azarias

That's a pretty big fabfile! Do you do anything special with your DB as you switch over?

Pff...this command line doesn't even know 'ls' :)

That is actually pretty cool.

I am noticing that many state governments are also sponsoring various forms of incubators, which also offer non-dilutive funds. I think that can be just what some start-ups need.

SEEKING FREELANCER

A start up in Ann Arbor, MI. Looking for a designer. Initially to design our landing page, and then work with us on a continual basis. We care a lot more about your design skills than your coding skills---we are fine with getting PSDs or html (although the later will be nicer). We're a technical team with mostly engineers. Thank you.

azarias[at]meritful[dot]commm

Google, MS, Rackspace etc. ought to give a good look at all the middle layer libraries like boto, and support them to make it a matter of configuration to switch cloud service providers.

This already works well for email providers.

I agree with trying to understand your options to the fullest...except the casual mention of mental health issues. Most PhDs I know are still sane :)

But it helps to be pragmatic and interesting, even in systems. mobisys and mobicom is full of stuff that is more interesting than pragmatic.

I urge you to reconsider.

What do you want to do when you "grow up"? If you are hanging out on HN, I assume you have some interest in start ups...read my other comment. And I can give you a lot more reasons why you should continue [especially if you are at one of the better institutions].

This is great, and thanks for writing it up. I don't think many graduate students would consider doing this right after graduation...I certainly wasn't in a mood to write another detailed document after getting done with my dissertation (also a couple of months ago, and in computer science).

I wanted to add a little about the end-game. For me, the decision of what to do next followed a slightly different path. In the fall of my 5th year, while planning to graduate, I had to really think about what to do next. Academia sounded interesting, so I went ahead and applied to tenure track jobs, and did interviews. Come winter, I had an offer from an Ivy League school. But I had also wanted to do startups for a while.

From my experience, working on projects that were not provided/sanctioned by advisors was somewhat like working on a startup. You have to build things that others find useful/interesting, sell the crap out of it in publications, presentations etc, and I also had to fund it.(my research was building systems software that improves user experience in poor network environments, like those common in developing regions. One of the definite perks was travelling lots and deploying stuff I built.)

In other words, I have no idea why most PhDs are not be expected to go work on a startup when they finish. They are domain experts, and are expected to be good communicators when it is all said and done.

So, when it came time to make the call---an assistant professor, or a startup founder---I chose the later (and disappointed my advisor). Some friends tell me I could have done that without a PhD, and it was a waste of time. I think a PhD naturally leads to a start up. The Grind, as the op calls it, is something that teaches you a lot about yourself, and surrounds you with some of the smartest people you'll find. Your job, every single day, is to innovate [with a more flexible runway]...and you can make (and learn) a lot out of it.

We deploy many research projects in Ethiopia, and the situation has always been murky. For example, it has been long outlawed to provide calling services for others over VOIP. So, if you run an internet café, and provide a calling service charging people, you faced jail. Private use of internet has been mostly unmonitored so far---but far too many people are now using their home internet for calling other people it appears. Given its very big diaspora population, communication is a very lucrative business in Ethiopia, and the government has made it clear in the past that the monopoly is going to continue this way because "it is one of the major sources of funds for development". This sounds like the next step in that approach.

I always thought the main barrier with international money transfers was the cost. If your backbone is something like WU, how do you reduce costs?...and can't Western Union roll out of bed one day and decide to make it even easier to send money?

PG had an interesting write up of this a while ago: http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html

I actually think YC would probably have picked up on them...Especially with the early traction numbers. It would be interesting to have a postmortem of applicants...but I doubt YC would ever release that information.

There is definitely a lot of social fatigue. I have cared less and less about my friends' hiking pictures over the years---and family and a few very close friends might be the largest group I will ever closely follow. It will be interesting to see what you guys come up with.

The last exciting acquisition I remember is Mint. One of those "must work hard" events.

Congrats guys. This is really exciting stuff!

I'm pretty sure this is for amusement only. Remzi (a well known researcher in file systems) is also quite humorous.

I have always wondered when the cycle became self-fulfilling. From the timeline, it seems the turning point might have been late 50s and early 60s when you had the venture capital firms start to take hold with interest in small tech companies.

A surprising amount of peer review is actually done by lowly graduate students who are assigned papers by advisors. I really try to give an honest evaluation :) [and my experience is most people generally do]. However, like it was mentioned above, the penalty for rejecting a good paper is really low.

Read the 5 points again, except now imagine he is talking about writing code.

A lot of it makes sense...In fact, I say Tim Peters lifted half of the Zen of Python from Lewis :)

It seems like the academic publishing model would be useful here (and in fact that might be what they are doing with alums reading applications.) Each paper gets a few reviewers, which quickly determines the definite accepts and rejects, and the whole committee need only discuss the ones in the middle. The way partners and alums are structured in YC, it would probably be ideal to weigh reviews accordingly.

There will definitely be some noise, but one would hope things will shake out as they should most of the time. At least that's what I am hoping.