skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Three examples of extremely motivated people: Michael Jordan, Lance Armstrong, and Bill Gates. Everyone knows they're hyper-competitive; the common traits seem to be extreme reactions to slights real or imagined (using anger as fuel) and an extreme aversion to failure, finding it unbearably painful. They are antisocial, dealing with the public for business purposes, but not friendly. They also all had an unshakeable conviction that whatever they were doing was the most important thing they could do, and they wanted to do it more than anything else in the world. No divided focus! They all loved what they did.

Jordan: If another player talked smack, Jordan would make a point of humiliating that player on court next time they met. He also held grudges -- he froze out Sports Illustrated for years after they published an unfavorable article about his baseball career.

Armstrong: Like Jordan, but on a bike. To make a point, he'd beat someone by a huge margin, rather than coasting to a win. He held grudges, too, and wouldn't even let a rider way down in the ranks go for glory in a breakaway stage win if he was upset with them -- he'd set his team to chase them down, which meant everyone else had to chase too in order to keep up. All his Tour de France wins were after cancer; he was riding for people fighting cancer, which is what made it the most important thing to him -- he had incredible discipline as a result, which he lacked before the illness. He couldn't stand the thought of coming in second in the Tour and he worried about his top opponents purposely to make himself train harder.

Gates is likewise a well-known worrier. He thinks that at any time, a competitor could come out of the woodwork that would spell the end of Microsoft, just like what Microsoft itself did to so many others. Despite being at the top, he paddles as furiously as if he were just trying to keep his head above water.

They have all had unprecedented success. However, there is a cost -- they've made a lifetime habit of being selfish, pissed off and dissatisfied. This has consequences for every relationship, not just professional ones.

Inhabiting that headspace -- with all the worrying -- makes it a lot harder to enjoy life. They are probably no happier than you are right now; it seems you can choose to increase your "success" or happiness, but not both at the same time; they are mutually exclusive. You simply will not strive as hard if you are happy where you are. Once the habit's ingrained, even if you decide you are successful enough and switch to pursuing happiness, you'll probably start out pissed off and dissatisfied thinking you aren't happy enough! Interestingly, the very pursuit of happiness pre-empts happiness almost like a Catch-22. In chasing happiness, you guarantee you aren't feeling it. It's like "do or do not; there is no try" -- Yoda only one who decides what rules you have for it and when you'll let yourself feel happy, or not.
No, no, no, you fools. The worst mistake in human history is the INDUSTRIAL revolution.
In response to this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43118
Chicago is just getting close to reaching critical mass. The startups that succeeded here before did little to foster community. The startups here now are coming around to the idea of a start up community. It should be interesting to see how it plays out. The other problem here is that a bunch of the good hackers go to places like Citadel rather than do a startup.
Significant funding leading to worse startup outcomes?
It seems to me that if you receive significant funding and are expected to hire software engineers that you may end up with a worse result.

After all, these employees are not as driven as the cofounders. Even with equity, it's not the same.

Moreover, in a place like Silicon Valley, there's enormous competition for highly skilled software engineers.

So it might be the case that having the cofounders do much of the coding may result in a better outcome.
I agree with you and didn't intend to say that we're smarter. I was just saying that it is easier to outsource simple programming problems than the required investment for tough problems. The pool of programmers that can take a specification and imeplement it is larger and doesn't require to be in direct contact with marketers, but the person who comes up with the spec has to be able to talk with the stakeholders.
Thought about Research Triangle Park in North Carolina? Got Duke University, UNC Chapel Hill, and NC State close by. Close to the beach, the mountains. Weather is great, though it does get pretty muggy in the summer. And the cost of living is reasonable. And it has a strong entrepreneurial community (cednc.org). It's certainly not a huge city, but it's got a lot going for it...though, it would mean moving to the east coast.
That's a valid worry. I know for a fact that using Fasterfox will get you banned on many sites (I got banned for using it myself). I hope Cloudant guys expose some settings to help with that.
The author chooses to rant about CS research being patronage that wastes US tax dollars. The examples he chooses don't support his argument very well.

He doesn't like Haskell or Caml because they sprung from academia. Haskell was designed mostly by a couple Scots and the little funding it received came from Microsoft Research. Caml comes from IRNIA in France. No US tax dollars were wasted in either case.

He claims that Python wasn't invented by a programming language researcher. Guido Van Rossum was employed as a programming language researcher (working on ABC) by a Dutch government research lab, and then by NIST and CRNI in the USA. NIST and CRNI are US government funded research organizations. Using the author's train of thought, the development Python WAS partially funded with US tax dollars.
This isn't an agreement or disagreement with the essay (I tend to lament the current sorry state of CS research but not necessarily for the reasons stated in this essay). But I would like to throw out that (a) before there was chemistry and physics, there was alchemy and that was hardly based on the scientific method, (b) computer science is becoming more ingrained in hard sciences via simulation and visualization, and (c) there is no law that says the scientific method can't be adapted to include information as a first-class primitive like stars, particles, energy, and inclined planes (among other things). Maybe (a) and (c) are the same point and we are muddling our way through as informatic alchemists at this stage of the field in the sense of CS being defined by the scientific method.

As a CS PhD, I like the essay and appreciate that it raises points to think about. I never really thought about academics as bureaucrats in that way but, as a former academic who left the hallowed halls for the reasons you describe much better than I could formulate, I think I agree with you on that point.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com%2...
Equally important is to figure out what to write about. What you know best may not be what the potential readers want to read. As with startups, it is always good to some basic research about the market size. Amazon Sales Rank, a ranking based on sales velocity at Amazon.com and updated hourly, offers an interesting and useful tool to do so. Books with higher sales rank are selling much faster than the ones with lower sales rank.

The Sales Rank at any given time is available as part of Product Details section in Amazon listing. Historical values can be found at Charteous (http://charteo.us).
Chicago's the best. You can live within walking distance of world-class restaurants, great music venues, convenient public transportation and the most breathtaking architecture in America -- all for a fraction of the cost of living you'd find in San Francisco, New York, Boston or DC.

Then there's the demographic breakdown. If I'm building a Web application that I intend to market to normal people -- i.e., NOT the types of people who read 96 RSS feeds a day and obsess over TechCrunch -- I'd rather live in a place where my friends are, well, diverse. Chicago has a strong economy with no clear dominating industry. There's strength in diversity.

Not that there isn't a tech scene here. The Tech Cocktail events (semi-regular gatherings of 500+ local tech people) have been well-attended, and the Chicago Python Users Group is a great bunch of people. During a recent Chicago visit, a Bay Area resident told me he was astounded by how much more active the Chicago Python group was than the Bay Area one.

I have very little experience raising startup money, so I can't comment about the availability of VC or angel funding in Chicago. But are you really going to move somewhere just to get funding? What does it say about the quality of your idea if you feel like it will only succeed if you live in a certain part of the U.S.?
Funny you should mention Lawrence and Austin in the same post. As a current resident of Lawrence, I can attest that this would be a great town to start a startup in, but there seems a definite lack of interest from the CS grads. Everyone seems bent on a big paycheck at Sprint or Cerner or Garmin.

I actually like Austin because it's like a bigger Lawrence, but never actually lived there.

All I really wish is for a place with a bunch of nerds and some fiber-to-the-home. Sadly, AT&T owns us here and something that fast will probably never happen.
PSP 2 Launch: Details and Photos
I'm originally from Chicago. Chicago is great in some ways, but the attitudes of most business people (including those in "tech") are straight out of the 1950s.
Seattle, followed by Austin and then Ann Arbor and Madison in a tie for fifth
I hope it's released before Duke Nukem Forever!
This is blasphemous! The rich are genetically superior to the poor...

The idea that behaviours run in families is not unreasonable, but I don't see why the author looks to genetics for that mechanism.
I like open source as much as the next guy, but I don't know that I agree - is open source the cause of concentrations of 'interesting' things, or is it the other way around? Silicon valley wasn't built on open source....

Besides, plenty of hackers do interesting stuff outside outside the open source world (and that's not even considering hardware...).
Given that Steve Jurvetson is Estonian, I wouldn't be surprised. There must be something in the water in that country - it seems 'produce' an inordinately large number of brilliant people.
Damn, I am working on a python script to do simultaneous range requests and 'am hoping to release it as open source by October. @work, lots of ISOs get transferred over the network all the time; even on a fast network, it's a pain with uncached images. @home I download OS iso's quite often. This is a great source of pain for me and I am pretty sure for a lot of other people as well - hope the Cloudant guys pull it off. But they need a way to figure out how to throttle bandwidth usage.

BTW, is there such a thing as universal mind ? How come you think about something and very soon you find out someone else doing something with more or less the same idea ;-)
This is apparently what happened to Friendster. They raised a lot of money too fast and the VC appointed board started to take control and make bad calls. The board was focusing on the wrong problems but the founders didnt have the power to change direction. So yeah it can be bad...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/11585518@N04/sets/7215760148516...

The photos on this page have a few interns - Does YC take interns ?
If you don't know the difference between what Guido van Rossum does, and what Andrew Appel, Luca Cardelli, Zhong Shao, etc, etc, do, you are clearly not a PL researcher!

I am not a budget analyst. What bothers me is that I think a field I admire is being mismanaged, not that it is driving the US (or any other country) bankrupt. The US has worse problems than a little bit of science pork.
I think what you are describing is program verification, not proof-carrying code.

In proof-carrying code, of course, the proposition you are proving may not be associated with the source code as an invariant. But if it isn't, why isn't it? It makes no sense to have one language for the invariant and another for the program.

For example, one use of PCC is to prove propositions about a bit of machine code, such as a packet filter. When you create an environment that can state propositions about machine code, you have created a typed assembler, whether you like it or not.

Most leaders in the Netflix challenge are (at) CS departments because CS departments are full of smart programmers.
Also, when you're examining something that dubs itself "science," pointing out a spot of routine dishonesty, however small and irrelevant, is hardly indicating a "strawman." Shades of the [Curate's egg](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curate's_egg). I'm sure most of the entries on Enron's balance sheet were perfectly accurate, as well.
A Really important set of ideas, but I wouldn't want to learn them from this book. The author seems to think you can take two entire academic sub-specialties (History of Science, History of Technology) and cram their collective information into one trade paperback.

Societies are cagey and unpredictable about how (hell, if) they assimilate new technologies. Studying those processes takes more intellectual commitment than you get from a book you might find on the "Management" rack by the checkout at Kinkos.

I'd recommend Thomas Misa's Leonardo to the Internet as a good starting point.
I wouldn't say it has to be usable by Joe Average Programmer, but if it's not - and it will obviously never be - it should have to explain why. And it shouldn't be described in any context, whether paper, grant proposal, or university press release, as anything else.

C, for example, should never come within a mile of Joe Average Programmer. But the world needs C, it needs the Linux kernel, etc, etc. For other things, this is not so clear.

You have to be able to judge the prospects of research programs. Otherwise, how do you separate the dry holes from the promising ones? There is an infinite set of dry holes in the world, and any of them is happy to accept all the funding you can give it.
The "I Have 250,000 Users, Now What?" guy just sold his Facebook app for $3 million
In the rare cases that a programmer actually needs (dynamic) function composition, yes.

For very understandable reasons, most of the examples you see of higher-order FP languages tend to stress very intricate and elegant algorithms. But what is 99.999% of the actual functional programming that is actually done in the world? SQL and Web template transforms. About as intricate as a brick.

The result of having these incredibly high-powered, high-strung thoroughbred FP languages is that no one even thinks of these mundane tasks as cases of functional programming. But of course they are. FP is the natural generalization of declarative programming.

The real tragedy of Haskell is that, if the people who designed Haskell had actually been working on, say, XML and XSLT, XML and XSLT would not suck nearly so much.

I repeat that in almost all cases, dynamic construction of functions is unnecessary and can be eliminated. Otherwise, yes: write even more functions and pass around lists of function pointers.

But you're right that I could probably make the same point in a much less vitriolic way. Blame acid reflux.
Parkland is at the southern edge of the first Bentley Belt, which extends from West Palm Beach to Boca. I've seen at least six Bentleys in Boca. The only other place I've ever seen one was curbside at LAX. I've never seen a Bentley anywhere in the Bay Area.

Fareed's comment is weird. Where is there a parking garage on Sand Hill Road?
Estonia could be friendly, though I'm in Ukraine.
I'm not sure whether I agree with all of the author's conclusions either. Still, it's interesting that rich people were having more children during this time period.
I rarely experience long internet connection unavailability here in Ukraine (mostly due to thunderstorms or isp's hw problems), and even if I have such a problem, I always could use quite cheap CDMA 3G internet connection.
So Internet connection isn't a real problem here for doing startup. We have other problems over here :)
perhaps fittingly, that page crashes Firefox 3 alpha
There is no #3. Boston is WAY behind the Bay Area, even though die-hard Bostonians (er... I mean Cantabrigians) like to believe otherwise.

If you don't feel that the Bay Area offers any advantage to your startup, you could probably be based almost anywhere.
I live in Oak Park and have an office downtown.

I'm working mostly on web apps and some business/finance services ideas (with software seasoning, of course.) I'm also an entrepreneur-in-residence for a small alternative asset fund that occasionally invests in SaaS start-ups.

I've went to one "start-up event" in Chicago since moving here. It was a waste of time. (The event was held at a bar and it was too loud to have any meaningful interaction with people. I was also hit up a few too many times for funding and/or free technical input by people that had ideas for things they couldn't share except to say their idea was "like MySpace, only bigger!")

;-)

I'd prefer a smaller, more informal meeting at a bookstore or something where the signal to noise ratio was a little better. And, even then, only if there was a compelling reason to take time away from coding...
Sounds like we should get a Chicago news.yc meetup going. I'm thinking something more frequent than Tech Cocktail, is there a Chicago OpenCoffee Club yet? I know someone's working on a StartupWeekend here: http://startupweekendchicago.wetpaint.com/
It was the garage under the building that the techcrunch party was at.

Astons, bentleys, high end benz's... the works.
A news.yc meetup here would be great. OpenCoffee Club here has been ruined by MidPhase but theres no reason we can't set up a weekly or monthly meeting time at a coffee shop where news.ycers can come and go, with some way to identify ourselves like a post-it note on your laptop or something. Anyone up for it?
One of the recurring off-topic discussions on Startup News was the evolution of humanity from nomadic tribes through the Industrial Revolution and beyond. Now that the scope of the site has expanded, it would make sense that one of the most popular discussions is still the evolution of humanity. If this topic doesn't interest you, maybe you should submit a story that you find interesting.
The thing is - you're essentially distinguishing Guy Steele and Guido van Rossum from Andrew Appel and Luca Cardelli by success. Steele and van Rossum created languages used by lots of people, and so they're "system software designers", while Appel and Cardelli created languages used by small communities, and so they're "programming language researchers". If you set up your definitions like that, it's tautological to claim that programming language research doesn't yield any useful stuff, because everybody who creates useful stuff gets taken out of the PL research category.

The big question is: can you detect, a priori, which research projects will be successful?

For example, would you have funded Dave Moon's research at the AI lab? How about L. Peter Deutsch? Ricky Greenblatt? Kernighan and Ritchie? Tony Hoare? Dijkstra? Knuth? James Gosling? Matz?

The irony is that no matter who you consider relevant, you're almost always wrong a decade later. Moon was brilliant at the AI lab, and his work was the foundation for most of the 1980s AI boom. But it's largely irrelevant today. Matz and Guido were relatively unknown throughout the 1990s, but they're suddenly critical now, because technology has shifted towards dynamic languages. Hoare spent most of his life working on arcane topics like proof-carrying code, but think of how many bugs have been found because of assertions.

What if the next big development in computing comes out of type theory? Would you then add Luca Cardelli, Benjamin Pierce, and Phillip Wadler to your "system software designers" category? (Heck, Wadler has already made important contributions to Java 1.5 generics.)

The university system is built upon the premise that you can't tell what basic research will be successful beforehand, and so you better fund all of it (or as much as you can, at least ;-)) and wait for some entrepreneur to sift through it and figure out what's commercially viable. You seem to think that all that random chance is unnecessary, and you can pick the winners beforehand and shut down the rest. If you're right, there's a very lucrative career waiting for you as a venture capitalist, where you get to bet Other People's Money on the future system software designers.

(BTW, I met a girl at a party who's in a swing dancing class with Guy Steele, and he calls himself a Programming Language Designer. So maybe your title for him is a bit off the mark...)
there's a few ror things happening there, the guys behind shopify I think.
I think you're referring to the TechCrunch interns.
That's uh... well I'm happy for him.
Wow, and this is one of those ideas at least two different people have suggested to me in conversations. I guess it was just waiting for the right platform. And no, none of them are mentioned in this article.

That's a good argument for keeping ideas like this in a journal or outliner or something so you can review them when a new-platform gold rush like this comes around.

And, as anomalous as this deal seems, I have to say it: it's also more support for the "get popular first and worry about profitability later" school of thought.
Note to self: avoid management team of trip advisor at all costs.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30042 for reference
Brilliant story, describes a post-singularity entire universe computer simulation where the god-like strong AI governs humanity using Asimov's 3 laws of robotics.

It contains some surprisingly brilliant insights about human nature.
Clearly I'm not a PL researcher. However, I have friends who are. They too have a tendency towards hyperbole about the importance of their field. You've just inverted the hyperbole: this field is such toxic fakery we're robbing taxpayers and ruining young minds!

At all the good universities, the computer science department is also part of the electrical engineering department. Thus you have valuable research going on which crosses between hardware, software, information theory, physics, etc.

The people running these departments know that along the way, a few somewhat promising computer scientists will get sucked into reading philosophy books as a hobby, and lose their way in the world. These people become PL researchers (in the sense you're using the phrase) . The school earmarks minimal funds and provides minimal infrastructure, like a USENET group or a mailing list for these types (no pun intended). They know by doing this they will successfully keep them from messing up useful research (best case) or living on the streets (worst case).
<evil>
Or _maybe_ somebody who's investing in facebook is also somehow involved with the acquisition. get one of the apps an exit => facebook's value shoots through the roof again.
</evil>
I am from Chicago as well. As far as I can tell, there aren't many of Us here.

I suggest replying if you are from the Area and leaving your email address if it is not in your yc profile.
Sorry, Top 40 engineering means nothing.
"The big question is: can you detect, a priori, which research projects will be successful?"

wow! What an insightful post. i regret I can "upmod" you only once!
I tried to make the same point in another comment but it is nowhere as clear as this! I am humbled!
VentureBeat: The Y Combinator List
Ahh, makes sense.
http://paulgraham.com/say.html perhaps?
Animoto: the end of slideshows
Threadless is the third.
One YC-funded startup is there: Inkling Markets.

http://inklingmarkets.blogspot.com/2007/06/inkling-is-hiring...
I'm dubious about this. There's no source. The Mashable and Techcrunch articles about this simply derive from this one. And yet Inside Facebook isn't claiming an exclusive, despite apparently having one.

It may be true, but there are a lot of fishy signs.