Frighteningly Unambitious Startup Ideas - <AUTHOR> http://ardenthoughts.tumblr.com/ <comment><USER4> "If I were Paul Graham, these types of companies simply would not satisfy me (despite what look to be very lucrative payoffs)."

That's hilarious, because I'm the one who wrote all the summaries of the startups that she's judging them by. I deliberately express startup ideas as x for y whenever possible because that's the most efficient way to describe a startup in a few words. Airbnb, for example, was in its day "eBay for space."

On Demo Day we accompany each startup's name with a brief summary of what they're doing. The goal of these summaries is not to convey the full breadth of a startup's eventual ambitions, or even what they're currently doing, but just to help investors watching 65 presentations remember which company is doing what. TechCrunch reused these descriptions, as reporters often do. And now this woman has read the summaries printed in TechCrunch and is treating them as if that were all there was to know about the startup. It's like a game of Telephone (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers>).

My standard advice to startups presenting to investors is that it's better to start with an overly narrow description of what you do, so that investors at least know what you're talking about, and then expand from there.

See <http://paulgraham.com/investors.html>, particularly items 1 and 14.

It's surprising to me that someone who wasn't even at Demo Day would feel confident enough to judge the startups' originality based on the 3-5 word summaries we use on the schedule to help investors keep them straight in their heads.

I was about to say that it's also surprising that people would upvote such a post. But on reflection it's not that surprising.

<comment><USER5> I wasn't at the Demo Day, but it's hard to consider making car repair more efficient to be a problem that really matters. Not saying it can't be a decent business, but your essay about ambitious ideas was pushing people to do better.

<comment><USER6> I am just baffled by the idea that people here think there isn't a huge dent to be made in the universe in auto repair. There are 723,400 auto mechanics in the US alone, making a median of $35k in an incredibly inefficient marketplace that fleeces and inflicts misery on millions of working class families (who get to work and their kids to school in cars, not fixies) _every year_.

<comment><USER7> Lets not go overboard - I'm sure some customers have their complaints but your making the car repair industry sound equivalent to today's Wall Street. I genuinely rarely hear people complain about car repair - now if we were back in 1970 or 1980 Id have a different opinion.

<comment><USER8> He's not going overboard. When you don't know anything about cars, it's really hard to find a mechanic or car repair shop you can trust. One reason I always try to help people who ask me any question about their computer is that I just think of how ignorant and defenseless I've felt when my car breaks. I do what they do: find the person in my life who knows the most about it and cling to them like a drowning man.

If the Your Mechanic guys can solve this problem, they'd be rewarded with fantastically loyal customers (including me) in a big market. Actually I'm a little bewildered why anyone would see this as an unambitious idea. It sounds hard to me.

<comment><USER9> Agreed, it's not an overreaction. As an auto enthusiast and someone who has a large group of friends that are also auto enthusiasts we are acutely aware of the issues our non-enthusiast friends have with the auto industry.

We're aware because they come to us with their problems and seek advice. Everything from helping to buy a new car to trying to understand what the mechanic was telling them is wrong with their car.

When I was younger I worked at the front desk of a reputable auto shop. It was very common for customers to mistrust us, and they had good reason to feel that way, too. Not because our particular shop was bad - it wasn't - <USER2> because many others are.

The auto industry is _huge_ and has many _huge_ segments that can be targeted. There is room for many companies to grow into significant players.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Paul Graham said don't attack the problem head on. Make a beachhead. Supposedly these seemingly dull ideas are beachheads.

That was covered in a previous HN discussion about a similar article questioning YC startup ideas in practice.

But something like Dropbox seems to have a hard time scaling out, exploring other ideas, and that's with a founder who wants to build a big company like Apple.

Even if you start with a beachhead, it should be one that can grow. Apple started with a PC, to grow they made more and better PCs. Microsoft/Gates started with BASIC then pivoted drastically to an idea that could grow, an OS for PCs. What will Dropbox grow or pivot to in order to be an Apple size company? Hard to imagine backups for teams or iCloud but OS independent will be the ticket.

<comment><USER11> This beachhead thinking is key. The trouble is that it is harder to represent in the "we're X for Y" way, which is usually the thing that sticks with the audience (which is also the reason why it works so well).

<comment><USER10> But an X for Y beachhead doesn't make the current idea scalable. Perhaps it's a beachhead for the founder to get a reputation so maybe one day he can try a scalable idea, either in the current company or some future one. But it doesn't mean the pivot will be related to the current X for Y.

It worked out for Microsoft. But somewhat contradictory to this scenario Paul Graham also said to start chipping at the ambitious idea because starting companies is hard anyway.

So looking at seemingly dull ideas of YC, is there some way for them to scale without pivoting as far as Microsoft did?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> X for Y, where X = "Airbnb" and Y = "Large existing market poorly served by technology", is in fact a good shorthand for "frighteningly ambitious".

Literally. Airbnb is a frighteningly ambitious company. It is explosively generating value and we don't know how it's going to play out long term. It could end up with us living in caves with dogs watching out for the Terminators.

It is hard for me to take the rest of the article seriously after it suggests that "Airbnbing" auto mechanics is unambitious. It's possible that _most_ Americans have routine car service done at dealerships where they're being routinely fleeced, and that the current crappy system of servicing vehicles is driving talent either out of the businesses or to those giant dealership shops. Have you ever tried to find a reliable mechanic? I drive an old Audi. It's painful.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure, maybe you have a different definition of 'frighteningly ambitious' to me. What is the largest possible outcome from making it slightly easier or cheaper to repair your car? It saves a few million Americans a few hundred dollars?

My definition would be more like: sending ordinary people into space; making a mass-production electric vehicle; cheap solar power; curing flu/the common cold; inventing a new type of computing device; replacing huge incumbent companies (telcos, oil); reducing home electricity usage by >50%; inventing a new human-computer interface. Etc.

<comment><USER13> Let's say I wanted to solve a _really_ big problem. Not something comparatively simple like "new kind of computing device", but really big. Global. Like the fact that we tear through so many natural resources because people go out and buy new equipment so often instead of getting old equipment repaired. That is a major ecological problem of the 21st Century right?

So I look into it and I discover that one of the main reasons that people replace a broken device is because it's really easy to go buy a new piece of gear (everyone wants to sell you one!), and much more trouble to track down someone who will repair an old one (properly!) and go deal with whatever's involved in getting it done.

OK, that's an interesting problem to solve, right? But if people are throwing away devices, how do you get everyone to change their behavior? That's really hard, especially for a startup with limited resources.

So what's a minimum viable product to get started with? Well, what if you started with a way to let people get their cars repaired more easily? People already get their cars repaired, and the user experience is terrible. Solve the part of the problem that people know they need solved first (car repair), then move on to convincing them they want other things repaired too. That they don't need a new gadget every two years, they just need an easy way for someone to help them keep their old one in good repair.

And if it works, that's tons (as a measurement of weight) of working devices that don't go into landfills, and tons of natural resources that aren't used up making devices to replace them. Is that ambitious enough for you?

(Note: I have no idea if this is what the founders are actually thinking or not. I just know that you can't judge the ambition of a startup from their first product.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The reason why I think that it is difficult to say a frighteningly ambitious startup idea is actually something that is expected to come through YC, is that the funding that YC provides is miniscule, and will cover hardly an annual salary for a single, accomplished person who has a lot of domain knowledge in a field they may want to disrupt.

As someone in the medical space who is 37, married with 2 kids - My salary is more than the funding of YC - and I would not be able to take ~150K and divide it among multiple founders -- let alone have that funding cover, you know, actual startup expenses.

I feel I am in this catch-22 limbo area -- too old and too ambitious of an idea to fit the YC mold.

Personally, I see YC as being fairly myopic in the type of people they fund, and it is frustrating because I think YC is incredible!

Sure, there are tons of opportunities for nifty apps that serve a silo of a need (even if that silo is infinitely deep) -- but the idea I have to revolutionize the hospital space can't feasibly be built on 150K - unless I take that funding whilst retaining my full time job to pay for me and have that 150K go directly to the product.

<comment><USER15> I'm 41, married, and have 3 kids - my "cofounder" and I have just applied to YC for Summer 2012. I've been running in "start up" mode since around 2000, so my lifestyle has adjusted to a much lower level of pay than I would expect had I continued working in the fortune 500 as a developer, but I don't regret a single moment of it.

Even though your idea is ambitious, you might consider nights/weekends to work on it - you know the whole "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step" - get something together and see if you can raise some funding - <USER3> never know. There's a lot of money being throw around right now.

I think YC is setup so it attracts those who are willing to go out on a limb for an idea, since (and this is a guess) they might be the most likely to persevere through the rough patches and stick with their idea until it succeeds.

<comment><USER16> Thank you. Your voice was missing here for a while.

32, married. As of yet I have no offspring, but that's going to be corrected. Still, I lurked and commented here, always with the 'Ahhh.. If I'd be without ties and responsibilities once more' thought.

I cannot tell you how glad I am to read that someone with arguably more responsibilities in life and a bit older than me (another point that is rarely coming up here) gives a damn about conventions and prejudices and just joins the otherwise ramen-eating, single, < 27 crowd.

<comment><USER17> We're not all eating ramen and single. Yes, when you're married with kids and a mortgage the immediate risk is greater, but that doesn't mean us <27's are immune or ignorant of risk. Many of us have 100k in school loans. Even the ones who don't are not eager to throw away a safe opportunity at an established company to forge out on their own.

I had a tough time finding a cofounder among my peers. Even the most entrepreneurial of them, people who had started things in college, are still far more inclined to go to work for someone else (especially with an offer in this job market). While I know there's a myriad of reasons, I think a most would rather go somewhere where all of the responsibility is on them. If you mess up at a big company, there's hundreds or thousands of others that shoulder the fallout. If you mess up and you're one of 2 or 3 or 4 people....

My point is that it takes courage to start your own company no matter what age you are.

<comment><USER15> You are so right - I like to think of it as accepting responsibility for your life. Several hundred years ago "starting your own company" could be equated to "going west and creating a new life" - it takes a lot of guts and determination to strike out on your own, and most people would never dream of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Even Twitter wouldn't sound ambitious if you say "we are group SMS for the world".

To better understand how ambitious a startup is, assume that its adoption is 100%. If everyone is using it, does it change lives? If everyone chats on Twitter, does it impact politics? If everyone is on Facebook, do you reconnect with old friends? Etc. Dropbox is in that category too.

With used cars purchases, I can see how everyone would use the site, and still not have any meaningful impact. Cheaper cars. More efficient market. But still, in the end, cheaper cars. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER19> What is the best-case endgame for dropbox? I like it, but I don't understand why everyone's so excited about its potential.

<comment><USER20> What if you could edit all your files in dropbox' html interface? What if it was easy to do, and kept the simplicity they've become known for?

Then your OS would be a commodity, and Dropbox would be what provided the value. Seamless editing of documents across devices, no matter where you are or what sort of device you're working on.

That's a pretty good endgame for dropbox.

<comment><USER10> That's Google Documents + web photoshop etc. Most of the value will be in the quality of the editing UI, Google Documents vs DropBox documents.

Google Docs already turns your local filesystem into a "commodity." And what if Dropbox becomes Google Docs, that's not google/Apple sized. Then what?

The path to scale for Dropbox seems quite tricky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Those who disparage "X for Y" descriptions misunderstand their use. When you have only a few minutes (or seconds) to pitch your idea, being _X for Y_ or _the X of Y_ is an effective way to give people the gist and pique their interest. Only then does it make sense to go into more detail and explain the full scope of your ambitions.

<comment><USER22> Exactly. Only a minority of companies that use those pitches used the same phrasing in their initial creation process. The goal is to solve a problem someone has, the "X for Y" is a shorthand for "don't take my word for it that people have this kind of problem, look at this very similar situation".

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I had the exact same reaction when reading coverage of the demo day. Hopefully the ideas seem underwhelming because of the last part of Paul Graham's essay. In the "tactics" section he says, "If you want to take on a problem as big as the ones I've discussed, don't make a direct frontal attack on it." Maybe these YCombinator startups actually do have ambitious ideas, but they're starting out with something small and seemingly unimportant. Maybe in five years some of these companies will be reinventing education and communication.

</comment><comment><USER24> Ideas change. Apple didn't start with iPhone or iPad. They started with the Apple I, which was just a circuit board. Microsoft didn't start with Windows 7. They started with BASIC for the Altair. Paypal didn't start with online payments. They started as money transfer between PDAs.

As for the criticism about "X for Y", the problem is not with them, but with the rest of us. Most people (smart or not) have a hard time grasping completely original ideas, and they don't have the time to dive deep into it. "X for Y" is simply a low bandwidth way of transferring a core idea. It's the MVP of communicating your vision. If you have to take more than a sentence to convey your idea/startup, you're going to have a hard hard uphill battle. But chances are, you don't have a clear understanding of what problem you're solving.

</comment><comment><USER25> "With the press these companies are getting, I expect they will make investors and founding teams a hefty profit, but they certainly do not speak to me as signs of brilliant, innovative thinking."

This is something I've seen several times, I don't believe anyone has shown that 'press coverage' was a causative agent in a successful exit. I believe 'delivering a useful product' (which happens to generate press coverage as a side effect) is the missing piece here.

You want a brain dead stupid IOs App I would buy that is derivative? Instapaper for Printers. Which is to say I would love an App where I could launch it on my iPad and then 'print' to it across the network from my Mac or Windows machine. I don't care if it dropped the printout into iBooks or created its own 'space' (I could imagine a designer would have fun with the old 20th century printout distribution bins). But basically there are times when I wish I could print something out and then read it on the road later. It was a capability discussed for the old Plastic Logic Reader that never saw the light of day.

And yes, I still do 'listings' when I'm studying old code or dumping a bunch of numbers and charts.

</comment><comment><USER26> A problem I see with many of these ideas is what I would call the profitability mirage. The general belief is that the flow is: $founder->getStartup()->iterate()->getUsers()->monetize(), with a AcquiredException thrown somewhere in one of those method calls.

The problem is that so many of these startup ideas (that don't happily see an AcquiredException before monetize() is called) will fail at the monetize step because there is steep competition in many of these markets right now, and the burgeoning startup mentality means that someone else is probably doing exactly what you do, slightly better or worse, but they're at a point in their business cycle that they don't need to call monetize() just yet. Thus, you may have a mass exodus of users at precisely the point where you try and bring your ARPU above zero.

<comment><USER27> If the default behavior of a program is to throw an AcquiredException after a few iterations, I wouldn't call it an Exception in the first place. imho, the real exception here is the monetizeException.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm not sure what the value of this post is? Would you honestly expect every company or even every demo day to contain a frighteningly ambitious idea? And if they were frighteningly, scarily ambitious, would TC really hype them? The sane response seems to be to write them off instead as far too ambitious.

I guess I just don't get what the skepticism here brings to the table? I'm open to input about that.

<comment><USER29> I've sent the list of companies from the latest batch to several non-tech friends and not a single person has been impressed with anything on the list. _That's not a good sign._

With things like Dropbox and Reddit not only did my eyes light up, but the eyes of non-tech friends lit up. Same with Hipmunk. Hipmunk I didn't even have to show someone, I could just say "not shitty airline search" and they were intrigued.

I think the point to this submission and others like it are that a lot of people are scratching their heads over this current batch. Nobody expects every company to be "Wow!" but generally there are a few.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> > I feel confident in assuming Steve Jobs didn't pitch OS X by saying "It's > like Windows for Apple Computers."

Um, maybe not, but Bill Gates definitely pitched Windows as like a Mac, but for IBM compatible PCs. Seems like a bad example.

</comment><comment><USER5> This was exactly my thoughts when reading the demo-day list. I wonder how pg reconciles this? Seems like an emerging strategic weakness for YC.

</comment><comment><USER31> I think this is another in a long series of articles that mistakes the press coverage for the vision. When journalists say "we're x for y" that's their way of conveying the information _in a way that makes sense to us_ , by relating it to something we already understand (at least usually: I've seen TechCrunch use increasingly esoteric examples for "x" of late).

In some cases the companies themselves use that line in their pitch. This isn't surprising, given that it's such a fast and powerful way to give people a rough idea of what you're doing and how short each presentation at YC demo day is.

But that doesn't change the fact that in either case, this is just _shorthand_ and isn't reflective of the grand vision of any of these companies.

</comment><comment><USER32> Myspace for Harvard students.

</comment><comment><USER11> The "we're X for Y" is awesome because it is a simple, powerful positioning. That's also why it can be misunderstood so easily.

The same model is used in pitching screenplays and movies. Alien, famously, was pitched as "Jaws in space". It works because it sticks, but doesn't define the field (the plot etc) too much. Similarly, startups using the "we're X for Y" are giving themselves a quick mental positioning in the mind of the listener, but without carving an exact niche. It is easier to work up or broaden from defining the idea ('the beachhead') that way.

The way to misunderstand it is think that they mean to do exactly that. "What, they're taking a giant shark onto a spaceship?"

</comment><comment><USER33> There was a TC post encouraging startups to pitch their slogan in a concise format which did not follow the x for y pattern. In a few more words they mostly avoided the problem you are presenting here.

[http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/30/startups-give-us-your- best-...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/30/startups-give-us-your-best-one- sentence-pitch/)

I thought that most of them did quite well even if some ideas were unambitious even when presented in this manner.

</comment><comment><USER34> The problem is press coverage. The press needs to be able to write a story. In order to write that story, they have to understand (quickly) what they are writing about and deliver it to readers in a way they can understand (quickly). So if someone demo's a way for doctors to track medical records and an algorithm that uses all of this data to improve point of care diagnostics, what do you call that in a headline? Google for Doctors?

The reason why I bring the medical example up is because there is a team here that has a frighteningly ambitious start up (not idea yet). Medigram is a stacked team that is going after the medical industry in a way that no one else wants to. Starting with a messaging app that complies with regulators, they are planting the seed of trust with the medical industry. When they move up to records, they get data. When they get data, they use that math heavy team to solve the ambitious idea of making diagnosis more accurate. Then who knows? A tiny pill that you can swallow that transmits blood test data back to a central server and diagnose your issues instantly? I don't know, but they had to start somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER35> Unambitious startup ideas can be conjured up by a small team and sold to a big company later with hardly any up front dollars. If you want ambitious you should look outside the realm of 100% tech startups. Specifically, you should look in the food/tech realm - but don't look at the worthless calorie counters.

Disclaimer: I work for a struggling startup in the food/tech realm.

</comment><comment><USER36> Cool article! I think a broader question raised is one I have thought about a lot: what is the optimum trade-off between narrow clarity of function/purpose and broad ambition/expansiveness/spread of features? On the one hand: we obviously admire and use things that are ambitious and full-featured (google, facebook, etc. etc. etc.) On the other hand though: HS points out that the narrowed "X for Y" model makes a better YC pitch... but more importantly, it might make a better consumer pitch. E.g. sometimes I wonder why I don't use wolfram alpha more often... and I think one of the answers is that I don't quite know what it does. It possibly covers TOO much area and I might- at a moment of quick snap judgement- pick the far more limited service with the easily comprehensible/memorable single feature claim... Thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER37> The hard ones don't get press for years. Look at upvertr, sure it could be described as git + electronic software + parts sourcing, but it will take them a while to build this to the point where everyone will see how amazing and useful it is.

</comment><comment><USER38> I fail to see why companies that make money would fail to satisfy an investor?

Is there something about the YC model that makes companies that go on to turn modest profits not generate returns for the investor?

A business like Wal-Mart wouldn't satisfy you as an investor? I wouldn't have any problems taking 8% of Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart didn't invent anything new, they just did it a little bit better than their competitors. Techcrunch 1969: "Wal- Mart: Sears for people who like to pay less"

Impressive algorithms don't make money, businesses that satisfy customers do. You're not going to 'change the world' unless your customers are happy.

<comment><USER39> "Wal-Mart didn't invent anything new..."

Whoa! Wal-Mart revolutionized the supply chain. And Wal-Mart also started with a revolutionary idea: We can make stores in rural areas so people don't have to drive to the big city to shop. Every other chain considered those same rural areas unprofitable. It turned out to be a gold mine.

There are several books out there about how revolutionary Wal-Mart has been. I suggest you read one before assuming that Wal-Mart "didn't invent anything new"!

<comment><USER38> I don't disagree that wal mart is an innovator and that their innovations allowed them to crush their competitors, but from the perspective of Wal-Mart in 1969 they aren't doing anything new. At that point they're "Sears for people who want to pay less" which illustrates the silliness of OPs POV.

Fundamentally though Wal-Mart's business model is "big truck - small truck" it's just a specialization of Sears business model, similar to how all the businesses on TC are X for Y.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Let's just imagine the one-liner of the big companies today: \- Google: Yahoo with PageRank \- Facebook: Friendster for colleges \- Dropbox: Files sharing made easy \- Yelp: User reviews for restaurants

All ideas seem small and narrow at the start. It is true that you should recognize the possible direction the startup could go, but as PG said before, it is important to first make something that a group of users really really love. From there, you start growing into something bigger. The main point is that you may not know what it will grow and evolve to when you first start the company.

</comment><comment><USER41> Don't forget that Airbnb once pitched themselves as "EBay for space", just as Your Mechanic now dub themselves the "Airbnb for car repair"

What once seemed like a niche, unambitious company now is frighteningly ambitious.

<comment><USER42> As an ordinary person outside of the VC world, I literally have no idea what Airbnb is. Never heard of them once. Ever. I think there may be a mismatch between what people who read Techcrunch consider exciting and what actually has traction with the public at large.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Be aware, you've linked directly to the home page of your tumblr instead of linking to the post itself. Your HN submission will become very confusing after you make another tumblr post.

</comment><comment><USER44> "If I were Paul Graham, these types of companies simply would not satisfy me (despite what look to be very lucrative payoffs)"

There's a difference in investing in companies expecting some kind of a return and throwing money at really ambitious ideas in the hope that one of those gets really successful. I cannot see how investing carefully and getting returns (ie. making money) is not satisfying.

</comment><comment><USER45> This is delirious. The OP should have just read pg's essay on how to apply to Y Combinator. He clearly explains there (and here again) why the X for Y representation helps in getting a foothold.

Also, what does OP expect founders to do? Declare their complete vision beforehand to impress the audience. The purpose of a vision is not to get popular with the tech press, but to guide the founders.

</comment><comment><USER46> A wise man once said "Nothing is original. There is nothing new under the Sun. It's never what you do but how it's done".

While I agree that saying "My Product X is like Y on steroids" is somewhat unoriginal and maybe even uninspiring, the simple fact is that every idea is pretty much an evolution of a previous idea.

That being said, I'm not to sure what the point of the article was :)

</comment><comment><USER47> I think the idea of describing a startup as "like X for Y" is OK for some but in general I agree that it comes across as not being particularly innovative. I think it makes sense to give prospects a frame of reference for an offering but there are other ways of doing it aside from defining your entire company in comparison to another one.

<comment><USER48> I agree. People want to know very quickly what the idea is and what it's comparable to. I believe that it gets the audience more engaged in the fact they don't need to make the connection while learning about the product throughout the presentation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> We've been told countless times that the only thing VC's will fund is ideas that are already being done. The reason's given are so when the entire niche fails they can point and say "see, everyone else failed, its not our fault." The reason nothing innovative is ever done is because no one is willing to take the risks.

</comment><comment><USER50> it's be good if somebody with powers could change the link to the permalink instead of the base blog url: [http://ardenthoughts.tumblr.com/post/20053064127/frightening...](http://ardenthoughts.tumblr.com/post/20053064127/frighteningly- un-ambitious-startup-ideas)

</comment><comment><USER51> I don't think anyone can realistically expect to find a google-scale diamond in the rough at every single YC batch. "Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas" I suppose is about a process of collective unconscious iteration that would yield such a diamond every 5 or 10 years.

</comment><comment><USER52> FTA: I feel confident in assuming Steve Jobs didn't pitch OS X by saying "It's like Windows for Apple Computers."

True, although Windows was originally pitched as "it's like the Macintosh OS for IBM PC-compatibles."

</comment><comment><USER53> I dont think PG's essay had anything to do with his investment thesis or rather its the not the most important thing he looks for.

The ideas he backs are basically about the team.

</comment><comment><USER54> the only problem with this post is that Google was like Yahoo but that search actually worked, Microsoft was like IBM (the software bits) but software for the masses. There are a lot of counterexamples where starting with something existing provides a beachhead for the ambitious.

</comment><comment><USER55> If you can't pitch your business as x for y you haven't boiled down your idea enough yet.

</comment><comment><USER56> I'll take being "Siri on Steroids".

</comment><comment><USER57> Well everybody has an opinion, and a choice to tread on a path that feels "right". For a moment you might think these ideas are unambitious, but when you dig-deep you'll discover a lot of gems underneath. One wouldn't expect a frightening execution, speak or quality within six months of a startup.

That's probably a picture only big daddies like Apple can show to the world. For example on another thread you can already see DuckDuckGo revealing their ambitious face after a perceivable unambitious journey of two years!

Also another thing that probably we all miss is that the next big thing might not necessarily be anything from the ones ever listed - ambitious or unambitious. None of the big names like Facebook or Google or Apple were frighteningly ambitious ideas to the world until they kicked butts of everyone.

On second part: Suggestions on choosing a worthwhile domain name is really nice, but looking at how much has been squatted out there, there doesn't seem much of a choice or harm with the current trend of choosing twin word names.

There are fewer cheap options at disposal of entrepreneurs and so it is for the rest of the world.</comment>


Show HN: Fish like interactive tab completion for cd in zsh - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/changyuheng/zsh-interactive-cd <comment><USER2> There is also [https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh- autosuggestions](https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions) which is similar but more complete (not only works with cd)

Demo here: [https://asciinema.org/a/37390](https://asciinema.org/a/37390)

</comment><comment><USER3> Thats awesome stuff. Moving from fish to zsh has stopped a bunch of headaches</comment>


ISS crew take to escape capsules in space junk alert - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17497766 <comment><USER2> Planetes (hard sci-fi manga and anime) is becoming closer to reality every day. We need to address space debris now before we end up like that.

<comment><USER3> In case anyone else was unfamiliar with this, I looked it up[1]:

> _Planetes [...] is a Japanese hard science fiction manga by Makoto Yukimura. > [...] The story revolves around a team of space debris collectors based in > the debris ship Toy Box in the year 2075._

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wikipedia has very good article on space debris <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris>

</comment><comment><USER5> The second part of the article was much more interesting, especially the graph at the end.

</comment><comment><USER6> :TODO: @CN - Stop firing missiles at satellites in space.</comment>


Lessons of an MIT Education - <AUTHOR> http://www.math.tamu.edu/~cyan/Rota/mitless.html <comment><USER3> The author was quite harsh on the soft sciencies and humanities and I'm going to attempt a defense. First, he characterises these subjects as merely what, facts to be learned, instead of how, skills to be mastered.

Let's take history, which seems very what, full of dates and names. A great course in history teaches you how to think differently and with deeper context about world events and your country's politics.

I suggest that a society only interested in the workings of machines rather than the workings of people will soon treat people as mere machines. Let the nightmare begin.

<comment><USER4> The charactetization is incorrect. The liberal arts do teach "how." Creative writing or political philosophy or history teaches you skills you can use to analayze scenarios and communicate with people in different ways to different effect.

Where the author is correct is that in those fields the output isn't falsifiable. Your math skills allow you to construct proofs that can be verified. Your study of history allows you to write accounts explaining and putting in context historical events in a way that is pursuasive to other people. But they are not falsifiable.

I agree with holding the former in higher esteem. Being able to communicate with people is important, but it's an impoverished basis for an education. It's terrifying that many students manage to graduate without much exposure to the world of objective reality and truth that exists around them (and which makes their lifestyles possible).

<comment><USER5> I think you're mischaracterizing humanities as not falsifiable as if it should be like mathematics.

The content is not wrong in the same way a math question is, but many humanities classes are explicitly about taking arguments presented in essays, books, journals, by the government, by public interest groups, by private industry, and testing them against "objective reality and truth that exists around them." No humanities course just takes every argument at face value. Every argument is subject to intense scrutiny.

At least from my takeaway, just saying someone or an argument is "wrong" is not really what the humanities are about anyway. The humanities focus on the _reasons_ people have and give for their claims. Often reasons are complex and are tied into complex human contexts. Reasons are not just evidence, they are the entire baggage of argument, logic, context, culture, and history. The humanities focus on understanding those reasons. Whether deciding whether those reasons and claims are wrong is important, but not the entire purpose of the humanities, and never was.

To be sure, there are people who come out of humanities programs with distorted views of the world. I have met many, and it worries me in some ways what more and more do to the humanities.

But there are also those that come out of STEM fields with wildly distorted views of the world as well. And I think that is because they lack a solid humanities education.

<comment><USER6> >No humanities course just takes every argument at face value. Every argument is subject to intense scrutiny

Here is Orwell on the matter:

>"When the nautical screw was first invented, there was a controversy that lasted for years as to whether screw-steamers or paddle-steamers were better. The paddle-steamers, like all obsolete things, had their champions, who __supported them by ingenious arguments. __Finally, however, a distinguished admiral tied a screw-steamer and a paddle-steamer of equal horsepower stern to stern and set their engines running. That settled the question once and for all. "[1]

Feynman:

>"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong."

People lived for a very long time without a proper appreciation of controlled, repeatable experiments, and progress was _very_ slow.

1 - www.orwell.ru/library/essays/lion/english/e_saw

<comment><USER7> Until we come up with a mathematical model for human interaction or other humanities, we have to make do with what we've got.

Who knows if it is even possible to model human interactions?

<comment><USER8> I have an unpopular view, that physics is probably the easiest science. Chemistry is harder, biology is even harder. Heading up the chain into social sciences is just unbelievably hard to get good answers.

With physics, you can build a machine an test to your hearts content to determine what the underlying rules are. That's real tough to do when you're studying, say, an economy.

So, i don't mean this as a slight to physicists. It would never occur to me to use oil drops to measure the mass of an electron. It was a brilliant insight. But, with modern tools, I kinda think i could replicate that experiment in my apartment. Evolution? I mean, golly, that's a really subtle insight. I _might_ be able to do something with petri dishes and poisons, but that seems like a pretty tough thing to detect. I'd like to compare Darwin to Newton, but Darwin is probably closer to Aristotle. We haven't begun to get to the really good stuff yet.

I'm skeptical of phycology, there are issues with replication all the time. But clearly they're on to something. The whole advertising industry is built on psychological insights.

I've dealt with crazy race conditions that make me want to pull my hair out. They're not consistently reproducible. Eventually i work out the logic and things fall into place. But i have access to the source :) I can't imagine how hard it is to get anything out of random interactions of black boxes. Social sciences just aren't for me.

Anyway, yeah, i believe it's possible to model human interactions. We do it all the time. As with all things, some models are just more useful than others.

<comment><USER9> I think your unpopular view is very true. Worse, it's the key to finance and politics.

I used to know someone who had nothing but contempt for developers and the IT team, because while he was busy playing the corporate ambition game, they just wanted to do a good job.

As far as he was concerned, this made them easy prey.

Guess which kind of person runs the world?

Engineering and science won't teach you this. You can finish your PhD with a completely unrealistic view about how politics works, and how political outcomes are generated.

Neither science nor engineering are immune to this. Popular beliefs and high- status areas of research are decided politically, not dispassionately.

It's tempting to say that things would be better if we had dispassionate objective AIs deciding policy, instead of individual and tribal ambition - <USER2> of course one of the challenges of AI is that instead of simply automating math, AI has the potential to automate and amplify influence and persuasion.

When you don't really understand influence and persuasion - but others do, in practice if not in theory - that's not necessarily a good place to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Lesson Six: You must measure up to a very high level of performance. I can > imagine a propective student or parent asking, "Why should I (or my child) > take calculus at MIT rather than at Oshkosh College? Isn't the material > practically identical, no matter where it is taught, while the cost varies a > great deal?"

Is there any truth to this? Because it seem like classical university jingoism to me. "My institution is better than yours." Anecdotes like "All MIT graduates I've met were dumb" or "All MIT graduates I've met were smart" does not count.

Because I looked at the DE course he taught (18.03) and I completed harder math courses than that in my non-MIT education. I'm sure many other HN readers have too. I wonder if there is some test you can take to see if you are just as good as an MIT graduate?

The EU has done great work in this area by trying to standardize the university curriculum across the union. What that means is that a master's degree in computer science from the university of München is mostly comparable to one from Madrid, so name-dropping your university "does not work." It also means that it is trivial for a Spanish student to study one year in Germany and then come home to Spain (see Erasmus). The US system, where some colleges are rated higher than others for irrational reasons, is strictly worse.

<comment><USER11> As an MIT alum, I don't see a ton of value in competing over whose classes were the hardest. I've met super impressive people from everywhere from community colleges to Rhodes scholars and do not subscribe to the idea that MIT alums are uniquely good.

But having taken some physics and math courses at multiple universities MITs went much deeper in a shorter period of time. This isn't necessarily reflected in the syllabus because the _topics_ may be the same but the devil is in the details.

MIT had absolutely fantastic problem sets that took me 10+ hours a week per class to finish and were rarely changed from year to year. This is because they've been tuned over so long that whether you get the answer correct is almost besides the point, the useful part for learning was the process of banging your head against them. This was true to an extent at other universities I've been at but usually the expected proficiency required to excel in a course was not quite so severe.

I ended up getting a PhD (in materials science), spent many hours working as hard as I could in lots of classes, and despite honestly knowing my stuff quite well I never got an A in an undergraduate physics course at MIT. Those were only gotten by the students who were obviously frighteningly talented, often with research experience in the course material already. Don't take that as sour grapes or anything, I am super proud of my B's in these courses. But MIT grades harshly, which may be part of why it's "harder".

Most MIT students stop caring about grades freshman year. Most MIT students interact with one another in class as fellow masochists struggling together against a common foe (learning the material) rather than competing against one another for grades. This is what I would personally call the weirdest and most advantageous aspect of MIT versus Ivy Leagues, but I actually think state schools are awesome at this too.

I'd have put that environment on the list of lessons way before any of the ones on there. Learning the value of close collaboration with people, regardless of whether you may think (probably wrongly anyway) that they're "better" or "worse" than you. Learning that when it comes to the real world, on a team you're all up against a way bigger opponent than each other, you're up against the laws of nature. And that success against that opponent is far more satisfying than any grade.

<comment><USER10> > As an MIT alum, I don't see a ton of value in competing over whose classes > were the hardest.

There are many schools around the world with much harder and more technology intensive curriculum than MIT. If you disagree with that statement, then you do see "value in competing over whose classes were the hardest." If you do not disagree with that statement, then you must agree that the "MIT experience" you describe can be gotten in many schools other than MIT. F.e, I also worked 10+ h/day 7 days/week year round at university and also felt that getting A grades were impossible.

I think the professor is making a great point by comparing math to sports. Yes, you can go to a sports university but you don't have to. The way to get good at it is by busting your ass of (and having good genetics). It's your own effort that counts, not the name of the institution, imho.

<comment><USER11> I think you're misunderstanding what I was trying to say. I am explicitly saying that lots of other schools are fantastic, and also that schools which aren't pitched as the "best" produce fantastic alumni. So, as you say, I agree.

Yes, I think that there are schools around the world with harder curricula than MIT, with the caveat that every university has different strengths. I could go into my accomplishments in undergrad, but it's truly besides the point.

At some point it's truly ridiculous to compare as if it's a linear ranking. It's counterproductive to worry about rankings, and causes completely unnecessary friction between institutions. Pride and insecurity get in the way of solving problems, and all of us are ultimately struggling against a much more interesting challenge than each other.

I think the professor here is really not making a compelling argument, to be honest. None of the listed things are unique to MIT for sure, though strictly speaking he doesn't claim that they are -- he says that they are lessons of an MIT education, rather than unique aspects of an MIT education. He's a mathematician so this may be intentionally precise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> An insightful list, but one part bugs me: the approval of working so hard you can't stay awake. This is bad for learning, and apparently there are even experiments showing that it's bad -- which casts an ironic light on the part of this list about demonstrably knowing things vs. bullshitting.

Maybe there's a deeper reason it's good, but I'm skeptical.

<comment><USER13> Indeed. I thought Lesson 8 was simply a statement of institutional-scale masochism.

>MIT students often complain of being overworked, and they are right. When I look at the schedules of courses my advisees propose at the beginning of each term, I wonder how they can contemplate that much work. My workload was nothing like that when I was an undergraduate.

Ok. How is that at all healthy, not just medically but academically? There are limits, and when you push too far past them, you reduce long-term performance. The human machine operates within engineering tolerances like anything else.

<comment><USER12> Maybe it works better at sorting people by ability (in some more visible sense of ability) than at helping them develop. I think that goal explains more about precollege education (as one of many goals for it, all fighting it out) -- at the college level the biggest sorting happens in admissions. I'm just guessing about all this, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> xkcd-sucks MIT is a very good school, but shouldn't be fetishised. After several years of hiring people in the Boston area, I've seen just as many mediocre MIT grads as mediocre BU grads. In fact, the only person at my company to be fired for incompetence was an MIT graduate

<comment><USER14> was the person incompetent or did he/she not get along

<comment><USER15> > fired for incompetence

Surely that was clear enough?

<comment><USER16> In defense of the person you're replying to, a lot of large corporations have "employee improvement plans" that are designed specifically to create documentation that can justify a firing, especially when that firing is for some other reason (e.g. "not getting along"). The improvement plans have nothing to do with getting the employee back on track, but rather to either 1) show that the employee is unable to keep up with artificially high work demands, or 2) get the employee frustrated enough to quit.

That means that when a person is fired, the stated reason for that firing is not always the same as the _real_ reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Lesson Ten: Mathematics is still the queen of the sciences. > When an > undergraduate asks me whether he or she should major in mathematics rather > than in another field that I will simply call X, my answer is the following: > "If you major in mathematics, you can switch to X anytime you want to, but > not the other way around."

You can argue that with Physics as well. However, I have learned in my life, that there is a value in not having the option to "go back". Flexibility comes at a price.

<comment> david-gpu > "If you major in mathematics, you can switch to X anytime you want to, but > not the other way around."

I hear people say that about mathematicians, physicists and even philosophers, yet I've never come across any of them in my career. I suspect it's wishful thinking.

<comment><USER18> I disagree. I've worked with a sizable number of people whose training was in mathematics or physics. I've never worked in an organization dedicated to either field; my surmise is that a high level of facility in those subjects demands an activity and agility of intellect which lends itself well to almost any complex and primarily mental pursuit.

<comment><USER19> Most people in most jobs are doing work that's not directly related to their degree.

<comment><USER18> I've worked with a lot more math and physics grads than, say, poli sci or sports medicine grads. Not to disparage fields that aren't math or physics, and I don't have a degree in the fight in any case; just that I have noticed something of a preponderance over the years among those who do have degrees not actually in the field.

<comment><USER19> Right, but there are other fields of work where poli sci grads would be more common than math and physics grads.

<comment><USER18> Government, I suppose, but then that's basically what they're trained for, so...

<comment><USER19> Do you have actual stats on where poli sci graduates work?

Take English majors as a more straightforward example. Virtually no English majors are employed doing anything directly related to their studies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > The world and your career are unpredictable, so you are better off learning > subjects of permanent value.

I've been looking for a way to express this idea for years. Doing a core subject at University like Mathematics or Physics can be used in a million different careers.

In a similar way I'd recommend learning say Functional Programming over React or Scala.

Plus I guess learning Category Theory over functional programming too, although I'm not quite sure how true that is.

<comment><USER21> > learning Category Theory

There is a level of abstraction which for most people is the wrong end of the stick to start from. Category theory is one of them. (and I'm a big fan of category theory and Haskell).

Category theory may occasionally lead to elegant, orthogonal and consistent solutions, especially if you are building new abstract tooling (LINQ in C# is a good example). It gives you tools to reason about structure.

However in most situations, it doesn't give you anything you can directly use. Most of them time it serves to clarify and enlighten rather than generate. Categorical thinking [0] may be more useful than the actual theory.

If you seek to apply category theory without first getting your hands dirty with conventional "inefficient" programming, you will end up with abstruse solutions that are potentially overly complicated and unmaintainable. Applying theory without the requisite real-world experience (to temper the tendency toward heavy abstraction) is a problem of youth. The world is not full of highly-intelligent people who can work with highly abstract code. One needs to learn to work with the inelegance in the real world and with other people in the system. A larger coherent system, though weak in parts, may produce a better result than a few bright people.

[0] [https://www.johndcook.com/blog/applied-category- theory/](https://www.johndcook.com/blog/applied-category-theory/)

<comment><USER22> Yes! Absolutely. Unless you already have quite some proficiency with mathematics and/or generic programming then learning category theory is pretty pointless. In fact I don't even know what it would mean to "learn" it if you don't have a suitable background to build it on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This was written in 1997. "From the Association of Alumni and Alumnae of MIT April 1997"

<comment><USER24> That explains what he might have meant when he was talking about the "hidden curriculum" in comp. sci. Nowadays, the complaint more often heard is that the curricula have become too applications-focused, with the kids having huge gap in their understanding of theory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Those who do not become computer scientists to the second degree risk > turning into programmers who will only implement the ideas of others.

The horror! Maybe this was truly a terrible fate in 1997.

<comment><USER26> There's probably a few poor souls at Google pulling $150k+ that are doomed to this...

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> (Off topic)

> Scientific biographies often fail to give a realistic description of > personality, and thereby create a false idea of scientific work.

Any recommendations for biographies which give a realistic look into famous scientists' lives? I am reading the Einstein biography by Walter Isaacson and it's pretty good so far.

Completely off topic : how do you configure a LAN to have <domain>/~username urls (such as the linked post's url) exposed to the internet? I remember having such a directory in my school's linux network where I could place files in public or public_html (can't remember)and other users could access it by going to <internal school ip>/~myname, but it wasn't exposed to the internet.

<comment><USER28> Try "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman?"

<comment><USER29> Surely you're joking Mr Feynman is an autobiography and definitely does not reflect Feynmans life unbiasedly. Its a great book but if you want a more unbiased account of his life check out Genius by James Gleick.

Walter Isaacson also just came out with a biography on da Vinci and he has one on Benjamin Franklin, though I never finished it, it was written to the same standard as Einstein.

<comment><USER30> _Surely You 're Joking_ is a great read but _Genius_ is what you read for genuine insight into the man, and it's probably the best biography I've yet read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I liked the part about the hidden curriculums. Any idea how one would balance it with the actual one when you have plans to go to grad school?

For me, the hidden curriculum is in machine learning and AI. I was recently given a chance (as an undergrad) to join such company. I think this is my best chance to learn about the field in a qualitative way and possibly get my name on a research paper before I graduate with a BSc. I'd work under the supervision of Ph.D.'s in the field.

That being said, for my grad school efforts, I would need to keep my GPA in check, which is currently 3.2, but which would suffer a blow. My question is that does anyone have an idea whether admission boards (in private US colleges) tend to tolerate lower GPAs for whatever hidden curriculum I've found, given it's still academic and aligned with the actual degree I'm applying to? I'd be applying as an international student.

</comment><comment><USER32> > It is demoralizing to give a young person role models of Beethoven, > Einstein, and Feynman, presented as saintly figures who moved from insight > to insight without a misstep.

There isn't a single Beethoven scholar I can think of who seriously entertains the idea of Beethoven being a "self-generating" genius who never made mistakes.

Also, the Beethoven pieces that today's composers most admire-- the late string quartets-- were almost universally shunned by actual Romantic period commentators.

Perhaps the Romantic Age stereotype is demoralizing to students because professors with a narrow domain expertise don't actively seek out music history experts to revise their outdated views about the Romantic Age.

<comment><USER33> Yes, scholars. Maybe it's a generational thing. Young people have too many people they have to compare to. You have to be great at everything! I'm hearing that high schoolers don't have confidence anymore.

<comment><USER32> > Yes, scholars.

As well as anyone who has played a piece by Beethoven or read a children's book about him. The Beethoven stereotype is the impassioned if erratic genius who literally ripped through the paper correcting his own errors in a quest for perfection, persisting in his struggle to write masterworks even after going deaf.

The author is almost certainly confusing Beethoven's myth with the Mozart myth-- the child musical prodigy through whom Christ's perfection sounded.

This matters because the author is attempting to make a causal relationship between Romantic-era genius myth-making and higher education in the U.S. at present. If he can't even match the myth with the right composer I think I'm right to be skeptical of his theory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> If you find these lesson interesting, there were another 10 lessons from the Rotafest: [http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo- rota-10-le...](http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo- rota-10-lessons.html)

[Prof Rota was a bit of an institution already in the 80s, when I took his probability course 18.313. The course utterly kicked my butt, and I believe him when he writes that the homework would occasionally lead to publications.]

</comment><comment><USER35> I thought that the point of a liberal arts education was 'knowing how' to live a good life, and then possibly knowing how to communicate effectively through speech and the written word.

One of the most cutting arguments I've heard from liberal arts education advocates is that STEM extremists want to turn college into a high-level trade school.

</comment><comment><USER36> Has the course number changed? It's not on the Open Courseware list.

[https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/](https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/)

<comment><USER37> It is 18.03. He may have just inadvertently flipped the 0 and 3. It is 18.03 now, and was in 2002 :D.

<comment><USER38> No, it's not 18.03 (which is differential equation). Check the syllabus.

[http://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Guidi- Not...](http://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Guidi-Notes-Rota- Probability-Vol-1-2.pdf)

Seems that after Gian-Carlo Rota died, the class is defunct. The closet one can get is 18.175, but it still presents material from purely theoretical standpoint (e.g. no application to physics to CS).

<comment><USER37> Hmm my mistake. The blog post said Differential Equation and a classroom of 300 some students. Not many non-core classes have 300 students in them. I remember my diff eq class (18.03) being rather large (similar to 8.01, 18.01, etc etc).

While 18.03 is not core, it is a requirement for most engineering disciplines at MIT.

<comment><USER39> The confusion is that the article refers to two different courses:

"18.30, differential equation, the largest mathematics course at MIT, with more than 300 students" [ths might be the course that is now 18.03]

"18.313, a course I teach in advanced probability theory"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I quickly scanned for "You will be hired at places that others are not even considered for because you are largely paying out the nose for a brand name." Didn't find it. Lame.

</comment><comment><USER41> I just realized that was written in 1997.

It's interesting to wonder if, 20 years later, the author would change some of what he originally wrote.

</comment><comment><USER42> Lesson zero: You don't need an education.

<comment><USER43> found the self-taught programmer :)

No offense intended; I'm self-taught as well and can appreciate the sentiment immensely. But damn do I wish I made a few different decisions during high school. I'm ~1 year into my web development career and I'm concerned about what happens when I get bored of building APIs and web apps -- I seem to have a talent for picking up new skills pretty quickly, but I'm afraid my lack of formal math and algorithms training is going to limit the career trajectory of self-taught programmers like me. That's without considering the ramifications of an irrelevant college degree.

<comment><USER42> Come work for me. I only hire people without college degrees. I consider college degrees a red flag.

<comment><USER43> Why's that, might I ask? I've seen statistics that I haven't verified that indicate that while somewhere between 25 and 40% of CS undergrads aren't able to find work as programmers, around 40% of professional programmers don't have a CS degree. And I'm really not sure what to make of this.

<comment><USER42> Because they wasted years of time learning useless garbage that universities teach that is of no use.

<comment><USER44> I wanted a college degree because I see it as hedging my bets. I may not want to work at the boring companies of the world, but if I ever needed that stability I can have it with a college degree. Four years while I can work part-time in my field and the offer of my parents to fund my education made it a no-brainer.

All I'm trying to say is it's never so black and white, and while I don't plan on using the lack of a degree against somebody, I certainly wouldn't call it a red flag either.

<comment><USER42> I don't like people who hedge. I like risk takers.

<comment><USER44> Hedging isn't the avoidance of risk, it's reasoning what risks are worth taking and hedging against those not worth taking.

Put in other terms, when you have to play cowboy on a production server, you take a backup first to hedge your bets; otherwise you aren't brave, you're just foolish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Man I think I hate Ivy leagues.

<comment><USER46> You're in luck, MIT is not one of them.

<comment><USER47> They are in HYPSM though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> On the other hand...

[http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/03/16/suicide-rate- mit...](http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/03/16/suicide-rate-mit-higher- than-national-average/1aGWr7lRjiEyhoD1WIT78I/story.html)

<comment><USER49> I can't seem to get to the article. What does it say?

<comment><USER48> Sorry about that. Wr,dr: Suicide is a bit of a problem at MIT.

" _Over the past decade, the university's student suicide rate has been 10.2 per 100,000 students, according to a Globe review of public records as well as university and media reports. More recently MIT's suicide rate has been even higher; over the past five years the campus has reported 12.5 suicides per 100,000 students._

" _The increasing rate has been driven by the school's undergraduate population, whose suicide rate in the past decade has outpaced that of the school's graduate students — 12.6 to 8.5._

" _The national average for college campuses is roughly between 6.5 and 7.5 suicides per 100,000 students, according to three major studies that looked at undergraduate and graduate student suicides from 1980 to 2009._ "

On the other hand, over across the street at that other school,

" _At least one other local school, Harvard University, has an above average rate for its undergraduate population. The rate of suicide at Harvard was 11.8 per 100,000 undergraduates over the past decade. When accounting for both undergraduates and graduates, the rate at Harvard was 5.4 per 100,000._ "

So maybe it's Boston.

But wait,

" _...the university's undergraduate rate has declined, particularly since the early 2000s. Between 1994 and 2005, the undergraduate suicide rate at MIT was 18.7 per 100,000._ "

Holy poop.e

Edit: And I just noticed the "Ten Lessons" were written in 1997.</comment></comment></comment>


A Super Ball Bot for Titan - <AUTHOR> http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/5762/a-super-ball-bot-for-titan-a-baby-step-to-learning-about-saturn%E2%80%99s-unique-moon

<comment><USER2> Full title is "A Super Ball Bot for Titan: A Baby Step To Learning About Saturn's Unique Moon" which makes a lot more sense.

</comment><comment><USER3> The images of the 'super ball' look like something straight out of Sci-Fi. This is pretty cool stuff.

</comment><comment><USER4> Instantly thought of Barbeau-bot. >.<</comment>


Startup School Recap - <AUTHOR> http://andybrett.com/startup-school-2010

<comment><USER2> I attended Startup School, and felt Andy's recap did justice to the talks he chose to cover; however, as he said, there's lots more to learn by watching the justin.tv video archives. Two things I absolutely loved that Andy didn't mention:

1) Tom Preston Warner's focus on "optimizing for happiness instead of money". Watching the archives out of order won't give the same feeling as being there in person, but Tom's talk provided a very, very different point of view from the other 10 speakers (bootstrapping vs. angel/VC funding). Also, aside from Startup School, my impression of Tom is that he has very strong convictions about his ideals and is extremely hard-working. He was at the airbnb party after Startup School, and was inside talking to people, then moved outside - presumably because it was too loud inside to really converse effectively without yelling. I hadn't seen him for a while before I left, then saw he was still outside talking at ~12:30. He's now answering questions "all day" today on HN at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1804443>

2) Brian Chesky was also one of my favorite speakers. I think his talk showed a great understanding of the audience. A lot of questions posed to the speakers focused on how to grow a startup -- Brian Chesky's entire talk was about how airbnb did that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely agree, those were both great talks. It was easy to see how Brian's personality comes across in the AirBnB culture (or maybe vice versa).</comment></comment>


How to Prototype an App in 1 hour: meet POP - <AUTHOR> http://www.boardofinnovation.com/2013/04/05/how-to-prototype-an-app-in-1-hour-meet-pop/ <comment><USER2> 1\. > _During workshops we don't have time to learn people how to use software_

"teach"

2\. The inventor of the PalmPilot used a prototype made of cardboard for months, to see if it was usable. He would bring it to meetings and "use" it to take notes like it was the real thing! Here's a pic of one of those prototypes in the Computer Museum in Palo Alto

[http://bambax.smugmug.com/Other/2012-10Californie/27080082_g...](http://bambax.smugmug.com/Other/2012-10Californie/27080082_gbQz7C#!i=2272103432&k=v2tqR5s&lb=1&s=A)

<comment><USER3> Thx for the feedback and the inspiring example!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> On being a maker: Most non-designer/non-technical business types I know can pretty competently use tools like Keynote or Basalmiq Mockups to slap screens and ideas together. I'm not sure that hand drawing sketches out would be any faster for them. And then if you're paying for UI stencils to draw...what's the point? Maybe it's nice to take a break from looking at a computer screen?

If learning Keynote or a tool like Basalmiq is too much of a learning curve, I'm not sure someone should even be working in the world of app design? I know non-technical people that downloaded some Keynote templates and were slapping together ideas in less than an hour after reading some quick tutorials.

Also, as far as mobile prototyping goes, I'm a strong believer of higher- fidelity mockups since screen real estate is such a premium.

<comment><USER5> Using drawing software for prototypes has the disadvantage that there is a temptation to start tweaking nonessential details... fonts, shadows, colors, obsessing over alignment of widgets, etc.

Pencil and paper doesn't have these problems except for the most anal- retentive of folks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> At a glance, this is a very creative way to fuse the best of digital prototyping with the spontaneity of hand drawn prototyping.

However I believe that digital linking and editing stages would be easier if it were on a browser than an iphone.

<comment><USER7> I use pop a lot and its actually really easy and intuitive. Just my opinion.

<comment><USER8> Can I use it on an iPad? For non phone app prototypes an iPhone screen seems rather small.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> POP is great and I use it not only for hand-drawn sketches but also for wireframes and comps too. Especially for an iPhone app with clever uses of comps and transitions you can pretty much demo what the final app is going to look like before writing any code.

<comment><USER10> What such options are the for an Android? Do they generate skeleton code?

<comment><USER11> You may want to check out this: <http://jimulabs.com/>

<comment><USER3> Nice! Thx for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I personally prefer Prototyper by Appgyver (<http://www.appgyver.com/prototyper>), editing your mockups from your computer with a mouse and keyboard.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is my new response to anyone who wants their design to "pop".

</comment><comment> alok-g See also: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4789281>

</comment><comment><USER14> Seems ok but I would stick with Axure for wireframes and prototyping.

</comment><comment><USER15> Most good software engineers could probably prototype faster with code either html or cocoa.

<comment><USER16> Really doubt it.

And the idea behind paper prototyping is to be able to discard without regret. Once you code, you can get attached to your first ideas and not iterate, or iterate over some arbitrary restriction set by the tools. Paper prototyping makes it easy to "kill your darlings" without regret.

More than that, the second and probably more important idea is to avoid the _customer_ to get attached to an un-iterated design, and the "but it's almost done!" effect that can be devastating when negotiating times.

<comment><USER17> I don't doubt it...at least not for desktop or web apps, which are the kind that I build most of the time.

Just this past Thursday, we found a new task that our call center would have to perform. I opened Visual Studio, created a new WinForms app and layed out the UI within 20 minutes. I emailed the screenshots to all the principles and got responses back within the hour.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hi, a great addition to the HN. I'm currently attending the SW, and since we are a little down on the developer side of things, I would love to check out what you shared above.</comment>


UK porn filter blocks game update that contained 'sex' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/21/uk-porn-filter-blocks-game-update-that-contained-sex

<comment><AUTHOR> Also known as the Scunthorpe problem [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem)</comment>


Machine Learning Algorithms in a Different Context: Smooth Fields from Particles - <AUTHOR> https://community.dur.ac.uk/joshua.borrow/blog/posts/density_from_particles/ <comment><AUTHOR> Nearest neighbour searching and Gaussian filters are everywhere these days - here's a cool way to use them to simulate fluids. Thought people might like to see the applicability of stuff they use every day in a different context.</comment>


Ask HN: How often women read HN? Participate? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I read it pretty often and have a comment history going back a number of years. Most of the time my gender isn't something that comes up. I wish I could say this place has improved in terms of how it feels to be women identified here, but I personally don't really feel like it has. It hasn't gotten worse, which is a credit to the community given how many other ways HN feels like it passed eternal September a long time ago.

I will note that some of the work I've done under nyms has hit the front page here and it was disheartening to see across hundreds of comments how many people just assumed whoever was behind the project was a guy. It was rare for anyone to be gender neutral and that was as radical as it got. No one assumed the author of that project was a woman.

Oh well.

</comment><comment><USER3> I expect that not very many women will out themselves in response to your question, considering how much negative attention such an outing often results in.

<comment><USER4> What are you talking about? Can you cite an example?

<comment><USER3> Quick example from [1]:

 _" After sifting through near to three million pull requests submitted on GitHub, they found – against their expectations – that code written by women was approved at a slightly higher rate than that composed by men, 78.6 percent to 74.6 percent, respectively. That's roughly an extra 120,000 pieces of code._

 _" Nevertheless, there was a depressing caveat: this rule only applied if their gender was unidentified. If female coders' gender was known, their overall pull request acceptance rate fell from 78.6 percent to 62.5 percent. This appears to suggest that women may in fact be better coders, but are automatically discriminated against simply because of their gender."_

Apart from that, there are endless examples of women being harassed, stalked, assaulted, and even killed because of their gender. Is it any wonder that many might prefer not to reveal their gender and enjoy the benefits of relative equality when they have the ability to do so, such as in an online forum like HN?

Really, you'd have to be living in a cave not to be aware of the existence of sexual harassment. Just on HN, articles about it float to the front page at least one or twice a month, which is why I really have to wonder if you are just trolling by asking that question.

[1] - [http://www.iflscience.com/technology/women-are-seen- better-c...](http://www.iflscience.com/technology/women-are-seen-better- coders-only-if-their-gender-isnt-known/)

<comment><USER5> Correlation != causation. Might it be possible that women who play the woman card are not as capable as those who let their code speak for their ability?

>women may in fact be better coders

How can someone make such a blanket statement like that with so many confounding variables. Do you think it possible that funding sources and expected (and socially acceptable) results might have something to do with the conclusion these sorts of studies come to? Do you think there are grants available for researchers who would interpret this data differently?

<comment><USER6> Another simple theory is that introverted women may be better coders than both extroverted female and male coders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe someone should set up a comprehensive census for HN?

Note: I do not mean someone should set up a page long google form that asks for age and gender. I mean someone who has at least a small amount of experience with census' should set up a detailed and lengthy census which asks questions with nuance. I don't think I have the capability to do this, or I would.

</comment><comment><USER8> My wife reads it quite a bit. She isn't a tech, but she likes seeing what we all say about stories so we can talk about it later

</comment><comment><USER9> It is a product/platform/community's failure if you even have to ask such a question. Remember the days when "a/s/l" used to be common like "lols" or "IMHOs" of today? Well, nobody cares about gender, age or location. But these attributes make all the difference in how one communicates, and how communities (authentic communities) are formed anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER10> I read it every day but I had not commented until now

</comment><comment><USER11> Who in the actual fuck cares if it is a man or woman reading and participating?

</comment><comment><USER12> I read it every day and comment once in a while.

I also post links sometimes, not often.

For Russians - m Russian - it's clear from my name that I'm a girl. not sure about non Russians.

</comment><comment><USER13> how often do people read hn? that is how often women do.

<comment><USER14> A poorly posed question. I assume the OP meant to ask how much of HN readers are women.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> daily

</comment><comment><USER16> Every day.</comment>


Designed as Designer - <AUTHOR> http://dreamsongs.org/DesignedAsDesigner.html

<comment><USER2> Nicely written, but full of flaws.

It doesn't actually challenge Fred Brooks' point, which is that consistency comes from the overarching control/vision of one person or very small, "resonating" teams.

The author of the essay uses the example of Ezra Pound mentoring and editing T.S. Elliot's work, resulting in something better, to argue against Fred Brooks' assertions.

But... Elliot the writer + Pound the editor is a very small, "resonating" team, don't you think?

Fred Brooks, in the quotes cited, _doesn't_ state that these people work entirely alone, don't take any input from outside, do not use editors, do not owe anything to cultural legacy, etc.

Lots of historical citations and beautiful quotes does not a well-rounded rebuttal make.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think Richard addresses the importance of the roles of the individual people. His novel point is as the title suggests, that the role of _the thing designed_ is far too often overlooked. Consider the terms Lisp-y or Pythonic. It is a strange quality which seems to lie outside ourselves, yet we somehow comprehend it. It may not even be real, but I think the essay highlights the powerful yet (often) unnoticed affect it has on human creativity.</comment></comment>


Graves and Garbage: The Hard Life of an Archeologist - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/graves-garbage-hard-life-archeologist

<comment><USER2> _"It's tough, physical work, all day, every day," one of the archeologists in Johnson's book says._

 _Turning her copy over, King pointed to the trowel on the back. "This is a riveted trowel, which we would never use. It should be a welded trowel, because the riveted trowel would break, and break quickly."_

Some years ago, I had several archaeologists in my GIS classes. One of them told me he had a bum shoulder from digging all the time. He was in his twenties.</comment>


Traffic Congestion and Infant Health: Evidence from E-ZPass - <AUTHOR> https://www.nber.org/papers/w15413 <comment><USER2> I was approaching a toll booth near Albany years ago seeing the incredible queue of cars and I thought that getting an E-ZPass would be good for me but also good for other people.</comment>