skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Mike Jeffries is the Willie Wonka of the fashion industry.. Examples of his strange behavior abound. According to Business Week, at A&F headquarters Jeffries always goes through revolving doors twice, never passes employees on stairwells, parks his Porsche every day at the same angle in the parking lot (keys between the seats, doors unlocked), and has a pair of "lucky shoes" he wears when reading financial reports."

I am friends with a former A&F employee, who is very attractive and confident. Behind the soft-porn young american look/magalog that is the A&F marketing ethos, there is a darker side of requiring low-hourly-wage earning employees to spend nearly all their wages on A&F clothes (lawsuit was settled) and attractive employees being required to recruit other attractive employees (either sex) to work for A&F, whenever they were out and about (e.g. partying).
If you are an independent thinker and don't care much about what your peers think, then I don't think academia is a good choice.

I think it's no coincidence that startup founders tend to be more of the rebellious types.
Flutist James Galway takes nothing for granted: The master still practices his scales daily.
Google seems to have a Darwinian approach to innovation. Perhaps it works. These success stories are the ones that thrived and made it to the next generation. It's nice to hear for every Google News there is unmentionable projects. I wonder if Google has a technical caste system similar to MSFT.
Crayon Physics Deluxe, how kids might see the world from now on
I think there must be (atleast) another pair of eyes which doesn't think in terms of bits and bytes. I am not a good web designer (I hate picking colors) and I prefer to ask someone else (definetely a non-hacker) the layouts and color combinations.
Yeah, ignore those people. I think anyone worrying about Reddit (or even mentioning it) is just as likely to hurt this community as those who post "fluff" stories.

Let it be what it will be and relax, please. :)
My apologies. I was referring from the Gutenberg.Org version ( http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/132 ).
I think you can make the argument that the "non-hackers" are hackers in the sense that they know and understand the technology of social dynamics, psychology, relationships, selling. And sometimes they are unaware of how they do what they do - they just do it - like some hackers. As Joe Kraus said in his Startup School lecture, it's easier to start a startup in 2006 than in 1996 but it's still as hard to start a business.
The confusion between you and this guy is that you seem to be talking about "a business idea" and he's simply talking about "an idea for an app, but with no idea behind it for turning it into a business".

It doesn't seem like you and he are talking about different things at all.
I've got a non-hacker cofounder. He quality controls the project and helps me move the it in the right direction (He works in the industry we're targeting). He's also chasing down clients.
By the way, this isn't true for chemists. My roommate's a chem major and has interned all over the place; the scientists he works with apparently had little trouble finding jobs (here in NJ, anyway). Of course, their research centers on perfume or toothpaste...
I can relate to this article, but he's missing something. If you're building something people want, selling software over the internet can be figured out, and you can find developers to make it.

The first thing start ups should do is show evidence that people want what you are offering. Afterwards, figure out if the cost of customer acquisition < price they will pay (or advertising or whatever). Then you have a good business idea.

Viaweb, for instance, let businesses get a web presence easily at a price they could afford. The advertising cost to get new customers was lower than their price and cost of the product, so they were profitable.
In the network marketing world (of which I observed as a passive participant briefly), they have a saying - don't confuse activity as productivity. For example, in network marketing, filling out paperwork and reading web sites and listening to tapes are (low-value) spin your wheel activities. Approaching prospects, inviting people to meetings, mentoring, and selling product are high-value productivity. These productive activities can all be measured: As one of the co-founders of HP said in a maxim: "You can't make what you don't measure". For your startup, intend to focus on activities where you can measure results and success. Billing will be one - you can even see if people actually use it.
On the order of $15-20K/year. It's hard to save money when you've got a poverty-level stipend.
The Idea About Ideas
Social Media Stole My Privacy
A take on how social media has run amuck.
Misleading title - for "300 Million" read "Half Million".

From the article:

"How big is your system?"

"We had more than half a million unique visitors yesterday and growing fast. We're on track to do more than 300 million page views this month."
Assuming you meant "9 out of 10 fail", and that the average failure takes a year, including recovery time at a real job to replenish your finances and find a new idea...

That means you've had 6 chances just by the time your colleagues have finished grad school. 0.9^6 = 0.53, so you have a 47% chance of being a multi-millionaire by the time your academic friends are even entering the rat race. Compare that to the article's "If you're 95th-percentile lucky you might get a post-doc position, then you have a 50-50 chance of getting a tenure track position." Your odds are about 10 times better with the tech startup.

Then consider that at a minimum, you should expect 2 years of postdoc and another 6 years before getting tenure. That's now 14 years of training before you can actually work on what you want. 14 startup attempts with a 90% failure rate gives you a roughly 80% chance of success. The startup path is starting to look mighty good...
I like the concept and want to use it.

If you made a quick project here:
http://featurelist.org/projects/add/

Then I'll submit a few feature requests like this:

* Please add support for LiveJournal
* Please add support for Plaxo
* Please add support for SteamCommunity
* Please add support for multiple different (named) RSS feeds
* Please add support for Xfire
* Please add support for "group" joins that I recommend e.g. Google Groups or a Facebook group.
* Please allow multiple widgets to be configured/used per person. I use different social networks for different things, so it would be good to have multiple bars.
* Please find an alternative to iframe which is embeddable in more places (like a forum signature or blog post).
Cute, but, really, all good musicians do that. At least the classical musicians I grew up with (my parents and their friends) did. They'd run through a whole bunch of scales for at least twenty minutes before tackling whatever hard piece they were working on.

Growing up in that household, it used to drive me crazy.
Regardless of his tactics and business ethics, I found the most interesting part to be his attitude and devotion.

One quote I found interesting is, "I really don't care what anyone other than our target customer thinks".
A 60 Second Intro to Quantum Computing
Average startup profitability is to decrease by 30-40% in 2008-2018
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- Maxims For Revolutionists, 1903 by George Bernard Shaw

So, have the courage to say no, especially when it is unreasonable.
All we need is faster internet and there will really be no need for physical media.
Did you miss the whole Castro debate, where this was hashed and rehashed? There are a significant number of people who seem to think that "relevant for everyone" belongs on other sites, whereas "specifically relevant to hackers" belongs here. You can go to reddit for "relevant for everyone". Also, consider how much stuff is relevant to everyone. It would swamp the hacker news in a heartbeat if we started adding everything that's relevant.
That's kind of a non-argument when you consider the majority of stuff found on here most of the time.

Last week it was "Do you watch t.v." that was most popular. I suppose it's relevant for hackers, but then again t.v. gets in the way of everyone's productivity, so it's relevant for everyone.

Ås for the Castro debates, no I didn't watch them since I don't have closed-circuit cuban government controlled t.v.

May I ask how the hell you saw them and know their contents living in Austria as you claim to do?
The observers, presented with a ten-second silent video clip, had no difficulty rating the teachers on a fifteen- item checklist of personality traits."

I think, as someone who has the consciously think to make a good first impression and defaults to unconsciously not really caring about the impression I make, it freaks me out a little that humans make such snap judgements. I still make snap judgements but I prefer to form an impression of a person over time - interesting until proven boring and even then, as the filmmaker Pedro Almodavar said - 'it's our little quirks that make us human'. And to quote Neo in the Matrix, 'one does not truly know someone until they fight them' - you're not fighting someone until (hopefully) you have an established relationship. First impressions are overrated and I think they can be countered with better n++ impressions. A lot of married people I've met - the wife says 'she wouldn't go out on a date with him - she turned him down..at first'
"Female Mathematician"?? Sophie Germain deserves the use of her own name, as much as you wouldn't say "Male Mathematician" to refer to Fermat. Sophie Germain was one of the greatest mathematicians of all times.
"Grandpa, tell us about the download progress bar again"
I was talking about this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=118933
Stories like this are now starting to pop up and get votes:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122287

Reddit gets mentioned a lot for this reason: it got a huge bunch of users initially from people following a link that pg posted, so the initial stories and discussions were pretty good. Then it started devolving into a community that is often not pleasant to interact with unless you stick to one of the subreddits. People don't want that to happen here.
Have you picked a general focus of what you want to learn? It seems to me that it's less important which specific technologies you take classes in (for the most part) than determining which level you you like to work on. I think of it similar to programming languages: some people prefer "high-level" work, like application / UI design, or multimedia or image processing. "Low level" courses are going to be more about systems design, working with distributed / embedded systems, etc. It gets easier to choose once you've made that distinction.

You're asking about grad courses, so which CS classes have you already taken?
Wow, I can't believe python doesn't have something similar to ruby's

ruby -c foo.rb
Getting Things Done: The Science behind Stress-Free Productivity
So, in conclusion, according to you hackers are monotone, unidimentionsional people with no interest in how the world at large works as long as it doesn't have something to do with eBay or Chinese internet startups or other such things?

Sad. I pity such people then.
$80 shirts, $100 pants ... no thanks.
Totally depends on the startup. What's the core problem of your solution? If it's technical, you need hackers. If it's user-experience ("we'll make a better solution because the current solutions are clunky!"), you need a UX god. If it's a sales/distribution twist, then you need a smart sales/biz guy.

There are certainly scenarios where a non-hacker will be valuable. But for 90% of the startups I see on HN (and elsewhere), someone who is not a "builder" (code, design, copywriting) is a non-critical element for the first phase of a company.

IF something starts to take off, that can change. Google hired Eric Schmidt, and I hear that Mark Zuckerburg wants a biz CEO. But until it starts to take off (which is the hard part), a non-builder is non-critical. Not useless, mind you-- just less valuable than the alternative. Better than nothing, though!

Oh, and saying that Steve Jobs is a non-hacker is ridiculous. He certainly evolved into something else, but the guy started out going to homebrew computer clubs, working as a technician at Atari, and attending after school lectures at HP.
Android - commercial meets open source
No offense, but I guess most of us here would have read this already, don't you think?
I'm trying to be as clear as possible, but I'm not getting through:

There is a world of things out there that is quite fascinating and interesting and very relevant. Indeed, that world is far, far larger than the slice of it that this site focuses on. So much larger, that if everyone were to bring their own personal interests, politics, economics, and so forth here, it might well wreck the community, as has happened elsewhere.

This does not mean that I or others are not concerned or interested in that world, it means that by choosing to focus on our common ground, it keeps the quality higher.
If the article at the top of the thread is atypical of a tenured professor, this post is absolutely typical. I've heard this speech a million times. If you ever need to hear it again, ask any professor to give it to you and they'll happily oblige.

Undoubtedly, most tenured professors are having an "absolute blast". Why shouldn't they be? They are the end product of a rigorous system of selection for their particular set of personality traits. If you're not the kind of person who adores being a researcher to the exclusion of all other thoughts -- if you are not either a truly diehard optimist, or the most stubborn person you'll ever know -- you won't make it to where this guy is.

The career advice here is good, solid advice, as far as it goes. But the parody of this would be fun to write, and might contain equal amounts of truth. ("(2) Iterate until you find a group that looks excellent, or until you discover that all the excellent groups have a waiting list, at which point you need to either quit grad school, apply for a personal fellowship and win it, or work for whoever has the grant money to pay you.")

No time for extensive parody today, though -- besides, the guy at Piled Higher and Deeper has covered that ground better than I ever could -- so I'll leave you with this caveat: Very, very few of the people you interview with in a research group will ever tell you that your academic career is a waste of time and that you should just leave, even if it's true. They've got a very strong incentive to recruit you, so that you can apply your inexpensive intelligence and energy to their projects. They've got an incentive to be careful what they say to you, because if word gets back to their colleagues that they are discouraging prospective students it might derail their careers. They also have an even bigger incentive to keep fooling themselves.

And, you know, academic scientists really don't like pain. They're not drill sergeants. Taking starry-eyed optimists, most of whom remind you of yourself, and kicking them in the chest is not a lot of fun. It's for their own good, but it feels like euthanizing puppies. It's just so much easier to encourage them to follow the same path that you did, and to let time and nature and bureaucracy take care of teaching them the harsh realities of life.
Difference between Western and Eastern Science
Good thing Web 2.0 companies don't need profits!
The Hacker News RSS feed is broken...again (as of Sunday)
Sorry, I know you just fixed this, but as of Sunday morning the the Comments links in Google Reader are broken, again.

Looking at the feed, I think the problem this time is multiple <description> tags nested within each other...
> Breaking up things with naps is actually highly effective.

I disagree. Naps are inefficient. By breaking sleep up into more blocks you multiply the time you waste trying to fall asleep, shaking off "just woke up" grogginess, changing clothing, getting to and from bed, etc. Batching tasks is almost always more efficient. Grocery shopping every few weeks is much more efficient than going twice a week, for example.

I did some shift work for a while so I speak from experience. I would get about five hours of sleep before waking at 4:15am, and then take another hour or two of sleep in mid afternoon when I got home. I adapted comfortably to this and didn't mind it too much. But it did absolutely nothing for productivity or alertness. All it meant was more time spent changing in and out of PJs and lying in bed falling asleep. It also constrained the flexibility of my schedule because skipping the nap did a number on me.

Are people in siesta countries notably more productive than regular night sleep countries? I think evidence indicates the opposite. This whole "hacking sleep" thing is a red herring.
I think this is a very relevant article to the "Eternal September" story:

http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

What's surprising is that some of the group dynamics that contribute to the break down of online communities was identified in the oddest of settings decades ago...
Pakistan blocks YouTube website
I'll be honest, when you back that up with something more substantial, I'll read more of your posts. Until then you've got another fluff piece
>I don't have Excel, so I'll start writing a Ruby DSL to implement this right away.

You didn't listen to a word he said. I mean, just do the smallest list possible that you can fit into your head (so that you don't need Excel): this can only have two items if you want--find an Excel alternative; write a Ruby DSL. Weight those the way he said, and you will end up crossing the Ruby DSL off of your list.
Airline in first biofuel flight
Ask News.YC: What am I missing?
What am I missing? I see new companies create products that are basically the same as existing products and succeed. I'm sure I will see a new innovative software company that built a new bug tracking system and has a great cash flow. Is there still really room in these markets for new companies?
Just counting the potential fallacies in this article makes me tired.

Does average mean the mean, the median, or the mode?

Why should we care about the average anyway? The average Web page is probably a piece of SEO spam, but that doesn't mean much to me or to the world's best-read web sites.

"Recently there hasn't been any significant innovation." This is typical bad-investor thinking: stock prices are flat or declining, so this must be a terrible time to buy! I will wait and buy stock once the prices have gone up!
Don't miss http://www.scipy.org/Cookbook
A Javascript tool for creating carousel like widgets
I hadn't seen it until just now.
the problem with esr's 'definition of a hacker' is it is basically how he views himself at some point in his life.
How To Become A ESR
No? Show me serious writing by an atheist, explaining how morality exists and isn't religious?
Nice, mention Perl and genomics, but ignore BioPerl while pushing BioPython.
I'm not sure I get your question. Is there room for a better bug tracking system? You bet. I haven't found one with an awesome UI, powerful reporting mechanism and support to adapt to the workflow of big companies.
90 Hours A Week And Loving It.
I've probably read this a dozen times. I used to read it for motivation.

"Trying to learn to hack on a Microsoft Windows machine or under any other closed-source system is like trying to learn to dance while wearing a body cast."

I never agreed with this. The only time it's possibly a problem is if you want to learn about operating systems, and in that case the source to a current release of the Linux kernel is probably too complex. You'd be better off running Minix under a virtual machine, which you can do in Windows (or Mac OS X, or other proprietary OS) just fine.

A much more compelling argument is it's much easier to experiment with and install open source software on systems that have package management systems like apt-get. Certain excellent pieces of software run best on Unix-like OSes: Emacs, the MATLAB clone Octave, numerical libraries like ATLAS and GSL, Intel's LAPACK implementation, etc.

Whether you have the source to your kernel in particular is irrelevant in all of this and has everything to do with the open source community and traditions surrounding free software instead.

I view things this way because I've always cared more about making enduser applications/solutions instead of libraries and systems packages.
Was reddit once a bastion of intellectual conversation until one day the trolls came in and ravaged the entire site?

Yes, pretty much.

Though Slashdot and Digg have the same problem, I think the reason people here use Reddit as the canonical example of what not to become is that many of them are refugees from Reddit specifically. Also perhaps because Reddit had the greatest fall. (I don't know about Slashdot, but I suspect Digg was never that great.)
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In that case big ISPs and the fall of net neutrality will save Blu-ray. I wouldn't rule out physical media so soon. If the all you can download Internet model goes away (and let's hope it doesn't) things will progress very differently.
Managing Overachievers
Let it be what it will be

That's a good strategy for a startup, because a startup generally wants to have as many users as possible. In that case you want to let the site evolve into whatever interests the most users. But this is not a startup; at this site the goal is quality, not growth.
Interesting. My question was more in general. I read things about how you need to differentiate yourself but I see no obvious differentiation in many new software companies.
But, it is interesting that you mention you haven't found any really good bug tracking packages. I know there are a ton of players in the game, are they just incrementally better than the last?
reddit is one of the few YC successes. Its expected for them to be obsessed with reddit ;)
Summary: there appear to be more (how many more? who knows?) startups; they appear to be less (how much less? who knows?) innovative; ergo returns will decrease 30-40%.

This entire article has little more content than its title, which is itself completely made up.
Breaking Enigma : A practical machine by the father of abstract ideas