jyothi

Yes I have spoken to Paypal representatives, they created a trace 15 days ago. They say there is no update yet, we are following up with our partner bank in India.

  I understand that you're concerned about the withdrawal made on January 19, 2012. for Rs.117,300.37 INR. There's already a ticket made for this request and right noiw the recent update about this was that, our account specialist are coordinating with the partner bank and they are waiting fro reports from them about the trace.

  Date of the transaction: Jan 19, 2012
  Amount: Rs.117,300.37 INR
  Transaction ID: 5SF58792B0877314B
  Trace ID: 226874463
  
  We'll definitely send you an email as soon as we received the update from them.
  I am happy to have been of assistance to you today. PayPal strives for improvement and your support is appreciated.

  Sincerely,
  Toni
  PayPal, an eBay Company

The representatives seem to be not in a position to resolve it. they only initiate traces. There is no mentioned route to reach out to anyone else on Paypal.

I think moments like this define what should take priority. It is a wake up call but we all push it anyway don't we.

I think this case is the most extreme where it is directly about one's health and is very critical. You have to be alive and kicking to do what you want.

However what about the more grey areas like a loved one being sick, not getting time to see your child grow up, or even pushing the possibility of having a child or marriage - these are as irreversible. Just that these are a sacrifice of a feeling vs sacrifice of self. But you never know if the feelings are bigger than self.

the other suggestion on the post - pair programming is a good one. The interviewer itself who is engaging the candidate in pair programming has to be really good to step back and let the candidate bring in more suggestions and code.

Only off side is if the candidate is not comfortable working together with one more person.

3. Weird extra steps It is not really that weird. Puzzles or math problems are just a faster and highly probable measure of one's aptitude not just for the silly puzzle but how sharp you are even in business decisions. The mind has to be sharp. Trust me this is as important as knowing if you did multi-threaded cluster based algorithm blah blah.

Puzzles as a selection criteria - there will be false positives but too few false negatives.

Recently I was hiring for an online marketing position where being sharp with math actually matters, a lot. The candidate of 2 yr experience refused to take a screening test on aptitude. Very well, rejected as we have no data points of how sharp he was.

mixmax, these are very reassuring words for someone at a very vulnerable point in their startup. I tried, its positive, be positive and something will work fine. Or even a more realistic realization if you are failing too that it is fine to fail.

But I think the hardest problem we all founders face is to find the person who can share the views and motivate the right way. Most of the time, someone consoling would also be irritating, you just want to crib (mostly) and you will get over it and start working the next day.

It is almost ironically, sometimes, you just know what you want to hear and you are just waiting for someone to come and tell that so that you are fine.

The problem is not able to comprehend how everything would turn out as there would be tens of big and small issues at hand any given day and getting clarity is a big part of not feeling negative.

I have been fighting with all the bad vibes in office offlate and it is terrible especially as a single founder with a 7 ppl team. We haven't launched our product - it has been 1 year since our first engineer. It is already negative as you don't have anything out there and now you put in pressure things are going to break worse, ppl don't want to put in extra hours. It is hard to pump in positive energy. Fearing I will give feedback wrong way or push people too hard at this time I became reclusive. Few people own up, leaving them on their own track helps but it is almost a problem as you got to pull it off as a team and for that I have to speak up, bring them together with lots of energy. It is a hard time right now.

Hoping the system copes.

For those on dynamic IP the data is so mixed up. Atleast a date or timestamp of the download would make it more clear.

the beginning of Googlebot! more from the linking page

  Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web
   by Sergey Brin.

"We demonstrate a technique for extracting relations from the WWW based on the duality of patterns and relations. We experiment with it by extracting a relations of books. WebDB Workshop at EDBT '98 (postscript)."

Innovation works, copying strikes!

Organisation grows when its people grow. The freedom to take risks, make their own decisions would bring in a fresh look into how things are built & run. But I hope each one of these have good level of stake & passion comparable to the founders.

Does it also mean you might get too comfortable sitting on a large saving. So, do it with just enough cash to put up some pressure for early delivery. .

Wondering if $12 for copywriting work is expensive. An article with relevant content & tuned for SEO within an hour is fairly demanding. A good 500 word article will cost $15 in the market.

I run SEO services & have been using this new startup mediapiston.com as the content provider. I have had good experience so far. They have excellent review process where each article goes through 3 reviewers before it is submitted back to the requester. You can possibly try such a service.

As far as the author, programming & design work would get best rewards and in single chunk.

In short: Author states facebook (for that matter any user centric service) has grown to be worth few billions because of its users. The users' activity is critical to fuel the growth. Hence the user should be rewarded else this is cognitive slavery. And we are encouraging cognitive slavery widely on the web.

Good to encourage a share with the users for their contribution. There are blogging platforms like blogspot that share the advertising revenue inspite of giving a free blogging platform. It is an aligned incentive as users would write more effectively to get more ad impressions.

Facebook is different. The reward is the free subscription to all the networking, apps and fun that they get through facebook and not the other way round. Why should anyone be paid.

Edit: formatting

It is very difficult to be what Ron Conway is. Respect. He is not preaching but living an example & telling others that it can be done. The problem is that this mail was meant only for super angels to possibly introspect and be influenced. Not to be beaten around in public forums embarrassing the investors. Sometimes confessions in private work better as a fix. It is hard in public.

If Arrington had any sense he would have kept quiet and not divert attention to a debacle through TC at the cost of start-up community.

One of the smart things in Instant for google with instant is positively impacting the Ad Impressions. (page load still not necessary - but ads refresh with the search results)

I won't be surprised if the idea sparked more as an effort for 'How do we increase ad impressions? ' than search assistance for user.

in mission critical applications. I really hope there is some good competition for google.

I have to stress again on what the first parent commenter. I am a more genuine SEO person myself and sometimes it is just so annoying that google doesn't even invest in cutting down all the spam on first page result.

Almost seems like they are focusing just on the technical scale & adwords impressions. Given the talent at Google it shouldn't be hard to put in checks for gamers without anything useful on the site.

PS: disagree but down vote somehow doesn't make sense. There is nothing offensive or irrelevant in my comment.

I think speed beyond a point doesn't add much to the experience. One would spend at least 2-5 seconds to check out the results and minutes to find the right article, few milliseconds would not matter.

Instead if they return 'good results' in 1000 milliseconds also I would continue to use them.

On #2 & #14 in correlation - its a terrific idea to help startups build their team. Hiring is hard in early stages, less known, no time to dedicate on choosing candidates, fear of recruiting the wrong person etc.

Employees define the culture and a few key employees do change the scene for the startup at least on execution which is critical. Many of them might not be inclined or equipped to be CEO's but they are great contributors in the system. A relation/connection with the investor can easily convince these excellent talent to bet on less known startups at early stage.

Edit: rephrased

>> "You’ll get judged by your best work."

well till you get an audience, then they are going to watch your back and you cannot the do something always, good or bad rule. you will have to be cautious.

also there are cases where your best work gets ignored given the bad reputation of the bad work. As long as there is humans infer this will be there, it is extremely hard not to be influenced by previous work.

The blog reads don't do A/B tests for "small changes". On the contrary I actually think A/B tests over large number of users work great for small changes than user testing with a small set.

Many users cannot articulate the benefit of the small change, eye tracking or getting mental map of what the user thinks is very hard, with small set of users concluding something might be so skewed a decision.

Additionally the blog is misguiding >> After 11,000 tests and 400 conversions it clearly showed that the instructions made a 30% difference.

Below are the actual A/B test numbers from the blog:

Original: 193/5943 => 3.24%

Combination 1: 236/6058 => 3.89%

1. quoting this as 30% improvement is wrong. Google only said if you use combination 1 you would see 20% higher leads.

2. Since the difference between the conversion numbers is not very high one has to run it for a very long time and even on the first instance combination1 was no better than original.

Given 1 & 2 Google did mark the results as inconclusive telling us not to be fooled.

Edit: rephrased

> Back before I even knew that facebook had guidelines I had a facebook app disabled (and associated facebook account). It was not spamming or anything, just inviting people in strongly worded language to download the app.

The exact same thing happened to me in Jun '06 when facebook platform launched. The application was /ireadit I used to respond to each and every post on our wall, sometimes a long message encouraging users to invite other book readers, few emails to moderators of book clubs. Most of these messages were ofcourse similar. I had sent anywhere up to 20 such emails and my account got blocked day 3. The application was registered through my account (then only the owner can add other developers), it was growing at exponential rate, and we were so scared the app would stop working.

They unblocked the account in next one day. I guess that was only because our founder knew someone higher up in facebook.

yep. However no suction is necessary like in western toilets and everything works perfectly just with gravity. Thus, the squat ones do save lot of water, 1 ltr is sufficient for flush. Of course, the plumbing particularly the inclination & depth of column below, has to be done right.

Here in Asia, you most always find both western and squat toilet in houses, hotels and public toilets.

In public toilets squat toilets are still more hygienic to use than sitting on the western toilet seats.

Moreover if the flush doesn't work, which usually would be the case, you can always pour a bucket of water.

I've used piwik, it really powers the way you can do in-house analytics. Real time, javascript based tracking - no need to wait for data to accumulate. Plugin model makes it highly flexible and extensible. Module Design is very good.

I wanted something to analyze existing log data and could quickly write a small extension to do that. Creating new views or data points were straight forward too. Could easily integrating a simple external package like statviz.

Wasn't very fast processing data in bulk - 20 minutes to process 200K visits. But this was like a year ago. Ofcourse php, Zend db has its limitations with data processing and if the fact table and aggregate creation is rewritten in perl, C++ or something and done at predefined intervals without doing a running average it can handle fairly large amounts of data I suppose.

I understand the frustration with most search results today. It is not fair. And in a competitive space few not so good sites outsmart the genuinely good ones. But..

>> My understanding was always that "If I wrote it, they will come".

Its never the case neither on web nor in the offline world. There probably have been many great artists, actors and writers who never saw appreciation from critical mass.

Presenting right and getting others speak high of you is critical for success of a person, a product, a concept or just about anything especially when you are dealing with masses.

Presenting right - the finder should understand - make it right or make believe that you are right, I know the latter is not fair but the end result people see value in what you have. Hence yes you need to take care of things they understand, the title, keywords in text, alt on images etc

Getting others to speak of you - works as a fairly good starting point to evaluate anything new. As one understands better can always correct. Links, context & authority define this on web. As in the offline world either you proactively get people to vouch or the quality is exceptional that people talk about it.

Sadly post the initial assessment based on reference, a later correction based on content is very hard due to the limitation of technology - it can take months to years to conclude your site is a blog talking about wooden furniture (say) and you can be trusted not to be something else overnight.

Its good to question the status quo but if you aren't building a better widely adopted search engine, its better to be found by the current one.

Edit: format, removed unnecessary quote.

http://chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/ The detail article with architecture & photos from the building process.

Some of my favourites:

    // somedev1 -  6/7/02 Adding temporary tracking of Login screen
    // somedev2 -  5/22/07 Temporary my ass


    //When I wrote this, only God and I understood what I was doing
    //Now, God only knows


    Exception up = new Exception("Something is really wrong.");
    throw up;  //ha ha

True the overlap might be very high and it is extremely hard to find the common userbase with the available open tools. Will have to wait for hitwise, comscore or someone to publish a report.

I happened to look more into the global top sites http://www.alexa.com/topsites/global. It is lot more confusing - Google's India, German, HK, UK sites are considered separately. A clear example is http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/SA and http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/Italy where the top site is not google.com, so these users are not accounted in .com but use other google properties or variant country TLDs.

You might want to consider youtube traffic there, which is #4 on alexa rank. This will push the cross over by few more years for even statistical predictions. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/google.com+facebook.com+youtub...

Few other interesting things to note of the alexa graph is:

- Facebook crossed youtube traffic just about an year ago.

- Google crossed yahoo traffic only late 2008, that too mostly for yahoo traffic went down hill.

- What caused the sudden rise in internet usage in oct 2009 (for all top sites sites except yahoo show a spike in traffic). Can't be early christmas traffic, guess facebook triggered this high adaption of users who spilled onto other sites too.

Any married women founders or anyone whose wife is doing a startup ? Would be good to get tips from you.

I multitask fairly well but have always feared juggling married life with a startup. I am getting married this october. My fiancee is supportive, an engineer & workaholic himself and to an extent understands startup. I have known him for many years and he stood by me even before when I almost went bankrupt being part of a startup. I think his support and the possibility that I could discuss things from work (which I can't do with my parents/siblings) gives a good feeling.

Only concern is I feel he doesn't "yet" get the stress part and the variable low morale issue at times. It is very weird to him if I say that I am feeling low today and by evening if I am excited that we got 20 more hits on the site.

edit: emphasis

It is both a "4" (upright) and "f" from right almost similar to its favicon. Very creative confluence.

Sadly it can also be seen as facebook nailing down the 4 in a square.