skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, but it's not really an equal comparison. You can start a startup with a bachelor's degree (or less...) and a couple years of work experience. You need about 6 years of grad school, 2-3 years of postdoccing, and 6 years as a tenure-track professor to become a tenured professor. Assuming you aren't weeded out at any one of those stages. Your chances of getting tenure at the end of this are quite a bit lower than the chance that your startup will succeed, given equal intelligence and effort.

A better comparison would be startup founder <=> grad student, cashed-out entrepreneur <=> tenured professor. Startup founders tend to have more freedom than grad students, and multimillionaires tend to have more freedom than tenured professors.
"... I did too. Stupid autoreply, "Thank you for writing to us. Your message has been received and will be forwarded to the reporter you contacted. ..."

Wait for the reply. The NYT is pretty good in this respect. I've managed to nail them down to admit an advert for google jobs was dressed up as an article ~ http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/1685662827/ from this hackernews article ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70827
Your article inspired this post on my blog.

http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/eai/madgreek/archives/programmers...
Absolute horseshit. Really. Exactly what "best work in software" is being done by established companies? Practically every innovation in the software technology that really matters has come out of the startup/non-corporate-open-source or academic worlds.

It's fascinating that people are so jealous and insecure, apparently about the success and the moxie of startup folks, that they misread the referenced article. It's like an ink blot. Absolutely amazing..
12 Sites for Virtual Easter Eggs
The guy is 52, no wonder they rejected him. Not saying they discriminate, but would they rather hire a guy with kids and family or single 20-something geek...? I think the inclination for the latter has always been there for Google (and others?) and it's not really a secret.
I think this sounds like a great idea, especially given Jason's extensive experience working with young entrepreneurs and start-ups.

However, I am concerned with the "open door policy" and the "free to cheap" cost. With no real barrier to entry, the amount of participating people may become overwhelming, thus making it difficult and/or impossible to achieve the "intimacy" aspect.

In addition, both of these aspects would increase the possibility that the participants would not necessarily be the type of highly motivated, independent people (who would have found their way into the startup camp regardless of any barrier to entry, no matter how challenging) who are predisposed to succeed in a startup environment.

mS
I talked about this with my boss last night over drinks, and we both got a good laugh out of it. It's hard to believe that any person (particularly a programmer) would set a reply-to address to a real domain other than their own. I understand not wanting bounced emails, but c'mon guys. They have to realize that somebody DOES actually own that domain and that they WILL receive their bounced email. Shame on the companies like Bank of America and other companies who deal with sensitive and/or confidential information.

mS
One of best xkcd comics in recent memory. Come Monday, I'll be printing it out and taping it up on my monitor.

mS
Oh my god. Lions.

I'd have compared them to caged gophers.

Since we're talking about animals so much, it's Interesting how some really prefer weasel words. Obviously there are some tender sensibilities here.
Being an economics major in college, I have to say it's not BS, but it's tactical, not strategic in it's thinking. Politics and greed will keep the worst case scenario's from happening. A crash of the level he's talking about wouldn't take down just the US, it would effectively trash the entire world economy; possible, but highly unlikely.
"... It does seem like GXC currently has more traction than KN ... Don't believe everything you read in the NYT ..."

But they are trying by loading up on "press ammo". Compare

- http://gocrosscampus.com/press

and

- http://kirklandnorth.com/index.php?page=press
PG doesn't say starting anything new will be easy or that everybody should do it under all circumstances. He tries to focus on the truth. Even people who are fully happy working in corporate should be aware of what the truth is.

If a fat lady had an honest blog about healthy food and exercise, then that is great advice to be aware of. Some may think the information is tainted because of the source, but if you can logically deduce it is accurate, then the source doesn't matter. In fact, some may think a fat person should talk about cupcakes. However, the truth is that doing, and talking about, such things an athlete might, is exactly what the fat person should be doing. And no, that's not because they're already fat and need to lose weight--it's because that's the truth and everybody should be thinking about it, regardless of what shape they're in.

Same thing here. Paul is not 22 years old, but he focuses on writing what he believes is truth logically derived from his experiences and those of others around him. Therefore it doesn't matter if a reader is happy working corporate, a janitor, young, old, or lives outside the US. If it's truth, smart people will want to be aware of it, even if they never plan on starting a startup, exercising, or eating healthy.

I could write a blog with the same exact content, and it wouldn't get such publicity. But it wouldn't make what I say less true.
There is no One Right Way. Grow up. Paul Graham is helping people by expounding on his way. Why don't you expound upon yours?
What? Why is it impossible for the risk to be negligable?
I remember hearing Tom Merritt complaining about this on BOL a couple days ago... Apple's been using its updater to sneak in installs for a while; by default, updating a standalone install of Quicktime will automatically install iTunes on your system. While I'm sure that they're not the first to engage in this practice, it is definitely shady, especially for a piece of software like a browser. In the Quicktime / iTunes scenario, you can at least treat it as a program that simply does more than you need it to do, in the same way that nobody ever really used Realplayer as their default media player. But there is absolutely no functionality to be gained here; Safari is not going to allow them to do anything that they previously weren't able to do.
My employer, a large pharmaceutical company, even uses the word "ONE" in it's intranet portal; oneabc.abc.com
It's not strictly limited to proper nouns -- try "jury nullification" or "obfuscated code" for example. However, if the matching title is a proper noun, it requires exact case match. This is a side-effect of relying heavily on case for matching in order to prevent accidental or overzealous matches. This is in fact a fairly thorny problem, at least without some sort of semantic parser.
That depends entirely on whether the failure was worth the risk and amount that was actually learned. I can see this often not being the case.
If you believe that all money is just loans, then that 4% interest has to either to be defaulted on, or another loan has to be created to cover the original interest on a global scale. If you take out another loan to cover interest, then money will balloon to infinity. It's internal logic is consistent.
"Oh... you haven't founded a company? You suck." is exactly the thesis of the essay, not "the opposite".

The implicit suggestion that because they haven't started a startup they suck is certainly what people are reacting to, in large or small part.

Sure, it's just a narcissism piece + YC ad, but come on.
Tables Turn for Dilbert’s Creator
Honestly, I'm not sure why everybody is up in arms about either one of these essays (full-length version and/or Cliffs Notes). Both of them seem right on target to me.

Reminds me of an essay by Stephanie Tolan titled "Is It a Cheetah?", which offers cheetahs as an analogy for gifted children who are confined to (and as a result, crippled by) public school systems.

Excerpt:
"The cheetah needs to run! Despite design and need however, certain conditions are necessary if it is to attain its famous 70 mph top speed. ... It must have plenty of room to run. Besides that, it is best motivated to run all out when it is hungry and there are antelope to chase. If a cheetah is confined to a 10 X 12 foot cage, though it may pace or fling itself against the bars in restless frustration, it won't run 70 mph."

Full article:
http://www.stephanietolan.com/is_it_a_cheetah.htm
I reached the amount indicated above in 43 20-day cycles, not 43 months. This ups the returns considerably.

I wish inspectd.com had a logging feature. I'd like to see trades output as a cdf or similar. I'd love to more closely analyze the trades I made.
> [...] the more general idea, quite consistently expressed, that the startup life is better than the corporate life. By itself, this is neither true nor false [...]

Can't one way of living be better than another?

If not, how can I tell whether my life is better now than it was a year ago?

And if I can't discern even that, then why should I try to improve my life?

Or, indeed, how could I?
I love Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I had a professor in college who taught 'Introduction to Creativity' and was extremely passionate about teaching the ways of Csikszentmihalyi. We the students were inspired and intrigued by her passion about his ideas nearly as much as his ideas themselves. My friend and classmate started a blog, titled "optimal experience" (as an ode to Csikszentmihalyi) at: http://blog.think27.com
PG lives in a different world.

Considr Austin TX, the 3rd largest computer tech startup hub in US (read: the world). Programmers are NOBODY here, they're disposable code monkeys, and literally all startups I personally was involved in were started by polished and sleasy "MBA types" who regularly push engineers aside and have pictures of M3s and Porsches on their personal blogs. Needless to say, all local startups are a joke, (I won't point fingers).
Local investors are (for real) interested in seeing your 10-year financial projections, P&L and all that other useless crap. When I told that to my SV-based mentor he laughed his pants off.

If Austin is like that, I can only imagine how pathetic the rest of the world is, and how hard it is for them to get Paul's points.

If Paul is not exaggerating, SV is truly unique and everybody with a CS degree should be moving down there. And working for Yahoo/Google/Facebook in SV is truly a huge waste of your life.
So very true. I try to keep my opinions about Apple to myself, for all of the same reasons.

mS
Imagine if Stephanie had started the essay like this:

"A few days ago I was sitting in a cafe in Palo Alto and a group of public school kids came in on some kind of field trip.

They looked familiar. I spend nearly all my time working with gifted kids, but something seemed wrong about these kids. There was something missing.

And yet the public school they went to is considered a good one, and from what I overheard of their conversation, they seemed smart enough.

...
I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly cheetahs. Cheetahs in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals. And seeing those public school kids on their field trip was like seeing cheetahs in a zoo after spending several years watching them in the wild."
Startup Weekend Initial Pitches -- 20% Has Legs, 80% Not So Much
Clifford Stoll calls BS on the internet in 1995
"... The guy is 52, no wonder they rejected him. Not saying they discriminate, but would they rather hire a guy with kids and family or single 20-something geek...? ..."

Yeah I hear that Guido is getting on a bit. What about that Vincent guy or Martelli. Over the hill! Don't trust anyone over 30 or googles case "Don't trust anyone over 29.7" ~ http://efactor.blogspot.com/2005/10/i-dream-i-conquer.html
I went to a very large university (~50,000 students), which is viewed as something negative by many people. However, I cannot recall a single class where the professor did not know my name. Similarly, I cannot recall a single class where I didn't get to know the professor in some personal sense.

Particularly at such a large university, I think that some sense of personal connection with a professor is important. Why? Because I believe students learn better from a person with which they can emphasize. Furthermore, in my personal experience, having an entertaining professor directly correlates with the amount of enjoyment, knowledge, and fulfillment that I feel I receive from the class.

Many of my professors are now on Facebook, and I wholly appreciate their effort to be accessible in ways other than email and/or office hours.
Ah, hadn't realized we were talking about digg. Kudos, at least it's something to brag about at parties ;)

I haven't heard about "management" and "non-management" equity, sounds like a cheap way for sleezy MBA types to hoodwink hackers out of money. Could you explain in two sentences how liquidity works? I assumed everyone just cashes in their stock when an acquisition (or IPO) happens.
If a logo changes every day, is it still a logo?
No ramen allowed?

What about real ramen, starting with chuka soba and making your own broth (this part would take much longer than 10 minutes, but bear with me), adding in your own choice of meats, vegetables, egg, bamboo shoots, negi, etc...

Edit: I realize I made it sound like you put the chuka soba into the broth at the beginning, which would make for soggy noodles! You generally cook the noodles separately, later, and put them in, still firm and chewy, toward the end...

Remember, ramen is a real food (and really, really good), that's served in real restaurants (there are several good ramen restaurants in the Bay Area).

"Instant noodles" is the caricature that most Americans are exposed to (I, too, was a victim of this ignorance for many years!), but for the sake of the deliciousness that is Ramen, please stop calling instant noodles "ramen", even if it says so on the package.

It would be like an entire country being exposed to the concept of "steak" through frozen dinners, and developing a prejudice against "steak" as some crappy packaged frozen food.
Anyone ever make an email client?
Where should i start. I interested in making a new application client. Thoughts?
In which Erlang, Haskell, and Oz beat the crap out of C/C++ in speed on a benchmark
RedeyeVC: Feed Frenzy - we need SNMP for feeds
This is a really interesting idea, but I feel that much like with other rankings by user recommendation, it inevitably leaves the door open to people who will learn the system and then work the system.

Also, I'm just not so sure about the idea of a middle-man in this type of situation. Perhaps I'm idealistic, but I have always believed that if opportunity doesn't knock, you should build a door.
I am fooling around with the first option you mention, but I never see any apps that do this(?), so it doesn't quite seem right.

The second idea is feeling like making a car without breaks for simplicity in this case...
Just wondering, did he receive very high marks in school?
Almost certainly so, considering his tendency towards unthinking obedience... ;)
@DocSavage, I'm not sure I understand your response. If you spend your time working with gifted kids (or talented young entrepreneurs), I think you invariably develop some expertise on how to identify them, in "the wild," in "captivity," or wherever.

Just because their 'public school' (or company or university or whatever) is considered good, doesn't necessarily mean they are good. Conversely, not being gifted, talented, and/or a young entrepreneur doesn't make them bad. But if you spend your time working with people falling in the former category, perhaps you would feel as if the latter category was missing something. That's not criticism, it's just an observation.

And if they are missing something because of their external environment (company, private school, public school, university, or what have you), then, well, as with all analogies, the comparison eventually breaks down. We are humans and not wild animals in captivity. I realize that oftentimes, kids don't have a choice about what schools they go to. But, regardless, that's not really the part I thought was relevant. My point was more that there is a good chance that the people who are unhappy in a large, corporate bureaucracy may be the same people who were unhappy in a public school. Generally speaking, individuals have some capacity or power to change our external environment. And if you're motivated to change your environment, chances are, you will. Books, games, etc., are all great escapes for people/kids who are in a less than desirable (read: less than challenging) situation. Just as start-ups are a great escape for people who are bored to tears in large, corporate bureaucracy.

Shrug. I understand that there are obviously different opinions on this essay, but personally, I just don't feel that what Paul Graham wrote was an attack.
This is such a bogus comparison. Few kids get to decide where to go to school; practically all 25 yo hackers get to decide whether to try starting a startup or keep working for their current employer.
That depends, is my wife nagging at me at the time?
+1 for reminding me of a movie called Tampopo
The Mozilla/WebKit Arms Race
As nuanced as human beings can be, as varied in skill and manner as they are over time, PG fairly quickly saw the "startling" differences and attributed it to the employee environment instead of their being hung-over, for example.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=142465
Oh, no!

I wanted to uninstall "foo bar", not "foo" and "bar"! ;)
if you do Java try javamail api
I remember that when I was taught the phatic function of language, it was a minor epiphany. Prior to that, I thought of small talk (nice weather today, how was your weekend, how about those Broncos) as meaningless bullshit, which was really a problem for me. That concept made me understand that it isn't meaningless, it just has a different kind of meaning than referential language does (which really would be about the weather). Phatic language is about maintaining the connection. It communicates, "I think you're worth communicating with, you're an acceptable interlocutor" and so on. It's used most often with people one doesn't know well because it signals reduced risk. Without it, people feel tense and suspicious. No doubt there are deep-seated reasons for this.

But that doesn't at all mean that it should play the same role in writing.
"Oh... you haven't founded a company? You suck." is exactly the thesis of the essay, not "the opposite".

Can you point out where I say this?
The negative spin is that MegaCorp hackers are cowardly lions.

There are all kinds of reasons people might work at a big company besides cowardice. They might need the health insurance, or to pay off their student loans. They might want to focus on other things besides work.

Sigh. I wish people would stick to arguing about what I actually said in the essay, instead of what I "implied." If I wanted to imply something, I'd say it.
Hm, but when I compress wikipedia, it isn't lossless...
"... Where should i start. I interested in making a new application client. Thoughts? ..."

To learn how email was invented

- http://www.livinginternet.com/e/ei.htm

To get an idea of how the specifications started

- http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc822.html

and how they are now interpreted

- http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2822.html

and to program a simple client in python read the source code from
Programming Python by Mark Lutz ~ http://www.rmi.net/~lutz/about-pp3e.html I mention Python & Lutz specifically because they are covered in detail as a CLI then GUI app in "Programming Python Ed3", pp 766 - 911 ~ http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/python3/ You can download the source examples here ~ http://examples.oreilly.com/python3/
Have you looked at Thunderbird? http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/

Or Alpine (terminal-based gui but guts are there): http://www.washington.edu/alpine/
"I did learn something, though, in the course of the phone interview: that cosmic rays can cause computer memory chips to flip a bit. Did you know that? I didn't know that. I wonder if in my career I've ever spent time investigating a bug that was cosmic by a cosmic ray?"

http://xkcd.com/378/
Me too. I thought the (un)caged lion metaphor was poignant.

I was so stressed last year that my stomach lining gave out, lost my entire sense of self & found I'd lost all desire to do anything (doesn't help when you actually do live out of your middle-of-nowhere-in-Beijing office -- what a great place to bring home a date!).

Now I'm moving around South East Asia and spend <$30/day to live as I do a few hours of contract work per week (for the company I left) and am teaching myself programming (Earlier I'd sort of hacked my way through web dev w/ html, css, php, and various open-source db tools -- design & sales/marketing/networking were my strong points, not code. Now I'm going through Learning Python, Programming with Python, & Software Engineering for Internet Applications).

Basically I look for quiet, beautiful places with creative, interesting people. When I find such a place or such people, I stay there and work until such qualities evaporate. I find it's not a bad way to spend my time. It won't last forever (I'm hoping some day I find a place I actually want to live), but this sure beats having to get some shit job or take shit contracts to support an expensive, boring (to me) typical lifestyle back in N.America. I may go back when I feel ready or the right sort of opportunity arises (mainly meaning working with the right people), but I'm in no rush. I wouldn't mind living on an island close to Hong Kong -- secluded paradise a 24h/30min ferry to one of the best cities I've ever seen.

If you plan ahead, you can do Vancouver => Hong Kong for $380 with oasis air, and Shenzhen => Bangkok for $80 with Air Asia. Then get by on $1000/mo living expenses as you move around and find a spot that suits you. Not much risk...
Something in this article reminded me of episodes from "Kitchen Nightmare" where the know-all owner, meddles in the kitchen overriding the chef. Requiring Gordon Ramsay to step in and fix the mess. Restaurants are some of the hardest businesses to run. Capital intensive where the basic ingredients have short half lives and customers who willingly vote with their dollars ~ http://www.channel4.com/food/on-tv/ramsays-kitchen-nightmare...

Most of the time the problems stem from restaurant owners and sometimes staff in-experience, incompetence and the failure of owners to adapt. The number one message Gordon gives these owners is the (surprise, surprise) "Customers, Customers and Customers". Give them what they want. Make sure it's simple. Charge to cover your costs and keep a tidy ship. Make sure you are running a business to serve food. Not your ego.

Not too dissimilar to running a Startup.
Priority Based Non-Scheduling, how do you schedule your development projects?
We use Crucible:

http://www.atlassian.com/software/crucible/

It's all very informal and the reviewer can do the review in their own time, it works very well.
Can you point out where you don't? That is the entire gist of the piece the way most people read it, which I haven't seen you disagree with - people doing startups are lesser than people not doing startups. Or in the clarification, people not doing startups are voluntarily lesser.

The analogy to caged animals was the most egregious, as the reactions show, but that was probably deliberately chosen for impact.

"But something seemed wrong about these. There was something missing."

"Founders arriving at Y Combinator often have the downtrodden air of refugees. Three months later they're transformed: they have so much more confidence that they seem as if they've grown several inches taller."