skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Steven Levy
One of these SBCL instances is for telltrains dot com? :-)
The first bubble was a catastrophe because it involved public money. The second bubble is going to be a headache because it involves private money. But nonetheless when the value of something is way more than the intrinsic value, it's a bubble.

It's improperly termed "A bubble" and every time someone calls it that, it will only make the particular headache worse. When people lose money on bad ideas, that'll hurt, but it'll happen on an individual basis. Calling Facebook's valuation a bubble is like Chicken Little saying the sky is falling. If enough people really start believing Chicken Little, there will be problems; but the sky isn't going to fall.
That doesn't make sense. Even if my whole strategy WAS to get acquired, I wouldn't plaster it in 48-pt font on the website. What do you think Twitter's strategy is? It's a pretty cool idea, but I fail to see how anyone could monetize it. Does that mean no one uses Twitter?
My attempt was similar, but I didn't zragvba gur rqtr pnfrf so I may not have received full credit from the grader (they don't tell you which question your points come from).
The Definition of Inbox 2.0
Do you have anything to prove that? I don't have anything to prove my assertion (other than personal opinion) so I'd be interested if you had something.
Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
www.avashya.com is good too
A bubble happens when people buy something (stock, real estate or even tulip bulbs!) that they know is overvalued, on the ground that some "greater fool" will arrive later in the party and buy it at a still higher price. It's a kind of Ponzi scheme; at some point, there aren't greater fools anymore and the last players lose.

What we see now may be some misguided investments, bad companies, etc. Obviously, all the crap will end up being cleared at some point. But it's not necessarily a bubble.
MIT doesn't have a CS degree, only 6-3 or 18-C.

And doesn't offer honors.

Actually, the thing that I absolutely adore is that MIT doesn't do "honorary" degrees. You earn it.
For sheer enjoyment (measured in how many times I've re-read them, at least at various times in my life): Heinlein's _The Door into Summer_. Connie Willis' _Bellwether_ (these can be funny, right?). Ayn Rand's _Atlas Shrugged_ (more in my youth than today, but I can probably still recite passages by heart).

Non-fiction: Gerry Weinberg's _Secrets of Consulting_. Lynn Truss' _Eats Shoots & Leaves_.
"I beg to differ. A legit business model would include a base of customers who wanted to buy the products from the company -- something Pets never had luck with."

Based on that, the entirety of Web 2.0 should be an automatic bubble.

"That was one of their failures, but not their biggest. The biggest was not having demand, and being unable to create demand. It was easier for people to go to the grocery store once per month than to order online. Comparing Pets to Amazon isn't really valid, since Amazon meant to a seller of everything, and even when they were solely selling books, there was more value-add than Pets could ever achieve. You can shop for books on Amazon in more interesting ways than you can at a physical bookstore. That wasn't true for Pets.com."

Wow, you don't get it.

The "demand" wasn't there because the majority of people didn't have internet, weren't comfortable with ecommerce, and didn't want to give out credit cards. To survive in that sort of environment most companies relied on massive marketing push. Well, vulture funds gave them plenty of cash to burn, what were they going to do? Invest it in a CD?

They had as much of a legitimate business model as Amazon, their failure was the wanton spending and the inability to sustain their company. But the idea is sustainable, online pet supplies brings up 1.7 million entries on Google. Just because one company failed does not invalidate the market.

Amazon back then had a value add? What was that? Selling books for a loss?

And an economic bubble is defined as when assumed value is more so than intrinsic value. Read techcrunch for more than a month and you'll find plenty of investments or exits for extraordinarily pricing.
Technorati Relaunches; I'm Confused w/Video Review
Can't remember when was the last time that change of ownership influenced my decisions on buying or using products, at least immediately after acquisition. Of course new owners can dump the product, but likewise they can improve it. I didn't think about it before starting this discussion, but it seems to be true.
You're right. Everything is a-okay!
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Gur vagrerfgvat cneg bs guvf erfhyg vf abg qverpgyl jung vg fnlf, ohg jung vg fnlf nobhg fcnprf jr pna rzorq va gur fhesnpr bs n x-qvzrafvbany fcurer...gung 2y-x cbvagf va fhpu n fcnpr ner pbirerq ol gur cer-vzntr (haqre gur rzorqqvat) bs n urzvfcurer--sbe rzorqqvatf jvgu avpr-ybbxvat cer-vzntrf bs urzvfcurerf, guvf pbhyq pbaprvinoyl npghnyyl or n hfrshy erfhyg.

Edit:
Vs lbh pna'g pubbfr fhpu n frg bs x-1 cbvagf, gura nyy lbhe cbvagf snyy ba gur fnzr x-2 fcurer, juvpu pna or rkgraqrq gb n x-1 fcurer gung vf hfrq nf n obhaqnel orgjrra gjb x-urzvfcurerf; nyy lbhe cbvagf ner ba gur obhaqnel bs obgu.
Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep

http://books.google.com/books?id=UGAKB3r0sZQC&dq=Vernor+...

I'm sure his other books are good, too, but this is the only one I've read. I've never seen anyone else able to extrapolate the consequences of entire races advancing past the Singularity and how mortals manage to get by in such a galaxy (if you're able to accept faster-than-light travel as a premise, but he has a very interesting take on even that). A ton of innovative sci-fi ideas in one novel.
Something tells me you weren't around when pets.com was. At least they were selling something, what the heck is facebook selling?

Pets.com failed because they figured they needed to be a huge company before they turned a profit, as was the fashion. If you launched a similar service today, you'd probably have a great little niche business.
Better bust out your TI-89 and crunch out some P/Es. I'll give you a couple to start: EBAY, GOOG, AAPL, YHOO, JAVAD.
Isn't GOOG the most valuable company now?
Nah, this is all about redistributing the gains of the previous bubble.

"The correct answer is, The Moops."
Indian start-ups find angel funding elusive
I <3 OmniGraffle - such a rad program.
I am not the parent, but:

1. Subjective, with a nice insult thrown in there.

2. Do you really think the simplest form of poker for a bot would be a No Limit game?

3. Are you implying poker bots don't take opponents possible hands into account? wrong

5. No reason to cast doubt, chess has had much more effort put into it. Polaris has been in the works for 17 years, not 26. Compared to over 50 years for chess engines.

6. I don't think writing any chess engine is easy, but your main point, yes chess is a finite game. A computer isn't expected to win every time at rock, paper, scissors, so why poker? Like blackjack, there is a certain amount of available information, and poker bots can make the best play off that.

7. Amateurs with 1 year of poker under their belt win a WSOP bracelet.
No. It was actual purchases. This was looking at the e-commerce sales, not the site traffic overall.

There's another bit that I didn't include in the blog post because it was irrelevant to the point... which was that the people running without JavaScript had a high degree of (there's probably a more diplomatic word but what the heck) stupidity. Stuff like adding a "special instruction" to "make sure the book is signed" when the book description says this is a signed copy (and it's priced accordingly).

--Esther
Here in DC Georgetown has a bunch of job listings that seem to average about half the market rate. The non-profit sector pays slightly better, but it's far more lucrative to work for a contractor or one of the product companies in NoVa or DC (my strong bias is toward the former). As stated, it's profit-center vs. cost-center dynamics.
I think that most people miss the most important point. The market is the play between players, and their expectations. A bubble is the situation when players' expectations are disconnected from fundamentals and no longer have any ground in the reality.

And while it took literally few months of good acquisitions to create this Web 2.0 hype, much much faster than any fundamental changes arrived, few bankrupctes should be enough to kill it.

Of course, there's still a question what has changed fundamentally since the last bubble? The infrastructure costs nearly nothing, the ad budgets are way higher, as well as number of people using the Internet. However, the services are still rather poor, and nothing paradigm shifting.
Media Temple Mea Culpa- two months free for Grid users
So, even if the stock market does lose 20% of it's valuation in a "stock bubble," who is going to lose? It's going to be big blue chip financial companies that are overexposed to bad mortgages they purchased. And, blue chip tech stocks like Yahoo, GOOG, Intel, MSFT and HP might take a beating, but what does that mean for the startup scene?

Even if there's another round of layoff's in Silicon Valley, I think that it will be awful for the people involved, but it will only mean good things for startups as there will be more unemployed software engineers around looking for work. That's good for potential employers/founders.

It might mean that fewer companies will be interested in acquiring startups, but that just means that you still have to be smart about your burn rate and find a source of revenue. You might not be able to build to flip quite so easily.

A bubble isn't going to stop people from using the internet and it's not going to stop companies from advertising online.
It isn't exactly "revolutionary". Receiver-based approach has been employed for a while, although with a twist: analogous to methods of identifying DOS-attack sources, large ISPs or web mail providers (gmail) establish a network of "honeypots" - thousands of fake mailboxes whose addresses are published on fake web pages, allowing spammers' crawlers to absorb those emails into their databases.

Then you just tag IP addresses that attempt to deliver emails to honeypots. What you get is a simplest receiver-based system with just two groups of receivers: 100% spam-receivers and "others".
Yes, but maybe it can make smaller ad budgets? Or, smaller VC budgets? Less people choosing to go into the startup scene, instead of safe jobs? It is all about expectations I'd say.
JAVAD (Sun) I will give you.

Are you really trying to say that Apple is over-valued?

The stock market bubble (1.0) was based largely on over-valuation of companies that had no profits and no proven business model.

All of the companies you list -- perhaps save for Sun, is it profitable? -- are doing quite well, thank you. Whether they deserve their P/E ratios at the moment: that remains to be seen. But this does not compare with the massive number of over-valuated companies circa 2000. The NASDAQ, for example, sits today at about $2600 -- at the peak of the bubble, in mid-2000, it broke above $5000.

We are not in a bubble of any kind.
I appreciate that they're publicly owning up to their hardware issues and doing the right thing - it's good to see that sort of transparency.

At the same time I'm glad I'm not hosted there.
Of course, "earn" is a matter of degree (no pun intended). I mean, MIT has been known to grant "engineering" PhDs for things like this: http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/
"Based on that, the entirety of Web 2.0 should be an automatic bubble."

Pets.com was based on selling physical products. Most Web 2.0 companies aren't, but a lot of them are profitable or break-even.

"The "demand" wasn't there because the majority of people didn't have internet"

Maybe. But if your value proposition is "we sell pet food online" you have a larger problem.

"vulture funds gave them plenty of cash to burn, what were they going to do? Invest it in a CD?"

Perhaps spend it working on expanding their market base beyond pet products. Amazon did that, as an example. Alternately, don't take the money.

"Amazon back then had a value add? What was that? Selling books for a loss?"

Things like reader reviews and instantly available critical reviews, suggestions of other books, wish lists -- not to mention the ability to browse titles without having to leave my house. You can't (easily) do any of that in a physical bookstore. And it's why a lot of people started going there.

"And an economic bubble is defined as when assumed value is more so than intrinsic value. Read techcrunch for more than a month and you'll find plenty of investments or exits for extraordinarily pricing."

Defined by you, perhaps. I prefer the way Goladus described it: "Large, risky investments based primarily on the logic that values are surging and will keep surging fueled the inflated valuations."

Regardless of exact definition, a bubble that involves relatively small amounts of private money is not the same as a bubble made of large amounts of public money.
Obviously Goladus doesn't know about all the layoffs in the tech industry over the past year. Everything is not a-okay, and the scores of programmers sitting at the freeway onramp at University Avenue holding "Will Code for Food" signs should be a lesson to all of us: don't enjoy prosperous times, because they're secretly a bubble that's out to get you.
2 actually, running behind pound. I had a few more running on a couple of virtual slices on slicehost. But I recently got rid of them as SBCL has some issues with Xen.
What the heck is a "safe job"?
What's ridiculous is that we're arguing over semantics. I'm going to tell you right now, this is an economic bubble as defined by the mere fact that companies are being valued (privately or publicly) too high. Skype. YouTube. Facebook. Venture funding has been giving quite a lot of money to a lot of me-too sites with little differentiation or real value or even business models.

Just because it doesn't match the hysterics exhibited back in the 90's doesn't disqualify this. And it seems your only argument has been that. I also found your analysis of dot-com companies back then to be lacking.

Personally I don't think it really matters, there are way more important economic issues that needs to be addressed, be it the real estate bubble, credit meltdown, or the war America is engaged in.

Also, for what it's worth:
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116679843912957776-fF...

And PS: I own Apple stock. And yes, it is greatly overvalued. And I love it.
The "honeypots" might not get most of the spam though.
LA Times Takes A Stake In Mixx
The reason behind full employment of programmers is actually pretty down to earth.

Enrollment into CS programs dropped dramatically when the bubble burst, and has remained low to this day, even though the market recovered in only a couple of years after the crash. It's a matter of inertia, really: it takes a few years for people's perception of the job market to adjust and 4 more years to graduate.
"At least they were selling something, what the heck is facebook selling?"

Advertising space to advertisers who want to reach thousands of dedicated Facebook surfers, most of whom are demographically appealing to those with things to sell.
this is a good point. lj is an enormous site and the rumored price (reported in a russian newspaper) seems low.

i'd also be interested in hearing about lj founder brad fitzpatrick's departure and the return reported as part of this deal.
The 10 Most Marketable Web Development Skills
Job Descriptions From The Future: Startup to hire "best software architect alive!"
"What's ridiculous is that we're arguing over semantics."

We're debating what this all means.

"this is an economic bubble as defined by the mere fact that companies are being valued (privately or publicly) too high"

When you say "bubble" you strongly suggest the current situation somehow compares to what happened in 2000. It doesn't compare.

Yes, this is my only argument. The rest -- that it doesn't matter very much if Facebook goes under -- is obvious enough that I'm not bothering to mention it much. A bubble burst, to most of us, means disaster based on foolishness. There really isn't very much foolishness going on right now.
I agree with your statement regarding "unmotivated" people.

I'm currently working part-time at school just for fun and to have the experience of how it feels working there. This isn't a "research developer" kind of job but really IT job, developer.

Sometime it is hard to convince your boss that his/her approach was wrong in terms of software engineering point of view.

I like how people don't work overtime and sometime leave early :). Might be good to start a startup or get a consulting side-job there since there's no NDA or whatsoever to be signed (at least in my place). Plus you'll get to know in which area you should write your own software and sell it to them in the future.
This one you perceive a safe job.

Yeah, yeah, we all know here that there's no safe jobs anymore, and in our economy we're all exposed to global risks. yada yada But, besides the Startup News, there are people who still believe that computer engineer in Microsoft, Merill Lynch or whatever else, is "a safe job".
Since we are talking about "bubbles", here's an interesting read on possibly the first bubble recorded: the Tulip bubble ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania ). Substituting hackers for 'tulip traders' and web companies for 'tulips' makes for a humorous read :)
The thing is they wouldn't be able to find someone who can maintain a LISP/Python/Rails systems. There's an advantage to be a mono-culture I suppose.

I also noticed that your statement regarding hardware/software is 100% correct in the university where I am working right now.
- What the Dormouse Said, John Markoff

- Alongside Night, J Neil Schulman,

- Prometheus Rising, Robert Anton Wilson

- Anything by Doug Rushkoff, Get Back in the Box is a good one for business/entrepreneurship

- The Dubliners, James Joyce

- The Elements of Typographic Style, by Robert Bringhurst
If this is news to anyone at all, they haven't been paying attention. Why else would Microsoft have been destroyed in the search race? The one thing they lack more than anything else is the expertise to build a scalable infrastructure. And it has destroyed them.

> Instead of trucks and assembly plants, however, Google's supply chain is made up of fiber networks, data centers, switches, servers and storage devices

That's what you think, isn't it? Reality is that they are nearly one and the same. QA is expensive when you farm it out -- so don't. Delivery is expensive -- handle it yourself. Assembly -- well, given commodity components and stamped parts to hold them, designed by talented industrial engineers for rapid assembly and disassembly, who needs a proper assembly line? Truth is stranger than fiction...

True story: One of my roommates at the time (2000-2001) came up with the idea to transport Google clusters (the old corkboard pieces of shit, not the relatively sleeker editions that followed) via truck. The initial run was a disaster -- it turns out that U-haul D-hooks are rated for about 80 pounds, not 800 as advertised, so one of those racks almost ended up on the 101 at rush hour when they took a turn a little too fast. Bonded, licensed carriers have been used for the deliveries ever since and Chris moved over from operations to purchasing ;-)

To say that Google's internal efficiency is like no other I've ever seen (and I have worked at IBM Microelectronics, for example, so I've seen some pretty hard-core automation) is to understate the matter. Apparently there is no lack of applications for this infrastructure (Amazon is the only other company that I have seen come close, and it's no surprise whatsoever that Google and Amazon used to choose many of the same datacenters before Google started building its own), my only concern is whether Wall Street realizes this. On second thought, given the fact that Wall Street basically drove the scaling of Unix the first time around, maybe that's why Google's stock price is up 800% since the IPO.

> It has been rumored to be a big buyer of dark fiber to connect its data centers,

Again -- if this is news to anyone at all...

Why pay someone else to do a shitty, unreliable job of transferring your data, when you can do it better and faster yourself? The devices to light up a piece of fiber sufficient to hook up a MAN are about $40K apiece -- chump change for the gain in efficiency and cost savings.
Same, and with special emphasis on The Diamond Age.

Also Douglas Adams, Vernor Vinge, Richard K. Morgan, and all kinds of other stuff. I like to read almost as much as I like to program.

Best nonfiction I have read in a while: "Leaving Microsoft To Change The World" by John Wood. A Microsoft VP leaves to pursue his dream of changing the world with books, and ends up founding Room to Read (http://www.roomtoread.org/ .) Highly recommended.
Read his other stuff, it is equally good!
Indeed. We're not in a tech bubble -- we're in a real estate bubble. And as far as the crash of that market is concerned, we're still in the early part of March 10, 2000. The real pain has yet to begin.

The bottom line is that I wouldn't go whistling past the graveyard quite yet. A truly astronomical amount of debt has been accumulated by normal (i.e. not rich) people in the process of puffing up US home values. Unlike the dot-com crash, a worst-case scenario in the housing market wipes out the finances of a huge block of US consumers. And without free-spending, US consumers you can kiss the market for most small internet companies goodbye.

The apocalypse doesn't have to come from within; the people who are worried about a "tech" bubble aren't paying attention.
This is the first case I've seen where the words "counterfeit" and "genuine" were applied to things that are identical. They seem to have been inspired by the record cos' pioneering use of the word "steal" to describe copying.
Startups Tell VCs: Don't Show Me the Money (Yet)
The market for startups is so illiquid that it's qualitatively different from buying and selling most other things.

You're doing a single big sale, instead of a flow large enough to generate a smooth curve in response to demand. And the buyers are extremely fickle-- so much so that needing to get bought makes you way less likely to get bought.
This was a much more interesting (and painfully accurate) portion of the talk (I assume it is just one talk, just reporting it in 3 parts). Lots of stuff he has mentioned years ago, but slightly refined (fine with me - Joel always makes me optimistic that things can be better and should be and will be).
Indeed. I think his best book is A deepness in the sky.
Potential over-evaluation of some businesses in an industry is not tantamount to a bubble.
Seven Ways to Avoid the Growth Traps
Stop talking about bubbles and get back to coding. All the billionaires made in that era didn't pay attention to the idoicy going on around them. They just executed. Now I'm off to follow my own advice.
You can be king in two ways: bring the content or make the content.