skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most of the ivies do not have undergraduate business programs, probably for this very reason. In that context the MBA makes more sense; acquire a broad quality liberal arts education as an undergraduate (electrical engineering, math, Spanish, philosophy, sociology, ...) and then supplement with the best parts of management, marketing, finance, supply chain management, IT, and accounting. The undergrad major is more a supply and demand story; students irrationally demand it so it gets supplied. Good luck getting a management position with your management undergrad degree and good luck going to graduate school with the skills you've acquired. But they sign up in droves so...

That said there are definitely skills acquired in a finance or accounting or IT program. I can't say for sure with marketing but I would suspect to a lesser degree them too. His beef seems to be primarily with a management major and I'm totally sympathetic to that point.
That'll be the last time they ever roll something out to everyone at once.
Business Plans 2.0: Lean and Icon-Based
This is actually an example where valgrind doesn't catch the bug. All it sees is a write to the stack, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do as far as valgrind is concerned.
What exactly does your story prove? Even YC and successful VCs guess incorrectly frequently. Was the unmistakable message that the future can't always be predicted?
If it's actually happening, you can find a more reputable source than the Daily Mail.
No, he's talking about programmers who want to sell software without spending time on marketing it to their potential customers. Unless you've got an incredible product you'll have to get off your ass at some point and actively try to sell it. That's where the procrastination part pops up and I've been guilty of this myself.
Does the SMART status indicate a problem only temporarily when that problem happens?

Even though I have heard beeps, SMART doesn't indicate any problem now.

Is it possible to get beeping without SMART indicating a problem?

Is there a SMART status log?
It will be interesting how this maps to Open Source. Github has "followers" explicitly. In open source, is the "first contributer" more important? Lots of interesting intersections..
This is actually a usefully brief summary statement to pass on to contacts less familiar with the topic of entrepreneurship and its demographics. Enough to raise a question or two in their minds.
I agree -- for software engineers, programming is a popular way to procrastinate. Refactoring doubly so :-)

Whereas, for somebody comfortable with selling and networking but uncomfortable making or improving products, the networking and selling would be a way to procrastinate.
"But what about people who already had a Google profile, who did have their contacts automatically displayed to the world?"

One of my accounts had a google profile, and nothing was displayed automatically; it still required the exact same steps as the accounts without a google profile, including the "How do you want to appear to others?" form with the checkbox to display followers/following lists.
Because articles about sites should have links to the sites being discussed: http://makelovenotporn.com/
PG wants scribd to do well, and so HN auto-adds Scribd links (I believe this is how it works).
> The other side of that coin is that the wealthy consume less of a percentage of their income and invest a greater percentage.
Yes, which is why I'm not advocating an oppressive level of taxation. There is a huge range of tax levels which qualify as progressive. Your argument sounds like advocacy for trickle-down economics, which have not been very successful historically, especially in the 2000s, where income disparity has continued to increase.
And yes, poorer people invest much less, which is why it's in the interest of society to increase the possibility of the least wealthy to be in a situation where they have at least a low level of disposable income. That has historically meant a bare minimum of income redistribution, some forms which have worked, others which have failed spectacularly. I have yet to see that a difference of, say, 10% of the wealth of a multimillionaire drastically affects their investment habits, but such a difference for a lower-class consumer has immediate, measurable effects on consumption habits.
I make the case only for those with seven figures of income and above; I believe there is an important case for those with $1-10 million/year to heave access to good investment options.

> You honestly don't see that there's very real theoretical and real world downsides to involuntary redistribution?

Yes, but the arguments that advocate against wealth redistribution are, in practice, extremely poor and have little, if any, empirical support, while the effects of public education, public transportation, and social safety nets are evident and are the cornerstone necessary to support modern first-world economies. They are responsible for the knowledge economy by lowering the bar for higher education, greater availability of workers by increasing mobility and lowering the cost of living, and having more productive hours by maintaining the general health of the populace which, even in the absence of mass universal health care like in the US, still has public interests in the form of various regulatory agencies that control pollution emissions, drug testing, and general public health policy. The nitpickings of the particular failures of such agencies are interesting but contribute little to the debate, as the fundamental point is that by and far they serve and achieve their purpose, and when compared to countries that have little legal and enforcement options on those issues their success is evident.

The question is not IF there should be redistribution, but how much. My personal stance based on empirical evidence is less than Scandinavian countries, more than the US. The ethical dilemmas of involuntary redistribution are the same as those for taxation, conscription, and other more mainstream issues regarding personal liberties and positive and negative rights and obligations. I don't consider this one to be very debatable in comparison to more relevant topics of this day and age.
Indeed, it turns out not to have been a compiler bug, according to a comment on the original article: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1705#comment-248245
you're saying php is equivalent to lisp and haskell and erlang, riiiiight, ok....
Yea, it's no different than the Green Stats thing at the bottom of the page. He's just helping people out by using their stuff. Can't blame him for that.
Some thoughts on the “geo stack”
Dude, he speaks the truth. People do what they are most comfortable with and have a large blind-spot for things they ought to be doing but keep putting off. The tone of the article doesn't seem biased or inflammatory to me.
Scribd is definitely a YC-funded startup. When I interviewed there, the founder mentioned it.
I find it particularly annoying that society in general, not just marketers, tends to pressure people into having stuff. Nobody respects the "miser" who is earning decent money and not spending it by buying things. I get a lot of flak from people who ask me that since I can afford something, why am I not adding it to my lifestyle? They wonder if I take pleasure in watching the numbers change in my bank balance.

My answer to them is usually that it's a slippery slope from buying things I can afford to buying things I don't actually need (slickdeals.net is especially good at exploiting this behavior). This tends not to sit well with them -- maybe it reminds them of a fact they are uncomfortable with and are trying to suppress?
Yeah, Scribd is YC funded. I always figured HN automatically scribd-ed PDFs, but I guess admins might do it manually (though I'd guess there'd have to be something special anyway, since normally the whole title links to the story link).

I think the rationale is that some people don't like PDFs. They don't want to download something when they're just going to skim it now and probably never look at it again. I don't really get it, but I guess it would make sense for very long PDFs so that you don't have to wait to download the whole thing when you might take one look at it and decide you don't care.
First, being consistently ranked beside MIT’s, UPenn’s, and Stanford’s is not the same thing as being at MIT, UPenn, or Stanford. Second, this kind of thing is much more valuable once you're older and have some perspective (hence the MBA). Business degrees are generally about operational aspects of running a business, not the startup aspects, so if you expect them to teach you how to build a run-away success you're in for a disappointment. That doesn't mean a business degree isn't valuable (in and of itself it doesn't mean it's valuable either, but at least you should know what you're getting into).
Oh, I mean HN in general, not this particular submission. I'm even subscribed to Siver's feed. =)
Web Development Massachusetts
Initially (or at least a couple of years ago) if you submitted a PDF, the link would only be available through Scribd. It was a topic of much discussion. See here for example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=195431
I understand the point, but I think corollary 2 is a bit too strongly worded. Sometimes tools don't help you catch your mistakes but are fantastically useful for other things. The fact that the assembler does exactly what you tell it to is a prime example.

I think it could probably be re-worded as "use the safest tool you can to get the job done."
In support of my favorite rock star
consider that the author's program was an undergraduate program and try to remember how experienced or useful you were at 18-21.

This is important. I got an undergrad business degree and I got a nice background in accounting, finance, marketing, and to a lesser extent IT.

When I think back on it, either it doesn't seem useful or I've forgotten the useful bits (had some great classes on branding that taught me a lot more than what you'd learn from reading blogs or articles on it; but I couldn't write an insightful paper on it now).

But then, I've dealt with people with no background in these things and watched them make some pretty stupid mistakes that could've been prevented with basic knowledge of these subjects. (I once got a sick feeling--justified--when asking a partner about our finances after he insisted on handling them, and getting an email where he referred to "the books" in scare quotes).

On the MBA side -- the MBA program at my alma mater has placed several of my friends in jobs that were a big jump in salary and growth potential from where they were coming in -- and none of them were bankers.

I heard someone say once that an MBA is a great preparation for an entry-level CEO job, but no such job exists. That's why real world experience matters; not only do you gain perspective that will benefit your MBA education and post-MBA career, but it also helps you "know thyself" so that you don't bother with an MBA if it's not the right move for you.

Last thought: business education doesn't really prepare you for entrepreneurship, but entrepreneurship can help you benefit from a business education. Best example would be an entrepreneur who has had some failures and moderate successes, but now has the experience and skills to command a 100K+ salary and is ready to further prepare (or for the cynical, get credentialized) for a job at that level.
What's really funny is that everyone thinks this is how you disable buzz... and of course, Google continues to screw up this roll-out.
Ask HN: What websites do you visit daily?
What websites do you visit daily?
Most of your technical arguments against GWO are obviated by using their multivariate version.
Having been a blamer of tools, I would rather say "A good workman who blames his tools fixes the tools or gets better tools"

The statement This is, simply put, appalling advice. regarding the advice to try lowering the optimization level to see if the heisenberg goes away. The headline here uses the word "blame" but the referenced article has a headline of When you see a heisenbug in C, suspect your compiler’s optimizer.

Having written a couple of compilers and used many, I agree with the advice to "suspect" the optimization level. Try the lower level, but keep in mind that it could either be a lucky rearrangement of your particular code or a bug in the optimizer.

The -O3 level is widely held to be risky. To me, this means that there is risk of bad code generated, not risk of the resulting program being too fast.

I think the realistic estimate of the probability of errors in gcc is either 1.0 or approaches 1.0, and with -O3 it is not lower.

Yes, lots of people compile lots of programs with gcc and g++, but every shop I have seen has a set of coding standards that suggest or demand avoidance of certain features.

There is a test of a program or specification that gives you a choice between 1) Obviously no deficiencies or 2) No obvious deficiencies. Doesn't seem to me that gcc/g++ (or any other competing compiler) fits either of these criteria.
Whereas the author's experience was that "[they were being] designed to be investment bankers and management consultants", this Booth professor had designed a lesson around the unpredictability and inadequacy of the standard analytical techniques. That is the difference.
Nice work. How about having all skills that registrants list accessible in the 'Browse by Skill' box? I would expect the 'View All' link to show me all skills people had tagged themselves with, e.g. 'C++', 'Python', etc.
Originally published in 1993. While I think the value of good design is still discounted, it's being discounted to a much smaller degree (1) post-Apple and given (2) how much more critical good UI/design is to the web/software.
What makes you think hyperbole in news started recently?
Can anyone explain what is meant exactly by "failure of the Euro"? It just refers to a falling of the exchange rates of EUR vs anything else? Or rather to a scenario in which there is a changeover back to national currencies (slightly unthinkable, apparently)? Or what else?
I have always thought business school would be a lot better off if people were forced to read people like Seth Godin or even Chris Anderson.

My problem with business people is that they learn buzz words and jargon, and often treat the "makers" as tools. I would have a lot more respect for b-school if business majors were forced to pick a "concentration"- engineering, CS, etc. They wouldn't be expected to be great at their concentration; they just would need to know enough about what the people they're managing do.

I love this line: "For one, it’s harder to teach engineering to a marketer than it is to teach marketing to an engineer."

It's my belief that most engineers or programmers could be great marketers or business people, if they didn't have to spend all their time creating things. Business people have time on their side- they don't really have to make anything, so they can spend more time getting ahead.
The quote "I wasn't just having bad sex. I was having bad porn sex." from Mary Elizabeth Williams pissed me off.

Sex isn't something that is happening to you, it is something you participate in. So it is your damn fault if it is bad sex. Speak up about what you like, porn related or not.
Thanks for the reply, it's interesting to think about recursive creation. I do agree that atheism is a belief system just as much as classical religion is, they just beleive very different things.
I don't think anyone is going to be cured of buzzworditis by being forced to read Godin and Anderson.

Can I interest you in my biz, which is a freemium play on a purple cow concept? We just need enough money to get through The Dip.
The stuff you learn in business is more supplemental material for the stuff you learn in the more hard sciences like engineering. You may have built the best product, but without marketing, accounting, and operations, the product still might not succeed in the market.

With that said, I think business school courses should be taken on the side to the primary engineering courses as that provides the most well rounded education.
While I was reading this three separate things sprang in my mind and I think there is some degree of connection between them. Over the last decade busness degrees have become more and more popular, leaving engineering and science for nerds. Also I have seen more high school kids with an Idea that collage is waste of time and money, they better of trying to make it on their own. It seems that all these business schools which crunch out PHBs have given bad reputation to a collage degree.
> for somebody comfortable with selling and networking but uncomfortable making or improving products, the networking and selling would be a way to procrastinate.

No, no, you did the hard bit, coming up with an idea, and you have the connections and the sales know-how to make the business succeed. Now all you need is a cofounder who will come in and implement it in exchange for some sweat equity, say 1% of a business that will be worth at least one hundred million dollars.
I understand what you are saying, but considering a breakup due to antitrust action an acceptable business risk being agressive. IBM, in its own antitrust tribulations, did not feel that the risk of breakup was an acceptable business risk, and many observers felt that enabled them to stay as one.
After reading this, I gave the site a try. It sucked. For half an hour or so, one person after another just clicked next. In that space, there was one person who asked "where u from?" and 2 doodlers. There were at least a dozen people filming themselves masturbating. Using the site was simultaneously revolting and mind-numbing.

It would be difficult to get a worse user experience from a website.
It's certainly there to promote Scribd. I don't believe that HN has ever claimed to be an independent, impartial site. It's on a subdomain of ycombinator.com, it is heavily frequented by people who are either involved in YC, or people who want to be. Any story that is linked to a YC company is going to get a disproportionate amount of attention here, and I doubt that YC will hesitate to integrate links/widgets from YC companies as they've done with Scribd, CO2stats, and others.

I'm pretty sure that one of the purposes of the site is to attract people to YC. If you want to know why people like myself (who are just here for the hacker news/discussion) stick around, it's because it has some of the most interesting and civil discussion of any online community, and if you know about the YC bias then it's not a big deal to filter it out in your mind when browsing/reading the site.
Sarah Silverman is brilliant
I so wish I could have seen this talk @ TED.
Sure, Godin has his own buzz words. But his messages are simple. Things like "Go above and beyond" ( http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/02/the-least-i-... or http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/02/whats-expect... )

It's obvious stuff, no doubt- but it's stuff we all seem to forget.
I've found clicking a PDF link on anything but Mac OS to be rather unpleasant. Many people (me included) consider the scribd link a more pleasant experience.
I feel the HN title is a touch misleading - when I hear B-school, I think MBA, maybe that's just me. The fact that this is undergrad is significant. In my opinion, thought leaders, both from the external 'business' world as well as top professors, often feel it is a waste of their time teaching undergrads, many of whom are there because it is what one is supposed to do (ie. go out and get an education) rather than because they really want to, and have paid out of their own pocket, to be there, which is most often the case with MBA's.

I know that in my Computer Science undergrad, while I was interested in learning, I was more interested in living the student life. I just recently finished an MBA and while it fell short on some fronts, the talent of the professors, many of whom were doing real work and affecting change in the real world, did not disappoint, especially in the fully elective 2nd year. Further, students have much more to contribute after they have done, and have been vetted on what they have done, in the years after finishing their undergrad, rather than on what clubs they joined in their first of year of general undergrad. Undergrad Business degree != MBA.
What I want to know is why ChatRoulette hasn't converted completely into a gay hookup site yet.
I think that a lot of the complaints brought up in the article aren't really complains about porn so much as they are complaints about how impressionable we are as individuals. We let so many of our tastes, preferences and behaviors be dictated by mass media, so why are we then surprised to find that we let our sexual behaviors be dictated by mass media as well?

On a related note, I think that a lot of the complaints can be attributed to a kind of pluralistic ignorance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance), where individuals are under mistaken impressions about the preferences and comfort level of their partners. In a sense, this is the flip side of impressionability, where we expect that other people are similarly impressionable.
Taxes, Warren Buffett, and Paying My Fair Share
Maybe, maybe not. That saying is meaningless now, it comes from a time when craftsmen would make their own tools so if they blamed the failure of their work on their tools it was still their own fault.

Today it is much rarer for a person (computer programmer or not) to make his own tools. It is therefore perfectly acceptable to blame ones tools - but if you want others to respect you, you should check your own work first.
Tap is also an incredibly nifty function, but they are slightly different, I hadn't thought of using tap in the same way as returning before you mentioned it.

Using returning with a local variable makes for superbly readable code imho:

def foo
returning values = [] do
values << 'bar'
values << 'baz' if @iffy
end
end

def foo
[].tap do |values|
values << 'bar'
values << 'baz' if @iffy
end
end
I'm always aware of this when I look at model rooms for designer furniture. They are always alarmingly spartan. With that image, it's easy to notice that without the pressure of real stuff, your mind prefers it not be there.

That always struck me about IKEA. It tries to have both by trying to appeal to high design while filling their model rooms with clutter. It's very telling and a wonderful business model since they'll sell you the stuff: moose spaghetti, tiny candles, cacti.
Site doesn't load for me.

Ironically Google Cache helps: http://209.85.129.132/search?q=cache:http://www.scripting.co... ;)

edit: I should probably mention that google will eventually save that you viewed that website in its cache. Just to prevent angry blog post fury.
I agree. I also disliked this:

One friend said she's dreading her boyfriend's upcoming birthday because he views it as his "anything he wants" night. While she doesn't mind dressing up, she's dreading the "porn requests" (she didn't specify what those are, so we can only imagine).

That's not porn that is the problem. What is stopping this lady from simply telling her boyfriend what she does and does not like? And what kind of dysfunctional relationship is this if the boyfriend doesn't get to do "anything he wants" as a matter of course? Why is it a special birthday present for him to receive the satisfaction he obviously needs? Sounds like they're not really such a great match after all and porn is just a scapegoat.