Why I'm Getting a PhD - <AUTHOR> http://johnbender.us/2013/09/16/why-im-getting-a-phd/ <comment><USER3> Is anyone else doing their PhD (or did their PhD) just because they thought it was a lot of fun and a great way to learn a lot in a short time period? Not that it's the _only_ way to do any of those things, but I've found the lifestyle of a graduate student in CS to be extremely appealing.

My mentor once suggested that a PhD is only worthwhile if you plan on doing research after you graduate. But as he got to know me better, he noticed that I was _actually enjoying_ the act of obtaining a PhD. Isn't that enough?

<comment><USER4> _Isn 't that enough?_

Well, yes, it _can be_. During my PhD studies I met a couple people who could be considered "lifers" who were clearly very happy doing graduate-level research work. Maybe you are one of them. Their optimal career path would be a cushy postdoc job so they continue to keep doing what they are doing but without paying tuition fees.

I'm sure you know, but for others reading, there are reasons why most people _don 't_ do this.

1\. There is a strong psychological toll on doing original research. It's liberating and exciting, but also intensely frustrating and isolating. Writing papers, and their inevitable rejection, is a very disheartening venture that can't be accurately described without doing it.

2\. If you're in the sciences, which I assume most people reading here are, you stand to make significantly more in industry research than post-doc research.

3\. Research takes over your mind, you can't turn it off. When I was doing my PhD, I was essentially "on" all the time, it can never be a 9 to 5 job. Despite your best efforts, research will always have a toll on your family.

So if these things aren't a problem for _you_ , then it certainly is enough. Research is a uniquely rewarding career path. But your mentor uses that line as a way of helping/warning others. You aren't the stereotypical PhD student, and PhD students are already skewed all the way down the spectrum of "normal". The majority of the population, and most PhD researchers, struggle with these problems. If you're not committed to it for the long-haul, which is what your mentor is alluding to, it's not worth doing it.

EDIT: Now I've done my PhD, people often ask me "Do you think I should do one?" and the unsatisfyingly true answer is "I don't know, I'm not you" (and, perhaps even worse, is that _you_ aren't you when you finish the PhD from when you started, you change and grow a lot, which affects your viewpoint dramatically). That's another reason why your mentor has that saying, it's more easily digestible by those who are unsure.

<comment><USER5> (1) is (only) your personal viewpoint - i certainly never felt that.

(3) can apply to any interesting job, if you let it.

only (2) is an impartial criticism of research.

<comment><USER6> Of course I can't claim that my personal experience is representative of all people. But you're the first person I hear say that did not feel any psychological effects of doing a PhD.

Every single person I know that did a PhD (including myself) has mentioned feeling frustrated/isolated/depressed/etc at different stages in their PhDs. It is interesting to see that some people are actually not affected that much.

<comment><USER3> I guess I'll just chime in and say that, going into my fourth year, I've never felt frustrated/isolated/depressed more than I thought was normal. (I mean, does getting frustrated with GHC count? :P)

I'd actually say it's the opposite: the process of getting my PhD has been one of the more wonderful experiences of my life thus far. Although, I tend to believe that at least part of this is due in large part to one particularly awesome professor that I've worked closely with (and isn't my advisor).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I see a lot of people saying getting a PhD limits your options for employment afterwards and you should only do it if you want an academic career.

I'm currently completing a PhD, and that was one of my primary concerns prior to starting. However I've eventually become more at ease with it. For one, I see a new appreciation for PhD level knowledge thanks to Google et. al, who have repopularised the value of having a PhD with their hiring practises. The advent of machine learning has made higher level CS knowledge more valuable again where for a while it was even actively spurned by much of the software industry. At the same time the basic bachelor CS degree is becoming commoditized and its value is decreasing. Partly because of outsourcing, partly because of MOOCs, and partly because it is becoming evident to employers that people without college / university training can be as effective as people with that training.

All up, I'm a lot less worried about this point than I was before I started.

<comment><USER8> I had a similar decision to go through, and I'm in a PhD program in machine learning now myself! PhD's might not be the trendiest thing in the startup world, but they're not a detriment at all from what I've heard and seen. Interned at a well-funded startup with 40 employees at the time, and we interns were literally the only tech people there without advanced degrees; many were ex-Googlers and the like. Similarly, at Microsoft I heard from many that as long as you can demonstrate that you haven't lost your touch for coding (do implementation + theory!), you're at no disadvantage relative to where you were before the PhD, and quite possibly at an advantage if you want to do more research-oriented things. Me, I may end up catching the academia bug while I'm here, but I'm not worried about losing my "in" in industry.

...now back to that problem set...

<comment> hconceic-HN I'm almost done with my PhD, and for people that don't want to stay at academia, I find extremely important what btown says about not doing only theory. Very rarely you will find a job where you'll only have to do theory, and even if you think you still remember everything you learned in your Bsc, you probably don't. Also, some of the things you might still remember, may not be of any use in the job market anymore. From my experince, I recently started being contacted and going to job interviews at major companies and I had to spend some time going through some course material and MOOCs, even if I been doing some code during my PhD.

Regarding the PhD experience, choose your advisor and group very carefully. You'll spend a lot of time with them. Also, during almost 2 years I was working with a really bad crazy advisor, that was pushing me to the limit for his interest. I was almost quitting but decided to change advisor and I'm really enjoying this now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here is a different perspective, all be it in a cynical tone: [http://crypto.junod.info/2013/09/09/an-aspiring- scientists-f...](http://crypto.junod.info/2013/09/09/an-aspiring-scientists- frustration-with-modern-day-academia-a-resignation/)

And here's another, with much more objective tone: [http://www.pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir.htm](http://www.pgbovine.net/PhD- memoir.htm)

My take on the subject matter is that:

\- When getting into the PhD. track, one should be aware of what he/she is getting into, and be prepared for the resulting lifestyle.

\- One should have an extraordinary drive (even to the point of personal obsession) to search for answers towards the unsolved problems in his/her field of study despite knowing the consequences that will be imposed onto his/her life by this intellectual journey.

\- One should find a PI whose personality clicks with his/hers, and whose research he/she is motivated to work on. It is pretty rare to match these two parameters perfectly, but one can weigh trade-offs, and work with the best available while still maintaining his/her aspirations.

\- One should realize that, regardless of popular belief, academia is business with its own business model: understanding the intricate business logic behind the model will facilitate one greatly in his/her quest.

\- One should realize that like every human society, academia has its own fair share of personalities and egos, and intrapersonal skills matter, a lot.

<comment><USER10> wow that's a great summary of key points :) and thanks for mentioning that my memoir has a more objective tone than the other student's rant. i tried hard to present both the good and bad sides of academia, as viewed through the lens of a naive Ph.D. student. ah good times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> For whatever it's worth, as someone who just finished, you're doing a PhD for all of the right reasons.

You do it because you want to. Because you like getting to delve into a wide array of things. Because you want to focus more on interesting problems than interesting solutions. (Obviously, those two aren't mutually exclusive.)

If you're doing it with a career focus, it's not worth it. A PhD can be a hindrance in the corporate world, and jobs in academia are difficult to get.

Do it because you want a chance to do what you find most interesting for 5-8 years. (CS is probably shorter... In the geosciences, a M.S. is 2-3 years, and a PhD is an additional 4-6. Typically, you switch institutions between an MS and PhD, as well.)

Also, from what I've seen, people who come back to graduate work after working for awhile are generally more successful than folks straight out of undergrad.

On the other hand, a PhD can close more doors than it opens in the corporate world, at least in my limited experience. For reasons I don't understand, most people view a PhD as meaning specialization. You'll be seen as "too specialized", regardless of your actual experience and skillset. At least for me, the opposite is true. My graduate work required me to be a generalist. Everyone I know of came out of undergrad much more specialized and became more of a generalist over time.

<comment><USER12> _For whatever it 's worth, as someone who just finished, you're doing a PhD for all of the right reasons._

That's true. I think it's telling, however, that the writer doesn't mention getting an academic job, or tenure. I hope his PhD works out for him and his family, who are implicitly along for the ride.

I also hope that, in three to four years, the OP writes an essay about what he thinks after he's gone through the academic grinder.

For an alternate perspective on academia, see Philip Greenspun's "Women in Science" ([http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in- science](http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I truly wish you the best of luck, and for an excellent outcome.

One thing - you just can't say "why I'm getting a PhD", even from an elite school, the way you'd say "why I'm getting a law, medical, or business degree". Even if you've been admitted to an elite program, you can really only say "why I'm rolling the dice on the possibility of getting a PhD".

At elite programs, there is essentially no involuntary attrition in JD, MD, or MBA degrees. Yale law school has no 1L attrition. Columbia's JD 1L attrition is 0.3%. Attrition rates at elite med school is typically well below 1%.

[http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2008/04/law- school-r...](http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2008/04/law-school- ra-1.html)

(I'll stop with the googling of links here...)

Attrition rates for engineering PhD students appear to be about 33%. This (to me, atrocious number) is way better than science or humanities.

[http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/07/doctoral](http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/07/doctoral)

Unlike JD, MD, MBA programs, I don't believe that the numbers are better at elite schools.

[http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wicse/index.php/papers/li...](http://www- inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wicse/index.php/papers/lindareport2.pdf)

I dunno, maybe Berkeley is a risky program, it is a notoriously harsh school.

In spite of all I've said, I'm always hesitant to give anyone advice. There are still remarkable careers to be had in academics. Good luck.

<comment><USER14> > Attrition rates for engineering PhD students appear to be about 33%. This > (to me, atrocious number) is way better than science or humanities.

Perhaps this is because an engineering Ph.D. student is far better positioned to get a high-paying job than their 1L or med school counterparts. The engineering candidate doesn't _need_ to be there to get a job.

<comment><USER15> Exactly. 33% isn't bad to be honest.

When my advisor quit, I left my PhD without thinking twice, because I got a job at a much higher pay than my PhD stipend, and leaving my PhD didn't present the kind of financial burden that it would have were I in a humanities field.

Now I'd like to complete it again, but I'd want to do it part-time, and I have a much better idea of what I'd like to do. As engineers, we are pretty lucky to be in that position, even when things don't quite work out as planned, we still end up pretty well off. So there's not quite the same determination to make a particular course of action work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Career Path

...

Unfortunately, the problems I gravitate towards are not normally assigned to engineers and attempts to marry my interests with my domain of expertise [1,2] have met with understandably tepid responses. ,,, All of that makes perfect sense but it means I can't focus on the problems that I'm interested in.

\---

What Interests Me

The things that keep me up past midnight working and learning are technical. Problems both large and small that remain unsolved or problems where the solution seems unsatisfactory to me. A short and incomplete list in no particular order:

...

A few of these might align with a job posting somewhere but most don't. More importantly, I'm not as interested in the implementation as I am in conceiving a solution and understanding its value. ...

===

I guess you could say I'm taking The Fourth Path™.

While I may be new to the academic environment, I have taken efforts to ensure that my impressions are not naive.

===

I think what is Naive here is that even with a phd you will be working for someone. to do something. So, not having a functional goal for your work is Naive. Even if its research it has a "market". There are people who value it or they don't. The trade may be "in kind", be it social favours or prestige/ego polishing, if not in discrete financial incentives (grants, etc).

Its illusory to think your "career" is independent. At best, you are captive to customer if nor directly to your employer.

This all might be formalistic oversights for a blog post, but still...your a mid-career executive...this stuff shouldn't be off the radar entirely.

Good luck.

<comment><USER17> A big point in academia is that you can research whatever direction and niche you want, but you'll get paid only to research directions and niches chosen by others..

If those directions happen to overlap at the right time and place, you can have a great time getting a PhD; if they stop overlapping (possibly suddenly), then the choices aren't that nice.

<comment><USER18> Successful research strategies typically involve working on what is funded, and simultaneously bootstrapping what isn't until the early results are sufficient to get funding or at least collaborators on board. It's maybe tougher overall, but it's the only way to have interesting work longer term. It's also nice when you're mind is blown-out and you're stuck and sick of your current project to do something shiny and new for a little while.

I would assume that this is exactly how most businesses operate; you have to not only serve your current customers but line up new ones as well.

<comment><USER17> Yep, the funding requirements typically meant a process somewhat like - <USER2> you've got result A done or nearly done; then you apply for funding to do "A", but in fact do B for all that time. Then you apply for funding "to do B" while working on C for that funding... repeat ad nauseam for decades. Amazingly, it results in a process where each individual step is technically fraudulent but the total result is the intended one.

But this is not how most businesses operate, academic funding is a very different mindset. Well, perhaps defense contractor companies need to plan about their funding in similar terms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> For something like an opposite perspective, there's "Why I'm leaving [my job as a CS professor at] Harvard [to join Google]":

[http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvar...](http://matt- welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvard.html)

Shorter version of both posts: "Working at (university/big tech co.) frees me from all the distractions of working at (big tech co./university) so I can spend all my time hacking on the problems I find most interesting."

<comment><USER20> Where I get stuck: "we only accept PhDs at [GOOG/MS/FB] research." I want to be in these communities (preferably somewhere with funding + needs, likely to be a BigCo), but they don't make themselves very open.

<comment><USER4> FWIW, Peter Norvig was asked at an intern tech talk at Google "Do I need a PhD to work at Google?" and he replied "No, and most of the people here don't have one. What we are looking to hire is people who have the original thinking mindset that makes them able to _do_ PhDs, even if they haven't done one."

When you're working at Google/Facebook/Microsoft you're working on problems that are new to you, even if they aren't new to the rest of the company. You're learning, which is the fun bit of research. Many of the products you will work on may never have been attempted at the size/scale you are going for, and so that's research.

Industry has a lot of the R of R&D, you just need to recognize it when it's happening.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I bet I will see this entry tomorrow : "Why I'm not Getting a PhD"

<comment><USER22> More likely - Why I wish I hadn't have gotten a PhD

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I know many people have conflicting opinions about PhDs, but I think this is a pretty good explanation of what a PhD is: [http://matt.might.net/articles/phd- school-in-pictures/](http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/)

Disclaimer: I don't have a PhD :)

</comment><comment><USER24> I wish you the best of luck.

I went into my PhD with totally the wrong reasoning and eventually left after 3 years. All I can say is: the PhD is about _the process not the end results_ ; and it's _a qualification to conduct research_ and nothing more

This was my collected rant: [http://jamie.ideasasylum.com/2008/07/things-i- learnt-during-...](http://jamie.ideasasylum.com/2008/07/things-i-learnt- during-and-about-my-phd/)

<comment><USER25> Your experience mirrors mine in many ways (especially Hunt the Supervisor.. oh, the fun we had). Sounds like you were/are also in the UK -- 3-4 years for a PhD is considered fast over here in the US!

I think the most unexpected part of my PhD experience was the sheer mind- numbing slog that research can become, either your own project or assisting your supervisor. Writing a pretty easy script and then running it 1000 times with different variables on different datasets. Reviewing a metric ton of papers for a forced lit review. etc.

I loved the freedom of thought, and learned a lot about what I was interested in and motivated by. I loved the structure of academia, the familiar support networks, and I found I really enjoyed teaching. I particularly liked thinking up bizarre ideas and having the skills and tools at my disposal to see if anyone had done it before and quickly knock up a messy but functional way to test it out.

For me, it boiled down to wanting to do work on messy, imperfect data that came from the real world, which was at odds with the highly curated and neat datasets that can get you nice, repeatable results suitable for a PhD. Would I have stuck it out if I could have done the research I really wanted? Having seen friends go through the writing up stage and break under the pressure, I'm not sure. I'm not intending to go back and finish it, that's for sure.

Side note: the font size for your Joel on Software quote is insanely large (Chrome/Windows).

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Your interests align with mine. I have considered academia, but for now it suffices to work on language research projects in spare time. I _did_ get a job in compilers and build tools last year because of my language interests, so it's certainly not impossible. Compilers experts are not in high demand, but when they are needed they can go for a pretty penny due to short supply.

> I'm not as interested in the implementation as I am in conceiving a solution > and understanding its value. I'm sure that will sound like laziness to some…

Not at all. People like you are the reason that people like me have so many great papers to work from. The world needs people on both sides of that divide.

</comment><comment><USER27> Good luck. I'm just finishing mine. It's been a hard path, but also incredibly stimulating and awesome in a lot of ways.

I'm an applied math-type, but your list of topics looks like a great start. My most successful peers knew exactly the things they wanted to work on and have nailed it.

Cheers!

</comment><comment><USER28> Yes people often feel this way in their first year.

Look, I'm not saying the author shouldn't do it, I'm in a grad program now.

But things usually change and feelings usually get a lot more complicated before they get clearer.

</comment><comment><USER29> A few books that might be helpful:

[http://www.pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir.htm](http://www.pgbovine.net/PhD- memoir.htm)

[http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Your-PhD-Survival- Doctoral/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Your-PhD-Survival- Doctoral/dp/3642158463)

</comment><comment><USER30> "Because it's my life and I believe it's worthwhile to me." I don't understand why people bother to defend personal choices, like education, as if they're in some sort of formal argument. This says more about culture and your own insecurity.

<comment><USER31> Maybe they value others opinions/encouragement/feedback. A degree of insecurity isn't necessarily a bad thing, it can stop you making mistakes. I wish I'd taken some of the questions of my friends at school _Why do you want to get a degree anyway?_ more seriously years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's totally not worth it unless you want to be a professor. Trust me.

<comment><USER33> Suppose that I want to do basic research in, say, physics. How would I do so without a PhD?

<comment><USER22> If you were doing that, you'd likely either be a professor (of some kind), or on that track post-doc, etc... or the national laboratory equivalent. I don't know how many PhD-level "staff" positions there are on the big physics experiments.

It's probably more accurate to say "unless you want to be an academic" as opposed to "unless you want to be a professor", but since becoming a professor is usually the goal of an academic career, it's a fair statement to make.

<comment><USER33> Thank you for the reply. So the only, or at least best, way of doing science research is to be an academic, or work at a national laboratory (does that count as academia?)? Thus, the statement "only reason to do a PhD is to be an academic" is isomorphic to the statement "only reason to do a PhD is to do basic science research"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I feel like he's leaving out something quite important, which is what he plans to do once he has his PhD. Professor (research or teaching?) or industry (big business or startups?)?

<comment><USER35> This isn't actually very important. At least if you are in STEM. The point of the PhD is to learn. That's valuable to all career paths.

<comment><USER36> Wrong, it's _extremely_ important.

You're devoting the next 5+ years of your life to a single task. You're forgoing your programmer salary for the next 5+ years, which could easily add up to $300k - $500k in opportunity cost. Your forcing your wife and kids to come along for the ride. You're going to end up a world expert in a tiny niche that, quite possibly, nobody outside of academia cares about. You should have a _pretty good_ idea where you want this all to lead.

There are practical reasons for having a goal in mind:

* If you want to land an academic job, you should be planning for that from day one. Academic positions are _extremely_ competitive, and you need to make yourself an _extremely_ competitive candidate. That means you must present and publish your work aggressively often, networking extensively, and choose a popular topic of research that will garner you many citations, etc.

* You have to make many important decisions right from the start of grad school (who to choose as an advisor, what topic to research, etc.). Choosing poorly will have ramifications for many years to come. Having relevant criteria (such as some long-term goal) can help you with these decisions.

* It's not entirely unusual for candidates to languish for 7+ years in their program, often due to lack of direction or because they expected their advisor to motivate them and keep them on track. You need to motivate yourself. Having some direction from the start can help with this motivation, and also help you from getting swallowed up by all the time-sinks that will eat away at your productivity.

<comment><USER35> This sounds a lot like you are telling us what _you_ value in life. There are no rules in life and it's not a requirement to have your whole life planned out at every moment in time. Most people don't, including highly successful people. That's ok. What's important is taking advantage of opportunity when it is presented.

If a goal of yours is to learn, then a PhD is a great opportunity for this. The value of the PhD is not even gaining expert knowledge in a small area. It's _learning how to learn_. It's learning how to focus so hard on one thing so as to surpass or build on what the best of those who've come before you have done. It teaches you do deal with the fear of not knowing and having nobody to tell you the answer.

On the other hand, even if you end up coming to be concerned about money, it's still not a big deal. Sure, you don't go into a PhD for money. But wether you go into industry or succeed in academia afterwards, you won't be wanting for money. Hell, you can even leave part way through and get a well paying job!

Besides, your counterparts who ran the corporate treadmill will only be incrementally richer than you anyways. If you really want to be rich, you need to take on big risks such as starting a company or the like. Talking about putting your wife and kids in a tough spot! That said, I hope you put something in life above money.

Edit:

Regarding your edits, those are concerns that you do need to consider. Though it's really not the end of the world if you don't. Simply always trying hard goes a long way to doing alright in most scenarios and there are always great fallback options.

<comment><USER37> [bill lumbergh] I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you on that. [/office space] (My PhD is in behavioral neuroscience, so YMMV)

I've found that if people want to learn, then they will learn. You don't need a PhD for that, and the process of going through a PhD doesn't really teach you anything more than you couldn't have gotten yourself. Passion drives someone to learn, not getting accepted into a PhD program.

<comment><USER38> In theory I agree, but I _very_ rarely run into people who actually do so on their own. Even fewer who do something recognizable as contributions to a research field, in the sense of writing up something of peer-reviewed paper quality, which indicates the author is familiar with existing research, appropriately explains how the new contribution relates to concepts and techniques that already exist, and presents the results in a convincing format (whether that's statistical analysis or a good case study or whatever). It doesn't even have to actually be published; I'm fine browsing papers on arXiv too, or things circulated as whitepapers or tech reports.

They exist, but they're uncommon, and many of the people doing that kind of work are in sort of para-academic jobs, like long-time librarian at a big research library, or senior staff member at a (government or corporate) research lab. Even in an environment like Google, the majority of the papers and paper-like writeups seem to come from either people with PhDs, or people with long track records in a quasi-academic environment, like Google's sizable stable of ex-Bell-Labs researchers.

I don't really say that out of any particular love for institutionally tied research, but more out of the opposite, a frustration that it's so rare to find DIY research that really contributes to a research field. Some of that, I assume, is just incentives: if what you earn money on involves getting something to work, all that really matters is that you come up with a technique that works. Understanding how your technique relates to existing techniques, explaining whether it's completely novel or a variant of an established one, and doing the detailed analysis to figure out why precisely it outperforms existing techniques (e.g. is there one particular tweak that's critical, and if so, why is it critical?), is not always something incentivized in that context, but is important to advancing the state of knowledge in a field.

<comment><USER37> Hey Delirium, very well put. I'm curious about your experience (phd program, country etc) as I have a different perspective and I frequently wonder if it's just my experience in the biology side of academics.

"In theory I agree, but I very rarely run into people who actually do so on their own" This board is full of people who actually learn on their own:) People learned to code, people learned how to run businesses and people have learned how to build purely based on their passion to learn/build and contribute to the world. The reason why this is less so in science is that the resources are behind a paywall. I recently left my academic life to start a business and as such, I don't have access to scientific papers anymore….this limits my ability. This is also the major motivation for my startup which will bring raw academic scientific data to the public…but I digress. The fact is that you are surrounded by those people, but they aren't bringing their ideas to science because the process by which science is done doesn't allow for it…and that is a problem.

Re: peer-review papers/quality: ahha, I'm not sure I agree. Peer review in theory is great, in practice it's BS/politics/$$$$. Also, in my experience (YMMV), a lot of references in intros/discussions are "oh shit, you have to reference Joe Schmoe's 2008 paper here because he is on the editorial board." Not to discredit your point, I agree that peer review papers, citations and the like are important, but they are being abused now (at least in bio).

This is long winded, but my point is that we don't see a lot of people contributing to science because they don't have the resources to do so. I think that needs to change soon and I'm working to make that happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I was planning to apply for a phd, and not so sure. Thanks for such a nice post. Really helpful.

<comment><USER40> I'm biting the bullet this fall too. Having worked in a lab for the past year, I can see what the good ways to do it are, and the bad ways too. I hope to do it in the good ways.

<comment><USER39> either good or bad ways, I'm just afraid of being stuck in academia. writing some papers and starting to every sentence with " according xx (1910)" are boring sometimes, you know well, I gyess :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> John, it's great that you want to learn more about those topics. But, don't misunderstand. Earning a PhD is like 10% learning about the topic, and 90% learning the process of research and the business of research. Based on your blog post, it's going to take a while until that other 90% really hits you. Reading papers is easy compared to writing them.

Also, PhD studies and the academic life at a research institution are emotionally stressful and extremely time consuming. You have to consider the negative impact of that on your family, regardless of how supportive they are.

</comment><comment><USER42> As someone who was recently persuing a PhD, I would say anyone getting one is making a huge bet on the future of traditonal higher education institutes. In general, I am scared for the future of pure science

<comment><USER43> I think the right time to be scared for the future of pure science was in the 1970s. Pure R&D institutions started dropping like flies after that, and we almost lost our innovation edge.

I think the Internet brought us back from the brink -- except now it's not large institutions sponsoring R&D, but rather small companies and individuals. Pure science suffers in comparison to small tech (like apps and web stuff) because it's expensive, but I think that could change as we perfect crowd- funding mechanisms and as enough people accumulate enough resources to start privately funding pure science research.

I don't think traditional higher ed institutes are safe by any means -- but a PhD itself is still a worthwhile use of time, whether used for its intended purpose or as a pivot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> The problem with a PhD is that it requires a laser focus on a narrowly defined topic. I'm much more interested in the connections between different areas. Thus, no PhD so far. I also wouldn't want to put myself entirely under one advisor's control to the degree that PhD programs typically require.

I do think it would be an interesting way to re-structure my time, though.

</comment><comment><USER44> I've always been passionate about education and hope to one day be in a place where I can get my PHD. Unfortunately I've opted to relocate and travel for a couple years which has showed me that online PHDs virtually don't exist. Has anyone done an online PHD in CS or something similar?

</comment><comment><USER45> You're lucky to have a wife that supportive. I'm about to do something considered equally as risky, and the support of my SO helps in extinguishing a lot of the fear and anxiety. I have friends who are not as lucky with SO's demanding they continue down one career path or another.

Best of luck to you.

</comment><comment><USER46> This is awesome! I also have very similar interests and I'm applying for a PhD this year.

</comment><comment><USER47> Good on you John, best of luck.

I'm going to be applying for engineering PhD programmes by this coming January and I'm in a similar position to you: 28, wife, 2 year old kid, trying for another, etc.

</comment><comment><USER48> As someone who assigns little value to academia I would like to say, without irony or pretense:

Best of luck to you, sir! I hope it's fulfilling, but never to the point of satisfaction! :)

</comment><comment><USER49> My main challenge is to keep focus and motivation.

My weekend project to keep me motivated during my PhD: [http://bohrresearch.com](http://bohrresearch.com)

</comment><comment><USER50> The 23rd marks the "...first day of instruction in the first academic year of my PhD in Computer Science..." at Newcastle University. Good luck :)

</comment><comment><USER51> > Descriptive declarative languages that aren't

Sounds like Ruby! I mean that in a good way.

</comment><comment><USER52> I never wanted to leave college. Why leave--it's fun and the social benefits were unbelievable.

Although, I think a college degree is overrated. I truly believe a determined individual can use the Internet as a substitute for a college degree, especially Programmers. When I went to school I thought General Education requirements were a waste of time, but as I aged, I'm glad I was exposed to philophy, and psychology courses. I'm amazed how many people go through life not knowing what the Placebo Effect is.(yes--Strunk would be mad, but tired.).

</comment><comment><USER53> Looking back, I regret not having pursued a degree in Physics or Mathematics. I took the "easy way out" and pursued a liberal arts degree just to be done with college and move on.

In retrospect, it would have been great to have majored in something that, perhaps, may have been more difficult but more rewarding in the long run.

Therefore I suggest that, if you have the opportunity to do so, pursue your PhD. You never know when older age will sneak up on you and you will no longer have enough time to do so :)</comment>


Drone crash-lands at US Open - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oII7XOicv0

<comment><USER2> 3DR Solo. Not the best bit of publicity for 3DR on multiple levels.

As a hobbyist quadcopter designer/pilot, I'm getting real sick of these idiots flying in all sorts of stupid places you shouldn't be flying a 4 pound brick with potentially skin-cutting blades attached. People already have enough of an irrational bias against "drones", events like this sure aren't going to help.

Good thing the stands in that area were empty.</comment>


Ask HN: Why can't we comment on some posts? - <AUTHOR> http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2020416

<comment><USER2> Because those are links to the HN Job Board, rather than HN self posts. These have comments disabled, for obvious reasons.</comment>


Microsoft Tag: Microsoft's own 2D barcode - <AUTHOR> http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090108/microsoft-tag-microsofts-own-2d-barcode/

<comment><USER2> OK, I'll admit that color barcodes are cool, but there's several problems with this:

* There's no compelling usecase that cannot be accomplished with existing technologies like QR-code.

* Routing all Tag traffic though MS systems is just asking for abuse. For instance, with this setup, MS could retroactively yank a Tag that they didn't like.

* As others have pointed out, there's still a lot of black-and-white only printers out there, so without support for a fallback scheme, you'd need both a Tag and a QR-code app on your phone.

* Is the color barcode technology patented (forgive me if I missed that in the article)? If so, then that shuts out alternate implementations. What if MS decides to pull an MSIE for Mac kind of stunt and pull non-WinMo versions of Tag once it gets popular?

I don't mean to be an ass; MS Research came up with yet another great idea. No, my problems are with the productization of the color barcodes.</comment>


AI Startup Boom Raises Questions of Exaggerated Tech Savvy - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/ai-startup-boom-raises-questions-of-exaggerated-tech-savvy-11565775004?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> > Users can then choose existing apps similar to their idea, such as Uber's or > Facebook's. Then Engineer.ai creates the app largely automatically

The resulting codebase must be a nightmare to maintain, unless the app is little more than a collection of pre-written functions.</comment>


Ask YC: Implementing a web client in Python - <AUTHOR>

I would like to have any tips on how to implement a remote web client in Python, i have to fill in a web form with data from .doc files manually and it is really a pain, I would like to have some tips on how to implement this in Python. Thanks alot. <comment><USER2> <http://twill.idyll.org/>

Is Google Down?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, google is not down. but thanks for the link. i will be checking it out</comment></comment>


Boltsort - The winner of Vimeo's C code challenge - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vimeo/libvmod-boltsort

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the fully-functional, fast Varnish URL query string param sorter that won our coding competetion. I wrote about my entry a couple weeks ago: [http://blog.jasonmooberry.com/2012/09/what-i-learned-from- my...](http://blog.jasonmooberry.com/2012/09/what-i-learned-from-my-first-c- coding-challenge/) This one beat mine by about 400k urls/sec. ~2.6m urls/sec.

We have been using it in production on our Varnish 3.0 servers for a couple weeks now and it's solid.

<comment><USER2> Do you plan on doing any sort of writeup on the final solution? With the generated list of urls (based upon the information you provided) It is significantly slower than the version I ended up coding up <https://github.com/icefox/skwurly> by a factor of 3X. Now my version wasn't made as a varnish plugin, and some parts are ugly for speed reasons but there looked to be a number of techniques that could have been used.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! I don't think the memoization that you used in yours will work with the Varnish module format, but I think you had a good speedup even without that. For now we're just releasing the code.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is an easy/quick way to set up analytics for an iOS/mobile app? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> use one of the many app analytics SDKs for iOS - Firebase, MixPanel, Flurry, Amplitude...

<comment><AUTHOR> I heard that MixPanel is super complicated to set up. Couple of days worth of coding. I am looking for something more straight forward. Are there any that comes to mind?</comment></comment>


PlayStation Vita Exploit Reverse Engineering Challenge - <AUTHOR> http://yifan.lu/2016/08/05/henkaku-koth-challenge/ <comment><USER2> I dream of a world where device manufacturers are required to hand the firmware signing keys over to the public X years after product going to market. I have a growing collection of no longer supported but perfectly capable electronics which are just collecting dust because they're locked down. The Vita is a prominent example of this - the hardware is amazing, but the titles are just not appealing and I'd much rather play some SNES or homebrew on it. Instead it sits collecting dust, neither providing any value to me, nor any revenue to Sony.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interwsting plan to find a new crew to take up the mantle on the scene while they step away since they don't have time anymore.

Doubt it'll pay off though since they obviously spent years mastering this hardware and it's unlikely anyone else will invest as much time.

Hope I'm wrong.

<comment><USER4> In theory everything you need is in those binaries. We had to start from nothing. There's already a lot you can learn from the device just by running your own code on it.

<comment><USER5> It's cool tho read the creator speaking :-)

In general we like to have it all given and explained, but this kind of contest always will interested someone.

Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure how this is going to help the community. I'm sure the scene would thrive faster given they release the source and tooling.

</comment><comment><USER7> How much CTF's are helping in real world ? Is it just a game ?

<comment><USER4> I have to admit I never done one myself (always been meaning to, never had the time) but a lot of friends have and I trust their words. I believe it helps in the real world because these "war games" simulate real world systems and trains people in attacking them (therefore learning how to defend against such attacks).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The fact that the author is essentially thanking Sony for securing devices against them is something I find a bit baffling, unless it's some deep sarcasm I'm not seeing, or thanks for not making it _too_ secure.

<comment><USER9> The reason you're not seeing what he means is that you didn't grasp that the rest of the paragraph explains why he is thanking Sony.

He is thanking them for the opportunity to learn so much.

<comment><USER4> Yup, when I hacked the Kindle, it was a weekend's work. It was fun and challenging work, but not educating as this was.</comment></comment></comment>


VA Will Try Again to Make Its Health Records Compatible with Pentagon's - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2018/09/21/650385092/va-will-try-again-to-make-its-health-records-compatible-with-pentagons <comment><USER2> [https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/03/vista- computer...](https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/03/vista-computer- history-va-conspiracy-000367)

A little history on the VA's EHR system and the lineage it shares with the Pentagon system.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Summary (since this is an audio link): Mandated by congress that the VA and Pentagon have compatible electronic medical records system, so that VA patients have access to their records from their service.

1 billion spent, and completely failed.

Now VA has a contract for 10 billion over 10 years to use the same software as the Pentagon.</comment>


Psychosynth, a synthesizer and modular audio framework inspired by Reactable - <AUTHOR> http://psychosynth.com/index.php/Main_Page <comment><USER2> Reminds me of AudioGL:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-RCzeJQazA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-RCzeJQazA)

[https://www.audiogl.com/en/audiogl](https://www.audiogl.com/en/audiogl)

There is a downloadable version of it, but sadly its development looks dead :(

</comment><comment><USER3> Would love to have this running on a multi-touch-capable Ubuntu laptop/tablet device .. but, where are they?

<comment><USER4> You can install Ubuntu fairly easily on almost any Android tablet that has an unlockable bootloader.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me of the open source project Integra Live[1], I look forward to trying it out! I instantly wanted to make a mix of Lex from Jurassic Park saying "It's a unix system!".

[1][http://www.integralive.org/](http://www.integralive.org/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Awesome project, great to see that its all open source.

</comment><comment><USER7> Cool stuff. I think the official website is a better link, though. [http://psychosynth.com/index.php/Main_Page](http://psychosynth.com/index.php/Main_Page)

<comment><USER8> Ok, we changed the URL from [https://github.com/arximboldi/psychosynth](https://github.com/arximboldi/psychosynth). We also rolled back the clock on the story. (This is the latest in a series of experiments we've been running that attempt to give good submissions a second chance at attention on HN.)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (March – 2014) - <AUTHOR>

Please lead with either SEEKING WORK or SEEKING FREELANCER, your location and whether remote work is a possibility. <comment><USER2> This already exists [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7324231](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7324231)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks used the search and didn't see it. Thought it might not have been posted.</comment></comment>


5 Characteristics of Data Driven People - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rjmetrics.com/2014/06/05/characteristics-of-data-driven-people/

<comment><USER2> Particularly enjoyed the section on analysis paralysis.</comment>


Why I respect Kevin Rose more for killing Oink - <AUTHOR> http://jakenbake.com/kevin-rose-oink-oink/

<comment><USER2> Good read and I agree.</comment>


Ejacs: a JavaScript interpreter for Emacs - <AUTHOR> http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/11/ejacs-javascript-interpreter-for-emacs.html <comment><USER2> Surely he could have picked a better name. "Yegge ejacs in your browser."

<comment><USER3> _"Yegge ejacs in your browser."_

Ejacs has nothing to do with browsers.

<comment><USER4> Ejacs has something to do with Javascript, which has something to do with browsers.

<comment><USER5> True, but I think the purpose of Ejacs is so you can script emacs with javascript instead of elisp. People always make the mistake of tying javascript to browsers which is one of the reasons javascript bears the title "The World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language."

<comment><USER6> I thought the title was "The World's Most Misunderstood Webbrowser Language."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> His comparison of EmacsLisp and Javascript is pretty helpful (scroll down for a while).

<comment><USER8> Thank you for pointing that out. He had lost me long before that part of the post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> <http://github.com/bard/mozrepl/wikis/home> is a cool little project I've been watching on github; it to provides emacs integration, now it's just a matter of learning emacs. ;_; Here's a neat screencast of it in action: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v78HRi-J2ek></comment>


Chess queen of Africa - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/global/2016/aug/28/chess-queen-of-africa-phiona-mutesi <comment><USER2> She seems like a really impressive young lady, but still has a long way to go before becoming an elite chess player.

Her Fide rating of 1622 is 91,039th out of current active players, 102 out of female African active players and similar 10th best under 10 year old female player.

[http://www.chess-teaching.com/world_youth_tops.php](http://www.chess- teaching.com/world_youth_tops.php)

[http://ratings.fide.com/card.phtml?event=10000399](http://ratings.fide.com/card.phtml?event=10000399)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wondering if Phiona, the subject of this film and book, might be able to transfer her chess talents to tech fields -- such as Cisco networking, open source programming, etc... Read the book. It's very well written.</comment>


How I wrote a script to generate faces by inverting Haar cascades with Python - <AUTHOR> http://matthewearl.github.io/2016/01/14/inverse-haar/ <comment><USER2> This is a neat project, but with all due respect: I don't think the output can be convincingly called a "face". It would be interesting to see this attempted in a higher resolution.

<comment><USER3> Your comment makes me wonder if maybe we should start thinking beyond techniques designed to recognize faces and instead brainstorm how we would get a machine to learn not how to recognize but how to reproduce. I reckon going about it this way would be instructive on how to improve recognition since recognition and reproduction are two highly related activities.

<comment><USER4> Parts of machine learning used to be focused on density estimation / manifold learning for exactly this reason. It seems to be the case that supervised tasks (for sufficiently complicated and diverse problems e.g. ILSVRC, MSCOCO) implicitly learn some portions of what you would want from a density estimator. This is enough to generalize to new, but related tasks - see the huge body of work on pretrained VGG for {semantic segmentation, style, texture generation, depth/surface normal prediction}.

Learning a general density that is useful is quite difficult - you could be missing entire modes from the data distribution and never know it. You don't know what you don't know, after all. And there is still no clear (in my opinion) evidence that learning a density really helps generalize to a new task, _especially_ when the end task is still a supervised one.

Explicit density modeling seems to help the most in semi-supervised / limited data settings, but any time you can bring some enormous but related labeled data to bear on your supervised problem it seems to win over any kind of density estimation tricks - compare trained from scratch nets for the tasks I mentioned, to ones exploiting pretrained VGG models.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Generative adversarial networks can do this much much better. Check out this blog post:

[http://www.foldl.me/2015/conditional-gans-face- generation/](http://www.foldl.me/2015/conditional-gans-face-generation/)

and the corresponding paper:

[http://www.foldl.me/uploads/2015/conditional-gans-face- gener...](http://www.foldl.me/uploads/2015/conditional-gans-face- generation/paper.pdf)

<comment><USER4> If we _really_ want to get into "what is better" \- the state of the art has recently moved significantly past this (paper [1] and blog [2]) - not to mention the recent submissions to ICLR in this realm [3][4]. GAN training is very tricky to get working in practice, especially on new problems, though conditional GAN seems to be a bit more stable in learning than the unconditional relatives.

This blog deserves credit for thinking differently about a problem and getting something useful out of it.

I think the goal of this inversion was to inspect what the cascade is "looking at" in some sense - and for that this does a great job! Inverting a lossy classification feature is nearly always going to be worse than something designed from the ground up to be a generative model.

[1] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.09300](http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.09300)

[2] [http://torch.ch/blog/2015/11/13/gan.html](http://torch.ch/blog/2015/11/13/gan.html)

[3] [https://github.com/Newmu/dcgan_code](https://github.com/Newmu/dcgan_code)

[4] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.05644](http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.05644)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Would be interested to see how this compares to deep learning methods.</comment>


Retirement Calculators for Engineers - <AUTHOR> https://www.nesteggly.com/ <comment><USER2> This is fun to play around with!

A UI request - in testing different scenarios, I want to delete & retype the first digit or two only (what if I want 60000 per year? 75000 per year?) but deleting only the first digit empties the whole text box and I have to type out the zeros every time. Would be great to be able to edit only part of the many long numbers instead of the whole thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I recently implemented localization of the number formatting and must have introduced this bug then. I'll fix it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Broken on my iPad,I guess I work another 5 years? It gets to where it wants more info and I watch the wheel of misfortune spin.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ugh I'm sorry to hear that. I'm presently testing on Chrome, Firefox and Safari on macOS and Windows with no issues. What browser are you using?

<comment><USER3> Both Chrome and Safari on the iPad

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm not quite ready to open source this project just yet as I believe I possess some trade secret-level intellectual property. I might be wrong about that, so if anyone can find a calculator that can do what my calculators can do then I'll gladly open it up. That being said this is a 100% client-side app and I'm not collecting anyone's data (other than Google Analytics). I just wanted to share this project here to solicit feedback from smart people and help everyone get a clearer picture of their retirement.

<comment><USER4> I don't see how you do anything differently than networthify, Personal Capital's Retirement Planner, and everyone else.

In fact, you make the exact same mistakes they do, and more, which are critical ones.

<comment><AUTHOR> Networthify is missing quite a few features. Namely social security, pensions, annuities, taxes, capital depletion. It makes you internalize everything in your head in real, after-tax terms as if inflation and taxes don't exist. Nesteggly is better in this respect because it gives you a picture of your financial future in actual dollar terms.

Personal Capital's Retirement Planner is quite a bit different too. For one, it's a Monte Carlo simulator. Two, it assumes your retirement income will remain constant for your _entire_ retirement. Third, to use their calculator they make you sign up, link your accounts and endure the harassment of their financial advisors.

<comment><USER4> You might want to consider providing something that optionally allows you to sign up.

There's a lot of details that are required for increasingly better projections, and sometimes people taking a glance at what your software has to offer might not necessarily have time during their lunch hour or on the weekends to fill everything out.

Yes, Personal Capital targets sub-HNWIs, but realize they run a business, and if they're targeting you, it's also a sign you're probably doing something right.

<comment><AUTHOR> Stop revealing the features of my premium product before it's released. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Darrow Kirkpatrick has a taxonomy of retirement calculators here: [https://www.caniretireyet.com/the-best-retirement- calculator...](https://www.caniretireyet.com/the-best-retirement-calculators/)

These calculators would be in the low fidelity category. He gives examples of others that have higher fidelity.

Bogleheads has a nice list of calculators also: [https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Tools_and_calculators](https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Tools_and_calculators) The Retiree Portfolio Model is a high fidelity spreadsheet tool that takes some effort to use, but can be well worth it: [https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=97352](https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=97352)

One thing that low and medium fidelity calculators could do to provide value is education. These calculators are mostly used by those that are years away from retirement, who are probably younger and could use pointers to topics to learn about that will apply to their situation going forward.

For example, a colleague asked me about backdoor Roth contributions recently as he now makes too much to contribute directly. It turns out he had rolled a 401k into an IRA when the company we worked for was sold 12 years ago. I left it in a 401k and told folks at the time about the rules that might make backdoor Roth contributions uneconomical. I failed to educate properly at that time, and now he's not able to do Roth contributions to save money in the future.

Calculators that grow with you, remembering what you've entered and prompting for only the information needed for the next decision point are also a good idea. If you are targeting engineers, you'll likely grow into a very high fidelity calculator towards retirement, as engineers tend to like to fully understand the nuances of the situation. It may be that your tool creates a spreadsheet that can be downloaded and edited to handle the last 5-10% of the special nuances for that particular individual.

Making data input easier for users to think about is also a good idea. The recently featured on Hacker news [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23069276](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23069276) calculator has a place where you can enter special future spending. Having a page that you enter your child's age or rough birthday (even future) could make prompting for uneven income and spending like not working, child care, sports and college easier for folks to plan for and enter.

There are many cliffs in the tax code for example. Frugal professor had an old post that shows some of the cliffs before the 2018 tax code changes:

[https://frugalprofessor.com/federal-income-tax-calculator- to...](https://frugalprofessor.com/federal-income-tax-calculator-tool/)

I'd like to see calculators that determine which cliffs folks are likely to be near and educate them about the issues.

The ACA health care subsidy cliff is another important one. Earn $1 too much and your health care costs go from <$100 to $1000+ per month for early retirees.

Getting a balance between tax deferred (traditional IRA, 401k, etc.), tax free (Roth) and taxable savings is also important. You want to be able to withdraw savings from each of these in retirement in a balanced way. [https://www.gocurrycracker.com/6-years-of-nearly-income- tax-...](https://www.gocurrycracker.com/6-years-of-nearly-income-tax-free- living/) has a nice rundown of what they do to minimize taxes.

Why am I talking about taxes so much? The only thing you control in your retirement is the contributions and withdrawals from the various accounts. The market conditions control the returns. Being smart about how you balance your actions to minimize tax drag can be a big boost towards retirement.

Other decisions can also have a big effect your retirement spending. Are you planning on retiring in a state that taxes your social security benefits and capital gains? How much sooner could you retire moving to a state that doesn't tax these?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's funny you mention FI Calc. We're actually collaborating together to implement my strategy into his calculator. Here's the PR:

[https://github.com/jamesplease/fi- calc/pull/197](https://github.com/jamesplease/fi-calc/pull/197)

I totally understand where you're coming from with optimizing for taxes, tax cliffs, etc. Tax law is just so immensely nuanced and fluid. I mean, every _state_ has their own set of crazy rules and these rules change all the time. Even the popular backdoor Roth isn't a sure thing:

[https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-why-you-may-want- to-...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-why-you-may-want-to- reconsider-doing-that-backdoor-roth-ira-conversion-2019-04-17)

My calculator takes the Occam's Razor approach to taxes and uses a generic "tax burden" parameter in the assumptions. Someone as savvy as you are would surely be able to keep that parameter lower than others. For most people trying to minimize their tax burden, I think they'd be better served by a financial professional than a calculator. Just my $0.02.

<comment><USER4> If you're not implementing basic tax calculations, it's child's play. Too many uneducated kids don't realize you can't retire early with a 401(k).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The site does not work on mobile iOS safari

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm testing the site right now on my girlfriend's iPhone 7, iOS 13.3.1, Safari. All systems are go. Can you tell me more about your phone?</comment></comment>


No Bachelors Degree, No Problem - <AUTHOR>

If you're a skilled Java/Spring or JavaScript developer, I know of several openings at a respected company in the South SF Bay Area where those involved in hiring don't care about your lack of a degree as long as you're reasonably good.  I am omitting the name of the company because this isn't an official message.  This is just me, a frequent HN reader, reaching out to other HN readers.  Please be willing to relocate to the South SF Bay Area and currently be living somewhere in the United States.
I say reasonably because I don't want to scare anybody off unnecessarily.  Trust me, if you're reading Hacker News, you're probably better than 95% of the shockingly unskilled people who we phone screen on a regular basis.  I'd be happy to have a quick conversation with you to get a general idea of your skill level, at which point I can recommend you be brought in for an interview.
I know there's a regular "Who's Hiring" thread, but I think the semi-unique nature of this opportunity is reasonably worthy of posting separately.  Startups often don't care about education, but unless you have many years of experience or wrote a book, big companies often do.  In fact some of these openings officially require a Master's degree.
My contact information is on my profile. <comment><USER2> As a front-end JS dev (Backbone.js, jQuery, etc) I'm having a really hard time finding internships. I was recently hired by a venture-backed SF tech company but decided to leave because I didn't believe it was the right place for me right now -- I'm starting to regret it. I can't seem to find any listings offering internships. Heck, the company I joined didn't even list them. The recruiter kept pestering me on LinkedIn so I finally asked and lo and behold they had internships.

<comment><AUTHOR> Internships are available.

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure I see your contact information on your profile. Not really sure how HN works. I think if you've added an email address anyone can see it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I posted this awhile go:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5345474>

Feel free to contact me after looking at my site and assessing if you think I can contribute.

</comment><comment><USER4> The email field is private and not shown to the public. Generally people add their contact information in the About field.

<comment><AUTHOR> Didn't know that. Adding to About field.</comment></comment>


Ask Slashdot Story | How To Get Your Program Professionally Marketed? - <AUTHOR> http://ask.slashdot.org/story/09/07/03/1822249/How-To-Get-Your-Program-Professionally-Marketed?from=rss <comment><AUTHOR> I feel sorry for the person who posted this to slashdot.</comment>


Hands On: India's $35 Aakash Android tablet lands in America - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2011/10/26/aakash-android-tablet-exclusive/ <comment><USER3> Not to discourage you guys, but, this tablet is horrible. I am a class X Indian student, just got this for 2300 from the government outlet at Delhi. Its too slow. The battery only lasts an hour or so even if it's plugged in for 5 hours. YouTube, is also way too bad. Wifi connectivity is messed up. To switch to a new network, you have to restart the device. It feels a bit cheap on the outside too and neither my USB Keyboard nor my external Hard disk was compatible. I'll give it a rating of 3 out of 6.

It's basically slow with its 300mhz processor. You can easily get 600mhz tabs at 38$ directly from the Chinese factories.

But, there is one good thing about this, which is the GPRS capability. It also comes with 100 mb free data per month plan.

<comment><USER4> > It also comes with 100 mb free data per month plan.

If that's true then it is actually the real revolution here in my mind. For non-entertainment purposes a tablet is just a window onto the internet. It doesn't really matter how you get to the internet, but the minute you can your world expands a thousand fold. Suddenly giving millions (or tens or even hundreds of millions) of underprivileged people constant, always available internet access is a _huge_ disruption.

<comment><USER5> That's true. I mean imagine for rural farmers how revolutionary it would be just to go on a weather website and be able to see that it's not supposed to frost within a couple days after they plant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Compared to the top-end devices currently available it is a mediocre device. But it have the potential to introduce technology to an impressive amount of people. I live in Brazil and three years ago I worked in an international team that included three indian programmers. Only one of them had a personal computer in his house. It is a completly different reality.

</comment><comment><USER7> _"Many of those likely to use or own the the Aakash Tablet will never have used a desktop computer, and it's possible they never will."_

Not sure why, but I love concepts like this.

<comment><USER8> The largest percentage of cell phone users in the world will never have used a landline and never will.

It's a big mistake thinking that every new emerging economy has to go through the same industrialization steps in the same way as the last one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This device will allow people to lower the information differential between city dwellers and villagers, allowing them to negotiate better prices for their goods/services. This prototype is a great first step - let's see how users value the final version.

</comment><comment><USER10> I know its $35 and all, but we have to contemplate the fact that it's running a 366 MHz processor, and that used be enough to do all sorts of things.

I look at this device and think of the many levels of failed abstractions this poor CPU chews through every time you tap the screen.

Something is terribly wrong here. Not with this device in particular. With our abstracting complexities to create more complexities; wasting cycles away. Sometimes I feel like throwing it all out the window and just making the machine do what I need.

</comment><comment><USER11> Imagine what this would do to the PC sales in India? PC Sales were at 4.68 million in 2010 and it was expected to go up 22% in 2011. A significant chunk of those potential customers will opt for a far cheaper and mobile Aakash now. Ofcourse, there will still be some who will opt for a PC (as Aakash does not put a significant dent in their wallets), but the Tablet does it for a lot of people, with out having to worry about support, viruses etc.

<comment><USER12> Seeing as 4.68 million new PCs for a population of largely previously off-line 1.2b people is a very small drop in the bucket, I expect it will continue to go up rapidly very quickly for many years to come as India gets richer and PCs get cheaper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I seriously think the Indian government is wasting money on this.

Funding projects like Rasberry Pi would have been much better. They don't even understand what a tablet is. It's a crippled device where all you can do is watch videos and browse the Internet on your couch. You can almost do nothing productive with the device.

Tablet is a rich man's device. Giving that to poor people is nonsensical.

</comment><comment><USER14> Does it really have a KISS-style logo on the back?

</comment><comment><USER15> In many countries such as India and throughout asia people have never used a landline. Think about this for a second. Everyone carries around cell phones because they simply leapfrogged the infrastructure requirement for land lines.

A tablet like this is certainly going to change things. How cheap are cell phones these days? I'm not talking about that fancy iPhone you have in your pocket. I am talking about how much it costs to go into MetroPCS and grab a phone off the shelf. Or possibly WalMart.

If you thought we were connected as a world before things are about to drastically change even more.

</comment><comment><USER16> it could be revolutionary if it helps create a slew on android education/entertainment apps meant for low CPU / low network tablets.

note the official poverty line in India is about $1/day and 30% of the population is below it. These people are not worried about YouTube videos.

<comment> mkr-hn This could change your life if you can't get to a library and you can't afford a normal computer. Just being able to look up how to fix a car could restore mobility to someone who couldn't afford labor, or afford a tow to a mechanic.

That's one tiny example in a sea of little conveniences a computer affords us that we don't usually think about. And I'm not even talking about India. There are people in this situation in the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I hope this device provides access to internet for all students.

The big thing in education is "access to information".

<comment><USER18> I would guess this won't be easy in rural India.

It would be awesome if they load it up with lots of free ebooks and a decent offline copy of wikipedia (wikidroyd) from the start.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder whether they can produce them for $35 in a massive scale or the cost keep inflating like the OLPC

<comment><USER8> The parts are pretty standard and the government can potentially buy them by million plus they can easily line up cheap manufacturing. The OLPC was a unique and novel design with no real momentum behind it.

The main barrier to the success of this device is that since it's a government project at least 50% of the budget will be siphoned off into pork barrelling, ministerial pet projects and 'consultancy fees' to close friends and relatives of the politicians involved. Unless of course Indian politics is unlike any other variety.

<comment><USER20> India has a big problem with rampant political corruption.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_India>

<comment><USER8> Really who would have guessed !

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's $60 retail, there are $75 retail Chinese Android 2.3 tablets - <USER2> didn't change the world, why would this one?

Is the government going to create online courses in English and Hindi? Is it going to have English lessons so you can access all those 'educational' Youtube videos? Is it going to record the best elementary school teachers and put their lessons online?

Or is it going to be another - "we put computers in schools and therefore solved all educational problems" just like the US did with the AppleII in the late 70s

<comment> jk-in Students will get this device for $35.

It is not just about courses in youtube. Quite a few courses are already available in the educational network in India. At present, only a small section of the students have access to these; that too, only at school. The main objective of the government is to provide means to access these courses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Thats 1732.5 INR. Thats pretty good. Lower middle-class should have not problem affording this. As it costs less then a family night out in India.

<comment><USER22> wait!! you are saying a family night out in India would cost more than 1700 INR? Unless you are going to a five star restaurant, I am pretty sure this is not the case.

This would be awesome if they don't allow the cost to increase, down the road.

<comment><USER23> I went to India last year and an average Indian restaurant meal at a non-high end restaurant was about 200INR for 2 people.

For a group of 8-10 people it was about 1000INR to eat.

On the other hand - if i went out to Dominoes and got a medium pie which basically only fed me - it cost 300-400INR. Quite the price difference. I noticed that most families got the single serve pizza and split it with their kids which cost about 50INR (that was the size of a personal pan pizza).</comment></comment></comment>


Internet giants, you're no longer startups, get some customer service - <AUTHOR> http://glassbalcony.tumblr.com/post/50566035697/hey-internet-giants-youre-no-longer-startups-get <comment><USER2> I couldn't agree more with this article. I was banned from adsense yesterday for embedding advertisements on a mobile application or within a third-party toolbar (neither of which I have ever done, and have analytics to prove it). In the email they sent to inform me that I was banned, they including a link to an appeal form. This sounded reasonable, until after submitting my appeal I received an automatic reject ion within a minute of submission. No human could have possibly read, let alone reviewed the evidence I submitted.

There's simply no avenue for me to appeal now, and furthermore I cannot use the platform ever again.

<comment><USER3> Had a similar experience. In fact, due to large enough ad traffic, we were assigned to an actual contact in the past, who had repeatedly ensured us that our setup was valid. Then a few months ago all of a sudden our account was banned. After two appeals asking for what could possibly be causing "invalid activity" (if there was, it was certainly not coming from us), we were told not to contact them again.

<comment><USER2> This is sadly something that can be done by your competitors. Blackhats have tools to bomb you with ad clicks that follow obvious patterns. I've seen multiple cases of people complaining about this whilst research ways to appeal my ban last night.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > One possible opportunity is to get the legal system and governments involved > in this so as to require an adequate level of merchant support.

I wince every time someone proclaims the government should step in to regulate something that is obviously none of their business. That's the easy way out, and it hurts everyone in the long run.

<comment><USER5> This seems self contradictory. One of the government's jobs is consumer protection and regulation. If support is deemed to be a required thing, why shouldn't it fall under that scope?

This just seems like the normal knee jerk reaction from the right half of the political spectrum that says all regulation is bad.

<comment><USER6> If you start asking for customer support as part of regulation, you massively raise the entrance costs for other companies.

<comment><USER7> This is an easy problem to avoid: just have the regulation only kick in when you bring in a certain amount of revenue.

PayPal did $1.5 billion in revenues in Q1 2013. So you could draw a line at $1bn/year, say, which would be more than high enough to leave out any reasonable definition of a "startup" while still covering established market leaders.

<comment><USER6> It's an easy problem to talk about avoiding, sure. We can see an obvious failure mode, so we just won't do that. But it won't be you doing it in the first place, you won't have that sort of authority. You've got to think what sort of person's going to be giving you what you ask for, what sort of terms they're likely to impose.

The person doing it won't always have an incentive to avoid the same things that you or I might think of as undesirable. The last thing you want to do is to ask for something, be one of a selection of competing viewpoints on it, and then get the Cthulhu version imposed on you.

Can you get rules that make sense out of a system? Sure. But the tendency is that you won't - at least not without a threat that forces a uniformity of interest upon the system.

<comment><USER7> You're assuming that "the system" is something that has no inputs to affect the behavior of "the person doing it". Which is wrong. There are plenty of points in the rulemaking process (see [https://www.federalregister.gov/uploads/2011/01/the_rulemaki...](https://www.federalregister.gov/uploads/2011/01/the_rulemaking_process.pdf)) where those in the startup community could ask for a more targeted rule, if such a rule were being considered. And given how no politician wants to be tagged as being against job creation at the moment, I have to think it'd be an easy sell to convince them that a more narrowly targeted rule would be in everybody's best interest.

"The system" doesn't need to have "uniformity of interest" in order to make sensible things come out of it; you just need to be willing to make your voice heard within it, and to accept that you may have to compromise a bit from your ideal outcome in order to get other interests to come along.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Internet giants, you're no longer startups, get some customer service

That's like demanding that a slaughterhouse provides customer service for cows. You're not the customer, you are a peasant. Google's business is not providing infrastructure, it's aggregating and selling information, no matter what outwards appearance they like to give themselves.

<comment><USER9> Not really.

One might say that you cannot demand "free services" to provide customer service, but I would not consider Google's services as "free". This is because you are paying with your personal information, it's just another currency.

There are a lot of Google services where customer service is indeed relevant, for example Gmail, Google+, Google docs, etc.

For the record, this is not just Google. Facebook, twitter and others need to step up as well.

<comment><USER10> Whether the service is free or not has nothing to do with the amount of support they provide. If they charged $0.01 per year, would that then change any argument in any way? What about $0.01 for life?

Google is monetizing the interaction in some way, either directly or indirectly (possibly even as a loss leader), otherwise they would not offer it. That is all that matters.

Once we can all get past the "free" concept, it turns into a rather mundane comparisons of price vs features, but price may not entirely consist of currency.

<comment><USER9> I agree.

The point of my above statement was that one might argue that it's not reasonable to for example call Linus Torvalds and demand customer service for free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My experiences only:

Google Adwords technical support isn't so bad now that they have a call center. They can't actually resolve anything but do write a message on your behalf to the 2nd tier support. Having used it about 4-5 times now it takes about between 3 to 7 days to solve a problem... longer if they are confused.

Before having used Google's email support for years it is all outsourced to India who just send out faq responses to your intial emails. The email support does seem to have some power to fix problems but first you have to learn how to describe your problem in as few words as possible. Never be verbose. Emails get responded to during India daylight hours.

Google Adwords work so well that if Google Ad-bot goes crazy and nukes your campaign/adgroup etc other companies have bought your url as an ad so your customers end up in the wrong place, people can't tell the difference between the ads/organic so they often never make it down to the organic links, etc. You can loose thousands and have higher technical support while Adwords is getting around to looking into what happened this time with the ad.

<comment><USER12> Of course it makes sense they would offer support for Adwords -- a product with which they draw in revenue. This article, however, talks about their Adsense product, with which they pay customers.

And obviously, they have to have ad sellers to have ad buyers, but I still find it curious that they offer support for one and not the other.

<comment><USER13> _but I still find it curious that they offer support for one and not the other_

It's pretty simple. Without AdWords, Google would not exist. They could drop AdSense and nobody would really notice. I'm exaggerating, but AdWords really _is_ Google, and AdSense isn't necessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Back when google first listed my families business they had mined the data and logged the business address as my moms address. The problem with this was that the family business was a ghetto auto parts junk yard. Not only have we had murders there, but they place has also been robbed, attempted to be put on fire etc.

When I went to change the address of the business it took google over 2 weeks to process. On top of that trying to reach them to get them on the phone to explain the situation and why it was dangerous was a whole other hassle. They really had a lack of understanding in this situation and it was frustrating. Overall, the issue did get fixed, but nobody felt comfortable about it then and it still ticks us off now.

<comment><USER15> In getting to my grandparents house, Google Maps for years listed as part of the directions a two-track that doesn't actually go through all the way (it ends in the middle at a junk yard). My grandma runs a business from her house, and customers were being routed down this two track road. Not great for business.

As we couldn't contact Google about it, she had to print new business cards that told people when to stop following Google's directions and which road to take instead. MapQuest didn't have this problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm pretty sure that alternatives exist for every "necessary" service/product Google and PayPal provide. If you are absolutely _so_ fed up with a service, prove it. Switch to an alternative. The sense of entitlement exhibited by people when they feel they've been slighted by a service/company (such as Google or PayPal) in the fashion alluded to by the author boggles me. Doubly so when those same people don't do anything to change their reliance on or stop using said services/companies.

These are public companies with shareholders that demand that they maximize revenue and earnings. As a user (and maybe even as a customer), they _will_ disappoint you. Act accordingly.

"As more and more businesses rely on google's commercial services..." As a business, you should be very careful/skeptical of on whom the success of your livelihood relies.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is an opportunity for foundering companies like Microsoft and Yahoo to differentiate themselves in a positive way and raise the bar for everyone.

Apple already did this with their stores and Genius Bars. Buying an Apple device comes with the extra peace-of-mind of knowing that you can call someone or take your device to a nearby store if you're having trouble.

Another similar story is the domain registrar Hover. They specifically set themselves up as the anti-GoDaddy and it seems to be a winning strategy.

</comment><comment><USER18> When I had a Google Adsense account blocked it took a call to a Google VP that I know. But even then the first call was not enough and he had to escalate internally a second time.

This definitely sounds like something for the EU consumer champion Neelie Kroes to take on.

<comment><USER2> Sorry to hear about your experience. I'm currently going through exactly the same. Would you mind sharing any tips about how to escalate the issue?

<comment><USER19> Other than "be friends with a VP at Google"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> While I understand the point the author is trying to make - the larger companies have the resources to provide quality service - I disagree with the notion that poor customer service is excusable for startups.

In fact, the article doesn't even compare startups and "Internet giants", but I suppose the heading of "Paypal doesn't have good customer service" (no surprises there) would be less interesting.

</comment><comment><USER21> You are mostly correct.

The real question is, when there are hundreds of horror-stories out there about Facebook and Google et al terminating access without notice or review and the devastating effects upon people's digital lives, why do the media and Gov do NOTHING despite thousands of complaints?

<comment><USER22> What should the media and government do? It is a civil issue and you have agreed to the companies terms of service, so in essence, you have given them consent to terminate your account if they see fit and then when it happens you kick and scream for the government to fix it?

The fix is if you don't agree with the terms of service, you don't use the service just like if you don't agree with a contract, you don't sign a contract.

<comment><USER23> IANAL but I don't think that any company can enforce a ToS that's against the law. OP stated that there should be some kind of law to regulate this and I agree. There are many laws (at least in the EU) that regulate some ridiculous things (e.g. shape of the fruit) so why not regulate this area if the end user will benefit from that?

<comment><USER24> Please stop using the shape of fruit anti-EU attack. The shape of fruit is regulated in the EU because it was demanded by the producers of said fruit and the manufacturers of the machinery they use.

<comment><USER23> You probably misunderstood me - this wasn't an anti-EU attack. The fruit law was just an example that a law can be made when it's necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Unfortunately the reality is that customer support will only be justified if the increase in cost is accompanied by a greater increase in revenue (thereby increasing profits). Alternately it can be justified by "the other side of the coin", which is to stave off a decline in revenues (say, because you are so pissed off at the lack of support & service that you're willing to go to a competitor: ex United Airlines)

<comment><USER26> There are many costs that simply do not get reflected on the balance sheet. It's important to consider costs from every avenue in order to accurately reflect what a company is paying. Technical debt, corporate politics, etc all slip by the accounting radar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Ironically In my experience startups got better customer service 90% of the time.

Yeah also let's EU to dictate everything, since they have been doing such as a good job(!). While we were in there they can also pass couple of more stupid cookie laws.

</comment><comment><USER28> I have never tried to deal with google customer support, but I have had terrible experiences with both yahoo and paypal support.

Around 5 years ago, I made a typo on a balance transfer from my bank to paypal. I did not have enough money to cover the balance transfer in my account, or in any other account (I was a starving college student at the time.) When I called paypal, they informed me that there was nothing at all that they could do for me. I called multiple times and asked for supervisors, but they refused to do anything. Paypal attempted the transfer twice a day for the better part of a week, racking up massive overdraft fees on my account.

I finally got my bank to block all paypal transactions and they were kind enough to waive the fees, but I will never again deal with paypal.

Similarly frustrating was my experience with yahoo mail support. Last year, a yahoo mail account that I created around 2002 and forgot about had been hacked. It was sending rather embarrasing spam email to all my contacts, and I was unable to reset the password for the account because I had not provided real answers to the security questions.

I emailed their customer support and told them that I understood that they could not give me access to the account without the answers to the security questions, but I would like them to close the account as it was clearly in violation to their TOS.

They responded asking me the answers to the security questions. I tried to explain in several emails that I simply wanted the account _CLOSED_ , but every response from yahoo support was "We can give you access to the account if you please provide the answers to the security questions." I got no indication whatsoever that they even understood what I was asking.

I understand that providing support is expensive and that you receive lots of stupid questions, but any company that treats me like paypal and yahoo will never recieve any business from me again.

<comment><USER29> > I have never tried to deal with google customer support,

See, there is an advantage in having _no support at all_!

We've tried to deal with Google support (AdWords), we can safely say that there is none, even the sales people at Google cannot get any internally (or so they say).

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Yes! especially if you sell hardware to customers and then make a mistake...

I've bought a nexus 4 with 16G and received one with 8G and google hasn't responded to any of my emails.

<comment><USER31> And if you take the next obvious step (chargeback on credit card, item received was not as described) some automated system will kill off your entire Google Play account. Effectively holding all the apps you've purchased as hostages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> If you want customer support, go to a company that provides it. Don't go using a service, knowing full well that it doesn't provide support, then go screaming about how they don't provide you support.

You knew that going in. You just fooled yourself into thinking it would be different this time.

</comment><comment><USER33> Anecdotal, but my Neuxs 7 broke the other day and I was pleasantly surprised with the Google Play customer support. They solved my problem very quickly.

</comment><comment><USER34> I have been a customer of the Google Search Appliance for about 5 years now and their customer support has only improved. 5 years ago it was honestly terrible but now I find it relatively fine.

</comment><comment><USER35> We're accepting it with our wallets. If the pain wasn't worth the cost they wouldn't be able to do this

<comment><USER3> It is possible though, that by putting off and alienating good-faith customers (due to lack of proper support), Google is actually losing money here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I only partially agree. For things like hangout gmail android and reader giving support would cost so much they couldn't continue to roll out new products (given that they would have to support them).

However where significant money is concerned I agree they should have real support. Only offering support for some products could get really confusing for users unfortunately.

<comment><USER3> It's one thing to use a free service, but it's different when you make them your business partner. Not offering support for Adsense for example is unacceptable.

<comment><USER37> "Not offering support for Adsense for example is unacceptable."

Evidence suggests otherwise. There are many many people and companies who use/rely on Adwords - either out of ignorance of the lack-of-support-dangers, or in full knowledge and accepting the risks. It is, arguably, the least-worst alternative: who _else_ are you going to use? Bidvertiser? Chikita? Skimlinks? Yeah… No…

<comment><USER3> I think that's exactly the problem - they are a monopoly and can get away with anything.

<comment><USER38> Unfortunately too true. Google owns search, maps, google play/android, adwords/adsense, video sharing.

At this point they are competing with Facebook and apple the most, since they don't have a monopoly in those industries. I find it hilarious how many of the googlers love their retina MBPs and iPhones though. Can't wait to see that showdown.

I'll take godaddys tech support any day over Google, hell even Comcast has a support number.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Google does have good customer server in a few places. I've been quite happy with the AppEngine Premier support -- but considering that the support package alone is $400/month it certainly better be amazing.

</comment><comment><USER40> Why don't startups need to provide customer service? The title sounds suspiciously like you don't need to provide customer service until you have some cash in the bank to pay for it.

But if you can't figure out how to provide customer service for a small number of clients, I don't think you can just throw money at the problem down the line and magically have great customer service. May as well with good practices start early.

</comment><comment><USER41> This guy is right on the ball.

I've spent most of my career doing customer care, and to put it bluntly, real companies have some kind of support, even if it costs money.

</comment><comment><USER42> I think this might touch on a larger point. If a startup grows with poor customer service then how incentivized are they to add it later on?

</comment><comment><USER43> Why I'll never trust Google with my data or files</comment>


Craigslist, Kijiji & Oodle: The Geographic Distribution of Classifieds 2.0 - <AUTHOR> http://ryanspoon.com/blog/2008/05/11/craigslist-kijiji-oodle-the-geographic-distribution-of-classifieds-20/ <comment><USER2> Discrete data on a line graph? The horror...

</comment><comment><USER3> I love how these graphs erase the huge lead that craigslist has. it almost seems like a fair fight.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow, St. Louis all over Kijiji. Who knew. Glad to see these classifieds spreading to the midwest.</comment>