skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have no idea. I don't know where 'goat time' could come from or why there would be a dragon reference. I've seen a lot of bad translations, but this one is so bizarre that I kind of doubt its authenticity.
Scott Adams: Leadership is a form of mental illness?
their utter and complete misunderstanding of all the basics of business is starting to grate on me

Their linkbait really grates on me as well (though I happen to agree with this post's conclusion, if not the methods), but I think it's pretty unfair to say that they misunderstand all the basics of business. They seem to be doing pretty well for a shop their size. In fact, I'd say there's a good chance they're doing better than Fog Creek. Maybe misunderstanding the absolute perversion of what too often passes for "business basics" in Silicon Valley isn't such a bad thing.
"Secondly, EVERY SINGLE COMPANY IN THE WORLD that has shares that trade is valued by taking the last share traded and multiplied by the number of shares outstanding. It's just the DEFINITION of valuation. It's TAUTOLOGICAL."

Indeed. And Pets.com was worth $100 million on the day of its IPO. And tulip bulbs were worth more than a man's annual salary in 1637. And that house down the street was worth a million dollars last year. Someone paid for those, too.

You don't have to have a different definition of "valuation" to see that a small sample of the most eager investors in the private market doesn't guarantee a reliable estimate of value.
Groupon's Guidelines for Marketing Copy
I wish the rest of the world followed these rules.
Electrical Engineering Thesis Setting to Archive High Expectations
Students who are hoping to achieve an Honor’s Degree in BSc (Eng) will have to submit the Electrical Engineering thesis. Extensive time and effort and knowledge of the subject is required to produce exceptionally well written theses which will help to confer the degree.
I disagree with that as well. You can always fork if you're not happy with the way the project is managed. If your fork is considerably better, chances are, people will pick it up, as it already happened in the past a few times (EGCS, X.Org, etc.)
Security testing with Google's ratproxy
There's no doubt Facebook will IPO eventually.

I imagine a lot of the employees could and probably have cashed some shares out in previous rounds. I'm sure VCs are happy to wait for their IPO (they can probably raise funds just by saying they own Facebook stock)
Will the classes be put online at some point?
What does Chicago have to do with FB valuation? KTHX.
DHH makes a good point though - what are FB's profits/profit projections? No one knows. Assuming its $200M, how the hell can FB be worth $33B? That's all...
So far, I'm guessing :

lumber = log
vomit = thow
insult to father's stones = thrown in superclass
wind, pole, and dragon = maybe "try,catch,finaly" or "if,then,else"
goat-time = WTF ?
I can verify point five. New York does indeed smell.
37signals is great at understanding the laws of small business, however arguing with those same laws doesn't always work when scale is involved.

This would have been a valid argument 2 years ago if Facebook was trading at this valuation, however Facebook has a reasonable valuation given their rapid revenue growth. They may surpass $200 million this year and their user base is still about to double (yes, to beyond 1 billion users).

They haven't even begun to open up the revenue faucet. 37signals should stick to providing advice to "lean startups" who want to build small businesses.
How and Why Chrome Is Overtaking Firefox Among Power Users
But is not Canada who is behind. Media producers are way behind the Internet in general.
My gut feeling is that Facebook is somewhat overvalued at $33billion. (This is $66 for their average user.) But I don't think it is overvalued by orders of magnitudes and I think the 37signals article is very demagogue.
Google at least has a business model, I can't say I can actually detect one in the case of facebook.

As for netscape, yes, in part it was a lost (or destroyed, more likely) opportunity, but at the same time even if they had continued to be successful their valuation at the time was right up there with far future science fiction.
It's weird, it's like in Chicago they don't have multiplication or something.

Oh, and New York smells. (take that!)

Two of my heroes dragging discourse on hacker news into the toilet. What's the world coming to?
Congratulations, Netflix!
While the exact numbers are obviously not available - something like 500 million was spent on FB ads in 2009 and in 2010 that number is likely a billion.

I don't take David's flawed 'they wouldn't raise money if they were making good revenue' as a valid statement. The revenue they make is all profit - there is no middle man or hidden expenses. They have operating costs which are sizeable, but it as they grow and mature their business and revenue - their profit will grow.
I find it absurd that people comment about the "problem of abstractions" is a developer at all. And to even bring up this "problem" in the context of web programming is laughable. The whole web is a pretty huge abstraction, and languages like Ruby and Javascript are way more abstract than something like COM (which is really all about object layout).

Lets get this straight. The key is not to have no abstractions. That's just stupid. It's to pick the right abstraction to build on.

"The problem I've seen time and again is that they have no idea how this is implemented. Ask a green .Net developer about the ViewState lifecycle and see if they know how that really works."

There are lots of stuff I use that I have no idea how it works. And in fact, that's the way it should be. If I'm only using things that I fully understand, I'm probably not moving fast enough.

Ask your RoR dev who is using an OS relational store how queries are processed. Nine times out of ten they won't know, despite the fact that they could have looked at the code anytime in the past decade. Actually even give them an hour to go look it up, and you'll still probably get a wrong answer. But you know what, who cares?
Creating your own generators on Rails 2.3
Time has come for me to write a Rails generator...
They value head count.

It's typical of non-technical middle managers that their value is proportional to the number of people they supervise - so they all fight to keep the size of 'their' people.
It doesn't mean that conditions there are any good.
How Twitter uses Hadoop
I remember a documentary on Walmart where someone said they succeeded by realizing that a small percentage from a very large number is still a very large number.
Someone (maybe everyone) in that group knew what they were doing to be wrong.

I doubt that they will abandon their ethical choice; they'll find smarter ways to do what they'd intended all along.

One thing that might work is if someone in the group has damning correspondence, everyone will panic and promise to "never talk about that summer again," genuinely preventing future problems.
You should never meet your heroes (IRL or online). It invariably leads to disappointment.
I find Google Translate to pretty good for getting the general idea of what someone is saying. That being said, I think user24 makes a good point - I've often found it's much more accurate (i.e. you can understand what it's trying to say) for European languages than Asian.

I wonder what "vomit" was supposed to mean. And I think I'm going to start calling "boot time" "goat time" from now on...
This is a good example of an advancement in one area because a researcher from another area joined the effort. His engineering perspective allowed him to see the problem differently. It's like the opposite case, where for example a biologist joins computer scientists and invents a clever new genetic algorithm.

I wonder if he would recommend that we participate in projects like http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/ or http://folding.stanford.edu .
Android UI Utilities
I believe that's a damn stupid name.
How can you "not detect" a business model for a company that has revenues of over a billion dollars? seriously?
There is a relevant difference between valuations derived from secondary markets and public markets. Investors in secondary markets rarely have clear understanding of real financials or the capital structure of the company. This is a good writeup: http://www.homethinking.com/brontemedia/2010/09/17/secondary...

Also, Chicago has lots of smart people, and I agree with you that FB is well positioned to make lots of money.
it's "a meanningful metric" not "an meaningful metric". Please spell people. This is not SMS!
Not perfect, plenty of delayed reaction, but at least gives a flavor and some easier than previous access to good stats on what gets blocked and why
Having worked at Netflix for 2 years (a fantastic performance driven culture - at least 2 years back), I can say I am happy for them! Netflix vs BB is one of the more fantastic David Vs Goliath stories of recent times!:)
If one's regret is tied to the success or failure of the activity, then they might want to adjust their regret minimization algorithm accordingly.

I think a lot of entrepreneurs would regret not trying, or at least that's the impression I get from hearing stories of those who've tried and failed. It's just in their blood to give it a shot - win, lose or draw.

That goes for all kinds of activities, including ones where "failure" means death and success just means having a story to tell. People still give it a shot, knowing they would have regretted not doing it. I guess "jetpack tester" would be one such category.
Gartner: Global 'IT debt' hits $500 billion, on the way to $1 trillion
What is the history of the Y-combinator?
2. That's just not correct. Spend twenty minutes talking to anyone who trades in bonds or equity before you make assumptions about what liquidity you need to get a good price... it's not much. Facebook trades all the time on sharespost, certainly enough to be liquid and to reach a market price. Google itself only has a tiny fraction of the shares available to the public (10% if I remember correctly) and far less than 1% of the outstanding shares trade every day. That doesn't mean that the market doesn't find a market price.

3. Also not correct. When entire companies are bought and sold that had a previous market in the shares, the price for the entire company is usually a PREMIUM ON the the market valuation. "PREMIUM ON" means MORE THAN. Somewhere in Chicago, I understand that there is one market of some sort, I think they trade corn and pig bellies, surely SOMEONE there can explain it to you...

4. Also, just not true. They are very profitable and their profit is almost certainly growing at a rate that will make their valuation reasonable.
I think it is always wrong to point out spelling mistakes, except in posts about spelling mistakes.
First of all, Joel, it's THEY'RE not THERE. ;)
Getting a valuation on this asset is interesting because it's hard for me to understand what 1-Billion dollars buys in today's world.

I often use the tallest building in the world as a reference for the value of 1.5 Billion dollars. So FB is worth about 20 of these.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Khalifa

The sad thing is hearing how much our government loosely throws around a billion dollars. 50-Billion here, 100-Billion there... No biggie.
I'm so glad they didn't sell to blockbuster! I wish more companies would stick with it and not sell to their competitors so early on.
I didn't expect something so painful... and a few posts below i've noticed you had also an pleasant discussion with the national tv guys too. That could have been waaay worse :)
If he calls them felons and they wind up being acquitted for whatever reason, however technical or stupid, then he would be liable for libel.

He clearly wanted to avoid using weasel words. The only way to do that without being reckless is to not refer directly to the objects of the post.
No problem, just tweak the search results for "facebook login".
I really like the new grid system YUI released with version 3.2. Much better than their old system, and is fluid.
I was impressed (surprised?) at how civil this response was. Probably because it was a response to Joel and not randomHNuser9 :)

I was also surprised that it didn't really address the question of whether or not you (37S, dhh) are "stewing in their own witty ideas, listening only to the adoring comments they get from the groupies"

Do you have any thoughts on the "bubble-ness" of Chicago. Think it's a totally invalid point?
Our failed experiment: great on the rack, bad in the mirror
only when you're outside. :)
More than Fedora + CentOS + RHEL?

Are web-hosting or shared-hosting providers using Ubuntu?

What do you thing Amazon or RackSpace are using?
Outside of the fact that Blockbuster was often not a very nice company: did it really have to turn out this way? I think it didn't have to end in bankruptcy. Someone will eventually write a whole screed about missed opportunities (e.g. expanding beyond movies, early strong internet presence) and the reasons BB management missed them (stuck in the '80s?). But I'm sure a smarter team would have capitalized on the future instead of ignoring it.
Why I hate squid proxies
I'm not sure a company doing as well as 37s can be accused of having a "complete misunderstanding of all the basics of business".
Given fb's current position - would it not be incredibly stupid to NOT do everything possible to continue their growth and try to become more widespread as a necessary layer of the internet?

Assume they want to continue growing. Growing both the number of total users and the number of places they grab the users' attention (mobile is the next natural play). Of course they would continue raising money and not worry about profit margins right now as they are still driving money back into the company's growth.

There are two factors that influence your 'multiplier theory' given their advertising model. Number of users and the amount of attention you have from those users. They still have a lot of potential upward growth in both areas.

If facebook made a billionish dollars this year on ad revenue - they could double it with twice as many users. Double it again with twice as much user attention from being a core part of the mobile web. They are still growing their ad platform, so that is another multiplier.
Signed up for all of them.

All the courses are from 6:30pm - 8:30pm so they shouldn't get in the way of other stuff you are doing.

There are 5 free courses being offered, 4 of which are on mondays and 1 of which is on a wednesday.
The cyberpunk writers like Gibson were the most prophetic of all the sci-fi authors of the 20th century. This is straight out of the Sprawl trilogy.
No offense but have you taken more companies public than:

* Marc Andreessen

* Jim Breyer

* Peter Thiel

because they are some of the directors on the Facebook board, and I think they know their stuff.
To be worth 33 billion they should be pulling in ~1.5 billion in profit a year with a reasonable expectation that they will increase over the next several years OR they are going to make significantly more than 1.5 billion a year fairly soon. I suspect FB could start making 1 billion a year fairly soon, but suggesting they are going to be make 3+ billion each and every year within 5 years seems like a significant stretch.
Use your powers for something good. We're hiring:

http://www.change.org/jobs_at_change#ruby-hacker
you should say what's the size of your sample for the a/b tests. in my experience there is always a high degree of uncertainty if you are just testing with a few thousand people
Whenever I see the word "monthly" on the web, I bookmark it and realize I'll probably never see it again.
I am starting to learn, with our 2 and a half year old daughter, that you can watch the same damn thing many, many times.

Beyond that, I completely agree with you though.
Wow, making selling a game into a game itself. How brilliant!
Interesting article, but one of the most confusingly-organized pieces of science coverage I have run across lately.
Generally and traditionally, no. You're probably right about the requirements for getting into the various digital distribution outlets, but it seems that gamers are willing to forgive a lot of problems and missing polish for the chance to play something while it's still in development.

For example, I think Minecraft is a great example of a MVP, although I admit it's an unusual case. The developer started on it in May 2009 and as far as I know it was available to play or buy within a few weeks of that. It's now making a lot of money, as I'm sure you're aware.

Valve's efforts with TF2 were a step in the MVP direction. It was in development for years and years before a massively marketed release upon completion - so in that sense nothing like MVP - but the fact that they then kept on developing it and new people kept on buying it showed that games don't necessarily have to be this big "release and forget" deal where a slow start dooms the product to complete failure.

Realtime Worlds recently collapsed after taking $100m in venture capital and then releasing APB to mediocre reviews and terrible sales. What if they had been selling alpha versions of the game all along? Perhaps they would have slowly picked up fans over a long period rather than relying on the huge marketing push to find a critical mass of fans in a narrow time window before the world moved onto the next big thing. Perhaps the earlier feedback could have alerted them to the game's problems and given them the chance to pivot. Perhaps they could have seen the game's failure coming and given up before wasting quite so much money.
For a little more context, a 33B valuation is ~1/5 Google's current market cap, 1/8 Apple's, 1/6 MS's, 1/4 Oracle's, 1/2 Disney's, 1/2 Amazon's, 2x Yahoo's, 15x AOL's, etc.

It would make Facebook the 79th largest company in the US, and 226th in the world. It would be right behind the likes of DuPont, Dow, eBay, Metlife, Time Warner, and Target, and right ahead of the likes of DirecTV, Lockheed Martin, Texas Instruments, Dell, Fedex, and Nike.
Keep in mind the purpose and tone of this article of his.

He is not trying to merely state matters of fact. He is stating some matters of fact while also betting his reputation on a few matters of inference.

Betting your reputation is one thing, but committing libel is something else.

A safe article would have said, "I saw these people together. The end."

To go beyond that, he'd need sources on tape. He may or may not have that, and even if he does, he may not feel like escalating this that quickly.
Is the problem that they're sitting there in a city
without any other Internet industry

orbitz, groupon, careerbuilder, peapod, everyblock, skinnycorp, grubhub, the onion, ars technica, to name a few
Marvell 1.5GHz Triple Core ARM Processor Can Play 140 Hours of Music, One Charge
Agreed, kind of depressing that neither appears to have anything better to do.
Google IPO'd with a market cap around $23.1B which went up to $33B very quickly:
http://www.google-ipo.com/

Google's revenue in 2004 was $3.1B:
http://bit.ly/bOQZeZ

Facebook's revenue for 2010 is rumored between $1.2B and $2B:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/03/facebook-revenue-2010/

VC investment rounds and secondary market transactions are probably not the best way to price a company, but they seem to be in the ballpark.
This is a financial event, not an operational one. The debt holders will now own the company and operations will continue on whatever trend is set. There is no new technology trend in this story.

The businesses lesson is that Blockbuster was once an extremely hot startup, then it became a big company able to issue large amounts of debt at favorable rates. And now this.

Innovation destroys some businesses as it creates others. It can take a while though.
http://www.sharespost.com/companies/facebook

I think the simple summary of your point is this: Things are worth what people are willing to pay for them, not what other people think they should be willing to pay for them.

Facebook is worth $26 billion. That doesn't mean that buying it at a valuation of $26 billion is a good investment. Worth and my estimation of what it will be worth in the future two are different things.
People are horrible at taking variables like growth into account.

It isn't 66$ per user. It is 33billion/expected number of total users over the lifetime of facebook.

So if you throw in rough estimates of 2 billion facebook users and give them a decade of profiting from an average user...3$ per year per user.
PHP Console in Your Browser
I don't get it when people find it weird that I will reread some books multiple times. I've read some books once every year or so and even my wife thinks I'm weird. She's a serial book reader (150 books as of now for the year, almost one a day) and will sell them as soon as she reads them, I don't work that way even after she tries to push me into selling some books I just can't.
Why not just remove your old high school friends as Facebook friends? What you'd have left is a small social network filled with only people you want to keep in touch with.

Privacy complaints, not trusting Zuckerberg, objecting to valuation...those are Facebook complaints I can comprehend.

But disliking the network of friends you created? That seems like your problem, not Facebook's.
Yes, seriously.

I can't make soup of it. What's their intention long term, everything seems to be in anticipation of what they're really going to do.

In all the time that I used facebook (haven't used it in months) I had a very hard time figuring out how they were making money on or off me.

It can't be the ads I never clicked and it wasn't the subscription fee I never paid.
In the past, FB's focus was almost solely on growth and they making planet-scale progress. If you reach some natural border in growth, you can throw your resources on sales, ads and novel revenue models, we haven't seen before.
Well it hasn't ended, they can still come out of this but they will never be the pre-Netflix BB.
Sheesh, did this topic hit close to home or something? Someone needs to chill and lay off Chicagoans, or red bull, or something..
I agree. I also think managers with discipline and ok intelligence are better than managers that are really intelligent with little discipline.

The disciplined managers focus on what needs to get done and do it. (The don't spend part of their day reading HN ;)
I lead a small .net shop up until 2005, when MS decided that integrated unit testing was only going to be available in their Team Edition, which was $1,500 per seat. They later retracted, but we were already drinking python and ruby kool-aide and never looked back.

Although I really enjoyed C#, everything else about the community and ecosystem will eventually be a killjoy if you value your work over your resume.
Am trying to find out if there's broadband in the room, if so then we should be able to stream.
2. The bond and equity markets are based on sound regulation, transparency, and quarterly statements. Facebook has none of those things when it operates in the dark of the secondary markets.

3. Again, these premiums are based on outstanding shares traded under the transparency of the public stock market. See Secondary Suckers for a nice take on the perils of the secondary market: http://www.homethinking.com/brontemedia/2010/09/17/secondary...

4. Do you have their P&L handy to back that up? If the valuation was so wonderful and they were raking in the profits, then taking series E funding three months ago doesn't make much sense.
I don't want to put words in his mouth, but it sounds like David is arguing that should Zuckerberg decide to just walk away from Facebook today, he would have a very difficult time coming up with $6.9B in cash in exchange for his equity. (Not to mention if other equity holders wanted to liquify at the same time.)

It is important to point out however, this a valuation does not make. Liquidity is not part of the equation.