weel

A subway ad on the DC metro, maybe?

I know it's hard to write pithy headlines, but describing open source as "programs written by volunteers" is misleading. A lot of open source software is actually written by people who get paid to do so, or who get paid at least partially because they do (or did) so.

As far as I can tell, yes. In particular, the people being sued by them presumably cared quite a bit.

Precisely. I actually have another comment to make, though, which is about the impedance mismatch between Engineering School culture and Ivy League culture.

I graduated Caltech in 2005. Caltech may be the best example of a school with extremely high academic standards but mediocre credibility with the "white shoe" crowd. Many of my fellow Caltech alums are descended from parents who are highly educated and moderately affluent, but also immigrants and/or Asian and/or Jewish and/or from less fashionable parts of the US (say, Idaho). On top of that, many of us display personality types most easily described as "geeky."

Caltech alums end up in many industries, but everywhere they tend to converge on rather specialized, analytical work. I know two who went into politics... to do statistics for campaigns. I heard of one that went to law school... and became a patent attorney. The ones in finance tend to do quantitative modeling or computer systems. Many, of course, ended up in private sector R&D (biotech, computer programming, engineering, what-have-you). And about half of us went to grad school, often to pursue a career in academia.

Now one reason for this pattern may be that white-shoe firms are not interested in hiring eccentric geeks as much as they are in attracting "well rounded" Ivy League folks. But an equally important reason is that the eccentric geeks are often not very interested in "white shoe" jobs, or at least don't look down on more specialized work.

That may be hard for the "white shoe" recruiters to understand. I recall talking to an acquaintance for whom being a McKinsey consultant would be the epitomy of career and life success, surpassable only by joining the Dutch foreign service... and who was almost offended at the idea that I was not in the least interested in such prestigious occupations.

I can easily imagine this attitude rubbing the white shoe folks the wrong way. "What, you are actually considering a career in kernel hacking (or genome hacking, or whatever) as a viable alternative to joining our glitzy band of Masters of the Universe? You must be, like, arrogant or something."

The article starts, "Think your Brown, Cornell or MIT degree carries weight in the professional world?" But what on earth is the "professional" world? "Top law firms, consulting agencies and investment banks."

In other words, what is being said here is that employers that emphasize pedigree and polish like to hire from schools that emphasize pedigree and polish.

Next week, somebody can publish a study saying that employers of, say, computer programmers, actuaries, and petroleum engineers actually love to hire from MIT, Caltech, Cornell, or CMU. And that would surprise me equally little.

Robertson screws are not flat head screws. They are a type of screws that is particularly popular in Canada and that requires a square screwdriver. Look it up on Wikipedia... it's an interesting tale of intellectual property guarded too zealously for the inventor's own good.

After using Hipmunk and ITA Matrix, I won't go back to using Orbitz or Expedia for searching fares. They're still convenient for actually booking things, but that's it.

I've lately had to book some flights between SFO and IAD on very short notice, and with Hipmunk for searching and Orbitz for booking, I can go from deciding that I should get a plane ticket to having it ordered in 10 minutes. For more complex searches, though, ITA Matrix still beats Hipmunk.

The OCaml compiler is a work of art. Reading it fills me with awe.

I interviewed for jobs in California last week, and I got job offers from three startups (two in San Francisco, one in the Valley), one of which was pre-series-A. Each of these reassured me that they knew a good immigration lawyer and offered to pay for them (in one case as part of a lump sump relocation bonus.) I ultimately decided to go work for Facebook instead, but I can confirm that there are certainly startups making job offers in the full understanding that they're going to have to arrange H1Bs.

xs4all

I interviewed at Google today and I recall their documents specifically saying that they would appreciate my not disclosing their questions.

Missions? As in proselytizing?

I think you should do it, because there is a lot you can learn from it. But once you're doing it, you should evaluate periodically whether you are still learning. If at some point you think you aren't, don't broadcast a public flamewar lambasting the VC, but leave amicably for "personal reasons" and move on.

Try bugmenot.

Go to google. Type into the search box:

  site:news.ycombinator.com <whatever-your-query-is>

I like my Thinkpad X61. It's not a netbook per se, but it has good battery life and isn't too bulky.

I recall speaking years ago with the head of admissions at Caltech, who had previously had a similar job at MIT. On his desk was a newspaper clipping about legacy admissions, so I asked him for his opinion. He was a very polite man, but you could see the fire in his eyes: he was not happy with it, and rather emphatic in declaring that neither Caltech nor MIT would do such a thing. (This is definitely consistent with my experience at Caltech. I know of one Caltech student who was the grandson of a big-time donor, but he was also one of the best in his class, and clearly had what it takes to get in anyway.)

I find it very interesting how you describe applying to Ivy League schools as a "total crapshoot." I wonder what your opinion is about high-end science/engineering schools (not just Caltech and MIT, but also CMU, Cornell, Harvey Mudd, etc.) Is their admissions process just as flawed? Or are they more predictable?

Yep. Also I am compelled by ancient tradition to point out that Caltech's style and traditions are going down the tubes due to the shift from administration by faculty to administration by professional administrators. (Note that this has been the received wisdom for long enough that it can't possibly be quite as true as it's made out to be.)

I think the reason many entrepreneurs are young is not so much that young people have inherently better ideas as that young people are in a better position to take some risk. That is why a good fraction of companies that are started by older people seem to be started by older people that already have money in the bank: they, too, are in a position to take some risk.

I have found that it helps sometimes, but not always, to right click the Moonlight plugin and choose "install microsoft codecs" from the menu.

I sometimes see job ads on facebook. I have no idea if this is true in general, but in my case, I have been surprised at how good of a match they tend to be. I am not sure exactly what characteristics the employers are targeting when they set up the ad campaign, but I can guess based on the fact that one or two of the ads specifically stated that the company employed other Caltech grads (I have a BS in CS from that school).

I have Moonlight installed on Linux, so I checked "Yes" for lack of a "sorta" option. Moonlight seems to be good enough to get to the few Silverlight sites I need (several European TV broadcasters...)

It's a good introduction to Python for those who cannot yet program. I recommend it to the economists who want to use my Python experimental economics user interface library, and they usually like it.

They already changed it to the standard system...

I think that at the very least, a super angel needs a halo, tights and a cape.

The first post on my twitter account was "what is this and why would anyone want to use it?"

It was definitely not "this is precisely the thing that I had been hoping for 10 years somebody would code up."

If you had tried to estimate the number of potential twitter users by counting up the number of people in the world who were search for a service that would publish their SMS-length plain text messages on a web site, you would have gotten nowhere meaningful.

In the economic analysis of law there is a standard argument that goes like this:

If you punish a crime more severely, people will do less of it. But you have to be careful. If you punish both murder and shoplifting by death, a shoplifter who is being pursued by a cop might as well shoot the cop—he has nothing to lose.

To give any legal advice, you must be a licensed attorney, which requires that you pass the bar exam, which requires (in most states) that you attend an ABA accredited law school. This system limits the supply of lawyers, which drives up their wages. That's bad. But what is also bad is that it allows the ABA to impose its priorities on law schools. (http://goo.gl/tosb etc.)

And don't even get me started on the restrictions on law firms taking outside capital.

When I saw the title I thought it was about Bayard's "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read." (http://www.amazon.com/dp/1596914696)

Works fine for me already.