skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is quite inaccurate. There exist jobs for which the above are true, but not most.

If you're concerned about learning... Sure, but it'll be completely different stuff.

If you're concerned about having a mentor... Or not. Real leaders in the corporate world are rare.

If you're concerned about money... Not really. If you've worked and then go back and got an MBA you come back at mid-management.

I'm hardly a cheerleader for MBAs, but the stuff that you've written here is a little too typical, "hacker with a chip on his shoulder". I've seen a lot of people learn good stuff in MBA programs and I've seen more waste their time. It's not one size fits all.
I guess if I want to be cutting edge I have to either be academia or military, huh?
The 'tour' doesn't work. There are no events or anything else on the front page to 'hook' people.
Cheap engagement rings, unique wedding rings & designer wedding bands
Inexpensive, cheap engagement rings and wide range of his & her unique wedding rings crafted from 14K gold. Checkout our designers wedding bands.
There are LOADS of companies like this. I run a few small ones myself that generate good revenue. Software-related is our www.sourceguardian.com site. Like most things we solved a problem for our own needs and then turned it into a product. We have a healthy income from this which isn't far from being 'passive income'. My suggestion would be to look at a problem that hasn't been solved, or hasn't been solved well. We pick niche markets for what we do and that works well for us. I know of many companies like this.
freshbooks.com
It's not letting me finish talks. For example, right now Peter Norvig is halting at -15:20 and PG's talk is halting at -17:46. If I reload, the halting still happens, but at a different time. I've tried it on Firefox and IE on WinXP. Both apparently have version 9,0,124,0 of Flash.

Also, some of Norvig's slides aren't showing up.
Wow, hmm from the suggestions, I will be changing the front page design as ideas come in.
TechCrunch UK - WebMission Day 2: Brunching and lunching
you could always hack news.arc:

> http://www.arclanguage.org/install
House Republicans Move To Increase H1B Visa Quota
Henry Ford and the source of fear
I feel a bit like you, web development can be incredibly boring. However, lately there is a bright light on the horizon: social networks analysis should provide for lots of opportunities to run some interesting algorithms. You could always start with the Netflix Challenge (not sure what interests you).

Also many people seem to make shitloads of money with "ad opmtimization software", tools for people to help them optimize their spending on ads. OK, that is ads again, but I think an area where you could run wild with algorithms.

What about image analysis? Google doesn't translate images yet...
That drive isn't exactly going to fit in my media centre PC.
Just an idea: try to bring programming to the masses. I see a lot of non-IT people that to solve their everyday work tasks need to write code even if they don't realize it very well. Currently the mainstream application to do it is... excel. An environment where people can write code almost without realizing it to solve specific problems can make the difference.
dropsend.com - surviving in a particularly crowded market of sending big files over the web and charging for it when there are free services available. Though, they are backed by a HUGE marketing power of Carsonified.
They don't; they have good products and tell a compelling story.
needs some more work :) as the videos seem to stop at mid points. nice though
Vanilla ( http://getvanilla.com/ ), open-source, standards-compliant, multi-lingual

bbPress ( http://bbpress.org/ ), as simple as it gets, from the creators of WordPress

PunBB ( http://punbb.org/ ), fast and lightweight
It seems like a lot of people here are missing the point of an MBA. You don't get one primarily for what you learn; you get one for who you can meet. Sure, you're going to learn some stuff you didn't know, but top MBA programs are aimed at people who were in an industry for a couple of years and have experience. The purpose, learning wise, is to fine-tune your skills. You should go after an MBA mostly for the networking opportunities, not the learning opportunities.
And Eric Sink's SourceGear. [1]

[1] http://www.sourcegear.com/
Yes, there was. Or rather, there were indications that the Wii would get very popular.

I was in the camp of "the Wii is definitely going to be successful", but the market at large obviously wasn't. From what I heard at the time, the Nintendo DS was very successful in "niche markets" (or "casual gamers", choose the label that suits you), which could be taken as an indication that the Wii, with its promised novel control scheme, would be very popular at least among non-gamers. For contrarian investing, there were a lot of things pointing towards Nintendo being undervalued in early 2005. The prevalent opinion of "graphics capabilities is the most important aspect of a computer game" and "gamers want predictability, not a novel control scheme" and "Nintendo sales have been falling since the NES" should have set off lots of red lights among people who actually play games.

Market-leading is actually an irrelevant label in this regard, the important thing is that Nintendo released a console that made them more profitable than they were. In sales, the GameCube did about as well as the XBOX..not the market leader by a factor of 6, but definitely not something that would kill the company by itself. Any console doing better than that would drive up the stock price of Nintendo ("break the negative trend canal in sales", as an annoying stock market analyst would say)
What's your point? You asked for his opinion, got it, then shot him because of it.
There are plenty of good products that people probably wouldn't pay for these days: web servers, unix-like OS's, and scripting languages; just to name a few. Once upon a time, companies made a lot of money selling Unixes, and for a period of time, there were commercial web servers.
"I think he mentioned mobile phone chips..." - that would be ARM, one of the (sadly too few) UK technology success stories:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_RISC_Machines
>>> If you're concerned about learning, you will learn more about business in one good hands on project than 2 years of formal education.

That statement pretty much discredits everything you say. Have you run through an entire MBA program? This statement is unbelievably ignorant.

As for CMU, they certainly do have an "MBA" program. Also, CMU is a 2nd tier B-School. It's still very good but not at the top of U.S. MBA programs.
Ask PG: Can we have a feature to save links in Hacker News?
It is often near impossible to find useful links back after a few days.

Reddit has a feature where you can save a link. It would be very helpful to have this same functionality in HN. I know there's heaps of services like Del.icio.us and Ma.gnol.ia, but in the vain of keeping things simple.
the quality is better at omnisio
virtualmin
A Web Shift in the Way Advertisers Seek Clicks
what if someone comes in to ruin the fun, and just keeps hitting the "reject" button on perfectly good responses?
Nice work. From the looks of it, I thought it was some new thing that Adobe or some huge company put out. When I read that you guys were from YC, I was shocked (not that YC doesn't put out good stuff) that you built such a good product with so little funding. Keep at it!
You are right. I used the term "enterprise software" only as a contrast to "consumer software". The "Fortune 5,000,000" is probably the best target market for a startup.

Why? Targeting large enterprises (what the company I work for does) is also an extremely difficult market, but for other reasons than the consumer market. Selling to large enterprises requires professionel and experienced sales people with very good industrie contacts. You also might run into the "small company problem", i.e. you don't sell because you look too small and you don't have enough customer references. Not much fun!
I prefer the former

Don't we all...The latter is a solved problem with a million variants, the former is new ground.

Would you recommend any papers/books in that area?
No, but a priori I would assume Philip Morris is a good company. Knowing what their product is, I revise that opinion.

It looks like there is a larger back story to this than was originally obvious to me from your essay and that has loomed very large in your estimation of Digikey's character. Framing it as a David and Goliath morality play is good marketing but I think a more nuanced view is reasonable - they're somewhat less good than I originally believed.
"37signals/DHH style" companies--in other words, not startups? This is interesting, because his advocacy of non-startups is an oblique way of saying "don't start startups". I wonder, did PG and others even know what the talk was gonna be about?
How about all the many online shops that sell actual products, and others that fall below the radar, that sell everything from property advertising to job listings.
Brands then and now
Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation by Shriram Krishnamurthi (Free Book)
Lockout: The Self-imposed Computer-aided Work Enforcer
Install the del.icio.us browser extension and tag 'em YCHN. Using an existing service that works well is simpler than cloning the site piece-by-piece.
This is the question you should be asking! What needs to exist? If it happens to involve powerful algorithms, go for it. If not, go for it also. Unless of course you think you'd rather do something else...
Ask YC: Best ways to become socially adept?
I know about and have done Toastmasters. Are there any other effective ways to develop my interpersonal abilities, besides reading "How to Make Friends and Influence People" etc?
Are you talking about comment links? Upvoting saves normal submissions, which is part of the philosophy.
Wow, I've never seen that in my settings.

Ok.. so it's already there, I guess that changes my question to:

"Can we have a top level link to our saved articles?"
Thanks for that! Good book, good link.
Reaching a bunch of relatively small, and perhaps not well-connected companies does, of course, present some obstacles of its own.
I want to put another plug in there for Vanilla http://getvanilla.com/. Great software!
When is it ever not a good time to sell to Microsoft, if they are interested?
I'm not sure I see the downside of showing Karma. Do you have any specific examples of groupthink in mind?
Sure, but I think there's more to it than that-- if you take the promise "ubiquitous computing" seriously, there's a lot of potential input/output devices available besides a traditional keyboard/mouse/monitor.
menloparkbum, if you are interested in solving the problems you mentioned, then please get in touch (my email is my profile page). One of the aspects of my start-up is to solve the problems you have mentioned.
Ubuntu 'reaping Linux dividend'
Sure: but part of the point of the essay is that certain languages (Lisp, Assembly) are so spare (and bare) that the simplicity of the complexity (and the complexity of the simplicity) are more readily visible.
You can't read yourself into social adeptness. I'd suggest participating in some non-nerd social gatherings. Figure out something you like and go spend some time doing it. Oddly enough, the nerds you do meet in other contexts tend to be interesting and well connected. (In Berlin for instance, there's a large overlap between the open source / founders social scenes and the electronic music scenes. I met my cofounder and many of the contacts that we're using through music rather than, say, the local LUG.)
I had a good time with salsa dancing. It's a good way to meet girls, requires some actual skill (that can be learned with some effort), is fun in any case, and... dancing can tell you a lot about someone in a surprisingly short period of time.
Northeastern sues Google over patent
"They might create better algorithms(and I profesize that Yahoo’s algorithm is at least as good as Google’s), but more data beats better algorithms, and Google has way more data than Yahoo or Microsoft have. Social search has so much potential, and yet we see half baked products from Wikia?"

This is the most vapid thing I've read in a while.
It's all well and good saying that we have everything here in the UK, but where? I want names, places and events.

Where is the UK start-up school with an illustrious list of speakers - including SV ones?

Who are the VC's with some balls to back some risky, yet exciting start-ups?

If we are to catch-up with SV, shouldn't we be doubling, or even tripling, our efforts, like having Seedcamp run twice a year in a similar vein to YC, etc., etc.

There is good reason why the UK/European start-ups have gone to the sates, and that is because they don't believe we have everything here. If we have everything here, then make it more evident.
Are you suggesting that they should crush dissent had they known? DHH wasn't saying don't start startups. His point is that people have a warped view of the world and the average startup is more like 37signals than it is like Google/facebook.
People can do that on reddit as well.
Yes, but there will be a game there where you are rewarded for helpful contributions.
Well, you implied one was more difficult than the other. Then the other one has to be easier, otherwise it doesn't make much sense.
Angel financing - Term sheets
My estimates weren't ex-recto as you said. I took a brief look at Xobni, and thought that even I could have done it in a few months. Then a few engineers from MS could do it even more easily.
A year of boxing worked for me. The experience of being in the ring, seeing his eyes while he's trying to punch your face, works wonders. You become peaceful and confident in everyday interactions.

Singing and playing guitar helps too, it makes you wanted and welcome, which you want to be.

A non-trivial fact for me was that a lot of conversations aren't about information; talking is a game, played for fun. Read "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", watch "Pulp Fiction", and try to do the same.
And Apple beat Amiga, which was another 10 years ahead in the GUI, multimedia, multitasking, separate processors for audio & video, etc. Mac and Windows caught up some time in the mid 90's. Commodore was beating themselves too, with a dearth of marketing and slow development. I only saw one TV ad. I finally switched to Linux in college, when it was clear they weren't going any farther.
Startup Camp SF 2008 (May 4-5, 2008)
Who's up for an HN dinner afterwards?
the fortune 5,000,000 company I work at subscribes to GoToMeeting.com - .. desktop sharing.. teleconferencing for product demos and meetings
No. Digi-Key and certain other parts companies are suppliers, not manufacturers; hence they are in the information business. Octopart is really an aggregator of aggregators. Should we expect Orbitz to make their content available to MyNewTravelStartup.com?
It would not surprise me if there's a whole bunch of useless services running; disabling them might help.

http://www.blackviper.com/WinVista/servicecfg.htm
Web programming lacks challenge only if you lack imagination.
A lot (majority even?) of factories/universities do have generators which they operate at most expensive hours and feed the excess back into the grid. It only makes sense to have these on hand from a risk perspective considering the volatility of electricity costs.
Find a fellow nerd and go to events together. Make it a project to encourage each other; that is, if I don't muster up the courage to meet someone and start a conversation, then you get a demerit. It's almost uncanny how we will find a way to succeed given a limited scope, easily defined problem.

Once you get into the swing of things, instinct takes over and you'll be fine. You probably have something interesting to discuss with almost everyone else out there. The trick is finding it.

I don't buy into the philosphy of learning about popular culture, sports, or current events just to have something to talk about. Stick with what turns you on; you can be yourself (who else would you be?), and the same thing probably turns someone else on, too.

(Aside: A drink or two couldn't hurt. That's what it's there for.)
The end-consumer market is very difficult since internet-users are used to get everything for free.

...except for Mac users, who support a healthy little industry made up of one- and two-person software companies.

In other words, consumers don't spend money for software, except for the ones who do.
Github.com, Lighthouse, a lot of companies that make Mac software (think TextMate).
Back for me as well.
Consider attending a political event. You'll be surrounded by only the socially adept who will all be forced to at least talk to you momentarily. Watch as they work a room. A relatively cheap donation will get you invited. Consider it a training fee. You'll learn more about power and interpersonal relationships in a night than a month of sitting by yourself at the bar.

btw - I second that this is a skill that does not come from books. It requires real effort on your part.
Maybe existing DHH style companies are a good area to look for inspiration to build free alternatives with some premiums added afterwards... Like flickr added pro accounts for $25/year. Read Wired's "Why $0 is the future" http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free

Building less of an app also means it will be easier for others to come later and build what you made and give it away. Look at how it took 2 people at Google a few days to build HuddleChat which some said was too similar to 37signals' campfire.
Here's the thing -- as has been pointed out here many times, investors are conservative. Once a meme catches on everybody rides that wave for a while hoping for the point where there's some consolidation and those startups get snatched up.

Doing really cool stuff is riskier. Scarier. There are no rules laid down yet for what sort of value you're generating.

That said, there are hard algorithms more places than you expect. When trying to scale something that looks simple on the surface, problems often become complex enough to be interesting.
Has MySQL Forgotten All It Learnt?
Even that's superfluous. Just go here and you've got your saved links: http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=Harkins (replace Harkins with your username)
What exactly is most troubling for you?
If the terms they offer are not worth it to you.
37 signals style companies cannot be startups? Are you saying that a talk on starting a company that charges money for their product is not appropriate for Startup School?
I could tell you what works for me, but unless your personality is much like mine (which is unlikely), that isn't going to help you.

The best way to find out what works is to try. Just go out there and interact with people. Observe them to see how you are doing.
"pretty much discredits everything you say"

How? Please provide some data to support this statement. Then I'll understand and perhaps, be better able to respond.

I have my MBA, 86 hands-on IT projects, several management jobs, non-IT P & L responsibility, and have hacked tens of thousands of original programs, all in a business environment.

I freely share my experience and assessment so that someone else might be able to take advantage of my mistakes. Don't like it? Fine.

But when you say something like "This statement is unbelievably ignorant" with no supporting data, you add no value and make yourself look like the fool. If you disagree, say why. If you don't...</FlameResponse>.
A) Practice, practice, practice.

B) Listening. Speaking is an important part of socializing, but it's a minor part.
_by displaying their public information_

What is public about it?
"This is quite inaccurate."

Maybe for someone, but not for me.

"it'll be completely different stuff"

Exactly. That's my whole point. Some things I learned in my MBA program, like the time value of money, were at best, easily gleaned from dozens of books at Borders. Other things, like marketing strategies and case studies, were just wrong and counterproductive. Nothing valuable I ever learned on the job was even on the business school's radar.

"Real leaders in the corporate world are rare."

True. And much rarer in academia.

"If you've worked and then go back and got an MBA you come back at mid-management."

So what? Been there, done that. As an experienced hacker, I don't remember the last time I had a mid-manager who earned more than I do. They are easily expendible. I am on the critical path.

"hacker with a chip on his shoulder"

No, just one who loves what he does and has seen the light. If you can hack, don't make the same mistake I did. Forget the MBA and get better at hacking by hacking.
The Shadow of a Legacy
The secret to making money online
ETelos Goes Offline with MediaWiki, WordPress and the Apps You Build
China vaults past USA in Internet users
Talking to Disqus's Daniel Ha
SixApart Buys Social Media Agency Apperceptive
One thing most geeks have in common is the ability to process information. Most of us don't have great social skills because we don't participate in social events but even more so we don't pay attention when we're in these situations. When you're in social group, push aside your latest paradigm and actually watch what other people are doing, its easy to pick out the people with the best interpersonal abilities. Watch them but don't mimic, instead find similarities in yourself (your interpersonal muscles) and then start working them out. Walk up to people and introduce yourself. Its hard at first but eventually it'll come naturally.
I've heard improv classes go a long way.
I've modded you down simply because I honestly don't think Windows is as mediocre as it's made out to be, and this is coming from a current Linux user, and I can't help but feel that Visual Studio or .NET is far from mediocre no matter which way you look at it, and I even think Office is a market leader largely on merit.

I also don't think the cost of Windows represents a "large margin" - paying the cost of 2 new videogames for an extremely complex piece of software that is supported for 7+ years seems pretty good value from where I'm coming from, even if the alternatives are better value.

I honestly think it's a shame that they've felt the need to flex their monopolistic muscle unnecessarily and have given themselves such a bad reputation when they could have had just as much success in a more positive way.
OpenID getting more usable, a tiny bit at a time
I'm with you on taking a buddy - nothing like the spirit of competition to get you over the line.

Tech events are great too - barcamps, meetups etc. You'd be surprised at exactly how many hackers don't just defy the monosyllabic geek stereotype, but smash it out of the park.
i think you're making too big of a deal out of hardware choice. you're talking about people who don't know if they want a gui or not, yet you think those same people will want to choose what type of computer to run it on? as if. people like that want to AVOID having to make choices like that, as often as possible.

i'm up at the other end of the spectrum: i know all the tradeoffs, i'm as technically savvy as computer buyers get ... yet i don't want to make that choice, either. i haven't had to worry about what type of hard disk controller i've got for ten years or more, and i'm glad to be rid of dealing with piddly issues like that.

the only people who care about the low-level hardware they're using are gamers, tinkerers, and cheapskates. probably a tiny percentage of the total computer-using population.

well, i guess i do care about what hardware i'm using -- to the extent that i want it to be pleasant to use. once again, apple's interests are exactly aligned with my own.