I did indeed receive a liberal arts education, and I'm confident it helped broaden my mind. But I'm not sure it's required or sufficient to find one's passion.
Many people graduate with liberals arts degrees and find themselves utterly directionless, perhaps because they've spent so much time avoiding specialization. It's truly important to get exposed to a range of disciplines but it's just as important to sort through which of those resonate with you and which don't. Many people don't go through the latter process very effectively and they end up with indecisiveness.
I'm honestly not sure what the "answer" is here to helping people find their passions; I think it's worthy of an ongoing discussion. But I will say, I doubt hanging out on HN will help to inspire your passion unless it's creating something for technical people.
Thanks! It's a custom theme, as is the site in general, so unfortunately there's no link available to download for WordPress or whatnot. Feel free to copy the HTML and CSS, though.
Henry Work and Mark McGranaghan deserve the bulk of the credit for today's CrunchBase, IMO. They (re)coded the guts of it in early 2008 and put in place the API. Others also deserve props for improving it over the years (Andy Brett comes to mind but there are others with whom I'm less familiar such as Ben Schaechter). Not to mention those who have led efforts to maintain and improve its content, such as Gene Teare.
Like others in this thread, I'd love to see CrunchBase get more developer attention, and accordingly, I agree that talented RoR developers who are interested in big data should consider applying. There's a lot of great stuff that can be done with CrunchBase's data and for its audience.
Ye I agree. Big part of the reason it rocks is because of the data that is entered every day, which is still happening. I just checked the feed and it is averaging 20+ items per day, which is what has kept it as the main source of startup info.
The OP gripe is about it being down, slow etc. and the stagnation in dev - all of that shouldn't be hard to fix (and it may well be on the way to getting fixed) and it certainly isn't at the point of neglect where they should consider giving it to somebody else.
