skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you want to do startups you should go to school and bootstrap something on the side. If you come up with a viable product you can then maybe consider dropping out, but you need to hedge your bets and start by going. Note that Bill Gates was a college dropout not someone who never went to college, BIG difference.

College isn't about the curriculum as much as about your fellow students. If you go to a good Computer Science department, you WILL find coders that are at least as good as you. Great people to start projects with and network with if you are looking to do a startup.
What makes it a dropbox killer rather than a dropbox clone?
If I play them side by side I can hear the difference, but listening to the lower quality version doesn't bother me.
Is that necessarily true? Back when I was into videography I had a $500 miniDV camera, and its dynamic range was horrible. Shooting outside on a gloomy overcast day, the sky would still be completely blown out and people's faces barely exposed enough to see. Yet a good film camera obviously has much better dynamic range. Therefore I would think that, depending on the camera, there would be room for improvement using HDR without seeing any noticeable "HDR effect" at all.
Homes might be disadvantaged by the presence of an alcoholic. A friend of mine came from a home like this- her father spent truly stupendous amounts on alcohol. There was never enough money afterwards.
I can relate to this - even though I probably got more rejections than offers from job interviews, I learned a lot from them. However, I wish companies would give some interview feedback to candidates they rejected. Companies don't do this for the fear of getting sued.
Another option would be to put all data in a separate file and reference it with a link tag, just like rss/atom. Then from the markup we could use a 'ref' attribute to reference it.

Zero pollution

Zero overhead

Markup/style/data separation
The Open Source Culture of the Flame Algorithm (video)
"Instant" is the new "suggest".
yes indeed I'm increasingly using couchdb, planning on picking up erlang and it would be useful to avoid the mailing list if you can pass info along...
This is why I love EVE Online! I haven't played since its beta, but the potential for real loss (and gain) is what makes it so enjoyable. In this way, it is a worthy successor to Ultima Online. I don't know why people play other MMOs - I just don't understand their appeal. They lack the passion, the intensity, the power of these games.
http://mylittlehacks.appspot.com/dataislands
1. There are a significant number of college dropouts who founded massive companies (Bill Gates springs to mind). There are people who are so driven that college is a waste of time for them. A certain amount of luck is required too but luck rewards persistence; and

This example is usually posted and, once again, usually noted that people like Gates and Zuckerburg are really bad examples of people who "didn't go to college" (especially since they actually did, they just didn't complete it). The only lesson that you can really take from them is that if you are already proficient, have achieved an upper-middle/upper class education and gotten into Harvard, and formed a successful software company that benefits heavily from luck of positioning and timing, yes it may be a good idea to drop out of school.

I don't know what maths education is in US high schools but in Australia I learnt differential and integral calculus in high school

Confuses me too. I did multivariable differential/integral calculus in high school as well, but those with only calculus in high school seem to get in a bind whenever it comes to vector calculus or worse, calculus/differential equations with linear algebra.
A Facebook application that had nearly 2 million users.

A game data aggregation platform and feed system for EA.

A lot of open source Erlang stuff (http://github.com/ngerakines)
I learnt hardly anything computer related at uni, I actually lost some knowledge. However the social side and the things I learnt about myself made it more then worth it.
Given that this actually is my area of expertise, I'd be quite interested to hear an explanation for the downvotes.
Please post it!
The Moscow subway is cheap and as of ~ 2005, utterly reliable -- far more reliable than NYC subways. In SF, muni is a bad joke, and bart breaks every other month.
I'd still like to know where the 4,000 clients came from.
It’s mostly intended for places where data is going to be slurped out of a database and dumped into a template or renderer. Adding a bit of extra gunk to the template isn’t the end of the world (especially if you have a sane template system).

If I’m writing some text by hand, I’m going to use markdown and just write:

# Hendershot’s Coffee Bar
1560 Oglethorpe Ave, Athens, GA

As for the benefits: having some widely-used machine-readable metadata linked directly to the data could let browsers do some pretty neat stuff in the future, like letting a user click to add an event to his calendar, look up directions to an address, or add a person to his contact book.
Only if you make lipops, I guess...
The people without CS degrees also seem to be universally weak on theory: discrete math, computational complexity, proof construction, relational and abstract algebra, graph theory, and (amazingly enough) calculus

I studied all that stuff in getting my BS in CS. I've not used any of it professionally, and now 20 years later I could not have an intelligent discussion on any of it much less apply it. My work has all been in business/enterprise computing, and strangely these are employers who are most likely to demand a degree as a basic qualification for employment, but are the least likely to actually require any of that knowledge.
It seems that I can type just a bit quicker than it expects. I typed 'ana' and came up with a lot of 'a' results. Erase and type slowly and I get the 'ana' results that I expected.

I reloaded and tried again and this time came up with 'an' results.
What'd really like to see is sharing specific folders with friends or colleagues who also use this app, just like Google apps allows you to share files with anyone.
How to do market research for a new product?
Hi All,

I have several ideas for new products, they are all hardware/software based. Apart from speaking with my contacts in the industry I am completely unclear on how to do basic market research to see if there would be any interest in my new product ideas. How does one actually go about doing market research for a new product? I'd be very interested in hearing what did and didn't work from the HN community.

Thanks for reading,
FB
"I try not to be a snob, I try to use 'the best tool for the job' but I don't think PHP is a very good tool."

That was my point actually. :-)

Just because you don't want to use PHP doesn't make you a snob.
I haven't finished college. Currently 23, making 80k. There shouldn't be a question, you NEED to go. Professionally it makes things just that much more difficult. You'll be climbing an uphill battle from the start. Your professional network will be smaller, and people are going to make judgments about you from the start. To deal with that you'll have to develop a personality where you project yourself smarter then you are (and hopefully you remember you're doing it).

However you're young, and probably hard headed. My recommendation, go for a year, during that year work on the idea you like. If it fails stay for another year, and work on another idea.
We support that.
If then. Look how many BigNameCorps are still using ASP classic.
Whoops! I hacked this together this weekend, there might be a few bugs. Thanks for letting me know though.
Is US prudishness ruining the internet?
Ask HN: The arc installation
I have some basic knowledge of coding, but I am completely lost. Just how lost: where exactly do you type the: mzscheme -m -f as.scm

also, how do you create the arc/admin

and how do you get the localhost:8080 to start
Why can't they just wait for the market to move forward? My G1 is almost 2 years old, meaning time for a subsidized upgrade. In a few months I'm going to have Flash on my phone for the same price I paid (about $200) for 1.6.

Google has said before that it is going to break out the user interface portions of the OS so they can be updated without a (carrier in the loop) OS upgrade. To me that says that OS level innovation is going to slow, and so will fragmentation. At that point the only thing stopping you from taking advantage of an Android feature will be horsepower.
And even if you're restless (like I most certainly was), you can still work while you're in school for a company, the university you attend, or yourself. Best of both worlds, and it keeps loans down.

But the one big thing that college offers that lee references here is the learning things you may not have thought of learning. You'll have to take some "fluff" classes, or classes that aren't related to your major, but they expand your appreciation for other topics.

More importantly, at least for me, was the idea that college was a sandbox in which to learn about myself and leadership. I went the fraternity route (of the "Greek" variety, at that), and I learned more about leadership than I would have thought possible at my age. When I first got to school, I never would have dreamed of joining a "frat", let alone running one.

Working my way to President and leading 60 men/fratboys to a higher calling than getting drunk on weekends - a Sisyphean task if there ever was one! - built up my ability to lead without authority, and focus on such nuanced topics like recruitment for business and attention to detail.

Not everyone will have the same experience, that's for sure. I can definitely say I learned a ton outside of the classroom, and the ability to have those experiences when the generally worst case scenarios is a few angry drunk guys and not salaries or a business was very unique.
I don't see why it would be difficult to go back in your late 20s. In my case I think if I had done that I would have had more maturity and self discipline.

Of course if by that time you are married and have kids and a house, etc.... yeah it would be exceedingly difficult to be a full time student for four years.

EDIT: changed "have a wife" to "are married"
Oh, sorry, I didn't see your response until today. I am actually not looking for a cofounder right now. I just misunderstood the submitters question, thinking he was looking for inspiration in what to look for in a co-founder.
It's easy to write code that works if you're switching between C, C++, PHP, and Python. However, being able to write idiomatic code is a different matter entirely.
I went to silicon valley right out of high school to work in tech, I absolutely understand where you are coming from.

For what its worth, I also started 2 internet companies while in high school and have been a passionate entrepreneur since. After much deliberation and discouraging (not a typo) advice from those around me, I went back to college after 1.5 years in industry to get my degree, knew what I wanted to study, finished quickly and paid for a majority of it on my own. In a few cases, I even finished just as my friends who had gone straight through after HS. I had some real-world experience and knew what I wanted to study. I did serious research on degree programs and studied exactly what I wanted.

If you are up for it, college is a different kind of challenge that is hard to recreate. It requires a lot of "work" but its satisfying to move toward a long-term goal and finish; very similar to the satisfaction of building/launching an app from nothing. It requires discipline no matter who you are (entrepreneur or not) to get through college or school.

Quite simply: I wouldn't go if you expect to get professional experience or learn more about CS, I would go to learn and have fun but know that it will get harder for a lot of reasons to go back later (mostly because you won't have as much fun). ;)

Just like you I thought going away for a few years would make or break me professionally. I guarantee not much will change and you won't miss out on ("waste") as much as you think you will.

All the best.
I'm not sure how much stock to put in the consensus of a group of people who overwhelmingly attended universities. It's not a vote.

Also: a lot of the topics you've cited are only superficially implicated in systems programming. Discrete math is a great and obvious example, but (perhaps counterintuitively) so is complexity; once you understand 1, log n, n, n2, and 2n, you're ready to read papers and algorithms books critically. The number of times I've been called on to construct a proof of anything, let alone of the complexity of an algorith, is zero.

Graph theory is something you'll miss. Go audit a class and read Skiena; better yet, build a router or a program dag analyzer.

Finally, there's a hell of freight loaded onto that "meh"! You just "meh'd" a decade's worth of debt and four years outside of the industry. A "meh" answer here is pretty damning! Fortunately, I don't think it's at all "meh". There are plenty of good reasons to go.
I'll second pretty much all of this.

It's important to consider that not getting the degree removes backup plans. Backup plans are important to have if you're not independently wealthy, especially in the current economic climate.

It's unlikely that OP is so badass (s)he will be able to avoid years of learning software dev. University is a good place to do that and full of good people to work with. It's not like undergrad is even 10% as demanding as a startup (except the top top schools, perhaps) so why not go and work long hours and if you get traction then go full time on the startup.
We're heading towards a mental man-machine symbiosis. Think of all your gadgetry as a co-processor.
I'm working on a new product. Before we started, my partner and I interviewed a few people from our target market to listen first hand to their pains and how willing they would be to pay for something that solves their problem. We found willing individuals through an ad on Kijiji, and they were just eager to help.
I'm not sure about the wider population, but the abstainers in the study linked by the article were both "lower SES" and more likely to have had drinking problems in the past.
I'm a college undergrad graduating pretty soon and I decided to study biology, not CS, for the same reason that you mentioned - that I felt like I probably "knew it all" already. I also ran into the problem that my school doesn't let anyone test out of the first year of "Intro to CS" which is basically writing for loops and understanding variable types in C++ - wasn't going to waste my time with that. But, having been allowed to sign into some upper level algorithm courses (like Bioinformatics, which I really enjoyed) I've learned that I definitely do not know as much as I thought I did, and there is plenty that they can still teach you. When you're completely self taught like I am, a good algorithm class will really help stretch your brain and make you think in new ways. There's a big difference between being a "badass dev" and having a real CS background. If you develop in a high level language, you're going to learn that the actual implementation of simple things you do all the time is non-trivial and may have impacts on your applications that you're unaware of.

If you make the most of your college experience you can get involved in research, get on or off campus jobs - basically, get to know interesting people, and get some exposure to real world problems and experience trying to solve them. I don't think you should throw away this great chance for growth.

You might consider doing a different major, i.e. math, science, engineering, if you're interested in anything else, and just taking the CS classes that interest you. If you have issues with prerequisites, get to know the professors personally - this is the college secret to being allowed to do just about whatever you want.
But what do you do that dropbox doesn't, besides google apps syncing, that makes Insync a Dropbox killer?
You're leaving out the part where your parents were of sufficient means to provide you with the resources -- eg, a computer, a modem and phone line, not to mention food, clothing, and an expensive private school education -- that put you slightly ahead of the curve. I coded when I was a teenager, too, but my access was limited to a couple of hours a day in a public school computer lab for 9 months out of every year. My evenings, weekends and summers were spent bussing tables and slinging hash... to pay for college.

So yeah, you did have an unusually fortunate circumstances. Even being in Chicago versus rural Texas provided you with a greater pool of jobs that would consider you beyond your academic credentials. And a greater pool of badass, awesome people to work with. And internet access, which multiplied both of those pools by some huge amount. Not everyone has those kinds of resources, but universities with deep pockets attract them.

And last, entrepreneurial work is not harder, just more risky.
I think this yet another step in Apple's progress in refining the App Store for both the consumer and the developer. Every thing Apple does with the App Store is taken one baby step at a time, but their baby steps have added up. If you look back at how different the App Store was when it came out, you'll notice how far it's come since then.

These review guidelines that Apple recently posted were not needed by most developers, and will still only be relevant to those 1% of developers whose apps are controversial or unlucky enough to get rejected. However, since this has been covered so much by the publicity (just like the iPhone 4 antennagate issue and Adobe-Apple war), Apple felt the need to succumb to the media. Sure, it was not that big of a thing in the first place to just publish their review guidelines, but isn't it unusual that Apple is having to quiet down the media more and more often these days? Apple shouldn't have to do this, but with people taking everything out of proportion (all these issues only affect the small minority), it's hard for them to ignore it. What do you think?
I could imagine with slightly more financial account integration how they could arrange to at years end have a simple process for Small businesses to have tax reports generated and other important information. It's certainly a nontrivial task to get up and running, but I'd definitely pay to have my entire financial information processing all taken care of in one place.
Socrates was grumbling that writing things down was impairing our ability to learn things by heart.

As far as I am concerned, the more rote memorization that things machines can take off my brain's to-do list, the more time+space I can devote to higher-level thinking.
I looked at the video, I looked at your site, and I still don't understand what the big difference between you and Dropbox is.

I realize the "Dropbox Killer" title wasn't accurate (or posted by you!), but from your other comments, it does look like you're competing with Dropbox (correct me if I'm wrong). Which is why I keep trying to understand what you do better, and failing.

Some background about me: I don't use Google Docs at all (which might be a problem, since your demo seems focused on that). I use and love Dropbox, I'm a paying customer (50Gb). I don't have any major complaints about Dropbox, it's been a dream so far, but I'm always open to alternatives.
Which is weird, given that the most interesting thing about the study linked in the article is that it has more controls than previous alcohol mortality studies, including social behavior factors, and it still finds that moderate drinking correlates with reduced mortality rates among older white adults.
This is really a personal decision. Most people would benefit from college, but there are plenty of otherwise smart people who aren't cut out for it (like me). Here's what I'd say:

Go to college, but don't stick around if it turns out to be a waste of your time. That's the mistake I made. It took me nine years and $35000 in student loans to figure out that I'm not cut out for college.

That said, I did learn a decent amount about programming in college that I might not have learned about on my own. So it wasn't a complete waste of my time.
Ease up on the smoke machine there, friend. You don't have to be Harvard material to "make it" without a degree, and you know it.

A good friend of mine with even less school than me (I have a summer semester at UIC) recently left his last job with a seven (7) figure pay-check to found and then sell (lucratively) his third startup. He could also kick both of our asses in a programming contest.

JWZ: another obvious counterexample.

There are people for whom school is extremely helpful, but if you're going to make your way through your career on raw technical aptitude, it's clearly not a requirement.
>"Months later - the people who had the unhelpful software actually could remember how to do the puzzle, and the people with the helpful software couldn't."

In the real world people with helpful software can take advantage of their time saved by tackling even harder classes of problems that people with unhelpful software never even had the time to get to.
It depends whether this fits your target consumers. Basically, decide whether this fits your branding. Is your startup's product intended to appeal to young or whimsical consumers? Are you portraying a refreshing, lighthearted attitude? Is it related to humor in some way?
This looks awesome, something I'd use every day.

My co-founder and I currently use Google Docs for everything from financial planning to project management (to-do lists, features, planning, spreadsheet feedback forms, etc.), but we also use Dropbox for sharing anything except docs and spreadsheets (stuff like sharing images and assets with our designers, etc.) It'd be great to bring it all under one program.
A piece of string with two cans is an iPhone killer too I suppose, by that logic...
I agree with all of this but I also assume that someone who thinks they're a dev "badass" just out of high school is privileged enough to consider putting college off for 5 years to see if they can make it on their own.

If your circumstances are such that you'll be leaving home to support yourself on your own and never have the luxury of downtime or uncertainty (and there are many tens of millions of these people), yeah, I think, go to school.

Oh, hey, Hacker News readers, welcome to 5-7% of all of me and Erin's arguments. =) Erin's got a (technical) degree and had to clean up hotel rooms to pay for it. Our worldviews are uh different.
You can always say "It happens." I don't really understand your point. "Hey Fred, some $100 bills are missing from my wallet... you haven't seen them, have you? Ya I took em to buy some blow. It happens. Get over it."?
Impressive, and I like the speed. Not sure suggestions are my cup-o-tea, though this seems it could be handy if I used them more heavily. And you should probably watch the tab order / arrow keys, sometimes it seems to get lost, and can "select" entries which are not visible. I'd probably capture the tab key in JS and control it manually, otherwise my settings let tab go to every link + form item.

I'd probably get more use from something like this which searches my history + bookmarks + delicious + instapaper + etc, and does a normal search on those. Otherwise, currently, I type in "xcode" and get 3 from my bookmarks (missing my "xcode plugin" bookmark, among others), and none from my history, despite having 19 xcode hits in my history.