maximumwage

minor scripting skills; I was hoping to find an open source crawler, or a way to download an entire website.

Why not just give in to information addiction? Unlike many other addictions, there's the possibility that the knowledge gained from it could lead to beneficial outcomes. As the book "Ambient Findability" says: what we find changes who we become.

I like your advice. I actually made a living on eBay/Amazon for a while during college by selling used video games. My current living expenses aren't much higher now than they were then, since I'm not raising a family or paying a mortgage.

I had a lot of other symptoms and was diagnosed with anxiety by a real doctor (not by internet commenters). Plus I had very high scores on inventories that are used to measure anxiety and depression. Also, SPECT and fMRI studies show that people with depression and anxiety have very different brains than people who are mentally healthy, indicating that some people have a baseline level of resilience that's higher than others. And tough love doesn't work. It's just another way to beat up on people who already feel beaten down. I still agree with most of your points, though.

Comments on every story like this follow the same predictable pattern. On Digg and Reddit, it's basically: "Haha, dumb liberal arts major! Of course you can't find work in the USA! You deserve what you get because we live in a just and fair world and everyone is responsible for everything that happens to them in life and the consequences of all their decisions!" Some of the comments here are similar, but other comments point out the fallacies in that line of thought. As someone who was a high school valedictorian who wanted to get a CS or business degree, but ended up with a Bachelor of General Studies in English, I've given lots of thought to why students get liberal arts degrees. Most students are unprepared for college-level classes, especially in mathematics. Despite having a perfect GPA in high school, I failed calculus - not because of partying (I didn't drink) but because I was totally unprepared for college-level math after bad high-school math classes. Mental illness is also a major reason why lots of people can't handle the rigors of an engineering or even business degree. According to NIMH, 26% of Americans age 18 or older suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder [1]. Also, 40 percent of students have felt too depressed to function at sometime during their college career [2]. Throughout college, I had: never had a girlfriend or even kissed a girl, worried all the time about the end of the world and other potential threats, had never learned how to masturbate, and was concerned over whether God loved or hated me. Now THAT's mental illness! When they have a heavy cognitive load from mental illness, students are less able to deal with challenging classes. Finally, after going through the stress of being being unprepared for college classes and suffering from mental illness, many students end up with humanities degrees because they figure "at least it's a degree in something" and that any degree is better than no degree, because that's the message being broadcast from tons of outlets - guidance counselors, college advertising, college advisors, etc.

[1] http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-numbers-coun...

[2] http://www.jedfoundation.com/press-room/news-archive/Student...

I too would like a way to see an archive of all previous stories submitted to HN. For example, Digg has an option to let you see all of the stories that reached the front page over the last year, ranked by votes.

The book "The How of Happiness" has a some other good evidence-based methods for increasing happiness too: http://bookoutlines.pbworks.com/The-How-of-Happiness

According to Compete, MovieForumz currently has around 5000 unique visitors a month. Did you sell the site, or is it still bringing in money - albeit with a smaller audience?

Not everyone has the mathematical intelligence, willpower, mental health, and emotional stability required to make it through an engineering, science, or even business degree. In addition, many students feel they have to go to college just to get a job. For those reasons (and others) many students end up studying for a liberal arts degree. What should those students be doing instead?

Best of luck to you with your startup! Here are some good articles about negotiation: http://www.negotiatormagazine.com/subject_index.shtml

Not everyone has the mathematical intelligence, willpower, mental health, or emotional stability required to make it through an engineering degree. In addition, many students feel they have to go to college just to get a job. For those reasons (and others) many students end up studying for a liberal arts degree. What should those students be doing instead?

What is the correct attitude that twenty-somethings should have? So far I have a few guesses: work on creating value for the world, be relentlessly resourceful, focus on cause and effect instead of whether something is "right" or "wrong", etc. Am I on the right track?

My advice is to make sure you don't get depressed or hopeless. Being away from home for an extended period of time and adjusting to many new situations can lead to a negative impact on mental health. Both depression and hopelessness happened to me in college, leading to bad results (I didn't date, I had no friends, I didn't care about classes since I thought everyone in the world was going to die from pandemics/war/etc). If you find yourself becoming depressed, the techniques at the following link may help. They're based on empirical evidence and have helped many people: http://bit.ly/z8rwF

I was interested in learning about negotiation a few months ago, so I bought all the best-reviewed books on Amazon. Here's the ones I especially liked: The Power of Nice (Shapiro), Bargaining for Advantage (Shell), 3D Negotiation (Lax), Negotiation Genius (Malhotra)

I really enjoyed The Dream by Gurbaksh Chahal. He founded BlueLithium, which was acquired by Yahoo. The book goes into detail about the attitudes required to get rich and manage wealth. Here are a bunch of other books written by rich people as well: http://www.bigwinner.org/books

"His initial example is how after Sept. 11th people stopped using Aeroplanes whilst car travel went up: except more people extra died in that year than died in the Sept 11th tragedy. Car travel was perceived as safer even though it wasn't in the slightest." I heard that statistic after September 11th. It didn't help. It just made me more afraid of driving.

Hi Jerry, thank you for your comment. I was worried about making the list too extensive. However, to prepare it I went through tens of thousands of books on Amazon.com and read through the author's bio blurb. The vast majority of business books (90-95% in my experience) are written by people who have not achieved success in business. This list covers the small percentage of people who actually started successful businesses, raised funding, or reached the executive level.

According to Professor Neal Roese's research, regrets related to education are the most common form of regret: http://psp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/31/9/1273

He also wrote a book about regret and counterfactual thinking titled "If Only": Delivering a reassuring, groundbreaking message, If Only describes two types of "counterfactuals," as these thoughts are known in psychology, and both "if only" thoughts can lead to a better understanding of yourself. One variety allows us to improve performance and learn from experience by comparing what we actually did to what might have been better. A second kind asks how things could have been worse, which makes you feel a whole lot better. Dr. Roese also reveals Americans' top regrets and shows you how to avoid them. And he shows how our brains erase regrets of actions (stuff you did that didn't work out) but let regrets of inaction linger. So his advice? Just do it.

My advice: don't listen to suggestions from random people on the internet (though I like a lot of the suggestions in this thread). Talk to other successful sellers and a diverse selection of wealthy people and find out what they did with their money. Also, Gurbaksh Chahal's book "The Dream" has a good overview of the emotions involved in becoming rich, from the perspective of someone who sold his companies for millions of dollars.

I'm not on Twitter, but I enjoy following the feeds of top entrepreneurs and investors. Here are a few good lists and rankings: http://www.bigwinner.org/twitter-leaders/ http://buzzmarketingfortech.blogspot.com/2008/12/c-level-twe... http://twittercounter.com/pages/100 http://twitterholic.com/

I put together a list of hundreds of blogs written by successful entrepreneurs, executives, investors, venture capitalists and other top people:

http://www.bigwinner.org/successful-people/

I don't read them all regularly, but I love getting advice and information from successful people.

software test technician

To sum up the criticisms I've seen on TechCrunch - the site is down, it's just a Wordpress install, difficult to monetize, inexperienced team, the company's acronym is TIT, etc. With all that said, he learned a valuable lesson. He learned how to deal with the angriest people from one of the most self-critical industries in the world (IT). I'm no therapist, but many of the comments on Slashdot, Reddit, or TechCrunch seem to come straight from a guide to the DSM IV. If he learns how to deal with criticism like that, then he's set for life and I'd bet on his next venture succeeding.

Find people you look up to and then do what they did.

It's like popurls for Apple news.

I liked "Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever" by Ray Kurzweil. Arthur De Vany's evolutionary fitness essay is also very good: www.arthurdevany.com/webstuff/RevisedEssay.pdf

solving a problem you have and have a passion for and is a problem that lots of other people have too