efnysien

> he \emph{believed} in it

ftfy

It sounds like what you're looking for is best served by an incubator. Barring that, if you're in the valley (or even elsewhere) you should get involved with some sort of shared-working space like HackerDojo. From what I've experienced, the people and environment provide a nice expectation boost (it's very difficult to push yourself alone - much easier when people know what you're up to, and have expectations on you to succeed - then you have to!).

Best of luck!

cheers!

If someone could be so kind as to paste-bin this, I'd be grateful. The NYTimes paywall has been in full force lately (probably due to me being on uni IP?) considering that I rarely visit the site.

Is this behind a paywall for anyone else?

First used phabricator as an intern, and later brought the toolset for class projects (Compilers and now thesis-work). It's been massively helpful, and like others have commented, their IRC is active and helpful.

FWIW, a friend who'd never used the tool got up and running (after a kind of messy install) in less than 2 hrs. For any other undergrads out there doing any serious project work with people, this is worth your time. I mostly use it as a personal task-manager (asana would do the job), but I like how good its command line tools are, and how I can do just about anything from terminal.

> I'm mad because I can't rationalize how a company I dislike can make something of value so I'm going to make butthurt posts on HN about it.

Keep it up buddy.

Anonymity, and the effectiveness of anonymity has a lot to do with how the site, or product is structured. With secret, you have the app directly plugged into your friends-list, and while the content is 'anonymous', it's a watered down version of true anonymity. All apps like this serve to do is breed insecurity and malcontent amongst our peers.

Now imagine another version of Secret, where you truly anonymize message sends. Instead of seeing content from your friends lists, you see content from the world-over. Instead of some sort of petty, mean-girls-esque hate journal, it could be a modern, 21'st century version of the confessional (not that I'm a fan of the confessional, but you gotta admit there's something rather tantalizing in the concept).

SV seems to be stuck in a mire where product has to revolve around one's social group. What happened to the days of good old voyeurism?

Piazza is great at what it does: enabling discussion and making have a rolling wiki where they can talk to course staff about issues with the homework. However, they're alienating me with the career-recruitment spam - especially because it's not optional. Plus, isn't this all the more alienating for humanities courses? If it bothers me, and I'm enrolled in/TA'ing cs classes, it must bother the hell out of humanities majors with classes on piazza.

While not straightforward or easy (for an average chap), it's quite possible, and very useful. Although I wouldn't call it most people's programming language of choice, knowing, and being able to grapple with how C pushes memory management to user-code will definitely change the way you think about programming.

TLDR : Pick up any of the hundreds of books on it and start learning! If you're having trouble motivating yourself, try solving Competition Programming problems in it - it's usually a good way to learn a new language.

As a Junior at University right now, this article speaks quite positively about the benefits of doing a PhD.

1) Even if you get a PhD and aren't shining at your field (read gulped into tenure track positions at a top 10 CS program) you're not confined to becoming a professor at a state school. This is a legitimate fear, and one of the things that has always made me frightened of pursuing a PhD.

2) Even if I end up outside of Academia, I'll likely bear little to no fiscal loss. The work will most probably be more interesting than the work I'd be doing had I not done a PhD. The job-ceiling will also be significantly higher, or non-existant.

As a semi-related question - does anyone with a background in the area know if it's easier to get accepted into a top-10 CS program having been born and raised in the States? GPA, research experience and my school's 'ranking' is a non-issue - I'm just curious if residency in the United States ever affects PhD committees in regards to admission.