skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A degree in Philosophy = the same value as a degree in computer science. You come out knowing about as much as someone with 2 to 12 months of real life experience depending on how much you applied yourself. You shouldn't expect anyone who 'majored' in something to actually have applied it.

To get that experience I would challenge PG to go around
the internet and debate something like universalism vs
nominalism. You would have to take the nominalism side if
you think 'math' is 'science' and not philosophy. Remember
though, that bertrand russel was a universalist .. you know
.. that strange believe that numbers exist outside of the
human mind and are not physical, sort of like what Plato
believed.

PS forget Wittgenstein. To quote him: 'My propositions are
elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally
recognizes them as senseless'.
It's not just one expression, there's a whole family of expressions that should evaluate to 65535 which evaluate to 100000 under Excel 2007.
$200M market for a product catering to prejudice. If you had a similar product idea or implementation that could make you rich; would you still execute?
Yes, it did. Google too I imagine.

There are way more overvalued Geocities' out there than undervalued Microsoft's though.
Telecoms thriving in lawless Somalia - "customers can enjoy service at 150Mb/second"
The ads on Facebook get abysmal clickthrough rates (often less than 0.1%). $10 billion is a P/E of more than 300, and even for a very hot company, that is pretty far into outer space. If these are in fact the numbers being thrown around behind the scenes, you're probably right that it's because Microsoft wants a place to improve its ad serving (and to deny Google that same place).
I agree. It's a shame they're not doing something truly valuable, like getting inside-out with all that user information.

It's especially easy to get dark on them because of the attitude: "We're marginally more forward-thinking than MySpace, so think of us in terms of Google."
Authors@Google: Tyler Cowen
Well done, but I don't see a whole lot of value in it.
i don't know what's more sad, the fact that she thought I was ben casnocha or the fact that i'm less popular than ben casnocha.
I would not be willing to spend years getting inside the heads of customers whose mindset I oppose. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet lose his soul?
Flat Rate Considered Harmful: How to ignite innovation on the mobile web
Possibly because tech companies grow faster and most tech companies in the early stages are lead by technologists. (aka "total geeks") This article is full of watered down stats that mean nothing.
I think this was actually a part of someone's management thinking for a while. I think I remember Nicholas Taleb mentioning something about this in Fooled by Randomness (not the programming part, just about management thinking that advocated firing your best people and promoting the lazy ones)
Facebook Beats MySpace In UK
priceless indeed
Amazon Launches DRM-free Music Store
Man Has Memory Span of a Few Seconds - Terrifying/Fascinating
Facebook is not Microsoft.
It reminds of a line from a PG article about building a new Silicon Valley, where he mentions that plopping down industrial parks is silly, since it's not for lack of buildings that most cities aren't hotbeds of tech innovation. Places become Silicon Valley because of a perfect storm of the right communities of people, not because they've got lots of office space.
The Facebook Commandments
There is nothing more wrong about this product than tanning creams. The users of this product aren't aspiring to be white people (which seems to be implied). It's used for aesthetic reasons.
This article isn't notable for its content as much as for the evidence its presents about where social networks are in the media. I was a freshman in college when Facebook and MySpace came out, and to anyone my age, articles like this would have been passe two years ago. It's a little funny watching the rest of the world go through exactly the same little crazes (how many friends can I add today? what do I do if someone I don't like friends me?) that we went through back in 2004.

It's reminiscent of those articles from the late 90s explaining the various types of emoticons.
One year ago, FB was "worth" $2B, now it's "worth" $10B and this time next year it will be worth nothing.

We're in another bubble and it's about to burst as recession hits in and ad spending dries up.
I guess Microsoft's valuation of Facebook was done in Excel. Can anybody check if 6,553,500,000 gives 10,000,000,000 ?
Excel as a database
I'm not sure I agree with Aaron's implicit definition of genius (one who has a deep understanding of the details of things). I prefer to define genius as one who fundamentally changes the way we think about the field in which is genius operates.

By this definition, a genius can have an incredible talent for a field without having deconstructed the way their talent comes into being. They work on intuition. It is up to the people the follow them to figure out how they did it.
I know Ben's writing has been accused of being trite, but isn't feeling sorry for his readers a bit harsh?

/joke
"Microsoft in recent weeks approached Facebook with proposals to invest in the startup that could value the fast-growing site at $10 billion or higher, said people familiar with the matter."

Who puts the valuation for Facebook? was it MS or WSJ assumption?
Interesting, which startup?
What recession? I think the current Federal Reserve would lower interest rates into the negative to keep Wall Street booming.
Where are you? And what are you trying to filter?
I just ran across this thread randomly -- far too late -- but, yes, I would. In a <cough> concurrent thread, I gave my thoughts on why I'm glad I learned JS first:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46531

Functional JS rocks. And the fact that you can examine other peoples' programs with FireBug is huge.
Blue Screen of Death in Halo 3
Is this photoshopped?
We are based in Edinburgh, Scotland. We are working on a new trust-based collaborative filtering algorithm and looking to apply it to domains like Search and News.
Let me get this straight: You're saying the playing field is even for almost everyone on the planet? Or that it's even enough?

And "perfectly well" defined how? Working diamond or coal mines? Or cleaning deep fryers or hotel rooms? It's their fault they work those jobs?
http://suddendebt.blogspot.com/2007/09/for-my-next-trick-i-w...
I am working on a startup called 'Yadster'. We are trying to build new collaborative filtering algorithms (like those based on trust/reputation) are trying to apply them to applications like Search and News. We have a basic prototype working, but a lot still needs to be done... :)
Another reason many startup founders are young - salary
A 22 year old founder can take a low salary, and not be too far from the market rate. What if the market rate for the founder is 300k? There is no way anyone would take anything near that much salary at a startup. The older you get, the bigger the sacrifice becomes. Now, maybe the older founder gets more equity, but any significant amount of equity is still pretty much an all or nothing payout. The younger founder gets a better deal - salary closer to market, same all-or-nothing equity.
One of the main differences between the facebook platform and the windows platform is that on the web, it costs very little cash for users to leave for something new. When desktop hardware and OS installations were involved, people stuck with their first choice (which was in large part determined by what was available in local retail stores).

It looks like people do the same thing for social networks, because they do invest time into their profiles and connections and such; but it's still far less of an investment than someone typically would have made in a PC back when Microsoft became the dominant desktop platform. It takes all of 5 minutes and zero dollars to switch from Facebook to Myspace, or Orkut, or whatever. Even if you had a desktop that could run all of the other competing desktop OS platforms(which wasn't possible for most people) it took a lot of work to switch between them. If you were already using windows, you didn't even think about using anything else.
Love at First Byte
This is called opportunity cost:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost
I always considered being "founder" status to indicate you have NO salary. At least in the early stages. You pay your bills, then every dime you have left you put back into the company. Basically, the startup is your life, with all of your financial incentives being driven by your equity ownership.

But maybe you are referring to early startup employees? I can see what you say being the case in that type of situation, where salary is typically low in exchange for more equity.
Yes. But I guess my point is that you can't compensate for the opp cost with equity, because the reward is binary.
Your "market rate" argument assumes that this year's compensation is the primary motivator.

Very often not the case.
At my previous job I did some "data cleansing" of transactional data for our customers, to ensure it was in a usable format to perform ETL on and eventually load into an OLAP datamart for analytics.

You would be surprised how many big (like household name) companies use Excel/Flat file formats to record their data..
If you can be a pornstar and make some money, would you still execute?

If you can be a doctor that does abortion, would you still execute? (Conversely, if you're a doctor that doesn't do abortions, would you still execute?)

If you can own a tanning salon and make some money, would you still execute?

If you can make songs about selling drugs, pimping ho's, robbing people and make money, would you still execute?

Everyone has their morality line drawn somewhere.
Cool concept if you could get a partnership or two to print just all the highest rated articles each month that could be a cool magazine. I only buy mags when flying. I frequently wish I had some of the best posts printed out just for my eyes or to bring with me while waiting somewhere, reading in bed (laptops aren't comfortable)
My point does seem obvious after re-reading. What I really wanted to imply is that the current startup system basically penalizes experienced people. Is that a good thing? Is it even possible to change that?
Not speaking from experience, but I believe that it's very common for founders to pay themselves a modest salary once they have received funding.
looks good, here are my recommendations:

I like the folded corner in the right to go to the next page, but i have no way to go to the previous page (besides the back button in firefox), maybe you should add a previous folded corner in the left.

Another thing that I'm seeing is some overlapped text, just for curiosity I checked it with firebug and noticed that the footer has a -30 px margin top, you should change it, there is a lot of overlapped text, watch your negative margins and the position absolute of some elements.

Hope that helps.
"Man Has Memory Span of a Few Seconds"

We have a term for this where I work: manager.
I can see his point, there's no incentive for mobile operators to improve when they offer all you can eat service for a singular price.

That said, I think it's wrong. Prior to the broadband revolution, people on dial-up were extremely stingy with their attention span and time. Back in the day I had to save up and count down the number of minutes SimCityDemo.zip would download off AOL so that I can time it correctly.

But the surge in popularity for this fueled the subsequent revolution. More people saw value in being online and to compete, the service providers gave away more hours. Then more free days. Then more free months. Then faster speed. And now ubiquity.

And the consumer interest has only surged. Now people are free to experiment, free to tinker, because of the abundance and availability of access. I may not use any of the stuff shown at TechCrunch40 but I'll at least give it a shot. What do I have to lose? I pay $14.99 for unlimited DSL and $19.99 for unlimited EVDO.

Similarly, what's going to cause the mobile revolution to explode in America is more than skin deep. It's not just the pricing, it all has to do with technology and government regulations. Japan's mobile revolution happened years ago, not because their operators competed on tiered services and billing practices, but because they competed on technology and was relatively free of government regulations.
Bought an album on there today. Great service! Easy to use, and 256kbps of DRM free MP3 goodness! Few kinks in the download process, but nothing Amazon can't fix easily. Highly recommended!
Theoretically, you could make one of those calculations like the one that says that a 50% chance at 2 million dollars is equal to a sure million dollars. To real-world proof it though, you'd have to factor in risk aversion.
I think you drank a bit too much kool-aid.

For young folks, there's little risk and opportunity cost but with zero experience likelihood of success is small.

For older folks, there's more risk and opportunity cost but with more experience and connections likelihood of success is greater.

This isn't a penal system, this is a distribution system. Being young isn't the prerequisite to success. Everyone harps and focuses on it because of that trait is unique (remember, likelihood is small) in an otherwise older folks dominated field (remember, likelihood is bigger).
In general - the older you get, the more responsibilities you have (house payment, kids, etc). People with those types of responsibilities are generally more risk averse than those who are young and free (no kids, house payments, etc).

I started my current company when I was 26. I think back to that time (1999) and I didn't blink an eye when it came to the risk. I jumped in quickly, without worrying about it.

Now its 8 years later. I have a wife, a kid, a house payment, etc. I would definitely think a lot harder about making that type of move now. Obviously, my salary is higher (which is one aspect of it), but the big reason is that my obligations are much higher. If I miscalculated now, my family would suffer greatly.

So in general - I'd say younger people with less obligations and responsibilities, are more able to take that type of risk.
Not a meaningful statistic. A site can increase in users and still drop in the rankings. Wikipedia's rise does not equal some other site's fall.
Amazon releases AmazonMP3: A Real Alternative To iTunes
This is hilarious. Here is a product that makes skin color literally skin deep -- and you're complaining that it appeals to prejudice?
I find it interesting that you're okay with opposing someone but not understanding why they think the way they do. Isn't that a bad sign?
Missing from PG's startup essays: acquisition negotiations strategy/advice?
I'd be interested in hearing advice/stories from anybody that has negotiated an acquisition. Specifically, the acquisition of a tiny startup (1-5 people) by a huge company. Thanks.
I think there is a basic difference between a skin lightener and a tanning product. A more apt analogy would be 'hair relaxers' that were popular in the 1960's and 70's, these products helped African Americans straighten their hair. There is a pretty rich dialog about these products that I think would be worth reading to get a better appreciation of the context and controversy here.

I personally would not want to market a product that advanced an image of beauty in a culture with documented history of racism and classicism against people with dark skin. But that's just me.
This market is not really new...
It seems a lot of E/SE Asians got cosmetic eye lid surgery to look more Western

http://www.time.com/time/asia/covers/1101020805/story2.html

To understand it better all you have to do is walk around in a big Japanese city and look at the print ads (or hell just watch some of the commercials)... it still perplexes me to this day
Are you assuming that every would-be 40-something founder makes 300k? That is rare.

Also, a company may be formed by tech people who get laid off and motivated out of necessity. What is the risk for them in this case?
when i said each time zone what I meant was to have an industry boom in each zone (north, east, west, south)of the country so that best and the brightest from each zone can get an opportunity to become an entrepreneur and innovation ... i know people from east not ready to move to west and they can't get the right spark to ignite their brilliant ideas ...
somebody pointed out that Excel is storing the value correctly as 65535, but is setting the text as "100,000".
Here's how to test.
type the equation in cell A1.
Hit Alt+F11, then CTRL+G to get to the "VBA Immediate Window".
Type
print Range("A1").Value
and hit enter. You'll get 65535. If you do .Text instead, you'll get 100000.

Even better, If you make Cell A2 =A1*2, you get 131070. A3 =A1+1 yields 100001. Hmm. ;)
The startup ecosystem does seem biased towards younger folk, but I dunno if I'd say it "penalizes" older founders. I think people make choices throughout their career, and those choices will change the payoffs for future choices. As you get older, your choices have less potential impact, because there's less time left in your future.

This only applies if you have optimized your career around being an employee, though. Someone who makes $300K/year obviously has, and has picked up quite a few skills on being productive and navigating office politics. But a 50-year-old homeless bum who just got his life back together faces the same incentives as the 22-year-old startup founder - perhaps even moreso, because employers will look at a gap in work experience with suspicion.

And it seems like many of the businesses started by older founders fit this pattern - either they've just been fired and lost everything, or they're housewives returning to the workforce, or they're senior citizens looking for a career change. Once you've got nothing to lose, you've got everything to gain.
Is the formatting for news.yc documented anywhere, btw?
new article - old story; i could be wrong but i think that i've already seen this on reddit a long time ago.

Honestly I think reddit is where this story belongs too
It seems to me that as long as ethnicity correlates with appearance, and beauty means a certain kind of appearance, then some ethnicities will be more 'beautiful'. Italian muralists painted pale fat women even though such women were probably more common in Germany -- it was a standard of beauty that happened to favor one ethnic group over the group that promulgated it. Similarly, I don't think the people who decided that tan=attractive were part of some vast Latino/Latina Attractiveness Conspiracy.
I have no idea what it what it does and I can't be bother to read all that text. You should assume most people who come to your site will be like me and leave without ever even finding out what it is you do.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=307215&cid=207394...

That seems like the most plausible theory I've seen so far.
Yeah, like deodorant, diamonds, Armani, the Model T, cruise ships, tanning salons, makeup, corsets, diet pills, jumbo mortgages, health spas, and The Great Vowel Shift of the 1600s.

Nearly everything is marketed by making you seem like a person of higher social status. If people were comfortable with who they were, we wouldn't need 90% of the goods on the market (and the remaining 10% would likely be much cheaper). It's not human nature to be content with your lot in life; if we made everyone equal, they'd find some new dimension to elevate. Bring on the Star-Bellied Sneetches!
Amazon MP3 vs. Apple iTunes: Where Should You Shop?
Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe (free download)
Made for a highly enjoyable evening's reading -- does anyone have any other good science fiction books to recommend? Free ones, even?
What if AOL merged with Time-Warner?
Prejudice is just Bayesian reasoning. What's wrong with it?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2uIJqqOlQw
Web Analytics 2.0? I am more worried about Web Analytics 3.0!
here's one:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40584
I'm not sure that racism is worthy of deep contemplation.
There are tons of reasons why more people are more successful when they're young. God, getting old is depressing.
Data entry is a good one as it's time consuming... .time = money and India = low cost so the math is easy on that one!

Copywriting as well, but like gommm said, test your prospective resource first.... a watertight grasp on English is essential if you're planning on having an offshore resource write copy for your site/marketing material/etc.
It correlates with socioeconomic status. During the middle ages, fat women were considered attractive because it indicated that you had ample food available, a sign of wealth. Now thin women are desirable because it shows you have time to exercise, money for a gym membership, and don't eat at McDonalds.

Same goes for many other physical attributes. In much of Africa and Asia, whiter skin is attractive because white foreigners have all the wealth and power. In the U.S, tanned skin is attractive because it shows that you spend all day on the beach, which means you're wealthy enough to live near the ocean and leisured enough to spend time in the sun.

Humans seem biologically programmed to favor mates that are wealthy and powerful. However, the specifics of "wealthy and powerful" aren't hardwired in, so we take our cues from physical characteristics that appear correlated with wealth and power. When I was a kid, the girls would make fun of all the geeks. Now that geeks tend to be millionaires, they've reversed their tune.
The two week test is a great idea..... I wish the founder of THIS company had thought of that, as I'm sure he'd rather pay for a two-week project and find out that the resource was a poor one, rather than find that out when there's a few months of dev work to be paid for!

I totally agree on the co-founder front..... having just one good coder in-house is better than having a half-dozen off-shore who have no clue what they're doing (IMO).
If it is, link plz.
True, but having high-end developers in-house is both handy, and good for the economy!

And as biased and prejudiced as this may sound, I've found that workers from India and China often have "shake-and-bake" qualifications.... can you imagine how frustrating it is to work with someone who apparently has a Masters in IT yet doesn't understand that "var1 = textfiedl1 + textfield2" is NOT something I want to see in proper VB.Net code? Nevermind that I swear I heard him utter "wow, that's genius" when I cobbled together a session-based auth script.... ugh.

Like I said above, outsourcing basic, labour-intensive stuff is OK as long as you can verify qualifications and get plenty of references. Personally, I would never, ever outsource anything mission-critical or "high-end" as I'd be more than a little afraid of having IP compromised (not to mention security).

All that aside, one golden rule I swear by is:

Real-world experience is more important than qualifications.

Always.

I do not care if you have a Masters degree in Information Superhighway Architecture Specialization and Awesomeness. If you have 3+ years of experience and can exhibit resourcefulness, experience and intelligence, I will hire you over Mr PhD/Masters/B.IT/B.EComm/Fresh-out-of-college.

Maybe slightly off-topic but pursuant to the whole "verify your resource first" mantra.
That's true, but I was noting that these 'wealth' and 'power' physical attributes can be genetic.