"Wasting?" I have a brilliant idea, I'm good with visuals, and I've got a cofounder. And I can't think of anything else I'd want to spend my freshman year on.
good god please bury this term, the yc fanboys have turned the "startup" lexicon into such a shallow cliche that its almost at the point of parody. you don't have a "cofounder", what you have is a guy down the hall in your dorm
I can't think of anything else I'd want to spend my freshman year on.
try your homework, it'll pay dividends unlike yet-another pointless website
Yeah? Why are grades that important? They show that you can do things after a professor tells you how to do it, and that you're good at busywork.
Project work shows initiative at the very least. But again: I'm not doing it for a resume. I'm going it because I have a good idea and I want to realize its potential.
Why are grades that important? They show that you can do things after a professor tells you how to do it, and that you're good at busywork
why are you telling me this? just drop the fuck out now and save the money you are pissing away on tuition if you are convinced its all just a waste of time
but get used to being self-employed, because without that degree you won't even get through filter0 for any recruiter or hiring dept. hard to tell a cto how smart you are when the HR staffer shreds your resume because your last education is high school
I guess my "obedience" line appeals more to high school than it does to college. In college, I'm having to do thinks like design a portfolio just to let my professor see my assignments, and it's taking a lot of diverse skills. In high school, grades are much more focused around busywork: several very mediocre students were ranked highly because they would do what the teacher asked to the letter, and nothing more.
I still think that projects are more valuable on a resume (or, I'd look at them more if it was up to me), because with a project you can see exactly what work was done. I can see something somebody made and understand what they place emphasis on, what details they skim over, and - to some degree - what taste they have in certain subjects. It's not valuable just because it's on the paper, but because you can glean more from a project than you can from a grade point average.
it's the knowledge that matters, not the grades. i am more concerned that a project like this could make 'unalone' work more for the grade (or the degree) vs. for the knowledge.
there were also many cases where i've felt that getting a higher grade would mean i'd end up learning less - as in, i'd focus on completing projects/assignments/memorizing what's needed immediately for the test vs. focusing on truly understanding the material and how it would apply to the real world.
this quarter of graduate school i'm also taking twice my normal load while still working full time: reason is one of the courses i am taking is only offered once every few years. this could mean a lower grade, but i'd end up walking away with greater knowledge.
There are many ways to show that you have perseverance. Going through university/college is but one.
Also IMHO college/university has to be one of the best places to meet like minded people.
If your aim in life is to work at a company where you have to tick boxes and go through a hiring dept which hires you based on some grades, then sure - get the grades.
Personally I've never been at an interview where they care what grades I've got, they care what I've done, and what I've built.
Went to an art school for their writing program (wanted to be a writer) and they cancelled it the year I got there. I sat in the computer lab (this is 1993) and taught myself everything I could about anything related to computers. I mean I literally hung out in the labs for 12-14 hours a day.
I learned to write software that year using SuperCard and writing extensions in Pascal. My college was the second college in Minnesota (the U of M being the other) to get internet access. No graphical web yet and you could only access it on NeXT boxes, of which we had an entire lab.
Wrote what I can safely say is the first graphical instant messenger application. Worked on the local LAN via AppleTalk. It didn't catch on, but when I saw ICQ several years later I kicked myself in the pants for not pursuing it.
I got kicked out of school for not going to classes but was offered a job in the labs by the dean right after he booted me. I turned it down.
Six months later, a professor tracked me down and hired me to work at his digital photography studio (one of the few to have the hasselblad $15K digital leif-back). Built my first website in 1995, three days after Netscape 2 was released.
Haven't looked back since.
Some people do need to go to college though. Some people don't. Timing is as important as the ability to teach yourself. Being OCD totally helps. Ambition, timing and a little luck are the most important things.
No. I've got a bright friend who's similarly looking to do something outside of college, who has abilities that I don't. We complement each other.
I'm maintaining straight A's, partly because I'm in a set of programming-intensive classes. I do both at once.
My site won't be pointless. It appeals to a niche that hasn't been appealed to yet, and we've got a non-community driven revenue plan. The goal is that even if our community doesn't start off strong, the technology driving the community will.
the comment is combative and in poor tone, but i'm upmoding it. there's more to your education than knowing how to make a dynamic web-site.
take something away from undergrad: if you want practical experience work on business-wise pointless but technically interesting projects (just for yourself) or open source projects. take the time to learn mathematics (calculus, calculus-based statistics), electrical engineering and physics: web fads come and go, but solid scientific knowledge stays with you.
I did something similar to what unalone is trying to do - worked on a fast-growing volunteer website in undergrad - and have no regrets. The time I spent working on FictionAlley was much more educational than anything else I did in college, and if I had to pick one, I'd say ditch college and build your project.
It's not just "knowing how to make a dynamic website", too; in fact, after I finished, I vowed never to use PHP again. The most valuable skills I got from FictionAlley were all soft skills. How to balance a dozen different feature requests and pick out a design that isn't what anyone suggested but satisfies them all. How to diffuse a massive PR disaster. How to deal with a completely unreasonable customer. How to make your life a living hell by promising features to users before they've been developed. How to (roughly) estimate the time a project will take (if you're just starting out, expect it to take roughly 10x as long as you expect). How to build things incrementally so you get to the finish line eventually.
I picked up a couple useful technical skills too; I learned all my UNIX, SQL and vi skills from that project, along with softer technical skills like how profiling, logging, optimizing, diagnosing performance problems, etc.
Most of this, you simply can't get in college. The projects are not of sufficient scope. You'll never have an unreasonable customer for a homework assignment, no matter how much you hate your professor. ;-) You probably won't have to maintain code that you wrote 3 years ago and can't stand now.
Heck, most people don't get to deal with that at work until they're in their late twenties, or even well into their thirties. I have older alum friends that graduated before I matriculated, and they're just now getting into positions where they have to balance competing tradeoffs between different groups.
I actually risked my degree a whole lot more than unalone is doing - I was a physics major, and it's a lot harder to do dynamic web programming + upper-level physics than it is to do dynamic web programming + CS. It ended up working out for me (after a really nerve-wracking last semester) and I got the degree, the fundamental math/physics/CS knowledge, and the experience of working on a fast-growing website. But if I had to drop one, I'd say drop the degree, get the fundamental knowledge from textbooks, and do the project.
Wow! I didn't know anybody from FictionAlley was on Hacker News. That's incredibly cool.
Your interface was one of my favorite FF ones. I liked how you sorted by author name rather than genre: it put the emphasis on the writers, which was really neat.
Yeah, I was the tech lead for FictionAlley from 2002-2005. I wrote about 90% of the code in the current system, and did most of the design and project management (though of course it was a consensus effort, and lots of people contributed). I've been mostly-retired for almost 3 years now, but I still get called on for occasional bugfixes.
It's funny, in the "When will you consider yourself a success?" thread, I was thinking that my answer would be "When random people I meet say, 'Wow, you built X! I use that all the time' where X is some project I've done." It's really gratifying to hear someone using it.
I can imagine. I only ever wrote one fanfiction piece, so that wasn't up my alley, but at the governor's school I attended, we'd read HP fanfiction aloud at night (this was right before Deathly Hallows), and FictionAlley was one of the big ones.
This semester I've been really focusing on web development. We want to apply to YCombinator over the summer, and I want to make sure that I'm more than capable of handling the aspects of the site I'm running.
My co-founder (apparently that term's inappropriate now) is very much a math-and-science person. I'm not averse to them - I took calculus in my junior year of high school - but at the same time, that's not what interests me. I'm much more an arts person: writing, music, theatre. It's a good combination, because we look at what we're developing in different ways.
At the same time, I'm learning how to program, I'm in a digital arts course, and next semester I'm taking an upperclassmen programming course. I'm not planning to throw my life away on a project. But if I've got a good idea, I'm going to try to implement it. I'm young: I can risk failure.
> But if I've got a good idea, I'm going to try to implement it. I'm young: I can risk failure.
Sure but don't risk your undergrad. Graduate school is a much better time for this. And to quote DHH, don't treat your life like a planned waterfall project: "I want to do web development, so I will do X, then I will do Y."
Worst comes to worst, I leave college for a year or two, and come back after I've tried everything a bit older and a bit wiser.
I don't think that web development is my big thing. I'm interested in the web, but I'd hate to have to work on ideas I don't love. My current project is something for writers, so it has practical uses for myself as well. And YCombinator summer happens in Boston, which happens to be the place I want to go, so I told my cofounder and we agreed we'd give it a good try.
Crabapple is obviously trolling, but (s)he's got a point: it's a really bad idea to drop of out of college to pursue anything less than an instant success. You'll have plenty of time to chase rainbows once you've finished your degree. I realize that this isn't popular advice amongst the "school is for luzers" crowd that camps out on this site, but every good developer I know had the maturity and perseverance to finish college. It isn't that hard.
Important corollary: you'll never have more free time to pursue personal projects than you do in college. You don't need to quit school to find the time to make a popular website (just ask Rob Malda).
right. it's not even about a degree or the knowledge. more than anything, as this acquisition shows, start-ups aren't about technology or knowledge: they're about executing on an idea and tons of PR and marketing.
but one way to increase your chances of winning (that is, drive a start-up to profitability or a home-run exit) is to get a body of knowledge that makes you stand out from others.
i certainly agree that college is the time to pursue personal projects: but personals means exactly this, personal. work on projects that will teach you the most vs. the projects that seem to be the best from business perspective. you have rest of your life to spend worrying about making a profit.
for 2 years out of my undergrad career i did contract systems administration / internal web app development. however, i've learned a lot more about systems administration. in retrospect, it'd have been better spent otherwise. trying to have personal projects while working full-time and doing a part-time masters is a great luxury.
work on projects that will teach you the most vs. the projects that seem to be the best from business perspective
I think that the best metric is a third thing: "work on projects that you like the most."
I think that the start-up I'm working on will teach me a lot. And it's got more than enough potential to earn me a living, too. But more than that, it's an idea that I love. The fact that I think I can sustain myself with it is an added side effect.
I mean, I won't drop out of college just for the heck of it. My co-founder and I are applying to seed investors, though, and that means we'll spend time on leave from college working on the idea. If we get accepted, we'll work on the project full-time for as long as we can. But if we don't, then it'll continue to be a side project and we'll launch it from college.
Most decent colleges will let you take an indefinite "leave of absence" to pursue other stuff, and come back whenever you're ready without reapplying and without having lost your credit. Technically, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerburg, and Larry & Sergey aren't dropouts, they're just still on leave and haven't bothered to come back yet. Wozniak did go back, after his plane crash, and finished his degree.
And I found it wasn't time that was the limiting factor, it was attention. I found it really difficult to have spare attention to devote to personal projects when I was a physics major, learning CS fundamentals (mostly on my own, but I took some upper-level electives and ended up finishing the major), doing sailing & orchestra, and trying to have a semblance of a social life. Might be easier in a less-demanding major with fewer activities, but I found it a lot easier to do personal programming once I got a job.
* Bill Gates had the resources of an extremely well-connected and wealthy family to hedge his risk. He has also repeatedly and publically advised young people to stay in college, and not follow his path.
* Mark Zuckerburg didn't leave college until Facebook was growing so quickly that he had to make the choice.
* Larry and Sergey were grad students; they were trying to get their doctorates, not their BS degrees.
Ignoring all of that, there's some serious selection bias going on: for every Bill Gates, there are ten thousand droupouts who are flipping burgers.
Not really an argument, just pointing out that there's a 3rd option besides "drop out" and "stay in school". And it sounded like that was the one unalone was considering.
True...but he'll just be trading off the cost of homework, for the cost of supporting himself. Personally, I'd kill for the kind of free time I had in college....
> Personally, I'd kill for the kind of free time I had in college....
When I see all the posts telling you "what would you tell your younger self", that's what I think (at the age of 25, working full-time while attending graduate school part-time and dating somebody an hour's drive away).
When you're a full time student... you don't know how great being a full time student is in many ways: not a worry in the world, you just manage your course load; you select the time of your courses, deadlines are reasonable and set ahead of time. On top of that if that there are smart and inspiring people for you and plenty of courses that you can take just for the hell of it (I really miss taking history and philosophy courses).
Of course it's easy for me to wax nostalgic about the great college days when I just drove home (to an 830 sq ft apt all to myself!) in a sports car I purchased new, after dinner at an upscale Indian place -- I am tempted at times to just take a leave of absence from work and do graduate school full time -- but once you're used to a certain lifestyle it's not easy to go back and cut your spending drastically.
Perhaps I'm young, but right now I can't imagine not having free time. I mean, no matter what I do, I want to make sure that I'm doing it by choice. The only thing I don't like is being put on rails and made to do things that I don't see the point of.
Right now, I'm learning Processing in one class. I'm not learning anything new about language: I already know Java. Processing isn't used as much, and from what I've seen it's not doing anything that I want to do. We learned Scratch, which is a childish language, and ActionScript, which I've already worked with. I love learning new things; what I don't love is being in a place where I'm not learning and have to do busywork, while I have an idea and think I can mess with it. If that goes wrong, I'll know enough to find a program that teaches me exactly the thing that I go wrong with, and next time I'll be more prepared.
Not to sound too condescending, but part of the goal of higher education is to expose you to things for which you can't see an immediate application. Your perspective is small; your professors' perspective is much larger. They're trying to teach you concepts, not languages.
That's not to say everything that you study will be meaningful and exciting. There's tons of busywork in college (especially in the first few quarters, when they're bringing the slow kids up to speed), but that's life! If you think you're going to escape busywork by starting a company, you're being naive.
More to the point, if the stuff you're studying is so boring and unrewarding that it makes you want to quit, then you've got plenty of time to work on side projects while things get more interesting. That's where the free time comes from!
Back when I took my intro to CS class, it was taught in Scheme. I hated this at the time -- and bitched about it constantly. "When am I ever going to need this language that isn't used for anything, and that has such a fucked up syntax))))))?"
Looking back on it now (and having had to implement many of the algorithms we learned about in that class in C, Java and other languages that are less suited for it), I wouldn't have been able to grasp many of the sorting, binary tree or hashing algorithms nearly as easily in another language.
To my own surprise, one of the things that I now consider most valuable about my undergrad degree was that it forced me to at least grasp Scheme and Smalltalk.
I almost took a leave of absence when I was in college to go to work and study in china for a year (learning chinese and working as a developper for a year) but in the end I didn't do it (partly because of money and because of sars)...
Looking back I regret not having pushed ahead and taken that leave of absence because working even for one year in a company makes one appreciate the subjects of the classes in college much more... And I feel part of the classes of college were wasted on me because I lacked the experience to appreciate them
It's not a matter of perseverance, though. I know I can finish college. I'm only a semester in, but I like classes, I can stand the people, and I'm good at this.
It's more that I'd rather take risks early. If I try this and succeed, I have more of a vantage point. Perhaps I'll end up at a better college, at a better program. If I stay in college for four years before doing this, my idea might have been taken, and if my idea doesn't work I'll have to hunt for an alternative venue. Right now, I've got the ability to leave for a little while, then come back, and I don't see why I shouldn't at least try.
I'm all for taking risks early -- smart risks. But it's not really that smart to quit college to pursue a business that has no traction. Nobody is going to steal your idea if you don't drop out, and nothing is stopping you from working on it now. And if it does turn out that your idea takes off, you can always quit then. Staying in school is a smart hedge against failure that most entrepreneurs don't have.
Ignoring, for the moment, that a college degree lends you business credibility that's difficult to obtain otherwise, it's important to realize that quitting school right now probably won't give you a strategic advantage. Quit school, and you've got to feed yourself, house yourself, pay the bills and do a million other things just to manage your life. Stay in school, and you've got to do some homework. Otherwise, you're surrounded by smart people, free resources, subsidized housing and food. It doesn't get any easier!
Assuming that you're not going to some ridiculously expensive private school (and paying for it out-of-pocket), I can hardly think of a better place to start a business than a University. I've never had more free time than I did as an undergrad, and I think that others would tell you the same.
Nah. I'm going to public school. But - I said this before - the problem I'm having is that I don't see the purpose to the specifics of the things I'm doing. It saps me of some motivation when I'm doing things that not only aren't productive but aren't learning.
Most of what you do in a company -- startup or otherwise -- is boring schlep work. If you don't have the tenacity to put up with the relatively small amount of tedium that a university doles out, you're going to be in for a shock when you enter the business world.
> Worst comes to worst, I leave college for a year or two, and come back after I've tried everything a bit older and a bit wiser.
Before you make this decision, you should talk to people who tried. However, as I've said, life isn't a planned waterfall project. You seem bright, focused and most importantly confident.
I guess what I mean to say, don't come away from this knowing _nothing but_ web development (whether with a degree or not).
When I was an undergraduate, systems administration was all I wanted to do. Then all I wanted to do was backend web-development. Now I've realized that both of these are just narrow technical skills that anyone could do, but I am no longer nineteen (yet luckily, I'm also not 30 yet).
shutdowns like this are going to be common. 90% of existing websites have no viable chance of being self-sustaining by ads or subscriptions...but this shouldn't surprise anyone, at some point, a near-frictionless model coupled with strong winner-take-all economics is bound to result in a few dominant players choking off nearly everything else
I disagree. Creating a website/webapp is ridiculously cheap IF you do it well. There's no barrier for entry. Anyone in their bedroom could be the next twitter on a shoestring.
Creating a website teaches you a lot, and is a lot of fun.
Yes twitter doesn't make a profit, but they have a massive userbase to sell to. I think they'll probably work out a business model if they put their mind to it.
co2stats is just a greenwashing tool, and its utility will die as fast as greenwashing dies. by greenwashing, i mean the suggestion that users choose products based on their adoption of "green"-appearing means of production
No indeed it isn't, nor is pointless commenting on news stories. This post was of another minimalist .com that serves a single purpose without the extra noise or cruft other sites that provide that information carry.
steve jobs is a psycho-grade control freak whose "singular vision" of tech implies pointless upgrades on a regular schedule. apparently i can't mount my ipod in linux because his OCD control issues can't grasp someone using a computer that doesn't have a glowing fruit on it. but when you put all this in a tony mall with minimalist blonde-finished tables, its cool. but it isn't. monocultures always die and apple will be no different.
What he may be trying to say is that Apple is every bit as evil as Microsoft, except the monopoly part. They employ many of the same techniques to bind their users to their hardware and software in ways more enlightened hackers would consider revolting.
Not anymore, really. The iPod product line is really stagnant; the only feature that iPods have over the competition is that they come with an Apple logo. They only play proprietary music formats. They don't have a digital output. They require the proprietary database.
All in all it's not that great if you want your music player to play music, rather than be a fashion accessory.
The laptops do have beautiful cases, but inside they are exactly the same as what Dell will sell you.
You heard it here first, folks: the iPod is not that great if you want your music player to play music. Sure, plenty of people enjoy it for just that, it plays the most common music formats, and has excellent integration with the largest music retailer including (in new models) the ability to purchase music from the device itself, but really, as a music player, it's half-baked. What it really needs is digital output, because when you're on the go, analog headphones just don't cut it. And they should ditch the database, because having a computer automatically manage your music is an unreasonable compromise of the absolute control the user must have over everything, always.
Sheesh, just say "I don't like it" next time instead of trumping up this pretentious garbage. You are not superior to anyone just because they had the gall to buy something that meets their needs instead of yours. If the functionality of the iPod is so unappealing to you that you see it as little more than a fashion accessory then chances are good that you're part of a niche market. Get over it instead of casting aspersions on everyone that isn't as picky as you. In other words: stop acting like a fanboy.
iPods play MP3 files just fine. Most iPods also play nice with non-Apple tools (I used one with Linux for a long time). It's incorrect to say they play only proprietary formats - while they won't play certain open formats, they do play common formats. Also, AAC is not closed, so, any computer can play it. And many standalone music players do.
As for the laptops, they have astonishingly beautiful cases - Apple pretty much dictates what Sony will be building the next year. You really can't compare the feel of a unibody Macbook with that of a Dell, regardless of what's inside. One is solid, well built and impressive. The other is... well... "inexpensive" could describe it.
A Volkswagen may have four wheels and an engine, but it's no Maybach. There is a world of difference, even if not everyone can tell before experiencing it.
The fact their hardware-software combination cripples their stuff for a great many users (me included, don't get me wrong) do not imply their gadgets are not cool. They are.
why the "concern" about inflation? this is a "gimme" get-rich scheme for anyone who understands how inflation works. gold at 4000, oil at 500...it will be a triviality to make money as hyperinflation works through the system
EDIT: Here's a link that will give me about 70 cents of your first order (I've been recommending them here for almost a year, so I'm curious to see if people will sign up, etc.) http://www.dynadot.com/?s7h8k6z57v36m8e
People often suggest this sort of thing as if it was some sort of magical protection. If you're running something that's illegal in the US and are a resident in the US, it doesn't matter one bit for the lawsuit (other than it being more annoying to collect evidence) if the servers are in another country.
the whole point is to avoid ever exposing yourself as a US resident
you use a whois proxying service to block your ID. and when company C tries to strongarm the ISP over which they have no jurisdiction, they get told to bugger off.
oh i hate these pricks and their "oh i know you would give your nuts to be in the same room as me, here are some pointers" posts
fuck you douche, i neither want or need your money
who will want money from you is the dipshits who threw a substantial amount of cash into your sorry funds in the first place...right now they are probably wondering if your zero-return, high-risk investment vehicle is worth the paperwork. something tells me you will be returning their calls
stop wasting the precious hours of your life