skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The business literature of previous generations often talked about "service to mankind" as an ingredient of success. This essay sheds some light on what they might have meant by that.
Stone is a cool idea. I like the no database idea. I remember being at RailsConf 2007 and hearing Avi Bryant talk about SmallTalk and his database less SmallTalk web framework called seaside, http://www.seaside.st/.

Later Dave Thomas gave his keynote and asked a similar question of are relational databases the way to go? Why aren't we trying out OO DBs? It would be nice to see some benchmarks on Stone, anyone know what speed for it is like?
I think there is a ill informed mentality that somehow hackers are "smarter" than the coders working at Microsoft. To be honest most of the people I have met at the startup community aren't really all that special in terms of "intelligence" but they do have that drive which is what makes them special. I just think people in this community need to stop ego boosting themselves... yes some of you are probably pretty smart... but most of you aren't impressively smart or talented -- just very driven... (which is a great trait by the way)

as far as the actual commentary goes I think Microsoft is doing it because honestly 30-40 million is chump change for them and yeah they could develop it but why bother when you already have it tall done and the structure already setup?
listpic?

http://mashable.com/2007/06/08/listpic-craigslist/
http://www.crazedlist.org -- Lets you search states, regions, etc. on Craiglist. You have to disable referrers though, which takes about 2 seconds. I didn't make the site nor do I know the guy behind it, but I found it pretty useful when searching for a car.
First of, I don't have an MBA but I contemplated it at one point. The conclusion I came to is that it's only worth it if it is a top 10 program.

In the case of a hacker I would probably go for a Stanford MBA due to to the connections you can make there as well as the tech friendly area. A lot of the North Eastern business schools are very finance heavy.

It may also be worthwhile to think of a sales/marketing MBA - combined with the hacker knowledge that seems like a win/win. Northwestern, I believe, is very good in that regard.
Yeah woot it was awesome thank you
all the general advice that could be given has been given

But any one of us has only heard a small portion of it. So there is value in repeating these things.
What went wrong with Skype
Starbucks. Certainly one of the most amazing recent examples of pure marketing genius. They've had a little backlash, but they've weathered it very well.
Care to define your terms?
Educational Versus Inspirational Conferences
The contrast between this and DHH's talk is worth mentioning.
I kind of like the concept of having the product and the network do the marketing. Craigslist did not spend any money marketing but yet they were able to grow entirely based on their product/service. Any competitor could have stepped in and actually had a marketing campaign to steal the show but nothing happened. Similar to facebook I suppose.
I think even YouTube/FaceBook/Flickr started along those lines. Hell, even Jimmy Wales was running a porn website ring before focusing on Wikipedia full time.
Facebook.

But they haven't switched to doing good.
I'd be too afraid it'd turn me into the kind of person many MBAs are. Work with assholes and you risk becoming an asshole. I learned that in the financial industry the hard way.
I guess the question is how do investors know an idea is "obviously good"? Did anyone/everyone know that the pagerank algorithm was "obviously good" before they tested it? And if it was - did they build it/think of it in one day?
I don't think that's true. Those sites grew mostly through word of mouth. I don't consider that to be devious.

What's wrong with Jimmy Wales operating a porn site? I don't see how that's related to Wikipedia.
Ha, with EC2 you can get around that now. Separate your website IP from your crawling IP, and every time CL blocks an IP, switch to a new one. Eventually they'll have to block the entire AWS range, but that's okay, you can crawl over cablemodem/DSL connections that use DHCP. What are they going to do, block Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner?

Then you can get around referer [sic] blocks for your links to CL that the user clicks on by using a redirect, I think.

You can slurp the entirety of CL daily without causing them traffic problems. I mean it's equivalent to each page getting one page view per day, which is nothing. Just keep track of URLs so you only slurp new content, and serve thumbnails off your own hosts (it's fair use).
Close. We were SFP06. I recall driving with Matt to the PO with the paperwork sometime in early May 06.
Who Are The Top Tech Bloggers?
This looks similar to aspect-oriented programming.
For example, post-sharp (aspects for c-sharp).
Nationwide, esp downtown Columbus, OH.
ImageMagick security advisory
MIT, Northwestern and Stanford all have great programs. But getting into those programs is easier said than done.
Ahh, but what if you're not the first person to do that? Be careful about overcompensation.
What has Facebook done that's particularly evil?
I got my first two apartments on Craigslist, both a few years ago. I was looking for a new one this year on Craigslist, but the rentals section is so full of lies and "call me for info" that it's worthless.

Basically, the openness of Craigslist is destroying it. I'm not sure how to solve the problem, but I would really like a forum that is non-commercial.
I'll tell you the speaker I didn't like. It was that dude with the dead cat stapled on his head, the one who got up in front of the microphone, supposedly to ask a question, but really just so he could speak truth to power about how college graduates all work for dropouts.

I have news for you: You didn't impress anyone. You're just a dude with a dead cat on your head. I didn't drive an hour down to Stanford to hear your truthiness. The only advice I want to hear from a guy like you is something that Paul Graham has written out and that DHH has then tattooed on your ass. That way, the next time you're in a room full of mirrors, you can read it verbatim.
Exactly my point - nobody buys an idea before it's actually tested and has been found to work. And once you've done that you're not selling an idea. Which is probably why there are no examples of it. To my knowledge at least.

Famously Yahoo turned down Larry and Sergey when they approached them with the idea - they didn't want it before it had proved it's worth. In other words: they wouldn't invest in an idea.
I've heard something similar before:

"Why did Greg and I do something so ludicrous as sneaking into an eight-billion-dollar corporation to do volunteer work? Apple was having financial troubles then, so we joked that we were volunteering for a nonprofit organization." -- http://www.pacifict.com/Story/
Douglas Hofstadter's Innumeracy Exercises
Until we can cash in our karma for fame, fortune, and hot babes... I doubt we need to worry about overcompensating :)
Doesn't a (non-software) patent require something resembling a semi-working prototype (at least back when Tesla was getting patents)? I say "semi-working" because there are a lot of patents for things like free-energy devices that never worked, but were built.
I have a slightly skewed perspective, but I spent four years working at a Wall St. firm, and discovered that, while many people in finance have MBAs, the best frequently do not. The placement even worked that way: an analyst out of college gets a two-year contract in banking or trading, then the bank makes a decision. The chaff gets thrown away, the mid-range is sent to an MBA program and returns at the associate level, but the best stay on for a third year as analysts and then immediately become associates.

This doesn't address the question very well, I suppose, and obviously people outside of finance get MBAs. I feel that, at the end of the day, an MBA program is what you make of it. It can be a valuable networking opportunity. It can be two years off from working full-time. If you're thinking of going into it to learn about derivatives and accounting, then I suspect you're better off learning it on your own.
I don't think that businessperson 'asshole' stereotype is always well deserved. I've worked with a lot of MBAs who are competent, caring, and good at programming.
beacon?
whats your email address?
I was surprised he said that. People can always ignore you. Marc himself emphasizes that the greatest product in the world can still lose if the market isn't good.

Some might reply, "How many great products can you name that people ignored?" I can name very few, but there's massive selection bias at work; the great products that people ignore are ipso facto ones that most people haven't heard of.
So mention it. :D
pg writes that "starting an organic farm, though it's at least straightforwardly benevolent, doesn't help people on the scale that Google does".

Although I agree with pg's main point about scale and about trustafarians, an organic farmer seems to resemble a founder of a tech company more than he or she resembles a founder of an ineffectual or parasitic charity, foundation or NGO: a friend of mine knows countercultural types who dropped out of the rat race in the 1970s to start organic farms in Mendocino[1] for reasons other than financial, and she says they all seem to have become millionaires. (If there is interest I could ask this friend exactly how many people she knows who started organic farms.)

[1]: Mendocino County is the closest place to San Francisco that in the 1970s had aesthetically pleasing terrain and cheap farm land.
+1.. Thanks to all from YC and anyone involved in planning and coordinating the event.
I agree that being benevolent and not focusing on profits in the early days is a good strategy for Internet businesses. Success on the Internet is all about scale. Growing faster than your competitors is key because your product can iterate faster and achieve a dominant position. Giving it away for free and being benevolent helps spur growth and is thus a very important strategy.

But I'm not sure that this holds outside the Internet realm. In other industries, you cannot be too benevolent and non-profit-like. I can't think of many examples that have succeeded via this route. I'm not sure I agree with your idea that Microsoft started out as benevolent. I think the profit motive was there from day one. To back this up, look at this letter written in 1976 by BillG:

"As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software...The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software...Most directly, the thing you do is theft...I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up."

(http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/gateswhine.html)

So acting like a non-profit is important in the Internet world where scale is key, but I think in other industries the non-profit strategies should be left to the non-profits.
I've heard you either startup or go to business school. Either way, both are similar. Personally i'd choose starting_up.
I know of an example from the book "How to license your million dollar idea" by Harvey Reese. He thought of an idea, drew it on paper, faxed it to a company and got a deal - all in one day. Although: He did quite a bit of business with the company previous to his fax and he does talk about needing to evaluate the originality and market need of your idea.
I did a part time MBA program that was designed specifically for working professionals. I found it to be very useful - not necessarily for the class material, but to learn first hand about the other industries that my classmates were working in. I found that this information could be very useful for identifying software opportunities that I wouldn't otherwise think of on my own. Ultimately, whether you go back to school for an MBA or an advanced technical degree, the program will be what you make of it.
All startup school talks as individual videos
This isn't a new idea at all; in fact it's as old as capitalism itself. Adam Smith was one of the first to recognize that capitalism helps align the self-interest of the entrepreneur (selfishness) with the general interest of others (charity): "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages."
Excellent stuff. A manifesto for change.
Hijacking subdomains is a real form of identity theft and should be prosecuted.
Do you have a source other than himself?

His business model is that you can put your idea on his website (for a nominal fee of $175) and he will then try to sell or license it to someone, and you split the proceeds. Obviously it is in his interest to tell you that he has had tremendous success himself. Besides, I think the $175 will make him a good amount of money from naive hopeful inventors.
I have no idea how Digi-Key is interacting with Octopart, but I have been buying parts from them for a long time and have nothing but good things to say about them. I like the company so much that I called to see if they were public so that I could buy stock; they're not.

Although Octopart and its investors may be frustrated, it does Digi-Key a disservice to characterize it as "evil", not "good" or a company that isn't concerned with its customers - it is extremely concerned with customer satisfaction and I have been very pleased with every interaction I have had with it.

Sure it would be great if Digi-Key facilitated Octopart's objective, but that doesn't justify conflating it with the all-star "evil" hall-of-famers.
Harvard University (and to a slightly lesser extent, other Ivy League schools).

Their product is nothing if not world-class, and over the last century or so, it has become nearly synonymous with success, privilege, and prestige.

It can be disputed whether or not there was a significant conscious effort to manage its image through marketing or branding, but one cannot deny the effect it has in many places of the world that you are associated with that institution.
Rubyonrails.org squatted?
Amazing story. Please post it?
If you simply have an idea, there's no way to tell it to anyone without losing control of it, unless you patent it, in which case you have more than an idea.

However, there are people who are paid for their ideas. Often they come in the form of consultants. They're paid to come up with ideas to improve products and processes. In the ideal world, if they have a track record of coming up with good ideas, they'll get hired to look at problems and come up with more.

However, if you're just a dude with one good idea, there's not much you can do with it. Anyone you tell it to can take it for free, hence, no market.
Import Gmail Contacts (through the Google Contacts API) using Ruby on Rails
Peter Drucker said much the same thing: profit is the cost of doing business, not the purpose. The true purpose of a business is to provide goods & services to its customers. The "profit motive" is essentially a check on the resources consumed by the business, to ensure that it's not spending resources inefficiently, much as PG mentions in the 2nd footnote.

Up until the 1970s, it was common for corporations to be managed "to balance the interests of all stakeholders - employees, customers, shareholders, and the community." You can blame Milton Friedman for changing that: he popularized the notion of a corporation existing purely to maximize shareholder value, enshrining it so deeply in American culture that it's become law, and corporate directors can now be sued if they consider anything other than the interests of shareholders. It is important that companies pay attention to shareholder value, but it was a huge mistake to make that the only mission of a corporation. Score one for market fundamentalism...
Indeed!

I was "interviewing" with the head developer at a media startup who thought he knew his stuff and after handing him his hat on a number of things, he tried one last "zinger" question on O(). Turns out that neither he nor the head of engineering knew the difference between O(n^2) and O(n log n) but they were so confident that they did. Unbelievable.
I can see this, but it's not one of those things I'm so certain of that I could defend that point of view in a discussion with someone else. It'd be interesting to explore the reasoning behind it more.
Nothing wrong at all. I think he used it to finance wikipedia/nupedia in the early stages though. I just tried to give examples of things that started not necessarily with the thought of making the world a better place.
I concur - that's a pretty good example.
It goes back to the specialist vs. generalist question. An MBA experience will help you become more of a generalist, you will interact with people who are different from you and solve problems differently. It will also open up career options you may not have today, hedge funds, investment banks, consulting - some of which are intellectually interesting and pay well. Even if you decide to do a startup later, you will have friends working at VCs & operating companies that you can get help from.

If on the other hand you have decided that you want to live the rest of your life as a hacker, maybe it is not such a good idea. In any case, don't consider schools beyond the top 5 (Stanford, Harvard, Wharton, Chicago and maybe MIT).
Since when is porn evil?
My initial lure to Youtube was pirated music videos and sometimes TV, mostly stuff other people owned.
What we lost (now that web programming is mainstream)
Lisp speaks active voice.
Nope, I don't know the guy or the company just the book. He does seem to have a good reputation but like I said I don't know...
so a free ebay.
Wow, nobody has mentioned Apple? Maybe it's too obvious... dropping the price of the iPhone and then "making up for it" with with $100 store credit just blew my mind.
[Paulslist] Looking for room in startup appt / house
I'm taking my startup effort to the bay area from abroad for three months, starting soon. I'm looking for a room to live and hack in, the company of other founders is of course preferred. So if you have space left and would consider subletting, email me christopher.laux [at] web.de
While I am sure that there is a lot of truth in that post, I'd say that selling "sins" is much more profitable: sex, drugs, alcohol, tobacco - lots of money involved.
Often a letter of intent will frobid the seller from negotiating with anybody else.
Would Apple be too easy?
+ 1, you beat me to it by 2 minutes:-)
yep, flowthing (coming soon, needs a new name) will piggyback on craigslist, as well as its competitors in the jobs and real estate markets.
"And note that he didn't sell an idea - he sold a script that he has to write. Which is around a years work."

I don't think it's so different. He sold the idea of a movie. The script is just part of the "implementation".
A flip side of the same question: a doctoral friend of mine recommended that if one were to really get something out of grad school heavy-lifting and still learn critical thinking business skills, go for a PhD in any management science or economics; reason being a) Get paid to learn b) some programs award an MBA anyway c) learn a lot more behind the scenes than any MBA program. But, I have seen this to be very rarely useful hackers turned, for example, marketing gurus. Any thoughts on this?
i modded you up, because you brought value to the conversation. i don't think i agree with you though, or at least you haven't presented enough information to convince me. being concerned with customer satisfaction does not preclude the company from trying to keep prices artificially high.
Exactly - he didn't sell the idea, he sold the implementation.
The thing is you don't need an MBA to be more of a generalist. You can read all the class material at a fraction of the price. Not to mention in SV you have a lot of other venues for networking.

I talked to a graduate of Stanford's program about his opinion on it. He told me the biggest value the program gives you are new contacts (He didn't really think the class content was anything special), but since he didn't want to go to Wall St/ or to Big Corporation X (where the cred helps at times) he felt that he should have just skipped it and instead just dived into a startup (using his MBA school money for the venture instead).

Good MBA programs typically cost from $30000-$50000 per year and it doesn't even include opportunity costs.
On Choosing a Grad School, a Dialogue
Using the "request for some restaurant recommendations" example; couldn't potential advertisers put a coupon some where in the "conversation" that might sway the requester to visit their restaurant instead of the other options?
Thank you Jessica and Paul for organizing this!
Some of the comments about Digi-Key were unfair. Their prices are usually comparable to Mouser. Some items are more expensive, some are cheaper. They don't significantly overcharge for anything. You can confirm this with Octopart.

Also, the most interesting thing about Octopart is the line item that says how many parts are in stock, not the pricing.
"And the very best hackers tend to be idealistic. They're not desperate for a job. They can work wherever they want."

I've heard PG repeat this but I think it's fallacious. A lot of up-and-coming hackers can't pick and choose where to work except in the sense that any person can quit one job and apply for another one. They can't unilaterally get themselves into Google, for example.

Established hackers also may have constraints, such as time and family commitments, that keep them working a stable job instead of a startup, or keep them where they are rather than uprooting to go work at e.g. Google for a lower standard of living (possibly less salary and almost certainly higher cost-of-living, if you work at the HQ) even if they'd prefer to work there.

Or your company may fold and you may have trouble finding an awesome job right away and have to settle for a tolerable one instead. Considering that so many start-up founders live hand to mouth, they are quite likely to be "desperate for a job" at various points, or at least unable to work "wherever they want".

They might also find that the startup they want to do is just not as profitable or likely to succeed as some other one, and end up working on the other one instead. Scratching your own itch does not necessarily coincide with "making something people want" on a commercial scale.
Can you guys recommend any of these? I found DHH's talk to be very good.
Google Mentoring Videos
Perhaps the programmers I've met from Microsoft are atypical, but they've been smart as hell. Whatever Microsoft's problems are (and clearly they have some), it isn't that they don't have any smart people on campus there.
Paul's thesis here seems to be a confused grasp at what others have described, more simply, as the benefits of capitalism: "A good company is honest. In a world of complete information, two parties will transact iff they both benefit. This positive-sum interaction creates wealth."

What am I missing?
squatted by ruby on rails?
I didn't want to start another company, so I didn't do it. But if someone had, they'd probably be quite rich now...

You would be correct:

http://www.news.com/Symantec-snaps-up-antispam-firm/2100-735...
Scientific Influence, Conference Presentations, Gender Bias
There's recently been a debate at Cambridge University (UK) about Silicon Valley vs. Europe as the future for start-ups. Hermann Hauser, a very successful entrepreneur from Cambridge, argued that Europe will catch up when it comes to new technology (I think he mentioned mobile phone chips). I find his point quite interesting and I am willing to believe that Europe has a chance of winning when it comes to new inventions.

On the other hand, Silicon Valley is where the money is. Much more importantly, however, seems to be the willingness to take risks and embrace failures. This is something that cannot be found in the UK and I dare say it is vital.