skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Will having read Invisible Man make a police officer less likely to indulge in racial profiling? Will a familiarity with Steinbeck make him more sympathetic to the plight of the poor, so that he might understand the lives of those who simply cannot get their taillights fixed? Will it benefit the correctional officer to have read The Autobiography of Malcolm X?

The author seems to think one aspect of education is to propagandize a certain political view, and that the success of the same would validate forcing education on people. If it makes him feel better, then...yes, of course reading such things will have an effect. Where did you get your ideas from? Obviously, a brain not so capable of absorbing information tends to stick to its instincts. That's why not every human quality is curable.

I do wonder if the author realizes that many police officers come from a poor background, probably much unlike his own. Maybe they don't need Steinbeck to learn about the subject.
It's not a broad claim. It's common knowledge. Ask any doctor. Or scientist. Perhaps you can email the question to this guy

http://www.drfuhrman.com/

and maybe even learn something else in the process.

I'm not wasting any more time debating non-hacker issues here at hacker news. There are several other excellent threads directly related to hacker news. Let's talk about those over there. This is my last comment in this thread.
"So I have this fantasy: Suppose that the United States focused less on blowing things up in Pakistan’s tribal areas and more on working through local aid groups to build schools, simultaneously cutting tariffs on Pakistani and Afghan manufactured exports."

What a fantasy. I wish. But what's easier: bombing and shooting or educating? (Same goes for most other non-violent measures that could have been taken. They're harder.)
The letters of Stanley Kubrick
Newton's Third Law :)
RAILS SUMMIT LATIN AMERICA 2008
"Don't do something unless you can brag about it" isn't a bad philosophy to have. It means you're doing things worthy of envy.
A good review; the better parts are where the columnist, Mr. Kristof, describes the book and Mr. Mortenson rather than talking about his own opinion.

Most interesting:
"To get a school, villagers must provide the land and the labor to assure a local “buy-in,” and so far the Taliban have not bothered his schools. One anti-American mob rampaged through Baharak, Afghanistan, attacking aid groups — but stopped at the school that local people had just built with Mr. Mortenson. “This is our school,” the mob leaders decided, and they left it intact."

"Mr. Mortenson has had setbacks, including being kidnapped for eight days in Pakistan’s wild Waziristan region."

Strangely, the columnist adds in "It would be naïve to think that a few dozen schools will turn the tide in Afghanistan or Pakistan," right after that, undermining his own point... ?
"America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone’s options. Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal. Unfortunately, it is with me and my red pen that that ideal crashes and burns."

We tend to never look at the underbelly of academia, particularly those who are well served post-college in a world of newly minted bonus checks and corporate perks. Discussion exists as to where the process went wrong, a process that favors the inevitable elite and rich, but I have yet to see one solid and compelling reason why education (on average) fails compared to our European counterparts.

Excellent article.
This is the kind of article I need to read in the morning. It gives a sense of purpose. We are seeing a shift in our collective consciousness. The system we are part of is not the best. In fact it is arguably the worst system since the caveman era. We are the first generation that truly believes we can, need and will improve our world without hurting anyone.
Interface Design Principle: Let people learn more - Bokardo
Though in more ways than just choosing how the engine works.... I was being diplomatic. See my profile.
Apple's MobileMe problem child
Supercomputers at home will be common soon. Intel is going the road of multi-core, I'm typing this on a machine with two 4 core CPUs. Soon we'll have not just 8 but 16 and then 64, etc, cores in a sub $2K machine you can buy from Dell or HP or who ever.
Why Felix Dennis thinks now is a good time to start a business
[T]he main message . . .is to try to discourage people from becoming entrepreneurs unless they are deadly serious and driven to such an extent that they cannot stop themselves.
That would seem to depend on what you're trying to build. If you're building a blog, or something else that fits squarely in the WordPress design space, go ahead and use WordPress.

WP has, historically, aimed to solve different problems than Drupal. And I would hope that WordPress doesn't try to become Drupal if the cost is additional complexity, a slower development cycle, and less time to spend refining the documentation and user experience. I wouldn't say that Drupal is more powerful: it's more general-purpose. That is often a source of power, but it also entails being harder to design and develop, harder to use, and very hard to document -- the ecosystem is huge, and diverse, and all the modules evolve at different speeds. To the extent that WP has a tighter focus, they should treasure that feature, and maintain it wisely.
Thanks crocus for posting this.

When I made the parent submission to HN ~2hr ago which contained this article, I was going to post to the original source shortly but good to see you do it. That is what it is all about, helping each other :)

(I deleted the submission as it linked to this article in reference rather than the original, and did not follow the “Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter” in http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Anyway, if you find the article interesting you may enjoy some of the other ones I was reading at the time (also with good links) that were useful...

Which Universities Have No Chance at Entrepreneurship?:
http://campusentrepreneurship.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/which...

As Textbooks Go 'Custom,' Students Pay:
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB121565135185141235.ht...

The latest National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship newsletter shares a great new paper by Block and Keller called “Where do Innovations Come from?:
http://www.publicforuminstitute.org/nde/news/2008/enews-08-0...
I don't know, considering how awful some of the schools here are, do we really want to export them to other countries? It'd be nice if some countries took some chances and innovated in regards to how schools, corporations, and other social structures work instead of plainly copying the Western world.

edit: I agree that education is important and better than lobbing missiles and bullets at someone but at the same time...
Creating a Client-Side Search Engine With Gears
It becomes a broad claim due to the words "Any stimulant, I don't care which".

Many common stimulants (e.g., amphetamines) have such an effect. To extend the claim to "any stimulant, I don't care which" is a broad claim. There is no fundamental reason why every stimulant should have a down side (no "conservation of energy" law for human wakefulness). At this point, I'd say the jury is still out on the side effects of provigil.

By the way, I do consider this to be hacker news. Startup founders hacking their own bodies? I think that's interesting to hackers.
Actually, I added this as a toplevel post, so there you go. :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=246669
I had a number of conversations with a musician friend about drugs and bands. He was pretty adamant about staying sober and clean while playing in a band, and his main reasoning was that when you're stoned or high, you just don't know when you sound like crap. When you're chemically altered, you always think you sound good.

I've worked as an ER/Critical care nurse for 15 years, and I can say that categorically that all the stimulant using patients I've cared for tend to make bad choices. Perhaps it's a selection bias and only the people on stimulants that make crap decisions come and pay me a visit in the ER.

Do you really want a substance clouding your judgment when you're working on your startup? When you're chemically altered, how do you know that your business decisions aren't crap?
Ask HN: A stealth project disrupted
Warning: Sorry that this is a kinda long post, but I really need some advice on my next steps from follow Hackers.

2 Months back, I had a really brilliant idea. And I'm sure every entrepreneur have their own virtual bucket they use to store all their potential ideas. You would then rank those ideas based on several factors, ie, complexity, revenue model, type of market, etc. And surely, the algorithm is unique to each owns, since everyone has different situation's and priorities. To make the long story short, this idea that I had, was ranked number one on my list of ideas to pursue. It has repeatability being said, alot, that an idea is nothing and its the execution that counts AND there is probably someone else out there who has the same idea OR is probably doing it right now.

Well that happens to be damn true. Yesterday, I read on Techcrunch about a startup that has been around since 2005 and is doing something very similar to my idea.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/14/trackvia-raises-series-a-for-point-and-click-databases/
Trackvia provides software as a service for transforming ordinary spreadsheets into versatile databases.

In short, my idea has something to do with spreadsheets and is to a certain extend, similar to Trackvia but I strongly believe that my model will appeal more to the target users. Of course my targeted users are closely similar to TrackVia's - Small and Medium Businesses.

So what should I do now? Keep on pursuing this idea of my knowing that there is another well-funded startup that has a 2 year head start ahead of me? Drop the idea, and think about the second on my list?
Looking over your responses, sounds like your plan is a thinly veiled excuse to drop out, and you were posting in the hopes that you'd see enough "ra ras" to drown out the voice in your head that knows better. Dropping out of high school at this point is phenomenally foolish and a lot like quitting a marathon in the last quarter mile. Being a good entrepreneur is about making good decisions, and most importantly, about not quitting.
There is more than one competitor (scroll down to the bottom of the article you linked and you can see a few more).

On one hand, it's validation that it's a good idea. On the other, you have to be convinced that your execution can be better.
>> (anal retentive, OCD, borderline autistic, you know the type ;))

Being a jackass does not make you a better coder, it just makes you a jackass.
Fannie and Freddy get an exlplicit life line
I loved the landing page design. Great layout, big red call to action buttons, multi-column displays... That alone got me to sign up.
I didn't start programming till I was 17. Heavy math focus before that though.
The plural of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "data".
NSA's Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data
Agree.

I, too, taught "literature" to people that could barely read. It sucked.

If you can't read, you should learn the mechanics of how to read before dealing with things like "foreshadowing" "theme" "denouement."

Just, basic stuff.Otherwise, it's just ridiculous.

That's what these colleges should be doing, if they're taking student's money. Not raping them in their vulnerability, naivete, and ability to get a loan.
Are you are referring to Quickbase? Thanks for bringing that up.
Disgruntled engineer locks S.F. officials out of computer network
Lucky to be a Programmer
Well-said. I'm coming at this from a media perspective. So the use case is always "online magazine." Right now, I'd go with Drupal for that, since its got features WP doesn't and much better access control. But WP is catching up.....
"So what should I do now? Keep on pursuing this idea of my knowing that there is another well-funded startup that has a 2 year head start ahead of me? Drop the idea, and think about the second on my list?"

That depends. Is it a big market? Every Coke has a Pepsi, you know and every Nike has a Rebock and Adidas, a New Balance, and ... you get the idea.

You just have to be sure that you can find a way to get a piece of that pie. Is there a certain niche you can target? Are you really able to do something at least comparable to the others, or even better?

You may need a team or to find your own funding to compete.

And I wish you the best of luck!
This reminds me of the film "Charlie Wilson's War" and the story of what happened back in Afghanistan in the late 80s; after spending over a billion dollars secretly providing rebels with weapons in order to defeat the Soviets, we walk out without spending even a few million on rebuilding, and almost none of the population learns that we were the ones who saved them--and instead blame us for not helping, not being educated enough to know the truth.

And thus we created the enemy which we fight today.
This is awesome news. Read this:

http://www.ericsink.com/Choose_Your_Competition.html

The big problem with avoiding competition is that you are also avoiding customers. The existence of a competitor indicates the existence of paying customers. If you can't find anyone who is making money with your idea, you really need to wonder if there is any money to be made there at all.

Now you're primed to understand me when I say: Don't give up yet. This startup is doing valuable research for you, and it isn't costing you a dime. See if you can figure out if they're making any money. See if you can find some of their customers and ask them what they think of the product. Try the product. Take their product to one of your potential customers, demo it to them, and see if they like it or not -- think of it as a prototype for your own product, except that all it cost you to develop is the cost of buying a copy from your competitor.

If, perchance, the existing startup has uncovered a huge market for this kind of product, chances are they can't capture the whole market. You can grab some of it. If their product rocks and has a plugin architecture, sell a handy plugin and expand from there. If their product sucks for a certain subset of the market, build your own version. If their product just plain sucks, and they have a market anyway, take them on -- there's gold in them thar hills!

More likely, there is no market and this startup will obligingly discover this for you by building a decent product and then failing anyway. You will learn from their failure, while spending nothing! And they have a three-year head start on their failure, so you might not have to wait too long!

I haven't said anything about the idea, and I don't have time to research it... but based on the one-sentence pitch I urge you to read this and come to terms with it before you proceed:

http://neopoleon.com/home/blogs/neo/archive/2003/09/29/5458....

It's hard to believe how true that cartoon is until you've lived it. So be careful, or your customer support costs will eat your business alive.
i didn't start until i was 22... i'm 24 now. am i doomed?
I hate to be a downer, but sometimes these things don't sit right with me.
"After successfully launching their consumer offering (7% week-over-week growth!)"

Why are the traffic charts essentially flat for the last 6 months, or worse on quantcast.

I think "3. We didn’t spend enough time on marketing" is probably the most important, but then I'm not convinced the idea is "sticky" enough in the first place.

Still an interesting read though :)
I think the group version could be cool, and might be worth paying for... Think as a project manager you can see how exactly everyone is doing - I.E. the designer spending 30% of each day researching design, and 20% in photoshop... just sounds neat, Im trying the personal version for sure!
Hmm. No. I'm referring to Blist and DabbleDB (which are linked at the bottom of the article you posted).
This is why I take a Nalgene bottle everywhere with me. 32oz of pure, unadulterated h2o (depending on the quality of the local water source).
Me too - I find that running really hard for 1/2 hour in the morning make me pretty productive and 'sharp' for the rest of the day. As a side benefit, I sleep better, and my symptoms of asthma have decreased.

It would be interesting to compare each method's suitability for getting more out of each day.
Being a Better Programmer #2: Don't Be a Missionary
A ninth reason:

http://www.tomychen.org/?p=8

(Look at the includes)
RescueTime is probably the most useful yCombinator app out there. I would certainly consider paying for it.
S.F. officials locked out of computer network
Rails wasn't even released until 6 months after Basecamp was a out (and doing very well). It didn't really get popular until about 1-2 years later. By that time, Basecamp was doing incredibly well and we had released other products.

As the creator of Rails, it's flattering to think that the framework had a big say in the success of 37signals, but I think it's role is generally overstated by people who happened to find us through the framework. The vast majority of our customers have no clue what Rails is and couldn't care less. It helped, surely, but so did many other things, like having a popular weblog, like writing a popular book on our approach, like speaking at conferences, etc.
Minda ICT: How to Auto shutdown in Ubuntu
Saving Strategy From the Strategists
with entry level cars priced at 15k the average person has to work years just to save up enough money to buy a new car.

Have cars always been this expensive in relation to american wages?
it reminds me of the movie idiocracy. explosions and violence make more impression on short-term than litterature or culture
Success is never guaranteed. It'll always be hard. No matter what you do -- follow Getting Real or get $10M in VC -- you'll probably fail. That's a truth of statistics.

But the risk of failure should hardly deter you, so if you're left with "I can do that too", then that's mission accomplished for us.
I have seen enterprise systems where sftp access is granted to third parties by restricting the login shell severely to allow only sftp uploads. Is there a problem with that approach? SOX / PCI is making the 'secure upload problem' more pressing daily.
Have just setup a Slinkset board:

"Room.YC Blogs" - Aggregating 120 Blogs of Hacker News' top users.

http://roomyc.slinkset.com/
Put your city on the 3D map
ZooKeeper - A Reliable, Scalable Distributed Coordination System
The comment on consultants reminds me of the classic Demotivator:

http://despair.com/consulting.html
All you need is paying customers, don't worry about competition.

Also, using your current idea, think about a generalized version of your idea or one that focuses, say only on the financial vertical.
Thanks for saving the rest of us time, dominik. Collaborative reading for the win! :)
Every month or so, a comment comes up on hn that is so good it has to become bulletin board material. This is one.

We often get so bogged down in the code, we forget to use common sense. This post, especially the "perchance" paragraph is loaded with options to "find a way". Thanks, mechanical_fish!
Thieves Mistake 3 Year Olds Cochlear Implant For A Blue Tooth Headset
That depends on the price. If it saves me one hour per year, it's technically worth $50 or $60 per year, or more.

Of course, I'd have to think about that, whereas I'd pay $14.99 without a second thought. ;)
Excellent submission. That was an extremely well-written and particularly trenchant piece of writing.

It is interesting to compare the experiences of Ms. L to various people in their 40s returning to school when I was in undergrad. They too had difficulty with very basic (to us youngsters, anyway) methods of computer use. Many viewed computers with either outright terror or blatant suspicion.

I have often thought of volunteering my time to a college or tech school locally to teach computer-illiterate people the basics of computer use. It would be such a simple thing for me and judging by Ms. L's plight, it could make all the difference in the world to some people.
No, but cars also have higher resale value, are much higher quality, and last significantly longer than they used to.
I think his sentence was reasonable - like Sabeer, he feels he has a great idea and is willing to quit school (Apple for Sabeer) and work on it night and day.

ps to the OP: don't quit school. You might have the best idea in the world, but if it doesn't work (and there are many reasons that are not under your control for this to happen), it may be hard for you to return to school... School is generally lame, but it is the 'gateway drug' to better experiences in University.
Be careful not to each too much of your own dog food.

Almost every time I ever built anything, I thought, "I can build a tool to build it next time."

Be careful. The next thing you know, you could be spending all your time building tools for yourself and forgetting who the user really is.
I don't know anything about Larry and Sergei except through what they do at Google. So it's almost a tautology that their company would reflect what I know about them. I guess Jobs is a little different, but he's still synonymous with Apple to most people.

Can you think of any business whose founder is independently famous, and who reflects your theory (e.g. a musician with a talent for improvisation, who started a company that constantly changes its business model)?
There's nothing wrong with using politics and marketing to get good changes pushed forward. The real point here is to make sure those changes are good for more than just your own personal satisfaction.

There are good causes and not-so-good causes. Being a missionary isn't the problem.
So many of the problems with education in the US are cultural that it's depressing. When people don't want to learn, there is very little you can do to improve the situation. Especially in a compulsory system where students are not free to leave and end up simply disrupting those students who truly want to learn.

The thirst for knowledge in the third world and true desire to learn combats the worst features of the Western education model.
Is there a way to see this article without registering?
I'm kind of surprised to see this down-modded. There's nothing wrong with casting a wider net, especially if you're not a technologist.
Tony writes plenty of good stuff on his blog over here: http://www.tonywright.com/

In terms of amount-of-insight/word his blog is perhaps the most informative I follow.
Google: The Only One Who Won’t Like Our Yahoo Deal Is MS
Very insightful view into the mind of an essay marker. I've always loathed the subjectiveness of English courses, that's why I took computer science :)

I agree with the author, not everyone is cut out for English classes, but I think an alternative to these "trying help you an write essay" classes should be some kind of "just read a book and enjoy it" class. It would be a start anyway. In school, any hope of loving English literature is usually destroyed by some kind of forced book dissection or compare and contrast garbage.
Confirmed: Twitter Acquires Summize Search Engine
It is great that you are enthusiastic! I recommend seeing if you can find someone who can serve as your mentor and who can give you some advice when you hit whatever bumps your business will encounter. Having the ability to call on someone who has already been tripped up will help immensely.
Technically not a "failure" lesson, but the most universal thing I've learned so far: there is a LOT of startup advice out there, some of it contradictory, which makes sense when you read it... but you don't TRULY understand until you experience it. Which in some cases might be too late :p