by Marc Bousquet (New York University Press, 2008);

Generation Debt: Why Now Is a Terrible Time to Be Young, by Anya Kamenetz (Riverhead Books, 2006);

Academic Keywords: A Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education, by Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt (Routledge, 1999);

Ghosts in the Classroom: Stories of College Adjunct Faculty — and the Price We All Pay, edited by Michael Dubson (Camel's Back, 2001);

The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, by Frank Donoghue (Fordham University Press, 2008).
you are right Ajju..this 20,000 exemption number indeed was not enough this year ..I sponsored 2 H1Bs in 2006 and that year it was different..there is just strong appetite for those visas.. I am in full support of increasing that exemption limit because it seems it is pretty finite short fall and don't know why it is not given by priority in the general bucket.. if somebody is doing something on that then let me know how to support.. As far as Paul, you not being able to understand what I say..I don't expect you to understand much of it anyway..from your essay and comments, you come out as a typical guy who has a 100% workable solution (in his mind) but he does not understand the problem or market..
Because a bank wouldn't give you money. They wouldn't trust mere revenue. They'd want assets as collateral.
"Ironically, its easiest raise money when you're already making it."

I don't think it's ironic at all. VC investment involves a risk calculation, profitability means a lower risk but in return the VC should be willing to accept a higher valuation.
Angst is an emotion, so I'm not sure what you're saying. I think you're calling the responses overblown in a fancy and covertly insulting way. You'd be annoyed too if a carelessly inaccurate article caused people to avoid Lisp or Why's Guide or whatever.
Hi, we are toying around an idea of letting users browse jobs using Maps. This will remove the job search problem caused due to quantized geocoding. For ex: Dallas is tagged as "TX". A map search will get rid of such problem.
80 hours a week for two months in the Antarctic "Pig Barn." The heat was turned off for about three weeks.

http://stratocat.com.ar/bases/41e.htm
The financial industry has long been populated with far too many lazy, incompetent people with Ivy-league degrees and egos. I work with a bunch of older guys who are from the non-Ivy-dominated era of Wall Street, and it really appears this was a far more enjoyable time to have been a part of the industry. Perhaps it will be good for the mindless status-seekers to head elsewhere; just don't be surprised when their output doesn't exactly look like an answer to Sputnik. That being said, 90% of the "quantitative finance" world was and still is utter nonsense that legitimately drains other fields of technically savvy people, so it will be good to see them in other places. These guys are just a tiny percentage of the financial industry, however; most of the young guys in finance today are arrogant paper-pushers, no different from the sort of annoying people you'd encounter at a Hollywood talent agency.
Well, I'd try not to use such absolute terms. Obviously, I cannot prove religion false. I can say it's incredibly unlikely to be true, and has little evidence in support of its fantastical claims, but I can't go all-out "false" - see The Dragon in my Garage et al.

You do touch upon an interesting point, though - for some time I've thought that our very language is at fault here. True and false, right and wrong - loaded, ambiguous terms. Even proven and unproven don't really cut it. And yet for brevity's sake we cannot fully articulate upon the nuanced and disclaimer-filled totality of our meaning. See Sapir & Whorf.

Anyway, I didn't claim religion is "false". I would argue such a term is inapplicable. I do maintain, however, that it is outlandishly, even laughably, unlikely, and with scant hard evidence in its favour, its embrace reflects badly upon those who accept its tenets without question.
Spoken like a man who has never written code...

You get locked in because after 2-3 years of churning out work you have both comfort with one technology, and a base of libraries and routines that took you 2-3 years to write, and know.

Once your down that rabbit hole, switching becomes much harder as you have to abandon the mind share you created in the languages you used. And in the case of .NET since so much of what you do there is unique to MS alone, and mostly due to the "LOCK IN" to their OS, walking away from it is not FREE or EASY.

Worse yet stay with it long enough and watch your world crumble to nothing when MS seeking revenue enhancement decides it needs to release the next great language, and obsolete years of your work, with an upgrade. Don't think so? Ask the VB 6.0 crowd and the thousands of COM component vendors whose industry disappeared overnight when MS pulled the plug on them and forced .NET as the standard.

I don't agree that students should expose themselves to as many technologies as possible, if among their choices one technology could cause them harm...
Science Technology Engineering Math
The book Illusions of Entrepreneurship claims that existing companies create more jobs than new companies. Starts at page 153: Here's the google books link: http://bit.ly/m4vXV
> I'm even sorrier that there doesn't seem to be many/any viable careers for a humanities student aside professorship.

What do you think that they can do for "the rest of us" by virtue of said training that we should want to pay for?
How true is this? I'm not doubting you, just curious for other opinions.

We're raising money currently, and our investors have told us that revenues would come quite distant in terms of variables on if they'd invest. They love a great team, a huge user base and a lead on the market. Sure, having revenues extends your runway, but most investors seem to be of the opinion "users now, profits later".

I guess my question is, would a VC prefer a massive unmonetized user base, or a much smaller user base with revenues?
I don't think there's 3G in his location (africa). So if he's buying an iPod Touch, he might as well go for a used-non-3G version of the iPhone (refering to the first version) which are cheap now. I guess those old iPhones (non-3G) have unlocking software that's freely available.

I've seen sites selling sim-cards that unlock locked phones. So he can use something like that too.

P.S: I don't own an iPhone (coz I can't afford it) nor used one. So my situation is pretty close to his :)
I am sure the manifesto was made on a word processing software.
only so many spots for top websites

That's false, if you define top by revenue. There is no reason to believe there's any limit to the amount of newly created wealth consumers can absorb.
Fascinating. Thanks for that link. It's always good to see data replace hunches.
I'm pretty good at math (broke 50 on the Putnam) and I don't find programming to be boring. On the other hand, knowing that I've had problems with jobsite boredom in my past, I'm pretty sure that I'd hate the majority of programming jobs out there. Lisp and Haskell, which make programming beautiful in the mathematical sense, make a lot more sense to me than Java, and tasks like chasing down dependencies and hacking makefiles I find painful.

The type of programming and the language matter a lot. Most PhDs despise programing because of the problems they encounter in the professional sphere: most numeric programming focuses on details (numeric behavior of algorithms, efficiency in speed and memory use) that most researchers would find boring. A cutting-edge algebraist doesn't want to spend his time cutting clock cycles off of a vanilla matrix multiplication, nor does an academic analyst ("analysis" being a specific field of math, as in real/complex analysis) want to spend his time fretting over the (often jarring and unpredictable) discrepancies between floats and real numbers. There are people who love those kinds of problems, but they're rarely research mathematicians.
In 2002 I was working with a startup (that later failed). The office was in the basement of a warehouse, because they got cheap rent. The office itself wasn't terrible, decent offices and equipment. Since it was a basement there were obviously no windows. We were working 80-100 hours a week, often sleeping in the office. We had a really bad flood a few weeks before our launch date. We got (most) of the water out, but the walls started molding before they could get everything fixed. I bought my own hepa-filter and eventually "took a break" because I couldn't take anymore.
I had older classmates. I can't remember ever thinking of them as "losers." They were usually more interesting than the younger set.

No, you won't end up in a fraternity. However, there are a surprising number of people who end up in school years later. This shouldn't be a concern for returning.
Etymotic HF-2s (or similar) noise-blocking earbud headphones. People know that they'll be distracting you when talking, and they reduce the outside noise quite a bit.

As for the perception issue, that's more of a showmanship issue. For people who aren't in your field but do judge, I find a few stereotypes work out well. At my last job, I filled unused screen space with random API references. The busier and more technical my screen looked, the busier and more technical I looked as a result. It's the game you have to play when people don't let good work speak for itself.
sigh

Oh Microsoft.
"the answer probably shouldn't involve ads"

Actually we're not as down on ads as other investors seem to be. We liked Heyzap, and they make money from ads.

"The last thing you want to do is argue with the partners."

That's an overstatement. We don't like
people who supinely agree with everything we say.
That's as bad as refusing to listen to anything we say.
What we look for is a middle ground: people who
respond intelligently to our suggestions.

Some of the suggestions we make are stupid. If
people agree with those, we conclude they're
stupid. (We don't do this on purpose to catch
people. We just don't understand very well yet
what each group is doing.)
Some reasons why this analogy doesn't hold:

1) You don't have to wait 3-7 years wading through work before you start a start-up.

2) Your entrepreneurial experience will most likely be viewed by businesses as valuable. (Failure is acceptable in Silicon Valley.) On the other hand, how do businesses view 30+ year olds with esoteric, non-business-related over-education?

3) The maximum number of profitable businesses or websites out there is some % of the number of people on Earth. There is a very limited demand for professors, capped by the number of schools out there.

4) If you get funding, you'll probably make a lot more than an assistant professor. (Sad but true. There's a big difference between humanities and engineering/professional academic positions.)

5) The upside for a start-up is at least two orders of magnitude higher than academia.
Summary: They got lucky.

They were doing so bad in late-2006 (in an economic boom) that they were forced to leverage the entire company to raise capital for restructuring. So they had $23 billion in cash when the market for automobiles collapsed 18 months later. The only reason they didn't get government bailout money was because they'd just had a private bailout.

If you recall, Ford went to Congress for a bailout just like the others. They didn't let the fact that they didn't need the money stop them from lining up at the trough alongside GM and Chrysler. One can only assume their sole reason for dropping out was realizing the billions on their balance sheet would disqualify them from receiving funds.
Strong math background implies an ability for solving problems analytically. Programming requires this, but also requires a fair amount of implementation work which may not be related to the core analysis problem.

Speaking strictly for myself (physics grad), it's easy for me to get caught up in some sort of interesting data analysis, but programming can be a bore because it involves so much extra stuff. I firmly believe that this is the reason software like Matlab survives: not because its analysis functions are faster or better, but because it tends to push everything but the math and visualization out of the way.
I was like that, before working on a trading desk, and I had to experience it in order to know it wasn't right for me, so I have no regrets.

Some hackers love trading, for what it's worth, and there are finance jobs out there that have better working conditions than what I described.
They might not give you much money, but they'd give you some! There are plenty of small businesses out there without any real saleable assets beyond their viable business activities and future income, indeed for many banks such a market is their speciality. You won't see a $10m loan on $2k/month, of course, but I should be very surprised if you couldn't at least get a $10k or $20k overdraft, which may well suffice to buy another couple of servers or contract a graphic designer or whatever it is you need to scale incrementally.

Conservatism is rife in the banking sector at the moment but at the same time, making loans is their job, after all.
I'm still yet to graduate and feeling the goodness of working freelance at home.

oh my! you guys scare me off. I've always dreamed of an office for my startup where we work in a really nice garden full of trees and green grass, sitting on bean bags and chairs (freedom of posture :P) Maybe I should just do this. It's going to be really cheap and comfortable considering the temperature in my location is around 20c-24c during normal days.

I hate air-conditioned rooms. there's nothing better than the smell of green grass and evening wind blowing your nose. And listening to soft music in such an environment is really cool. But I would have to opt for a silent area for the office (which is far away from traffic jams) which would mean compromising the utilities/accessibility of the city center. When you have sounds of sparrows and pigeons in place on that soft-music, it sounds even more cooler.

I'll also have a huge hall to run for shelter incase it rains :)

And also I'll plant an umbrella kinda thing above every fella working, coz I don't want them to waste time washing them or their notebooks of crow/pigeon shit :D

P.S: anyway it's a dream office for my startup and sounds a do-able task :)
"The financial industry has long been populated with far too many lazy, incompetent people with Ivy-league degrees and egos."

Lazy!?! Investment bankers tend to be douchebags, but they put 90-100 hours per week, 50 weeks a year. Sure, there's a lot of face time to be put, too... but "lazy" is not the word.

I get the impression you don't even know what you're talking about. There are many areas in the financial industry: investment banking, trading, risk management, insurance, private equity. These areas attract all sorts of people, with all sorts of academic backgrounds and personalities. Traders are completely different beasts than, say, investment bankers.

"That being said, 90% of the "quantitative finance" world was and still is utter nonsense that legitimately drains other fields of technically savvy people, so it will be good to see them in other places."

Nonsense. There are simply not enough positions in academia and industrial research labs for all the Math, Physics PhD's out there.
I definitely had the screen set up as you described, but I still found working with constant open-back visibility to be pretty terrible.

As humans, though we share this with most animals, we have a strong desire to do important things (eating, defecating, sex, spiritual journeys) with at least some degree of privacy. Work, at least of the mentally taxing kind, falls square into that category.
The first two clips are a prolonged throat-clearing from a guy who makes no effort to disguise that he is reading. Maybe eventually he recites an argument for us, meanwhile the visuals are a yawner.
I'd say the "startup fail" scenario is even less negative, because I have the feeling that having the experience of even a failed startup makes you more attractive.
Emacs Database Mode - A Comint Demonstration
Augmented Reality - Going Mainstream
There's probably a limit on profitable websites based on the number of people out there. No comparison, though, to the number of spots in academia.
That's fine. But another aspect of this is that people like other people who are happy. You can choose to make yourself genuinely happier when interacting with someone by smiling.

If you learn math in order be better at solving problems, you've created a new smarter you. Is the real you the one who knew less math?

In the same way, you can choose to become a happier person who is more appealing to other people.
Ask HN: How to promote the truth?
The latest Twitter XSS (StalkDaily/Mikeyy) attack might be over (though the current fix from Twitter is still lame -- just try add some <> in your profile).

What concerns me more is the half-assed verdicts/advices/comments filling the various leading online media, which range from:

* Don't visit StalkDaily.com, it will infect your Twitter/browser/computer. (TechCrunch, Marshable, etc)

* How to clean your infected Twitter account? Change your Twitter password! (eHow, etc)

* It only affects Windows. (TechCrunch comment)

In an age where online media care only about time-to-market more than anything else (kindly reminds me of the recent financial industry... but I digress), what can we do to promote the truth?
Augmented Reality has great potential and will be a very important part of making mass customization mainstream. Shopping in a world with new inventory requires some good visualization tools.
Just try it. Small business loans require collateral.

Banks aren't in the business of betting on the success or failure of companies. They're in the business of liquidity.
Why should we trust the analysis at all then? I certainly don't.
In your first paragraph, you are framing this as a religious question, which of course is impossible to debate. In your second paragraph you create a non sequitur by assuming universes without (conscious!) life do not 'really' exist. This is all very poetic, but far removed from reality.
In Technology and Math you are as good as dead when you go past 40. Well, almost.

Edit: Losing 2-4 years out of 15 career years is quite meaningful.
yeah, i know a brilliant young mathematician who wants to become a beef farmer. for real.
i think the closest thing you can do is show all sides of a story and let the community make a collective decision.
By far the worst: on site doing commissioning / systems integration testing of warehouse automation systems - cranes moving pallets around, boxes trundling on conveyors, etc.

The automated equipment we were debugging (and volume testing with things moving around continuously) was the least of it... the huge site was still under construction. All around me there was racking being cut and welded, electricians installing stuff, aromatic concrete floor sealant being applied, various random drilling and banging.

I had to write large amounts of new code on the spot as we found problems (missing features, mostly) during testing, while the automation engineers stood around annoyed and waiting.

When I first got to the site, I didn't even have a laptop - had to lug a desktop PC and CRT monitor there and back every day (carrying it across half the site and the loading dock) for the first couple of weeks. For part of the time, this involved carrying it across iced concrete, since it had been snowing.

Oh, and there was the engineer from one of the third-party equipment suppliers, an Italian company - nice chap but he didn't speak very good English; the noise level didn't help the already poor communication, and when we started our testing, we discovered he had developed his control software from an interface specification three versions old and half a year out of date.
Luck favors the prepared
8' x 8' glass walled room - 6 developers (2 facing each of three walls), the fourth wall had the door.
"Regardless, there are still good reasons to seek VC investment when profitable."

Oh I agree of course. VC will be judging you on future potential; a bank will be judging on current performance. If you need a million dollars to really scale up, you need the VC. Facebook or Youtube come to mind, they could have never achived what they have without VC.

But if you don't need the huge cash injection, if you just need to incrementally ramp things up slowly, then VC is not your only option; that's all I'm trying to say.
Your statement reminds me of one of David Reynolds's concepts discussed in his book _Constructive Living_. Which was an interesting and quick read although somehow a bit unsatisfying. I've not thought about the "why" of that satisfaction point so I can't really recommend (or not) the book other than to say it's a quick read and has some redeeming qualities so it might be worth looking at.

Anyway, the actual concept concerns a weakness with the English language that actually impacts the thinking of native English speakers. And I think your thinking is falling into that pattern. The issue is that English blurs the concept of feeling an emotion and the doing of an emotional action. And it's useful to NOT blur those concepts into one thing. Specifically because by doing-X you can actually bring about feeling-X inside yourself.

English leads you to believe that your current feeling is somehow decoupled from your actions. When in reality you can actually control your feelings by taking actions.

So for example in this case by genuinely doing-interest in someone (regardless of whether you feel-interest initially) you will find you actually soon enough feel-interest in them.

You are a process not an entity and you can modify your own code.
More practically, the "arbitrary piece of code" can be expressed in a less-than-turing-complete language or language subset, and it would actually be possible to prove useful things about it.
Micro Focus is a major player in bringing cobol onto Unix/Linux/Windows systems.

They've been around for 30 years, and they have a market cap of less than a billion dollars (converting from pounds to USD - they're based in the UK).

Their business is really old (but new by mainframe standards), and doesn't have nearly as much room to grow. Even if they double in size by cannibalizing mainframe sales, they'll be worth 0.01 Googles, or 0.05 Amazons. So there's just not enough potential in supporting this kind of junk (which is not a trivial thing technically - it's ALL messy backward compatibility stuff, and the jobs are really not intellectually appealing: just imagine telling yourself or your friends that you maintain a small part of a cobol compiler for a living).

And startups have virtually no chance at cannibalizing Micro Focus - it took MF a very long time to take any appreciable amount of business away from IBM's mainframes.
A counter argument: if they are getting the PhD as evidence of mastery in a topic they love, it doesn't matter what comes after it, unless circumstances will force them to give up what they love until they die.

If one can see just this far, they will be able to plan accordingly. Suppose they do, then there is no reason to change course. The point is to know what you want and why you want it; having figured this out, screw what other people think, unless your plans require that as a parameter.