skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The most rigorous methods of valuation are usually reserved for publicly traded companies, in which financial statements and reporting can be examined thoroughly by a large number of analysts. In other words: actual company assets, liabilities, and equity can be assigned values. These fundamentals can be analyzed pretty tangibly, serving as the partial basis -- along with other performance metrics, and market and industry analysis -- for estimations of future performance.

The going gets tougher for privately held and traded companies. Transactional volume, secondary market pricing, liquidity, exit options and timing, etc., are usually the bases for valuation in the case of entities like FB. To be fair, analysis of the company's fundamentals does take place -- but it is inherently limited, due to the limited publicly available documentation and knowledge from which to work. Hence, a large degree of speculation is baked into the value. We needn't conflate speculation-qua-speculation with "irrational" speculation, as the press often does. Indeed, sometimes speculative valuations prove conservative. Nevertheless, speculation exists in this case because most analysts have no other choice.
LaTeX: More Than Just Academic Papers and Theses [pdf]
"Join Friendster Today - Login with Facebook"

I'd like to have been in the room when that discussion took place.
Does anybody know if it's guaranteed to spread across your cores evenly (exactly one node proc on each core)? I skimmed the source but couldn't figure it out.
News Corp. on verge of Myspace sale
Show HN: What happens when it's no effort to digitize your possessions?
Congrats to Basho! Don Rippert was an experienced and inspirational leader for Accenture.
Yeah, the bug report wasn't closed because they didn't want the feature, it was closed because they decided it made more sense as an extension.
I think the idea is that you could share pics of your latest furry costume with your 'fur-friends' circle, without your parents or potential employers even knowing that circle exists.

What's even better, is that there is technically nothing stopping Google from keeping your employer from finding all the great ideas you've been giving away on HN, if you've somehow associated your HN account with a circle... unless said employer comes directly to HN, obviously.
Makes me wonder what comments here would be like if names weren't shown until a couple of hours posting.
no, they didn't. vista and 7 still have exactly the same behaviour as XP for initializing a new device, they just do a better job of hiding it from the users.
Maybe. The premise of this whole concept is that we don't really know most people's ideas. Even our friends may have important things to say, but we would never know about them. For that reason, I can't say it categorically wouldn't work in a social setting.
http://2011.djangocon.eu/schedule/ still has a list of talks - not entirely convenient, but easier than watching the first few mins of each video.
I think it's a cool idea, kinda like LikeALittle but for organizational stuff.

To pre-select the group of people who can participate, you might want to look at a model like Yammer, which validates accounts based on the email domain. This way, you wouldn't have to invite specific emails (which would make me less trustful of the anonymity). If you go on Glassdoor, you see a lot of this dynamic where employees will write reviews meant more for the company than for perspective hires. It's because a lot of companies don't have a really good feedback system where the anonymity can be trusted. Might be a good use case to focus on in the beginning.
I don't think anyone is claiming that the concept of "circles" is a radical innovation. It's quite natural, and similar (if not identical) ideas have been expressed many times before (from what I've heard about "circles" anyway).

What's news is that Google is putting its full weight behind the idea, including a slick implementation. And it might turn out to be a better alternative to Facebook, which would mean a big shift in the markets over the next few years.
I still only see the intro as free
And the look on their faces when Google+ launches the day before.
Oracle Datacenter Crash
I upvoted it based on the many extremely useful comments. Perhaps other people did too?
This explains some of it. It doesn't explain why I need to pay $500 an hour (well, $300 an hour) to get a lawyer to look over the contract when I buy a house. I'm not too concerned about having the best possible lawyer in that case -- as long as I have a vaguely competent lawyer (the same way I want, say, a vaguely competent taxi driver or a vaguely competent waiter) I should be fine.
Remove comic sans and it will be awesome. Make use of Google WebFonts.
Opera 11.50's new "featherweight" interface packs a punch
HN, please help Friend's stranded in Vancouver (Canada), needs work for 2-4mo
Ok, I've no idea if this will work or not. Please hear me out :D
A friend of mine (German) went to Vancouver, Canada after graduation (5 year Math major/CS minor degree (~Masters)) and has a work-permitted visa.

So far he's been somewhat out of luck finding any work. So, if you, or someone you know, might be interested in a friendly German helping out with C++, Obj-C, PHP or Matlab for 2-4 month that would be great. He's not expecting much. Making new friends and paying rent and food, would be all that's asked for. If you read this far, you are awesome!

Please contact him at ralf.sangl@gmail.com, thanks!
I'm moderately bullish on FB. Not bullish enough to buy, but bullish in general.

However, plenty of people are obviously eager to short it, and if there are enough of them it might be possible to arrange something.
Check Yahoo! mail webapp... it's in HTML5 and has offline stuffs
So you are a start-up business consultant selling services?

I would suggest offering your advice pro-bono on the ASK HN threads ( http://news.ycombinator.com/ask ) so people get to know you and what business insights you can provide before jumping in and asking for the sale.
Ha, very nice. At my work we built a complex node-based UI for marketing segmentation and I rolled that from scratch using a similar architecture to this (1 canvas element per curve, jQUI for dragging)

http://cl.ly/7tpT
Of course scarcity plays into the equation, but Forbes does not try to misrepresent this fact. As a whole, the Forbes article can just as well be read as criticism of using extrapolation as the main valuation apparatus. The journalist very casually dismiss Zuckerberg's wealth as a paper fortune, which turns the headline's hyperbole into irony if you will.

My point is that what's actually written in the Forbes article is very open for interpretation, which makes it less of a thing to stomp your foot and grind your teeth about.

In my humble view, 37s is much closer to jumping the shark here, than what Forbes is.
As long as xp still works, it's impossible for microsoft to design an OS that businesses are interested in. migrating a large business to a new OS is a huge endeavour, and as long as there's any way to get away with not doing it, businesses are going to stick with XP.

the only way to get people off XP is to start writing applications that don't support XP.
Google Translate does a decent job on the text:

"A number of Oracle's site is down for the count. This is certainly Openoffice.org, Java.net and Netbeans.org. Visitors are greeted with the error message "Error 503 - Service Unavailable. " The cause of the problems seem to be a casualty in a data center in California, which should have happened Tuesday night Norwegian time. - All the sites are down due to a catastrophic failure in the cooling system, type the Oracle engineer Marco Walther in a twitter message . The power is cut to the plant, which has now been down for about 10 hours. According to Walther, it is unclear when the error in the data center will be corrected. Project Kenai offers more detail on the matter. It is said that a nedløsning for cooling in place on Wednesday afternoon, California time. This means that the sites probably come up again until at least tomorrow. In the meantime, the downtime consequences for software, application server Glassfish. There is trouble logging into the management console because of lack of access to the Java.net, according to @ netmikey . He has written a blog post with a proposal for a configuration change that allows the problem can be circumvented."
List of titles with links:

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/tuesday-1530-andrew-god...
Core Developers Panel

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/tuesday-1655-lightning-...
Lightning talks

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/tuesday-1615-jonas-obri...
The Django ORM and Multilingual Database contents

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/tuesday-1635-ed-crewe-5...
Integrating the Enterprise Using Django

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/tuesday-1415-klaas-van-...
Reusable Apps using "Eight Spaces"

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/17-20-remco-wendt-53197...
Closing

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/wednesday-1615-russel-k...
Whither Django?

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/wednesday-1530-andrew-g...
Scalability Panel

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/wednesday-1700-russel-k...
Sprint Introduction

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/wednesday-1030-nate-aun...
An iPhone-Python Love Affair: Building APIs for mobile

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/wednesday-1330-andrew-g...
Deploying At An Unusual Scale

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/wednesday-0930-armin-ro...
The Impact of Django

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/wednesday-1415-will-har...
Taming runtime dynamic models in Django

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/wednesday-1205-zachary-...
Django on Rais: Getting Resourceful

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/wednesday-1145-alex-gay...
The Best and worst of Django's core

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/tuesday-0930-martijn-fa...
Who cares about Zope?

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/tuesday-1030-jesper-noe...
Bitbucket - Lessons learned

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/tuesday-1330-markus-zap...
Celery: An asynchronous task queue (not only) for Django

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/tuesday-1145-szilveszte...
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/tuesday-1205-matt-westc...
Unjoinify: A module to tame the SQL beast

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/monday-1445-dennis-buns...
3 CMSes in 45 minutes

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/monday-1130-andy-mckay-...
Large Django Sites at Mozilla

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/monday-1600-idan-gazit-...
Responsive Web design with Django, Compass and the Less framework

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/monday-1645-lightning-t...
Lightning talks

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/monday-1215-jannis-leid...
How I learnt to stop worrying and love python packaging

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/monday-1400-alex-gaynor...
How I learnt to stop worrying and love python packaging

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/monday-1000-eric-floren...
From static to realtime: One app's journey into the modern age

http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2011/episode-5300929
Opening
thanks very much. I will replace comic sans tonight :)
ITunes: Change (or Fix) the Sorting Order of Your Media | The Mac Observer
Twitter co-founder starts new company
I'm at work and my company's network blocks Social Networking sites. Is this a joke? Does it really allow you to login in Facebook?
HN Roundup: Hacker News Hacks
Between browser extensions, Dotjs, Greasemonkey, etc., there are many ways of hacking HN. Most of them seem to be crappy or esoteric.

Let's round up all of the hacks that we actually find useful!
I'll add another way to acquire users for free, but it takes a lot of work and isn't "free" in the traditional sense at first per se.

Buy ads. Start with a $100 AdWords coupon that is free and not hard to come by. Even $25-50 would be enough depending on your market.

Bid on cheap cheap long tail keywords (3-4 word phrases). You won't get a lot of traffic at first, but that's kind of the point. Get your campaign dialed in where you are making at least $2 per $1 you spend.

Use that money to grow your advertising profitably over time using the same method. Work your way up the ladder so to speak.

You can do this on AdWords, Facebook, Microsoft AdCenter, and probably on AdMob as well. It's not hard at all. It just takes an incredible amount of patience not to blow all your money in a week.

Remember, the goal is profit, not volume. Grow profitably and volume will come with time.
AFAIK, market capitalization has not much meaning for pre-ipo stock. Problem is that, IPO price isn't just the last price at which the stock was bought in secondary market. Also, there is no indication if what kind of stock was sold. If it is not common stock, then this definitely wont be indicative of the actual valuation.
MySpace has the same thing.
Node's sweet spot is I/O bound tasks, not CPU bound tasks.
This is what scientific journals do with anonymous paper reviews. It works for specific situations but in many cases you can tell who the reviewer is by the content of their review.
Hacker News Collapsible Comments (Chrome extension) - Lets you collapse entire comment threads.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hockhafcdegocajmjh...
I think pundits (and Wall Street?) tend to underestimate the potential of incremental, evolutionary approaches to technology transitions. They're not as exciting I guess, but over the long term they seem to have at least as good a track record as "rewrite the world" initiatives.
facebook has hit that incredibly difficult point where they can't do anything cool anymore. the outrage that happens every time they introduce even the slightest change is huge; if they try to do anything cool they risk alienating a huge portion of their users. at with their current growth rate, they don't need to change anything.
You absolutely can go to Crossfit if you're out of shape. It requires a certain disregard for your social instincts, because you will feel out of place. While I was taking on-ramp classes (intro classes with more intense instruction and slightly easier workouts) I saw several extremely overweight people join up. I didn't see any of them more than a few times, but they were welcome and could have kept with it if they wanted to.

It's easy to feel self-conscious and unwelcome. Half the people in my on-ramp classes were in stellar shape already, and at least two of them were professional personal trainers who were interested in eventually becoming instructors. There were times when I was sure nobody else wanted me there, and I kept going just out of sheer bloody-mindedness, with a kind of "fuck 'em, I don't care, I'm going anyway" attitude. In retrospect, it was all in my mind. I never minded any of the people who were in worse shape than me. You won't be in anybody's way. And I would have said all that to someone who hadn't been doing "Starting Strength" for a few months, so it goes triple for you.
Great comments, thanks so much for taking the time to share!
Own site. Vaguely similar to Facebook, but less "formish" and more interactive. Black bar at top.
there's nothing stopping you from creating a regular google account.
HNCommentTracker (Chrome extension) - Highlights comments you haven't seen before, and shows an indicator of how many new comments exist for comment pages that you've previously read.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/imeeonmdbakdmilnnc...
My company's marketing manager spent quite a lot of time figuring out what we were paying adWords for. He quickly realised that most ads were displayed on eMule-related forums, and that most clicks we paid for were thrown-away money. Lesson learnt: track carefully where ads are displayed!
Google Takeout lets you easily export your data from Circles
Yes. It is the most prominent method of joining that they display on the landing page. This is real.

Edit: Granted, they relaunched it as a social gaming site, so that signup method makes a bit more sense.
Facebook has an SDK written in PHP so you should be able to work with that. It's pretty simple if you follow the examples. As of yet there is no official SDK for Ruby though the unofficial implementations are pretty decent and easy to work with.
Highlight new comments on HN homepage (Greasemonkey script):

http://coding.pressbin.com/74/Update-on-Greasemonkey-script-...
The most recent investors would not have bought the stock if they had assumed that their investment would be worth less in the future, therefore, yes, they are valuing the company at $80bil or whatever the number is. This is unlike the "37signals is worth $1bil" link-bait stunt in that people expect to make money on their Facebook investment.

Of course, GSV is simply betting that Facebook will be valued by the public markets for more than $80bil at some point in the future, not necessarily for any extended period. They might very well be hoping to make money off Facebook in a greater-fool-theory play.
As a big risk and Langrab fan, this looks pretty awesome.
Oracle Delivers Complex Reporting System with Trusted Aspose Components
Oracle Consultancy used trusted applications: Aspose.Cells and Aspose.Slides for Java when implementing a document delivery module for a complex reporting system. Aspose’s applications integrated into Oracle’s Java environment and produced the documents they needed without being dependent on Microsoft Office applications; did not require Windows Automation and provided powerful document controls. Importantly, they saved valuable time compared to building the document management system from scratch.
A lot of the problem is users' reluctance to upgrade off of XP to Win7 (or even Vista). Certainly Microsoft deserves blame for XP having been as insecure as it was when released, but newer versions of Windows are incredibly more secure against these sorts of attacks, especially when they are running Microsoft Security Essentials.

I'm not sure what you're talking about in terms of "MS-Versions" of HTML and JS, at least in the sense of them being a security risk. That's just anti-MS bullcrap, really. IE is actually inherently quite secure in lots of ways Firefox still isn't, and the primary vector for these types of attacks are Adobe plugins (Flash, Reader) and have nothing to do with browser-specific code.
Seems like a useful app and it works pretty well. Others have mentioned the font, but in general I think if you worked with a designer on improving the overally appearance and the design of the different elements, the app would benefit greatly.
I should also add that Smalltalk didn't "fail" for its technical faults. It failed (in an oversimplified nutshell) because the companies that owned the Smalltalks had business models of charging per developer seat and their investors would not allow them to "pivot" and drop all that revenue to plug it into a browser for free. Sun could afford to give away Java for free as there was no business model behind what started as a lab experiement. Combine this with "the Internet age is coming" mantra that hit in the mid-90s and you have a perfect storm that put a hold on enterprises moving forward with Smalltalk. The internal priorities of enterprises were either put on hold or changed to address "this new Internet thing".
Why shoot them down? Ask for money.

There's good money to be made in developing ideas that you might not see the value in but someone else does (possibly rightly!).
happens to me all the time. I've found that its very helpful to just turn off my wireless (gasp!) and keep all of my browsers minimized. It is amazing how much my efficiency has improved.
Fine nerd humor!
Slay the 3-Headed Beast of Latency, Jitter, and Packet Loss
And so it does. I haven't had reason to look at MySpace for a goodly while until now.
I now have the black bar at the top, too. But I am not using Google+. I wonder if the black bar is getting rolled out to everyone.
You mean 355/113
Minimum 10,000 euros of capital, although you can sort of get around that and "get away" with 2500. Yes, you can invest that in your company, but it's still sort of stupid to have to do it. Also, a notary must be involved, and they have a pretty hefty fee. Also, you must have an accountant involved, and then there are various taxes and fees to pay.
How to Develop a Reliable Sales System
A lot has changed Canada since the late 1970s, which is why I say you'd need more information than just that little map or even stats of the kind I got off statscan. You could probably come up with a half-dozen stories why that fit the map data, but that wouldn't mean they were right.
Monster-brand HDMI cables? Maybe this doesn't qualify because you "need" a cable -- it's just that the functional difference between the $10 cable and the $150 monster cable is essentially nil.
Oh wow, that's... bad.
It would be nice if they open-sourced it so people could make their own maps, teams, etc.
I use RockMelt and I absolutely love it. I have almost every website I check streamlined in one place and the facebook sync is very convenient. That being said it is also highly distracting.
You can segment AdWords to only display on Google search results. And you should.
There's already the paper-based mobius circuit: http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/mobiuscircuit
Scientists gain insight into how learning new tasks affects brain structure.
For those who think this is going to be an anti-government regulation, libertarian orthodoxy type article, here's the tl;dr:

"government regulators who have forced more competition"
You could probably strip all punctuation and capitalization from any user input so that the style remains fairly obfuscated. IMO it's punctuation and capitalization that usually gives away the IDE identity especially on a chat medium.
thank you. not being a designer I tried to keep it basic. Can you point out any specific design/appearance issue. Is it the interface or the widgets?
Nugget ice machine - heaven for ice chewing hackers...
DHH had the same complaint when private transactions valued Facebook at $30B as he does now, when they value Facebook at $70B. See:

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2585-facebook-is-not-worth-33...

DHH can write my web framework but I wouldn't let him manage my money.
The fact that we can even debate these numbers means that Facebook or it's investors are breaking the law and should be investigated.

Private companies are not allowed to publicly broadcast their share price for exactly this reason. Until something hits an open market market you really don't know exactly what something is worth.
Five copywriting errors that can ruin a company website
An American Expat's take on taxes in the Netherlands
So, they lost the social graph game and now focus on the popular social game market. It's what zynga failed to do until now. There's huge audience and the monetization is guaranteed if they enroll virtual currency. if they can prove they can gain traction and provide a platform that is easy to convert to, I'm game.
the Grisu family acts as the default rendering algorithms in both the V8 and Mozilla Javascript engines (replacing David Gay's 17-year-old dtoa code)

Hmm. I think maybe a weekend hack is in order. Perhaps dtoa in Python can be replaced in a similar fashion, since Python maintains David Gay's algorithm as an upstream source.

http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/fc831c49216d/Python/dtoa.c

EDIT: Looks like there has already been some gripes about the quality of David Gay's implementation.

http://bugs.python.org/issue9009