skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you've ever read How To Win Friends And Influence People, you've probably noticed that every principle comes with a little story. The reason they include the story is to help you remember the principle. So, for example, they will say to remember people's names, and then there will be a little story like "Ben Franklin always remembered people's names. This one time..."

The only point of Seth's post is to remind you of the principles from his books. It's not meant to say anything new, and it's not supposed to mean anything to you if you haven't read his books.
Porn passed over as Web users become social: author
My brain is too full of internet memes; I keep on expecting to see a video of some banker huddling under a blanket and crying "leave Wall Street alone!"
Sadly, Wall Street has traditionally rewarded companies for being competent.

Welllllll.. I guess it's a good thing they hired lots of incompetent senior executives in the last decade, that should bring in plenty of interesting change as they bypass the 'competent' processes and try out new things!

PS: More seriously, I don't buy this one-dimensional definition of competence. I think you can be competent and innovative at the same time - I think I am. I don't think you can reduce risks to near-zero and be innovative at the same time, of course, but I don't think "not failing" is a necessary element of "competence".
Just to be fair, however, he's young. I think most of us have been there. We've taken the path less trodden (self employment, working at a startup, etc.) and we've had doubts. In order to counteract those doubts, we need to act as if the "other way" is stupid, that we're better, and that we're doing the right thing.

I think that's what this guy is doing. He's young, he's confident (to a point), but he lacks the wisdom and ability to reflect that comes with age.

So while it's easy to call him "ignorant", a "douche bag", or whatever - he's not willingly being any of those things. He's young, cocky, and exuberant - like most of us were.

(Of course, when /we/ were acting the same way, we were probably getting called out the same way too.. so this process might actually be necessary to develop that wisdom ;-))
I could understand if you just wanted to write some thoughts down as quickly as possible (hi AIM), but normally those are converted in to rough drafts and then in to finalized copy.
Is this guy's startup profitable or is it dependent on that superfluous 'investment capital' stuff?
In this case can Sam be forgiven being young and naive? So far it seems he has only experienced lifes "ups" and is surrounded by people who have yet to fail (in any significant way) with ego/attitude to match that such lack of hubris brings, hence the mentality.
Agreed. They have families and kids and rent. When half your friends are living and working in NYC...this has been a really rough week.
The hard way is to change your user-agent to a search crawler

Google would delist them if they did that. Google indexes the text on the bottom of the page, the rest of the page is images.
You can see my comment below for a short list. Art of the Start is a great place to begin. It covers everything with a very pragmatic approach and is very easy to read. "The Power of Unfair Advantage" is a great book that I don't often hear people talking about. I just don't think it's that well known. I highly recommend it.
Backblaze makes it dead simple to backup your files online
There is no such thing as a conservative banking job at these companies. All of these firms have strongly cyclical business, resulting in aggressive hiring and regular layoffs, and think nothing of canning an entire department if they don't need it any more. Also, at higher levels, the odds of being sacked out of the blue for political reasons increase greatly (e.g. new VP arrives, fires the next tier of management and brings his friends from his last company).
Also, if you work in IT you risk being made the scapegoat for some failure outside your control (note the rating agencies trying to blame the subprime crisis on bugs in their ratings code). And if you do get canned, it's merciless - I've seen it happen to people on holiday, people who have just signed mortgages, and so on. These people are escorted from the building by security and then forgotten.
You also have to contend with the risk of burnout, one of the reasons why there are relatively few employees above the age of 30.

You have to do exceptionally well to receive the grand salaries and bonuses, as these are heavily skewed towards the minority of top-ranked employees. Plus, for every 'master of the universe' there are 10 people in compliance, legal, audit, helpdesk, facilities, hr, IT, back office, etc slaving away.

Going into wall st is an aggressive career choice.
My email is also in my profile.
The Venetian and Athenian systems were good, but today's modern Swiss style direct democracy is something to think about as well.

Also, great info thanks for the posts.
That's awesome, especially one month-ish after launch. Congrats!
If he uses "fuck" and "shit" that much in a presentation, I wonder how frequent they are in normal conversation?
max. If that's the way forward, then I'm open to an arrangement like that. My first concern with that though, is that it sounds like an employee, not a co-founder. I've been working on a project as a solo founder for about 5 months now, and not having anyone else to turn to when I'm out of gas is just brutal. My worry would be that an arrangment like this would create a hired gun mentality. I'm not looking for an employee to supervise. I'm looking for someone with skills that compliment my own to lean on as we explore an opportunity.
just wrote you.
> "Rails is the hot shit"
I actually spit my coffee with that!
I really don't understand it either.

Currently looking at the top stories, his article on fastcompany is #2 and the blog post he wrote about the article on fastcompany is #3.

What's wrong with this picture?
Uhh... I don't think that word means what you think it means.

If you replace 'competent' with 'reliable', the article reads a lot better. But I still pretty much completely disagree with everything he's saying.
Hmm. Seems to me that Toyota is doing pretty well being "competent" by his definition.
Right. The Seattle Times had an article a while back (http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/favorfactory/), which has a database of earmarks and contributions from companies and executives/owners/etc. of companies. Often you will see contributions from high-level company officers. The data isn't good enough to show causality, but some correlation.

Anyway...interesting stuff.
Just wrote you. Thanks.
Homespring: A Salmon-oriented Programming Language Spec [pdf]
"You can see that Homespring programs have a very poetic and expressive
quality. Although it is said that artists must suffer for their work, this does
not apply to HOtMEfSPRIbNG as suffering is not included among its features."
The problem you are facing is that if you find anyone, this person is not motivated by a burning passion for your idea, whatever it is, but for financial gain. You are partnering with someone who is motivated by money, but who does not have any ideas of his own. In my opinion, this is an inherently risky co-founder. What if a better opportunity comes along? What happens when times get tough?

You can only found a company with someone who either completely believes in the idea and who will stick with the idea when times get tough, or someone who is secure and will do the work, and hopes for a payout in the end, but for whom the payout is not important.

The middle-road - cofounding with someone who just cares about the financial aspect of it, is a very risky thing. You'll lose the person quickly.

In any case, you have an idea, and you have a concept. When you co-found with someone, who makes the final decision? What happens when there is a disagreement and the other guy decides to fork your project?

It's not that easy to co-found.
It's easy to confuse the value banks create with the money they have on hand. For example, take a look at bank of america. They earn about 1.80 for every share outstanding, and there are about 4.5 billion shares. so BofA creates about 8.1 billion of value every year (given todays rates). So with a loss of a trillion dollars, it would take BofA 123 years to make that back.

You have to remember, banks take a tiny fraction of a ton of money. They make the promise, give me a buck today, and i'll give you back $1.02 in a year, with no risk. You created all the value in the initial dollar, they just make the 2 cents. So, when a bank doesn't even give you your dollar back, they wipe out a ton of value.
"You can see that Homespring programs have a very poetic and expressive
quality. Although it is said that artists must suffer for their work, this does
not apply to HOtMEfSPRIbNG as suffering is not included among its features."
AIG, the domino that topples all other dominos
http://www.moneyweek.com/investments/stock-markets/lehman-wont-be-the-last-domino-to-topple-is-aig-next-37182.aspx
I disagree, I thoroughly enjoy Seth Godin's posts more so then the average comment or post here on HN. His posts are short, but to the point and memorable.
This is very helpful, useful stuff. As I said, I'm open to discussing arrangements like this, whatever will make the most sense. Ideally I'd find someone who's also passionate about the project and not just potential payout, of course, but we'll see where things lead. Let me know if you're interested.
Just wrote you.
The police spent two months investigating and found that there was insufficient evidence to lay charges. That means that Dr. Wightman is considered to be innocent. If there were a university hearing on this matter, the allegations made against Dr. Wightman would not even be permitted to be introduced.

If Dr. Wightman had been accused of murder, torture, or war crimes, he would never have lost his job.
is there a contest going on to see who can have the biggest rss icon on their site?
Okay, here's what comes to mind based on those criteria: an operating systems, databases, large numerical simulations, intensive graphical manipulations, mind-modeling. Do these sound right?
A scientific inquiry into the WTC dust
Counter opinion from a secular Turkish physicist:

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/08/13/taner_edis/ind...

He thinks Islam-science scholars are selective in their representation of medieval Islamic science, and overemphasis their similarities with us.
It's fun using technology in a manner which it is not intended.

A sentiment I can applaud. Bravo!
most textbook authors don't make that much money from the text books they write. It's more of a prestige thing. Unless you're Serge Lang or Thomas Hungerford, I suppose...
I always got the impression that the goal with Java was to make bad programmers better, not to create the ultimate language

And you would be correct...

http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/m...
"Not so long ago, companies were filled with incompetent workers."

Seth, please come and visit the company I work for. You will find little has changed.
"Forget BMW , meet the Scion!"
My Boss is Adamant about Using a WYSIWYG Editor to Code HTML.  How do I Change his Mind? 
My Boss is Adamant about Using a WYSIWYG Editor to Code HTML/CSS. How do I Change his Mind? Any solid arguments with documentation would be greatly appreciated.
Nifty! Good thinking, I like it :)
I'd like to hear about it. Email is in my profile.
Other than the chortling about people losing jobs, I agree with this guy.

Finance and portfolio folk really create little.

They are gamblers in the basic sense: their highest goal is gaining as much as possible in return for as little as possible - the cheapest, easiest way.

It is a curious thing that as many of us grow, the less interested we are in that mindset. Our eyes start to open to the costliest, hardest way.

It's not to be found in investment banking, finance, and the market any more than it is playing the lottery.
Everything You Wanted To Know About Acne
If we need to know about acne and acne treatments it is important that we understand the structure of our skin first. Our skin in normal conditions without the influence of any external or internal factors is supposed to be unblemished and that is why babies have a smooth spotless skin. There are two parts in our skin, epidermis and dermis. Epidermis is the upper part of our skin which is made of skin cells.
Hewlett-Packard to cut 24,600 jobs
i did

Answering affirmative to an either/or question isn't helpful.
To summarize: Be ready. Shift happens.

This makes a lot of people uneasy.
If (if) you don't want to share you knowledge for the benefit of fellow programmers then that's another question.

I share my knowledge for the benefit of fellow programmers at the 10 or so conferences I go to a year, and on my ad-free blog.
This is a very good article, but in reference to what I was saying the other day...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=304624

... this is still not science. This article is just metascience. I'm still cut off from the real scientific literature. I can't see their original figures. I don't know how they pinpointed individual neurons with their probes. I don't know the estimated error of their technique. I don't know whether their sample seems to be large enough, or if there's an obvious bias in it. I can't read their caveats. I can't find out how this relates to the work of their peers, because I can't look up their chain of references.

To fix this I have to pay Science $10 for the right to read their article for one day (presumably the unspoken assumption is that I will print it out), or $150 for a year of Science browsing rights. Of course, that only buys me access to Science, and it's likely that many of this paper's significant references -- including, most importantly, the earlier and more detailed publications by the same authors -- are not Science papers, so they'll cost me extra.

At least MIT hasn't locked their libraries yet, so if I had the time I could go down to Cambridge and read a bunch of articles from MIT's terminals. Not sure I can print them, though, let alone file them electronically for future reference.

All hail PLoS!
I think that Rand and people who agree with her work see perfection as a relative thing. In her books, the "perfect protagonists" are the ones who always live life according to moral values without ever slipping, and who manage to persevere and create great things. That's perfection in her books: always doing your best, and your ACTUAL best rather than a measly excuse of a best. And when the guy mentions perfect people, I think that's what he's talking about.
Yeah, that's the point. It's damn fast now. The "too slow" meme is from decades ago.
They confuse speed with velocity.

We really enjoy your teachings about marketing Seth, just as long as we don't have to repeal Newton's laws to understand them.
WYSIWYG editors aren't perfect and will sometimes produce non-valid HTML/XHTML. its also very difficult to make a very specific change to the structure or style. in only using a WYSIWYG editor, you're ceding control to the editor. your page looks like what it wants it to look like. if you want something more refined or exacting, you have to hand code.
why not just throw the idea out to the public instead of going through an email sharing process?
My little list of perfect people tends to be one of people who do what they feel to be right without compromise. A lot of them are writers: Samuel Beckett and James Joyce are the two novelists of this last century who I'd argue wrote perfect works. Steve Jobs is on my list, absolutely. Even Don LaFontaine: the guy did what he did superbly, and he changed the face of an industry.
What technology elite is he referring to? The Java people? People who, before Rails came out, never would have given Ruby the time of day?

Or is he referring to the ones who spend their spare time using Smalltalk, Lisp, Scheme, Factor, Prolog, Haskell and Erlang? They're small-minded and quick to reject anything the market hasn't accepted? Really?

Those two camps have very different attitudes towards new, unproven ideas.
To be pedantic, there is such a thing as an 'inclusive or'. The two options you gave aren't mutually exclusive, so someone could both like the title and watch the video.
it reminds me about an article of comparing US and German customer support

The US CS have better communication than technical -> "your call is important, the problem will be resolved within 24 hours bla bla bla" ... but things rarely get done

The German CS don't talk much but their competency is high so things get done quickly ... much faster than the US
Maybe because his articles are immune to TL;DR?
I would argue that Adobe knows very well which parts of the web it owns. And yes suprisingly the killer app for flash is video (or was in 2005 ;) ).
No Spare will Travel | ServiceLive Blog
Network Protection without Network Hardware | TechJaws
Obviously, if you consider it's a bad thing you shouldn't need our help to tell him why.
Just tell him your good reasons.
When corporations succeed, it's usually in spite of themselves.

BTW, Seth, being a contrarian doesn't automatically make you brilliant.
Talk about being at the right place at the right time. Taleb may have even timed the release of this new essay.
Am I the only one who is scared to death of hosted backup services? I'm really meant to be OK with having my email spools and document directories on some startup's server?
Mozy is cheaper and more proven. And works on the Mac as well as Windows.
Interested, could you explain, please? E-mail is fedorov@rutgers.edu (also in profile)
BSA IT industry rankings: The countries catching up to the U.S. are not the usual suspects
Righteousness has an amazing ability to align itself with self-interest.

Priceless.
probability user will accidentally sign up to rss feed = size of icon / total screen size
I'm intrigued as well. Please email me at amide [at] yat.ch

Thanks
...until <video> works. Adobe own video on the web at the moment.
Are you guys not paying attention or what? The financial industry is NOT going under. It's doing fine. It's doing what coders would call a refactoring, and it is nowhere near to collapse. And the developers at those industries are certainly not getting laid off. Don't react based off 24pt headlines, first think about the real situation.

And YouNoodle is a slimey business. It may be successful, it may make a lot of money, but I still don't like this parasite businesses who contribute nothing of real value, and get created solely by marketing gimicks.

And a word to Sam: lay off the uppity behaviour till you have had a down. Nobody wants to watch a move where things just go up all the time, it's the middle of the movie, where the hero is doing wretchedly that is the heart of the story.
Ask YC: How to provide an overview of web development to a non-techie?
I volunteered to provide an overview of web development to a friend of mine who is a project manager (not in technology). He wants to start managing web development projects but he does not have a technical background. I put together the following list of things to cover. I would appreciate your advice on this - should I add more? How much detail should I provide and is there any order I should follow? How do I keep my cool when he does not get things, even after explaining a 5th time! TIA

1. Web Servers and Browsers - How websites are served and viewed.

2. HTML and CSS - Show him the basic ingredients to build a HTML page. Tell him what CSS is. And then teach him to build a simple site in Dreamweaver (the guy is not a coder!)

3. Site Layouts and Structure - Explain common layouts used in most websites eg - brochure site, blogs, newspaper sites, ecommerce sites, social news sites, video sites, etc.

4. Design - Not sure what to tell him cos my own design skills suck. I just know its really important.

5. Open Source vs. dot net (maybe I should not even include this)

6. CMS, - Talk about Joomla, Wordpress.

7. Common components used in websites - video, forums, FAQs, user registration

8. Domain names, whois, etc.

9. Different phases of web dev
- A. Requirements, B. Design, C. Build Out, D. Content, E. Testing,
Regarding hirind "quants," I think it's a hit or miss. Quant's are good for throwing numbers through a spreadsheet all day (literally); however, the great ones see the big picture in what they're doing. Most don't.

You may want to look for more, "right-brain thinkers."

http://broadstuff.com/archives/1234-Is-the-Master-of-Fine-Ar...
Clearly this one wins:
http://www.havelaptopwilltravel.com/biggestRSS.html
Have him create an HTML document in MS Word or his WYSIWYG editor of choice with some basic formatting and image placements, and then compare how it looks in three different browsers. Show him the issues involved with troubleshooting the WYSIWYG HTML in a text editor.

Or you could show him this:

http://www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs/main.htm
The Five-minute Rule: 20 Years Later and How Flash Memory Changes the Rules
Windows 7's milestones to nowhere
After the Angels - What the stock market mess means for entrepreneurs (and angels)
if you're going to talk specifically about HTML/CSS to cover markup/styling, you should also maybe mention programming languages to make them understand how things like CMS and such are built.

edit: i'd include this instead of the OS vs .net debate, with possibly the OS vs .net debate as a sub-topic.

i'd also expand the CMS topic to include all software packages, but focus on CMS and similar things.
At my university, the WORST people to work with are the people who love talking. They always argue and want things to go their way, and it just stalls projects. The best are those who simply do what they are supposed to do, quietly and competently.

The problem with the blogging is that it's not the non-communicative ones who are out there talking, it's the ones that love talking.

People who know intricate details about hardware do not have time or inclination to write all the time about it - the audience is small, and usually just as competent.
It's not really much use for OSes unless you're a research project, because the compilers target an OS and not bare metal.

Also, it's slower than C on actual processing (about the speed of Java). So numerical stuff is out, unless the benefits of being parallel outweigh the benefits of being fast. (This may improve as the back-end optimization project shows results.)

I think the perfect target would be any sort of massively multi-user network server.
Just have one text field for the url you want to shorten. When the user clicks submit, then give two urls. One is the shortened url, the other is for analytics. Make the analytics url publicly accessible and have a button on that page to make it private -- for a cost!
Maxklein,

Saying Muslims did not inherit a big portion of their tradition and culture from Arabs is like saying Africans did not inherit tradition and culture from colonials.

Now, I am both African and Muslim since birth. If you look at my username it says Rokhaya which is 100% Arabic and Kebe which is a common last name in West Africa.

Out of the 9 main languages in my country you will find plenty Arabic words in each one of them, yet you will not find as much of one language in another.

Secondly we are thought to memorize everything in academia and that we are able to do mostly because before going to school we spent our early days memorizing the Koran. Not understanding, not even being able to read in some cases, but memorizing the parchments.

Can you please explain further your statement and give some examples, and I will be able to go even further.
Y Combinator Challenge #24 - A Buffer Against Bad Customer Service
Tons of official pics and specifications of GM Volt Electric Car
> Java developers want less money than Lisp developers.

This wasn't true even 5 years ago. People flooded into Java/J2EE because it was considered 'Enterprise' and paid a lot more than alternatives.

Even today Java pays more than .NET or Rails and certainly PHP in large companies.