skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No you're totally fine, I think everyone who is getting in to web/tech startups is the same boat. And you major matters very little, almost everyone who is doing a web related startup has learned their skill set needed for the development of web/startup is learned by them selves... so you can too. Plus almost all universities cater to people who just want basic training and education so they can work at another company... so that's not a surprise no one is pushing you to a entrepreneurial path.

As for looking for co-founders, go to technology related meetups and every city is bound to have a group there who are interested in startups as well (barcamps, meetup.com, etc). Also #startups is a good place to bounce ideas. Good luck!
Any room for new enterprise collaboration softwares?
is there a room for additional enterprise collaboration softwares that compete or co-exist with sharepoint (microsoft), lotus notes (ibm) or other open source offerings?
They're requesting the ability for anyone to extend the standard without risking incompatibility with future versions—in exactly the same way that anyone can already extend XHTML 1.0 and XHTML5.

It's not just Microsoft. Sam Ruby of IBM has been requesting it since 2007 when he made a very similar proposal:
http://intertwingly.net/blog/2007/08/02/HTML5-and-Distribute...

Sam was appointed co-chair (with Chris Wilson of Microsoft) of the HTML working group in January 2009, and I expect he'll be a prominent supporter of some version of this proposal. But the primary editor of HTML5 (Ian Hickson of Google; his co-editor is David Baron of Apple) has so far preferred more limited additions that address specific use cases, such as the "data-" attributes in current drafts, or hard-coded support for specific W3C vocabularies like SVG. His reasons are similar to yours; he hopes that by forcing all extensions to go through the HTML working group, the W3C might prevent implementors from fragmenting HTML into mutually incompatible dialects.
I'd love an invite.

tigermatt2000@hotmail.com
While I agree that in the common case entensibility will often be used for evil, it can also drive progress and innovation.

To play Devil's Advocate though, there are many examples that can be brought out in favor of extensibility.

For one, XMLHtttp was invented by Microsoft back in the IE4 (I believe, though maybe it was IE5) days. The amount of AJAX we use today was entirely possible back then, as long as you were willing to limit yourself to the Microsoft browser.

If you always limit yourself to the standard, you'll never end up moving forward. The IE5 spec timeline only projects a finished spec in 2020. Do you think that by 2020 we won't have leapt leaps and bounds ahead of what the HTML5 spec aimed to standardize?
Yes, that’s a very insightful remark! I was going to mention that human language and programming languages are fundamentally different things, but I already wrote too much.

Interestingly, though, in the 1950s Chomsky’s first attempts at characterizing human language took just such a route, and involved simple transformational grammars and other concepts that did not work for human language, but turned out to be useful for the analysis of programming languages. As a result, we now learn about things like the Chomsky Hierarchy in undergraduate models of computation classes.
If you're interested in dealing with immigration hassles, sign me up :)
Remind HN: Deadline for Startup school is Noon PT Today
Just a friendly reminder for those who didn't finish/start their applications.
> But then again, I'm clearly not Richard Stallman, so I'm probably not qualified to have much of an opinion on this.

Richard Stallman has earned the right to have an opinion, yes, but I see a huge problem in the people that take his lead.

This whole "Freedom is more important" and "lets protect the users" sounds a lot like the US propaganda whenever a country is going to be invaded ... i.e. the people there don't know any better, lets send them a couple of bombs in the name of democracy and human rights. It's self-righteous, cocky and plain insensitive to those people, because maybe they like their life just the way it is.

If the authors of a Free Sofware project wanted other people to not build upon their software without subscribing to their ideology, they should've put that in the license instead of the perpetual harassment going on.
TechStars Investor Day Hits a Home Run
I find the automatic garbage collection particularly impressive, but I wonder how it affects performance: Apple could have included the ability to use Objective-C 2.0's GC on the iPhone, but they didn't.
Really neat idea and an interesting read, but I really wished there was a video of the simulation running.
Very cool, hope to get there some day myself :)
I'm getting really tired of anything related to Comcast. Actually, I'm getting tired of just Comcast in general.

I don't see any benefit of Comcast owning another network. They've already ruined half of my hockey season as it is!
Dawkins is awesome. The man cares enough to educate and debunk myths. I wish all academics had such passion and devotions to their craft.
Is there a transcript anywhere? I hate the recent trend of people just posting videos online without transcripts. I can browse a transcript in 2% of the time it takes to watch a video.
Here's Ogori Google I made in 5 mins: http://fi.bemmu.com/ogori/
Unless you go to Stanford, MIT, etc. most people you will meet will not be interested in startups.

My advise is first, stick it out. You are pretty far along, no sense in changing now. Second, go to your CS department and hang out, I'm sure there will be at least a couple top notch hackers regardless of where you are. If that doesn't work, try to meetup with some people outside of school via tech communities or events. Djangopeople, meetup, HN, etc. that kind of thing.
Sometimes it's fun to be pedantic, provided you're not an actual asshole and the other posters are being pedantic too.
This seems to violate clause 3.3.2 in the iPhone SDK agreement, since it embeds an interpreter. That said, Apple's already accepted one app using it, so it was either ignored or in line with their intentions (even if not the wording).

Regardless, very cool. Saves me writing my own faux-VM for a project I'm working on. I'd intended to compile code to Obj-C and build everything on that, but this will save me a whole lot of time.
I'm completely sure that Kanye has ADD. That was in no way to his advantage, and if he thought it through the way non-ADD people do, he wouldn't have done it. It was a strictly bad play.
The vast majority of people in general are not interested in running their own business. For most people, being a small part of a large corporation as we make it out to be here. You get security, structure and much more balance in life between work and other pursuits.

That said, WashU is a top notch school, and I'm sure there are at least a few people who would be interested. Keep in mind that few people have starting a company as a goal. Most would probably be more receptive if you had a specific problem or industry that you want to focus on, and which they are also interested in.
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I'm a freshman here at Wash U. Have you heard of WUTE? It's a small but growing organization of tech entrepreneurs, check it out at wute.wustl.edu. I met with the head of the club yesterday (he's a computer science professor) and it seems like a great group of people. Also, did you attend the recent IdeaBounce? It's a great way to meet people interested in entrepreneurship; I actually found quite a few people who are just as involved in the technology community as I am. I'd love to talk to you, here's my email: http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/d?k=01vqV9OdbUlDk40CbmVWIumw==...

As a whole, though, I do agree with your sentiment: a disheartening number of people here are perfectly content with getting their masters and scoring a steady paycheck at a large corporation. I suspect that the situation may be similar at most any other university, though. I don't see why it would be specific to WUSTL.
I feel very similar. I go to college at the University of Kentucky. It is very rare that my fellow CS majors are on the same page as me. So many of them just want to get a job after college and do not have the same passion I have for writing code and starting companies. So far I have only found one or two exceptions.

Maybe I'm just getting arrogant, but I am thinking that people like us are few and far between. I would love to hear if things are different at other colleges, but this is how it is where I am. Has anyone here been to a college where they find a lot of people that really love what they do and want to turn it into a company?
In the abstract, I like the idea of HTML namespacing. However, their proposed implementation gives me a nasty feeling in the pit of my stomach.

It seems that this proposal would contort HTML to better accomodate XML data, just as other interchange formats like YAML and JSON are taking the stage. Also, a lot of the scripting advantages are already taken care of with HTML 5 custom data attributes. I just don't see the need.

Plus, some of these changes would seriously break compatibility with legacy parsers. The only purpose for this proposal seems to be making life easier for Microsoft programmers.
would love one

christopher [dot] ryan [dot] neal [at] gmail [dot] com
It's been said before: old apps on old hardware are a similar speed to today's apps on today's hardware. Often, they're snappier.

Faster hardware makes software slower. Partly it's because they're doing more; partly it's due to inefficiency: Work expands to fill the available time - Parkinson's Law

1. Apps are already fast enough.

2. If we need extra speed to do extra things, we can draw on the reservoir of inefficiencies. Examples: Flash's ActionScript became many times faster in ver 3 (on the order of Javascript to Java). Google improved plain Javascript performance by up to x10 in its Chrome browser. Apple's iPhone is very snappy.

3. We seem to have overshot the need for performance (making it ripe for disruption), and that people value things other than performance, like mobility, size, weight, battery life - as in netbooks and smartphones.
Blog on consuming energy efficiently by PlotWatt
Founder seems to have gained some traction and is featured at http://www.america.gov/st/business-english/2009/April/20080311115809berehellek0.7334253.html for VisibleEnergy (now PlotWatt)
I actually attended the first few WUTE meetings last year, though I wasn't all too impressed with the attendees (largely grad students with a medical lean).

I haven't had a chance to check out an IdeaBounce, but you're right -- perhaps I should.

In any case, I'll send you an email!
Pretty disappointing, IMO. If you want to help get entry level jobs, it may not be wise to let companies spam "Senior Software Engineer 5+ Years of Experience" jobs all over the boards. That's 80% of what I saw on the NYC board, not to mention the spam "make $15,000 a month doing data entry at home" ads.
Ideally you would be able to carry out such an experiment but as troystribling mentions it's possible that an increase in the safety of cars may lead people to drive more dangerously. It's hard to isolate this correlation.

An experiment may be to show that holding everything else constant, a car from 2009 would lead to 50% fewer serious accidents. If we look at the data and notice that there were only 25% fewer accidents, we would then conclude that it may have come from the factors mentioned.
Wouldn't it save you a whole lot of time to do it in Obj-C in the first place?
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EDIT: This is wrong now; see below.

The SDK agreement seems (both in letter and intention) to be forbidding apps from downloading code that is run by a custom interpreter. It does not prevent an app from interpreting code that is part of the app itself.

"No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s)."
That was my understanding as well, but the very latest iPhone SDK document says "downloaded or used" instead of 'and'.
Seconded the suggestion of IdeaBounce. There's actually a fair amount of entrepreneurial spirit at WashU, though a lot tends to be in the biomedical area. While I wasn't a WashU student (ex-fiance was), I participated in IdeaBounce for a while and eventually networked my way into several other groups in St. Louis that were doing interesting things.

Beyond that, I had a similar experience as a student at Iowa State. Smallish town, a lot of folks focused on getting jobs, and the general creativity of the entrepreneurial groups a bit lacking. Eventually I made my way through to various programs about start-ups run by the state of Iowa and met a number of angels, early stage investors purely to meet other people doing interesting things (which landed me time doing sales at a photovoltaics company and business planning for a textbook coop idea). Really my goal was to meet a lot of people and learn a lot of things such that, when I moved out of Iowa (I'm in SF now), I felt like I made the most of the opportunity in the time I spent there.

In the end, I think if you try to be open and meet a lot of people, you'll eventually find others that share your interest and match well. Use STL as a place to hone your skills, toss ideas off people, and prepare yourself for opportunities in the future. Perhaps something will stick between now and graduation but, if it doesn't, you'll have learned a lot.
(Warning! Mentioning my own product!) I use JotBot to track time and prompt me to stay on task.

I also have assorted CLI tools for stashing and retrieving notes, and some tools that interact with Todoist.com, creating and managing alerts to my G1.

I'm also evolving a Time-boxing/Pomodoro desktop app, which helps keep me from spending too much time on one project to the detriment of others.
The code is being compiled from Actionscript bytecode as part of a larger project. Although I'd planned to compile it to straight Obj-C, I'd still need garbage collection and AS-type (ECMAScript) objects.
Or, maybe, twins share similar thought patterns and therefore make similar lifestyle choices (how much to eat, how often to exercise, and so on) and that's why they share similar weights and muscle mass.

That said, the nature/nurture pendulum has been stuck on the "nurture" side for a while, and it's now starting swinging back to the middle where it belongs. It's got a ways to go though. I'm reading Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate now, and I highly recommend it to people who are interested in this topic.
Justice: what's the right thing to do?
One thing to consider is looking outside the CS department. When I was in school, some of the most talented hackers who were actually trying start-up ideas were students in various random majors who spent much of their time toying with ideas and technology rather than focused on classwork. Didn't make them great students but several of them went on to launch moderately successful ventures.
In a more informal vein, I just got some space in Soho and am looking to host a semi-regular hackathon. I have done these in Philly in the past, and it has worked as follows. A bunch of people get together for a full day on the weekend, enter with a goal of accomplishing a side project (either a small new project or a piece of a larger project), and we all work from early morning til late night, then get some good food and drink afterwords. At previous hackathons I've gotten iPhone apps and simple web apps built, and they have been great fun. Sometimes it's just motivating to be around a bunch of people who are working something out of passion for creating, and this is a good way to harness that vibe. Get in touch with me if you're in NYC and interested in this sort of thing: @kortina on twitter or the same on gmail.
Almost any religious belief can be spun in a way so that believers stop questioning their faith.
I like rule 3:

"Please enjoy what you get, even if you hate it."
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Chicago is a musical, based on the play Chicago by Maurine Dallas Watkins. Its book was by Bob Fosse and Fred Ebb, music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb. Set in ban era Chicago, it is a satire on corruption in the administration of criminal justice, and the concept of the "celebrity criminal". Its sarcastically upturned moral values are very reminiscent of The Beggar's Opera.
Perhaps life has no explanation. Perhaps the fact that every person who tries to understand life reaches a different "answer" implies that life is life to be life, and that any other meaning is personal in nature.

Evolution is describing something objective—it describes how something happens. You're looking for the subjective realm of philosophy.
Thanks for your long post, it was very informative and you've convinced me about "could care less".

I think HN's apparently strange mix of anti-authoritarianism with prescriptive attitudes to language becomes easier to understand if you consider that the anti-authoritarianism is not an independent value, existing for its own sake. It goes hand in glove with a meritocratic value. HN contributors aim for and admire quality over authority, and I think that's a better explanation for the language pedantry we sometimes demonstrate.

Of course I'm describing the ideal, which is not always achieved, and HN's idea of "quality" in the use of language is subjective.
First off, congratulations on you're enrollment at WUSTL--I grew up in Saint Louis and always admired the university. I've never had an intimate view of the student body there, but I do believe the school to be as progressive as any.

I'm of the opinion that, aside from a few select areas in the world, you will always have to search diligently for "someone with an entrepreneurial spirit [you] connect with." As a student at Bradley University a few hours away in the backwards city of Peoria, Illinois I know how that goes. The key (as usual) is to be relentlessly persistent. I can be outright annoying with my obsession with entrepreneurship, but I know it will pay off.
As painful as it is, I found dealing with an interrupt-rich environment much easier in assembler than in other languages. The ability to use coroutines significantly reduced our efforts in building interrupt-based programs. Plus the ability to segregate tasks by interrupt level, this helped a bit.

I'd like to hear more. What you were trying to do? Why did it need coroutines/interrupts? How did you manage the much-lower-levelness of the language? Also, how is it that coroutines are easier in assembler in the first place? Is it because you can save the state of an execution path and jump to it later?

I've become interested lately in the idea of building a limited language (i.e. specific to the problem of one application), Lisp style, that expands directly to assembly language, as opposed to the normal way of doing it which is to expand to a high-level language that is then handed off to a general-purpose compiler. The idea is that because the language wouldn't be general-purpose, you could exercise much more control over the assembly language that is generated. What do you think of this?
Predictably, the person before me searched for "horse porn".

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we can't have nice things.
Sounds nice in theory, but then again, so do most proposals about making stuff more extensible.

There's more examples out there of how extensibility went wrong rather than right. (for example, OpenGL 1.x extensions vs. Direct3D's continually updated core API)

With this kind of proposal, I'd be more convinced if I was presented with practical arguments based on how real people and organizations would use the extensions, rather than theoretical technical advantages of slightly different approaches.
From what I can tell it's actually closer to 25% each for NBC, Disney, and FOX and the rest is spread among the investors and employees.
Consciousness is a real phenomenon. Although it is a subjective experience, the fact that it exists is entirely objective.
You missed me by a few years, but go to an engineering school pizza socializer. (They still do those weekly, right?)

The vast majority of the students have no professional programming experience and most are incompetent at programming -- and, for that matter, the pre-meds really suck at surgery and the pre-law can scarcely write a nastygram without sounding pleasant -- but you won't lack for smart, motivated people if you search.
Python has coroutines as of 2.5: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0342/
I totally agree with your thinking. There's probably a startup idea in there somewhere...
Or in HN terms: A function that adds 2 to a given number, but is called 'subtractTwo()', compiles without problems.
The name and the meaning don't have to match.

ps. epic post!!
I attend a state college--the mission statement of which states that it's purpose is to Give the average
person an education. It's quite tough to find anyone truly passionate about their studies lest a startup.

I'd recommend the CS department or Physics. Lots of physics student are creative, nontraditional, and self taught programmers.
Like a-priori, I have read The Blank Slate. I'm pretty familiar with Pinker's work and the article linked here doesn't say much. As a matter of fact, it doesn't say anything helpful at all. "Why don't we apply what we know about twins to everybody?" Well, it's because the role that genetics plays in behavior isn't clear cut and well-defined.

Full disclosure: I side with nature over nurture when it comes to behavior, but I believe it's probably 60/40 or 70/30, meaning environment still plays a major role.

Sure, the cases of identical twins separated at birth is compelling. They sometimes make the same career decisions and even marry and divorce and remarry people with the same exact names.

But what about identical twins who turn out to be of different sexual orientation? What about identical twins who are almost nothing alike but raised in the same home?

Genetics definitely needs to be recognized as a significant influence on behavior and human nature, but there's a reason we don't apply identical twins studies and findings to everyone. I can't believe anyone would say, "If it applies to these people, why don't we apply it to everyone else?" It rarely ever works that way.
I concur, but it isn't going to do much good if he doesn't read English.
Zuckerberg Moves Up The Forbes 400 List. Net Worth Now $2 Billion
From the site: "This is a common error of usage", 'the erroneous "modern" usage'

This tells me that the author completely misunderstands how language works. It assumes that there is a 'correct' way of using a word, and that a word is something more than an arbitrary collection of sounds.
I got "Paul Graham nude". Wunderbar.

What's missing from this is the accountability in the real world cafe. If you ordered something disgusting, there is a significant chance the next person is not too far behind you and will take it out on you.

Also, the cafe has a finite menu of predefined positive choices, whereas Google has an infinite menu including potential negative choices.

I just ruined the joke, didn't I?
Almost any secular belief can be spun in a way so that believers stop questioning their faith. Religion has rather little to do with it.
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From what I heard, and this is how I feel too, most startups probably have profit in mind as motivation. Of course if it's potentially profitable then it'd probably be cool.