Most college seniors are sweating now due to the economic downturn: How am I going to find a job? But maybe there’s also a bright side to all of this. As bad as it might seem to do a startup, right now might be the time to do so. You might be thinking, “What? Crazy!” Well, let’s look at some of the positive things for young people.

1. Less Competition. As VC cut back their funding, many companies are going to die. Layoffs are in now. Moreover, fewer people are going to enter the industry. If you’re a younger person or a college student working on a project on his spare time, chances are you are not funded anyways. In a sense, it levels the playing field. You are more competitive now.

2. Real Products. I think a lot of young people try to make products that are neat, but probably aren’t that valuable. It doesn’t solve any problems. For example, do we really need another superpoke 2.0? Often times, this is driven overvalued acquisitions spurring unrealistic motivations. Hard times forces you to think, are we solving a problem?

3. Buy. Like Warren Buffet’s philosophy, sell when everyone is greedy, and buy when everyone is in fear. Similarly, Paul Graham explains that you are investor in your own company.

4. Taking some time off. For many, it’s tough to find a job right now. Chances are you will some weeks, or even months submitting applications and interviewing. Why not take some of this time to code something you are passionate about. If things don’t work out, saying you build something and putting on your resume will not hurt you.

“I’ll create a GUI interface using Visual Basic. See if I can track an IP out of this.” ORLY? Using VB GUI to track an IP? Try hammering the backside of a nail into wood.

Here are some of my quick thoughts:

• I like PHP because I am more familiar with it, and don’t have the time learn a completely new language.
• Many libraries I use are written in PHP; it would seem like a big hassle to find all the tools again for Ruby.
• It does seem like the MVC setup in RoR is a bit more solid a well built.
• I am not sure whether to tie the current engineering problems at Twitter to RoR.
• CakePHP has less documentation than RoR.
• Ruby has been debated to be slow.
• PHP might be a better solution for you if you are limited by a shared host or cost.

I’ll keep you updated on what I choose in the future. Any inputs? Django?

Installing this SEO tool gives me a fun perspective of how websites work. YCombinator’s Hacker News is my favorite reads of the day. The audience is a relatively young crowded dedicated to startups and programming. It’s a great source for technology news as Digg and Reddit are mainstreaming. In the mages, the red highlights been nofollow links. As articles get more points, they become legit.

Below is a screenshot of the the top posts.

Here is what the up and coming posts look like.

Update: The SEO for Firefox tool I use can be found here.

Randal E. Bryant, dean of the computer science school at Carnegie Mellon University, states that “We in academia and the government labs have not kept up with the times. Universities really need to get on board.” From my personal experience, I’d have to admit that university labs, at least for undergraduates, do not have cutting-edge technology.

Six universities will be involved in the initiative. They are Carnegie Mellon, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Maryland and the University of Washington.

I am really excited by this initiative. On the other hand, I already feel behind the times as the upcoming classes will have more knowledge about parallel computing over large-scale data sets. This is a good reminder of how quick technology is moving.

Details here:

To simplify the development of massively parallel programs Google and IBM have created the following resources:

- A cluster of processors running an open source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure (MapReduce and GFS from Apache’s Hadoop project)
- A Creative Commons licensed university curriculum developed by Google and the University of Washington focusing on massively parallel computing techniques available at: http://code.google.com/edu/content/parallel.html
- Open source software designed by IBM to help students develop programs for clusters running Hadoop. The software works with Eclipse, an open source development platform. The plugin is currently available at: http://lucene.apache.org/hadoop/
- Management, monitoring and dynamic resource provisioning of the cluster by IBM using IBM Tivoli systems management software
- A website to encourage collaboration among universities in the program. This will be built on Web 2.0 technologies from IBM’s Innovation Factory.

With China always in the news, I figured I’ll share the site. Here is the link to my Chinese to English Annotater. Note that it is not a translator. That is an entirely different problem, which requires much much much harder algorithms.

We recently got pinged about a job request that we just had to post about

If you like coding in Ajax, and know how to shoot a gun, this could be for you.

Title: Web Developer
Salary: $200K plus DOE
Taxes: No Federal taxes taken out for the contractors that accept a 12 month. (6 month contractors will have taxes taken out)
Location: Iraq
Start date: ASAP with 2 weeks training (one in Washington DC and another in Ft. Bening GA)
# of Openings: 1
Summary:A principal Department of Defense agency is looking for programmers, developers or coders to code, support field deployment and maintenance of a new database application which will be used by Army units in Iraq. Scope These are full-time positions (12/7) located at one of the major US Bases in IRAQ. Deployment will be period of 6-12 months. Training on the application software will begin prior to deployment and will take place in Virginia. These positions are available for full time employment or for independent contractors. These positions are available now.