skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's interesting to hear an outside view on entrepreneurship at MIT. Inside of MIT, most Course VI (Computer Science) students have gone through 4 years without even having a single conversation about starting a company.

There is a single class with Course 6 that teaches skills for presenting an idea and putting together a project proposal, but it's aimed at seniors going into industry and working at a large company, or students going onto grad school.

There are resources available - but most of them are accessed by MBAs and Alums. Dropping out of school to start a company is something that's considered a huge risk by your undergrad peers. The few that do are definitely given respect, but because the academic program is so tough - dropping out for most things is considered giving up, and not really an option which most people think is viable. Most would-be entrepreneurs wait until after graduation, go to grad school and drop out there - or work at a big company until they get tired of it. The community (of students and professors) just doesn't encourage many students to leave or take time off.

This however, is entirely different from the Institute. MIT as an institute (deans, registrar..etc) let's undergrads in good standing take a leave of absence with a single sheet of paperwork and a single 5-20 minute phone call. To get back in after the leave of absence - the same single sheet and 5 minute phone call are put through, and then any financial aid paperwork has to be renewed. If most undergrads knew how easy it was - I think more would try it.

It's interesting to me that about 2-3 years out of school, 60% of my older friends have consistently started "itching" for something more interested where they can push themselves to their own limits like they did during their undergrad career. This is in sharp contrast to the countless job fairs students go to their junior and senior year which encourage them to take the safe route and work for a "large" company.

NOTE - These comments about MIT and its community are strictly from my personal experience with taking a leave of absence from MIT to start a company, coming back, and leaving again with 2 classes left to start another company. (I did this in the period from 2002-2006). I also think that that the various MIT (entrepreneurship) clubs around the country really help with the community.
Apparently a lot of people: http://snapshot.compete.com/valleywag.com
'... you can get away with copying other people's 100 lines if you really need to ...'

Owch! that will come back to bite you. Wouldn't it be better to re-write, re-factor to reduce complexity and get cleaner code?

'... think it's kind of unfair for you to link to the interface definitions rather than some implementation ...'

because it's the interface that we are stuck with & have to work with

'... If you're interested in a narrow-scoped pixel image application, why not use some Java image processing library? ...'

because it's not COSHER & I do not want to be locked into using non-free software ~ http://wearcam.org/cosher.htm
MSN Money: Startups, passion, entrepreneurs are just different
'... I definitely have the impression that many Java developers just love to play around - they program for the sake of programming, not for the sake of getting things done ...'

hmm I thought that would have been a positive attribute to look for
'... but boy look out for the UML architects and the patterns ...'

Matt don't let the Architect Astronauts scare you ~ http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html
Poor Michael Arrington... his life is just so hard right now.
btw, what does your website do? I can't really tell from the front page, or anything else I clicked on. If it has something to do with photos, maybe there should be some images somewhere? I might be able to figure it out if I really made an effort, but I generally avoid making efforts :) (and I tend to think other people do as well, though they won't always admit it)
Does Your Startup Specialize in Everything?
His position makes him an ant under a magnified glass, not surprising that he's getting burned out. But this has less to do with The Silicon Valley than with Mike himself. The increase in startup activity is also making him filthy rich, so I have trouble mustering much sympathy.

His post was pretty thoughtless. I was going to eat fish tonight, but thanks to him I'm having a big juicy burger. I'm gaining weight because he's depressed!
I agree that it's getting a little "bubbly" around here.
Favorite Books of Highly Successful People (Chris Anderson, Mark Cuban, Jim Buckmaster, others)
Startups and Their (Un)fair Advantages (read the comment)
I am not sure why this turned into a Java vs Python thing - there are lots of "external" Open Source imaging libraries for Java one could use, too.
Changing the channel / Firm develops new ways of sending TV shows and ads over the Internet (Joost)
TalentSpring Launches Competitive Job Hunting
Journalists, Made For AdSense Publishers, And Regression To The Mean Of Content Quality (Google is destroying their business models)
Talking Ruby Website (integration of Ruby with telephony, collaboration, and messaging)
Legless Chihuahuas Prove Google Hot Trends Not So Hot
Study: Microsoft loses ground in search
Excelent Startup-System Scaling Presentation by Former Yahoo & MySQL Employee
That's interesting - how could you use FlashPaper in a server setting? Is it available for Linux? Would it be sufficient to have a single user license to serve the web?
Free business advice by volunteers
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a63_1179788439

(I kid, of course)
happily scrubbing out EXIF data

They don't keep any exif data? Thats a shame
Yeah, I've got some work ahead of me there. Would this be better?

http://brlewis.com/y/2007/Minimalistic/ourdoings.html
If he starts with Python, he may not know there's other languages. If he... If he starts with digital computers, he may not know there's analogue ones. :-)
Out of curiosity, is there a limit to the length of a Leave of Absence? Are there situations where a leave request would be denied?

Stanford used to have very liberal rules regarding Leaves of Absence, but restricted them a few years ago. The rumor is that they were losing too many people to Silicon Valley. Now you're only allowed to take one year off, and that still eats into the maximum time you're given to complete your degree. Plus, almost all students are prohibited from enrolling part-time, so it's not really feasible to pursue a degree while working (or working full-time on a venture).
"I was going to eat fish tonight, but thanks to him I'm having a big juicy burger. I'm gaining weight because he's depressed!"

Best. Comment. Evar. :)
Chris Anderson's (The Long Tail) 5 top business books
Purplenova
Unfortunately, the only true, actionable message one can get from this post is that crying to him on the phone works every time, and I don't think that's the message he wanted to send!
I would ammend that to "$12k, a few weeks, and an incredibly powerful platform for self-publicizing his site."

As with most things Web 2.0, there's a catch-22 at the beginning; Nobody posts, so nobody visits, so nobody posts. Guy's PR ability to drive traffic to his site is certainly much more valuable than the idea or the technology.

Sure, any young hacker could have built a site like that for $12K and a few weeks...but that may not be enough to give it a similar chance for success.
There's some truth to that. Money can't buy you good interactions with people.
cool site to post your frustrations - cool rails application..
I'm no expert on this, but isn't the conventional wisdom that this time around the economic factors are much more solid. There is a much more revenue being generated, simply because by now people are making a lot of $$ of purchases on the internet.

Just because people are selling companies and there's a lot of money floating around doesn't mean it's neccessarily a bubble...maybe it's just good business.
I went to a SCORE workshop; it was lead by an egomaniac. You can get an advisor, but they won't take you seriously when you're 20; and, I wouldn't bother going now. My impression of SCORE is that they build businesses locally, so you will get an advisor who has worked in a type of region-specific business that just happens to not be software, for 40 years, and does not know very much about computers at all. But the most apparent thing is that I was 20 years old, and everybody else was 35+. I also felt a little bit of disdain towards me because I was 20 years old and wanted to start a software business. They had this great advice to find a high school student to do your web site and not pay him or her any money. That's their brilliant advice to all new companies.

But, that's my personal experience, that's all.
Anyway, as Java's such a popular language, you can get away with copying other people's 100 lines if you really need to. A quick Google search turned up an image scaler outright.

You'd be copying its bugs too. And you wouldn't pick up any future bug fixes automatically. Copying lines of source like this is cut-and-paste programming, rife in MS-shops everywhere.
Is 30 Too Old To Be An Entrepreneur?
Justin.tv network launches - more shows to come
This discussion has played itself out. If you're thinking of starting a business, do it. If you're over thirty, you certainly can't turn back the clock, and if you're in your twenties, there is plenty of evidence that it's doable. So go out and get started.
This question keeps coming up, but nobody's provided a definitive answer. Could someone just tell me if I'm too old to be an entrepreneur? Then I can move forward with making sure my ethnicity, political leanings, religious beliefs, and hair length are right. As soon as everything checks out I want to start implementing my idea.
It's unfortunately true. Some news editor friends of mine are now being measured on the CTR of their stories. These are folk with advanced J-school degrees and years of newspaper experience. But they are now writing the basest, most puerile clickbait to boost their numbers.

It's all popcorn now.
Yes, yes.. But I hang out in #python.web on freenode, and you'd be surprised how many people I get who think that Django, or mod_python, or CGI is the only way to make Python webapps. Not the best way; the only way.
I'm having a really hard time figuring out why any of what Mike said is a bad thing.
I wonder what the "social influence" factor would do to the perceived value of applicants' resumes. I'm not convinced it would lead to better hires.

Here's a study on the effect of social influence on music preferences:

http://www.iserp.columbia.edu/publications/press_releases/musiclab.html

The researchers found that, while quality songs (as determined by market share and rank by the independent participants) do better on average, songs of any quality can experience a wide range of outcomes. "The 'best' songs never do very badly, and the 'worst' songs never do extremely well, but almost any other result is possible," they said. A song in the top 5 in terms of quality had only a 50% chance of finishing in the top 5 of success.
Paul Graham Was right.... after all
You need at least 2 founders to build a successful startup.
Don't try to deceive yourself into believing one person is all it takes. Once your startup get traction, you'll get burnt out if you are doing it all alone
JavaScript: The Lingua Franca of the Web
From the blog post:

"JavaScript's C-like syntax, including curly braces and the clunky for statement, makes it appear to be an ordinary procedural language. This is misleading because JavaScript has more in common with functional languages like Lisp or Scheme than with C or Java. It has arrays instead of lists and objects instead of property lists. Functions are first class. It has closures. You get lambdas without having to balance all those parens."

Can anyone point to some good literature describing how one would go about writing Javascript in a functional style? I've seen some, none of which appear to be very practical.
Reading through Higher-Order JavaScript was practical for me at least: http://interglacial.com/hoj/hoj.html
The idea that only twenty somethings have what it takes to be entrepreneurial is downright ridiculous. Yet it is an idea that keeps on popping up (recent nytimes article for example). The reason may simply be that there are more people in that age group starting companies. A larger starting pool results in a larger pool of success. But as is the case with any statistic it seems, people mistake it for truth. So in conclusion, no, 30+ is not too old to start a company. But if you want to use it as an excuse to sit on the sidelines, by all means, do so.
What Silicon Valley Could Learn from Columbus, Ohio
"Almost none are remotely capable of this."
-this may be true, but what can you expect from a university?

the best we can really hope for is to provide students with a support system for entrepreneurial activities, and to expose entrepreneurial students to potential mentors.

the rest is up to you.

this is randy komisar on "teaching entrepreneurship"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4crM-PDRpk
Conditions in Columbus would make the need for capital a bit easier with low cost talent and rent.
It would probably be wise to link to the actual blog post, rather than the front page.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000857.html
Have a look at some of Douglas Crockford's stuff. If you're familiar with The Little Schemer, The Little JavaScripter may be of particular interest.

http://javascript.crockford.com/
Hey, great link! Thanks.
It's the hype that makes everything seem bubbly. It's quite annoying for a lot of people which is why http://www.uncov.com/ and many other rants about it exist: to take the hype down a peg or two.
Montreal has a tech scene? Since when? I can't picture any city in Canada having a tech/entrepreneur scene. At least not one as a solid as the one in the Valley.
There's some extensive hype here. If you find yourself floating around in the same circles, that hype is being spread and regurgitated to you time and time again. You'd be living in your own personal bubble, shielded from the realities of non-SV people. A lot of this hype gets people excited and allows new things to happen; and those with their head on their shoulders will be able to see past hype and see a successful outcome for themselves.
TRUEMORS: Bruised Kawasaki
True, but how about some details? A story?
forget about SCORE.
I went to SCORE, where they fixed me up with a patent lawyer who obviously, was trying to get business for himself.
Agreed, this topic is getting old. (Edit: no pun intended, seriously, I just noticed this!)

Still, I have a theory about all this...

The stats compiled by Valleywag are impressive, they show that almost all of the top 0.1% most gigantically successful companies were started by people in their 20s (Microsoft, Google, etc).

What they do not address is the age of people who start the other 99.9% of companies. I would agree that companies started by young people are more likely to be outlandishly successful (for a variety of reasons: creativity, time, etc) but I don't think that they are any more likely to start a very successful company. In fact, I would suggest that age makes it more likely that a company will be a success, though perhaps not a paradigm-busting breakout.
How Microsoft Windows 1.0 was announced to the press
Confirmed: CBS Acquires Wallstrip (a video blog makes money)
The Dangers of Moonlighting
What's that Boston/Cambridge gathering, and is it today or yesterday?
Take This Career, and Shove It!
Help test the alpha release of ScienceHack.com
ScienceHack is a search engine for science videos. I`d love to hear your thoughts on the user interface and functionality.
Thanks, Rami
It's sweet - we're launching companies with hardly any cash and the burn/pain isn't nearly that bad.
Disagree. You can do it with one if you know what you're doing. I'm on startup #9 and it's growing faster than ever with only one person at the helm.

Let's just agree that every case is different. There's no ONE right answer here.
No. Uncov exists because the easiest way to get eyeballs without any real insight is to ride someone else's wave. Ranting is easy.
Please make a logo :P
Today.

http://www.webinnovatorsgroup.com/
Hmm, I don't think this was a bug. There was a pretty popular news story about legless chihuahuas that day (edit - a comment on techcrunch says cnn.com had it on their front page).
Douglas Crockford - Software Quality - Covers the Full Range of Emotion [video]
Some highlights:

"Software Crisis" has existed for 40 years. Basically, software is hard to make, and insecure. The "crisis" is not reported anymore -- it's obvious.

Software is malleable, which is its power and curse. He posits that "Software is the most complicated stuff that humans make." Because software is malleable, there are no good metrics for software completeness or quality. In software, legacy is a pejorative term, it means "the crap we did before we knew any better."

-- The actually typing of code is only a few % of our time. However, we think we spend our time typing. Too much effort goes into optimizing this small percentage. Think of IDEs with autocomplete. [Though features that help you read code are probably worth it.]

One important concept in software development today is incremental development. But also dangerous, you can build yourself into a corner. Architecture is important.

Security oriented programming is good programming. Security requires code simplicity.
Sure, there's a lot of hype and excitement out there. But to call it a bubble is somewhat misleading. The biggest deals happening right now wouldn't even warrant a sidebar mention in the web 1.0 boom. Niche retail sites were getting $60m rounds, regularly. Companies with huge losses were going public with valuations over $1B.

Now Arrington is calling it a bubble because companies are getting $7m first rounds? Sure, there's a lot of hype and a lot of these companies will go nowhere, but from hype and exuberance grows innovation.
Kevin Ham - "the man who owns the internet" (long)
Yes, soon. The current logo was creatively designed in Paint :P
Academia.edu: looking for technical co-founder
http://www.academia.edu is a Facebook/MySpace style site for academics. It launched in alpha version last week.

It's a site where academics can create an academic webpage, and upload their papers and research interests. You can see a sample webpage here: http://oxford.academia.edu/RichardPrice

We have also built a paper-tracking engine that tracks the latest papers uploaded to the web in a given field. You can see the results for Computer Science here: http://cs.academia.edu/categories/2/papers

Academia.edu's founder is Richard Price. Richard's previous ventures include http://www.liveout.co.uk and http://www.peopleradar.com (the #1 Facebook API application - recent page views per day have been around 1 million).

Richard is looking for a technical co-founder to join Academia.edu. He's looking for someone who:

- Is super smart - awesome at problem-solving.

- Is super driven - pushes themselves, and everyone else, to meet high standards.

The site is built in Rails and C#. Knowledge of those is a plus, but not essential.

The team is based in SF. We're offering a significant equity stake, and a competitive salary. We want to be surrounded by super smart people, all of whom are driving each other to create a great product for our users. We'll pay out whatever equity it takes to hire the most brilliant people. If you are interested, please contact richard@academia.edu.
I'm curious - what proves your point here?
In my experience, startups are like life. You go it alone, but it sucks less if you have a partner.

Just make sure you pick the partner carefully. I think we've all had partners that were worse than nothing.
CBS Acquires Wallstrip, the financial videoblog
Some of mine are from testing the site before we launched it.
Dude Yamaha. The streotypical venture capitalist.
I just spent a minute making this, you can use it if you want.

http://images.redial.net/sciencehack.png
Is this inherent in the human mind or are you making an untestable claim?
What a great example of Hannah Arendt's "the banality of evil". Since the domain market is unregulated why not take advantage of that for your own personal gain, regardless of who it harms? After all everyone else is too right? Buy up all the names you can and fill them with worthless advertising instead of useful content. How disgusting!
How disgusting, indeed?

It's for sale, nobody owns it, and it's eventually going to be controlled by whoever can use it best. I suspect that you aren't hurting for content, given that there's already more than anyone could possibly absorb.
You can tell this was started by financial types (Ehrenberg is a former derivatives trader; Lindzon runs a hedge fund) because they spent $600K when all they really needed was an iSight and a Macbook.
Deep, man: Startups are like everything. Because you need a partner. Or definitely not.
MICHAEL ARRINGTON: The genie is out of the bottle
Eyejot :: Cool video emails without any instalation.
Software Amateurs versus Software Professionals -- A Classic 5yo article that still holds true
Dealing with Subscription Payments
Why stop at Ohio? It's a lot cheaper in South Dakota. But why choose S.D. when Poland is such a good deal? And Poland is outragously expensive compared to Jakarta. Although those Jakarta snobs really can get on your nerves... Tunisia is the answer.

I just don't think you're trying hard enough.
good discussion (check the comments too) of the hoops you'll have to jump through once you have the enviable problem of your customers wanting to open their wallets :)

annoyingly, paypal and google checkout really seem to have dropped the ball on flexible recurring billing (paypal requires buyers to have a paypal account, and google punted on recurring billing altogether)
The Personal Space Race - Beyond the Internet Startup
This is an interesting idea. I wonder how you will grow it? Most University IT departments are understaffed and overworked. Even though they should provide these services, they often can't. Are you planning to charge universities for providing this service?

It seems to me as if academia.edu has plans to provide library services. Personally, I don't like the commercialization of libraries, especially when library scientists are coming up with excellent solutions (like http://xxx.lanl.gov/ .)

Either way, there are many directions academia.edu can go, must be an exciting time for you. Good luck.
Go big, eh?
See Who's Online Behind Your Browser
That and the fact that your comment page likely gets way more traffic than anyone else's.

(I went back and checked and the last pre-public-launch submission/comment is #62 http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=62 - we're now over #23900)
This smells wrong... like "how to get rich playing poker"
Tunisia is deifnitely the answer.
Tips on selling your product or team
My big question is how did you manage to score a .edu domain?
I strongly second his recommendation of Douglas Crockford's series of Yahoo videos. If you're doing anything with javascript they are more than worth watching.
Thanks for the article! Are you going to webinno?
Right, and a lot of people lead quite functional lives with just one leg. But I don't think anyone chooses that route if they could help it.

I don't mean to be patronizing (I don't see how it remotely is). Going at something with a partner isn't a requirement for success, nor is it only for "cheering up." Investors like to invest to successful ventures, and a business partner is a nice assurance for them.

But go ahead and show 'em, you rebel without a cause. ;)