skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> but could it not simply be that his work was motivated by trying to improve human lives? It is pretty natural to consider in the face of disaster what might have caused it and what might have prevented it.

But that's the thing. He SAYS he believes in the free market, which means, in my mind, put up an idea and see who takes to it, but in PRACTICE he basically means, "People are too stupid to know what's good for them - so we'll shove changes down their throats when they least suspect it and are the most distracted."

The thing that may distrub you (I'm a bit more familiar with friedman) is that his "solutions" have nothing to do with the crisis itself, or, as you say, preventing it. He has said numerous times that "free market solutions" are the best way to lift people out of poverty en masse.

Yet, his particular suggestions are not aimed at "solutions" for most people but rather opportunities for a select few.

The fact that they have to be slipped in sneakily while nobody's paying attention because they're too scared and trying to survive makes me suspicious - if all the things that he advocates should be quietly sneaked in while we're too traumatized from disaster to pay attention were as good for us as he claims, why then do they have to be snuck in quietly while we're all reduced to fear an panic and can't think straight?

In other words, why not let his suggestion actually be put to the test of a real democratic free market - why does he insist that "free market solutions" are best introduced during times of fear and panic and by using stealth and secrecy and decption?

Could it be that none of his "free market solutions" would ever actually be successful in a properly functioning free market?

If so, could it be that the people at the top of the food chain don't really want a properly functioning free market where people make rational decisions based on self-interest?

>> It happens all the time, in fact, it is standard practice when starting wars to fake some attack of the enemy to be first. That is not what we are discussing, though.

But in a way it is. Once you accept the possibility that people are willing to exploit tragedy to push their agendas on a weakened populace, then the next step in the economic model is to make "progress" of that sort more efficient and business like by being able to predict and prepare for such scenarios in advance - and the only way to have the sufficient knowledge necessary to do this is to somehow have asymetric distrubtion of knowledge of such events a priori, which suggests that people who have such knowledge would be colluding with the people who cause the disasters.

> Also, let's think the other way round. Naomi seems to
> claim that people don't want free markets because the
> evil power people have to force it on them. But could it > not be the other way round, people would actually want
> them, and the evil power people are actually trying to
> prevent it? The "evidence" could be interpreted in both > ways.

I actually agree with you 100% on this.
Are the prospects this bad in math as well?
I think that I'll have to be more explicit. You're a lamer and you're spamming this forum. Please go away.
You know, this smacks a bit of "Me thinks the lady doth protest too much."

Ideas are a dime a dozen. But good ideas are not. If you already have the skills as a developer, and good, marketable, monetizable ideas are really as easy to come up with as you say, why aren't you a multi-billionaire 15 times over by now?

I suppose I'm a bit biased because I've approached people before as the "idea guy", only to be turned down by developers who insist that ideas are a dime-a-dozen and that they're too busy working on their own wonderful get-rich-quick idea to make billions of dollars by starting a company which loads YouTube flash videos up 2% faster or some such technical marvel.

You know what? Year after year, same developers, same cocktail party, same meetups, STILL working in poverty and obscurity, 100% certain that any day now Google will come along and offer them billion$$$ for their one-man company centered around an algorithm that loads YouTube videos 2% faster.

I highly doubt that you're a several-time succesful entrepreneur as you claim on your site.

Startups are just plain hard and you need all the good thinkers you can get and they're not all programmers.

Good luck competing with the luxury of snobbery.

BTW - suppose this non-existent guy's business idea (I say that because it seems like every programmer these days is posting a blog about, "The other day, this stupid guy came up to me asking to develop his stupid idea.") took off and made billions.

Do you have experience developing products for startups that go on to make billioins?

Did Pierre Omidyar have experience programming for startups that go from $0 in sales to become Fortune 500 companies in less than a decade?

Let me know how your holier-than-thou attitude works out for you financially in about 10-15 years.

I'm going to guess you'll either still be programming or putting up some blog whining about how Indian and Chinese programmers are stealing your opportunities.
Shutup xirium. right - a username based on your website - that's really sophisticated marketing there - makes you an expert on marketing, enough to call others lame.

"xirium searches for stuff." Kind of like that thing, what's it called ... um ... Google or something?

You have a really valuable addition to the market: "We're like google, but not as good and well-funded."

You're one to call others lame.
Way past.
Not an incubator, a program that hosts events and gives early stage companies deals on Sun equipment.

Still, nice that the european startup scene gets some love.
Could you give an example of something Friedman wanted to "slip in" after a crisis?

And how would you propose to "let his suggestion actually be put to the test of a real democratic free market" - where would you find such a real democratic free market?
A dissenting view

It's true that, as the article and many commenters have said,there are lots of bad places, and bad cultures within academia.

So what? There's also some great groups and great cultures within academia. If you want to go the academic path, the thing to do is to make sure you end up in such a place. So far as I can see the way to achieve this is:

(1) Do a lot of research before you join a group. Just because a group looks great from the outside (brand name University, famous prof) doesn't mean it'll be a good experience. Interview former members; tour the lab; ask hard questions about the culture - what do people love about their jobs; what do they think is the worst thing about the culture; what do they think about their career prospects? Follow up on these questions in detail - most people love to talk about their careers, and if they won't, it often means that they're not happy. If you get defensive responses, or a refusal to respond, that tells you what you need to know about the culture. Don't look back.

(2) Iterate until you find a group that looks excellent.

(3) Mentally, when you join a group, think of it as being on probation. After three and then six months, ask yourself "Am I having fun? Is what I'm doing making a difference? Is the culture here genuinely good?" If the answer to all these questions isn't yes, get out, and go join another group. This is hard to do - you'll get a lot of advice to the contrary - but 9 times out of 10 the results are a major improvement.

I'm leaving academia now, after PhD, postdocs, being a tenured prof, the whole nine yards. It was tough at times, but overall, it was an asbolute blast.
Okay, I'm sorry too be harsh in response.

But I think this is on topic for the simple fact that most people here I would classify as being interested in working on or eventually starting a startup. Which I think they hope will either sell a product, or have an IPO or get bought out.

So whether you like it or not, your dream of a startup is dependent on the macro-system.

The reason I posted this is because I'm in the same boat. I've been trying to put together a startup, I've had training in economics, and I was sort of brainwashed to believe growing up that hard work = success and good idea = market adaption and people at the top = hard work and good ideas.

This view of the world that people at the top dominate certain market mechanisms and they do so because they take advantage of disaster and face no natural competition and opposition makes me pause and think about my own experience and I thought it might be food for thought for others.

For example, why should I work hard to present an idea that I hope will beat competition and be adopted democratically in a free market system because it's the better idea, when there's a good chance that the eventual winner will be a well-connected group that sneaks it's market entry in when I'm scared and distracted because, say, terrorists run amock in my city?

If that's the way the world works, then ALL free market endeavor is lost because the system will tend to collapse because there will be no motivation to compete in a system where winners don't compete but rather cause problems for their competition and sneak solutions while we're all distracted and putting out fires.

That affects everyone - including programmers.
As a single hacker founder, I would love to have a non-hacker co-founder.

Founders that can compliment each other is the way to go.
That 'campus' sounds scary. Like Hitler Youth but with nicer shirts.
xubuntu runs very well on a PowerBook Ti 3.5 from 2002.
I got a BSc, read half of On Lisp and then wrote a screenplay which got accepted to be read by a Hollywood agent. A good screenwriter is a good technical person! Compression is important, too, due to the confines of the screenplay (~100 pages). As opposed to a novelist, who has to write a lot more than a screenwriter.
This story was in a compilation by Asimov titled "The Last Question".
I'll have to dig up my copy of Sun Tzu and see how they compare.
I think where you run into problems is when one founder doesn't have any knowledge of the other founders areas of expertise i.e. the Bus Dev guy and The Programmer.

The ideal setup seems to be a designer with a bit of marketing skill and business acumen (doesn't have to be huge amount) and a coder.

These two can leave each other alone to work when it matters but they also have the crossover skills to help each other work through a problem.

A good designer on the web is going to know a little bit about coding and a good coder is going to know a little about design.

Its a nice mix and you dont run into any bike shed problems where you have 4 different people checking out the same code.
My definition of work: What you do in the meantime for other people who pay you to do it while you're trying to figure out how to arrange your life so you don't have to work.

I don't count projects I actually enjoy as work.
You could be right about premature optimisation. Shift workers live shorter lives than colleagues doing the same job. So, if you increase waking hours now then you may not increase your total and you might not spend them most productively.

Regarding greatness, political office impinges greatly on sleep. Margaret Thatcher was widely known to get as little as four hours sleep on a regular basis. Successive British Prime Ministers age relatively quickly after obtaining office. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any other examples. Therefore, it is likely that examples are outnumbered by counter-examples.
Debian "Lenny" with Gnome works nicely on my PowerBook.
Polyphasic sleep is a bad idea if you value creativity and alertness.

Here is an article from a doctor who has studied sleep schedules and memory: http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm
If you're going to go at it with a non-hacker, I suggest finding someone who at least understands the process (maybe one who has written even a small program) so that he will have a respect for what the hacker half does. Likewise I think it would seem easy for a hacker to underestimate the importance of a salesperson, designer, marketer, business developer, etc., so take the time to understand and appreciate this aspect of your startup. In the end, you'll both learn a lot from each other, and you'll have a well rounded and balanced set of founders.
There is something very wrong about that picture. It's like a picture of a 20 year old with a 60 year old's facial features photoshopped onto it.
In the 8 bit days, Woz designed the hardware and wrote the firmware. Jobs made sales. In the 16 bit days, Jobs specified design constraints, such as form factor and noise limits which techies solved. Jobs would have been involved in technical decisions in a managerial capacity only. There is a creative process in marketing and suchlike, but Jobs wasn't coding or designing components.

That's the issue under discussion. Is it worthwhile to have a non-programmer as a co-founder? Yes, if they have very complimentary skills.
Oops, something does look broken. Will fix.
plastic. surgery.
Actually, the teaching is depressing even at stellar universities. I'm a postdoc at such a place. Last semester, I taught "Calculus for kids who don't care." This semester, I'm teaching "Poker and craps for kids who don't care."

I suspect the only way to avoid this is to work at an engineering school (not necessarily a top one).
Fixed; sorry.
what we've got here is faiiiiilure to communicate!

From Guns'n'Roses civial war song, in my opinion, as long you manage to communicate nicely, you won't have problems.

Most ppl fail, to communicate! Hackers Non-Hackers alike.

Ultimately, wikis, git and the plethora of other IT tools, are here to create better communication, they are social tools, and theory behind them is social, ... i mean, they try to solve many social issues, of trust, communication etc ...

Your greatest enemy is pride, just because others dont have your skills, doesnt mean they are ignorant and useless. Be modest ... listen and always try to be non confrontational
What he really means is not "don't become a scientist" but "don't get a job as a professor." The two are by no means identical. There were scientists long before there were research professors (that concept dates from about 1870) and there are still plenty of scientists who aren't professors.

Like being a writer, being a scientist depends on what you do, not who pays you.
My wife and I will be co-founding after school's done this summer. I'm the hacker, she not so much. But, she's pretty handy with a database, and an organizational genius. She's worked in high tech before, too.

On the plus side, we know that we work together well.
Digital downloads will be Blu-ray's downfall
It doesn't sound much like a free market scenario. Instead, asking the government to build things seems always to be the worst option, because the government doesn't really care about the money. I don't know the system, but I'd imagine giving the people vouchers to buy themselves into schools would be more like it.

Also, I don't think Friedman has any political power - was the government really following his suggestions? It sounds as if no schools were built after all (public or private), which is surely not what he suggested?

In any case I see his point, after Katrina it seems to have been a good opportunity to start over with something new.
YOUR TEXT:

"We provide QA outsourcing services especially focused towards startups."

MY QA:

Replace "QA" with "Quality Assurance".

Add a comma after "services".

Replace "towards" with "toward".

YOUR TEXT:

"With our good value services in the area of QA , you get to have excellent value for money while you focus on your core business."

MY QA:

Replace "good value services in the area of QA" with "high quality QA services".

Eliminate "to have".

Add "your" before "money".

Replace "while" with "so that you can".

YOUR TEXT:

"Some of the services are, 1- Functional Testing 2- Automation Testing 3- Usability Testing 4- Performance Testing 5- Security Testing"

MY QA:

Replace "the services are" with "our testing services include".

Remove all 5 instances of "Testing".

Put commas after each phrase.

Add a period at the end of the sentence.

YOUR TEXT:

Oh! and what else you would want us to have in our services especially for your needs? Any ideas?

MY QA:

Delete this sentence when you get done laughing.

YOUR TEXT:

"Check out our website for more detail and we would be more than happy to have your ideas developed as our capabilities too."

MY QA:

Add a period after "detail".

Delete "and" and capitalize "we" to begin a new sentence.

Delete "more than".

Delete "to have your ideas developed as our capabilities too."

YOUR TEXT:

"Cheers! Khurram Mir www.kraysis.com khurram@kraysis.com"

Replace "Cheers!" with "Thank you." unless you are drinking (which I am about to do).
Stop it with the insults. Spammers are arguably fair game (this post was certainly spam) but ad hominem attacks against other users are against the site rules.
It's moot now. September 1993 will go down in net.history as the September that never ended.
Python for All Scientific Needs
The Year September Never Ended
Hacker Slang and Hacker Culture
Sturgeon was questioned. None of us know what happened during that questioning. But the judge has ordered both attorneys not to mention his claims during the trial. Sturgeon was not charged with any murders. From this, one can reasonably infer that Sturgeon's claims of having killed eight people were not credible.

On the other hand, Nina Reiser's blood was found in Hans Reiser's car and at Hans Reiser's current residence, where she had never lived.
My startup has 4 full-timers, of which I'm the only hacker. There's a (damned good) web designer and two business people. The business people and myself are the "co-founders". This reflects the nature of our business, which is largely technical, but has a significant non-technical component.

So far so good, but we're still just getting off the ground.
Ahhh, the Seductive Fragrance of Molecules Under Patent
This should be be made required reading for this site.
Yes.

The only difference (but a big one in my view) is that you are an independent researcher from the very beginning.
The Short March: The Suburbanization of China has begun
Zoho is well-positioned, with a great strategy, but I believe their flaw is they build products that are good, not great.
True, but adding DRM will make Flash the platform of choice for so much more. Why aren't there 50 competitors to Apple's movie rental product? Because DRM sucks and is expensive.

Maybe if Adobe can make flash DRM 'just work' then it will actually empower consumers rather than hinder their use of the content.

I admit, I love the concept of subscription DRM and really with Apple didn't make us all back up all the stuff we've purchased. I don't need the headache of backing up those episodes of "Lost" that I downloaded from the Apple Store, and now that I've had to have them reset the DRM once, if my backup drive fails, I've lost everything.

The solution isn't to eliminate DRM but to make it more flexible and simple to use. Yahoo Music's subscription store was awesome ($6 per month for unlimited music) but I'd give it only a 5 out of 10 on usability.
If you find indentation to be a pain in Python, you haven't configured your editor properly.
What are they using for such pretty error messages in py?
Yes. In my year, we had 12 people entering at Rutgers.

2 graduated in 5 years, and got good postdocs after 1 year (one went to UIUC, I'm at Courant). We are the only ones who have a real shot at research oriented tenure track.

1 dropped out in the first year, 2 more have or are dropping out with a masters (1 after 4.5 years, 1 after 6).

3 more will graduate after 6 years, IF they can find a job (50% odds). One guy has a wife, and hopes he can find a job in the NYC area (he's looking at a 4+4 teaching load). I know other people who have such jobs: none like them.

1 more is potentially a long termer (he hopes to graduate in 7 years).

The only major difference is that you will probably not be a technician (as described by this guy), you will do your own research from the beginning. You can also survive without grants, though it will hurt your career.
Why does popcorn cost so much at the movies?
>what we've got here is faiiiiilure to communicate!

>From Guns'n'Roses civial war song, in my opinion, ...

Sorry, but the Guns'n'Roses got it from the movie "Cool Hand Luke".

[1967 - The phrase is first used in the motion picture Cool Hand Luke, delivered by actor Strother Martin](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_we've_got_here_is_failure_...)
The Peter principle ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle ) can lead to a bozo explosion ( http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/02/how_to_prevent_.html ).

I believe that there are two factors which influence likelihood of a bozo explosion. The first is the organisation's rate of expansion. The second is the quality of human resources.

Regarding the rate of expansion, it is widely known that a company which repeatly grows at 100% per year is consumed by bozos. However, an organisation which does not expand may also be consumed by bozos. This is because the superstars don't wish to remain in a company which is mere "treading water" and therefore the quality of staff declines. It is very likely that the optimal rate of expansion is small and steady on the basis that it is better to not hire at all rather than hire badly.

Regarding human resources, if you've got a company with 100 staff then it is logical to delegate hiring. At this point, hiring takes a life of its own. After human resources personnel are added or replaced, you'll have people who've been hired by people who've been hired by people that you hired personally. If you're not careful then new hires could be of any quality.

Google has been relatively close to 100% expansion in some years. So, I'd argue that Google's human resources is closely monitored. Indeed, you could take an educated guess and say that the success of hiring could be monitored with an algorithm. Maybe this is a ranking algorithm? It is also extremely probable that job applications are filtered automatically.
Digg, Wikipedia, and the myth of Web 2.0 democracy.
Ask YC: Why are you guys obsessd with reddit?
As someone new to the site, I am confused at the level of animosity and obsession with reddit. Was reddit once a bastion of intellectual conversation until one day the trolls came in and ravaged the entire site? Is News.YC currently going down the tubes? I think whats important is that the focus and content here will keep a certain demographic of people away from this site. Am I wrong?
I'd like to second Michael's point. My research is genuinely exciting. It's enthralling for little kids, grandparents, and everything in between. More importantly, I find my research fascinating.

The career path is challenging. Salary/hours worked sucks. Multiple moves are required for the two postdocs and a permanent job. There are serious politics.

The question is ultimately personal. Is academia worth it?
"A taste for the mysteries of numbers is excessively rare, but when a person of the sex which must encounter infinitely more difficulties than men to familiarize herself with these thorny researches, succeeds nevertheless in penetrating the most obscure parts of them, then without a doubt she must have the noblest courage, quite extraordinary talents and superior genius." - Gauss to Sophie Germain