skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're serious about getting stuff done with your computer, get
the best damn computer you can, regardless of company reputation,
regardless of what other people think about it.

I'm not sure how this is an argument in favor of Apple. OS X is
missing many modern OS features, like automatic updates for all your
software and programmable window management (a la Xmonad). If you are
just going to use emacs, Firefox, and xterm, using OS X is going to
waste a lot of your time compared to a slightly-tweaked Linux install.
(With that in mind, if you use GNOME or KDE, you are also going to
have your time wasted, although at least everything updates itself in
the background, and it's no worse than OS X or Windows.)

Of course Apple is a dick. They insist on having complete control
over your user experience.

Including sending you to prison if you don't do what they tell you.
I don't think you quite understand -- if you don't follow their rules,
you lose your job, your house, your freedom, and your way of life.
(This is not really Apple's fault, since they didn't make the law, but
the fact that they are interested in "taking advantage" of laws like
this show that they are truly evil. Nobody has threatened me with
jail over modifying my OpenMoko phone.)

Finally, it's important to keep in mind that Macs are just Dell
machines in a pretty case. Intel makes reference designs, and
everyone uses those. Macs are truly pretty, but that's all -- they
are not particularly functional. In my group of friends, there is
about a 50/50 split between Apple laptops and Thinkpads. Among these
people, there is not one broken Thinkpad, but there are three broken
Macs. All the problems are keyboard-related, so they have to carry around
an external keyboard until they have $1500 to buy a new computer.
Apple won't fix them.

Incidentally, I have watched someone accidentally spill a bottle of
water onto his Thinkpad, and the thing still works fine. The water
drains through the little drainage holes that go through the laptop,
and it's easy to disassemble everything so it can dry out properly.
Not so with a Mac -- I hope you like external keyboards.

So anyway -- you are not really depriving yourself of anything if you
go for a Linux box. The software you'll run on it is the same as
anything else. The hardware is identical to what you get in a Mac.
The price is probably the same. In fact, I think you'll find that the
increased customizability will make the Linux box a better deal.
I'm not sure about that. Changing the world is actually very low on my priority list and I'd say most of the other founders I know think likewise.

It's not that I wouldn't love to change the world - I just don't find that a realistic goal to set. My immediate goal is much lower and more egoistic: I need to create something that rakes in enough money to sustain itself and cover my basic living expenses.

Only then will I have the time and mental freedom to pursue one of my world-changing ideas.

The problem with the world-changing ideas is that most of them are so inherently binary. Who can really afford to dedicate themselves at least 6-12 months to an all-or-nothing experiment?

For me the most important attribute of a business model is not the revolution-potential but rather the scalability. I'm going for things that have a chance to pay my bills even when they're only a small success. Call me a coward but I need a leg to stand on before I'll dare to reach for the stars, so to say...
It's amazing how effective a bit of community marketing was-

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/7rfiv/official_r...

The very first thing I thought of when seeing the app was out was that I had to buy it, and go through the silliness to win the mighty bobblehead.

It's certainly something that I'll note for Chron X. People want toys, and silly contests are a fun way to involve everyone.
There is nothing silly about spoons.
Social Collapse Best Practices
I'm not sure how this is an argument in favor of Apple. OS X is missing many modern OS features, like automatic updates for all your software and programmable window management (a la Xmonad).

Most of my software does automatically update. I'm not entirely certain what programmable window management is, to be honest, so it doesn't seem entirely necessary.

I don't think you quite understand -- if you don't follow their rules, you lose your job, your house, your freedom, and your way of life.

As I said in my other response post: I'm not standing by Apple. I'm saying that I won't go out of my way to vilify them for this. I believe really firmly in an artist's right to control their creation, and I think that Apple's work qualifies. Jailbreaking is also removing a lot of profit from the app store developers. I think that's a damn shame. People are pirating the App Store applications.

Jail time is pretty severe. But I won't criticize Apple for going after people who're refusing to play by their rules, because in all honesty, if I was in their position I don't know if I wouldn't be just as harsh.

Finally, it's important to keep in mind that Macs are just Dell machines in a pretty case. Intel makes reference designs, and everyone uses those. Macs are truly pretty, but that's all -- they are not particularly functional. In my group of friends, there is about a 50/50 split between Apple laptops and Thinkpads. Among these people, there is not one broken Thinkpad, but there are three broken Macs. All the problems are keyboard-related, so they have to carry around an external keyboard until they have $1500 to buy a new computer. Apple won't fix them.

It's an old adage that design isn't how something looks, it's how it works. Macbooks have far more elegant functionality. This is much contested, so let's not have yet another debate about this, but the computers' designs are leagues apart. I'm also a bit biased because the Apple Store has fixed my messed-up keyboard, and because I've spilled OFTEN on my Mac with no problem.

This is a debate that has a lot of different perspectives. In my college, three Dell computers have died on my floor alone. No Macs have. There's a different story in every group.

So anyway -- you are not really depriving yourself of anything if you go for a Linux box. The software you'll run on it is the same as anything else. The hardware is identical to what you get in a Mac. The price is probably the same. In fact, I think you'll find that the increased customizability will make the Linux box a better deal.

I know this'll provoke another rant, so I apologize in advance, but again and again: if that's how you look at computers, yes. Linux will be better. I don't look at it that way: I look at built-in experience. I think that customization is a waste of time. My computer uses the graphite theme and a black background, no custom icons, and half the software I use is default Mac software. Out of the box, Mac offers more. That's my perspective, and the two of us have bitched back and forth about this enough that having this damn argument just doesn't seem worth the time.
I wonder if you'll get any reflections in the spoon sightings.

http://www.snopes.com/photos/risque/kettle.asp

In any event, nice job- I was pleased to see the 280 North guys were involved.

Does this use Cappuccino in a mini-browser, or is it all custom? Maybe they'll do a HN app next ;)
This is a really nice thing to do. But doesn't it create an incentive to export drugs to countries that will pay more?
Wow! That's a lot. Is it because there's a strong hacker presence, or did the HNdir guy come from Illinois?
I think the article is interesting but mostly stating the obvious: Projects that do not make money and aren't able to garner a top spot in their sector/niche get killed. What I would find much more interesting is an article how Google chooses the companies it buys.
It's ugly, cluttered, sloppy, and broken in a different way in each major browser, including their own.
And used by others to build trust for web startups among non-techie investors.
"You can't expect people to tell what they want straightforwardly if you ask them, since people often don't know what they want at the surface of their consciousness, or cannot articulate it."

People do tell you what they want, it's just that normally companies have already formed to supply those needs.
Well, I can only speak for Stanford, but you can't throw a rock without hitting a startup CEO or CTO here. Every week there's a flyer in the CS building recruiting for a new startup. MIT may not have Sand Hill Road around the corner but I'd be surprised if they are any less entrepreneurial.
I blogged about this similarly a few weeks back where I discussed whether the whole call/response mechanism needed to be rethought... I still believe it does... http://www.reynoldsftw.com/2009/01/is-the-internet-broken/
No offense taken--I think getting a liberal arts education is crucial. As an alum, however, I think I'm entitled to be critical about specific qualities I found to be problematic at Harvard.
> I think getting a liberal arts education is crucial.

Why do you say that?
Steps toward improving Gentoo
I'm checking HN while my code compiles. Since there's nobody to swordfight on desk chairs with.
http://www.hbs.edu/entrepreneurship/

Much of the MBA class is Consulting & Investment Banking types, but there are plenty of entrepreneurs & future entrepreneurs at Harvard Business School.
"@prestemon I'd have more respect for IMVU if it was a porn site. At least that's honest."

http://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/1211577601

I'm looking forward to their worthyness badge that Jeff will be giving users of stackoverflow.
Hello everyone!

Thanks so much for your comments both here and on the original blog. I will try to reply to a few points raised here which I think misunderstand my argument.

1. "This thinking caused the economic crisis" ... I am having a hard time following the logic here. Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs ... how did they cause this economic crisis again? I believe the poster is conflating my argument with a view I never made, which is that people should focus on short term versus long term. I never stated this, and no one would claim that a person who only tries to maximize the profits for one day to the detriment of the company for ever would be a successful entrepreneur.

2. As for the bankers in this world, according to my view, they would be complete failures ... as they LOST money by the bucket loads.

3. As for the question of starting a company to change the world, I applaud you. You may be very successful in helping many people. But this would not put you in the same league as Bill Gates, Sergey Brin or Steve Jobs UNLESS your company can consistently make money.

To make my point perhaps a bit clearer, take for example another profession ... brain surgeon. You can be the nicest brain surgeon in the world. You can set up a company that offers free books to children. But if my father needs brain surgery, all of these are side considerations. What matters is whether you can perform the brain surgery successfully or not. That is it.

The same point applies to competitive athletes. They can be fine people, but if they come in 8th in a footrace, they have not succeeded in their job, which is to run faster than their competitors.

4. As for the point about twitter and other non-moneymaking companies, that is exactly my point ... they need to find viable business models. Linkedin is a company that makes money and one I consider to be an entrepreneurial success ... twitter, no (at least not yet).

5. As for Vincent Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee, they are all successful scientists. They are NOT successful entrepreneurs, unless you stretch the definition of entrepreneur to a point where the term becomes meaningless. (e.g. "My mom is an entrepreneur because she gave me the wonderful gift of life," etc.)

If you change the definition of a word, you can prove any nonsense. For example I can prove that camels have wings and can fly ... just by stretching the definition of camel to also include all animals with two eyes. This is a logical fallacy.

So in sum, you can respect people like Jimmy Wales or Tim Berners Lee or Linus Torvalds or my mother. I certainly do. But they have not won the entrepreneur game. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin ... Yes. My mom ... no.

Love,

Anjali Sen
http://smartbabesaresexy.blogspot.com
the hndir guy is weird. i hear he's from illinois too. but illinois has--at least historically--been pretty supportive of startups.
Just saw this comment.

>There's no such thing as "public" money; it always comes from private pockets and ends up in (different) private pockets.

That is just a play on words. Of course individuals are "private"; it's in their capacity as taxpayers (rather than volitional payers) that they collectively constitute the public. "Public" and "private" are terms from economics with established meanings.

>I can't see what's pejorative about taxpayer money. That's whom it comes from.

I don't want to get into a big discussion on this, but this is a good example of the distinction between connotation and denotation (http://classweb.gmu.edu/bhawk/101/semiotics/decon.html).
Living In A Post Rails World
Twitter is fashionable, IMVU is not,
Twitter doesn't have a business model, IMVU does.

It's a shame some people choose to follow fashion rather than logic.
It isn't just me, Bruce Schneier doesn't trust the vendors either, and for good reasons:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/02/the_doghouse_r...

(yes, I know this is about a hardware enclosure, not about a drive, that's actually lucky because someone could _check_ if the bytes are actually encrypted)

Now let's hear you mock Bruce :-)
How true.

I am in music school studying viola, and these comments really hit home.

Not everyone can be successful, not everyone can be above average, and these attempts to stretch the definition seem to me to be a way of just making people feel better when they are not successful.

If being an entrepreneur is all about passion, GREAT, I can be a successfull entreprenuer, and so can everyone else! Wow!

But this is nonsense. In any human endeavor, not everyone can win. Not everyone can be Yo Yo Ma, even though it may make you feel good and touchy feely to say that you can.
I would really enjoy working on IMVU. It looks like there are some really interesting software problems to solve, and it's making real money.

Working somewhere like twitter would be horrible. They've gone the whole "hype it up into its own bubble" route.

I guess if you don't like working on things that are used by kids, then that's up to you.

Look at http://www.neopets.com also - hugely successful. When you see kids using these things it's pretty cool.
So I'm supposed to give up anonymity and expose myself to moral and religious fanatics, corrupt governments, incompetent IT departments, inconsistent international law, predatory industry associations, greedy lawyers and whatnot to gain what exactly?

Less spam? Freedom to choose weak passwords for my ebay account? Avoiding a multi hour internet outage once every few years? Allow the military to save money on computer security? Are these the Pearl Harbors and Maginot Lines the article talks about? Exuse me, but were people not dying in the millions during the second world war?

This coalition of computer security "experts" and sensationalist journalists, both with massive vested interests, has been pounding us with this nonsense for decades now. It's boring and stupid and I wish they would just go away and stop threatening my freedom.
Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 released
I was thinking that a company's Web site may be a more efficient way to communicate to people than physical stores, which may certainly help.
Yes, like nearly every other day. That doesn't mean that I didn't find time to spend with the people I care about. Both are a matter of priorities.
It’s 4 AM, but I can chime in on that quickly before I go to sleep. I think that without much hesitation people would agree that a liberal arts education by definition is well rounded. You take English classes, science classes, math classes, foreign language classes, history classes, etc. Through your liberal arts education you learn a large breadth of material that when taken together helps to make you a very well rounded person intellectually. There's something to be said for specialization, but you can specialize on your own time.

I’d argue that being well rounded, social, and able to converse on many different subjects will serve you a million times over in your startup. There's far more to building a successful startup than a good idea, design, and code. That’s the easy part and it’ll certainly get you off the ground. But to truly run a successful startup, every aspect of your life and your personality will be tapped. Business by its very nature is a social thing between people and a liberal arts education, and the “college experience,” will serve you well in getting past that first stage and on your way to a legitimate business. If you want to be running things rather than working for someone, you need these qualities.

Disclaimer: I graduated from Yale in 2006 with a Psychology degree after being Computer Science for the first two years. Programming just wasn’t for me. Psychology wasn’t exactly my major of choice (although, lots of it is very thought provoking), but it allowed me the most freedom to choose the courses I wanted.
HBS has an Entrepreneurship Club which holds a yearly Entrepreneurship Conference, and it is definitely part of the curriculum, but in the past the real emphasis has been on assimilating MBA students into mainstream corporate culture, and not as much on starting new businesses. That may change now that the economy has shifted somewhat dramatically.

Anyone interested in HBS should read Philip Delves Broughton's book "Ahead of the Curve" about his experience there.
So, you blame reddit for a shoddy anti virus strategy on your part ?
It depends on your metric.

If your goal is to be a good technology entrepreneur, it's probably worth noting that of all of today's technology leaders with entrepreneurial backgrounds, either zero or very few of them actually studied entrepreneurship or business in school (as a major).

If your goal is to be a well-rounded individual, then learning a bit about a plethora of different fields certainly doesn't hurt.

If your goal is to make a lot of money, then a traditional liberal arts education can be your ticket (historically speaking, anyway) to a well-paying, and hopefully otherwise rewarding, career.

If your goal is to learn as much as possible about everything, then you'll definitely feel at home in a liberal arts environment.

It's a very flexible tool for life, and in a very quickly-moving economic climate such as this, flexibility is key, as any recently laid-off Class of 2005-2008 investment banker will tell you.
Everything comes down to marketing given equal functionality, if google would use its own homepage to promote these projects they would 'fly' regardless. What they do is actually quite smart, they check to see if projects can 'hold their own', and only if they can they get added to the shortcuts.
blogs with pride on his use of MS and .NET technology. In the circles I mix with that is not something to be proud about or admit publically!

What part about using a well designed language and platform with excellent tool-support should he be ashamed of?

I mean, he is obviously acting like a douche here, but if you are going to attack him for something, at least find some valid reasons.
I can't belive this has not been instituted before. Not only does this provide advantages for the army, but the it provides away to get conservatives to accept immigrants more easily.
HBS = Case Studies overload, the corporate type of cases....

1. It is really how for driven and greedy, (please don't neg me), people to channel their energy into money making, as that is the emphasis.

2. The brand power. It will unlock you doors just b/c of the name, especially in the corporate world. Think of it, nobody will get fired b/c they hired a Harvard grad, just as as nobody will get fired b/c they use java, or xml.

3. Connections. Lot of smart people, and some of them will be bound to be somewhat important one day, so they can help you out. the proverbial old-boys-club kinda of thing. This was true, especially during the wall street's financial bubble madness.

To get a inside look, check this out. It is a good read.
http://www.amazon.com/Ahead-Curve-Harvard-Business-School/dp...

If you are looking into technology/mobile/internet companies, I am not sure I could recommend it. HBS doesn't quiet get tech. Since you are working with case studies, you by default are looking/studying the past, and not the future.
For traditional businesses, yes. Fedex was started there (as a class project), so my favorite dessert place (Finales).

Disclaimer: I haven't gone to HBS, but I know people that have, and have been to few of their classes as an observer, and took some classes at Harvard Extension. (part of fas, not hbs), but who were taught by HBS professors..
The Science of Entrepreneurship
Actually, I don't think MIT cultivates as much of an entrepreneurial culture as you might expect, especially considering how solid the computer science department is, and how there's the Sloan school. It's kind of hard to describe, and I didn't go to Stanford so obviously I can't truly compare the two.

I loved MIT but I can say without a doubt (unless things have changed dramatically in the last 9 months) that you don't see flyers recruiting for startups, and startup CEOs/CTOs tend to be more than a stone's throw away. The caveat here is that a lot of (compsci) professors at MIT were indeed at one point involved in a startup of some sort, but it's not the kind of thing that everyone knows about (so they might be a stone's throw away, but in disguise, which is effectively the same thing). Almost nothing about being at MIT made me think "after school I want to be involved in a startup". Ironically, I now work for one.
White Collars turn Blue - by Paul Krugman from 1996
Even for the pure capitalist, there are well documented benefits to having a non-momentary cause or purpose [1]. Your workers work better; your community supports you; your customers favour you. It's good PR, and every lasting company that makes lots of money does PR.

But apart from the ideal capitalist (who doesn't exist, sorry), the human species has an instinct for cooperation and for belonging (not always requited). It's not intellectual or calculated, it's just part and parcel of the animal that is homo sapiens, as much as being bipedal. It's why sacrifice is at the centre of popular films (e.g. Titanic), and why members choose to hang out with each other, and to devote themselves to something. I surmise that the reason why humans evolved this instinct is because cooperation and unity are very effective at promoting survival and growth - which today is largely handled through a business or enterprise.

[1] for example, see Built to Last and Good to Great
I submitted this to newmogul.com.
Designing for Better Health Competition Launched
Hear Hear, I'm all for anonymity by default, and allowing the user to opt-in for confirmation of identity.

Possibly it might be nice to have a service where you can get your gpg key connected with your person. Then you have the ability to sign electric documents and such naught. I do believe this type of option needs to be a private industry and completely optional.
In Japan’s Stagnant Decade, Cautionary Tales for America