skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Portable computing circa 1968: a carrying case for your Teletype.
This is a really interesting follow up to a great Atlantic article I saw a couple weeks ago:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200907/ideas-tax

The general concept is that the only thing that should be taxed is behavior we don't want, which is unproductive assets. We should encourage people to work, so income tax is bad. We should encourage commerce, so sales tax is bad. We should encourage people to accumulate wealth, so basic property tax is bad. BUT, we should discourage unproductive assets, so we should tax them.

A negative deposit rate is essentially a tax on unproductive assets. Maybe this is the way of the future.
Consider the possibility that the Chinese people you know are self-selected democracy fans in general and US democracy fans in particular. While the number of such people might be quite high in absolute terms, relatively speaking I don't believe they comprise a large or even significant part of the Chinese population.

A typical American might be quite surprised to learn that his/her country's democratic process is not viewed with universal envy or even respect. Out of the Chinese people I know I have never heard even once that they would like to move to the USA because they seek political "freedom". In fact, quite the opposite; if anything they'd move to the USA despite the government. And it is hard to disagree; I personally have difficulty viewing democracy in the USA as a system worth copying. Don't think I'm singling out the USA either; many 1st world countries are single party states in all but name, IMO, Japan the undisputed leader in that ignominious race.

Anyway, this is a huge topic and not well dealt with in this format. If you're interested, here is an interesting translation I read recently of a Chinese perspective on democracy. I found it well written, accurate and fairly representative.

http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20090623_1.htm
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why not work on a new startup new while you're still young?

as for programming, the new languages (python, ruby) are much easier to learn and use than C++, and just as powerful language wise.
Say Goodbye to [Linux] Reboots with Ksplice
I use:

1. Mac OS X - for "normal people" stuff. Web browsing, IM, Twitter, music, movies, foo.

2. Linux (Ubuntu) - so that I can build (3).

3. Haiku (http://haiku-os.org) - because I can.
Haha, yah, I voted twice too. I run Linux (Fedora) on VMWare on my Windows box. Windows just runs much better on my poor graphics hardware.
I've two laptops, one with Mac OS X and one with Linux. I use both for development but as a client I prefer Mac OS X that Just Works. It was fun years ago to hack on config files and even to write my own device drivers when it was needed, it was a game with the benefit of learning a lot of stuff, but seriously, I expected Linux to be mature enough after a few years... instead it's the same problems again and again. All my wishes for Linux are instead incarnated by Mac OS X, so after more than 10 years of only linux one year ago I switched to mac os x, and I'm very happy so far.
How Facebook is Doing It Wrong, and Why It Doesn't Matter
Network - and don't get too caught up spending a lot of time doing something you're not happy with. I've seen lots of successful people get bogged down attempting to be successful with the current task at hand that they lose sight of the big picture.

Living in Silicon Valley is good advice - it's the right place to be to do some networking. You seem to be good at identifying opportunity - just make sure you talk to lots of other smart people and understand what they're doing, what they find difficult, etc. You'll know it when you hear something that you want to get involved in.
You can be very smart and still be incorrect at times. Blunders happen.
I am currently a student at UVA as well. Are u in Cville over the summer by any chance?
Google may be on the BEST end of the spectrum.

On the other end, there are thousands of companies that use H1B as an excuse to get cheap labor. These companies advertise for jobs as required by law and dump the resumes they get so they can claim there is no available talent within U.S. These are not conspiracy theories but rather well established practices.
It's a rather unscientific poll, using estimates and predictions of future energy costs to present to those surveyed.

That said, I am not happy about the cap and trade program in general. I think that it will hurt the economy and favor those who are capable of exploiting giant loopholes in the program. (Essentially consolidating industries into a few large players.)

And THAT said, I think HN is worthy of a much better article on the subject than a few paragraphs about a poll followed by a bunch of quotes from politicians.
<crappy_horror_movie_voice>He is the other yourself</...>.
In recent times it has been fashionable to talk of the levelling of nations, of the disappearance of different races in the melting-pot of contemporary civilization. I do not agree with this opinion, but its discussion remains another question. Here it is merely fitting to say that the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.

--alexander solzenitzen
My evil twin! Oh my god!
I don't think most Americans have a problem with truly bright engineers. I think the problem is when large corporations abuse the system to keep wages down.

Plus, yes the complaining will always come from the lower 80%; the top 20% usually have a way to solve their problems - that's the benefit of being on top.
One option: use your entrepreneurship and management training to figure out the answer to this question: what could someone with your skillset, who didn't need to otherwise work to support themselves, and was willing to devote 100% of their time, do that would have the maximal positive impact on the world?

Then live frugally, like a college student. The 100K will support you for the next four years. To be able to devote 100% of four years of youthful, intelligent energy towards one of the world's problems without other major life distractions (school, job) would be an amazing resource and you could have a tremendous impact. (An important component of this should be finding something that excites you, rather than just responding only to a feeling of guilt).

I disagree with the commentors who suggest you should invest your money. You're an entrepreneur. If you want another 100K, you can go out and do something to make that. (I would however recommend never, ever, going into debt: never spend money you don't have on the assumption that you'll be able to make more later; this is a powerful reality check that ensures that you really are doing what you think you can).

I expect other commentators to voraciously disagree with my suggestion that you spend the money supporting yourself instead of saving it; I'll just note that in advance so I won't feel like I need to respond to any of the responses.
I think you missed the point. A grad student who idolizes Feynman, Einstein or Hawking does not think he's as smart as them (not even close). Instead, he hopes he can make contributions at the same level of Feynman, Einstein or Hawking. Maybe if he works really hard and is lucky, then maybe he can make one important contribution.

People who think they are smart and have no track record of achievements are just self-deluded, egomaniac, sick fools.
This narrative where the second generation immigrants ascend economically is not actually true. For certain ethnic groups it may have been true at one time, but the data actually show that Hispanics descend economically after the first generation, for one example.
Shh! Ixnay on the oilerspay!
Eating to Fuel Exercise
Again, what is wrong with that? I would take someone who is motivated, willing to work hard and is innovative over someone is simply comfortable with the likelihood that they will never contribute anything that will change the world.
The 'abuse to keep the wages down' is worked into the H1-B system. Reform is needed, but the spirit behind the program is valid.

Under the H1-B program, once you enter a certain stage of Department of Labor processing, you cannot get a promotion. Promotiotions = raises. Either the H1-B worker takes upon much more responsibility than they are being paid for, and therefore floors down the price the employers are willing to pay for an equiv. worker, OR they get stuck in a dead-end job and are first to get axed.

Ideally, this processing would take only a year or two. Thus, the demand of not changing the employee's title wouldn't be /so/ ridiculous (only a little ridiculous). However, in these post 9/11 delayed processing days, it ends up taking 3-4 years (especially if you're Chinese or Indian--the H1B Program has 'country of origin'-quotas (NOT citizenship, ORIGIN.))
I suspect there's just a wee bit of hypocracy taking place here.

One has to wonder if this truly was the case, and he came to these conclusions in a reasonable timeframe (on the order of 1 year), why on earth he's bothered to stay with HP for 2 full years?

Very likely this was due to an "earn out" clause in the acquisition agreement of Tabblo (his start-up).

So, in other words, the author has stayed-on for...the paycheck.
I have a question for you.
When applying for your new jobs as an H1-B, are you required to start the H1-B process all over again?
It's relatively easy to measure how smart a mathematician is. How do you measure how smart a politician is?

Then there's another problem: in certain organizations, it does not matter if you're very smart because you can't act on it. There's no better career suicide than making your superior look dumb in the corporate world. Your co-workers may feel threatened and conspire against you.

In government, you can't do certain things because the powerful interest groups or public opinion just won't let you. Hence, I ask again: how do you measure the performance or the smarts of a politician?

BTW, Cheney himself said in the early 1990s that going to Baghdad in 1991 would have resulted in a Vietnam-like quagmire. How ironic.
If you care about lifestyle, move up to Boulder. Killer startup community, more friendly than the valley. City with highest per capita advanced degrees. Only 100k population with the intellectual capital that you would only find in Boston/Bay/Austin. Google, Microsoft, crispin porter, tons of great companies have offices here. Relatively low cost of living. Come up here and bike, hike, and ski. Hell, you can kayak through the middle of town. Startup community will really challenge and inspire you...
The H1B program is idiotic. Immigration laws just need to be reformed. We need to stop importing nearly a million third world peasant laborers a year and start easily allowing in smart people who already speak English.
Plan 9 from Bell Labs ( http://plan9.cat-v.org ) and
Inferno ( http://code.google.com/p/inferno-os/ )
Yeah, I hate it when companies hire dolphin engineers instead of humans. Dolphin programmers will work for half of what a human one will -- often times being paid under-the-table in fish.
2 more months I would say: unless you like really high risk.

I wouldn't invest a full 100K right now in unless I had more to go round ;) (I do run a fairly large investment pot for me and some friends - things take a bit of managing atm)
Random thoughts:

- Kiva (& similar microlending orgs) seems like a nice way to put some portion of that to work for good causes, without it disappearing nearly as fast as simple charitable giving would make it go.

- If you own a place to live outright (no mortgage), even if it is a tiny apartment, you have an incredible amount of flexibility in your life that you would not have otherwise. (Of course, that flexibility is more interesting if you are living in SF than in Montana.)

(edit: paragraph breaks.)
Is there any information anywhere on the "survey" methodology? I can't tell whether they just asked store clerks for their opinions, or were actually getting hard data somehow. Reading between the lines on this one doesn't cut it.
We're talking Physics here. Let's not forget that.

A hard-working, motivated person does not need to be Einstein-smart to change the world. There are many ways of changing the world, but coming up with a new theory that dethrones the old established theory is probably the hardest and riskiest way of all.

If I wanted to recruit someone, I would want someone who is motivated and willing to work hard, over someone who is bitter for not being Feynman-smart that is for sure.

The point I am trying to make is that people should set small, realistic goals and accomplish them. Instead of one big goal, divide it into small ones and conquer them one by one. Do not engage in ego-masturbation until you've accomplished something truly Earth-shattering. Just keep working to accomplish more.
Good post.
The other end of the spectrum: I used to write code for autonomous UAVs back home (commercial and military). After completing my second degree in the US, I made it through to 90% of the interviews and selection process at the top firms that play in such applied heuristics. At that point I didn't think I was wasting my time, given my background and experience.

In the end, I was apologized to almost everywhere as they couldn't offer me a position because of my immigration status and there were existing federal restrictions limiting their hiring of foreign workers. Nonetheless, almost all those companies still e-mail me today asking whether I would take a position at their operations in my home country because there just aren't that many good people who do this kind of shit in the US.

Why, I ask?
Later, I got multiple offers from companies back home who were willing to pay 5 times as much and were either in direct competition to the folks in the U.S. or were selling them patented technologies that cost billions in licenses every year.
That's the funniest comment I've read in a while. Kudos!
I already gave my points about immigration in some earlier posts, but my opinion is: Immigration is irrelevant to prosperity of country. Several reasons for that:
1. The countries many immigrants are from, you know they have very affordable medicine and education (former Soviet Union, for example), so in fact any modern American big software company parasite on this cheap facilities, without any interest in developing similar things domestically.
2. There plenty of examples of countries with high rates of innovation, but with low immigration rates: Sweden (ericsson), Finland (Nokia), Japan.
3. I dare to claim, that immigration erodes values of American society.Imagine a person from China or India (the country where 60 million people literraly live in poop, they are born in cast of poop-cleaners-by-bare-hands), the person comes to USA and imeddiately becomes middle class (upper sometimes). Well, this new middle class built from immigrants from ugly places, thet have a lot higher tolerance for injustice and corruption.
RDPR isn't really as much about getting rich as it is about being rich. Getting rich requires skill, luck, etc. Being rich requires a different mindset in order to continue being rich. Rich people don't buy fancy cars. They buy things that turn a profit so that they can get fancy cars. That's what RDPD is about. I don't know about the rest of the series of the MLM stuff.
Yeah this book is more about building businesses than building personal net worth. There is however a strong correlation between the two :)

A very good book. I recommend it too.
I am not saying cultures should disappear. What I meant was national and other imaginary boundaries have engendered wars, genocides and other evils. Bringing boundaries down will not makes us clones in a 1984 like manner but may give rise to even more diversity due to the mixing. And these indigenous cultures are of no use when people are not free to roam the world!
Successful physicists were once seen as celebrities, not entirely unlike renowned athletes. Thus it was possible for them to attract similar attention from the opposite sex. The public's respect for physics and other cutting-edge intellectual pursuits has waned, however, and it is unlikely that we will be seeing this again.
A TC post on HN which apparently features "journalism" from Ms. Lacy. I call double-fault & loss of serve.

Ms. Lacy can't string English sentences together with even a modicum of workmanship competence. She cites reference she hasn't even read, crassly pimps her own works in 3rd party organs, and continues to offer exclusively hyperbolic punditry over reasoned & thoughtful analysis.

What's wrong with media today? I offer up the "career" of Ms. Sarah Lacy.
Question for Mac/Windows users: I develop on Linux, but occasionally on Mac or Windows. To be honest I'm pretty happy with a text editor and a few terminals on any platform, but one thing I miss is fast window management. Specifically:

* Focus follows mouse

* Alt+LMB drag to move whole window

* Alt+MMB drag to move nearest corner (ie resize)

The default Mac interface in particular I find difficult, as there's just one tiny resize tab in one corner. Is there anything that can help me here? Or do you do things differently?
Moving to Silicon Valley would be good times but unless you get a job you'll quickly eat through your 100k on living expenses OR you'll be living 40 miles away from your job and enduring a hellish commute on a regular basis. My suggestion would be to try and work with a small start-up who wants to quickly build some sort of international presence in a country of your choice and go live there for a year. That way you're working on something cool, you're still building your skills, but you're also able to take advantage of doing some travel outside the U.S. Given your background I'm sure someone would take a chance on you as a good business development guy.
Super Turing Computation via Analog Neural Networks
I think we might still see it again. We just need an international problem (like say global warming) that needs a genius to solve. Someone who solves a huge problem will become famous.
There's an entire bounty system set up in game, if you've got a problem with someone you either deal with it yourself or pay someone stronger to deal with it for you. It's a very simple system, and I'm unsure why so many people are using the 'banks' in game, because it's essentially handing money over to someone who can now buy an unstoppable ship.

Personally my 'bank' account was collecting ores in secure stations.
Exactly by whom was he arrested and court martialed? Somehow it sounds as if it was by his own superior officers...
Do you use Plan 9 as your main OS?
The future of Virtual Reality is not server centric
One way I tend to look at it now is to put myself in perspective. I generally go under the assumption I am pretty smart - whether it is true or not - and that can often be a bad thing. It's often good to sit and consider the effect such awesome minds (and I think it is hard to argue their contributions aren't above and beyond what most "very clever" people will achieve) had on the world just to put my own achievements in perspective.

The crucial thing of course is to understand that it is still possible to achieve great things without reaching those heady heights :) (for example Von Braun is little remembered in pop-physics but his [and his team's] achievements changed the world substantially)
Cross-Database Admin Tool which can manage MySQL, PostgreSQL and Oracle
I've been using Mac OS on and off for the last six years, but in the last year it has replaced Linux as my dominant workstation OS. I still have a few Linux and Windows build machines around the office.
Well, it's no secret that inland areas of China have climbed the prosperity ladder at a slower pace than the coastal cities. If you're going to compare an immature developing country to a mature rich developed country, maybe a better comparison would be to the richer cities, as that is the direction things are moving.

I have no wish for a flamewar either, but the attractions of a quiet suburban lifestyle, however opulent, are not universal. A big city is dynamic, convenient, connected and sophisticated in a way suburban life can never be - personally I find suburbia isolating and depressing. But honestly I don't know, I'm going to ask some of my friends what they think about that now :D

Hm, suburban life would be possible for some but you're right, you'd have to be rich. There is certainly not the low density, expansive McMansion suburbs you see en masse in the US. Houses do exist, especially further out of the cities, but they are smaller and very expensive relative to local pay, which varies wildly through the country, as your friend will no doubt attest. In rural areas it would be possible to live in a house more cheaply but at the cost of local amenity and lack of non-farming jobs, which are not famous for their high pay. So basically, no, not as we know it.

Anyway, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say China is some kind of utopia or even generally pleasant. Just that there are good points and bad points to both countries. Your parents would never want to move to a high rise in Shanghai; my Chinese friends would never want to move to a small town in the US, seriously.
It depends on the context.

In my context, we are building something new, that has never existed before, and we don't know the design we are going to converge on. Of course we have some reasonable ideas that we want to try out. But for us, slapping components together to achieve a desired behavior is way more productive than building that behavior cleanly de novo, because we don't know if the behavior we have in mind will work. The immediate goal is to try out a broad gamut of possibilities, quickly; find something that works; and then to push ahead to the next stage of the workflow. The medium term goal is to assemble a workflow that takes us from sample to analyzed data. The longer term goal is to iterate this workflow, so we go faster and faster from sample to analysis, on bigger and bigger data sets.

As we complete a single iteration, we get a chance to clean up our toolchain. But we only to clean it up enough that it will support the amount of scaling up we want to do in the next iteration, since the next level of scale will introduce new, unexpected problems.

Once we have a system that runs fast enough, and big enough to be worth deploying on an ongoing basis (say for a five year lifespan) it starts to pay to build a clean toolchain, reducing our ridiculous, MacGyver'ed, Rube Goldberg monstrosity into something clean, maintainable, and extensible. But if we tried to do this from the beginning, by now we would have gotten exactly.... nowhere.

Of course there's a balance. One perpetually runs the risk of creating an intractable hairball. That's another sign it's time to clean up the toolchain...
"...a step or two above the absolute dregs."

By attempting to identify the true 'nerdiest', as people distinct from present company, you've fed into the very same stigmatizing separate-and-point primary-school behavior highlighted by the original article.

The willingness of those excluded to try to redirect the labels/taunts/stigma to someone else of even lower status helps keep the whole sordid enterprise going.

I trust that wasn't your conscious intent, but it can just as easily be a reflex. "At least we're a step or two above those people."
wherever there's a silver lining, you can be sure ted dzuiba will be along shortly, to tell you about the cloud that goes along with it.

why would anyone want to live this way, always thinking the worst of everyone around him?
You said you're thinking about a career in Wall Street. I work as a trader at one of the big banks, so shoot me an email (address in profile) and I'll give you some thoughts about what it's like. I'd rather not air everything in a public forum...