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Summer Reading and Startup Program

Posted by Zonk on Fri Mar 18, 2005 05:56 PM
from the better-than-a-book-report dept.
Education Businesses IT
putko writes "Paul Graham, lisp hacker and creator of the company that became Yahoo! Store has an essay on what to do while in college. Previously, he's covered what high school students should do. He's also begun a summer startup program, which invites people with good ideas to try out for some startup capital. The deadline is March 26th." From the page: "We're going to call this project the Summer Founders Program, and it preserves many of the features of a conventional summer job. You have to move here (Cambridge) for the summer, as with a regular summer job. We give you enough money to live on for a summer, as with a regular summer job. You get to work on real problems, as you would in a good summer job. But instead of working for an existing company, you'll be working for your own; instead showing up at some office building at 9 AM, you can work when and where you like; and instead of salary, the money you get will be seed funding."
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  • Search for "beer" in document:
    0 Results.

    • Verrrry interesting... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Faust7 (314817) on Friday March 18 2005, @06:16PM (#11980716) Homepage
      Heck, let's get even more general. I searched for "fun" and got the following results:

      When I was an undergrad there weren't enough cycles around to make graphics interesting, but it's hard to imagine anything more fun to work on now.

      There's a fundamental problem in "computer science"...

      When Harvard kicks undergrads out for a year, they have to get jobs. The idea is to show them how awful the real world is, so they'll understand how lucky they are to be in college. This plan backfired with the guy who came to work for us, because he had more fun than he'd had in school, and made more that year from stock options than any of his professors did in salary.

      It's interesting, isn't it, what you can quickly conclude if you just search for the right terms. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a kegger to attend.

  • Nothing Inspires Like Actual Experience (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ackthpt (218170) * on Friday March 18 2005, @06:02PM (#11980624) Homepage Journal
    What to do first summer in college? Work. Work somewhere, even if you have to volunteer, but work! If you're observant enough you find a need, a niche, an opportunity for something somewhere. That's your launchpad.

    Me? I'm an old cuss working in a small shop, converting legacy stuff with new tools. I'll save them a bundle. I may release some of my code open source, just so others can benefit. There's so many needs around me, it's more than I can keep up with. Occasionally I come across something that'd be great beyond these four walls. If only I could take a break and expand upon it...

  • Where was this program when I was in college? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by teutonic_leech (596265) on Friday March 18 2005, @06:10PM (#11980678)
    The Summers Program ounds like a wonderful opportunity to me. Anyone with an ingenious nature should will give their right arm to get into this one. This is what young fledgling entrepreneurs need - an environment where they can explore their ideas, make mistakes, learn from others, and maybe produce a protoype of their invention/ideas. Damn, I wished I was back in college again - so many opportunities - so little time...

  • As a high school student... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18 2005, @06:13PM (#11980696)
    ...I would not want to do this.

    Why? When I'm in college, there are two things I wish to do:
    1. Educate myself. Not for the sake of getting a job, but for actual education.
    2. Relax. Because it'll be the last chance I get before I become a wage slave.

    Why should I start working a 'real' job early? I'd rather flip burgers through college. No, I'm not monied, far from it. But I really don't want to 'grow up' early. I'd rather work menial, temp jobs to pay my way through, rather than do this 'summer program' and get seed funding for a future venture. Why? Because that would involve an immediate transition from student to wage slave. And I don't wish to go through that transition too early.

    • Re:As a high school student... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by bleckywelcky (518520) on Friday March 18 2005, @08:06PM (#11981425)
      I think the point of this program is to inspire you NOT to become a wage slave. If you can work a job and spend your spare time venturing off into new business or investing ideas, you can become independently wealthy by age 30. And then you can do whatever you feel like doing, while still being young enough to enjoy it.
    • ...I would not want to do this. ... Why? Because that would involve an immediate transition from student to wage slave. And I don't wish to go through that transition too early.

      But this program is not for "wage slaves," it's for those people who will go on to hire wage slaves to do their work for them while they are out relaxing by the pool.

  • Simply Awesome. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by firew0lfz (690262) on Friday March 18 2005, @06:14PM (#11980700)
    I didn't read the full article, but from a quick glance I'd love to participate in a program like this. Too bad I live in Oklahoma.

    It's spring break right now over here and I'm the typical freshman college student still trying to figure out what the hell I wanna do with my life. Gas prices are at killer levels right now, and most of my friends had already left for various locations for vacation; so I spent most of spring break in the house.

    I spent all of spring break pondering the 3x+1 problem (do a search of www.mathforge.net on it) and I think I've found what I want to do. Yes, I'm not all that clever (122 on an IQ test online and a 26 on the ACT; that and the highest math I've taken up to this semster is Trig) but simply working on such problems and forcing your mind to *think* - rather than being taught in school the proper 'rules' of math; is something I've never really done. (Also read up on Feynman and what he had to say about things like that.) I didn't bother reading all the background information on it either (since, well, to be honest, I didn't get all the fancy explanations that I've read online) but working on such problems is a feeling I've not experienced since I was very young. Somewhere in the process of being forced to grow up I lost that.

    This is awesome that this program is rewarding folks for *thinking* and *working* rather than just being able to read a book and take a test. Three cheers for this. I really love the last line of the article as well:

    "So the best thing you can do in college, whether you want to get into grad school or just be good at hacking, is figure out what you truly like. It's hard to trick professors into letting you into grad school, and impossible to trick problems into letting you solve them. College is where faking stops working. From this point, unless you want to go work for a big company, which is like reverting to high school, the only way forward is through doing what you love."

    • College is where faking stops working

      Huh. At my college (admittedly not the best) I think most of fellow students found that faking was working. Turns out, that was adequate peparation for most of them for the corporate life.

  • Not correct about the Mathematics (Score:3, Insightful)

    by d2_m_viant (811261) on Friday March 18 2005, @06:15PM (#11980708)
    He's correct almost everything except the part about taking mathematics in college. If anyone is considering a degree in CS, be prepared to be inundated with courses involving Math. When he says "I don't think you need much more than high school math plus a few concepts from the theory of computation." -- it's misleading.

    I go to a university in Portland, OR [up.edu] and I'm currently persuing a BS in Computer Science, and I can honestly say that you will be taking courses up through (and past) Linear Algebra, Vector Calculus, and Applied Statistics. I wouldn't say these are courses that require just "a few concepts" beyond high school mathematics, I think it's more accurate to recognize that the foundation of Computer Science in based upon mathematics.

    • Re:Not correct about the Mathematics (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Andrew Cady (115471) on Friday March 18 2005, @10:04PM (#11982058)
      You won't use any of that in programming (he was talking about hacking, not CS degree reqs), and anyways that's all very basic, math-for-engineers stuff.
      • I used linear algebra in robotics and AI, as well as in spectral analysis of graphs. There's a whole world of math beyond that, in discrete math, which /is/ quite a bit more related to CS. Combinatorics overlaps quite a bit with graph theory, which is a bit part of CS theory, and the basis for a large number of practical algorithms. Algebra/number theory is quite useful to me as a cryptographer, though it might not be completely useful to everyone.

        It's really hard to go wrong taking too much math, and very
        • Mathematical science must be considered desirable in itself, though not with reference to the needs of daily life. If it is necessary to refer the benefit arising from it to something else, we must connect that benefit with intellectual knowledge, to which it leads the way and is a propaedeutic, clearing the eye of the soul and taking away the impediments which the senses place in the way of the knowledge of universals.

          -Proclus
      • I'm thinking that it depends heavily on the type of things you are doing in CS. Image processing and transformation is one thing that I know uses tons of linear equations. (think photoshop filters)
      • Rarely is there a Computer Science graduate student who didn't wish he or she had more mathematical background. Now, if you're just going to be a "hacker" ala Graham, I admit more math is probably not necessary.

  • Math (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I found it odd that Paul Grahan considers that

    In fact, the amount of math you need as a CS major is a lot less than most university departments like to admit. I don't think you need much more than high school math plus a few concepts from the theory of computation.

    I can hardly think of any CS field where high-school math is enough for doing anything serious. The fields where more math is required are too many to list: starting with graphics (analytical geometry), algorithms (obvious), networks (statisti

  • He is wrong about databases... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by barfy (256323) on Friday March 18 2005, @06:26PM (#11980780)
    And it is also why it is difficult to find top-class databases.

    In general he is right. The fun *is* in the hard problems. The hard problems in databases are scaling (speed and size), robustness (ability to recover from error), and security (prevention of unathorized viewing or changing). These are truly hard problems. Often they are solved by doing stuff around the operating system rather than with the operating system.

    Actually writing some accounting package or some other database app... That, I agree, will cause you to want to poke your eyes out with a stick.
    • "if you ever suffer from insomnia, try reading the technical literature about databases"

      Having read a fair amount, he's far from wrong on this point. :)
    • i have to strongly agree. i've been doing languages and operating systems, networks, graphics, essentially everything, for a long time now. except for databases.
      i've always had scorn for databases. until i needed one that was fault tolerant and scaled and had certain distribution properties. and now i'm several months in, and its by far the most interesting and difficult distributed systems problem i've ever looked at. i have alot of catching up to do with the state of the art. and i'm regretting not having
    • The hard problems in databases are scaling (speed and size), robustness (ability to recover from error), and security (prevention of unathorized viewing or changing).

      Not really. These problems have been solved. Relational Algebra and transaction theory get the job done for the first two. Security really isn't gonna get much better than Kerberos.

      The "hard problems" as you describe are all just heuristics. They aren't fundamental problems, is optimizing for the common case.

      Personally, I find heuristic
      • I took a graduate-level databases class last spring. One of the things the professor said was that "it takes a PhD to properly tune a database". She was right. What makes databases act like they do is not trivial.

        When you throw distribution into the mix, they're even more complex. What the `right' thing is to do when network latency comes into the picture is quite an interesting problem. Without throwing away ACID properties, there are quite a few possibilities.

        Lea
        • One of the things the professor said was that "it takes a PhD to properly tune a database".

          I don't disagree, but it's still just tuning. It's heuristics.

          It's like increasing performance of a garbage collector. It's really difficult and there have been a ton of PhD dissertations about it but it still comes down to a heuristical problem.
      • You can still make all changes atomic with flat files (very easily). If your state per user is under a few kilobytes it's perfectly reasonable (and does not violate ACID) to use a flat file for each user's state. And if it's bigger you can still isolate with multiple files, which you can change multiply in atoms with a simple journal. This is how databases work when they use flat files for storage.
      • Why can't you do ACID with flat files?

        And the point is that it obviously worked. Well.
  • Do not work.

    Do something you enjoy, anything you enjoy. Play music, draw, hike, anything but "work" (if you happen to land one of those magic jobs where the work is your fun, continue to do that and consider going to school part time - it is a rare thing). Of course there is the "well, I need money for when I return to school" dilemma- take out more loans, build some credit debt do whatever it takes to enjoy life and your limited time

    After college, it is likely that one will work [struggle] until [near]
    • I would disagree with this advice, I don't think you can fully appreciate a pocket of empty time until you have worked your ass off or been really busy trying to accomplish something (work, family, charity, etc) for a long time, which excludes high school students.

      I had a couple of those summers off and blew them because I had no concept of the value of having literally months to do whatever I wanted.

      I think you're imposing the worldview of a wants-to-retire work-a-day guy (I'm one of them too) person onto

      • I don't know about anyone else, and it could just be cos I go to a rather high-pressure university [cam.ac.uk], but I'm completely drained by the end of term. I'm about to hit 4 or so weeks of holiday and will need every last one for a) rest and recuperation, b) catching up on work and c) getting ready for the next term's worth of stress in the form of exam season.

        I get your point, and I think it's an interesting one. But be careful about encouraging students to move quickly into the world of work for the sake of it
    • I'm sorry, but that's the worst advice I've ever heard. It's possible to work and still enjoy yourself. I think if you do not work in your field you will be at a serious disadvantage when it comes to finding a job. Let me rephrase that. If you DO work during college, you will be at a significant advantage, simply because most people do not work during school (fast food does not count for job experience, unless you're going to McDonald's University). Find something you enjoy doing, get good at it, get paid f
        • I didn't say work until you drop. It's about balance. It seems for me that my mind and ability to think in class dulls the more time I spend away from it or work. It's hard to keep your mind sharp enough for school unless you're doing something to exercise it.
  • I enjoyed the most recent 'what to do in college' essay on PG's site. But considerably less so than I did his 'what to do in high school' essay.

    Insofar as Paul's advice is geared toward the general student and not just the "I want to be a God programmer-- full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes" student, I'd have to say it's a bit lacking and a bit limiting, even despite the great advice that it does give. He suggests majoring in something like math, skipping psychology, philosophy, the study of other languages, etc etc etc and concentrating on "hard problems". Implicit in this is
    1. That the social sciences have no "hard problems";
    2. That the sum total of one's worth as a thinker is held in their ability to solve a branch of "hard problems";
    3. That college is fundamentally about learning how to solve "hard problems".

    If you want to have a balanced, open-minded outlook on life, you have to reject 1 and 2. If you want to have a realistic chance at being happy in life, you have to reject 3.

    My advice to the aspiring programming god in undergrad is to heed Paul's advice up to a point, but also to remember three things:

    1. Just because 95% of people in social sciences aren't as smart as you are, that doesn't mean the social sciences themselves aren't worthwhile. Dig a little. Branch out. You'll be better for it.

    2. Just as, or more important, than going to college to learn to program, job skills, how to solve "hard problems", or however you want to put it, is that college is the greatest, most well-timed, and most forgiving classroom where you learn how to life your life. Don't forget that or take it for granted. Get out and have some fun and meet some people.

    3. Anyone who's really damn good at programming is abnormal. This isn't a valuative statement; you've got some genes in you that are simply not found in a similar configuration in the vast majority of the population. Now, this is going to involve some tradeoffs. Learn to accomodate them and/or live with them, because you're stuck with the bad along with the good. Be OK with that.

    And good luck.
    Mike

  • Lisp conspiracy (Score:3, Funny)

    by Tablizer (95088) on Friday March 18 2005, @06:44PM (#11980906) Homepage Journal
    Man, he'll do anything to force people to use Lisp :-)

  • To do while in college: (Score:5, Funny)

    by Scrameustache (459504) on Friday March 18 2005, @06:44PM (#11980908) Homepage Journal
    College chicks.

  • I feel sorry for Paul Graham (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Timbotronic (717458) on Friday March 18 2005, @07:42PM (#11981286)
    His devotion to work above everything else borders on an obsessive/compulsive disorder. In How to Start a Startup [paulgraham.com] he documents how he "used to work till 2:00 or 3:00 AM every night, seven days a week". And the there's this:

    "During this time you'll do little but work, because when you're not working, your competitors will be. My only leisure activities were running, which I needed to do to keep working anyway, and about fifteen minutes of reading a night. I had a girlfriend for a total of two months during that three year period. Every couple weeks I would take a few hours off to visit a used bookshop or go to a friend's house for dinner. I went to visit my family twice. Otherwise I just worked"

    All this for what? The Yahoo fucking store? Look, it's his life and his choice as to how he wants to live it. But I simply don't believe you have to have no life in order to succeed. Look at Richard Branson. He works hard sure, but he hasn't forgotten to have fun along the way.

    It's been over 10 years since I was at college and I certainly don't regret that I slacked off and partied a lot of the time. There's a certain freedom at that age that's hard to come by once you get older. You can work hard at any age. Live a little.

    • Yeah, and as a result, he doesn't have to work again in his life. And I'm sure the work he was doing was extremely enjoyable to him.

      What's wrong with that?
    • He overworked himself yes, but now he's wealthy and respected enough to live without the burden of money over him, forcing him to work on stuff he doesn't want. As he said, it's like cramming 40 years of work life into 4 so you can do whatever you want in the other 36. Besides, you learn much more from the experience than from just working for someone else's company. More importantly, he is a great hacker, so it's in his nature to take challenges.
      • It sounds like Paul Graham himself has done really well for himself with the cram 40 into 4 method. However, for every person who does as well as him by taking that path, there have to be hundreds or thousands of burned-out workaholics in stressful, financially unstable work situations. If you're the type of person to do that sort of thing anyways, you might as well. I don't think it makes sense though to encourage others to do that.

  • summers? (Score:3, Informative)

    by wolfgang_spangler (40539) on Friday March 18 2005, @07:48PM (#11981310) Homepage
    continue your classes in the summer. Do not take your summers off. Summers are a great time to take your useless classes, like gender or sensitivity training that colleges seem intent on stuffing into you nowadays. Do not do the minimum of math classes, take more. Take more physics. When not at school, go to the freaking gym and get some exercise.

    Want to get/keep a good job? Learn about digital signal processing.

    • Some of the best classes are only held in summer! Everyone is more relaxed. Auditors never seem to watch the classes, so the professors teach you the interesting stuff. (this can be good or bad, depending on how interesting relates to the real world) Take summer classes. If you need to take time off to work, take a differrent time. Or do what I did and only take 12 credits so you have time to work. But take the summer classes, they are the best.

  • The article refers to Graham as a "lisp hacker". This is incorrect. The proper spelling is "Lisp hacker". Like "God", the word "Lisp" must be capitalized to show proper respect; otherwise SHRDLU may eat your firstborn child. Carry on...

  • What to REALLY do (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nate nice (672391) on Friday March 18 2005, @10:34PM (#11982173) Journal
    You have your whole life to work and hopefully during the school year you work hard. So, when you have time off, use it. Use it to travel, sit around or read up on what interests you. Don't believe this "work-is-life" crap. You only live once and you'll have plenty of opportunity. I'm not saying be a lazy bumb but by default you are not. You already work hard and deserve some time to do as you please.

    Work on your own programs, take a break from computers all together but all in all, do what YOU want. You won't always be this (generally) young age so enjoy it while you can. You will be working and working hard the rest of your cursed life so make do now.

    I never had an internship but did work that was really cool and interesting. Why intern as a programmer when I already do tons of it? I did cool things like surveying to make ends meet in the summer, etc. Working outdoors getting a hell of a tan. Other summers I could travel some, etc.

    When graduating recently I got any interview I wanted and even had places calling me that I never applied for. (use your schools career center!)

    Now I join the working dead and don't have the time to get out and be free like I used to but at least I did and enjoyed myself.

    It's good to be ambitious but it's also a good idea to be ambitious about your time and your life. Enjoy it.

    Youth is fleeting.
  • We've seen enough of Paul Graham's essays now slashdot that we can find his site now. You don't need to post EVERY essay he writes, which is about once a week or two. He wrote the Yahoo store, he didn't create cold fusion...I will scream if I see one more article from him about what people should do to be like him, when his advice always involves using the word "hack" 50 times, and his advice is more or less irrelevant anyways. People like he and Mark Cuban got really lucky when Yahoo was handing out mad
    • I too am tired of Graham. It's bad enough that I see his tired harping in the Lisp/Scheme communities and now Slashdot. Sometimes I wonder if he is doing more of a disservice to Lisp than Erik Naggum did, but then I realize that at least Graham is an optimist (albeit, an incredibly naive one).
  • This guy seems to view college as a way to train yourself in a discipline, and refine your skills. I couldn't disagree more. College is when you educate yourself, and enrich yourself, and expand your horizons. It's when you meet the people who you hang out with because you actually like them, not because their locker happened to be near yours in high school. It's when you have more freedom than ever to go out and do what you want, without the obligations of life and the restrictions of high school tying you down. It's when you find out just what it is you really like doing, and who you are. I can't imagine a better way to become a boring, pitiful waste of a human being than his recommendation of 'take programming classes, do programming research projects, and then you can take a few math classes for some real variety.'

    It's not that I have anything against technical work, but really, you're gonna be doing that shit for the rest of your life if you get a job in it. Go out, find some beer, and drink it, for god's sake. Enjoy yourself. He disses social sciences because they're not logical, and subject to trends. He specifically disses on philosophy classes, because they don't teach you in a useful way. That is completely missing the point. They aren't engineering classes. You're not supposed to go through a giant textbook of information and have more thrown at you in lectures. The point of a philosophy class or a literature class is to have a subject that you can go in and discuss. Anyone who can read Nietzsche or Plato or Spinoza and not have a reaction of some sort, and a desire to tell others about it, is just a boring person.

    Don't let yourself be pigeonholed like this. Don't be the typical boring engineer who can program anything but can't get a date to save his fucking life. Chances are if you're majoring in Computer Science you're already pretty damn good with computers. Go learn about something else, while the information is easily accessible and you don't have other obligations breathing down your neck. If you think you're smart, then find a way to apply your brain to something else other than the same old shit. Try out some shit that you didn't think you'd be interested in...you might be surprised. And don't forget to have some fun, because if you follow this guy's program, you're not gonna have a lot of chance later.

    I know a lot of you think programming is really fun. But trust me, if you go out and look, you'll find other things that are more fun, too.
    • Perhaps for some it is the best years of their life. However, I find my self much happier now all of that is behind me. I am fortunate in that I have a passion for the work that I do. In contrast, I could not say the same for college.

      I believe the best time of one's life can always be the present as long as he pursues his ideals and goals with a passion.

    • MA - US (Score:4, Funny)

      by francisew (611090) on Friday March 18 2005, @06:39PM (#11980871) Homepage

      Seeing as they started their comapany in the Cambridge, Ma area, they live in the same area, and the foreward of Paul's books mention that area, I think it's a safe bet that they mean England.

      :p
    • Reminds me of my favorite math prof in college. When he came into the country, he had two employment options. One was with NASA (his latest book that I know of was concerning the orbits of artificial satelites). The other was at my university.

      He likes to teach. Basically it gives him more of a sense of accomplishment than what he would have been doing with nasa. Go figure.

      Personally, I'm glad he made the choice that he did. I miss the demented leprechan...
    • It seems that if it ain't an interpreted language, it ain't any good.

      And Java is NOT??? And LISP can not be compiled??? Maybe it is this, hmm, slight misunderstanding of the basics of Java vocal proponents that turns smarter-than-median people like him off... Maybe not too much to do with language itself, but with the mindset behind it?

      Paul B.

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