skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who hasn’t gotten too deep into hackerdom yet, this thought goes through my mind often when viewing a newly launched startup:

“What you need to understand, right now if you have not already, is that early adopters are not real people. The geeks, techies, friends and family that initially use your product are not representative of the public at large. Their opinions on your product are not representative of what the mainstream will think.”

I suppose most people want to use their hacking skills to make something useful in their domain of expertise. Unfortunately, for most hackers their domain of expertise is hacking, which limits the userspace.
(sighing and looking back at the last 10 years)
I incorporated a company myself. It isn't very hard. In BC, I did it all online (except registering a non-numbered company.)

If you have no revenue, DONT DO IT. Only do it when you have revenue. There is too much bookkeeping overhead.

On the other hand, if you are providing a service without revenue (i.e., you can get sued for it) you've got to think whether it is really worth it.
And down... Or not the whole site, you can see this content from:
http://www.foundersatwork.com/blog.html
Mixx.com now on facebook
I half agree. Classic network effect doesn't apply. But there is a sense of "that's where I can reach the most users".

Further, Varian's argument about knitting websites is a little off, since Adwords/Adsense effectively allows you to reach those customers via Google.
I don't think any intelligent person thinks these places have a monopoly on ideas or a guaranteed path to success. Your point samples on MIT/Harvard people don't buttress your argument any more than my encounters with very creative people who were so smart that strong standardized scores were a natural offshoot of their abilities. We can say there are both bright people and uncreative people at universities.

Yes, people can develop no matter where they study. I don't see anyone arguing that other places are the entrepreneurial equivalent of raising babies without light. The post's question was "best" place for a given aspiring tech entrepreneur.

Location is key because "great faculty and programs" aren't just within the university. They include the guest angel investor speaking at a seminar, the Ruby hackers-entrepreneurs at the local gathering, the founders presenting at one of the many local showcases. They include events like YC Startup School, which I would probably not attend if I went to school in Virginia.

Bottom line: Go to the place most conducive to your entrepreneurial aspirations that you can attend without troubling debt. Then make the most of your choice.
OS X == (UI niceness > windows) + (coding tools like unix)

I don't see how you can argue with that much. I prefer to code on linux. I prefer to have a window manager and desktop apps that work @ home. Add the fact that the macs are the nicest laptops of all in terms of features and form factor, and there doesn't seem to be any other comparison.
Joost?
One of the most bizarre game mechanics ever.
Yahoo's Top 5 Must-Keep Stars
Very painful, but a good read.
[Duh!] Report says - More teenagers ignoring CDs
I listened to a talk she gave at Stanford and she did speak very quickly but without the "saying twice as words". She conveyed her ideas twice as quickly and got more said.

Of course, her laugh was so annoying I almost shut off the podcast even though it was interesting.
WorldWide Telescope TEDTalk
Apple Prepares iPhone SDK And Other Goodies
Being a successful woman in tech is such an outlier that it's worth examining. Sort of like being a billionaire.

Also, she herself talked about her interest in clothing and fashion, so it's hard to knock the writer for spending time there.

The article also mentioned how Larry and Sergei looked and dressed too. Maybe it's something the readers of that magazine care about.
When seeing "team sites", I immediately knew this is intended to compete with SharePoint. If not immediately, then surely at some point in the future.

Sure, it used to be JotSpot. But the MS attack seems still obvious.

SharePoint is growing massively in recent months, but its a fairly monstrous thing. Think "corporate IT". They want "customizability", even though in the end its going to cost them more than the initial licenses.

Anyway, Google is now supposed to be a Big Software Corporation, so it needs to compete with other Big Software Corporations in every area. (Though I always thought they were a Big Advertising Company.)
Sounds like judging a race car driver for the pavement he races on.
Joel: How Hard Could It Be?: Lessons I Learned in the Army
> Almost nobody stays homeless by choice

Supporting link: http://guide2homelessness.blogspot.com/2006/06/changing-your...
>Also is a computer science or business degree recommended?

why not both?
"Pay as little as possible. State universities, full-tuition scholarships, whatever. The debt is what will imprison you, and colleges aren't worth anything near what they cost."

Remember that many private colleges give really generous financial aid if your parents are not wealthy. Stanford is free if you make under $100K; Amherst has abolished all loans in financial aid, so it's free for those making under about $40-50K and quite reasonably priced (often less than a state uni) for those making under $100K.

My actual tuition at Amherst was only slightly more than the sticker price at UMass; my sister's at Rice was less. Now, granted it's not really a fair comparison, since I would've gotten a full-ride at UMass Amherst (and UMass Lowell offered to pay me to attend). But I'd look long and hard at the scholarship options available before discounting a top college based on price.
Too Twitter-y. You need clever fresh terminology (i.e. not "Following") and a slightly different design. It looks good, but I get an "I've seen this before" feeling. If you're targeting English and Chinese speakers, it could be cool to incorporate that into the design, probably to the extent that non-Chinese speakers can safely parse the characters as "icons" though.

You definitely need something that makes it standout. Why shouldn't I just write down my dreams or post them on my blog? I could see some cool text pattern recognition features encouraging me to post a dream; that is, who else had a dream like this last night/ever? You mention natural language processing, so perhaps you've already got something like that in mind...

Being able to reply to individual dreams might be annoying, though maybe we could post "interpretations" (in the Freudian sense).
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22note%3A+if+you+do+not+know...
I'm intrigued that you, as a veteran, would phrase it this way. If you got to call yourself 10 years ago, what would you say?
I went to brown - I loved it, it had a really great CS department, especially for an undergrad, and was overall an amazing social and academic experience. Not a big entrepreneurship culture in the CS department, but I think you can make that happen if that's what you want to do.

College is all about the people. Find the one with the people you like the best and respect the most. You'll figure out the rest while you are there.
The first time I opened the page I completely missed the article.

My centre of focus was on the MIDDLE bar. I like asymmetric web pages, but the design of that website just hurts. To actually get through the first page of my article I moved my laptop right so I was focusing propelry instead of looking to one side of my screen constantly.

The article takes up less than 50% of the area of the screen, which just squeezes it out of perceptibility. So I never got through the article, I'm sure it was good or it wouldn't have been posted but it was awfully presented. Poor writer, I hope he got paid well for people being unable to read his work.
From the article: Jupiter Ace, RAM: 3K, Resolution: 512x368

That'll be tight. 23552 pixels in 24576 kilobits of RAM.

From the article: VIC-20, RAM: 5K, Resolution: no hires mode

That's wrong. You can get VIC20 to do 128128 in two colours or 64128 in four colours. There was a type-it-in listing from Commodore to draw a circle in VIC20 hi-res.
In terms of where Joel is willing to put his money where his mouth is, he's said again and again that he doesn't believe in building a better mouse trap.

The operating principle is to hire turbogenius ninja SWAT team superduper geniuses who, for some reason, will work for you instead of earning 3-5x more by being independent consultants.
Someone has to mention Cornell. The undergrad community is intensely entrepreneurial, the CS department is top notch and you won't find nearly as many a-holes as at Harvard (half serious).
Remember the Tasp from Larry Niven's Ringworld? They invented it.
RIPE NCC explains YouTube hijack
It really depends on where you are located and what you are doing. Is there a reason you want to incorporate instead of registering as an LLC (i.e. are you going to be seeking investment any time soon)?

At the risk of being unpopular (judging by the other comments), I would advise you to go do it now. It's not that difficult, and you will have to learn how to do it eventually. Furthermore, if you are really planning for your startup to go anywhere, things are most certainly not going to slow down. In fact, your time will just become more and more valuable, so right now would be the smartest time to incorporate.

If you are not yet making money, then that means your taxes won't be that difficult to file anyway. If you are making money, you are suppose to be claiming that on your taxes, whether you're incorporated or not. Either way, you can at least legally cover your personal ass(ets).

Keep in mind that my thoughts are based on procedures and tax law in MI, so if there is some mysterious overhead in your state that differs from MI, then you must take that into consideration.

So, I guess my suggestion is:
If there is a good chance your startup will flop and fail within the tax year, and not get sued in the process, don't bother. But if you are serious about it and believe it has potential to grow, why not do it now?
Glaring omission:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Color_Computer
For those of you wanting to understand what BGP actually is, I recommend an introduction to BGP by Geoff Huston [1]

[1] http://cidr-report.org/ispcol/2006-05/bgp.html
Doesn't orgasm-on-demand kind of cheapen it?

Then again, think about how much young males would accomplish if they didn't spend all that time masturbating. Of course, they'd probably just do it more.

Maybe if you toned it down to non-orgasm status it would make my work day better...
There are no breaks for me on Ubuntu 7.10 in Opera 9.5.
Wired and Reddit are part of the same media conglomerate, so that explains how the wired articles get on Reddit. I think a lot of n.yc readers read reddit, so that is how they get here so fast I bet.
How big is the website? I speak conversational German (albeit a couple years out of practice), but wouldn't have time to do this if it's more than a couple pages.

If you want a really good dictionary that translates words in context (and also includes common phrases and sentences), use http://leo.org.
Exactly. I mean, who cares about what Netflix' headquarters look like? Or what university his daughter goes to? Sometimes it feel like these journalists are just filling in a template.
I'd highly recommend the University of Maryland's "Hinman CEOs" program. UMD has been pushing entrepreneurship very heavily in the past few years (especially in the engineering disciplines.)

The Hinman program provides mentors, classes, living/learning environments, conference rooms, and other facilities to help potential entrepreneurs. Additionally, they bring in a steady stream of successful entrepreneurs to speak, network, and help you on your way.

Add that to its close proximity to Washington D.C., good tuition, and highly ranked engineering/business departments, and you have a fairly good entrepreneurship package.
Why Startups Fail: Run Out Of Cash, Run Out Of Commitment
Am I the only one that doesn't see the appeal of those desktop-in-a-browser websites?

Most of the 500M people that access the web via a cybercafe only are going to be in 3rd world countries, using something like Win98 + IE4 over a dial-up line shared by 10 machines. Oh, and paying in 10-minute increments. A Flash or AJAX based desktop analog is not going to have a hard time to work there.

There is indeed a potential market there, but you need to work with the grain of the Web to make it work. Desktop in a browser is going against the grain in my opinion.
11 Solid Ways to Improve Your Time Management Skills
3G iPhone to launch mid-year with Infineon chip - report
well... there is probably already a few teams with econometricians on board. based on my prior experience with that ilk - I'm sure their progress got held up by the insistence that all returns (err, ratings) follow a guassian distribution.

Also, all of that training in math and stats is pretty useless if you just use it to "prove" something you already "know" :)
I use OSX at home, and windows at work. No big surprise there. So when I first learned about Ruby on Rails, I did the intro tutorial on both platforms.

I had to install Ruby on windows. My Mac had ruby pre-installed, but it shipped with a broken ruby, so I had to reinstall.

I had to install a few patches to get the very first tutorials to work on my Mac. It was seamless on Windows.

Since then, it has been more of a pleasure to code on the mac than the windows. I'm also a lot better able to deal with remote hosting, because I'm going from unix to unix, rather than windows to unix.

That said, I was surprised that it took a bit more struggling on a Mac, considering that the 27Signals team is very mac-centril.
I would tell myself to apply earlier! Although I've learned a crazy amount about a lot of things in the last 10 years, I've just relearned a lot of them (better this time) in the past 2 months. The thing about it is, there's this perception that the people who do these things are so much smarter, more experienced, more something than you, but that's not necessarily true, so what's stopping you? Just yourself.
Webtops really are pointless. The only thing worse is when they get uppity and start calling themselves WebOSes.
"a signal generator smaller than a packet of cigarettes implanted under the skin of one of the patient's buttocks" - that's a not-insignificant catch.

Also, I could see this causing some serious psychological cognitive dissonance - the stimulation coming without any of the other physical and mental factors associated with orgasms. Kind of like when that Chinese guy got a penile transplant and he had to get it removed because his wife found it creepy.
Great read. When managers lose touch with workers, morale suffers.

I would even take it a step further. When managers lose touch with workers, they lose touch with HOW the business operates. They know the WHAT, but not the HOW. I see it over and over. Maybe they forgot how to do it, maybe things have changed, maybe they never even knew. But as soon as a manager tells you HOW to do something and you know he's wrong, time to plan your next move. It's inevitable.
make lists, make use of down time, reward yourself, concentrate on one thing, avoid procrastination, set personal deadlines, delegate responsibilities, set up a long term planner, employ a program like rescuetime, work in a team, be careful to avoid burnout

Nice submarine!
Sure, there's plenty of fluff in the article, but it isn't because the author (http://www.math.wisc.edu/~ellenber/) is clueless about science. The article is probably at the right level of technical depth. Seems ambitious to even touch SVD in Wired.
If you're a junior in high school, I'd take as many college level courses (mostly math and CS) as I could in your senior year and seriously consider skipping college.

I would normally never recommend this to anyone who cared about their future, but if you truly are an "aspiring start up entrepreneur", then you already know this is the right answer. In your case, college is an unnecessary detour.
Munin - Another monitoring tool
yes, completely.
It was, good find.
That game looks incredible! I'm not a huge Sony fan but I like that they take chances on quirky games like this one, Patapon, and Loco Roco.
So should I wait?
Babson College for entrepreneurship. Any top 10 engineering school in the country for CS. You learn the same shit, it's the just level of immersion in the coursework and peer pressure that differentiate the school.

A lot of mentions of Stanford here but how many of you actually went to school there? I swear to god somedays I think most of you are just card-carrying cargo-cultists.
Well about bloody time...

In parts of Europe almost everyone (OK, a lot of people...) have 3G phones. I would never consider a non 3G phone nowadays.
If you live in the midwest, I highly recommend the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It's a top 5 CS program.
I'm willing to bet every dollar to my name that the author can eat you for breakfast when it comes to "knowing about science".
I've been struggling to make the decision whether to get something like the ATT Tilt (3g/GPS/ability to store files) or wait for iPhone revision b.
How hard can it be? Surprisingly not that much. My time in the Marine Corps was similar. Training-wise it's all pre-planned by officers for staff NCOs to execute but when push comes to shove all that gets thrown out of the window at a minute's notice. Because of the escalation of the war in Iraq our training schedule was "lost" and we began an accelerated infantry course whereby all weekends were taken out, humps amped up, and classes extended.

What's always been amazing to me has been the ability for people to adapt. The weak ones weeded out from boot camp end up in infantry training capable of handling quite a lot of stress and workload. You'll _feel_ tired but when the entire platoon has been asked to practice drills for another hour you simply push through and do it.

When boots are on the ground, however, it's not so similar. There's so much downtime in between missions. And in time that's when accidents happen and people get careless. Maintaining discipline and order has paramount and that's when the hours and days of reflex drilling snap to and you stay alive for yet another day.
I learned to program in BASIC on a Tandy 1000SX and an m100. That thing was great for long trips to grandma's.

I still remember my very first attempt. I tried typing lines from a BASIC book into a DOS prompt, which obviously frustrated my tiny being to no end. My dad showed me how to start gwbasic, and I've been on this ride ever since.
Why does he or the author consider him a psychologist? I think its a bit misleading when simply reading the title of the article. He has an undergraduate degree in psychology, but his master's is in operations research (and correct me if I'm wrong, but OR is usually the application of statistics to business problems, right?). Wouldn't the article more accurately be something like "Operations research guy uses statistical technique motivated by psychology ... "
Love - A Proceduraly Generated 1 Man Made MMO
microsoft sharepoint cloud-platform and a backpack compeitator
How can you have a list of 11 things with #4 as "Concentrate on One Thing"?
> I would now consider Quake II to be the best of the current crop.

God, doesn't anybody have taste? Not that I'm not guilty of popping wood at the arrival of OpenGL in PC gaming, but come on people. Quake II's actual content is uninspired at best.
Stanford has an amazing campus and most everyone there is very positive. It is like a little island for overachievers.

MIT is great but the attitudes and environment are quite different. The campus is in a much more urban environment. Rather than the upbeat attitude at Stanford, MIT is more of a tough-love kind of school. "You might think you are smart, but really you suck and are lazy" is how motivation works at MIT. At Stanford it is more like "yo, we're all super smart. let's be rad and play ultimate frisbee later." I think it has something to do with the wildly different climates.

This is very qualitative, but from my experience MIT is probably a better place to go if you want to do a form of engineering that requires crazy smarts that isn't computer science. Like hardcore electrical engineering, or bioengineering or material science or designing atomic weapons. Stanford is better for straight-up computer stuff.

If you can get into one of those two schools you are a step ahead of the game. They are the only two schools in the USA that are worth their super inflated tuitions. Otherwise I'd just go to the best school you can get into that costs the least amount of money.
Never got to use JotSpot :( / but this seems direct competition to backpack
I incorporated right away. Mostly for tax purposes. I can write off 40% of my rent and a lot of my business meals.

I also plan on contracting to extend my runway. It's best to be incorporated for that.
Part I: "I have an idea..now what?"
Captchas suck, still a hurt point on the internet.
That's incorrect though. That's like saying someone always called an orange an apple, and therefore their apple (really an orange) is the same as ours.

The whole point of a word is so that when I say it, you know what it means. The word "language" has an agreed upon meaning, and that meaning is not twiddling a knob.
I don't think it's accurate to say Macs win on hardware. There are clearly some Windows OEMs who make hardware that's generally better (Lenovo for instance) though I'll give Apple credit and say that they're pretty good.
FriendFeed Changelog: see what code we are writing
We're working on an open-source distributed storage system that can also be used to easily share files. It also has p2p streaming download which is kind of fun to use. http://allmydata.org
I can't believe you wouldn't give yourself stock tips if you could call yourself from 10 years ago.
Atwood is a dyed in the wool Windows / .Net evangelist. Nobody should be terribly shocked when he makes the assertion that anything other than Windows & .Net are substandard platforms.
"Meloy has yet to test the device on men, but says there's no reason it shouldn't work in the same way."

I don't know about you, but I'm going to start investing in Fruit of the Loom RIGHT NOW.
Hrm. My Irony Sense is tingling.
"I take issue with David's claim that, when it comes to computers and operating systems, there's any "best" anything. In my considered opinion, they all suck. Sure, there are tradeoffs, pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses. But an objective best? It's all relative."

"Don't waste time arguing about the character select screen. Results speak loudest. Show the world what you can do in your programming environment of choice."

Hardly sounds like he's bashing non-Windows. More like bashing elitism and OS-ism.
I wouldn't. That would be wrong. (j/k, good idea)
Oops. I stand corrected. The author of this particular article obviously does know the subject very well. My apologies.
"Paul recently suggested that we could save ourselves a lot of time writing blog posts if we just sent out our changelists from Mercurial"

Wow. I mean, wow!! This is a great way to get technical people invested in the development of your app!
Why Xen? I've been using VMware for years and I am curious about these newer tools: Xen and VirtualBox.
Seeing Metaclasses Clearly
I have no idea if this works as advertised, but those are some impressive looking metrics.

http://munin.ping.uio.no/ping.uio.no/vodka.ping.uio.no.html

Think I'm going to try installing this. I've got homegrown scripts to monitor a lot of this stuff and I've used nagios in the past. But it's pretty cool to see it all laid out like that.
The Xobni recruiting video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lgg02cCIOto