skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If it was more than about ten years ago, you were correct. In the late 90s and early 2000s, a majority (>50%) of professional Web developers used Dreamweaver, according to market surveys done at the time. It worked quite well when the formatting was in the HTML instead of CSS. It was essentially a GUI word processor with an HTML file format. When CSS took over the presentation role, drawing the interface like a MS-Word doc no longer really worked.
The author went through the trouble of saying he'd eliminate straw-man arguments at the beginning of the piece and then spent the rest of the piece rebuilding the straw man with gems like "MBA thinking" and "MBA's are entitled", "MBAs think they're special snowflakes".

If you're hiring, particularly in a startup, you owe it to yourself and your company to carefully consider qualified applicants. Yes, hiring signals exist, but all signals are not equal. Placing too much negative value on a person achieving a Masters degree can easily turn out to be a mistake.

I also don't buy the opportunity cost argument. Does the author examine every line of every resume to determine what the applicant could have been doing instead and gives the best score to the applicant who left the least on the ground? Or is this pedantic behavior executed exclusively on MBAs, because they deserve the stereotype?

I question the value of yet another article like this. It's just amplifying the noise in the echo chamber. The author states he knows several MBAs who have worked at or founded successful startups. Why not write about that instead of rehashing the same, dull, unsupported claims?
Good luck!

And a suggestion on the design front: if you're going to be generating that much content, make sure your blog is friendly on the eye, constraining your fluid width layout so you get a maximum of 12-15 words/line would be an easy win :)
That isn't true, and it's dangerous to say it is.
Some rendering screenshots would help. I'm viewing this on my iPad and the only difference I see is bad kerning in the examples on the right.
I've never made a cold call but I've had 100% success with email in 2 scenarios:

1. I've just started a digital magazine with curated articles. I emailed 6 contributors (5 of whom had never heard of me) and just asked clearly and politely for permission to reprint their articles. I gave them the option to say yes or no. I used a similar flow for each but they were personal and focused on the reader.

2. I emailed the local Mac dealer to offer some webdev services (email marketing and SEO). Just as a test, really to validate cold email as a customer acquisition tactic. Again, it was all about the recipient. The polar opposite of the generic emails I get from Indian agencies every week.

There's a great I Love Marketing podcast that talks about a play they call "the cats whiskers". It's worth a listen if you plan to do cold emails. It's episode 24.

Actually, I just thought of a third -

My girlfriend is an artist and had gifted a painting to some friends for their wedding. They hung it prominently in their restaurant and had a few enquiries about it from their customers. They collected a few email addresses.

About a year later, my girlfriend decided to do a limited edition print run and sent 9 emails (just as a test really, to see if there'd be any takers).

Basically said "You saw my painting in Ord Ban. I'm doing a ltd edn print run. Send £100 to my paypal email if you'd like one". Next morning there was £700 in paypal which covered printing/shipping and a profit margin. Not 100% cold because the recipients had expressed an interest but there'd been no prior contact at all.
In my main day to day business we do no outbound marketing or cold e-mailing/calling as we are overrun with business from companies who randomly find us. That said, if were to use outbound, I'd still come up with a separate, more intrinsically intriguing Thing™ to talk about than the nuts and bolts of the business.

In my original post, I was just pulling on experiences with ancillary projects, particularly content driven ones (e.g. interviews are a great way to launch a blog) or in my role as chair of a a commercial O'Reilly conference, where e-mailing potential speakers or inviting them to give interviews, etc, is a common technique that works well.

As ever, YMMV.
Could you find me a politician who opposes the foster care system on the grounds of socialism?
http://fontcombiner.com/docs/demo
> Born in El Paso, Texas, Caldwell graduated from Stanford University in 2003 with a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and a B.A. in Psychology

Opportunity cost...? What makes having a B.A. in Psychology not a negative hiring signal too? He could have been getting a business degree which would have helped him know more about accounting! Etc.

Feels like a pretty silly argument. An MBA is generally going to be more likely to be successful than a non-MBA in running a business, startup or not. It might not be worth the kinds of salaries an MBA would demand, but a negative? Feels a bit anti-intellectual. More knowledge is always better.
OSS can deliver good encryption solutions and can greatly enhance security.

No solution is perfect, but if you read the trail of Snowden-branded leaks and the opinions of security experts, the greatest weapon that the NSA possess are the vulnerabilities and backdoors planted on people's own devices. Plus, NSA is not the only enemy, or the enemy most of us should fear, but rather organized crime syndicates or business competitors, which for many of us are much more immediate threats.

You're making the mistake of thinking that just because all security solutions are imperfect, they are somehow equal. You're wrong!
Not correct. Google has begun releasing new version of old things directly into Play Services or as separate new apps, letting the open source version bit rot.

One example is the location stack. They have moved into it play services and added a few features, but the open source one is now going to bitrot. 4.4 has now a new closed source launcher, and I'm sure the old GoogleHome.apk will go bitrot in a couple years.

If you get AOSP today is quite far from an Android device. Surely it's better than nothing but the distance is widening every month as Google keeps going down to this closed source way. In another couple of years AOSP would probably be irrelevant if you also don't subscribe for the Google apps when you build your device.
I am the last person to defend the idea of hiring MBAs for sake of hiring MBAs, but the author really loses me with the last two paragraphs.

Imagine that if instead of getting an MBA, ambitious young over-achievers spent
two years in design school. Or spent two years getting a masters in computer
science. Or two years getting into Y-Combinator and doing their own startup.

Who would be worth more in the open market when all is said and done? Who
would have a better chance of building their own great company?

The problem with MBAs is that they are oftentimes too expensive / not the right fit for startup roles / environment, not that they have limited career prospects.
I am starting my own startup, am very active in my startup community, and I'm just about to finish my MBA.

Why? none of the reasons in the article.

I'm a code monkey, I've been coding for over 30 years. But in my career in IT I've found that the hard problems are not the tech problems. The hard problems are the people problems, and most of them derive from communication difficulties between the finance/biz world and the actual implementation required.

Finance and biz types are not going to learn to code, because whatever. So if anyone's going to solve the communication problem it's going to have to be me, by learning finance and biz speak.

I wouldn't recommend it for everyone. But it's doing the job I intended it to do. I find that just the knowledge that I am studying an MBA has a dramatic effect on attitudes around me; I'm no longer just a code monkey technician type who isn't qualified to have an opinion.
Due to how the sun revolves around the earth once a day time is very much about where that unshielded nucular reactor, as pushed by angels, is in the sky. With time zones we have a huge approximation of where that is, unless you live in Greenwich then you can be pretty certain that the glowing thing is not directly above your head at noon. So time zones are a compromise.

Given that everyone has a smartphone these days (well, the people that matter), why can't we go back to the pre-railways 'sundial time' and have always accurate, infinitely variable time? For instance, move across the room and the time will be ever so slightly different?

We could then have UTC more widely recognised and used for international importanty stuff. Obviously we would also have to get the phrase 'Greenwich Mean Time' to be used instead of this faceless 'UTC' mnemonic.

With this system there would be a lot more small talk chit chat about time, you could plausibly arrive a minute or two late and 'not realise the time'. Time could be vague yet oddly accurate at the same time. It would be a whole lot of fun.

Moving to this new 'n' zany system of timekeeping could be easy. All the scientific and computing community are on UTC already so there would be no change for them. A little deal could be done by the smartphone makers so that the default time shown was 'sundial time', auto updated by GPS, wifi or other geolocation. UTC could also be shown side by side, prominently so you could easily get the time in either system depending on your need. A special app, not installed by default, could then show retro 'timezone' time after you clicked through a few dozen menus. Obviously this would be laden with skuomorphic design but functional if you really wanted this legacy time system.
Several cities in UK are bringing trams back.

They call them 'the metro' usually to sound more modern.

I use one twice a week, but it only runs on actual roads for a small part of the journey (Birmingham to Wolverhampton) so it is more of a light railway really. The extension at the Birmingham end will bring the trams back onto main city streets.
When I was a kid, that might have worked -- the G stopped at Queens Plaza (with local service all the way to Continental Ave.), so you could take an E or F down Queens Boulevard, make a quick transfer, and be on your way. Sadly, the MTA seems to have it in for the G; the line now terminates at Court Sq., the trains are shorter than before (which was already shorter than other lines), and some of the stations are in very poor shape.

Also worth mentioning is the J, which is mostly a Brooklyn/Queens train.
Randi Zuckerberg: Don't Make My Mistakes. Always Think Before You Tweet
Excluding Nexus devices, which manufacturers are currently hacker-friendly (i.e. let you to unlock the bootloader without exploits)?
I was talking more about content of the phone: emails, passwords, pictures, contact lists...

But proper OSS phone could give answer to GSM location as well. Imagine network similar to Tor, where SIM would be emulated on phone and shared among community members. Phone would automatically rotate SIM and network IDs every hour. The actual voice call would be over encrypted VOIP.

I am not saying it would be practical (or even legal), but OSS could solve technical part of it.
"I was a TeX user, so I would need a set of macros. I thought that, with a little extra effort, I could make my macros usable by others.[..]"

Read the summary for paper number 69. Many here may recognise the syndrome, the punchline being the last sentence. As I use LaTeX a little, I'm grateful.
The setup phase is too difficult. The complex part is the key exchange phase.

Simple and secure mail is an unsolved problem.
Duh I thought from the title MBA == MacBook Air
One Big Happy Molecule: Vulcanization
> There are few to no business aims that you could possibly fulfill without being inherently interesting to the people you're writing or being in touch with.

If your marketing costs are low - like you only pay for hits or something - then you can afford to brute force the problem. Which is the underlying idea behind spam and door to door. Rather than solving the hard problem of how to identify the people who are likely to be interested in your product.
I don't do it but I have friends who have built successful companies just because of cold calling. Their products and services are not unique or anything special but it works because they're not afraid of selling to strangers on the phone.
OpenPGP end-to-end encryption has to be done client-side, and the keys have to be stored client-side. This is hard to do given the current trend of using webmails. Besides, using OpenPGP means that you have to store a copy of your key on all the machines that you use to check email, and people usually do not know how to do this without entrusting a third party (Google, Dropbox, Apple, etc.) with the information.
There is a big anti-intellectualism trend happening in the US right now. It's a lot like the sort of "hate" that the humanities gets these days as being somehow less important than the STEM disciplines. It started with art programs, and then philosophy, then English, then languages, and I imagine it will spread until there are only a few, if any, majors and degrees that are actually "valued."

This is in a country with a pitifully low literacy rate.

Both my wife and I are very luck - we both have MAs in English (she focusing on rhetoric and I on technical communication) and we each landed great, full-time employment in our fields.

Still, we have friends with similar degrees and focuses that work in the same jobs they had when starting college, or worse are without employment at all.
>>The problem with MBAs is that they are often too expensive / not the right fit for startups, not that they have limited career prospects.

MBA's are best suited at places where you need things to be generalized and managed even if it is at the expense of efficiency.

If you are looking at hard focus based work which requires a lot of application of specialized knowledge and effort. MBA's not just make a bad match for those jobs, but will likely mess it up.

You need MBA's when you need some super abstracted generalized knowledge applied to non critical tasks. You can hire an MBA to run a hospital's billing unit, but not to treat patients. Same with software and start up's. You can use them to do some work on stuff like market research, setting up the pay roll unit, attendance systems etc.
4. Manage to avoid the HN dupe checker.
In the OSS world, many people feel no need to finish things and make them usable for the end-user. (I am looking at you, bcache.) Honestly I'm wondering why. Does nobody have the missionary drive anymore to bring Linux to the people, and everybody wants to just hack something to make it work for themselves? When do OSS developers feel rewarded and highly regarded -- when things work for them and the other people on their IRC channel, or when people start picking up the features they just wrote and actually using them?
The meaningful difference is not between rails and tires. It is between dedicated rights-of-way and one shared with automotive traffic.

When buses get dedicated right-of-way, as in Curitiba they provide similar service levels to subways.
Big improvements on Windows 7 / Chrome.
This may be an overly pedantic point, but marketing != advertising.
I like Sneak's Law: Most users cannot or will not securely manage key material (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9k4GP3Evh9c @ 23:00).
Build libraries with a spec, encourage competing implementations.

This is how it's been done for many years in Java land, and it's good; really good. But it does come at a price: change is much, much slower, and eventually people might get impatient and just do their own thing.

The way it works now in Java land, is that a new idea or technology comes along (e.g. web sockets), some projects implement it with no spec, and a couple of years later (hopefully; it sometimes takes much longer) a spec is created, and you get lots of compatible implementations.

Sometimes you want to pull your hair out in frustration at the pace, but sometimes you're so glad to have 4 or 5 high-quality implementations for a standardized API to choose from.
I just started using AWS yesterday and was pretty annoyed by the really counter-intuitive AWS website. I've been using other IAAS before, but AWS's information is all over the place.

Thanks a lot, really helpful for me atleast!
This isn't journalism. Celeb gossip rag fodder at best...
I agree fully. In business, you talk business, and a MBA certainly helps, not hinders.
HealthCare.gov: How political fear was pitted against technical needs
Slavery always requires less thinking.
many times it gave me surprising (good) results...even when I cold emailed some "hot shots" (Guy Kawasaki, Fred Wilson, etc.)

Here's a great post I found by a seasoned entrepreneur about this:
http://www.startupmoon.com/how-i-got-meetings-at-twitter-lin...

I also wrote about my experiences with cold emails:
http://blog.jhaniv.com/cold-mails-to-hot-people
Another possibility would be to build all the planned subway extensions in Queens; Brooklyn already has good subway service, and a few more lines connecting the two boroughs would not hurt:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IND_Second_System

While we are at it, let's actually make use of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockaway_Beach_Branch
Excellent point! I think it is important to derive specs from working implementations and not the other way around ton begin with. But yes, once the spec is in place change gets harder. Bonus points for having a clear versioning / feature addition & deprecation strategy that allows quick development.
Apple should be more like Bloomberg
> But the request object in flask is not global.

So you're saying that if I don't use multithreading my global variables are not, in fact, global?
There are rants about PhDs and Masters in Computer Science as well. And MBA fits more into 'Business studies' rather than humanities.

I am not going to argue about importance of each field. But computer (and technical) illiteracy is very high as well.
You're misinterpreting what Dalton said. An MBA is not a negative hiring signal strictly because the hirer is thinking about opportunity costs. The fact is that a candidate who spent two years getting an MBA is at a disadvantage relative to people who spent those two years doing more useful things (e.g. getting an engineering masters, or getting real world startup experience). More knowledge is better, but the idea is that a non-technical candidate with 2 years of operational/sales/marketing experience at a startup will run circles around someone fresh out of an MBA program - this is the opportunity cost Dalton talks about. The argument is that the person with experience will indeed have more useful knowledge than the MBA.

It goes without saying that the opportunity cost of a dual major in Psychology is extremely low (i.e. a few classes) if your primary major is already Symbolic Systems - a degree which integrates CS and psychology.

> in running a business, startup or not.

Saying that an MBA will be better at running any kind of company, implying some sort of equality between the completely different challenges of startups and normal large companies kind of undermines the credibility of this argument.
Am I missing something or does this not include options for the reserved instances? Because _that_ is the part of the EC2 pricing that is most confusing to me.
Makefile-based static site generator
That's explicitly what an MBA was for - the fast track managers with several years real world experience at say age 28-32 at global companies like IBM.

Now a lot of people do an MBA directly after doing a first degree some of this is to game the immigration system as a masters qualification is seen as better than a BSC.
Ultra-thin iPhone Air Concept Shows a Bigger Screen
Manic digger help
Really BAD: has too much proprietary things and the hardware is bad for freedom: modem transport is over HSIC (high speed USB), but it controls the GPS (included in the modem chip), audio and perhaps NAND too

http://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/TargetsE...
I just gave a small donation to his campaign fund. You can donate here: http://mcginnformayor.com. Wish there was a place on the donation to tell them why you're donating.

I really hope that more mayors (especially NYC where I live) make this a focus of their campaign. So sick of the cable company monopolies.
People cannot use Gmail without help. People have trouble editing wikipedia. People misunderstand some simple concepts.

Even people who have taken the time to install and use PGP, and who seem to want privacy, make weird mistakes such as "Messages encrypted to public keys, to passwords and passphrases, and PGP messages not encrypted at all!"

http://ritter.vg/blog-deanonymizing_amm.html

Usability of Security: A Case Study of PGP 5.0 User Interface http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/1998/abstracts/98...

"Why Johnny Can't Encrypt" http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~tygar/papers/Why_Johnny_Cant_Enc...
The average user has no idea just how broken email is w.r.t. the concept of secure and private communication. Google's entire business is built on this broad ignorance. So for that matter is the the internet ecosystem in general if you expand the concept of use of data to include tracking of site access patterns, etc.

Moreover, it's certainly not in SV's vested interests (regardless of recent protestations to the contrary by google, facebook, etc) to see secure mail become the standard, and by extension to broadly educate and move the consuming public to a mindset of security first.

All of that said, the average end-user is/would be befuddled figuring out the use of shared pub keys, the web of trust concept, and in moreover, PKI in the bigger picture.

And even if you could get broad use of pgp going for message payload privacy/security, you don't solve the problem of metadata if you are using the current email protocol.

It's long past time for a new persistent messaging protocol that addresses metadata leakage and payload security comprehensively. There are people working on this now. Hopefully that will drive some positive steps forward on this issue.
They're trying to change things around. The G has been getting attention lately due to the population explosion in Williamsburg/Greenpoint. You'll have to ask someone that rides it every day, though. The J connects, but through Manhattan. Another mention is the East River Ferry which connects Dumbo, Williamsburg, Greenpoint and LIC. Still a far cry from connecting the rest of the boroughs, though.
Oppo goes as far as supporting development of CyanogenMod and ParanoidAndroid ports for their devices and are releasing a device in partnership with CyanogenMod.
Same for me … :)
Exec summary: my plan to hide assets from creditors and prevent GM from honestly meeting is liabilities was the only thing that saved the company. The government's enormous pile of cash on absurdly favourable terms and without which it wouldn't have worked wasn't actually that significant.

Hmmmmmmmmm.
I think it's an interesting suggestion. If you believe it's false and dangerous it may be helpful to provide some reasoning.