skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(Building) Architecture may be an anomaly to Matt's belief that the new generation is better, but I've noticed a precipitous decline in ability of graduating architecture students over the last decade. Its so bad now that I simply can't afford to hire anyone right out of school because the cost to my firm of both extensive training and loss from mistakes is so high. The problem I see is architecture schools focusing on trends in aesthetics such as deconstruction rather than teaching students how to actually build a building. This is probably different than CS schools in that the deconstruction philosophy necessitates divorcing building from reality, which hopefully there are no parallels for in CS programs.
I can say, having a newborn, that polyphasic sleep in some looser form is real, necessary, and practiced in some form by both newborns and the mothers and fathers who care for them.
Thats my name, laugh all you what but still those building exploded.
why not just auto-copy everything to AWS and do checks for uptime of your host. Then if the check fails, auto-forward the url to the AWS location.

This way if it hits the fan, the only problem the users will notice is the 5 mins of downtime between the checks, before the site becomes slower due to the switch to AWS

But then again I don't really know hardware so could be wrong. But from what I understand should be possible
Key activity indicators of successful companies
> In ten years, some of you will be rich, successful and powerful. Most of you -- despite all of your hard work and independence -- won't be.

So why spend 60 hours a week in a suit under fluorescent lights in an 8' x 8' cube either way?
Some are gold (the one about his breakfast for instance), but the vast majority are trash.
While this is a great defense of Matt and people like him, the people described by the WSJ absolutely exist.
Hey to whomever down voted this comment: down voting it doesn't make "who" right when it should be "whom". Down vote this all you want, it does not change the Queen's english darling.
I prefer an n810 (great screen, hardware keyboard, Linux) with internet access over bluetooth and a small cell phone.
But even they're better off than their parents. Their parents toiled away their lives in abject poverty while someone else benefited from their labor. The lower end of our generation spends their lives playing Guitar Hero and various extreme sports in abject poverty while nobody really benefits from their labor.

At least from a selfish perspective, that's a vast improvement. I'd rather be poor and have fun than be poor and work all the time. In fact, I'd prefer it to being rich and working all the time.

Neither are as good as having fun and making a decent (or beyond) living, especially if you can make working fun too. So yeah, I'm lucky to be in that group.
Actually, now that you mention it, I suppose it is possible to overdose on homeopathics.

Moreover, there is a significant side effect: A financial one. That's why I prefer to advocate DIY homeopathics. If yours don't seem to be working, try making them by the light of the full moon. No kidding.
Right, we'll all be happier. It's not about being rich, it's about being the primary beneficiaries of our labor and striking a proper work-life balance.
Well said. Wishing you wouldn't have censored yourself. I read your comment before you removed the last line. It hit home very well, imo.
Google dives into subconscious marketing
What about things like solving the 4-color problem? Even within pure mathematics there are plenty of cases where programming is useful. There would probably be more if the average math PhD had better programming skills.

Definitely Java is not the right way to go - for a mathematician I'd recommend something more like Python or Mathematica.
provide some value.

there doesn't really appear to be anything there that provides anything there that isn't already readily available in other places.

Aggregating market information is good, but there is so much out there that does it already that it'd be better to have even ONE thing that gives someone a unique reason to go to markets.com
Thanks ! I have my fingers corssed :)
Segway's new hyperdirectional RMP robot
A quick and dirty guide to starting up
The only comparison of Gmail's new emoticons with other options anyone is likely to do
Added it back. Thanks.
OK so it is doable, good.
It's less obvious to those that don't have an idea of what they want to do, esp straight out of college with no work experience.
Perhaps. Just try to remember that yours is not the first generation to pursue these goals.
Specialization (and REST)
It’s also largely intellectual activity, which is considerably more fatiguing than routine physical tasks. Jobs in information technology might look a lot easier than manual labor to an outside observer, but they’re not. Burnout sets in much faster...

Has Matt ever worked full-time in a factory or as a cashier at a busy grocery store? Nobody is disputing that intellectual work is challenging, but most physical labor involves a level of soul-sucking tedium and repetition that I'd suspect anyone with a college-to-cubicle story can't even imagine.

I'd add that my experience is that these environments are also often ruled with a totalitarianism that makes the worst office job look positively cozy.
This comment reminds me of two friends I've got:

One finished a graduate degree in English last spring. She is now working as an admin assistant for $28k a year. People told her that she had too much of a sense of entitlement, when all she wants is a job doing what she's now very qualified to do: write. She is getting a teaching certification because public schools hire English majors and apparently no one else does.

The other has three degrees in business (two associates and a bachelors). He wants to be a manager, so he's applying for jobs as a manager. He has no experience (he worked as a sacker in a grocery store for about five years, but that's it), no skills (other than supposedly "management"), but since he has a degree in management, he thinks he can just jump right into it. Of course, this hasn't worked out for him so far, so he's working phone support for an ISP and living with his parents, rather than take a job beneath him (I've actually gotten him a higher-paying job at my company, and he didn't even show up for the interview).

One of these people has a pretty large sense of entitlement, the other one just doesn't want to use her masters degree as a secretary.
The Republican Party has spent the last 28 years systematically destroying unions.

The decline of the unions had much more to do with 1) competition from the American south, Mexico, and Asia, and 2) the rise of an American tribute empire, where America's primary export is debt that then gets inflated away. This enriched those connected to the debt creation ( Wall St, government workers at all levels, licensed occupations, people in real estate) but devastated manufacturing.
Has there ever been a generation which hasn't claimed "This time, things will be different!"? If you'll look back on what was written caustically about (and in rebuttal by) the Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers, I'm not seeing much difference now.

There are going to be a few of us in each generation which set out to be entrepreneurs and will tenaciously stick by that world-view our entire lives. The readers of this board are a self-selecting group (and aren't necessarily representative of the latest set of graduates) but many will still end up employee grist for the cubicle mill after their first dozen major setbacks.
MIT Venture Capital Conference Entrepreneur Showcase Signups (30 startups)
matt, really well done, right or wrong the points are strong and presented in a very interesting manner. I've read a lot of your blogs here on yc news and have rarely agreed with you, in Maroon vs. WSJ article, I'm all in on Maroon.
SoftLayer is an amazing US host. They have a quality service, the support is great, and the price isn't bad, although they do have their 'premium'. I can't vouch for how they'd act with legal matters, but I'm sure the sales reps can give you a good idea.

Don't go with PRQ. I've had a server with them before, and their support is nonexistant, and the speeds are nothing amazing. We've once waiting 3 months for a RAM upgrade.

Leaseweb is good if you need a cheap, decent server. They stand up for their clients in legal matters, and the speeds are pretty good.

I've had dedicated servers with all of these hosts, and all my reviews are based on first hand experience.
I'm an Xer (75). Let me just say that based on my experience, which includes a few years in management, the WSJ article is an accurate and fair description of the millennial generation (from a purely stereotypical pov).

Now, that's not to say I disagree with Matt. He does however use many counter arguments that are more applicable to Xers than millenials (Yers). Yer's have never seen much of economic downturn, and the "meager, middle class lifestyles" they been living are have showered them with seemingly endless material wealth.

I think Matt has misread most of the WSJ article, to be honest.
"Prescribing" homeopatic treatments in mock cases instead of real drugs is actually an incredibly neat idea. I can't believe the doctors didn't already think of it. It makes everyone happy. (Except sometime down the road, when someone attempts to heal something serious with homeopatic medicine...but I suppose that is already a problem.)
I can't tell if that's a compliment or a slam.
One word: Security.

When you get married and have kids, you'll see how much more important that word becomes.
Architecture has been in awful state for the past 80 years. Just compare buildings built in the 20th century to those in the 19th century. My girlfriend is getting her masters in architecture now and it's an awful waste of money. She's learned a lot about "aura" and generating weird building designs from algorithms, but precious little about how to create buildings people would enjoy living in. The schools should be shut down and boarded up before they do any more damage, and the architecture profession should return to an apprenticeship system.
What makes you think that I'm not married and without kids? In fact, I value my free time more knowing I can spend it with my wife and daughter.
Err, excuse me. I've taken my daughter to A&E (the UK equivalent of ER) a couple of time in her life due to high fever and a very nasty hacking cough. On both occassions, they prescribed ibuprofen, liquids and on one occassion put her in a cooling bath to reduce temperature.

On both occassions I was satisfied: I was pretty sure that it was a viral infection, but with a temperature that high, I wanted to be sure. I would be bloody annoyed if the docs prescribed unnecessary antibiotics. Not all patients are dense and doctors shouldn't treat us as if we are - that just spreads ignorance.

Actually, we are lucky over here now. NHS is a really very good phone consulting service. You phone up with a sick child and they take you through a very VERY detailed list of symptoms and questions. This phone service has saved me a couple of night trips to the hospital since it started.
I think you've got your generations a little mixed up.

Millenials are children of boomers. Boomers in no way have spent their lives "in abject poverty while someone else benefited from their labor".

Boomers spent most of their lives getting high and partying in the ultimate self indulgence. That's why their kids are the way they are.

Now, if you're X, you're parents were kids during either the depression or the war, and as such the values from those times run strong in you. (Added to that the fact that you're always eating the boomers scraps)
lucky for me, my university (northeastern) teaches both java and scheme. I think one of the guys who wrote HtDP is a northeasstern comp sci professor.

Intro to comp sci is scheme, honors freshman comp sci is java, and I think down the road it branches off into assembly, C++ (which I know engineering students take alongside MatLab), and Lisp. I could be wrong, but I'm in engineering (switching into comp sci and cog psych).
I use to work for a newspaper. At the time (might show my age here) newspapers were switching from traditional cut and paste/film-plate production to digital composition. I had to push and push just get the newspaper to think about stopping the use of knives to cut and paste content and start using digital layouts. The management basically refused to change. Being inside the industry I know they saw the digital age coming - and even though they knew it was inevitable - just like the Trains business of yesterday that didn't realize that they were transportation companies not just train companies - newspapers took to long to understand that they are more than print. From my point of view newspapers should have lead the drive to the online content world instead they stuck to their print... Like I've heard before - its easier to kill a business than it is to fix it.
Excellent article.

Governments around the world have intervened massively on the supply side.

Because in their flawed logic, more science and engineering graduates == more innovation and prosperity for everybody!

But anyone who knows economics 101 knows how silly that is, all that this massive intervention on the supply side has done, is depress pay for scientists and engineers.
Same here. Amazingly well written post.
A experience for myself was that I could relate so closely to the post and the sentiments even though I sit here in India.

My parents who fall into the majority middle class educated white collar segment have toiled their 35+ years of work experience hoping for a rosy day, which they would have never seen if we, trophy kids had not changed our attitude and ambition.

PS: Even here miles apart our parents dealt with us - trophy kids - in the exact same way described on wsj - lot of appraisals & proud moments, challenging higher achievement all through.

Another interesting connection I do feel is the outsourcing mundane tasks to India part, though it happens in-house or the company next door. Which implies in India there is a gray segment of the generations that exists.
Interview with Egnyte: secure on-demand file server for SMBs - over 1000 customers in 8 months
Fair enough, but many people value their next paycheck more than the free time.

You asked why we should toil away as an employee for someone else, and that's the answer. Being an entrepreneur is risky business.
Summary: Turning to a wholey raw vegan diet appears to have affected my cognition adversely.
I think there used to be a different balance between various things. You could expect to find a 'good company', dedicate a lot of your live to it, and be more or less reciprocated. These days, it's "every man for himself". In Europe, they have, in some places, attempted to legislate this relationship, which I don't agree with, but sometimes I feel there may be something we are missing out on in terms of long term, loyal employer/employee relationships. I'm not sure I'd want that myself, having pretty much grown up with the hopping around + brutal layoffs style common in tech, but still... it makes you think.
There's much less security in working for a big company than most people think there is. Just ask any of the 760,000 people laid off so far this year.
Tech Layoff Tips
Sorry, but I have to say: I'll Dreddit...
Beta Testers wanted new Blackberry Site, Pinota
Ask HN: Is there a name for the 'web shortcut' services? (tinyurl, tinypaste, cli.gs, etc)
Other than 'web shortcuts', is there an umbrella category name for tinyurl and the resulting offshoot services?<p>This feels like an interesting niche blog to start.<p>[Full disclosure: I created look.fo and str8.to]
When I investigated a low cost solution like this before, the issue was big companies like AOL not honoring TTL's less than 24 hours. Is this still the case?
I think that's exactly it. It's just taken a couple of generations to adapt to this new reality.

My parents (well, my mom at least, my dad was an entrepreneur) would never quit their jobs. This was something that was unheard of. Xer's would be happy with whatever job came their way. Now, the millenials are fully understanding that their jobs are about as secure as their car parked in the bad part of town.

Honestly, corporations have changed how they treat their employees, and so the employees are adapting.
In the long term, working on your own projects using the latest technologies and latest editions of popular languages, and having projects to show for it, will give you much more experience and credibility than working at a company for the same amount of time.

Over the years, I'm sure early adapters of Java, .Net, Ajax, Rails, Django, and Objective C did not have a hard time finding jobs. Companies typically try to convert existing developers to use new languages, and an employee hired for this knowledge will be an expert. A startup using the latest technologies will want to hire employees who already possess this knowledge. Finally, a user experimenting with new technologies might decide that he or she is so far ahead of companies who are still using old technology that he or she should start a business.
call em plinks <-- cause it's cute

short for hop-links maybe?
New Sat Nav Service - From Europe
MANY physicists still code in fortran. Its blazing fast for the numerics they do and pretty simple to learn. I personally would just teach them C, but there are sooo many math libraries written in Fortran that it has a lot of momentum in the physics community.
And that's certainly the way the younger generations see it - so why not do your own thing? (Hey, I agree)

But given that most businesses require more work and eventually fail, taking a job is still much more secure. Perhaps this will change in the coming years, but not yet.
I believe it's neither. Both end the sentence in a preposition, 'for'. If you want to be accurate (which I guess you do, since you posted) then it is "for whom you work".
I couldn't tell whether this entry was satire or not. It started getting a little over-the-top at "If we seem to have high self-esteem, it’s because we’re better."

Regardless, I don't see why the original article merits a response. There will always be people who don't like you, think you have it too easy, and are willing to paint a whole generation with that brush. Ignore them. There's little you can say that'll make them change their minds, and usually they'll just take your rebuttal as evidence of entitlement or arrogance anyway. Actions speak louder than words.
Tipjoy starts giving out gold stars
He isn't always right, but experience has taught me that he is more often right than wrong.
Well, poor people starving as usual is all part of the plan, so no one notices. This stuff isn't in the plan.
I'm sorry if I came across as condescending. That was not my intention at all. I went to an Urgent Care 2 years ago, I waited for 2 hours, only to be told that I should take Tylenol, get rest and drink fluids. I was very upset.

I don't think those expectations are the fault of the patient. It's a natural extension of our drive-thru, fast-food.

At very least, I've found those expectations to be common in most of the 20+ hospitals/ER's that I've worked in over the past 15 years.

I field at least 3-4 calls a night asking for advice. I am not allowed to give any advice over the phone because of liability reasons. People's only option in the middle of the night is to go to the ER and wait their turn which creates frustration and high expectations. It's a bad system, not bad patients.
Embrace real constraints, not artificial ones
I think they are referred to by there services. Like tinyurl is a tinyurl. But if you wanted to coin plink I'll support it! Only 1,499,999,999 internet users to go
Yes so did I. To me it means the title of the article was speculative at best. Inaccurate is another word one could use.
US for sale
I'm a big fan of Mechanical Turk after my last project: http://iamelgringo.blogspot.com/2008/09/mechanical-turk-now-...
Right... it's a problem with solutions at different equilibriums (I'm not sure of the exact way to phrase that), and I'm not sure that what we are moving towards is necessarily the best for all people/jobs/companies: sure, there's more flexibility and responsiveness, but as an employee, I have figured out at this point that I don't really have any more loyalty to an employer than they are likely to have for me, and perhaps we both lose out because of it in some ways, at least for certain combinations of people/jobs/companies.
>In the long term, it's less risky than working

Bullshit. For every single Paul Graham there are hundreds of entrepreneurs living in abject poverty, wondering how they'll feed their kids or where they get the money to pay the mortgage.

You're taking a very small subset of extremely bright, assertive go getters and insinuating that this is the norm. It is not, and statistics show this.
Ditto. Maybe that was the point?

I'll give him a compliment, because whilst this advice maybe obvious, it is extremely difficult to follow, and it is useful. IMO that makes it a worthy post.

I have followed this advice once, and it was really tough to do, but ultimately I'm very glad I did.
ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet
I don't mean "when I used the internet, we didn't have mice, we had to click with our heads!" I mean do you remember the feeling in your chest as you discovered new things every day that blew you away as cool. Like discovering that your home town has a web site or that you could "Post" on-line and talk to people. Do you remember that feeling? I think it's like a drug because ever since I've been looking for that again and the best we got today is news about things outside the internet... i.e. blogs. Sites used to be about "Visit my Homepage" not they are "See the Celebrity news on my Blog". Do you miss the old days?
Being right about the obvious most of the time isn't hard. It's like predicting a startup will fail.

It's much more impressive when you're right when everyone else (at the time) thought you were wrong.
I am not sure that being poor and playing Guitar Hero wears less on the nerves than being poor and working, in the long run. I admit I've never tried either.
I'm not sure that what we are moving towards is necessarily the best for all people/jobs/companies:

That I think is the key. Everyone figures that it'll be great when we're all sitting around in our pj's "working", but will it? We're talking about a change to the fundamental nature of our society. There will be winners and losers, but that's a very different world from the one we know.
Sounds like a startup opportunity for Factory 2.0 ;~).
how about urlets (not sure how one would pronounce that)