Good idea on the upvoting. I haven't added that as a signal for interest in an article. Right now it just redirects to the HN url upvoting that article.
I'm not entirely convinced that the CS program is phenomenal at tech. I wish it was, since it's my alma mater (ECE/PHYS 08). I've tried to hire people out of there for ebaynyc and now shopspring.com, but they don't seem nearly as prepared as the northeast college graduates. Tech seems way too old school. They only teach java (I'm pretty sure they don't even offer a functional programming class!), and all of the candidates that I talked to had no experience even building a simple web app.
I was a hardware engineer for four years when I applied for hacker school. I was working for one of the major microcontroller manufacturers. I quit my job as soon as I was accepted. I was looking for a way to get into the software world, and am very grateful that I found hacker school. I learned more in those three months than I could have ever imagined. I'm now working with an amazing team in NY on some very challenging machine learning applications. Looking back, it was one of the best decisions of my life.