2% is not bad for a product that's still "beta".

LOL! Let's see...three years of beta... Talk about plausible deniability. Hey, we can't vouch for the quality. It's only beta! :)

RSS is nice, but spammy. There should be a way to subscribe to an "N-point feed" that only includes stories above a certain threshold.

I second the idea that the RSS needs a way to be more filtered to the quality articles.

Also, having something more than just a title and link in the RSS feed would be nice, but I suppose that you don't really have summaries anywhere yet anyway.

Perhaps you could include the points in the title of the RSS feed entry? Google Reader seems to allow RSS feeds to update already sent articles, I dunno if other RSS readers support that well though.

I want a way to change my password. Or is there one and I'm just blind?

Are you kidding me? You have to make things the people on your thesis committee want. There's only 4 of them, but you have to have 100% satisfaction.

That may be true, but you can work for 5+ years at a problem, fully supported by your university, without having to worry about pleasing anyone in the short term. There is no need to worry about releases or fickle customers. And in the end, success is virtually guaranteed. So I would have to agree that grad school is more "friendly" than starting a startup, where you have to start worrying about the viability of your work within a few months (at least in the YC model).

It's true that you don't have to prove yourself after the first semester of grad school, but there are many "release"-like hoops you have to jump through in those 5+ years. The main one is your thesis proposal. I also had to do a plan of study a couple years before that; nowadays, my school (Northeastern) instead makes you publish a paper (and you're encouraged to publish multiple papers). There's also all the things your advisor asks you to do as his research assistant, which isn't always directly connected to your thesis work.

Your adviser, committee members, and conference/journal reviewers are all "fickle customers". And these aren't customers who came to you because they want your product, these are more or less assigned to you and you're stuck with them (unless you change departments or schools). It's true that you get a stipend, but I'm not sure that counts as "full support". And while the drop-out rate is obviously lower than the startup failure rate, it's far from zero.

Still, I agree that grad school is less scary than a startup. But don't think it's not all about pleasing others, with many non-trivial deadlines and constraints.

Good points. I had some of them in the back of my mind, but I think that I was subconsciously trying to forget about all that :).

In the end though, is it not all about money? As far as I am concerned, grad school is something you do for fun, and which costs a lot of money. Even if you receive a minimum paycheck, you have to take the opportunity costs into consideratiosn, so five years of grad school cost several 100000$, or am I mistaken? Why then do you worry so much more about starting a startup? The differences in maximum loss seem marginal, except that for grad school the losses are guaranteed, and for startups they are not.

It does not depend on being in grad school or not whether you can do what you want, it depends on having the money - either to pay for grad school, or for toying around with your startup.

I realize I made some oversimplifications, but still...

At least where I go to grad school (Ohio State University), grad school does not cost anything. You either win a Fellowship, you teach a class, you help a professor with his research, or you do grunt work like grading papers and labs. In any case, tuition, fees, and 80% of health insurance is covered, in addition to a $1600-1850 per month stipend. That works out to a respectable $20k/yr.

If you do not get a Fellowship, you are expected to perform 20 hours worth of work per week (which you actually receive credit for), in addition to your time spent on classes and on your own independent research.

In other words, grad school is more like a low-paying job than a cost. You could make the case that you could be working a higher-paying job in that time, but then you are missing out on the flexibility of being a Ph.D., which allows the possibility of being a professor or getting hired for a pretty high income. Additionally, you have the opportunity to leave your mark on the field with your research.

Even more interesting is that Ph.D. work could lead you to your startup idea, as you unveil a new use of existing technology or a new approach altogether which leads to a money-making possibility. Furthermore, if you are exceptionally driven, you may be able to get some work done on your startup idea while attending grad school, because at least so far, I have found grad school to be significantly easier than my undergrad was, because I am taking less "real" classes.

I meant you don't need to make something people genuinely want, as it would solve a problem they have. You have to prove to the committee that you put in a decent amount of effort, but that's about it.

Correction (as above): It's true that you don't have to make something people want at all in many fields (c.f. theoretical math), but many in engineering probably use it to make something people just don't want immediately enough for you to get funding and make a product before said funding runs out.