skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One guy who wouldn't have paid so much if there weren't other people offering similar amounts. My point is that you can't pick an arbitrary amount ($58 Million) for the valuation - but that this amount is always dependent on other people.

The problem with your example is that we all have limited knowledge about any given business transaction. Assuming ten people were standing around bidding on little rocks thinking they are diamonds, for that moment (to those people) they are worth $10k. When they have more knowledge (i.e. that this is glass and not diamonds) then the worth of those rocks drops. So the worth varies based on the knowledge in the market and valuations of others.

Now in any given market if one has more knowledge about a good or service one might be able to say that a good or service is over valued. For instance, I have always believed Myspace to be over valued. However, this realization does not give one the ability to pick a number out of the air and state that it is a correct valuation.
"academic office"
One should never ever hire programmers in india (or anywhere) without the help of a good programmer to test them and check on their progress....

The problem is that almost anybody can call himself a programmer and find a job since a lot of companies don't bother to check and do not take into account the huge difference of quality and productivity between programmers....

So what I did when we used programmers from philipines (same situation as india) in my company is first request them to do a small application that took two weeks to develop and we checked the code extensively.
The first group of programmers didn't work out but the second one produced quality code. We then hired them and did weekly review checking out their code and testing it.

But it's true asking coders in other countries is not the cheap way out of getting a co-founder, who knows how to program, some people want it to be
Approach many in parallel.
Parakey had an incredible number of people involved in their angel round. I'm sure almost no one had a substantial (money-wise) investment in these guys. The early exit was probably somewhat disappointing relative to what could've been a huge late exit, but you can't be too sad doubling up that fast.

In other news, Facebook has $4million in cash to hire two people with??
Apple Cracks Back At iPhone Hacks
NY Attorney General Subpoenas Facebook Over User Safety
Your Man in India (YMII) is actually a service designed for Indians in the US to use. Brickworks is their task outsourcing business. They are not taking on new customers right now because of all the interest caused by 4 Hour Work Week. Get Friday is Brickworks' main competitor. They currently take about 2 weeks to respond to an inquiry (in broken English) and you then have to give them you CC# and commit to a monthly minimum and wait another 3 weeks before you can try the service. All reports I have seen have been very positive once the service starts, but I'm not holding my breath. Ask Sunday is a start up that was offering a month of free tasks (or 30 tasks total) for free with promotional code "beta". I use them for some business outsourcing stuff and have been quite good. I bet they are going to start getting overloaded with demand as well.

At the end of the day, for non-code business outsourcing (research, online tasks, etc.) the services don't save you that much money (US temp agencies are ~$18/hr - these Indian services are around ~$15). And obviously the best type of tasks to outsource are repetitive homogeneous ones that don't require subjective decisions.

I blogged a bit about some of these services here:

http://blog.robwebb2k.com/2007/07/29/ask-sunday/
office $$ i $$
nowhere as easy to escape nor self-created nor eradicated as you suggest

Um, yes it is. 100 years ago almost everyone was "poor" by absolute standards. Today, almost no one is. Poverty has been all-but eradicated and it's something you almost have to aim for now.

And the income gap appears to only be getting worse

This is a make-believe problem. If I get a raise, the income gap has just increased (or decreased, depending). Whichever might occur doesn't change the basic advantage of getting a raise.

around 50k. Good luck trying to raise a family (food, car, rent/mortgage) and save for their education on that

Um, let's see...90 percent of the people I new growing up (actually much less than 50K), including my family, would fall in this category. So, you may have a very pampered sense of what is required to survive in this world, because it's totally foreign to me.

it's possible to redistribute wealth through a Horatio Alger ethos generation after generation

If that is your goal by itself, then a good mugging will do the job with much, much less in the way of administrative costs than redistributing money through a school system or some other structure. At any rate, the prices for schools are strictly nominal and are invariably lower for low-income students. This is just how schools segment the marketplace, and the fallacious sticker-price of schooling shouldn't distort one's view of society.

But fewer than 50% of the American populace goes on to attend

And fewer than 25 percent should attend. Your average person should enter vocational training rather than pretending to become a professional by spending 1000s of dollars on art history classes.
Why Your Start-up Will Fail
An oft-cited study estimates that just two-thirds of all start-ups see their second birthdays, and less than half make it to their fourth.

Whatever the exact figures, no one would argue that scores of budding new ventures die on the vine. One of the most common killers: lack of focus.
Thanks this was a really nice short movie...
Serious bug found in Excel 2007 ::: 850*77.1 = 100,000 and not 65535
Heh, mildly funny. I liked this one:

They are strangers to the can-do society. Most employees now "get it" that when asked to perform impossible tasks, the correct answer is: "Certainly, consider it done." IT staff, by contrast, still believe the answer is to explain X at length X why solving your problem is impossible and indeed undesirable.
My argument against it is that it's comedy, so...

At any rate, from what I've seen, when you have two groups in a company, sysadmin-techs, and programmers, the sysadmins are always held in greater esteem by other employees.
There is no absolute standard of wealth.

It's true though that nearly everyone 100 years ago was poor by present standards.
The Sponsored Startup:  A Look at Path101
I'll bite.

The author has had a series of bad computer support experiences and chosen to vent by writing an article that attempts to re-enforce every nerd stereotype. It's the same as accusing all managers of snorting coke and playing golf all the time or secretaries who sit on the phone all day to their friends while filing their nails.

If his work was due in and his computer wasn't working and support were refusing to fix it, wouldn't you escalate the issue?
Australian Government Proves Why Blogging Is Best Left To Everyone Else
Vitamin: Getting a startup right the second time (imthere)
Zimki, a Web 2.0 company bites the dust and closes shop
I read a lot of stuff by startup pundits. Obviously YC, but also rants by Joel Spolsky, Wil Shipley and others. Each offers something to the mix.

Sadly, I've never found anything of note in the writings of Wil Schroter. It mostly seems like a list of flaccid truisms. Has anyone else found nuggets of wisdom in there?

Read PG's stuff on Why Not Not to Start a Startup instead. Way more considered.
His book has few interesting points (though, rather inspiring than ground breaking).
How to eavesdrop on a fiber cable - Protect your network against fiber hacks
Fire your best people... reward the lazy ones
Rands In Repose: Pushing buttons during an interview
"Um, yes it is. 100 years ago almost everyone was "poor" by absolute standards. Today, almost no one is. Poverty has been all-but eradicated and it's something you almost have to aim for now."

Depends on what your standards are. Me, I think we can do much better at redistributing wealth. And that need not be in the form of social programs but simply in more level playing fields.

"This is a make-believe problem. If I get a raise, the income gap has just increased (or decreased, depending). Whichever might occur doesn't change the basic advantage of getting a raise."

I don't see your point. The poor are staying poor while the rich are getting richer, relative to today's standards. That's a fact.

"Um, let's see...90 percent of the people I new growing up (actually much less than 50K), including my family, would fall in this category. So, you may have a very pampered sense of what is required to survive in this world, because it's totally foreign to me."

When you were growing up twenty years ago (or so) this median was much lower. And you merely want people to "survive"? I want everyone to have the opportunity to thrive while advancing society. Where it might be less true for the US today, poverty still runs rampant. To take it to an extreme in today's world, how would you feel about carrying your daily water 3 miles (even as I've seen kids do so with the biggest smile you'll ever see)? Those folks might "survive" (for thirty or forty years) but humanity can do much, much, better.

"If that is your goal by itself..."

Take a moment to look at reading and writing scores in impoverished areas. Whereas our government assures a free education it is far from equal. That's really all I care about. The achievement gap is real and will be because wealthier kids get to school already better prepared. Further, they live in neighborhoods where the differences cascade. Fixing divergent school districts is a very hard problem so I see the best hope at the college level, so long as the opportunities are there (i.e. the point of this op-ed).

"And fewer than 25 percent should attend. Your average person should enter vocational training rather than pretending to become a professional by spending 1000s of dollars on art history classes."

That's a different argument (and one where we are probably on the same side). The point, for me, is equal opportunities. And too many start off too far behind. Just because one person can fight the tide, doesn't mean everyone has that capacity or the support necessary.
Machine Architecture: Things Your Programming Language Never Told You (vid + slides)
Thanks, we work are a team of 2 co-founders: juanpablo and me.
Uh, hello?!, this is a feature... somehow...
On average. Murdoch is way over one one end of the bell curve (too early to say which).
Btw: I really meant 'just functions', nothing around them.
India to help build 2nd Silicon Valley in US
Y Combinator and all other angels/VCs should take note of this !!!
There is a joke about lawyers in there somewhere.
This is the classic "Lake Wobegon" effect, where everyone believes they're above average.
Thanks a lot for the response, I've asked a few people the same question but from an employer the response has a lot more weight. I likely will apply for co-op when the next opportunity comes around. Since you made it sound easy to get a job with some of the smaller/younger startups, I guess the benefit of coop is that the larger companies (RIM/MS/Google/etc.) will take me more seriously? My thinking was that if I choose not to reapply, I would leave my summers open if I felt like working on an open source project, or if I had an opportunity to do research, or get involved with a student start-up, or if I wanted to go home for a few months. I still have to wait a while before I can even apply to transfer, so I will see how things go before making my decision.
If you don't realize it's a joke:

I've never encountered a group of IT people that fit the stereotype. The most beautiful woman I've ever seen worked in a Systems department. Many women in IT got there by taking job training and 'working up through the ranks' from positions like call center rep or data entry clerk. I've seen at least two departments with over half women-- average women too, with kids and a husband and a mortgage and such.

Other IT departments I've seen have immigrants who don't come anywhere near these stereotypes. If I were to request help from IT right now, I'd probably get a patient, helpful, and friendly guy from Kenya who usually has a huge grin on his face.

Every IT manager I've encountered looks for customer service skills in addition to technical savvy.
Funny thing is, 65,536 is 200,000 octal. They can't even make elegant mistakes.
How To Get Attention From Your VC
Fred Wilson uses Xobni to figure out which CEOs of his portfolio companies he speaks to the most, and gives some thoughts on how to get attention from your VCs.
Sketchcasting
Great unanswered question in the comments:

"I just wonder though... Mike, the same rules were on for TC40 - you had to launch at the conference right? So if someone had blatantly broken the rules and demo'd at another conference, would you have kicked them?"
Edit: I needed to reread the article.
What a bizarre idea. What's the point? As long as people are going all the way to the US, why not do whatever it is in the real Silicon Valley?
OPEN SOURCE BLOG !!
I hate "welcome" screens
Is it really "Serious" though? I mean, this isn't exactly devastating. Office 2007 has been out for almost a year and this being the first time we've heard about it seems to imply that not many users have run into this issue. It's poor that this got by their internal testing, but I'm not sure it's Serious.
This yellow card inviting me to sign up to your mailing list appears on top of the text I was reading, with no obvious way of dismissing it. So I closed the window.
"Us high-end types will be as vulnerable as assembly-line workers."

I think this is the most insightful statement in the article. I keep hearing "yes, but the high end tasks will remain here" from every proponent of overseas outsourcing.

Why? Indian people and Chinese people and I'm sure people from lots of other countries are just as smart as us and often highly educated. There is absolutely no reason they can't do so called "high end tasks" as well as we can.
When you were growing up twenty years ago

Not quite, but for what it's worth, I've spent a long time in the category of which you speak (quote poor endquote people). I've known people who did perfectly well with respect to economics on much less money than you think necessary within the last few years.

I want everyone to have the opportunity to thrive while advancing society

They do. You get your wish. Outside of people under the thumb of re-distributive regimes like the one in Zimbabwe, we are all pretty much free agents (and even Zimbabweans are as well, if they flee their country.)
OK, I get it. All the cash compensation went to the investors.
Under infinite precision the probability of selecting this particular expression to evaluate is zero. Under finite precision it is small.

However, it raises the question of what other errors Excel has. Excel has had other serious mathematical errors in the past - like the standard deviation function. In Excel 97, if you wrote down a sequence of large numbers with a standard deviation much less than the mean (1e10, 1e10 + 1, ..., 1e10 + 10, say) it would say the standard deviation is equal to zero!

Furthermore it doesn't help that there's always a total lack of transparency in how Microsoft handles bugs. We have no way of knowing whether Microsoft knows about this, if or when they intend to fix it, and what other problems this could possibly hint it. Megalomaniacal megacorporations are so banal.
Somehow I don't think the idea of an elegant mistake would go over very well with Ballmer. God damn philistine business people.
Well, how many have actually gone undetected? There are quite a few papers out there that show that Excel-induced accounting/financial errors are a lot more common than previously thought. Some financial services have gone as so far to prohibit the use of Excel in their financial planning and forecasting.

Check out some of the papers on Google Scholar for bibliography: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&safe=off...
Any problem like this could be potentially very serious, when so many people around the world still use Excel for making important business decisions. Not being able to trust your numbers 100% is a big issue to some..
According to later posts on this, many calculations which involve storing 65535 or 100000 really store the other one:

Dana DeLouis writes: """

And if you multiply be say, 2 you get something else:

=A1 MUL 2
returns 131070, as if A1 had 65535. (which it should have been)

=A1 MUL 1
Keeps it at 100000.

=A1-1 returns 65534

=A1/1 is still 100000

=A1/2 retuns 32767.5
"""

Given that it would more often be the case that 65535 or 100000 comes up as an intermediate number than the final result, it could be that there are many calculations that have been done in error silently for those using Excel 2007.

EDIT: Replaced asterisks with MUL because I don't know how to escape them.
If Twitter and Yahoo Answers Mated You'd Get Attendi
I wonder how much of their time the second time around was saved because they had already built so much back-end? I know the gist of the article is to concentrate on ideas and user experience instead of features, but having all that work in place had to be a big boost for them.

I think some of the best programs I've seen were built once, thrown away, then built again. Once you start coding, it is easy to put the blinders on and think only in terms of features and not users. Likewise, it's easy to think of a million user experiences you want to provide without having any clue how the pieces are coming together. In a way, they had two startups, one for each problem. Seems like it worked out well for them.
Hint:

- Add the semicolons back to any line that doesn't start with '#' and doesn't end with ':'

- Replace all the ':' with '{'.

- Fill in all of the '}' where they belong, which is probably easier to do by hand on such a short script than to write any logic to do it for you.

Once you've restored it to valid C++, you should be set.
i think we already have enough silicon valleys (banglore, hyderabad, bombay) in india, and there are more coming - but in USA there is only one and it needs one in each time zone ...
New Arc suggestion: a Markdown/Textile implementation. :(
Why would there be one per time zone? If that were the case, I'd like to put in my application for the Hawaii one.
Facebook Is Evil and Its Strategy Is Obsolete
An idea for a business is hardly patentable!
Where to look for Python developers?
I am working on a collaborative filtering startup and looking for a partner/developer who has experience in building scalable high-performance websites in Python. The geographic location doesn't matter as we are willing to work and collaborate online.

Where should I look for him/her? Any ideas...
Graham's "how not to die" is closest to my mindset
Yes, the top two reasons why Forbes will fail are:

1. a startup screen that smells strongly of 1998;

2. that annoying sound which emerges faintly from your speakers as you read the article. It turns out that it's coming from the video ad that has been thoughtfully placed at the top of the screen to remind you, the reader, that you have just been linkbaited.

I hope for Forbes' sake that I accidentally clicked on that video ad, because audible ads that play automatically are a harbinger of doom, like finding an angry black cat underneath your broken mirror.
Doubling your investment in six months is pretty good, but VCs would much rather wait three or four years and get 20 times their investment. Since it's a minority of companies that turn a profit for their investors, a Parakey-scale success is not the kind of thing that VCs dream about. $4 million is probably less than Sequoia invests in most of its companies, so it's certainly less than they're hoping to get out. If they turned a $2 million profit, that's a piddling 1% return for a $200 million fund.

This is a really interesting case of founders turning the tables on VCs. When there's a lop-sided outcome, it's usually, from what I gather, the VCs who come out on top. I wonder how much of the uniqueness of this had to do with Blake and Joe's high profile (and their presumably resultant ability to get unusually favorable terms from investors).
The Habit of Going the Extra Mile
This might be a start: http://www.python.org/community/jobs/
Misleading title.

If you have "troubleshooters" like Bill putting garbage into your source repository, then it's YOUR fault.

Do you have any standards, procedures, or conventions? Do you QA the source code, or is User Acceptance Testing enough?

If anyone working for me tried to squeeze hard coded error codes by me, I'd keep sending them back until either: a. It was done properly according to standards, b. They quit because they couldn't be "creative", or c. I'd fire them.

Sorry for being a little testy today. I just replaced a 92 line internal bubble sort with 3 lines of code. Of course, I didn't realize it was a bubble sort until I resolved 23 variables named "a", "aa", "aaa", "b", "bb", etc.

You see, I'm the poor schmuck that has to clean up your "best people's" mess.
Pretty cool app.

I tried to use it last night to make a presentation for YC.

Didn't work as planned. Couldn't draw fast enough to keep the flow going.

Also, it kind of made the presentation long and drawn out(9 minutes).

I want to present everything relevant in 3 minutes or less!
I think it's important not to overgeneralize this argument though.

The example works because it's very specific to a particular way of programming. Extend that insulated idea to everyone, and you won't have much of a company.
Seems the issue is fixed.
Nice Job!
Wow, they're really milking that 12 ad a page slide-show aren't they?
People make way too much of the Facebook platform. The part that's relevant to innovation is allowing third-party apps access to a list of who and what a user likes. It's silly that people are obsessed with building those apps inside Facebook, though. Look at use rates for the various apps. Facebook could get rid of every app except the basic profile, Photos, messages, the Wall, and Events, and it would be just as popular. The rest isn't nearly as promising.
Why don't you just use Python?
In other words: Facebook isn't worth $10B.
Because clearly our nation's best and brightest all want to move to New Jersey.
"Sadly, I've never found anything of note in the writings of Wil Schroter."

I was talking with a girl the other day who had confused him with Ben Casnocha, which I thought was pretty funny.
sanj - it's tricky to find a voice and message that resonates with a broader audience. in my book, for example, i explained a lot of stuff like "how to scale" which i thought was relatively pedestrian yet was really complicated for some people to understand. then when you take it a step further and publish it in mainstream media like forbes, you have to be careful of alienating a broader audience. what to you is a "flaccid truism" (great label btw) is a wildly powerful concept to others. i spend far more time trying to simplify concepts than trying to dig deeper into them. from what i've seen of most on-line startup pundits, a great deal of their audience is made up for the same people and becomes somewhat nepotistic.
Hat Heads vs. Bed Heads
summary of BBOM architecture
What if Facebook merged with Amazon.com?
Microsoft calc.exe gets the answer right.
Be careful with that logic. It applied to Microsoft in 1990, when their stock was less than $1/share (split-adjusted).
Short version: For a technical job, interviews with the technical people are what matter most/exclusively.

If you want trivial advice about how to find out about the company from the unimportant interviews, read the whole article.
I'm doing some screen-scraping type stuff right now, and Forbes has the nastiest HTML I've ever seen on a big site. I don't think it means they'll fail though.