skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think a lot of points in the article made sense.

Salary might not be as good a measure of college value as how each individual student feels about the school they attended and their performance in the real world many years later. Related, there was one example of a student who felt that attending community college gave him a chance to feel more confident than he might have otherwise. (He does not say this directly, but being around students who were like him and with similar abilities made him more confident, as well.)

Also, the majors offered at MIT are different than those at typical schools, which could alone account for your average salary statistic.

Next, I would not be surprised if students from top universities are more likely to work in big cities than those who are from schools in the middle of the country, accounting for cost of living differences and local job opportunities.

Finally, if salary is a factor, then the cost of college should be, as well.

I think success at MIT would be that a student found the coursework challenging, opportunities plentiful, and made lots of smart friends, and not a potential salary or prestige. And I think those same factors are also important for most students who succeed from other schools; in other words, doing things that make them happy.
Good suggestion, thanks!

http://somanyschemes.com/2008/12/01/me-iphone-eniac/
Alexa has never been a good measure of traffic.

My blog has a much higher Alexa rank than pownce but has half the unique hits (based on numbers given above). I skewed my rank myself using the SearchStatus plugin for Firefox.
Should Startups Focus on Growth or Profits?
Right yes I don't think GWT is really interested in desktop - unless like you say you compile it, but then its quite different.

I have run it hosted just fine with no eclipse components (only for dev of course) - just the JVM and about 10 meg of jars (or 9 meg dev jar) - I am not sure where you get the 150 meg from though?
I can imagine. I only ever wrote one fanfiction piece, so that wasn't up my alley, but at the governor's school I attended, we'd read HP fanfiction aloud at night (this was right before Deathly Hallows), and FictionAlley was one of the big ones.

That is so cool.
Linux Kernal on the iPhone — Does Android Dominate the Mobile Future?
BitTorrent at War With VoIP? Hardly
+1. This is not a failure. Granted, I dont know what their total investment was, and whether they got any $$ from Six Apart to cover that investment, but personally for those two this will probably end up more in the success columns.

Tried something awesome against entrenched competitors. Made progress, and accomplished a lot. It didnt work out, but they got some sort of payout and immediate jobs! For the founders this is a lukewarm win, but still a win, I would think.
If you're connected, you get featured.

There are plenty of folks out there (even young folks, say 20-30) who are making millions each year from businesses they're not shouting about. They don't get the same sort of self-serving press these digital socialites get, but they're still raking in the dough and having real success.

Entrepreneurs have to make a decision. They can either be part of the in-set and get a constant ego boost from the press, or they can just get on with running their business. The smartest people choose the latter.
C++ was (and is) pretty widely used - even in places where java is now (the dreaded enterprise, yes C++ was very big there too).
My parents almost never gave me any money directly. My dad did teach me to sell though. From 12-16 I made some of my money selling misc things at flea markets and the like on weekends.

Probably some of the most valuable entrepreneurial learning I ever got was standing in front of a booth trying to convince people walking around to come over and buy something.

I probably had a half dozen "businesses" with different friends and family before I was 18. Much better than an allowance.
Or social connections. Given Kevin Rose's involvement, it was next to impossible for Pownce not to get more press than it deserved.
only if your company is trucking in low-iq monkey work...which covers 99% of the "startups" today
Ad-supported sports "betting"
If you wonder about feature articles, read this: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Anyone have any insight on how exactly Six Part benefits by closing down Pownce? If Twitter bought Pownce to kill it, I'd understand... but what's in this for Six Apart?
Worst comes to worst, I leave college for a year or two

and chances are, like most dropouts, you won't return. then you won't have a viable website business or a degree. four years later you are stacking shelves at borders. one day you are asked to create a display for a book by paul graham and you just lose it and uzi the whole mall as you realize how you were guided down this path. i crack me up
Why the sky is in fact NOT falling: http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=379206#p379206
ditch college and build your project

guess what, there are two things you can't do in a "startup" that you can do in college....smoke a bowl at the dorm and get laid by women out of your league.
and then there's always...gasp! taking a history course so you don't spend the rest of your days as another dumbass voter getting your info from cnn

but if you would rather slave away on a pointless website, there's always porn breaks i guess

why do people on this site piss on college so much??? ITS FUN CHILDREN. YOU GET TO MEET PEOPLE
there be dragons in online conceptions of gender

And how! There are plenty of biomales who nonetheless consider themselves female, and would probably be well-served by a site like this. What's the value in keeping them out?

Gender is not always so strictly binary.

I don't think you really need to worry overmuch about keeping out men. If you just say it's a "site for women" and make sure to have lots of offerings on topics that you know will attract a largely female audience, you'll probably find that you don't have a problem. http://shine.yahoo.com has an almost entirely female audience, and they certainly don't do anything to keep out anyone. Most men won't want to visit a site that's marketed towards women.

And anyway, what's really the harm if men visit your site?
I'm glad Malcolm wrote this because I was starting to think that I was the only person who thought that the term MVC was not well understood and differed from the original meaning.

When it comes to most people's use of the term, MVC means little more than separating business logic from display logic, plus an ad hoc definition of controller.
I did think of that, and while some are all-male, it was hard to tell with the rest because they had no obvious author list.

Even so, the 'various' blogs are in a minority, so even if every one had a female author, it'd be heavily biased towards men. It's no wonder we have so many women in the industry when those that are don't talk about it.
Looking at the comments, I have only one thought: Pownce was thrown to the sharks!
Well, PR had a lot to do with Kevin's notoriety. Sure he had a good start from TechTV (though apparently not enough to keep him on the air there), but there was a well-orchestrated (and expensive) PR campaign there too. I should know.
Google’s Operating System Arrives - But Not From Google
Safari AdBlock doesn't work nearly as well. It's less intuitive - very sadly, considering Safari itself is quite intuitive.

Also, Safari's got some stability issues. Maybe it's just Safari 4, but I've been having some irritating crashes recently.
A little love for Posterous (YC Summer 08)
http://www.ugosweb.com/jiprolog/index.aspx
she can be airbrushed to resemble a real woman, thats why she was on the cover of mit tech review, another toilet paper mag for the psuedo-intellectual crowd
Flagged as FUD.

Seriously, read the other links... the whole thing is just flamebait.
The main advantage I can think of is that git makes it much easier to try out crazy and potentially embarrassing ideas. If you want to do this in svn, you create a branch, which exists on the server, which is visible to everyone else (though I guess many won't have it checked out). And when you commit, you need to be online, unless you've got something like svk.

In git, you just create a local branch, try it out, and see if you like the results. If you do, you can have a buddy pull your new branch and see if he likes them, and if everything's good, merge it into master. If you don't, just delete the local branch and nobody's the wiser. Also makes for really quick commits while you're trying things out.
So how is this supposed to work with the hundreds of such super-simple sites? Am I supposed to bookmark each and everyone of them?

This type of information belongs on a mobile device or something that aggregates them together, but as an independent website, there are too many such simple websites for me to bookmark them and find later effectively.

The web is no longer an effective application distribution channel, because when you 'choose' an app, it does not remember you 'chose' it. It simply disappears within my 2000 or more bookmarks.

The system is broken, things are not simple.
blogsalot != knowsalot
Bad branding? Even before I knew what it was, I had a sense of what a Twitter was. Pownce sounds like I'm about to get ambushed.
This is quite an accusation, could you please back it up? I assume you use OO also?
'git mv' for moving files, and I'm overly dependent upon 'git status' for checking what's changed.
One way you could test this is to datamine Google's or Microsoft's usenet archive. You could track if users behaved in less social ways in more troll-tolerant newsgroup (i.e. track say a million users and compare their behaviour across different newsgroups). It could also be done across time for individual newsgroups to remove any bias inherent in the topic of the group.
Yeah, I guess you're right. I'm actually in the latter camp myself (although I'm not < 30 anymore).

I'm honestly not bugged personally about any lack of press. Having a successful company with no press is much better than the opposite (like you said).

I think my main beef is with the press itself (not the companies). I enjoy reading Inc mag ... but I was suspect as soon as that issue dropped in my mailbox. I knew Pownce wasn't "hot" and that it probably wouldn't last. Aren't they worried about looking stupid when crap like this happens?

I wish a Inc (or someone) would send 1 good journalist and 1 good photographer together on a road trip to profile a dozen tech startups that (a) aren't in NYC or the Valley, (b) have substantial revenue or growth and (c) haven't set out to be the "Next [INSERT UNPROFITABLE SOCIAL NETWORK/UTILITY]" ... it would actually be an educational and interesting read.
I should point out that hg is perfectly capable of maintaining multiple named branches in the same physical repository. Checkout hg branch. I am not that familiar with bzr but it probably has something similar.
Yeah? Why are grades that important? They show that you can do things after a professor tells you how to do it, and that you're good at busywork.

Project work shows initiative at the very least. But again: I'm not doing it for a resume. I'm going it because I have a good idea and I want to realize its potential.
But gender is ALWAYS "just ask and trust them", isn't it? Are you going to check their crotch? Or their hormone levels? Or their chromosomes? It's a bit silly, isn't it?

There is a sizable population on the net that likes to pose as female.

Not just on the net. I'd argue that the only reason it's so much more sizable on the internet is that gender-bending is so much cheaper there.
awesome! i never thought of that. thanks.
We can't keep stepping backwards to support changing processor technologies. Concurrency should be abstracted away from the programmer, and handled on a compiler level, irrespective of your programming language.
I found this particular paragraph to be not right somehow:

Programmers are unlike many types of workers in that the best ones actually prefer to work hard. This doesn't seem to be the case in most types of work. When I worked in fast food, we didn't prefer the busy times.

Who are the people who are "best at" fast food? I think perhaps you mean that people who build things get enjoyment out of building -- perhaps more precisely, of seeing their built item in action. I think programmers in particular are used to having short feedback loops between building and trying out, and that pattern of building up and testing as you go until a larger problem is solved is a strong motivation.

I guess I'm claiming that harder-working isn't really the issue. The issue seems to be who is having more fun. And in that sense, your claims still make sense. Part of the fun of building is a short feedback cycle. More checks in the process make the feedback cycle longer, therefore less fun. That explains why teachers' like their jobs. You can see it in someone's face when they learn something new.
CBS and CNET to adopt Facebook Connect
Why are grades that important? They show that you can do things after a professor tells you how to do it, and that you're good at busywork

why are you telling me this? just drop the fuck out now and save the money you are pissing away on tuition if you are convinced its all just a waste of time

but get used to being self-employed, because without that degree you won't even get through filter0 for any recruiter or hiring dept. hard to tell a cto how smart you are when the HR staffer shreds your resume because your last education is high school
You see this is what a lot of people get wrong. You think Pownce or X didn't grow because of Twitter or Y? This is a very wrong assumption assuming the world has 1600 million internet users.
It's available on Hulu:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/46689/the-simpsons-mypods-and-boom...

http://www.hulu.com/watch/46718/the-simpsons-think-different...
Crabapple is obviously trolling, but (s)he's got a point: it's a really bad idea to drop of out of college to pursue anything less than an instant success. You'll have plenty of time to chase rainbows once you've finished your degree. I realize that this isn't popular advice amongst the "school is for luzers" crowd that camps out on this site, but every good developer I know had the maturity and perseverance to finish college. It isn't that hard.

Important corollary: you'll never have more free time to pursue personal projects than you do in college. You don't need to quit school to find the time to make a popular website (just ask Rob Malda).
I don't think Ford was "Profitable" in 2005. To be profitable you need to reduce you income by all liabilities you are adding in the future such as pension and heath care. They have been cooking to books for so long it looks like they only recently got into trouble, but an under funded pension is just as much debt as any other loan even if it takes a while to come due.
Ask HN: Review my webapp.
He's right though, on all counts.
You've got my attention. Now can you link to a Simpson's parody you like and explain how the joke is better because it takes informed digs where informed means you have to have used and experienced the product, which may only be a few % of the viewership, to understand the humor?
From what I remember, The Simpsons has parodied everything, even if it works and is sacred. The Simpsons also parodies mainstream culture too, and the Apple has only recently taken its place in the mainstream and not by corrupting what it stands for, but by supplanting cultural values. The Simpsons parodies this uptake of culture. Think of this not as an anti-Apple creed, but as a nod in their direction for having finally arrived on the stage, and not being off in some geeks only enclave.
Agreed. They mentioned that they were working on it on their blog when Chrome was released (bringing chrome to Mac and Linux), so I'm hoping it's still a priority.

http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2008/09/platforms-and-prioriti...
I tend to agree with your sentiment.

Personally, I think Joel has shared some good lessons and insights. However I also think he ran out of really good material about 2 years ago, yet various outlets "demand" more from him.

This tends to happen a lot with almost any person who tries to blog/write too much on any sub-topic. At some point you've exhausted all of your unique datapoints and end up resorting to trying to spin the obvious into new and interesting stories. This is why, among other reasons, I like PG's almost-monthly essay installment schedule. I never feel like he is straining to product content.
That particular problem would imply that consultancies are not a scalable business. There are large consulting firms. So that seems off in one way or another.
i like to hide behind my mysterious username as well.
I think you're missing the real point of these exercises. A good hacker, and anybody else for that matter, performs best when he is secure in the knowledge that he is being trusted and supported by peers and management. putting up drapes is a subtle way of showing thet the CEO will do anything to make you comfortable and make sure you can get work done.

It's not about the most efficient way of cleaning toilets or putting up drapes, it's about psychology.
I don't think any of the startups we've funded care whether someone finished their degree. We certainly don't ourselves.

This is not to say grades are entirely meaningless, though. I've definitely taken a few classes where getting an A took more than obedience.
Two main positives:

* The interface is incredibly slick

* The API looks solid

My big question is, what sets this apart?
>Acquired & Closed != Failed

If that's so, what does == Failed?

I can see how this move might make sense for Pownce's people, but the product itself certainly failed - how else can you define a situation where you're forced to shut down your service?
We're in the process of converting NewsCred to Django. We thought we'd be joining Pownce as one of the few larger-ish startups using Django, but looks like we'll be going at it alone. I was surprised to see the biggest team of Django developers was 10!
From todays HN front page:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=382039
(On page 2 of the article)

"Not everybody gets it. Not long ago, we had a management trainee who sat around waiting for us to give him a formal title and promotion so he could "get stuff done." Problem was, he had never managed to win enough respect or influence from the development team to actually do things. He didn't work out so well; despite being smart and competent, he didn't earn the leadership position he thought he deserved. He would have been better off thinking about new features we should develop, writing specs to outline the benefits of these features, and winning the developers' trust through action instead of waiting for the title.

Another management trainee didn't care what his title was: He came up with a new idea for a program and persuaded the team that it was a good idea. I think he'll go far."
It's Kevin Rose's Internet; we're just using it.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20081101/keeevviin.html
If you are running Linux then iptables (netfilter) can be your friend. Look into the --limit option.

The banning can be made automatically with a script like http://deflate.medialayer.com/

Also they should be able to talk to the hosting company / data center; they may be able to provide the service filtering the DoD traffic right there.
I don't have a college degree and I've been gainfully employed and well-paid for many years now.
Social Innovation Camp (London) needs UI hackers
Good programmers are not lazy
Will uTorrent Really Kill the Internet?
It's good to put a tag line under the logo. The first thing I always will look at is the tag line when I stumble upon a new web application.

And, remove the small gap at the top of the page. Then, your UI will be near to be perfect.
The whole site would be more convincing if you included a section on reasons why git is worse than X as well. I don't know git well enough to know these, except for one: handling large binary files that change frequently.

It would make it seem more honest if you admitted that git wasn't the alpha and the omega when it comes to version control. I think it would also show people that you've carefully thought about this and are not just a 'fanboy'.
It matters when you realize how much more productive you are when you use a better SCM. I'd recommend giving Git a couple weeks and see if you still feel that way.
what next ...

Register: BitTorrent denial about protocol change "utterly ridiculous"
Geek Tourism
Off by five years: invented in 1963.
no SMS support
it's the knowledge that matters, not the grades. i am more concerned that a project like this could make 'unalone' work more for the grade (or the degree) vs. for the knowledge.

there were also many cases where i've felt that getting a higher grade would mean i'd end up learning less - as in, i'd focus on completing projects/assignments/memorizing what's needed immediately for the test vs. focusing on truly understanding the material and how it would apply to the real world.

this quarter of graduate school i'm also taking twice my normal load while still working full time: reason is one of the courses i am taking is only offered once every few years. this could mean a lower grade, but i'd end up walking away with greater knowledge.
Well, there's the famous Simpsons moment where Homer enters 3D, and one of the formulas flying past him seems to be a refutation of Fermat's last theorem. But a part of it is a matter of the craft of the joke. Listen to this: http://www.oldmansimpson.com/sounds/season04/lets/sound01.mp.... The joke is that old people tell long stories. But the story itself is funny and cleverly-written. It's not just a "let me talk and be boring," it's actually a long, boring story.

Like I said: they could have done something like made Cupertino akin to Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. They could pull a FSJ and make Steve a would-be Zen master. They could have had a scene with a bunch of "unique artists" all using Macs in Starbucks. It would still be a parody, anti-Mac people would still like it, but it would be accurate to what Apple really is. And that's what irritates me: not that they spent 6 minutes attacking Apple, which is a gratuitous amount of time for a paltry amount of jokes, but that they didn't make fun of what Apple ACTUALLY is: a company with a cult-like following and an obsession for perfectionism, even when said perfectionism borders on the insane. That's hilarious. The funny Apple parodies focus on that. This wasn't an Apple parody so much as it was an Apple insult.
True, but a) the readers here are not your average casual reader (though maybe we are getting there), and b) it is possible to title a document so it appeals to a new audience.

With technical writings, there is an immediate interest that draws in the readers. However, for a given audience, that interest is assumed. To pull in a new audience, the interest need merely be made explicit, and tied together with the article's material.

I appreciate the responses, you've helped me think this issue through. I should now be able to give better titles to technical articles.
Failure is obviously very subjective, but you spin it very poorly.

the product itself certainly failed - how else can you define a situation where you're forced to shut down your service

They were not forced, they entered into an agreement because it was favorable to them.
Thanks, well received critique. I've avoided blogging about articles before because it seems like linkjacking, but you've given a good rationale for the practice.