skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You aren't hiring robots. You're hiring people. If you want to be analytical about it, you'll end up hiring the person that tells you what you want to hear the best.

That's not usually the person you want.
Do you know what those tests are designed to do? Those tests are designed to narrow 3000 resumes to 300. That's it. After that, you still need to find your person from a pool of 300.

With a hot job market and hiring from (I presume) a no-name startup, you'll be lucky to get 300 hires to sift through. Even more important, those test eliminate some high quality performers. Facebook has a management staff already, and enough money that this is less of a concern.

You on the other hand, would do well to keep every door open. You can't afford to miss that diamond in the rough.
Asking a few nearly trivial programming or other puzzles in the initial job listing or in a first phone screen really helps for two reasons:

1) it discourages lazy people and resume spammers. Most people want to cut and paste their resume and cover letter and be done. Someone solving your (even simple) puzzle means they might actually be interested in what you are doing.

2) You make sure they aren't completely incompetent jokers. They pass the trivial reject.
Venture Beat thinks Google Gears is a big deal
1) References

2) Experience

3) Accomplishments you can see
10 signs you're in a tech bubble
Those are just some generic and basic return ratios and much less relevant to the size of most of these web startups.
Is VC Bashing Passe?
er. that's the point of this topic. i'm asking for tests to narrow down the pool of interviewees and screen out the bad ones so i do not have to waste my time to interview them. why wouldn't they want to join my company when i'm going to pay them 50% above market rate?
^ Agreed. Most businesses determine their worth from net present value, comparable sales, or capitalization rate based on net operating income.

A problem with these web start ups is that they often don't have substantial income, and often do not have comparable sales. Two years ago, who honestly thought that $500mm for MySpace turned out to be a bargain?
If you don't want to read the whole thing, here is the most important excerpt (IMHO):

"Parkinson shows how you can go in to the board of directors and get approval for building a multi-million or even billion dollar atomic power plant, but if you want to build a bike shed you will be tangled up in endless discussions.

Parkinson explains that this is because an atomic plant is so vast, so expensive and so complicated that people cannot grasp it, and rather than try, they fall back on the assumption that somebody else checked all the details before it got this far. Richard P. Feynmann gives a couple of interesting, and very much to the point, examples relating to Los Alamos in his books.

A bike shed on the other hand. Anyone can build one of those over a weekend, and still have time to watch the game on TV. So no matter how well prepared, no matter how reasonable you are with your proposal, somebody will seize the chance to show that he is doing his job, that he is paying attention, that he is here.

In Denmark we call it "setting your fingerprint". It is about personal pride and prestige, it is about being able to point somewhere and say "There! I did that." It is a strong trait in politicians, but present in most people given the chance. Just think about footsteps in wet cement."
"It seems like the service is being targeted because of the religious beliefs of the founder "

and the fact that eHarmony has lots of $$$$
This is best:

Utility.isEmpty(s);
So tempting to comment on the irony that this is posted by someone who seems to spend every waking hour on news.yc ;)
Does Ycombinator decline applicants based on programming language?
Does Ycombinator decline/discriminate against applicants based on their choice of programming language? For example if a startup has their app written in C#/.Net, do they have an equal chance of being accepted into Ycombinator?

Thanks.
I believe xobni uses C# in at least some of their code: http://www.xobni.com/blog/2007/01/31/kevins-thoughts/
The Myth of Risky Startups
Building Capital of the Entrepreneurial Spirit
Sorry, I just don't buy it. See, when the "bubble" term was coined 10 or so years ago, they were talking about a stock market bubble. The worst thing that's going to happen in this "bubble" is that VCs stop investing -- and as we've seen, that might not be the worst thing that ever happened. You don't need big money anymore, just a good idea, some dedication, and some technical chops.

I think these guys just like saying the word "bubble." It makes them feel good.
yeah the maps themselves don't play well together. Memory usage spikes pretty high, and then FF crashes. Nature of the beast.

When it works it's pretty cool though
You might write a different article, entitled "Top Sign You're Not in a Bubble".

1- journalists on slow news days keep insisting you're in a bubble
If your app is decent I would think using C#/.NET would increase your chances. Extra points for difficulty. Anybody can crank out a decent app in Lisp, but YC is investing more in the team than the app.
I think the site is impressive and the concept is fascinating. I just wish that they had more than 6 women on their list of 107 people they are tracking. It's not that the guys don't deserve all the credit they are getting - just that I wish sites like these would do more to balance who and what they are featuring.
Just a naysayer...
Why don't online shops have shop assistants?
Mabye it is the stupidest question ever, but with so many people worrying about their jobs, especially as computers take over, wouldn't it be possible that new useful jobs could be created? Maybe it is just because the right technology is missing?
Actually, that wasn't the central thesis of Blink at all...

The point of Blink is that gut calls are remarkably accurate when made by an expert with significant pre-existing knowledge and experience in the field. By letting your unconscious make the decision, you can tap into all the knowledge that just doesn't fit in your conscious mind. The brain's basically a massive pattern-recognizer: gut calls are effectively patterns bubbling up into your subconscious that rely on some deeply hidden information.

Gut calls fail terribly when made by people with no expertise in the subject. Blink gave the example of Warren G. Harding: he fit everybody's preconceived notions of what a strong leader should look like, but he was an idiot. George W. Bush is a more modern example. Every time you suffer buyer's remorse after an impulse purchase, it's your gut letting you down.

Every entrepreneur needs to realize that hiring is inherently a low-information process. You don't know anything about the person applying for the job. You can convince yourself by gut call that he's a good fit, but you're as likely to be wrong as right.

The real best way to hire is to have the person work for you for about 3-6 months as a contractor or intern first. Then you go based on your intuition. After 3 months, you've got a stock of information to make a good gut call. You've worked with them daily. But you can't just expect your intuition to magically work in your favor, no matter what.
One of my favorites:

"If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?"

Unbeknownst to me, there are even answers, on the internet:

http://www.paradiseawaits.com/Tree.html
6 Reasons Google Did Not Need To Acquire Feedburner
I am of a different opinion than the other posters so far. I believe we are in somewhat of a love fest right now. The number of me-too companies out there keeps growing. I think that the entrepreneurs starting these companies would be well advised to realize that the VC community is actually COUNTING on most of these to fail. So this represents a large number of our brightest young men expending their best efforts on enterprises that everyone accepts will probably ultimately fail. This is concerning for the economists.

I was reading on a blog of very good repute this morning about two financing deals that were announced today. One, was for Multiverse. They were given $4.175 million for a post money valuation of right around $10 million. This is familiar to most of us. The second was for HiPiHi. They were given somewhere between $7 Million and $10 Million for a post money valuation of between $70 and $100 Million. Both companies are in the same segment, virtual worlds. Both companies are at the same stage of life. "Why the different valuations?", demanded this blog.

HiPiHi is Chinese. Frankly, Chinese entrepreneurs have a better track record with respect to actually having users PAY for their products. EVEN THOUGH THE CHINESE USERS ARE NOTORIOUS PIRATES. Although most of the money was coming from American VCs, the advantage was given to the Chinese team because of this crucial difference. So China's young men are gaining experience building companies, our young men are gaining experience flipping companies.

Is there still any hope?

Can ANY of you young men see where I'm going with this?

It's anyone's guess how the current tech industry story ends. However, from the standpoint of a dispassionate economic analysis it would be thoroughly understandable if it ended poorly.
edit: don't comment before reading the article

oops
On customer loyalty
Visit Rackspace.com
If you can define objectively what makes a person good, you can probably, after a decade or so of research, put together a statistically significant test that will allow you to objectively determine whether a candidate is good or not. That's probably longer than your schedule allows, so you'll have to fudge it.

First, you want people who are analytical and can figure things out. I went to an interview once where the interviewer had a binary clock on the table. It wasn't immediately obvious to me what it was, never having seen one. He left me in the room for a minute while he went to fetch something, and while he was out I figured out what the clock was and that it was off by about a quarter of an hour. Later on in the interview he asked if I had any idea what it was, and I told him that it was off. Apparently I passed the test.

Second, you want people who know their stuff, and who, if they don't know some bit of their stuff, can take a reasonable guess or know where to find the answer. If the candidate submitted a portfolio, you can ask leading questions about the candidate's work: why did you do it this way? What were the tradeoffs if you had done it this other way? You also want to make sure the candidate does something small right there in your office: write code for a merge sort, for instance.

Third, you want someone who fits with your company culture. If you're dominant and want people to follow your instructions, you don't want to hire someone who's always questioning authority. No matter who's right and who's wrong, you'll both have an unpleasant time of it. If you expect people to wear business casual clothes and be punctual, you don't want to hire someone who's the most brilliant programmer in the world but who never gets in before 10:30 am and only owns one shirt with a collar. If the candidate is a poor fit for the culture, the candidate won't perform anywhere near his capacity.

In particular, the difference between a supremely productive programmer and a loafer is often the environment the person is in. Put someone who isn't punctual or a sharp dresser in a culture where he is expected to be at his desk every morning by 8:30 in a jacket and tie, and he'll turn into a loafer out of frustration within a year. No test will identify that.
There's no evidence one way or another, because there's no clear objective definition of "a good employee."

For some of the jobs I've had, a willingness to think independently and critically -- far more important in a lot of cases than a high IQ -- was an active detriment.
Because they realize that there's more to happiness than money, especially in a job where you spend at least 1/3 of your waking time?
No. But it might help to have a good reason for using an inferior language.

There have been many PHP-based products, and a few Java products that I'm certain of. As someone else mentioned, it seems very likely that Xobni are using .Net since they're building desktop Windows software. Our products are in Perl. And Python and Ruby have a few adherents among YC'ers.

So, make sure you can defend your choice, and you'll be fine. Presumably you've thought a little about your language choice, so defending it shouldn't be hard.

The other YC'ers might make fun of you, though. It really is a pretty stinky language for web apps (and most apps these days ought to be web apps).
Here's your fundamental problem. It's a logical fallacy.

You observe that a good employee is likely to have a high IQ. From this, you conclude that a bad employee is likely to have a low IQ, and that a person with a high IQ is likely to be a good employee.

The truth of a proposition does not imply the truth of the converse of the proposition (A - B does not imply B - A) or of the contrapositive of the proposition (A - B does not imply !B - !A).

Further, no company has a verifiable screening program, because they can't evaluate how good the people they screened out were. Suppose a company has a screening program that rejects 90% of candidates completely at random. They then choose their hires from the other 10%, using other means. As long as they get good hires in sufficient quality and quantity, they will believe that the screening program is effective. They have no way of evaluating the people rejected by the screening program.
That's a good point, but even in hiring someone for 3 months, you are turning away others. You need to make the call.

Although Blink does present the dangers of gut calls, you seem to agree there is really no other alternative when it comes to hiring. As an entrepreneur, almost every call you make is made with an element of inconclusiveness. Almost every call is a gut call.

Some gut calls do fail terribly, but when the only way to get the experience and pre-existing knowledge to make the call is to make a few mistakes, you're SOL.

Catch 22, I guess! :-)
That looks quite cool. It looks like a formalization of WSGI application techniques, rather than anything entirely novel, but it's simplicity is very appealing. The examples are impressively tight...not a lot of extraneous crap required to fire up an application.
Paste is a toolkit for building WSGI apps. There's nothing else quite like it. I use it a lot, both by itself and as a part of Pylons.
Okay, the conversation probably went in a wrong direction. Let's change pace:

1) Do you, personally, write code? If yes, that's a good thing.

2) You probably know that each employee is like a mini-founder. (If the number of total employees is small, then they could really be a founder.) It doesn't take a smart person to found a successful business, but rather hard work and dedication. People can do really, really well on an IQ test and have no dedication, or they can bomb the IQ test and have so much dedication that they make up for it. Therefore, if the IQ test doesn't have any correlation to how good an employee is, you shouldn't use it to gauge anything.

3) At the company I work at, we've put together a programming test. It's difficult and it grills you hard. If you get a 60/160 we'll still consider you (I got around 60% two years ago). The test is followed by every developer in the company spending time with the interviewee, asking them questions. Then the interviewee is asked to go to the white board and do a programming problem that we give him verbally, with no use of an editor or compiler. How he can react to a the stressful situation of being asked to solve a hard problem in front of total strangers says loads about him. But possibly the most important part is that at the end of the day, the decision for hire or no hire is made from a gut instinct by all developers. That's just how humans work, and it does work.

The programming test weeds out all non-hackers. We call each semi-promising person in, sit them in a room for an hour and leave them with the test. At the end of the hour we score them and if they do horribly, we send them on their way with no hard feelings. It doesn't use up too much of our time, and finding a great person is worth the effort.

You should read http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing3.html also.

Shawn
what's WSGI?
The Difference Between Difficult and Complicated
Umm, that's exactly the approach that I wouldn't use an IQ or other standardized test for. If you screen based on IQ or SAT or whatever, you will miss out on good candidates, often candidates who might be critical to the success of your business.

If I have 5 candidates who all have the relevant skills, useful work experience, a strong track record, cultural fit, etc, then I might be willing to differentiate them by test score. If one of them scored 1600 on his SATs and the others were 1200-1300, sure, I'll take the perfect guy. They're probably all qualified anyways, no harm in taking the one who's more qualified.

But I absolutely would not institute a minimum test score and only accept applicants above that level. Because too many of the best programmers I know had SAT scores in the 1200-1400 level, and too many folks with perfect SAT scores turn out to be terrible workers. I wouldn't be selecting for anything relevant to my business, I'd just chop out many candidates who might've been a good choice.

If you want to narrow the pool, include a programming problem with the application. Throw out everything that doesn't compile, run, or give the correct answer - that'll cut out most of the chaff right there. Look through the solutions and only invite the people whose code is clean and elegant for an interview. That'll give you far more relevant results. Plus, the very fact that you have an interesting programming challenge tends to attract top developers. One of the defining characteristics of a top developer is that they like challenge.

Hell, you could even make it a part of the application form and check the results automatically. No manual intervention required.
Web Server Gateway Interface; a standard for python webapps. check out http://wsgi.org/ for more info.
Salesforce Developer Conference: Complete Video with Audio of all speakers (Including Guy Kawasaki)
Web 2.0: The Biggest RSS magazine
They are using Twitter, SMS, camera phones, etc

I don't read Spanish. How crucial was Twitter compared to SMS, etc.?
the problem is that i know a lot of really smart people who don't have the self-motivation to produce anything.
I can't tell if you're joking or not. Take the more difficult route does not make you smarter.
What's a startup? Easy classifications are any company who has raised enough money to build a nice soccer stadium or has an employee count approaching Dunbar. 37signals is a small team launching cool and interesting products so I decided to track their products and growth. Basecamp has been around for a few years and resulted in a few spinoff products, but Highrise is totally new and going after sites such as Salesforce.com.
Hi, I wrote the site and I am responsible for choosing companies listed on the site.

Startup Search reports facts as they may occur. I start out with a product of interest, discovering the parent company key employees, investment rounds and other relevant information.

Any bias or non-bias towards women, a skin color, or a location is a reflection on the state of the industry or at least the subsection inside the United States currently tracked in the database. I will keep adding new data, reflecting a more complete picture with each new data point.
yes!

my comment on the blog post:

well, most of the comments at news.YC and other 'non-technical' newsgroups debate things that "dont really matter";

However, it's the process of debating the silly stuff that creates social friction, so that our gears may slough off grit, interlock and start working together. Now THAT's important!
RSS feeds are available for each object listing in the system: company, product, person, investor, and investment parter. They are exposed as link alternates within each of those pages. I know my way around RSS, Atom, and widgets, so you'll see more syndicated content added over time.

True Ventures sponsors the site in the same way National Geographic might sponsor a show about African safaris. There's an overlap in interests the brand gains from a run-of-site advertisement, and True is interested enough in the product's development to offset some of its costs.
To me it looks like women are over represented on the site, unless you think that women run 5.6+ percent of high growth startups. The last I checked the number was more like 2%. I could be wrong though, and if I am I would appreciate it if someone would provide the cite.
How I Made the Same Mistake Twice:

So I'm contracting on this Web app, and I'm looking after the design and page layout, and we have a workable prototype to show off to The People In Charge.

Right away, people are chiming in: Why is that font blue? Shouldn't that background be white?

Endless reassurances that the look and feel is easy to change, and that what's being presented is not the actual design, mean nothing.

Mr. Smartypants then goes and creates a second stylesheet to show how easy it is to change the look. That'll shut 'em up, he thinks.

Now they had two not-real designs to nit-pick.
So... we're in a bubble. What should we do? Nothing? Became assembly line workers? Work for IBM?
A speculative bubble is when people buy large amounts of stocks (usually with little thought to the actual company) in the hope that they will be worth more in the future.

The promise of a future higher value causes people to rush in, buying more and more stocks until one day people decide that they are not going to get a higher value for their shares and sell them all at the same time. This causes panic selling, and the bubble bursts. I don't see this happening (in tech) right now. Real estate yes, but not tech.
'... True Ventures sponsors the site in the same way National Geographic might sponsor a show about African safaris. ...'

That's understandable. I didn't see this as a problem mainly because there is ample notice.

'... There's an overlap in interests the brand gains from a run-of-site advertisement, and True is interested enough in the product's development to offset some of its costs. ...'

Ads, no problems. In fact I'm surprised that a paid option for more detailed information isn't there. Then again maybe the .org should tip me off as to the slant of the site.

'... RSS feeds are available for each object listing in the system: company, product, person, investor, and investment parter. ...'

Hey Niall. I take it back, well done. Having access to the data, for fee or free makes this a worthwhile site to use.
I don't think people that write these articles even understand what a bubble is- otherwise they might actually define it. There is no such thing as a 'tech bubble'.
Technology keeps developing at a fairly steady rate through all the bubbles. A bubble is about money- people making bad investments. There seems to be one major difference between the current time and the previous bubble- worthless companies are not being pumped and dumped on an unwitting public.
Very true. I've always found productive people to be much more useful than smart people.
Make an advertising kit (stats & info promoting your site, along with details on advertising opportunities) and send it out to companies that sell products relevant to your audience.
Sweet! Let's just hope that the next time they capture the photos Paul Graham's having breakfast outside! :P
Trying to do something you see as a good fit for you is more important than whether or not it worked out
Invitation to participate in new community startup space
I use ubuntu linux and it works perfectly.
nice articel

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